Not really sure what live blogging is….but I’m blogging today for the IMA from Museums and the Web 2009 being held here in Indianapolis. In a few minutes, our Director and CEO Maxwell Anderson, will give the conference opener, Moving from Virtual from Visceral. Pretty cool. This conference is becoming so web-by, that they are now even featuring live tweets during his presentation on a projector.
Live MW2009 Twitter Feed
Last week I helped host a speaker from West Africa at the IMA. Dr. Boureima Diamitani is the Executive Director of the West African Museums Programme. It’s currently based in Dakar Senegal, but will move during the next few months to Niger. During his short visit Boureima participated in meetings with IMA staff and local community leaders, and held a public conversation with IMA Director Maxwell Anderson on a range of issues.
Talking with Boureima during his short stay, I became conscious of the inherent contradictions that African museums represent. Contemporary African museums inherited their collections from the European colonial governments that established them. Colonial museums in Africa were originally created for the enjoyment of white visitors; black Africans were not admitted.
For those that don’t know, in one of my posts last spring I offered lunch with the IMA’s director, Max Anderson, in exchange for making a Wikipedia article about one of the IMA’s outdoor sculptures. To make a long story short, 5 people made articles and just last week Max fulfilled his end of the bargain by having lunch with the Wikipedians at Pucks. I joined them and so did Daniel and Despi. The conversation was wide ranging and engaging and the lunch was good, too …. Mmm, Puck’s beet salad and flat bread.
The Wikipedians, Max, and I.
One thing that I find interesting about writing for this blog is that I really have no idea what or even who is going to proceed or follow me. I get a date on the calendar that my post is going to go up, and that’s about it. So I was surprised to find out that Meg was so very interested in crunching numbers because today I’m writing about how I take care of our “Numbers 0-9,” by Robert Indiana. A marketing ploy, serendipity, coincidence, or the pervasiveness of numerality: you decide.
Anyway, I’m going to tell you how I help to keep our numbers clean and looking good (I get lots of help). For the past few years I’ve invited IMA summer interns working in other departments to help me and the conservation interns wash the “Numbers” (you can go here to Flickr to see a ton of images of our sculptures and Indiana’s various versions of the same sculpture on exhibit around the world).
Washing these 8 foot tall painted aluminum artworks is a fair amount of work, even when you have the good help I had. It’s a fairly straight-forward process to clean the sculptures: we simply wash them gently with soap (I use Orvus ) and water. Really, that’s it, some soap and water, a few ladders and lots of me acting like Mr. Miyagi and demanding perfect motions when doing the work.
Beyond the actual work it’s also a time when I can provide a real example of some of the maintenance we complete on the outdoor sculptures to interns in the other departments. After all (and this number is for Meg), there are over 50 artworks scattered throughout the IMA’s grounds, and soon to be a lot more over in the 100 Acres.
There are two other things that I wanted to mention, one is that you can go here and see a drawing by Robert Indiana that shows what the organization of the numbers meant to him and why we arranged them so. I’m always intrigued by this notion that just by putting two numbers together you can achieve a kind off greater meaning.
The second thing I wanted to mention is the fine Wikipedia article that Jasmine made about the numbers this spring. I have it on good word that invitations for Lunch with the IMA’s director have been sent out to the 5 that made Wikipedia articles of IMA sculptures. I’ve been digging around to see if others have been made, but haven’t found any. Speaking of that, I hope our IT department doesn’t check how many times a day I look at Wikipedia on this computer….
Well, that went off with a resounding and hushed thud. I was sure my last blog entry would garner heaps of new Wikipedia entries, a personal lunch celebration from the IMA’s Director, and an interview on the Today Show; but instead I got some publicity from other bloggers.
Though I appreciate the pub, I would have preferred people take me up on the idea of creating Wikipedia entries about IMA outdoor sculptures. And, no, I’m not crazy enough to think we would have an IMA wikimarathon to rival the art wikimarathon, but I really thought my post would have generated at least one entry by now.
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