Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

The second annual American Idol-style Summer Nights Film Poll is back. This is your chance to tell us what you want to see on the big screen! Last year you voted, we listened, and you watched movies under the stars at the IMA: This is Spinal Tap, Glory, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Mummy, The Big Lebowski, Strangers on a Train, Devil in a Blue Dress, Dr. Strangelove, Sholay and Ghostbusters.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Summer Nights 2008

Now it’s time to mark your calendars for season #34 of Summer Nights, June 5-August 28. As one of the few art museums in the country with an amphitheater, the IMA offers a unique movie-going experience. All you need is a blanket, some friends and a picnic basket full of goodies. And, by popular demand, another special midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is in the works.

VOTE NOW! Below are four categories of films. Vote for your favorite film in each of the categories as often as you like. Polls close at noon on February 25, and results, including the full Summer Nights schedule, will be announced in March on the IMA Blog.

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That’s right.  We did it.  We made blog t-shirts.  We asked you for slogans, compiled all the ideas and then chose the cream of the crop for an IMA blog poll.  If you recall, the top 5 slogans were:

• “Blog your art out” by Eric
• “Future IMA Guest Blogger” by Despi (that’s me)
• “Like you have something better to do” by Henry
• Front “Ping” Back “www.imamuseum.org/blog” by Lindsey
• “When you need a good poll” by Despi (yep, two from me)

The poll winner was Eric, by a landslide.  So it is his slogan that made its way onto the t shirt.

Slogan conceived by Eric, design perfected by IMA

Designed by IMA Apps Team member and Web Designer, Matt Gipson, these tees are available for sale in the IMA gift shop ($20).  For those of you who submitted suggestions for the poll, you should have received an e-mail from the awesome Emily (also known as Demily) asking for your address.  If you responded a t-shirt is on its way to you right now!

So what should the next poll be?

Taking concepts from philanthropy and social activism, entrepreneurship, the Underground Railroad and the music of Naptown, to The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Nascar, going green, public art, gas prices and a hypothetical mass transit system, artist Chakaia Booker has ignited conversation pieces on Indianapolis’s sidewalks. By cutting, twisting and weaving together rubber tires, Booker has fashioned a temporary urban art exhibition specifically for Indy, removing the road block between the city’s past and present. Read the rest of this entry »

So, there are a lot of people out there in the world telling you to vote these days. Voting is important, many argue it is a civic responsibility. I am writing today in support of that point of view. But not in that other big race. This one is pretty local.

A couple weeks ago, Daniel gave you a prompt to submit ideas for a new IMA Blog t-shirt slogan. We had a couple dozen contributors, many of which are IMA employees. So before you get all worked up about the unfairness of our contest, we decided to go ahead and be the good guys and give every person who submitted a comment(by April 15th) a free t-shirt with the winning slogan.

That being said, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try harder next time. I mean, c’mon, 3 out of 5 of the best slogans were submitted by IMA employees, and 2 of them were mine! To be fair, we might have chosen some of the other submissions if we could have reconciled the concerns surrounding them. An IMA favorite was “Lose 30 pounds in 30 days,” submitted by Ben, but we figured there was no truth in that advertising. Another fan favorite mentioned some names in a certain CEO’s title. We feared this might leave those outside the IMA circle clueless and that we might have some explaining to do if we selected that one.

I expect that you are reading this post and thinking, “My submission was SO much better than what they picked!” and that is okay. You can disagree, but we just want you to know that we took this assignment really seriously, and had an hour-long meeting to argue about which slogans should be selected as finalists. So, without further ado, please have at it. Vote for your favorite slogan and we’ll make a t-shirt with the winning phrase.

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The poll closes on May 5. You can only vote once (sorry, but it is the only fair way!).

We’ll be in touch soon to collect info to distribute free shirts.

So, we launched the new and improved blog earlier this year, and so far, we’re thrilled with the outcome. I’ve enjoyed writing posts, reading what my colleagues are up to, but more than anything, reading some of the thoughtful, funny, goofy, encouraging, nonsensical comments you have left. Thank you! …but I’m sure you sense something is afoot here…

There is and it’s simple. We’re making IMA Blog T-shirts and we want to hear from you. Specifically, we want you to sloganize, jinglelize, poeticize, jargonize, catch phrase our t-shirts. Need an example? How about – “I read the IMA Blog and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”

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