Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Chocolate: The Exhibition at the Indiana State Museum satisfies with its vintage ads, wrappers and boxes along side a history of the tasty treat and its spread throughout the world. The sweetest surprise was sitting on giant chocolates in their wrappers (actually cushioned seats) at the end of the exhibition. The exhibit highlighted decorative objects used to serve chocolate, as well as the design of chocolate’s packaging. However, I didn’t see any chocolate art.

Edible art? Artists use unusual mediums these days, including chocolate. Artist Jean Wertz Zaun specializes in creating chocolate sculptures and paintings that are to be kept and cherished as works of art in their own right. In fact, last August, Zaun was commissioned by the Henry Ford Museum to create a chocolate painting to enhance their showing of Chocolate: The Exhibition. And among others, the Toledo Museum of Art commissioned 37 of Zaun’s works in chocolate to enhance their Van Gogh Fields exhibit in 2003. View a gallery of her museum commissions here.
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Some tigers are saber-toothed and stuffed; others are rendered in chrome. Two museums brought me closer to wildness this summer: the Indiana State Museum’s Footprints exhibition and the new Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, WI.

At the ISM, Footprints features taxidermy to die for. In an exploration of the natural history of what is today Indiana, stuffed ice age sabertooths cavort with stuffed otters, owls, fish and badgers, arranged in an unintentionally surreal tableau. This is installation art if I’ve ever seen it: a barrage of lives that were, juxtaposed for maximum emotional impact. Later in the show, there are piercing black-and-white photos of Indiana’s hunting history. The eyes of the hunters and their giddy hounds smolder with pride in front a wall of raccoon skins, circa 1935. Footprints has a high haunt factor.

The Harley-Davidson Museum, on the other hand, is pure exaltation. This cathedral to industrial design and American capitalism opened just this month after a multi-year planning process. Read the rest of this entry »