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?
How do you make a magazine that captures the essence of a museum and theater, two historical estates, acres of glorious gardens and grounds, and a soon-to-be art and nature park? This is the question that has been on the top of my mind lately. It’s challenging, yet fun, to envision a magazine that entices readers to toss it aside half way through and come see for themselves. A magazine that demonstrates our mission and shows donors where their money is going. A magazine that the community sees themselves in and readers oceans away find engaging through online connections.
I sat down with IMA Senior Graphic Designer Matthew Taylor last week in the Design Studio to take a hard look at our current IMA membership magazine (Previews) and talk content and design. Read the rest of this entry »
Crazy drivers, traffic jams, road construction… if you commute to work by car you’re probably familiar with these frustrations. In the past, I’ve had the pleasure of living close enough to work that I could easily take a bus in the winter and ride my bike in the summer. In fact, the complication of parking made these modes of transportation much easier than driving.
Currently, biking to work is more difficult. However, last year I heard about Bike to Work Day, which occurs during Bike to Work Week in the middle of May (you guessed it, Bike to Work Month). I knew that I was not quite in shape for it then, but made it a goal to take on the challenge of biking to work this year during Bike to Work Week.
Don't worry mom, I've already stopped
To say that social media is a growing field would be quite the understatement. Whether you’re an avid tweeter blowing up my Twitter feed (cough cough, John Mayer!) or a soccer mom that uploads the latest school pictures onto Flickr, almost everyone I know actively participates in at least one social networking site – even my grandma is on Facebook.
But it’s not only individuals using these sites. Here at the IMA, as most of you know, we embrace social media as a useful tool in reaching our audiences and fulfilling our mission. And we’re not the only ones – LACMA, SFMoMa, and Walker Art Center are just a couple of our peers actively engaging online audiences. Even the Art Institution of Chicago recently announced here, that they’ll soon be launching a Twitter account.
But as museums and museum employees continue to grow their online activity – both personal and institutional – we’re faced with the challenge of exploring policies and guidelines online activity. Should there be employee policies in place for personal use of such sites? Should museums implement a clearly detailed policy for institutional use of such sites? And if so, what would either one of these policies look like and what purposes would they serve? Read the rest of this entry »
To our delight, The Davis LAB opened on the first gallery level of the IMA Saturday. (To learn more about the LAB, read Daniel’s most recent post.) From my opening-day-experience, I found that a wide range of museum visitors were drawn into the space, tempted by the shiny touchscreens or the cool pseudoscience, atomic age design and lighting. My favorite comments from the day included a little boy who was squeezed into a chair with his older sister watching live ArtBabble projected in HD on the wall.
“This is really cool,” he said timidly, referring to the space. Daniel showed him the new animated trailer for ArtBabble, to which he replied, “That was not cool…I mean that was not long enough.” Read the rest of this entry »
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