Ask IMA CEO Maxwell Anderson about the price of freedom. He’ll tell you about the IMA’s successful challenge to a law passed by the Indiana legislature this year forcing any entity selling materials deemed “harmful to minors” to register with the State and pay a fee to do so. If Judge Sarah Evans Barker had not agreed with the IMA, Big Hat Books, and other plaintiffs and struck down the restrictive law, every school with a sex ed text book—or art museum gift shop with books featuring the nude form—would have had to pay up and be policed.

Ask Indianapolis educator Connie Heermann about the price of freedom. Connie is the Perry Township teacher suspended without pay for teaching the book The Freedom Writers Diary in her class last year without permission from the school board. The book, written by the students of California teacher Erin Gruwell, is a record of their daily lives, fraught with violence and racism. This work of non-fiction contains profanity and bloodshed–because that’s what these teens experienced.

Filmmaker Richard LaGravenese (Living Out Loud, Freedom Writers) turned the story of Erin Gruwell and herstudents into a film starring Hilary Swank. In a Huffington Post blog entry last month, LaGravenese makes a passionate defense of the liberty to learn.

In the spirit of the First Amendment, the IMA is hosts a screening of the film Freedom Writers and a post-film discussion with Connie Heermann. Come to the IMA August 21 at 6 pm to hear about an all-too-real struggle for free expression in Indiana. Dissenters welcome.

After a few last minute tasks in the morning, Meg, my internship mentor for the summer, and I strolled over to our escape vehicle from the great indoors. A single key, a nine-person van and one destination: MUG n’ BUN Drive-in.

Most of the Marketing department decided to join us on our journey to Indianapolis’s west side. Some were hoping to relive memories of root beer and corn dogs, and others, like myself, to experience the glory of this drive-in for the first time. We were a sight to behold in our office regalia. We scarfed down the mountain of delicious food before us: Chocolate malts, fries, root beer, burgers, coney dogs, corn dogs and cole slaw. All morsels of an afternoon at MUG n’ BUN.

Suffice it to say, our tummies were not happy with us afterwards.

My summer at the IMA has been a revealing one. (Lesson #1: Don’t overdo it at MUG n’ BUN.) My knowledge of the museum world has grown, and I even learned a little more about myself. Gaining exposure to all departments of the Museum, by attending meetings, taking on a survey and marketing initiatives project, and getting to know the staff, has been a tremendous benefit of my few months spent at the IMA.

Some of the other interns I worked with are starting jobs or preparing for grad school. I’m heading back to Bloomington for my final undergraduate year at Indiana University and trying to figure out where I’ll end up after next May. However confusing the future may seem, the IMA has given me a whole new set of experiences from which to work. Being in the presence of so many people who are passionate about their job makes me happy I was along for the ride.

In the years since Star Studio opened, countless visitors have declined the invitation to make something in the drop-in studio by saying “Oh no, I’m not creative.” Huh. I’ve never had a child say that, though. Something happens between childhood and adulthood that prompts many of us to draw a line between who we are and who we think we aren’t. Maybe children are just braver, less worried about making a mistake. In the end, kids are just more open to the concept that making art is fun. I think many adults (and I’m including many adults who identify themselves as artists, myself included) sometimes forget that simple idea: it is fun to make things. It is satisfying to create, even if the thing you are creating is seemingly trivial, or unaccomplished, or ugly, or merely pretty.

I have the good fortune to see children making art often - in Star Studio, in the studio classes offered here at the museum, and at home, where my own children put markers, crayons, and Play-Doh to nearly daily use. Looking up from a work in progress, my son, who is not quite four years old, will say to me “Y’know, Dad, sometimes you’ve got to just check the theory at the door to the studio and just let the paint fly. Let someone else decide if that mark is genuinely felt or merely a self-conscious echo of a mythologized time and place you never knew. It’s just paint, man. Lose the paralyzing introspection and just make the work. Now grab me a chocolate milk.” I’m summarizing, but you get the idea. The point I’m trying to make is that we were all creative as kids, and we all still are…it’s a basic element of being human. Making art is one way to affirm that. We made stuff when we were kids because it was fun to do, and it still is, if we let it be. So, grab your Play-Doh, your sippy cup, and get to work.

Don’t get me wrong, the majority of artwork that visitors make goes home with them, but a percentage always gets donated. Often visitors will make more than one piece, so that they have one to take home and one to add to the collection. We didn’t start out asking people to leave their work, but it always happened. Now, we build it into the consideration of the activities that will be offered in the space. It isn’t really like the formal artist-displaying-work model that is in evidence throughout the museum…the work is typically anonymous and individual pieces aren’t highlighted.

When you walk into the space during the last month or so of an exhibition you experience the visitor-created artwork as a single, room-sized installation first, and only later do you focus on individual pieces. I think it is closer in some ways to the urge behind street art…the sort of private joy to be had from making something great and then leaving it behind for others to discover. I sometimes see visitors coming back to find something that they left behind a month or two before, not to reclaim it, just to see where it is now. The current show, Squares-Folds-Life: Contemporary Origami by Robert J. Lang opened in mid-February, and it will close on July 20th. We’ve been making paper ducks and sparrows with visitors since the show opened. I don’t know how many ducks we have in our flock currently, but I know that we’ve used somewhere in the neighborhood of 14,000 sheets of origami paper so far during the show. A colleague recently described walking into the drop-in studio by saying that it was like standing in a bag of jellybeans. Sometimes it makes me think of a really cheery version of The Birds…

After the show closes, we’ll shoot some photos of the space, and save a small number of the ducks and other paper sculptures that were made during the show, and eventually the rest of them will be recycled. The drop-in space will be cleaned and painted…a blank slate for the next collaborative installation.

I’ve always been at the mercy of this terrible, wonderful flick.  My dad took me to see it, on the first day of summer after my fourth grade year.  We were late; I think we came in during the “Summer Nights” number.  We both liked the visual geometry of the dances, the buoyant froth of the songs.

My friends and I started going in packs.  We saw it at the drive-in, the way it was meant to be seen.  We staged sock hops.  One 9-year-old dressed up like a version of Sandy in fishnet hose and a leotard and rode around the neighborhood on her banana seat bike.  Years later my friend made me this kitschy Grease mirror, a true piece of folk art:

Don’t get me started on the centrifugal force of Travolta’s hips as he snakes around the white car during “Greased Lightnin’.”  Or the carnival Shake Shack scene, where John and Olivia shimmy in black against a colorful planar backdrop worthy of Mondrian.  I’ve always loved sad Danny and the phallic hot dog scene.  And the strange appeal of Crater Face.

Just two years after Grease arrived, MTV was born, and the Spandex Revolution began.  Children of the 80’s will also find much to love about this year’s Summer Nights line up, which includes The Goonies and Ghostbusters.  The movie schedule was built around four categories we conceived: Stylish Danger (i.e. Gilda); Alternate Universes (Dr. Strangelove), Dark Humor (The Big Lebowski), and Mad Musicals (Rocky Horror).

We also paid close attention to what cartoon goes with what movie.  I’m particularly looking forward to Rabbit’s Kin (1957), starring Pete the Puma, an underappreciated Warner Bros. character.  Watch for Pete before This is Spinal Tap on June 20.

Leave me your raves and rants about Grease—or Summer Nights ’08.

Next Thursday, June 5, at 6:00 pm, you can come to the IMA and catch a documentary called Helvetica. Yep—it’s a whole 80 minutes of font porn. Director Gary Hustwit premiered the documentary on the fiftieth anniversary of the ubiquitous typeface, prevalent in urban centers everywhere for its clean, communicative ease. Think of the “el” signs in Chicago.

My husband couldn’t believe there was a whole film about one font. What’s the plot, he asked, an epic smackdown between Helvetica and Times New Roman, while crazy Comic Sans plots to sabotage them all? Sort of, I replied. Fonts are dramatic. They harbor visual memories (the Reeses Peanut Butter Cup font is childhood itself), deftly evoke history (from 1930s Art Deco to the Wild West), and keep social systems flowing (imagine a green highway sign in Freestyle Script…there would be wrecks galore).

Thursday night’s film screening is presented in collaboration with the IMA Design Arts Society and the AIGA Indy (local chapter of the American Institute for Graphic Arts) – two groups working to raise the design bar in our city.

Helvetica is part of a Design Film Series at IMA that continues June 12—with a selection of short films from the Ray & Charles Eames industrial design empire. Grandson Eames Demetrios will fly by to introduce the films. Then on June 19, come see a film about Sir John Soane, a 19th century English architect who influenced 20th century architecture whizzes such as Philip Johnson and Michael Graves.

All films start at 6:00 in DeBoest Lecture Hall and are free. See you there. But meanwhile, feed the font beast and leave me a comment about your psychological adventures with typeface.