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?

A full house (Photo by IMA Photography Dept.)

Osso (Photo by IMA Photography Dept.)

DM Stith and Osso (Photo by IMA Photography Dept.)

But I hope we have that same problem Saturday night November 7 at The Toby for Caddy! Caddy! Caddy! What’s that, you say? Caddy is an elusive character in the novels of William Faulkner. We describe the performance as southern-gothic-meets-Japanese-avant-garde. Ill-fitting wigs, chalky white faces, and 4-point barbed wire are the visuals. Slow, grotesque movements are the path to the unconscious. Oguri (below) is the single name of the Los Angeles-based dancer who created Caddy!

Oguri (Photo by Steven A. Gunther)

Oguri is a master of butoh, a radical yet subtle style of Japanese dance. The first person to perform butoh was Tatsumi Hijikata, in 1950s Japan. Here’s how Oguri himself tells it: “In Japan, there was folkdance, ballet, and modern dance. Performers presented seven-minute pieces for a classy, sophisticated audience. Hijikata comes along half naked and shines the light in the audience’s eyes. He killed a chicken on stage, and the little girls fainted and he was kicked out. After he was expelled, people sought him out because he seemed so cool, and at the time, many people had the same antiestablishment sense.”

Hear ye, hear ye. If you are antiestablishment in Indy, I am summoning you to The Toby this Saturday for Caddy!, which invites you to consider your nightmares. To look into “the mirror which thaws fear.” To observe disconnection. To confront pain.

The Nutcracker it is not. And, anybody with a ticket stub from a recent Toby event gets in half-price; students of any age are free with ID. I dare you to be there…

Visit the IMA Blog tomorrow for a full interview with choreographer and dancer Oguri.

The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

Blog: Vogel Appliance Blog

Flashy? No. Practical? Oh yes. If you’ve ever wondered how much dish soap you really need, this blog is for you.  This local appliance blog gives you tips and tricks that might help you save serious moolah come the winter season. And it’s coming soon.

ArtBabble Video: Jean Shin: Common Threads

IMA Work of Art:

Still Life with Profile of Laval by Paul Gauguin

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What a great evening at the IMA! Saw Osso, DM Stith, and The BQE with Q&A w/Sufjan Stevens. All were incredible!

Even though I miss my gaudy tropicals terribly I know their demise means the autumnal show is ready to start. And who doesn’t love a good show?

This year the colors are simply spectacular, the reds super intense like the color of first lust, the oranges brilliant as Vegas showgirl costumes, and the yellows absolutely glowing like so many rhinestones on a Porter Wagner jacket. It’s just been a great year to walk about and soak it all in. And it’s lasting a pretty long time too.

I suspect our cooler wetter summer has something to do with the great color. But did you ever wander why the trees and shrubs especially change color? The fact that the trees produce less chlorophyll allowing the red and yellow pigments (carotenoids) to show is fairly common knowledge. The trees also produce more red-purple pigments (anthocyanins). But is that all there is to it? I get regular e-newsletters from my former boss when I interned at the Cincinnati Zoo, Rob Halpern (thanks for the link Katie). He now has his own design/consulting business (ZHCD) and includes in each month’s newsletter a group of links to interesting and sometimes bizarre plant news. In fact these have been such a hit they now have a website devoted to them, plantworldnews.com. Anyway, one of Rob’s recent newsletters included a link about fall color. One theory suggests the reds in autumn color dates back 35 million years when the trees and their insect pests survived a series of ice-ages. Could it be the trees are warning the aphids “my leaves are about to die don’t lay your eggs on me”? It’s a fascinating story you can read in its entirety here. Let me also just say I really wish Rob would sell t-shirts or something with his logo. It’s brilliant.

Okay, enough chatter about color. Let’s look at some color.
Maples of all forms are great this year.

Cornus kousa are well beyond their usual color.

The always reliable Lindera angustifolia are spectacular. I love the glossy oranges and reds these plants develop. And when the leaves do turn brown they hold on til Spring, providing a nice cover for birds and your neighbors prying eyes.

Hydrangea quercifolia is glorious.

How about Hamamelis virginiana in full fall color and full bloom?

Another large shrub looking great this year is Aesculus parviflora draped in bright golden foliage. This native of the Southeast is perfectly happy in the Midwest. And is perfect with the late blooming Aconitum.

Parrotia persica is a tree I would love to see more often. The fall colors are fantastic. Once the leaves drop you have the added value of beautiful bark all winter that, like men, will just get better and better looking with age.

The Liguidambar styracifula ‘Slender Silhouette’ we put in Nonie’s Garden developed the glorious yellows, reds, and burgundys these trees are famous for. While the species becomes a broad pyramidal tree the cultivar Slender Silhouette remains a narrow 4 to 6 feet wide at maturity. I like the clean modern lines of these very vertical plants against the backdrop of the broad horizontal curves of the Efroymson Entrance Pavillion (which isn’t evident in this photo).

Not every year is good for fall color in hostas, but this year the Hosta sieboldiana ‘Elegans’ in Hosta Curve is beautiful in bright amber shades of gold. Lilies even look good.

Just walk around the gardens and everywhere you look there is a beautiful view.

Now let’s compare that fall color to one of Porter’s jackets. Oh, the tragedy of it all. Listen close.

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?

Image Courtesy of Freefoto.com

Soft Drink. Pop. Soda. What do you call that sweet, fizzy drink that comes in cans, out of fountains, and sometimes in bottles? I call it coke.

In Southern Indiana where I grew up, a Sprite is a coke, a Dr. Pepper is a coke, and a Pepsi is also a coke. The Coca Cola brand has resonated so much in my hometown that it has become the generic term for the entire category of product. Coke is in good company. Kleenex, Xerox, Google, and even Q-Tip have all created such strong brand identities that their trademarked names are now nouns. (Definition of brand identity.)

Brands like Coca Cola appear to be every marketer’s dream. They seem to need very little advertising and messaging. However, the truth of the matter is that Coca Cola still spends millions of dollars every year on tv and print campaigns for Coke Classic. So what’s up with that?

Like lawns, buildings and cars, brands need maintenance. No matter how great of a brand a product or company has, it needs to be updated and rearticulated in order to resonate.

In 2009, Coca Cola launched a beautiful, if slightly strange, series of commercials featuring bucolic fields filled with young people and singing, furry creatures. The tagline: “Open Happiness.” In a time of recession and war, the ad communicates that sipping a coke will lead to an imaginary world filled with smiles and giggles. Pretty simple. Very timely.

Like Madonna, Coca Cola is great at reinventing itself for the times. During the 1980s, responding to the end of the Cold War and inspired by the Reagan administration, Coca Cola launched their ultra American campaign. “Red, White, and You.” This is the 1980s at its best – patriotism and tight-rolled jeans

Learning from mistakes of the past (ahem New Coke), Coca Cola focuses on maintaining the quality of the product – the essence of their brand identity- while concurrently aligning their advertising to the changing times. Just like Joan Rivers, every few years the product gets a facelift.

So what do Coca Cola Classic and the IMA have in common?

Well, if you haven’t seen it already, the IMA is undergoing it’s own facelift or brand refresh. Over the course of the next few months we’ll be transitioning from our old brand identity:

to our new:

The IMA is a dynamic organization with a lot going on. We hope that the new look and feel of our brand will communicate the energy of the museum. Like Coca Cola, we know that the classic formula is always the best. So while the marketing may change a bit, the IMA and its mission will remain the same. We’ll still have over 50,000 works of art; we’ll still be free to the public; and we’ll continue to inspire creativity through art, nature and design.

All of this talk about brands got me thinking…What brands do you think are the best? Are there examples of museums with great brands? Let me know your favorites.

Born mid-1995 in Southern California, GeoCities lived on the world wide web and worked it’s way into the lives of millions by introducing casual internet surfers to pop-ups, pop-unders, animated gifs, and broken html markup until it’s death in 2009.

Survivors include Yahoo, WebCrawler, AOL, Twitter, and countless others. GeoCities was preceded in death by Jeeves, Compuserve, Netscape (the browser), and Angelfire.

Memorial services will be held at http://web.archive.org. Burial will be at http://geocities.yahoo.com/. Relatives, friends, memes, trolls, and search bots are welcome.

There are several websites that made a splash via GeoCities. Kate confessed to having a fan page of some sort at one point in time… and I had a few pages lurking out there somewhere too, though I’m struggling to remember what they were. Without GeoCities, we wouldn’t have the Icy Hot Stuntaz. Thankfully, the content will never die. Find a nice collection of screen captures of classic GeoCities websites at Internet Archaeology.

The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

http://www.beardrevue.com

Blog: beard revue

It’s all about the beards, people. This blog has a simple description: ‘Review, commentary & discussion for the beard enthusiast. Up the beard ratio!’

ArtBabble Video: Creation of a Tibetan Mural

IMA Work of Art:

Madre Jerónima de la Fuente from Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World

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rjstein: TAP is selling out regularly… Waiting lists and iPods not getting enough charge. Great problem to have! Time to buy more iPods!

September 30, 2009

This morning I went on an orientation tour of the library at the American Academy in Rome. It is a beautiful library, both conceptually and physically. Imagine sitting in small reading rooms next to wide open windows (no screens) that open onto idyllic Italian gardens. Imagine several floors of stacks that go down into a kind of crypt, and also those small, ladder-like circular stairways that lead to upper-level shelving. Imagine an aesthetic of contemporary simplicity and book preservation science in harmony with warm, traditional wooden desks and chairs. The cataloguing system is unique to the Academy, neither Dewey nor Library of Congress. The fellows and residents here have wonderfully generous access after they’ve taken the orientation tour.

Over lunch I listened in as experts in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance studies earnestly debated the reasonableness of the term Dark Ages. Is it useful to say that ancient Classical knowledge – about architecture, for example – was forgotten and then revived in the Renaissance? Later, after I had made as much progress as possible on my project, I set out on a long hike from the Academy’s perch on the Gianicolo hill – with a stop at Bramante’s Tempieto – down the stone steps and across the River Tiber to the Pantheon. If you never took a survey of art history course, you might not know that the Tempieto is a miniature Renaissance “classical” style building of elegant proportions designed by the architect Donato Bramante in 1499. The Pantheon, by contrast, is a large Roman temple originally built in 27 BC, then rebuilt around 120 AD. After the lunchtime conversation, it seemed fitting to visit one of the most famous examples of Renaissance architecture and the nearly 1,900-year-old domed structure that inspired its maker.

This evening (Wednesday) most of the Academy community attended a lecture by the organization’s President and CEO, Adele Chatfield-Taylor. It presented the “story” of the American Academy since its founding in 1894, through wars and many other challenges. Several parts of this story were especially affecting: the commitment to cross-disciplinary conversation, the struggles to quell objections from scholars to the inclusion of artists, and the decision to develop the Rome Sustainable Food Program. The last mentioned is a commitment to local, organic and seasonal food inspired by chef and food educator Alice Waters. In so many ways it is helping the Academy achieve it mission to enable creative communication and collaboration. Meals are now a complete delight! That means people want to “eat in” and to linger in long, enjoyable conversations. I’m tempted to start including detailed descriptions of meals in my blog posts! Let me cite the post-lecture dinner as an example. It began with a delicious and aromatic pasta dish with porcini mushrooms. A couple of us had special servings, made with rice-pasta – the kitchen happily accommodates all special diet needs! The pasta was followed by a delicious radicchio salad, then a course of fantastic broiled cheese. The dessert looked delicious, but I had to let it go. Tonight I’ll try to snap some photos!

October 1, 2009

Today offered an immersion in classical studies. After working with Marty on next steps for my project in the morning, I enjoyed an amazing slow-food lunch of tomato risotto and assorted vegetables before hurrying to a walking tour of Roman imperial sites led by antiquities scholar Corey Brennan. We jumped onto crowded city buses and rode down to the Palazzo Venezia. From there we walked to the Column of Marcus Aurelius. Corey had arranged permission for us to climb to the top (194 steps on a circular staircase just wide enough for human shoulders, only 5 people at a time). For anyone bothered by heights, the view from the top was overwhelming. From there we visited various ruins that articulated the Colosseum of Domitian, including the Piazza Navona, which retains the form of the giant track used for athletic events. Then on to the Pantheon, which I had visited the day before. In the crowd our group became separated. I eventually located 2 fellow tour members and we made our way back up to the Academy as night fell.

I had just enough time to clean up and join the Academy group in hosting a number of fellows from Harvard’s Villa I Tatti outside of Firenze (Florence) for dinner. The I Tatti folks deliberately spread out among the tables so that many of us could meet and talk. The dinner conversation was, as is usual here, fantastically enjoyable: A Hungarian scholar of NeoPlatonism, the director of the American School in Athens (not part of the I Tatti visit), and a filmmaker from the US were my conversation partners. At the end, to my surprise, I met a colleague from a museum at which I used to work. He and three others from I Tatti lingered to talk after the dinner. We enjoyed stories of the great art historian, Bernard Berenson, who gifted Villa I Tatti and his wonderful collections to Harvard. They urged me to visit the Villa during my stay – a train ride of less than three hours from Roma. What a day! I am ready for bed. PS this is a photo of the group converging in the dining room for lunch.

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?