One image from the documentary, in particular, caught my attention. It was of the National Sports Festival that was hosted in Indianapolis in 1982. I can’t find a copy of the image anywhere online so I’ll try to describe it to you (by the way, I have a VERY unreliable memory, so I might be remembering the details wrong…). Essentially, the image is of a stadium with a track, the stands are filled with fans and the infield is filled with athletes. In the center of the image stands 1, 2, and 3 from Robert Indiana’s Numbers. After doing a little research, (a.k.a. reading Richard McCoy’s blog from April 5), I discovered that they were used as backdrops to the gold, silver, and bronze medal platforms for the games.

The more I’ve thought about the image, the more I appreciate the connection to the current configuration of Numbers. We are currently displaying 4 & 6 in the Museum’s Welcome Center. 1, 2, 3, 4, & 6 now have a place in art history and sports history. Fingers crossed that 5, 7, 8, & 9 will have their chance one day, as well.

Robert Indiana, "Numbers," 1980-1983. Gift of Melvin Simon and Associates; 1988.241. © Morgan Art Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Indianapolis stands at the crossroads of the U.S., but now more than ever, it also stands at the crossroads of sports and art. The balance of the aesthetic and the athletic makes Indianapolis a vibrant host for the Super Bowl, but an even better home for the 1.7 million people that live in our Metro area.

Robert Indiana’s Numbers are just one of the many examples of art and sports intersecting in the Circle City this week. For a full list of all the fun cultural events organized in celebration of the Super Bowl, click here.

Robert Indiana, "Numbers," 1980-1983. Gift of Melvin Simon and Associates; 1988.241. © Morgan Art Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The IMA is getting into the spirit by positioning 4 and 6 of Robert Indiana’s Numbers together on the 2nd floor, near the Welcome Desk. You can also check out one of the Super Cars (for the Carolina Panthers) near the entrance, outside the IMA’s retail store.

As Visitor Services Manager, I wanted to make sure we were prepared with as much information as possible for this huge event. One activity that we participated in was Super Service Training, which was set up to prepare our team with valuable tools and resources needed before the Super Bowl (and ensuing crowds) got underway.  We had an amazing time with our trainers! We played games, learned the history of the city, and absorbed valuable information that all customer service associates need to do their job at the highest level. After completing the training, all of us received our own “Super Service Pin” and certificate, pictured below. We will wear these with pride!

Come by and see us, and happy Super Bowl!

Robert Indiana, "Numbers," 1980-1982, Gift of Melvin Simon and Associates.

When you drive by Robert Indiana’s Numbers, you might think that these more-than-30 year-old sculptures look pretty good.  But if you get up close you’ll notice that the colors aren’t nearly as vibrant as they once were and the surface has lost much of its original glossy appearance.  Also, there are a few spots where the paint has chipped or fallen off.  So, even though our routine maintenance has kept them looking as good as possible, it’s clear they need attention, or since they were made by Indiana, I could say that they, ah, need some LOVE.

Numbers has been on my mind a lot recently because I’ve been researching the most intervening conservation treatment of the work’s life: this spring we’ll be completely stripping and re-painting each number to appear as they were first fabricated.

Before undertaking a conservation treatment of this scale it is important first to have all of the historic information at hand so we can be assured that we are making the right choices along the way, and ultimately that Numbers looks great.  I won’t go into all of the technical information of the treatment here, but I would like to share a bit of its story.  Thanks to the help of pre-program objects conservation intern Jessica Ford, we’ve put together a fairly complete history of Numbers.  Jessica and I have also added a lot of information to the Wikipedia article about Numbers.

Detail of flaking paint.

In 1980 Indiana was commissioned to make Numbers as part of the 20^th-anniversary celebration of Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group (then called Melvin Simon & Associates). However, Indiana’s interest in numbers began long before 1980, as he states in the 2009 documentary A Visit to the Star of Hope: Conversations with Robert Indiana:

“My involvement with numbers started with my mother, and her insistence on moving from house to house in Indiana. Before I was 17 years old I had lived in 21different houses. For my mother and father, their only amusement was really the automobile, and so we’d jump in the car and go driving around and check out all of those houses that we had lived in; and, of course, there was a number one, and there was a number two, and there was a number three.”

For his important 1980 commission Indiana produced the following print called The Ten Stages: Number Sculptures Reflected.

Robert Indiana, "The Ten Stages Number Sculptures Reflected," 1980. © Morgan Art Foundation Ltd./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The artist has stated that his inspiration for this drawing came in the early 1970s when he was an artist-in-residence at Dartmouth College and was given a copy of the 19^th-century print of The Life and Age of Man: Stages of Man’s Life, from the Cradle to the Grave.  In a recent telephone interview, Indiana told me that the print still hangs in his studio, and that it looked like this black and white one by James Baille:

James Baille, "The Life and Age of Man: Stages of Man's Life from the Cradle to the Grave," 1848.

From 1980 to 1983, Indiana fabricated each of the eight-foot-tall aluminum sculptures at Lippincott, Inc. in North Haven, CT.  In addition to fabricating Indiana’s first LOVE sculpture, which is so prominently displayed at the IMA, Lippincott fabricated important works for Ellsworth Kelly, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, and Claes Oldenburg. (A well-illustrated monograph, Large Scale, was published in 2010 about the early years at Lippincott—I recently interviewed the author over on the Art21 Blog.)

In 2002, when a version of Numbers was on display on Park Avenue, Carol Vogel interviewed Indiana about the sculptures for an article in the New York Times.  In this article, Indiana identified the significance of the colors of each number in parallel to the original print:

1, Red and green, represents birth
2, Blue and green, infancy
3, Orange and blue, youth
4, Red and yellow, adolescence
5, Blue and white, pre-prime of life
6, Red and green, prime of life
7, Blue and orange, early autumn
8, Orange and purple, autumn
9, Yellow and black, warning
0, Shades of gray, death

”I didn’t use 10 because I don’t like double digits,” he said.

By 1983 Indiana had finished Numbers and it was in the possession of Simon Property Group.  While we’ve not been able to find a clear record of where each number was displayed, or really even good evidence that each part of Numbers was actually on display here in the city, it is known that 1 was first on view outside the Simon headquarters and that some of them were around the city of Indianapolis in the early 1980s at various locations.

Here’s a 1981 photo of well-known Children’s Museum of Indianapolis director Mildred Compton celebrating her 21st year of service in the central court of the museum on Meridian Street.

And here’s an account of 1, 2, and 3 being used as the medal podium backdrop for the 1982 National Sports Festival held here in Indianapolis.

If you have pictures or evidence of any others being on display in Indy, please leave me a note in the comments section. I’d love to see where else they  were located.

As part of the commission, Simon Property made arrangements for Numbers to be donated to IMA once their anniversary celebration was finished. True to their word, they were given to the IMA in 1988, but not installed until 1992—around the time the IMA was headlong into constructing the Edward Larrabee Barnes wing of the museum. Here’s a slide I scanned of the 1992 installation with three young ladies in the foreground.

Once installed, they remained on the IMA’s Alliance Sculpture Court until 2002.   After the museum underwent another expansion and renovation, in 2005 they were installed in their current location on the east side of the mall.  During this time, Indiana worked with the museum to give Numbers a new arrangement by grouping pairs of them together.  Here’s how he defined all of the pairings:

41 Pearl Harbor took place while I lived in Indianapolis
29 The crash which I experienced as a child on the East Side
50 Suggesting in part my hometown’s most famous institution: the last zero lost on a fast curve
76 The United States birthday every hundred years
38 My father worked for many years on this street

Indiana has created multiple versions of Numbers in a variety of sizes and materials and displayed them all over the world, however the IMA has the original set and the only one that hasn’t left the state of Indiana since it was fabricated.

And now a new chapter begins for our Numbers.  While it may seem fairly straightforward to restore these sculptures (they are after all, just painted aluminum), they were originally painted with a specialized coating system which is more than 30 years old itself, making them a bit tricky to re-paint correctly. Also, with a total of 20 different colors used (two on each), matching the colors can have its difficulties.  But we’ve assembled a solid team for the project and we all look forward to having them back at the IMA looking better than ever.

Finally, I leave you with picture of Robert Indiana talking with IMA Registrar Sherry Peglow in 2000 when the artist was last here to help install the exhibition Crossroads of American Sculpture, which included other Indiana-born artists John Chamberlain, Bruce Nauman, George Rickey, David Smith, and William Wiley.

The snow came down this weekend, and the grounds of the museum made perfect conditions for doing such a panoramic.   So I grabbed my tripod and headed out to the grounds to finally work on my shot.  I wanted to do something slightly different, so instead of using a single 360 degree shot, I took 2 and put one inside the other.  And this is the tutorial on how I did that so that you can make your own panoramic as well.

Step 1.  Take a series of shots for your panoramic

Grab your trusty tripod and find a good spot.  Pan across the scene taking a shot every 15 degrees or so.   Make sure your photos will merge together well on the left and right sides.  And you also want to pick something with a neutral top and bottom portion of the scene.  This will make cleaning up areas later on much easier.

Step 2. Stitch your photos together

In Photoshop goto “File” > “Automate” > “Photomerge”.  This will present you with a dialog to select all of the individual photos that you want to make up your panoramic image.  The defaults should work just fine for what we want.

Step 3. Merge and Cleanup

Each image will be an individual layer in your newly merged shot.  Hit Ctrl + E (windows) or Apple + E to merge your layers into 1 single layer.  This will make working with your image more manageable.

You will most likely have some blank space in the corners and around the edges of your photo.  Select the Rectangle Marquee tool, right click on your image and select “Free Transform”.  Now right click again and select “Warp”  Use this tool to pull out the corners and fill the entire canvas with the image.

Step 4. Stretch and invert

In order to polarize your panoramic, your image needs to be a perfect square.  Goto “Image” > “Imagesize”.  Uncheck “Constrain Proportions” and set the “Height” to the same value as your width.  You should end up with something like this:

Step 5: Invert

If you are only using a single image and not merging 2 images, you would always complete this step.  In my case I am only going to invert the number sculpture as I want to put one image inside of the other.

Click on “Image” > “Image Rotation” > “Flip Canvas Vertical”  and you will get:

Step 6: Polarize

Yup, this is where you start to see your panoramic take shape.  Click on “Filter” > “Distort” > “Polar Coordinates” and make sure you select “Rectangular to Polar”.  Now your images will look like this:

Step 7: Merge the 2 panoramics

Now we need to put one image inside of  the other.  Copy the first image to your clip board.  Then open up your second image and hit paste.  Drag the new layer so that its below the larger image.  Use the Rectangle Marquee Tool to re-size and rotate your image so that it fits nicely in the middle of the larger image.

Step 8: Cleanup

Chances are you will have some empty space where the circle meets itself.  In my photo this happened at points with trees which tend to be really easy to fix.  I just used the lasso tool, Selected part of the trees and pasted those into the blank areas to fill in the space.  You could also use the clone tool to touch up these areas as well

Step 9: Fill in the blanks

Our final step is to fill in the rest of the whitespace.  In my photo the background is solid white so this one is pretty easy.  We’ll just add a white background to fill out the area along the edges.  If you have a textured background you could utilize the clone tool to fill in these areas as well.

And thats it!  Now you have created your first Polar Panoramic Image.  Make sure to share your panoramics at the IMA Flickr Group.

When I was very young, I had a special sense about written numbers. It’s hard for me to access that now, through all the years of education devoted to making sure I understood numbers in a standard way. But I still have a feeling about that early relationship, and sometimes I wonder how it might have developed if I hadn’t learned to be ashamed of it and to ignore it.

Here’s what I can recall: I knew the shapes of the numerals as indicators of the distinct characters of each. Though my sense for some of them has slipped out of reach, in the way dreams do, I can still feel the stronger personalities. The numeral five was intimidating in appearance, but in actuality quite sweet. Seven was both stern and judgmental. Eight had complexity and depth – and eight led to a painful collision with my first grade teacher, Miss Logan. She taught us to write eight with one continuous figure-eight line. Soon after, she exhorted us never to write it as one circle on top of the other – an idea that had, frankly, not occurred to me.

Once I heard about this forbidden way of making the image, I badly wanted to try it, to find out why it was seductive and wrong.  I hunched over my practice sheet to try what sounded to me like an ingenious alternative. The hurtful rap of a ruler on the back of my head shocked and scared me. I could hardly believe she caught me in the act so quickly and easily. Miss Logan’s efficient suppression of dissent gave me, early-on, the impression that privacy and experimentation had no place in the classroom.

Back to the personalities of numbers: you might think it’s just as well that this idiosyncratic notion of numerals having distinct natures signified by their visual forms was scared out of me. Even in first grade it was beginning to raise some dauntingly complex dimensions of arithmetic. What kind of psychodrama might be the sum of 8+7? If 5 were subtracted from 9, what interpersonal consequences would that equal? Left unmolested, I wonder if I might have been able to craft an alternative way of working with numbers that allowed me to derive answers that approximated my classmates’. I’ll never know. As it is, I developed a serious case of math phobia and went on to do poorly in math classes throughout my schooling – with only the slight exception of geometry, to which I was timidly attracted. It is only in middle age that I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am actually fascinated by mathematics as logic, and by the more philosophical implications of mathematics, rather than the computing tasks. I’ve also noticed that the concept of numbers having “natures’ isn’t entirely far-fetched when one considers mathematics as a system for describing relationships and processes.

My early sense about numbers may be one indication of something it’s taken me years to notice about myself: I believe I am a primarily a non-verbal thinker. Until I reached this hypothesis, I thought everyone thought approximately the same way.

Several years ago, I began asking my colleagues in the art museum education department how they thought – not what they thought, but how. Were they conscious of thinking in words, for example? I started this line of questioning because I realized that I was completely unable to describe or explain my experience of thinking. Of course I could mentally use words. If I needed to craft a statement of some kind and make decisions about the most effective wording, I could certainly rehearse the possibilities in my mind and make a choice. However, that would be a particular situation, very different from my ordinary, day-to-day thought/language processes. Truth be told, I had to admit that in my on-going mental life, words don’t play a part. In ordinary conversation, I do not plan or even know what words will come out of my mouth. I would even go so far as to say that the times I have jotted notes for a talk or to teach a class have led to my most lack-luster presentations. The notes always flummox me.  It’s taken me a while to trust myself, but I now feel that I am better off speaking “spontaneously.”

But back to the question about thinking that I posed to my co-workers: Most people seemed taken aback by the question and several mentioned that they had never considered how they thought. Upon reflection, quite a few said that they were conscious of words and sentences going through their minds. Several said they “heard” their thoughts as an on-going voice inside their heads. One person described being vaguely aware of punctuation in his thoughts! Another described dreams in which she read the narrative and conversations in a way that reminded her of the bubbles over the heads of comic book characters.

It was difficult to cover my own surprise at these revelations. Even now, as I type this anecdote into my laptop, I wish I could form the ideas on this screen with my hands. I wish that you could take them in with a probing – or a playful – gaze, rather than following various linear sentences to various open or dead ends. I don’t think with words.

How do you think? Can you describe your experience of thinking? Please let me know. I think others will be interested as well.

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….

]]> http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/08/15/numbers-blog/feed/ 7 From left to right: Kendra Dacey (conservation intern), Courtney Von Stein (conservation intern), Meghan Rubenstein (education intern) Kasia Ploskonka (curatorial intern) Kendra Dacey (conservation Intern) http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/08/14/ima-by-the-numbers/ http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/08/14/ima-by-the-numbers/#comments Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:42:31 +0000 Meg Liffick http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/?p=649 I’m a number geek. Give me a calculator and a list of digits, and I’ll be happy for hours. If using the calculator was an Olympic sport, I might be a contender for the gold. I’ve got lightening fast fingers and my addition button is wearing out from all the use it gets. From attendance to web stats, revenue to ROI, I’ve been crunching numbers like Michael Phelps breaks world records.

As numbers twirl around my head like 10-year old Chinese gymnasts (they are definitely NOT 16 that’s for sure), I thought I’d share with you some of my favorites. You can find a lot of these stats on the IMA’s dashboard, but some of the numbers are not accessible to the public…until now. In the Museum’s ongoing dedication to full transparency, here’s IMA by the numbers:

Full-time Employees: 197

Average Daily Blog Readers: 220

To Live Forever Exhibition Attendance through Aug. 11: 18,254

IMA Members: 10,454

Pieces of Glass in the Efroymson Entrance Pavilion: 225

Days until To Live Forever Closes: 24

Tickets Sold to Summer Nights Film Rocky Horror Picture Show: 714

Percentage of Web visitors from Indiana: 52%

IMA Curators: 12

Visitors to IMA, July 2008: 47,548

Cubic Yards of Concrete poured for 2005 renovation: 25,000

Square feet of IMA building: 492,000

Nugget Factory productions on YouTube: 100

Women named Pam on Staff: 5

Designers named Matt on Staff: 3 (2 graphic & 1 web)

Days until Power and Glory: Court Arts from the Ming Dynasty opens: 73

Number of Views to IMA’s first-ever YouTube video: 3,593

Number of days I’ve worked at the IMA: 1,354

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