The Indianapolis Museum of Art is issuing a call for proposals for a summer 2012 six-week residency on Andrea Zittel’s Indianapolis Island within the IMA’s 100 Acres. Graduate and undergraduate students, as well as emerging professionals in the fields of art, design, architecture and performing arts are encouraged to apply to customize and reside on the Island.

Anchored in the 35-acre lake within 100 Acres, Indianapolis Island is a habitable “off-the-grid” structure accessible by rowboat. The 2012 residency will be the third to take place there. During the artwork’s inaugural summer in 2010, Herron School of Art and Design students Jessica Dunn and Michael Runge activated the installation with their project Give and Take, which consisted of a series of visitor interactions based on a system of exchange. The 2011 island resident was Katherine Ball, a student of Portland State University’s Art + Social Practice MFA program. Over the course of her residency, titled No Swimming, Ball initiated a series of ecological interventions in the lake and engaged a local audience through a series of public programs centered on the topic of water.

At about twenty feet in diameter, the Island serves as an experimental living structure that examines the daily needs of contemporary human beings. Residents collaborate with Zittel by adapting and modifying the structure according to their individual needs. The project blends elements of environmental art, sculpture, design and performance in a unique way, offering a challenging and experimental forum for exploring ideas about individualism and self-sufficiency.

If you’d like to be the 2012 Indianapolis Island resident, visit www.imamuseum.org/islandresidency for more information, including photos and renderings of the structure and to learn how to apply. Proposals are due Friday, January 13, 2012.

If you’d feel more at ease watching the residency unfold from the 100 Acres lake shore or online, stay tuned to the IMA’s blog in spring 2012 to find out who will be the next person to call Indianapolis Island home.

Filed under: Art, Art and Nature Park, Contemporary

This is the first post in a monthly series about my work on the African Art collection.  I came to the IMA in October to complete a nine-month fellowship that will serve as the final requirement for my master’s degree in art conservation from New York University’s Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts.

My first weeks at the museum have been filled with introductions.  In addition to meeting new coworkers, there were plenty of new places to get to know as part of the job.  Work-related travel has included a day trip to the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana to examine furniture in storage, condition checking the Mary Miss installation FLOW: Can You See The River? in 100 Acres, and a behind-the-scenes tour of the historic Oldfields-Lilly House and Gardens.

My introduction to the museum’s collection of African Art, however, is proving to be the most complicated. One of my main responsibilities at the IMA is to help prepare that collection for reinstallation early next year. This will involve months of surveying, testing and treating objects in that collection, as well as consulting on matters of storage and display. To begin to tackle this project, I wanted to assemble a list of the objects in the IMA’s collection of African Art, in order to ensure that my survey is thorough.

That practical, seemingly simple, request led me straight into questions of how African Art is defined at the IMA. If the answer seems apparent–that African Art is defined as art that comes from Africa–then consider the following example. The IMA owns two works by the living artist El Anatsui, who was born in Ghana and currently works in Nigeria. One work, Sacred Comb, is on display in the Eiteljorg suite of African Art. However, the other piece, Duvor (Communal Cloth) is displayed in the museum’s Contemporary Art galleries.

Which artwork by El Anatsui is classified as African Art at the IMA?

Because these two curatorial departments use different criteria to define their collections (geography vs. time period), both can claim either work.  Furthermore, the IMA’s department of Textiles and Fashion Arts uses still different parameters for defining their collection–those of medium and use.  As a work that references traditional West African strip-woven textiles, Duvor (Communal Cloth) is actually catalogued as part of the Textiles and Fashion Arts collection.

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Filed under: Art, Conservation, The Collection

I thought that this might be an opportunity to talk about aspects of the Out Of This World exhibition that are not so public. An insider’s view, perhaps. The easiest way for me to think about what has transpired with each project is just to walk through the exhibition in my mind, project by project.

Flight:  This is the first project you see as you enter the museum and the last project to be installed in the galleries. It was a hair-puller.  As you may or may not know, my business, Indianapolis Fabrications, built the sculptural works in my exhibition, as well as built and installed the Mary Miss Flow project, which opened to the public two weeks after my opening. If building two monumental exhibitions wasn’t bad enough, my business partner, Randy Domeck, had a wedding to attend that kept him out of the shop the two weeks before my opening. Add to that, my teaching contract at Herron School of Art and Design also started around that same time. Most of my work was installed by this point, but I was in a panic trying to manage everything going on. Luckily, we have responsible employees at iFab and Randy found time to handle some management of the business projects remotely.  He arrived in Indianapolis the day before my opening and we installed Flight in one day – the Wednesday before the preview and artist talk.  Phew!

Space Suits:  I had every intention of making these suits myself, but the scope of the exhibition quickly made me realize that in order to complete the work on time, I needed more help. Kyle Perry and Adam Buente of PROJECTiONE offered to help make a model of the space helmet. They found a 3D model of the space suit on the NASA website and were able to use that file to CNC cut the foam model, making my helmets very accurate reproductions of the original. Once I had the model, I made the mold and cast the helmets. Patrick Fitzpatrick had been a graduate student of mine at the School at the Art Institute of Chicago and he CNC cut a form for vacuum forming the visors. Meanwhile, I wasn’t home enough to do the sewing and knew that many of the parents at my son Angus’ school (IPS #84 CFI) were gifted craftspeople, so Donna and I started asking around if anyone would want to take on the project of sewing the suits.  Thank goodness Beth Hannan stepped up and said she could do it. I gave her my reference material and she did the rest in awesome detail.

Phoom: I built this project while at Sculpture Space in Utica, NY. Once I made the sculpture and it was ready to be painted, I was nervous about getting a finish that approximated flesh as closely as I wanted, never having airbrushed something like this before (this was also my first figurative sculpture).  The administration at Sculpture Space suggested that I go to the Golden Paints headquarters, which was only 45 minutes away in New Berlin, NY.  At Golden, Michael Townsend spent the afternoon training me to use Golden products and instructing me on using an airbrush. The other thing I needed help with was hair.  Yvonne at Yvonne’s Hair Designs in Whitesboro, NY makes custom wigs for cancer patients and was game to help get my sculpture wigged. It was a pretty funny moment to haul the sculpture into a typical hair salon for its first and only haircut. I often get curious looks when making my work.

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Filed under: Art, Contemporary

It was a Sunday afternoon in the home of a long-time IMA patron on one of winter’s bleakest, iciest days that we heard a wonderful performance of Franz Schubert’s great 1827 song cycle Die Winterreise, or A Winter Journey. The cycle comprises 24 songs about the painful feelings of a lover’s rejection, personal loss, loneliness and confronting mortality.

Now that it’s spring, we’re days away from a concert of another sort: Grammy-award winning contemporary music ensemble eighth blackbird will perform at The Toby Saturday, March 26 in a concert co-sponsored by Ensemble Music Society and the IMA. So what’s the connection besides the truism that spring always follows winter?

One striking aspect of that wintry afternoon was the spectacular contemporary art everywhere in the home.  Wherever we glanced were paintings and sculptures by well-known artists. The collection was fabulous. So the guests were listening to a great collection of early 19^th century music while enjoying paintings and sculpture from 150-175 years later.

What would you think if the contrasting periods were switched?  Does the art you enjoy at the IMA or have on your walls at home match your “art for ears?”  Are you willing to go to a concert and be as surprised and challenged as you are when you enter the fourth floor galleries at the IMA?

I remember thinking once I was quite sophisticated and knowledgeable about modern music, so I expounded to a friend, “John Adams and Philip Glass—how pointlessly simpleminded.”  Then I went to a conference in LA where we heard excerpts from Adams’ then somewhat new opera Nixon in China. That evening changed my perspective on an entire group of modern composers and deepened my belief that music loses so much when it’s recorded.

When eighth blackbird first came to Indianapolis almost three years ago, I experienced a tinge of anxiety before the concert because this group included extensive percussion and used video projectors with amplification in the program, again extending my personal boundaries of “classical” music, and as well as for many in the audience.  The audience reaction by people of all ages was enthusiastic.  You have to be willing to jump in and try it out.

So look beyond the dozens of recordings of Vivaldi or Pachelbel on iTunes and come to The Toby on March 26.  Be open to change and discover exciting music by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Missy Mazzoli and others.

Filed under: Public Programs, The Toby

In a few short days, you’ll have the chance to experience Tara Donovan: Untitled at the IMA and take the TAP tour along with it. Opening this weekend, it’s been a mad dash to finalize this exhibition experience that features audio commentary, polls, videos and high-res imagery, all accessible on an iPod Touch. Oh, and if you’re an IMA member, TAP is free to you.

This is the second TAP tour we’ve done for an exhibition, and another major accomplishment for the Nugget Factory. NF FTW! As with any project, the second go-around always seems a little smoother. We certainly couldn’t have done it without the collaborative spirit of the contemporary department. Also, big ups to our applications team for some slick interface modifications to the TAP software. Did I mention the entire software development, content production and implementation was done entirely in-house?

Another difference you’ll notice if you took the Sacred Spain tour last winter is that this tour focuses more on the visitor’s interpretation and experience and offers many different perspectives.

You’ll hear voices from curatorial, design, education, and conservation at the IMA. One of those voices is IMA’s Phil Lynam, Manager of Art and Design Education. We hope this sample stop will entice you to TAP into Tara Donovan:Untitled at the IMA. Listen below:

Stay tuned for more exciting news about TAP!

Filed under: Art, Conservation, Current Events, Design, Education, Interviews, Marketing, New Media, Technology