Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

GeoCities, age 14, died on October 26, 2009. The cause of death is still unknown.

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.

To my great surprise, I frequently meet people in Indianapolis who ask where the Indianapolis Museum of Art is. I have always been a museophile, so it shocks me when people say they haven’t been to the art museum in their own home town. Wait, what else do you do on weekends?

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This blog post is the second written by IMA Public Affairs intern Sarah Miller. Read her first post Personal Art Appreciation. She recently earned a Master of Arts Management with a Visual Arts Concentration from Columbia College Chicago and currently works at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Illinois.

Do you have any memories related to Robert Indiana’s Love sculptures? Or Anish Kapoor’s “Bean” in Chicago? What about Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s saffron-colored gates in New York’s central park? How about one of those giant spiders by Louise Bourgeois…or those cows on parade? Did you ever take a picture with one of these or another public art work? Well, I surely have (see me below). Something about the interactive nature of public art, and the feeling that it informally exists in its spot for me, rather than for a gallery space or for someone’s wall, really helps me enjoy public art. And I think regardless of if you like a piece or don’t, it inevitably makes you aware of your space, your participation in it, and someone’s efforts to enrich or change it. As a friend recently reminded me, these works at least make you ask, “Why is this here?”

Saying hello to a Juan Munoz sculpture

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"Installation Nation" at College Avenue and Michigan Street vacant lot

The local photo blog The Heidelberger Papers presents a regular visual exploration of Indianapolis through photographs and captions. The upcoming IMA exhibition Judith G. Levy: Memory Cloud will employ plastic photo viewers containing 35 mm slides to conjure memories, many of which visitors will have the chance to peer through, others of which will be out of reach. These two items prompted me to post my snapshots from the past weeks. Do we have some shared experiences? Read the rest of this entry »

IRT Facade

I recently got the chance to go see Crowns at the Indiana Repertory Theatre. It was great- the actors had good voices, the hats were compelling and fun and funny, the set was interesting and transitioned well for the actors from scene to scene. Most importantly, the audience loved it and really got into the story. To my surprise, there were a lot of kids there who enjoyed it, too. Way to go, Indy people, for taking your kids to the theatre.

But, I’m not actually interested in making this a theatre review. I have been thinking lately, spurned on by the recent culture rally Indy Culture Matters, about the large amount of cultural offerings we have available to us here in Indy. I have also been thinking about how much this defines the city as a thriving, important global community with an invested, artistic population. Most of our residents care about culture, and support it. But, I think the part that some people forget about is that fact that the institutions and organizations that comprise the local arts scene all actually support Indianapolis residents. Jobs, tourism, revenue- and more than our sports teams bring in, too.

So, get out and see the newest show at IRT, Interpreting William (which is based on the story of the founder of Conner Prairie.) If you aren’t into theatre, try something else.  Some events have shockingly cheap tickets. Indianapolis has countless offerings: Museums, gallery walks, historical houses, gardens, the zoo, the symphony. We have so much going on all the time, and it’s a shame to let all that amazing culture be wasted on JUST the tourists.

Feel free to comment and let me know of all the cool Indianapolis hot spots I left out!