I spent the last five years in lecture halls, teaching art history survey courses to undergraduates and, until a few months ago, I thought that 2011-2012 would be no different. Recently, I left the classroom and joined the Publishing and Media team at the IMA as their Kress Interpretive Fellow. In this new post, I will be translating the skills I honed as an instructor to suit the needs of the museum’s visitors.

Many of the courses I taught were part of the universities’ core curricula, which means that my students came from various academic backgrounds and typically enrolled in the class to fulfill a degree requirement. Some of my students had never even visited an art museum! An exciting challenge was to deliver the course material in new, engaging ways. My lectures quickly became multimedia presentations that employed devices like film clips, music, and the internet to introduce key art historical concepts and to illustrate techniques. The opening sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) provides a nice entrée into a discussion of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), the fifth movement of Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1830) exemplifies certain characteristics of Romanticism, a short scene from The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) demonstrates Michelangelo’s transfer of cartoons onto the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and so on. Similarly, one of my assignments at the IMA will be to expand understanding of the scholarly information offered in our digitized publications by conceiving of complementary text, interactive demonstrations, and audio-visual material. This online content will be accessible to a broader audience.

Xia Gui, "Fishing Village in Twilight Glow," mid-1200s.

Teaching also allowed me to move beyond my primary area of study – nineteenth-century Danish portraiture – and become a generalist. Conversance in other periods and regions of art historical research will serve me well at the IMA, since the museum’s collection is comprehensive in scope. For another project, I will develop thematic connections between pieces in different galleries. Viewers will recognize that shared artistic impulses yield different results depending on the historical and cultural milieus that informed the works’ production. For example, Xia Gui’s Fishing Village in Twilight Glow (mid-1200s) and John Constable’s The Cornfield (ca. 1816) reflect the artists’ attachment to their home regions. Xia Gui, a Chinese painter of the Southern Song Academy, probably drew inspiration from the landscape of Hangzhou (then capital of China). Local scenery interested the British painter Constable, too. The Cornfield depicts a spot situated between East Bergholt and Deadham in his native county of Suffolk.  In Constable’s choice of subject matter, he exhibited the nationalistic sentiments shared by many artists following the Napoleonic Wars. However, in its plein air execution, this preparatory oil sketch signals the emergence of an international artistic method, inspired by the studies of Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819) and Thomas Jones (1742-1803), and practiced by contemporaries like C. W. Eckersberg (1783-1853) and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875). In contrast, Xia Gui’s approach evokes Chinese artistic tradition in order to convey his allegiance.

John Constable, "The Cornfield," 1816.

Over the course of the next year, I look forward to exploring these two works further, along with many others in the museum’s rich collection, and to developing pedagogical strategies that will best captivate visitors to the IMA’s website.

Filed under: Art, The Collection

We recently launched the Raindrop web application as part of FLOW: Can You See the River, a project conceived by Mary Miss. Our team started on the project about a year ago, when Mary and her studio began meeting with us and scientists from Butler University and Williams Creek Consulting to build an app illustrating the concept that “All property is riverfront property.” When Mary and I began discussing the project, we talked about the challenge of catching a person’s attention and then engaging them with a visual experience that could lead them to deeper levels of information and insight about the natural world. This is essentially what a good visualization does, so I was excited to be part of the team building this technological bridge between art and science.

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Filed under: Technology

Ahh, finally, my first blog post.  This post actually started weeks ago.  I’ve been patiently awaiting the return of some questions I had sent out in relation to my Flickr galleries “Trapped In The White Cube.”  The galleries are a series of images that have been captured by various photographers visiting museums around the world.  Sometimes the galleries appear to be captured in solitude, other times they are alive with a visual cacophony.

As one of the two photographers here at the IMA, I am responsible for capturing the IMA galleries in a similar fashion.  At times I capture galleries alive with its patrons.  At other times I document for posterity the space free of human distraction.  I, as those participating in my questionnaire, enjoy seeing the galleries in various degrees of these states – the sole visitor reflecting on a work of art, the mass of humanity flowing between its walls, the gallery alone asking us to reflect on the images presented, or the gallery free of any artwork or person and completely desolate.

Below are a few of those images and the responses from the photographers.  If you are interested in the photographs presented, please follow the gallery series on Flickr.

 Witold Riedel:
Witold Riedel is a creative director at one of the largest advertising networks in the world. He is responsible for a worldwide campaign, which “involves a good amount of travel.”

This image was included in the “Trapped In The White Cube” series. An excerpt from Witold’s responses to the questionnaire is below:

(via Flickr)

 What made you capture and share the image you created?

Are we talking about the picture of the nun and the dinosaur? Oh, it was just a very sweet moment at the Museum Mensch und Natur in Nymphenburg, in Munich. I had missed my flight to Moscow on that day and after visiting the BMW Welt, Nymphenburg felt like the perfect contrast. The room was very small, I had to be close to the nun to take the picture. I only had one chance to expose the photograph without disturbing the composition. I was lucky. I had set the exposure and aperture and the focus on my Leica correctly. I like that there are some parallels in the expression of the dinosaur and the nun. The picture is certainly not intended as cultural criticism. I have nothing against dinosaurs or the Catholic Church.

What type of museum objects do you enjoy the most?

I like to return to some not very loved paintings, just to discover that I have changed more than they have. And I also like to see that they are still there, in their own place. Or maybe in a new place.

I  used to stand next to the Mona Lisa at the Louvre sometimes and just look at the people coming to visit. I actually have two photo series about this on my old website. It was interesting how many visitors were not actually interested in the work, they were more interested in having a picture taken with the work. It really is about that connection sometimes. The Mona Lisa is now in a different place within the Louvre. It is now easier to take pictures with her. But it is much more difficult to see her. That might be one of the reasons why I prefer the not so loved paintings sometimes. Though they obviously must be incredibly special already, just to make it to the galleries. What percentage of the work never makes it out of storage? Some museums have created galleries that feel almost like open storage. I like that idea quite a bit.

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Filed under: Around the Web, Art, Photography

One of the great artistic achievements of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the proliferation of monumental paintings for the walls and ceilings of churches and palaces throughout Europe. These elaborate decorative ensembles were the result of carefully designed programs developed by artists in collaboration with patrons and advisors. These large, often figure-filled compositions were the result of careful processes of visual planning, in which reduced-scale sketches painted in oil played an important role.

Most painted sketches were never intended to be displayed publicly, but rather were made as tools in the creative process. They were used to experiment with ideas for a composition, to propose a composition to a patron, or to record a finished painting for future reference. Preliminary painted sketches could be very rough in appearance, mapping out the artist’s first thoughts about a composition, or more finished exercises that laid out not only elements of the composition, but also served as studies of color and light.

Sebastiano Conca (Italian, 1680–1764), "The Madonna Appearing to St. Philip Neri," 1740, James E. Roberts Fund, 71.6

This lively, loosely painted sketch is a preliminary study for a large altarpiece in the Pilo e Calvello Chapel, Sant’Ignazio Martire all’Olivella (formerly San Filippo Neri), Palermo, commissioned from Conca at the height of his fame in 1739-40. In these years, Conca led a large and busy workshop in Rome and served as the director of the Roman academy. Unwilling to relocate to complete such commissions, Conca would have sent small preliminary sketches like this to his patron in Sicily for approval before undertaking the final full-scale altarpiece. Two additional painted sketches and one drawing related to the altarpiece also survive, with slight variations between them that indicate Conca’s exacting approach to composition.

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Filed under: Art, The Collection

I saw Cézanne on a bus today!!! …well, sort of. There is a new IndyGo bus in town and it’s hard to miss. The new bus features a painting by Paul Cézanne from the IMA’s collection. As you can see from this photo, the painting covers the entirety of the bus.

If you’re a little rusty on your art history, Cézanne was a French painter from the 19^th Century whose artwork was from the Post-Impressionism period. Cézanne’s paintings bridged the gap between late Impressionism and the 20^th century movement, Cubism. His artwork is usually very recognizable because of his repetitive and exploratory brushstrokes. These defining brushstrokes are easily seen in the painting featured on the IndyGo bus, House in Provence, which consist of a single farmhouse set in the landscape of Mont Sainte-Victorie, a mountain in Cézanne’s native Provence in southern France. You can also check out the painting at the IMA, as House in Provence is currently on view!

If you happen to see the bus around town, snap a photo of it! Then upload your photo to the IMA’s Flickr group and send us the link to your  image by emailing it to web@imamuseum.org. We will then send you an email with a coupon code for 50% off to the Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial exhibition or Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria. Happy searching!

Filed under: Art, Local, Marketing