Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Last week I helped host a speaker from West Africa at the IMA. Dr. Boureima Diamitani is the Executive Director of the West African Museums Programme. It’s currently based in Dakar Senegal, but will move during the next few months to Niger. During his short visit Boureima participated in meetings with IMA staff and local community leaders, and held a public conversation with IMA Director Maxwell Anderson on a range of issues.

Talking with Boureima during his short stay, I became conscious of the inherent contradictions that African museums represent. Contemporary African museums inherited their collections from the European colonial governments that established them. Colonial museums in Africa were originally created for the enjoyment of white visitors; black Africans were not admitted.

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The IMA Blog team welcomes new author, Linda Duke, Director of Education.

When I was very young, I had a special sense about written numbers. It’s hard for me to access that now, through all the years of education devoted to making sure I understood numbers in a standard way. But I still have a feeling about that early relationship, and sometimes I wonder how it might have developed if I hadn’t learned to be ashamed of it and to ignore it.

Here’s what I can recall: I knew the shapes of the numerals as indicators of the distinct characters of each. Though my sense for some of them has slipped out of reach, in the way dreams do, I can still feel the stronger personalities. The numeral five was intimidating in appearance, but in actuality quite sweet. Seven was both stern and judgmental. Eight had complexity and depth – and eight led to a painful collision with my first grade teacher, Miss Logan. She taught us to write eight with one continuous figure-eight line. Soon after, she exhorted us never to write it as one circle on top of the other – an idea that had, frankly, not occurred to me.

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An art museum provides a very specific sort of context for its contents.  As a visitor walks through the collections, there is a kind of underlying thesis at work: these things all fit, in one way or another, into a broad category.

It isn’t as simple as “If it’s in a museum, it must be art”, but then again… it almost is that simple.  I think that idea explains why we all sometimes respond so strongly when we encounter an element of an exhibition that doesn’t immediately fit our own perception of what the parameters for contents of the “Things that Go in an Art Museum” category of objects are (or should be).

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Both Thomas Jefferson (The Declaration of Independence) and Trey Parker (Team America: World Police) have said it in so many words: Freedom isn’t free.

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.

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My last day at the IMA did nothing for my stomach.

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. Read the rest of this entry »