Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

William Edouard Scott, American, 1884-1964, “Simeon and the Babe Jesus,” oil on canvas mounted to Masonite, 98 x 44 inches, Health and Hospital Corporation of Marion County, Indiana

It was a monumental undertaking one that had never been attempted at another American hospital.  Murals in public buildings were a new concept in 1914. Only the Library of Congress and the Boston Public Library had successfully completed similar projects.  The idea of bringing art to Wishard, then known as City Hospital, started on a very small scale with the idea of commissioning a local artist to create an oil painting for the new Burdsal units which had just opened in 1914. A committee of local artists was asked to select the artist, but the committee came back with a better suggestion.  Why not enlist several Indiana artists to paint murals on the hospital walls?  William Forsyth, a prominent member of Indiana’s famous Hoosier Group, agreed to oversee the project. At the conclusion of many months of work, sixteen Indiana painters had created thirty-three different murals that covered a quarter mile of the hospital’s wall space.

This included well-established artists such as, T. C. Steele, Otto Stark, Clifton Wheeler, Wayman Adams, J. Ottis Adams, and Forsyth himself, and younger painters and local art students such as Simon Baus, Walter Hixon Isnogle, Carl Graf, Jay Connaway, Emma B. King, Dorothy Morlan, Martinus Anderson, Francis E. Brown, Helene Hibben and an African American artist, William Edouard Scott, who would make a name for himself as a mural painter along with his other successful artistic endeavors.  Most of this group received housepainter’s wages, slept in empty wards and ate in the hospital kitchens, while the established artists painted in their studios and received no more than $150 a month for their work.

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It’s been awhile since I’ve rambled on about some projects, so I felt like the time was right to do so.  Today.  I have a lot of favorite things I like, but occasionally, I’m able to nail that down to a specific numeron uno - like a favorite dinosaur, car, airline or tie knot.  So when considering the amount of social networking sites today, I always, always point to Flickr.  I love Flickr.

Danny Beyer, sporting the new IMA Blog t-shirt

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In case you haven’t heard, there was a big announcement that the IMA was awarded a major gift from the Lilly Endowment to start a Conservation Science Laboratory at the IMA.  Needless to say, the whole department is pretty stoked!

I tried to think of a way to represent the announcement with some kind of image, but couldn’t come up with anything, so instead I made this.  That pretty much sums up what I think about the news.

Today, though, I’m in Kansas City at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art looking around.  Yeah, just looking around at the art, inside and outside.  I don’t often get to do this.  But I’m here because the Midwest Regional Conservation Guild is convening its 28th Annual Meeting this weekend.  For a long time the MRCG has been an important association for conservators in the Midwest – an organization for which I’ve been honored to be the Secretary/Treasurer for the past 4 years.

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Early next year, the exhibition Preserving a Legacy: Wishard Hospital Murals opens at the IMA. It tells the story of a group of renowned Hoosier artists who painted murals for the benefit of patients at Wishard Memorial Hospital in 1914. The IMA conservation department has been working to bring these murals back to their original condition since 2004. They have completed the conservation of works by such Indiana artists as T. C. Steele, Clifton Wheeler, J. Ottis Adams and Wayman Adams.

This exhibition details the journey of conservation and hints at the power of art to heal. I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of art therapy. While the halls and galleries of a Museum are my temple of healing, I would like to experience art’s power to heal in other settings such as classrooms, hospitals or shelters.

I recently had a conversation with two dear friends–one of whom is an art therapist/art teacher at a school for emotionally troubled kids in Virginia and the other of whom has experienced the healing of power of art at a local Indiana treatment center called Selah House. Their insights are shared below:
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One might say that I’ve been addicted to efficiency for quite a while. Even before learning about the need to conserve fuel and reduce CO₂ emissions, I would organize my activities and errands so that I could take care of them in as few excursions as possible. The logistics of ordering these tasks was almost an odd form of entertainment for a mind trained by late nights playing board games in college (computer science and engineering may have had some effect as well). These days, however, my mind has turned to other - perhaps more practical - conservation decisions involving hybrid cars, rain barrels, and energy efficiency.

This device monitors voltage, power, and cost

In today’s post I would like to share some investigations that I have done with a couple of cool energy efficiency tools. Perhaps you’ve heard of vampire energy. I’ve suspected that some of my home appliances are vampires, and a few weeks ago I decided to start doing some investigation of my own by purchasing a consumer-grade energy meter to measure the amount of energy that various electronics around my house consume. I haven’t done much analysis yet, but I have found that during normal use over a month, my entertainment center uses 75.04kWh and costs me $10.20 in electricity. This amounts to $122.40 over the course of a year. When everything is in standby, these undead electronics suck down 36kWh in a month (I need to run this test with the DVR on another outlet). Leaving the system in standby for a year would still cost me about $60.
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