It’s been hot. Not oh-my-god-I’m-gonna-die! hot, but hot. Especially on the more humid days. As long as you have a patch of shade to work in during the afternoon, it is quite bearable. If you can wait til evening to do the gardening chores, there is a bit of a cool down as well.

The same can be said of taking time to enjoy the labors of your gardening. Rarely is it not lovely to stroll through your garden in the morning, the earlier the better some days, I admit. Come afternoon it is much lovelier to stroll through your shaded garden – if you have one. And again, come evening the temperature usually moderates so it can be nice to do the daily inspection or sit out in the garden and just relax.

But you need some plants out there or why bother? Something that does well in the shade. Something that shows well in the evening light. Something not too demanding as it is July and hot and humid and you are a little weary of garden chores. How about a shrub? How about a white flowering shrub? How about a tough shrub? How about a native white-flowering tough shrub for shade that also does well in the sun? How about Hydrangea arborescens, smooth hydrangea?

This plant can be seen back home in southern Indiana growing on the cut bank of the gravel road, clinging to the soil, and live no matter what the weather has been. You gotta be tough to grow along a gravel road. Trust me. That’s the ‘hood I grew up in.

Hydrangea arborescens can grow from three to five feet tall and wide, on average. Unlike the more sought after Hydrangea macrophylla (big blue and pink blooms), this hydrangea blooms on new wood so you can cut it back every year if you want and it still blooms (this also reduces the size somewhat). It will even bloom after one of our vicious winters. And yes, I know many new forms of H. macrophylla claim to bloom wondrously every year, but I have yet to see one truly pull that off. I want them to, yet the performance just doesn’t seem to match the promotional literature in my experience. But I will keep trialing them.

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Filed under: Art and Nature Park, Horticulture

This post was co-written by myself and Jennifer Geigel Mikulay.

Artworks that are displayed outdoors face different risks than those that are kept inside. The pigeon, for example, is a dangerous bird to bronze sculptures; the acids in guano can actually corrode a bronze patina in a fairly short time. Another risk public artworks face is that we simply stop caring. When we stop noticing the artworks that surround us, their significance and cultural context is lost.

(via Flickr user travelbex)

Enter Wikipedia Saves Public Art (WSPA) which we created as part of our Fall IUPUI Museum Studies class (you might remember our student, Elizabeth Basile, blogged about her personal experience with the project back in December). The logic of this project is to put information about public artworks into Wikipedia so that people won’t forget or stop caring about them. Yes, there’s a lot of guano in Wikipedia, but with its millions of viewers a day and openness to participation, it’s a vital resource for the cultural sector.

Before we started WSPA, there were only a handful of articles in Wikipedia about public art in Indianapolis—not so good for a city that brags about having more monuments than any city other than Washington, DC. Through our efforts, there are now 57 articles (and more each week) about local public artworks on Wikipedia. Since we started WSPA, our articles have been viewed more than 66,000 times. Now we are thinking big about how WSPA can truly become a global project and how to get more people to make articles about public art in their own town.

Recently, we’ve had a lot of help from Lori Byrd Phillips (an IUPUI Museum Studies graduate student) and Sarah Stierch (a soon-to-be George Washington University Graduate student, who runs her own blog, Sarah – Your Favorite Museum Intern. Together, we’ve begun developing “The Process” to help Wikipedians and public art advocates translate information contained in public databases into Wikipedia articles. For example, did you know that volunteers working through Heritage Preservation’s Save Outdoor Sculpture! surveyed Indianapolis in 1992-1994 and found 205 sculptures? Information about all of them is available online through the Smithsonian’s public database.

Thanks to Magnus for making the application that allowed us to make this chart

But a lot has happened in Indy’s world of public art since the early 1990s. That’s why actually going out and visiting the artworks is important—to verify the information contained in the Smithsonian’s database, to make note of any changes, and to use the tools of 2010 to research and share information about those changes. In addition to finding artworks surveyed by the SOS! folks, you can research new artworks that have been installed across the city. We’re grateful to have our laptops, cell phones, and Web-based tools that have allowed us to create these cool things:

Here’s the Flickr map that we are using to plot the location of the more than 500 images we’ve taken of public art in Indianapolis. By mapping them in Flickr we also resolve their GPS coordinates.

Here’s the Google map that we’re using to plot the original 205 SOS! entries from the Smithsonian database. While the Flickr map is a lot easier to use, we are also experimenting with Google Maps because its satellite maps are so much better. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Art, Conservation, Local, New Media, Technology, Travel

The IMA Design Team used creative methods to establish the maps and wayfinding signs in 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park. Join them as they ‘get lost’ to help others find their way:

Filed under: Art and Nature Park, Design, IMA TV, Local

When I started at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in the fall of 2004, the opening of the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park seemed so far in the future it was laughable to me that we even had meetings about it. Fall 2009 seemed like an eternity away. For God’s sake, I thought to myself, I’ll be nearly 30 years old when the park finally opens! Now with the recent proliferation of my first gray hairs, 30 doesn’t seem that far away, and with the plans for the park taking shape neither does opening day.

The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park has always seemed a bit ambiguous to me. With the solidity of the Museum and its galleries and history of Oldfields-Lilly House & Gardens, the Art & Nature Park seemed like the elusive Holy Ghost of the IMA’s trinity. Scheduled to open in the fall of 2009, The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park has a history that goes well beyond my time at the IMA. Discussions about the use of the space have been ongoing for decades. However, over the last few months, plans for the park have really come together and as we get closer and closer to the opening date, I can now see more clearly the future of the 100 acres of woodland, wetland and meadows adjacent to the Museum.

Want to learn more about the Art & Nature Park? Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Art and Nature Park