To give you an overview of what someone who works in museum marketing does , I thought that I’d outline my typical day. In order to do that, I recorded my activities throughout the past Monday. While some of you were relaxing (or partying) on your Columbus Day off, I was hard at work with my fellow colleagues at the IMA.

Image taken from ugotbling.com

COLUMBUS DAY, OCTOBER 12, 2009*

8:27 Arrive at office. Plug in laptop.

8:35 Sip coffee and respond to emails sent over the weekend.

8:50 Research the 100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park for IMA  Magazine article.

9:15 Write interview questions for article to send to Ed Blake, the  landscape architect for 100 Acres.

9:32 Email interview to Ed Blake.

9:37 Discuss signage in Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion with Marketing Manager.

9:42 Register for Next Audiences Summit.

9:52 Review marketing budgets from last 2 years.

10:22 Read NYT’s article about the Louvre’s attempt to ‘Loosen Up.’

10:34 Get distracted by Jamie Oliver article in NYT’s Mag.

10:39 Review Web site content. Put together work plan to present in the afternoon’s Web team meeting.

11:22 Read Geoff Von Burg’s blog entry.

11:31 Email this week’s TV schedule for Sacred Spain commercials to Max, curator Ronda Kasl, and Nugget Factory.

11:38 Check attendance numbers from the weekend.

11:39 Organize opening weekend debrief meeting for Sacred Spain.

11:45 Polish up communication pieces for potential Winter Nights and Summer Nights media sponsorships.

12:18 LUNCH (Lean Cuisine and Fage Yogurt).

12:38 Watch Gentleman Broncos movie trailer.

12:41 Send movie trailer to Dan Dark.

12:44 Change Twitter name from @IndyArtGirl to @MegLiffick.

12:50 COFFEE.

1:00 Catch up on emails from the morning.

1:30 Web Team!

2:50 Review and edit Group Tours corporate mailer for Sacred Spain.

3:15 Respond to email from Contemporary Curator Lisa Freiman about the prestigious national award that her husband received. Congrats, Ed!!!

3:17 Create an initial inventory of marketing materials that can include media/corporate sponsor recognition during 2010.

4:02 Continue to draft 2010 marketing plan for Public Programs.

4:48 Brainstorm about communication ideas for TAP.

5:21 Respond to remaining emails.

5:42 Leave office. Head to gym.

6:13 Check email while running on treadmill at gym. DANGEROUS!

6:16 Attempt to respond to an email while on treadmill at gym. EVEN MORE DANGEROUS!

8:15 Read IBM’s social media guidelines while watching Will Ferrell on Man Vs. Wild.

8:30 Close laptop. No more work for the day.

*Please note that I have left out some details such as phone conversations, specific email correspondences, bathroom breaks, and Facebook and Twitter checks.

Next up (Oct. 28), I’ll tackle the ginormous topic of branding a museum. Stay tuned.

And perhaps this is why we began a series of articles in the IMA’s magazine on the provenance of important works in the Museum’s collection, written by Annette Schlagenhauff. As the IMA’s Associate Curator for Research, Annette has spent years tracing the paths of works of art from the artists’ hands to the walls of the IMA. The stories are fascinating and not without moral ambiguities and missing pieces.

Landscape at Saint-Rémy (Enclosed Field with Peasant)

The fall issue of the magazine features the IMA’s Landscape at Saint-Rémy (Enclosed Field with Peasant) by Vincent van Gogh. As one of the most important and valuable works in the Museum’s collection, Annette peers beyond the paint into the 120 year life of the painting. Painted in southern France in 1889, its early history is well documented, however, during the time of Nazi regime power when many of Europe’s art collections were in jeopardy, its provenance is spotty. Did Landscape at Saint-Rémy leave Europe legitimately or was it tied up in the Nazi’s campaign of looting Jewish art collections?

[This is why the magazine should be online. I could link to the rest of the story here and you could happily finish reading. Soon enough!]

Long story short, papers found in the New York Public Library confirmed that the painting left Europe still in the family of the original owners and had been consigned to a New York-based art dealer when arriving in the United States. The IMA can breath a sigh of relief and say that the provenance of the Van Gogh is clear.

But what would have happened if the provenance was not clear? Should research suggest the name of a possible legitimate owner, the IMA is obligated to attempt to contact them to discover more. Many paintings in the IMA’s collection have gaps in their provenance in the critical years of 1933-1945. Per the American Association of Museums (AAM) and the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) guidelines, the Museum posts these works on the Nazi-era Provenance Internet Portal and the IMA Web site–provenance research project. The facts unique to each painting help determine the course of action. (More here)

I think there are more than a few of us who would like Annette’s captivating, Nancy Drew-like sleuth job. No doubt it’s nerve wracking, hard work. In the winter issue of the magazine, and online, you’ll be able to join Annette in her journey to discover the past of the Dutch painting Valkhof at Nijmegen by Aelbert Cuyp. I see National Geographic documentaries in her future.

The Valkhof at Nijmegen

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Come to the IMA on October 3 or 23 to see The Rape of Europa in The Toby. This is an amazing opportunity to watch a documentary film that examines Nazi looting of the great museums and private art collections of Europe in an attempt to obliterate cultural identities. The film’s epic scope explores a descendant of painter Gustav Klmit’s flight to regain a portrait of her aunt, Louvre staff members who packed and moved 400,000 pieces of art as the Nazis advanced, and the “Monuments Men” who plumbed salt mines to recover stolen art after the war. You’ll be faced with the question: “Which is of more value: a work of art or a human life?”

Preview The Rape of Europa below and get your tickets now.

Professor Charles Falco

OK, yesterday Richard gave you his version of events.  Today, it’s my turn.

Part I: Making the Connections

My Background

The year: 1960
The place: Ft. Dodge, Iowa
Richard started his story ten years ago in Madrid.  I’ll start mine fifty years ago in Ft. Dodge.

I’ve been keenly interested in images since early childhood, starting with an old Kodak box camera, and advancing to my first “serious” camera when I was twelve. This involvement with creating and manipulating images using various processes — photography, cyanotypes, silk screening, etc. — steadily expanded as I got older, to the point that by age 30 I owned at least 20 lenses ranging up to a 800 mm super-telephoto, as well as had designed and fabricated various pieces of specialized photographic equipment for my imaging experiments.

The infrared camera described in this blog is the most recent piece of fabricated/altered imaging equipment dating back to an enlarger I made in high school by modifying an old bellows camera.Although I got my Ph.D. in physics, and have worked in experimental physics my entire career (first at Argonne National Laboratory, and since 1982 as a professor of optical sciences and of physics at the University of Arizona), I also have had an interest in art that dates back to childhood.  By age 30 I had visited over 25 art museums in eight countries, always using any free time during travels to physics conferences to visit art museums.  And motorcycle museums.

Like my interest in photography, I have been a participant in art as well as an observer.  In the May 14, 2007 issue of The New Yorker Magazine, Peter Schjelhahl wrote “An efficient test on where you stand on contemporary art is whether you are persuaded, or persuadable, that Chris Burden is a good artist. I think he’s pretty great.”  Burden is perhaps best known for his November 1971 conceptual art piece ‘Shoot’, in which he had himself shot in the arm.  A month earlier, for his piece ‘220′, he and three others spent the night on wooden ladders in a gallery filled with 12″ of water into which he had dropped a 220-Volt electrical line.  I was one of those three participants.

Jumping ahead a few decades, in 1997 I was asked to co-curate the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s The Art of the Motorcycle exhibition that opened in 1998, and which set an all-time attendance record for that museum.  I shared an award for this work from the U.S. Chapter of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art with the architect Frank Gehry, the then-director of the museum Thomas Krens, and my co-curator Ultan Guilfoyle.

Making a long story short, thanks to Ultan Guilfoyle, in 2000 I was introduced to David Hockney by Lawrence Weschler, who had written a story about him in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker Magazine.  This resulted in the most intense period of collaboration of my entire scientific career.  One consequence of our collaboration was that I was invited to the National Science Foundation in 2006 to give the Distinguished Lecture in the Mathematical and Physical Sciences.  Zina Deretsky attended that talk, resulting in her arranging for me to speak at the annual meeting of the Association of Medical Illustrators, resulting in me meeting Richard McCoy, resulting in this blog.

Artwork in the Infrared

In the spring of 2008 I realized that since modern digital cameras use silicon CMOS or CCD sensors, and since silicon is sensitive reasonably far into the infrared (to ~1100 nm, whereas the visible ends at ~750 nm), a suitably-modified camera might allow the capture of high resolution infrared photographs — “IR reflectograms” — of works of art.  The reason IR reflectograms are of interest for art is that many pigments are semi-transparent to infrared light, allowing such light to penetrate through these pigments to reveal features that are not apparent in the visible.  Such features can include defects in the canvas or board (Figure 1),

Figure 1

areas that have been repaired by overpainting (Figure 2),

Figure 2

or underdrawings made on the white gesso (Figure 3).

Figure 3

In addition to paintings, the camera provides useful information on 3-dimensional objects (Figure 4).

Figure 4

However, the IR sensitivity of the silicon sensor is only one factor in the operation of an imaging device, so the only way to know if such camera would actually provide useful information for works of art would be to modify one and characterize all of its relevant features.

I rationalized spending the money for this by telling myself that, even if it proved useless for extracting useful information from art, I still could use it for general infrared photography.  However, my understanding of the technologies involved gave me a great deal of confidence my money would be well spent. As a result, a technical description of this high resolution infrared imaging instrument just appeared as an invited paper in the July 2009 issue of the ‘Review of Scientific Instruments’.  You can download a copy of it from the link at the bottom of my art-optics web page.

Figure 5

I conducted the first tests of this modified camera in my own university’s art museum, and immediately discovered interesting new information in some of the IR reflectograms.  As an example, the lines in the underdrawing in Figure 5 that are revealed in the IR converge to a well-defined vanishing point, showing that this particular artist understood the laws of geometrical perspective that had only recently been articulated.  This is information that no one ever could have known before.

The Infrared of Indiana

Having determined that the modified camera was indeed capable of extracting useful new information from paintings, I took it with me to Indianapolis where I was to speak at the Association of Medical Illustrators.  Basically, the reason I brought it was to gain experience with it when “on the road,” vs. in the relatively controlled environment of a museum located only a few hundred yards from my office.  However, I didn’t know I would have the opportunity to test it at the Indianapolis Museum of Art against paintings recently studied with a special-purpose IR camera, so the introduction to Richard McCoy and David Miller made by Zina Deretsky was pure serendipity.

The results initially were disappointing to all of us when looking at the freshly-captured images on the camera’s LCD screen, but we were very pleasantly surprised when we pulled them into Photoshop(R) on one of the museum’s computers.  The reason for the difference in appearance is that the resolution of the LCD screen is ~10x lower than the resolution of the actual images.  As a result, even features that are quite apparent in the images captured by the camera usually are barely, if at all, visible on the LCD screen.

Since that first “in situ” test in Indianapolis in July 2008, I have captured IR reflectograms with this camera in eleven art museums on three continents so far.  One of my favorite incidents involving it was an evening talk I gave at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in which I discussed some of features revealed in one of their paintings (a Pissarro) by an IR reflectogram.  I captured that image at 11:31 a.m. and talked about it at 7:20 p.m., which must be some new record for the fastest time between extracting new scientific data from an artwork and “publishing” the results.  You can see this talk on Youtube, and my 2 minute discussion of the IR starts at 50′ 40″ into the video.

I should note that nothing revealed by that IR reflectogram was particularly spectacular.  But, I already had data on another Pissarro painting in my talk, so this was a great opportunity to work in something previously unknown about a painting in that museum’s own collection.  I also gave the audience the homework assignment of remembering what I had just showed them, and after my talk going back to the actual painting to look for the features themselves.  So, in addition to extracting useful new data from paintings, this camera also can be used to engage an audience in art history in new ways.

The final roman art webi just got posted! This project began in April of 2006 with basic concept development and has resulted in 20 hours of footage, thousands of travel miles, 11 scripts, countless contributors and participants, plenty of stock music, hours of editing, some mistakes and plenty of laughs. And now our project is over. So please check out the final video below.

Now what will we do? Find out in the next couple of posts…