With the Indianapolis Colts going to the Super Bowl and the Vancouver Olympics this month, I have been all about sports lately. I type this while watching Lindsey Vonn ski perfectly and gloriously to the first U.S. gold medal in the Alpine event. A few weeks ago, while our beloved Colts were preparing for the big game, the Indianapolis Museum of Art was all atwitter over a bet developing between our fearless leader, Max Anderson, and the New Orleans Museum of Art’s John Bullard. You know how the story ends: we lost the game, and now the IMA prepares to ship off our beautiful Turner to NOMA. You can read the whole story as described by the instigator Tyler Green.

But why was it such a surprise to everyone (ESPN, bloggers, sports fans) that museum folk are sports fans, too? Sports are generally seen as incongruous with arts, even by me, but a tweet by my former professor Jenny Mikulay got me thinking about sports in a different light.

“I don’t understand it when people think sports/games and art/culture are unrelated–they are the same.” -JGMikulay

This is such a wise statement, albeit one which might be difficult to agree with when standing in the midst of a beer-soaked, blue-clad screaming throng. Yes, inebriated with culture!  But why do we apportion sports within culture in this way? Games, a natural occurrence in most children’s lives, are an excellent way to learn about relationships and strategy and can develop over hundreds of years or be invented spontaneously. They are a physical manifestation of artistic communication. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Art, Musings

Ah, the Olympics. That period of time every 2 to 4 years, depending on your sport love of choice, when the world’s best gather to compete.

I must admit I have watched very little. In part because I am very busy at the moment. In part because I am not strongly sports oriented (I was picked for the ball teams just before the ugly girls in grade school). And in part because I just can’t bear to watch some of the people lose. Oh, I’m not talking about the no-chance-in-hell-of-finishing-in-the-medals people. I’m talking about the for sure winners. The athletes that the announcers describe as the gold medalist favorite. The athletes that broke a record at the World Championships (insert your sport of choice). But for every Michael Phelps there is a Lolo Jones.

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Filed under: Current Events, Horticulture

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: Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Musings

The heat of summer is definitely upon us and as I sit here in my office, I can’t help but wish I was outside roasting away! So, for those of you looking for a good excuse to get some fresh air and a little adventure, I thought I’d share with you my one of my new favorite pastimes… LETTERBOXING!

(stay tuned for a great way to experience the IMA grounds before the end of this post!)

A friend told me about how they went letterboxing on a recent vacation and was surprised that I’d never heard of it before. Letterboxing is similar to its more recent cousin, GeoCaching, and involves hiding small boxes with journals and stamps inside them. The idea being to bring your own stamp and journal with you to collect a log of all the treasures you have found! Letterboxers leave clues to the locations of boxes they have planted online for others to find. Experienced letterboxers can collect hundreds of stamps from around the country and individual boxes can stay alive for many years! As I began to learn a bit more about it… I was hooked!

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Filed under: Art and Nature Park, Horticulture, Local, Musings