Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

From mad reality comes the sanity of art.  “My whole village was crazy,” writes composer Tan Dun.  “We had a professional crying team available for hire at funerals and deaths…a shamanistic choir to set the mournful tone.”  In Chinese folk culture, “ghosting” is a verb: an active conversation with the spirits of the past and the hereafter.

In Tan’s composition “Ghost Opera”, part of the first concert presented in the IMA’s newly renovated Tobias Theater this Friday, gongs talk to splashing water (yes, water); stones talk to cymbals, and the breath of a monk talks to a Chinese lute (a pipa).  It’s going to be a visually stunning, dramatically lit piece in which the musicians won’t be sitting still.

Photo courtesy of Nana Watanabe

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Once upon a time, December 1980 to be exact, Italian architect-designer Ettore Sottsass had a little party to celebrate his plan to produce a new line of furniture.  He invited several young design collaborators.  A record was playing: Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again).”  When the vinyl platter kept catching on the word “Memphis,” a new design movement was christened.  What punk was to music, Memphis was to design.

Sottsass and the members of the collective, including young architect Michele De Lucchi, broke through the “tyranny” of modernist taste by making furniture made from leopard print plastic laminate, celluloids, neon tubes and zinc-plated sheet-metals, jazzed up with spangles, glitter, and crazy color combos. Read the rest of this entry »

If I ever end up on death row and get to choose my last meal, I will choose a meal a lot like one I had last month in a barn in McCordsville, IN. The soup, in particular, is hard to forget: chilled, neon-red late season Indiana tomatoes, swimming with a drop of pale fromage blanc, distilled into a shot glass, and served with a cracker, thin as a Catholic communion wafer. And that was just the second course.

The goats had stepped aside and the rain blustered outside. Eighty diners piled into the hay-filled dining hall for a five-course extravaganza presented by Slow Food Indy. Slow Food in an international movement working to reconnect people with the pleasures of real food, sustainably produced. Money raised from the dinner was used to send several local chefs and cooking students to Terra Madre, the global gastronomic gathering in Turin, Italy.

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Last week I helped host a speaker from West Africa at the IMA. Dr. Boureima Diamitani is the Executive Director of the West African Museums Programme. It’s currently based in Dakar Senegal, but will move during the next few months to Niger. During his short visit Boureima participated in meetings with IMA staff and local community leaders, and held a public conversation with IMA Director Maxwell Anderson on a range of issues.

Talking with Boureima during his short stay, I became conscious of the inherent contradictions that African museums represent. Contemporary African museums inherited their collections from the European colonial governments that established them. Colonial museums in Africa were originally created for the enjoyment of white visitors; black Africans were not admitted.

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