Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

If you happen to be at the Indianapolis Museum of Art later today, say 5pm, you’ll have a chance of discovering Bloggers Anonymous.  It’s our third event of BA, and something pretty different from what we typically do regarding technology.  We’re actually meeting people face-to-face.  At the IMA, we kind of dig technology and spend a lot of time developing digital projects, like this blog, ArtBabble, TAP and a million other things.  We really love our work, but I guess there would be one draw back to what we do.

Hey, you get to hang out with me.

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I’m actually talking about Easter Eggs in the technology sense. Hidden tips, tricks, messages and so on. A bunch of us have been working on TAP: Sacred Spain for some time now and it’s been slightly exhausting.  With the exhibition, Sacred  Spain: Art & Belief in the Spanish World, opening this weekend, it’s been a mad dash to finalize this exhibition experience that features audio commentary, music, polls, videos and high res imagery, all accessible for $5 on an iPod Touch.

X-Ray of the Virgin of Guadalupe

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In a few weeks, I begin teaching Museums and Technology (I’m not the only IMA instructor this fall – my colleague, blogger and conservator,  Richard McCoy is also teaching -  Collections Care and Management with Jennifer Mikulay).  Museums and Technology is run through IUPUI Museum Studies and will feature 18 or so, up and coming undergrad and graduate students.  They will one day enter the museum community with their own ideas, theories and philosophies.  I’m actually excited to learn from them.  The class itself is a different story, and for the sake of clarity, here is the official class description:

MSTD A414 / A514: Museums and Technology (3 cr.) This course surveys the growing use of technology in museums. It examines applications for information management in collections, conservation science, and archives. It examines critically the use of technology in the service of education both in exhibit contexts and in the variety of educational programs and web-based dissemination of knowledge.

(I would normally put an image here, but I don’t have a good one.  Instead I’m going to plug our latest video, a trailer for our next major exhibition Sacred Spain: Art & Belief in the Spanish World).

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A few weeks ago I followed through on a pact with myself to visit the Indiana Museum of Art solo.  The grounds in late spring are glorious and I spent as much time watching bold squirrels nibble on berries as I did experiencing the art inside the building.  It’s been a while for me since I visited what rates highly as a sunny afternoon destination in Indy.

From Flickr user SillyFrog

I went upstairs to see the Adaptation installation, and was immediately drawn to the unassuming Herrera exhibit, “Les Noces”.  It presents itself from outside as a placard and a pitch dark walkway leading into the unknown from which emanates the intense singing and occasional screaming of a Stravinsky scored ballet. Read the rest of this entry »

While I am in Saint Louis prostituting myself for plants at the Perennial Plant Symposium Horticulturist Geoff VonBurg is filling in for me. One of Geoff’s gardens here is the recently restored Orchard. But I have no idea what he is blogging about. Thanks Geoff.

Irvin Etienne, Aesthetic Czar, whose garden trowel I am not worthy to clean, is away this week.  He said something about a professional conference in St Louis, but I hear Dolly Parton is performing in Branson, so I’m not sure…

Anyway, he left me keys to the blog-o-graph and said, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

More and more this season, I have been enraptured with wonder at what nature does.  For the blog’s title, I turned to Jens Jensen, one of the great evangelists for the church of mother earth.   In the first chapter of Siftings (1939) he said that the “[natural world] about us has within it all the joy and happiness that we need.”  Amen.  As much as my life is enriched by the amazing work I see in our galleries, more nourishing for my soul is the beauty and humility of plants.  I want to offer three little samples.

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