Where did this love story begin? A swim teacher danced and suggested that I try classes for the coordination, recognition of rhythm and self-confidence it instilled. It was also one of the few activities available during the fall and winter months in a small town. I should mention that I was obsessed with Angelina Ballerina books. I met two of best friends in Creative Dance and find it impossible to forget my lilac butterfly costume from the first recital. From there, it was a whirlwind of performances from The Wizard of Oz to The Nutcracker until I was old enough to become a member of the Wabash Valley Dance Theater Company.

When I spotted an announcement about a new professional ballet company possibly starting in Indy, I broke into a set of grand battement (that’s large kicks for you non-dancers).

Indianapolis City Ballet seeks to unite and strengthen the ballet, dance, and arts community. Founded with a philosophy that more dance is good for everyone — be it professional, amateur or scholastic, contemporary, classical, jazz, ballroom or tap — Indianapolis City Ballet offers links to dance-related resources.

The Indianapolis City Ballet hopes to establish a 12 person professional company in Indianapolis (as opposed to a larger regional company) under the artistic direction of John Meehan, maintaining a performance regime of both classical and contemporary ballet. You can listen to an interview with Meehan on WFYI “The Art of the Matter”: Download audio file (AOTM_4-17-09.mp3)
To gauge and raise community support, the City Ballet is holding a gala performance this Saturday at the Murat Theatre with dancers from around the world. This probably isn’t news to you. The gala is getting quite a bit of publicity. You can meet the dancers in this Indianapolis Star article, or get a glimpse into the lives of a married couple from the American Ballet Theatre who will be performing at the gala in Glamour magazine. The story of the City Ballet is also featured in the latest issue of Dance Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, and NUVO.

As much as I hope the company is successful and the gala is a sell-out, I am not sure that Indianapolis is ready to support this venture. It has some major supporters and sponsors behind it, including both individual donors and companies like Saks and Tiffany & Co. But is the Midwestern ballet audience ready to be revived? I had friends in Ballet Internationale when it went under four years ago and that history makes me nervous. City Ballet includes its background online, but makes no mention of focus groups or surveys conducted to test the market, although they imply that the gala is the actual test. Also, I wonder if Indy has an audience with an eye for classical ballet? Dance Kaleidoscope is a contemporary company and often draws large audiences because of the approachability of modern dance. It seems the City Ballet recognizes they have to do more than classical ballet to draw people in — their ad in the Indy Star reads “A one-of-a-kind performance featuring acclaimed dancers from major international companies; neo-classical and contemporary ballets; fog machines, strobe lights and a cow in a pink tutu!”

In addition to a substantial amount of press, the City Ballet is doing an nice job stating their cause through tranparency on its Web site. The site also contains an educational section with theatre and ballet terms for newcomers, and the City Ballet is on Facebook with more than 230 fans.

Consider trying something new this Saturday night and supporting the Indianapolis City Ballet at An Evening with the Stars. It may be the beginning of your love story. Or share your thoughts — is Indianapolis ready for a new professional ballet company? I am.

Guy Ben-Ner is another artist featured in the exhibition Adaptation. IMA Curatorial Associate of Contemporary Art Allison Unruh and I had the pleasure of asking Ben-Ner about his work earlier this year:

Interview with video artist Guy Ben-Ner

What first drew you to working in video?
When my daughter, Elia, was born I was still an undergraduate art student in Israel. I realized I could not spend much time in a studio anymore, with the demands of work, studies and fatherhood. I decided to work from home and include my cohabitants in my plans. To get a child involved with immediate video magic was quicker than working with marble and much cleaner than painting at home. Besides, for the narratives I started to be interested in, video seemed to me the best tool. I needed things that unfold in time.

In collaborating with your family on videos, how do you negotiate the roles of artist and father?
At the time, I worked hard to conclude that both are one and the same role – so I did not have to negotiate too much.

Your works in Adaptation take inspiration from Melville’s novel Moby-Dick and Truffaut’s film L’enfant sauvage (The Wild Child). Why did you choose to engage with these particular sources?
Moby-Dick was part of a few “sea adventure” narratives I was interested in at the time, partly for the escape they offer (you sail away, leaving the family behind) and partly for the Western mythology they take part in as creators. Truffaut’s movie interested me because I understood it not as a wild-child’s story but as a director’s account of what it means to direct a child actor – an act that can never be fully justified or moral. So I will not call them inspirations but rather tools that helped me tell my own stories in a fictional disguise. I used them rather than being inspired by them. But maybe that is the same thing?

For Wild Boy, you built a large-scale installation that echoes the set you created in your home where you filmed the work. How do you feel that this installation changes the experience of the video for the viewer?
It is comfortable. It suggests to you, the viewer, to lie down, relax and take your time – that’s it. I am usually not very found of video installations, and I can live with Wild Boy detached from the installation very peacefully. (View an excerpt from Ben-Ner’s single-channel video Wild Boy, 2004)

Can you tell us about the projects you are currently working on?
My next movie is being shot with the kind help of the people at Mass MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), where I will open a show [on May 23]. All I can tell you now is that it will involve a light airplane, a car, a double bicycle and two people. I hope that sounds intriguing enough.

If you visited the IMA’s permanent galleries more than once this year, it is likely you did not see the same works of art. Each month the IMA rotates different works of art in an effort to display the breadth of the Museum’s collection. The scheduled rotation is determined through a collaboration between curators and conservators. Curators decide which works are displayed and their display time frame, while the conservators regulate the exposure time of certain sensitive artworks. Below are just a handful of the hundreds of works newly displayed in the IMA’s galleries in 2008:

For a look at all the works that went on view in 2008, visit the IMA’s Dashboard.

In celebration of the IMA’s 125th anniversary, the Museum also sought to acquire 125 new gifts to add to its collection this year. Stay tuned for a complete recap of this project.

Indianapolis has a newly installed resident along the banks of the White River. Donald Lipski’s new installation “The Tent” is a nice surprise for those who frequent the White River State Park’s plaza. The installation is playfully reminiscent of the Indianapolis Speedway’s checkered flag. The silver structure is unobtrusive against city skyline from the pedestrian bridge leading to the zoo.

The work is a gift from the 500 Festival, a not-for-profit volunteer organization created to organize civic events celebrating the greatest race in the world, as part of the 50th Anniversary Legacy Art Project.

“I recalled seeing a video of the 500 Festival’s Mini-Marathon with the colors of the runners’ shirts bobbing up and down,” said Lipski in a press release from the 500 Festival. “I feel that ‘The Tent’, a symbol of community and coming together, captures the movement and excitement of all the Festival’s events.”

Seven Spades by Donald Lipski

Another Lipski work entitled “Seven Spades” can be found a few miles up the river at the IMA. Made of 100 small objects, each object is a separate sculpture created by combining everyday things. I spotted conglomerations of phone cord, birthday candles, spades playing cards, plastic rulers, a branch, Lipski’s American Express card, electric wire, bike reflectors, drinking straws and address labels from the Herron Gallery in Indianapolis. The work is a fine example of assemblage art and reminds me of discovering unknown tools in my grandfather’s barn as a child in northern Indiana.

Text referring to the piece reads: “In some combinations the impulse seems to be to destroy the object’s former use. In others the inspiration is joining similar forms.”

Both of Lipski’s works are site-specific and add an eclectic intimacy to the city’s riverside art collections.

I’m obsessed with making something that matters. I’m obsessed with working. And I believe that it is only through hard work that good work is made.

One of the most important things to me has always been to keep my hands moving, to keep making things. I worry about what I make and what it means after I make it.  I also used to think that talking about art, especially your own art, ruins it. That’s partly why I dropped out of art school. But I’ve softened on that in recent years, which is maybe a result of having gone to art school. I do talk here and there about my work and hope it won’t ruin anything, but instead reveal a bit about the way I’m thinking, at least in the moment.

Overhead shot of "Whole"

For my show at the IMA I wanted to make sculptures that could stand on their own. I had previously created pieces that were sprawling and boundless and all consuming, the structures of which relied heavily on the spaces they inhabited. But this time I attempted to make sculptures that were contained, pieces that had a beginning and an end. And pieces that could be here, there, or anywhere but are themselves wherever they are and that rely only on themselves to be what they are.

There are nine stacks in the show. I used the most reductive forms of building to create mass-accumulation and repetition. My intention was to simplify my obsessive process into its most basic elements in order to reveal it, to expose the layers of building and to create a texture that is purely based on the movement of my hand making the knots.

Corner detail

People ask me if making my work is relaxing or meditative. It’s not. Working with these ropes is physically challenging. They are big and heavy and clumsy. I sweat, I curse, and I feel like I’m wrestling with an octopus.  There is a sense of accomplishment in overcoming a physical challenge. It is through endurance, and an intense level of psychological commitment and invariance that we push through the toughest of times. There is always a struggle and there are always challenges. I am fueled by the desire to overcome them.

Orly and Joe

We all have a need to flex. Whether it’s showing off our biceps and inflating our chest or wearing high heels and feathers in our caps, we want to be bigger. We want to be better.  My work attempts to deal with the hyperbolic nature of this survival tendency. Each stack is named after a different Mr. Universe champion from the ‘60s and ‘70s. They are not my heroes, but they are big men.

There are also moments of lightness, of fragility and gentleness. I like to pretend I am a boxer dishing out a bloody beating followed by a ballerina dancing with my toes barely skimming the ground.  And then I like to imagine that my work is the product of these two people falling in love. There is precision and there is rawness. And there is the combination of the two that creates the tension that I am attracted to.

But nothing I say matters all that much. It’s what I do. I believe in action. In what I choose to leave behind. In what I take the time to devote myself to. In the end it’s the work that matters.

The first in-house video I worked on at the IMA was re-editing an African Pottery Techniques documentary shot in Burkina Faso.  At the time, it was a pretty big step for the museum – to actually do this in-house, quickly, easily and for free.  When I compare that to our latest  video release on Orly Genger’s installation “Whole”, I kind of laugh.  We shot this video in HD, incorporated Time Lapse, used a lift for certain shots and then published to YouTube.  Check it out below.

My colleague Dan Dark recently recorded the Christmas at Lilly House tour with the LH Director, Bradley Brooks in an afternoon.  Dan then finalized and edited in the space of a few hours, then uploaded it to our Guide by Cell account.  Visitors to Lilly House can access this content by using their cell phone. Our first Christmas at Lilly House involved a lot more time editing and recording, and incorporated the Dell DJ Ditty mp3 players.  I am actually laughing….but it worked at the time.  We plan on increasing our audio content across all of IMA’s collections in 2009, and I am incredibly excited about some of the concepts we are planning.  But I can’t discuss those yet…

imamuseum.org/blog is almost a year old.  It’s been a really exciting year for the blog with some superb posts from all over the museum.  I’m proud when I think that internally, the IMA supports a variety of areas blogging.  Where else can you go and hear directly from conservation, security, horticulture or an artist duo?  We’ve come a long way from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres blog (did anyone ever see that?) we setup a few years ago, and our imamuseum.org drupal based blog just a year ago.  Sometime we get it wrong.  Sometimes we get it right.

I’m also reflecting on past projects because I can’t quite share some of the upcoming projects in 2009, yet.  I’m dying to, and the second I can I will post.  The main change in the digital content we produce is an increased focus on the contemporary world.  The Toby, Contemporary department as well as the opening of 100 Acres in 2009, presents access to cutting edge artists, performers and academics.  That means content opportunities that will become audio guides, videos, and web projects.  It’s gonna be a big year, and we plan on making ‘09 the best for the museum visitor and technology-focused experiences.  It’s all about keeping the momentum.

And in closing, this is Despi’s last day at the museum.  She’s been an integral part of the IMA and New Media, a dedicated professional, supportive colleague, and more importantly, a friend.  Best of luck Darnell!

The book Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thorton is another excellent find. “A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton’s entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture,” according to the book’s publisher. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s at the top of my wish-list. Read a review from The Washington Post.

Those are my two finds. I’m leaving the rest up to you. Your prime shopping date: Friday, December 5 – “First Friday” offers your best bet to buy art at the local galleries. Share your finds below…

Tentacles of the Beast, 2008

I just returned from a trip to New York in the height of the August heat with all of the lovely smells and suffocating humidity that comes with it. The goal of this trip? To spend as much time with artists and their work as possible, to slip into the city’s unique rhythms and magic anonymously and deeply. To see again.

My first experience with art on this trip happened unexpectedly and almost immediately. When I got to my Midtown hotel to drop off my bags before rushing down to a Chelsea studio on 26th Street, I pulled back my curtains and opened the windows, letting in the outside air to equalize the freezing air in my room. Set before me was a Hitchcockian scene, a 21st century Rear Window. I looked outside of my room on the eighth floor and saw various people engaged in quiet, disparate activities: in one window a woman busy at her desk, in another two people kissing, and an old man walking out onto the fire escape to grab a secret smoke. There were silent intimate recognitions, an awareness that we were all seeing each other, despite our resistance to acknowledging it, a fierce refusal to allow our eyes to meet directly. Extreme privacy and exposure both at once. I was reminded of the Impressionist era opera paintings where the subject of the work is spectatorship, the reciprocal experience of looking and being looked at. What happens in the space between.

The old man turned out to be a performance artist of sorts. Standing on the balcony he pulled open a new pack of cigarettes, removing the small bit of rectangular foil and carefully and intentionally released it in midair. My first reaction to his gesture was anger, but this soon yielded to embarrassment at witnessing his private transgression, an acknowledgment that we all have these moments but never want to admit to them. And then something happened: the small piece of foil wafted through the air, catching the glints of sunlight like some precious, weightless gem released from outer space. Watching it descend and flutter eight floors to the ground, I found myself smiling completely, awed by the simple beauty that such a common object could bring to this very particular context and moment. And then I realized that the old man had dropped the foil just for me, enacting a private performance pointing to the Beautiful, an experience of the Sublime.

Type A and Lisa

Then on to Chelsea to meet up with collective Type A (Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin), two artists with whom I’m working on a major Team Building project for the much anticipated Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park which will open in September 2009. The streets of Chelsea were mostly abandoned, the dealers secreted away in the Hamptons for the last gasp of summer before the frenzy of season openers in September. Adam and Andrew and I were about to head to South Street Seaport to take the Circle Line around the Harbor to see Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls project.  When I got to their studio, they were excited to show me a new body of work, a series of photogravures that they had been developing over the past year.

Untitled, Type A, 2008. Courtesy of the artists and Goff & Rosenthal, New York.

They laid them out before me and talked about their menacing quality and I disagreed with them immediately, saying that the series was emphatically intimate, beautiful, vulnerable, romantic, mysterious, nostalgic, and poetic. The velvety, luscious images depict the artists’ bodies posed in extreme shadow to reveal only a fragment of the whole. Each picture presents one body separate and alone, but inevitably in dialogical relation to the other. The best ones verge on abstraction, where the forms become almost unrecognizable, but forcefully organic and referential. Because Adam and Andrew each took the complementary picture of the other, there is a fascinating duality to the works that encapsulates Adam and Andrew’s unorthodox artistic relationship, a kind of unified portrait of the maker and the sitter, a self and other, a presence and a lack. In most photographic situations the photographer and the sitter usually are unrelated, but these images take on more significance because of Adam and Andrew’s collaborative practices over the past ten years. There is an interesting in-betweenness in these photos, a tension between the two of them that is an unspoken but visual and physical form of intimacy.

Adam, Andrew and I had a lively, rambunctious cab ride downtown to experience Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls from a boat. Approaching the Pier on a hot New York summer night, I was blanketed by the smell of saltwater and sea air along with the accompanying odor of diesel fumes. It reminded me of my youth at the New Jersey shore (and of another incredible project that Adam and Andrew are developing. . . more to come on that in a future post, perhaps). Now the art was coming to me in the form of a smell, showing me the way an odor can evoke memories and physical sensations, creating an elusive mental picture that fades immediately upon experiencing it, leaving a satisfying sense of longing and desire for a past that can never be completely reconstructed. Standing in line, Andrew had me turn around to see an old ship and the skyline of downtown New York through its masts. More magic in everyday things.

South Street Seaport near the Circle Line

The waterfalls are remarkable and ordinary at the same time. Our favorite one sat beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, itself a work of art. The majestic bridge juxtaposed with the immense scaffolding of Eliasson’s waterfall’s armature was strikingly beautiful and perfectly sited; the scale of hundreds of feet of rushing water against the backdrop of the bridge and cityscape utterly breathtaking and pleasurable. The irrationality of a manmade waterfall made from hundreds of feet of steel and pumps, sitting in an absurd location, pointed to the unlikely relationship between art, nature, urban infrastructure, and the postindustrial present.

So much more happened on the trip, including a wonderful studio visit with sculptor Petah Coyne who is finishing up a new body of work that will premiere at Galerie Lelong on October 24, 2008. I’ve been watching the work develop over the last few years and have been lucky enough to engage with Petah in an intense dialogue about its relationship to art history, literature (particularly Dante’s renowned epic poem The Divine Comedy), film, and personal memory. I think it is some of the best work that she has produced to date. There are two objects that stand out the most for me, one based on the medieval poet Dante’s idealized, beloved Beatrice and the other on the Roman poet Virgil. I would welcome either of these objects into the IMA’s permanent collection with gusto, just in case there’s anyone out there reading with the will and means to help us grow the collection with a single gesture.

Petah Coyne, Untitled #1180 (Beatrice), 2003-08. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York.

I have fallen in love with Coyne’s Beatrice, once described by Dante as “La gloriosa donna della mia mente” (the glorious lady of my mind). Long the subject of Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets, Beatrice has been transformed anew into a peculiar abstract vision comprised of roughly 20,000 silk flowers, wax cast statuary, taxidermy animals and birds, thread, silk/rayon velvet, felt, tree branches, tree bark, driftwood, specially formulated wax, pearl-headed hat pins, black spray paint, pigment, plywood, wood, metal hardware, chicken wire fencing, wire, cable and cable bolts. With all of these components, one would be hard pressed to believe that the final object could be specific, cohesive, and staggering. But it is.

Petah Coyne, Detail, Untitled #1180 (Beatrice), 2003-08. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York.

Petah’s irresistible blue and purple Beatrice, which contrasts with previous depictions of her in red and white, towers over the spectator at just over eleven feet tall; she is the whirling embodiment of Divine Love, virtue, and grace, a force of good, a personification of Beauty. This condensed representation of essential love simultaneously encapsulates the geography of paradise and its most famous guide.

Petah Coyne makes the viewer want to believe in Heaven, even if s/he has her doubts.

And then an amazing dinner conversation with Orly Genger who is in the midst of developing a powerful commissioned project for our Efroymson Entry Pavilion which will open on November 21, 2008. Orly once told me that she sees her work perched at the intersection of Anni Albers and Richard Serra. This colossal hand-knotted, organic installation is going to be amazing. Be prepared to be moved in lots of ways!

Then back to Indianapolis to escort a Chicago-based blogger around the Art & Nature Park. Walking out of the rear loading dock, heading over towards the Park, I ran into two IMA employees, Brad Dilger, our masterful installation tech who handles all of our intermedia art projects with great innovation and commitment, and Brose Partington, a fabulous artist in his own right who helps build mounts and other things for our exhibitions. Walking over to me with impish grins, they asked me to take a look at two shiny, ribbed aluminum venting pipes that were spilling out of a dark mechanical doorway on the side of our limestone building. Tied together and suspended on the side of the building, the functional pipes looked like part of a Tim Hawkinson installation (perhaps I was thinking this because on Monday I just installed a new addition to our collection, Hawkinson’s Mobius Ship, up on the third floor in the contemporary galleries). Upon closer inspection, I saw an object label (perfectly scaled and formatted) haphazardly affixed to one of the exhaust pipes.  On it someone had typed the following words:

Tentacles of the Beast, 2008
Aluminum on Limestone
Building Services
2008.1

I marveled at this installation of shiny pipes and the gesture invoked by our Building Services employees through naming it. Although I knew it was meant as a spoof, the effort that they made to name this everyday functional form moved me; the fact that they named it was a way of seeing in it its artistry and humor. It brought the Beautiful back to me again in another guise. It is always a good sign for a creative institution when things like this start popping up around the building where people work. And I thought how great it was that so many people sitting at the smoking shack – custodians, electricians, curators, preparators – were talking about the question of what made something art. Could a set of aluminum exhaust pipes transform into a sculpture in situ? The very real act of seeing was happening in the IMA’s back yard, people were talking about art and the everyday. It was exceptionally cool.

Tentacles of the Beast, 2008

So I asked Bert Reader, our facilities engineer, a.k.a., the artist, to share a little bit more about the work. Here’s what he said:

“This whole contraption came about in an effort to eliminate the need for the temporary emergency generator which cost the IMA about $1000 per day just to sit there.  Part of the reason for the recent generator failure was that the room air temperature became too hot when the generator ran. Adapters where purchased from Caterpillar and mounted on the combustion air intake manifolds.  12″ aluminum flexible pipes were connected and they were run outside allowing combustion air to be drawn in at ambient conditions. We are currently working with BDMD and Circle Design group to find a permanent solution.  Hester DeLoach [our typesetter] remarked that the pipes look like tentacles, David Lingeman [from Buildings] noted that it was aluminum on limestone, and the generator has been a beast, a problem child, since it was placed there, hence the title.  Someone mentioned that it looked like it was trying to get out, and interestingly enough had we placed the generator outside to begin with, we wouldn’t have had any issues.”

Art is found in the places in between. It is the responsibility of each of us to open ourselves up to seeing it.

I also owe a lot to football and it’s something I’m always willing to discuss, play or watch. It’s even more appropriate to discuss today and even into the summer. In a matter of hours, over in Moscow, the Champions League Final kicks off featuring an all-English match up of Chelsea FC and Manchester United FC (I’m rooting for Man U). In a matter of a few weeks (17 days to be exact), the European Championships begin, sadly without England, but I’ll be rooting for the Orange Crush (that would be the Dutch National Team) and glued to every game I can catch on TV.
Every two years I become transfixed with the World Cup or Euro Championships – and it is heaven. I remember beautiful goals as if they were works of art and the players that create them (Pele, Maradona, Cruyff and Zidane) like artists – but I excitedly digress and this is where I bring this post back to planet art museum. With all this football on my mind, I decided to research contemporary works of art and artists influenced by or featuring this sport.

Here’s what I found:

Local artist Artur Silva is pretty cool and not because I can have a conversation about Gordon Banks with him. Artur is Brazilian which means he has the luxury of supporting some of the best teams in the history of the game. I remember watching the 2002 World Cup game between England and Brazil in a bar as Brazilian fans samba’d around me celebrating their victory. It was painful loss for an England fan, but it really opened my eyes to the beauty of Brazilian soccer. Around the same time, I came across this piece by Artur Silva and it brought back so many memories of Pele, the game, the history. So thank you to Artur for that.

I’ve written about it before, but I don’t mind beating a dead horse. Zinedine Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait is an impressive cinematic work of art that depicts the beautiful game and one of the games greatest players ever, Zizou. Directed by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, it features stunning camera work (all 17 of them), a mesmerizing soundtrack by Mogwai and clever, thoughtful editing. Do whatever you can to find this video.

Fellow blogger Phillip sent this link to me ages ago and I went nuts. German artist Susken Rosenthal creates individual portraits of specific football matches by sketching and tracking the ball movement in real time. The result is similar to that of a seismographic drawing. To someone not familiar with soccer, it may not make sense. To me it’s a work of art.

And in short -

Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco not only plays soccer but has also depicted it in some of his work. Check it out here.

Here’s an interesting piece by Brian Jungen that synthesizes Nike silver soccer balls made to resemble lava rock.

Turkish artist Omer Ali Kazma created a video installation on Turkish team, Galatasaray featuring footage from over 8 months of work. I would love to see this somehow. Can anyone help me out?

And that’s all I’ve got…for now. If you’ve made it this far and want to contribute any recommendations for contemporary artists and football, please leave me a comment.

In the meantime, enjoy this Maradona goal scored against England in the 1986 World Cup. Painful for me to watch, but quite possibly a work of art.

A company called BetterWall allows you to buy those exhibition banners from around the world to become timeless works of art for your home or business. Started by a husband-wife team of environmental consultant and art historian, BetterWall works with museums through its “Recycle and Reuse Program” to help museums remain green by taking tons of vinyl banners off their hands and selling them, giving a portion of the profits back to the museums. I have a National Portrait Gallery, George Washington “Lansdowne” sign that used to be displayed on the Mall in Washington, D.C. framed in my living room, but this article by a Washington Post reporter was the first time I had heard of a company who made authentic museum advertising available to the public.

As unique objects produced in limited editions, the banners embody great art, great museums, and contemporary advertising trends. — BetterWall

Since you won’t find IMA signage on BetterWall, what happens to it all? To start out, indoor “case signs” that advertise upcoming and current exhibitions and programs are typically requested by IMA staff who would like them as souvenirs from the show. The exhibition’s curator always gets first dibs. Next, are the large, outdoor “facade banners” that hang over the front of building. (Roman Art from the Louvre was up last fall, and Breaking the Mode is currently up.) Because they are so massive, they are usually recycled in various ways by the IMA grounds crew for things such as tarps. The facade banners that do not advertise specific exhibitions are evergreen and are stored when not in use. The “perimeter banners,” made of the same mesh material as the facade banners, currently feature “It’s My Art.” When they are switched out in the near future, IMA staff will work with buildings management or the sign company who creates them to recycle them. And finally, the “trilon signs” at the corner of Michigan and 38th streets, are made of a durable material so they can look good regardless of the elements. Staff are looking into the possibility of an option for routinely recycling these as well.

So there you have it. It doesn’t look like authentic IMA signage is currently available for your decorating desires, but you never know what the future may hold. IMA members, check out your summer issue of Previews magazine at the end of April for a poster to put up in the office.