In the great green garden-room
There was an elephant ear alocasia
And some blue and white balloon flowers ….”

Brilliant red of the native sourwood tree with the clear yellow of Photinia in the background. IMA/Oldfields border garden near orchard.

Arisaema and sourwood leaves

It has been a long gentle slide through a beautiful autumn here in the gardens.  Cool sunny days and no heavy rain storms meant outstanding leaf color on trees and shrubs around the campus.  But the bright yellow has now fallen from the sugar maple outside the Deer-Zink Pavilion, the needles of the great pyramidal dawnredwoods around the Sutphin Fountain are going to russet orange, and the red maples on the mall above the parking garage are just past peak color.

Yesterday morning folks in my neighborhood were needing to really scrape frost from the car windows.  The last of the summer’s annual plantings are being pulled out.  Hostas are cut down, and autumn windflowers are spent.  Only some purple monkshood and blue tartarian asters have blossoms among the perennials.  And I have not been able to make myself dig this year’s surprise performer Canna ‘Ermine’ still pushing white bloom spikes 6 feet above the perennial border in the Tanner Orchard.

Canna Ermine

But it is, “Goodnight garden, and off to bed.”  The elephant ears from the Garden for Everyone are cut back and ready for their long winter nap in the hort office basement with their banana buddies.  I’m sure they are dreaming of the sunny tropics – or at least humid Hoosier July.

Bananas in the basement

A few more leaves to rake and compost, then a long winter trying to convince my colleagues to allow a few native black cherry seedlings to grow up in the gardens, “… but you heard Dr. Tallamy say black cherry supports vastly more Lepidoptera than redbud….”

Leaf pile

Post script for true plant nerds:
If Susan Sarandon can do the original version of Goodnight Moon on YouTube, is a horticultural version by Tracy DiSabato-Aust far behind for the next Perennial Plant Association conference?

And you can see how, I mean, it’s painted, this bravura, I mean this coil and the light and then the incredible translucency of the peeled fruit. It’s hard to imagine now how it must have looked... Well, we are always going to be looking at and celebrating that the stuff of the world, you know.

Still Life with a Chinese Porcelain Jar by Willem Kalf

Recently, this work  has caught my attention again, as I’ve had the opportunity to spend a bit of time in the galleries here at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I love the process of “getting to know” a work of art; the way it becomes like a familiar friend, and yet somehow, each time completely delightful and new.  It has me thinking about what catches my attention in each one, and some similarities between the very disparate works that I love. The first thing to come to mind? FOOD.

Some of my favorite works of art, both in this museum and elsewhere, feature fruit prominently. I suppose this could be attributed to “celebrating the stuff of the world,” as Mark Doty said. Undeniably, there is a universal connection between the human experience and the pleasure of eating good food. Artists have used food extensively as symbols in their work throughout the history of painting. For me, it has to do with the beauty of so many things we eat. I am amazed by the endless interpretation of something as simplistic as a bowl of apples.

Here are a few of my favorite food-related works of art from around the country.

I saw this painting in a Gauguin exhibition at the Met. It’s one of my favorites of Gauguin’s, both in style and subject, and I came to appreciate it more after I learned about his body of work and influence on the painters of his time in Gauguin and the Generation of the 1890s.

Two Tahitian Women with Mangoes by Paul Gauguin

I originally was introduced to the work of Ellsworth Kelly by way of his color field paintings. But the images I can’t get out of my head are his simple line drawings of fruit.

Apples by Ellsworth Kelly

And finally, for something completely different, there is something so jubilant and inviting about the cherry perched atop the spoon in this famous sculpture from Minneapolis.

Spoonbridge and Cherry, by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

Needless to say, I also loved listening to Alice Waters of Chez Panisse speak about food and nutrition when she was here last year.

What works of art with food do you love?

Hey, you get to hang out with me.

Draw back you say? Yes.  We spend so much time interacting online, we never actually meet the people that read this blog, watch our videos, follow the IMA’s main site, or follow our tweets.  There’s a disconnect of sorts and it’s something we struggle with constantly.  We produce digital content to enhance our visitors experiences with art, artists and exhibitions.  A lot of these people may never visit Indianapolis or the IMA.  But what about our local audience?  We care, we really do.

All museums care.  And some are doing a great job of bridging the disconnect between the online and physical relationships.  The ever impressive Wexner Center in Columbus, OH (my old stomping grounds) has been heavily involved in their local Social Media Cafe.  Brooklyn Museum has pioneered the new model for museum membership with their 1stfans idea – a socially networked membership that brings visitors in to the museum. And the Mattress Factory uses Twitter brilliantly to uninstitutionalize an institution.  Wex, BM & MF are heavily involved in new media projects and publishing online – but they too have addressed the same issue we’re contemplating – it would be great to meet some of you.  (If there are other museums addressing this, I would love to hear from you).

So if you’re free this evening, stop by the IMA.  You can meet some of the museum staff, listen to some music, grab a drink and if you really want, try out our new iPod Touch guide.

TAP into Sacred Spain

Did you think I wouldn’t end by mentioning some technology?

Indianapolis Museum of Art Garden, Pony Bridge; contributed by Terry.Tyson

I’m not the only one captured by the seasons, as shown by the IMA Flickr Group.  As of this writing we have over 200 members and we are pushing dangerously close to 2000 images!  It’s wonderful to see the many vantage points brought together to a single point on the web.

Here’s a few photos I captured three years ago shortly after starting at the IMA.  They are not altered in any way.  I always revel in these photos and tell people about them.  So I am taking my opportunity now to share them with you.

Grab the extinguisher. This tree's on fire!

Check out the latest additions to the Flickr group and please join us by sharing your fall photos as well.

I mean, you can’t help but gawk at this guy as your driving down the street, right?

So we’ve seen how effective art on a billboard can be, but what about a billboard as art? Next time you’re driving south on Keystone on Indy’s north side, you can’t miss the two large billboards flanking the busy street. They feature murals with saturated colors and a loose, urban/graffiti vibe.

They are striking, artistic, and only subtly an ad.

from Flickr user DieselDemon

What’s kind of shocking about them is that they’re advertisements for Pabst Blue Ribbon. I thought they didn’t advertise? I thought that was their thing, their shtick.

Well, it seems as though we’re witnessing the results of an art contest in which Pabst lovers submit art in an attempt to get a year’s worth of PBR and some cash prizes. Well now.

The PBR campaign can be seen on walls, bus benches and wild postings. In some cities, art is on display in bars, with coasters and maps to let drinkers know the locations of the art. These are consumer-created, ‘participatory’ art/ads that were placed where traditional advertisements are not found- probably to help bolster PBR’s ‘non-mainstream’ image. In other cities, it seems like the muralists preferred buildings to billboards, but here’s an interview done with the guys who installed the billboard murals  in the Midwest. When PBR decides to advertise, they leave no stone unturned. To see the evolution of PBR’s advertising campaigns, click here.

from Flickr user lippert61

from Flickr user DieselDemon

from Flickr user {luminary}

To see more of the murals on Flickr, click here. Well done, PBR. You’ve won over at least one passer-by. And I don’t even drink beer!

X-Ray of the Virgin of Guadalupe

Way back in September, Charlie initially wrote about TAP, giving our readers an early look at the software.  The application is designed to be extremely flexible, meaning that we will be reusing TAP for future exhibitions both inside the museum and conceivably outside.    Although the IMA attempted a multimedia guide back in 2005 for the American galleries (does anyone remember this?) – this will be the first time we’ve attempted this type of visitor-focused experience for an exhibition. And to think, the entire software development and authoring, content production and implementation was done entirely in-house (check out the video below for a closer look at TAP).

When it comes to new media production, a lot of footage and content goes unused in the final product.  In the case of TAP – we shot and recorded hours and hours of media for the tour.  Once it’s all edited and fine tuned, it boils down to about a 90 minute experience.  What happens to the hours of unused material? This brings me to Easter Eggs.  We wanted to provide some surprises in this tour and make use of content we ordinarily wouldn’t use.  In some ways, Easter Eggs are similar to a cameo by Alfred Hitchcock.  They are little surprises or experiences that were created to augment the real or planned experience.  In the technology sense, they are intentional, additional pieces of content that are hidden, hard to find – but the in the end, result in a funny or unexpected discovery.  What will you find?

The hidden location!

You won’t find Alfred Hitchcock on TAP – especially since he once said “Always make the audience suffer as much as possible” - but you will be able to locate secret 3-digit codes that will lead to you new stories.  How do you find these Easter Eggs?  Well, you can surf around HERE or come to exhibition and investigate.  You might find something – are you up for the challenge?

I have the distinct pleasure of being in Daniel’s class this fall, Museums and Technology.  While it is surprising for my classmates that I would take a class about something I do already, I am excited for the opportunity to explore more thoroughly the meaning of technology for the museum experience and how the visitor is affected by these changes. I see continual parallels between issues encountered with visitors in physical space and issues we are encountering all over again in our digital spaces. I’ve talked about Twitter before and I have been thinking about how it is harnessed by museums and where we are going wrong.

We were talking about Twitter again in a recent class, more specifically what we consider to be a successful museum tweet, and why. It’s very hard to nail down, and even harder to do. The main reason is because it’s so hard to avoid becoming a marketing ploy, something which happens without rapt attention. A museums use of twitter now stands as an analogy for the way the actual museum interacts with its visitors and the traditional barrier between the inner workings of an institution and the public at large. So many museums need to release their stranglehold on twitter feeds to actually let interesting information get out.

I was at the Indianapolis Greek Festival this past weekend, and I couldn’t help to think that they were doing something right.

There were throngs of people, tons of Greek food, everyone jostling and yelling and having a great time, but here’s the part that baffled me- you had to pay to get in, and the food was delicious, but quite pricey. What is the Holy Trinity parish doing that connects so much with their audience that museums cannot seem to do? I think we can be the Agora marketplace discussed by Dr. Steven Zucker (@drszucker) and Dr. Nancy Proctor (@nancyproctor) a vibrant place for community and discussion, in the same way that the Greek festival is. I think the problem is balance- how do we sell ourselves as experts in our field while maintaining that we want everyone else’s opinion, too?

Some people are getting it right, figuring out how to sift through all the noise and clutter to connect with their audience while maintaining their voice. One such person is the British musician Imogen Heap, who felt a divide between herself and her fans before she started to utilize blogs and Twitter, not dissimilar to the separation between and institution and it’s community. In a recent interview with Melissa Block on NPR, she describes the divide quite succinctly. She then discusses what it’s like to have that direct connection throughout the process of making her music.

It’s been so amazing. I’ve always struggled with this barrier that I felt like I’d had up until blogging came along. Just one comment from somebody really sparks something in me. It doesn’t need to be this huge wall between me and the listeners anymore. I really thrive on that.”

@ImogenHeap gets it- the audience has become part of the process, and there’s no going back.

With the twenty-fifth anniversary of Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s book “Subway Art,”  I have started to think about the placement of subway and graffiti art in Indianapolis.  One of my most recent findings –one that will be familiar to many that make the work commute on Keystone Avenue, are the two interesting designs at the top of the Keystone Towers.  I could not help but notice it when I drove by the building the other day, which made me wonder how many other fellow city goers think about the graffiti or let it pass them by without being introduced.

Check out street art in Indianapolis (image from obakadan)

One of my favorite artists started out drawing in the subways of New York.  Keith Haring’s  images are almost iconic now, so how does he relate to the contemporary artists who do everything to keep from being noticed as to not be arrested? Whether they stay invisible to the press like Banksy, or keep their career ever changing under different names, one can only help but wonder if graffiti would have a place within a museum. iMOCA has recently taken on this task with its interactive graffiti exhibition.  Some cities have attempted “graffiti parks” to contain the art within the park and not the alleyways and private properties of businesses and homes. In large cities, graffiti becomes a part of the culture and in some ways define it, and in my opinion gives full reason as to why the art should be preserved.

Yet as the mystery behind the graffiti and the artists makes the art so fascinating to me, I will keep to searching in the nooks and cranny’s around Indianapolis while hoping that you avid readers will share your own graffiti hot spots and stories of inspiration.

image from Flickr user * f l o r

With the help of Urban Outfitters and The Impossible Project,  Polaroid film will be back in production in 2010. When Polaroid stopped manufacturing instant film in 2008, The Impossible Project bought all the equipment and machinery. This year, Urban Outfitters will release 700 limited edition sets of Polaroid cameras and one pack of Polaroid film. Eventually, they’ll  sell film packs too.

Something interesting I noticed on the Impossible Project’s site was their mission statement:

The Impossible mission is NOT to re-build Polaroid Integral film but (with the help of strategic partners) to develop a new product with new characteristics, consisting of new optimised components, produced with a streamlined modern setup. An innovative and fresh analog material, sold under a new brand name that perfectly will match the global re-positioning of Integral Films.

If you simply can’t wait until 2010 (like me), Gallery Space at Space 15 Twenty in Los Angeles is hosting a month-long group show of Polaroid photography, in conjunction with the production of the film. Or you can always check out the slew of ‘fake’ polaroid apps like this and this.  Now get to shakin’ it!

So to better describe what my words can’t, here is a screen shot of the Metro Paris iPhone app.  This application provides users with the locations of the nearest subway stations in their area along with nearby businesses.

Métro Paris application

Here is a video of the application in action (its in French but shows all of the apps functionality).

For museums this technology could provide a new experience for a visitor.  Not only could they see the wonderful works of art but it would allow them to view more information about each work just by pointing their cell phone camera.  Maybe an ArtBabble video is displayed or some expanded information about the creator.  Or what if it pointed the visitor in the direction of every work by a particular artist they were interested in?

A lot of people probably are thinking, ‘I’m not going to hold up my phone and walk around like that.’ but it has to be safer than texting while walking.  Just watch out for open manholes in the street.

This technology is still very new and as our mobile devices continue to get more powerful these applications should become more powerful as well.  So keep an eye out for these applications as more are getting developed every day and developers are just starting to get acquainted with the new technology.