Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

The IMA blog staff is filled with all types. Some of them know their blog topics weeks ahead of time. Some work at a steady pace and figure out an idea a couple of days in advance. Some (me) usually wait until the last minute. I realized this yesterday and turned to Twitter and Facebook for inspiration. Some suggestions were inappropriate for an IMA post, some were funny, some were thoughtful, and I had a lot of people suggest blogging about IMA’s Deaccessioned artwork page.  Yes it’s cool….it’s transparent….it’s many things….but I had absolutely nothing to do with it.  If you do want more info, bug Charlie or IMA’s registration department- bravo to everyone involved in that project.

Thinking about that page led me to think more broadly about IMA’s main website.  Inside the museum, the IMA site is a major topic of conversation amongst the web team.  We’re in the planning stages for a web redesign of imamuseum.org.  This will include a better calendar system, better integration of digital content, a new collection page and lots more bells and whistles I can’t mention right now.  This process has really made me consider one word and one section: Interact.

IMA's Interact Section

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Anyone who knows me knows I love a good mixtape. ( I still call them mixtapes, even though now it’s a mix cd, or an iTunes playlist, or even a muxtape). I love making them, I love thinking about the connections between each song that I select, and I love trying to figure out why someone else chose particular songs in a particular order.

Recently, Bob Boilen posted an entry to NPR’s excellent All Songs Considered Blog where he provided readers with the first song of a mixtape, and asked them to add responses in the comments section, with each new post adding a new song to the mix in response to the previous post. Brilliant!

Let’s try to do something similar with works of art. I’m selecting the first piece in a kind of virtual exhibition. You pick the next one, and post a comment with information about the work, a link to an image of it, and a description of your reasons for selecting it (could be formal similarity/difference to the previous piece, subject matter, some biographical information that links the artist to the previous work, whatever…) Remember that you are responding to the last piece added in the comments section (although some larger themes might develop) and provide some description of why you are adding a particular piece to this chain o’ art.

I’ve chosen a piece from the IMA’s collection as a starting point: Kenneth Noland’s Fall Blues 1961-64.

It is a painting that I have warmed to over time, and one that I hope allows for a diverse set of responses. I’m interested to see where this game of curatorial telephone leads. Your turn…