If I ever end up on death row and get to choose my last meal, I will choose a meal a lot like one I had last month in a barn in McCordsville, IN. The soup, in particular, is hard to forget: chilled, neon-red late season Indiana tomatoes, swimming with a drop of pale fromage blanc, distilled into a shot glass, and served with a cracker, thin as a Catholic communion wafer. And that was just the second course.

The goats had stepped aside and the rain blustered outside. Eighty diners piled into the hay-filled dining hall for a five-course extravaganza presented by Slow Food Indy. Slow Food in an international movement working to reconnect people with the pleasures of real food, sustainably produced. Money raised from the dinner was used to send several local chefs and cooking students to Terra Madre, the global gastronomic gathering in Turin, Italy.

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Filed under: Education, Public Programs

The IMA Blog team welcomes new author, Linda Duke, Director of Education.

When I was very young, I had a special sense about written numbers. It’s hard for me to access that now, through all the years of education devoted to making sure I understood numbers in a standard way. But I still have a feeling about that early relationship, and sometimes I wonder how it might have developed if I hadn’t learned to be ashamed of it and to ignore it.

Here’s what I can recall: I knew the shapes of the numerals as indicators of the distinct characters of each. Though my sense for some of them has slipped out of reach, in the way dreams do, I can still feel the stronger personalities. The numeral five was intimidating in appearance, but in actuality quite sweet. Seven was both stern and judgmental. Eight had complexity and depth – and eight led to a painful collision with my first grade teacher, Miss Logan. She taught us to write eight with one continuous figure-eight line. Soon after, she exhorted us never to write it as one circle on top of the other – an idea that had, frankly, not occurred to me.

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Filed under: Education

Aside from the "zigazig ah" that everyone wants, I want IMA to be, “genre-defying.” Films, bands, authors, artists: they can all be genre-defying. So why can’t we?

In many ways museums have been required to wear many hats for a while now. They have found themselves in precarious places, needing to get a piece of that proverbial cash pie, necessitating competition with movies, sporting events, zoos and other, much flashier leisure time attractions. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: New Media