#6. IMA's Six Degrees of Separation

LACMA did it, everyone on Facebook is doing it, and now the IMA is turning it up a notch with blog “tagging”. Here it is…what you all have been waiting for…25 Random Things about the IMA. 

The Rules (according to Facebook, of course): Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged in your post.

1. General admission to the IMA is FREE!
2. Percival de Luce’s oil on canvas painting, An Anxious Mother, was the Museum’s first acquisition.
3. One person in all of Samoa visited our Web site in 2008. That person looked at five pages and stayed for just over two minutes.
4. Last year, 2,671 visited our site with an iPhone and 36 visited via a PlayStation 3.
5. One person visited the IMA Web site with a 1 bit screen resolution. How is that even possible?
6. Six Degrees of Separation: IMA staff member and blogger Anne Laker is cousins with the America’s Top Model Winner Adrianne Curry, who is married to Christopher Knight (aka Peter Brady), who once guest starred on That ’70s Show with Debra Jo Rupp (Mrs. Forman), who played Phoebe’s sister in-law on Friends, which starred Jennifer Aniston, who played a love interest of Kevin Bacon in the 1997 romantic comedy, Picture Perfect. Whew!
7. There are approximately 164 fluorescent lights mounted to the wall in the IMA’s Pulliam Great Hall. The lights are part of a three-story fluorescent light installation by Robert Irwin entitled Light and Space III, which was specifically designed for the museum’s main 60-foot atrium.
8. The largest painting in the IMA’s collection is Rosy Cardita by Larry Zox, measuring 69” 252”.
9. The smallest painting in the IMA collection is Portrait of Paul Peckham by Lewis Peckham. It measures 1 in. x 1 ¾ in.
10. Nancy Reagan and fashion designer Bill Blass (an Indiana native), donated a red silk, chiffon and taffeta evening dress worn by the former first lady to the Museum’s Textile and Fashion Arts Collection.
11. There was actually a vending machine in the building that sold art – Gallery of the Machine by Matt Eickhoff and Artur Silva. (The vending machine is making its way back to Artur’s studio at the Harrison Center for the Arts for some repairs.)
12. The IMA’s collection includes Vincent Van Gogh’s Landscape at Saint-Remy, which was painted during the final year of the artist’s life.
13. The IMA recently acquired the landmark Miller House and Garden in Columbus, Indiana. Designated as a National Historic Landmark in 2000, it is considered one of the country’s most highly-regarded examples of mid-century Modernist residences.
14. The IMA has its own in-house Nugget Factory which conceptualizes, films, produces and delivers high quality art video for ArtBabble.org.
15. The 52 acres of the IMA campus currently open to the public comprised the town of Woodstock in the early 20th century.
16. Encompassing 152 acres of gardens and grounds, the IMA is among the 10 largest encyclopedic art museums in the United States.
17. Last year, 508 IMA volunteers donated more than 26,000 hours of their time.
18. According to the Dashboard, the IMA’s Horticulture staff planted 30,443 new plants on the IMA grounds in 2008.
19. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is one of the most popular days for the IMA. In 2007, we welcomed 4,500 visitors on MLK day.
20. Within two years of beginning an engineering-based, detailed approach to reducing its energy consumption, the IMA’s average monthly demand for electricity and natural gas was reduced by about 40 percent. The energy conservations also reduced the IMA’s greenhouse gas emissions (CO2) by more than 6,700 tons.
21. The IMA’s Stout Reference Library has more than 100,000 items of information on visual arts including books, periodicals, museum publications, auction catalogs and individual artist files.
22. As one of the 10 oldest general art museums in the country, the Indianapolis Museum of Art was founded during American history’s most remarkable movement in creating museum institutions, starting in the 1870s when New York and Boston established their museums.
23. The Toby was built using 23,642 pounds of recycled material.
24. In 2010, the IMA will open 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, which will be one of the largest contemporary museum art parks in the country. The Park will feature artworks commissioned from both emerging and veteran artists, who will create temporary and permanent works in response to the site’s varied geography.
25. The Indianapolis Museum of Art offers FREE general admission! Oh, wait…did I already mention that?