Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

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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I’m talking about class photos today.  School groups are flocking to the IMA.  The exhibition Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey just opened, the Nugget Factory just interviewed Dawoud Bey for their iTunes U series, In the Factory.  And recently we created a Flickr group called Class Picture Day.

Class Picture Day on Flickr

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Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey opens tomorrow night at the IMA with a conversation with artist Dawoud Bey followed by an opening party. For the exhibition, Bey photographed young people from all parts of the economic, racial and ethnic spectrum in both public and private high schools. I had the pleasure of asking Bey about his work earlier this year:

Interview with artist Dawoud Bey
As published in the fall issue of the IMA’s Previews membership magazine

Q. Can you tell us when you became interested in portraiture?
As I began to figure out what I wanted to do as an artist, I was spending a lot of time going to museums and galleries looking at work by other photographers. The pictures that resonated for me most strongly were those that were of human subjects. There seemed to me something quite powerful about a person confronting the camera, returning the attention of the photographer. Read the rest of this entry »

That sums it up.  You can always tell how stressed out I am by how messy my desk is.  To the untrained eye my desk might look pretty neat.  But only I know that I have stuffed papers that ought to be filed into that little tray and I have five new projects with documents waiting for a file folder.    (So maybe I am a little crazy with the organization…I think it keeps us all together in the long run.)

Check out this photo on Flickr to see a diagram of my crazy.

This is a super-busy time for the Nugget Factory and it just sort of happened.  For a couple of days last week, Daniel was out of the office with Dan shooting some video in San Francisco for the upcoming show, Power and Glory: Court Arts of China’s Ming Dynasty. I found myself sitting at my desk, working at a normal pace…and bored out of my mind.  Two days later, with the full factory back in action, things sort of erupted, with new tasks flying in at every angle.  I guess I prefer it that way…Check out this selection of stuff we have coming soon: Read the rest of this entry »