So we know the IMA doesn’t actually look like this today… but we can pretend, right?

(via hanginthere)

Happy Holidays everyone!

Filed under: Art

The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

www.eatmedaily.com

Blog: Eat Me Daily

Eat Me Daily is a blog about food with a critical (and sometimes cynical) take on the culture at large, including media, books, cookbooks, art, design, celebrity, fashion, robots, and cookery.

ArtBabble Video: Director’s Journal: Virgin of Guadalupe

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Art, Current Events, New Media

This blog post is the second written by IMA Public Affairs intern Sarah Miller. Read her first post Personal Art Appreciation. She recently earned a Master of Arts Management with a Visual Arts Concentration from Columbia College Chicago and currently works at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Illinois.

Do you have any memories related to Robert Indiana’s Love sculptures? Or Anish Kapoor’s “Bean” in Chicago? What about Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s saffron-colored gates in New York’s central park? How about one of those giant spiders by Louise Bourgeois…or those cows on parade? Did you ever take a picture with one of these or another public art work? Well, I surely have (see me below). Something about the interactive nature of public art, and the feeling that it informally exists in its spot for me, rather than for a gallery space or for someone’s wall, really helps me enjoy public art. And I think regardless of if you like a piece or don’t, it inevitably makes you aware of your space, your participation in it, and someone’s efforts to enrich or change it. As a friend recently reminded me, these works at least make you ask, “Why is this here?”

Saying hello to a Juan Munoz sculpture

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Art, Local, Musings

The blogs tend to concentrate on the “tubes” and the IMA’s presence in the virtual world, so I’d like to take a moment and focus everyone’s attention back on the brick & mortar museum. I have been conducting a little research on the IMA, comparing it to some sister institutions – Detroit, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and St. Louis – and how our security department stacks up to others in operational costs and “bang for the buck.” During this research I have come to reaffirm, at least in my own mind, how unique the IMA is and how great our responsibility is to protect it.

I’ll try not to belabor the point with too many statistics, but in sheer square footage – 669,000 and change in the main building – the IMA ranks in the top ten out of about 230 other art museums. That’s a lot of square footage our security officers have to patrol each day, 24/7/365. And in that space is an art collection of roughly 54,000 pieces of art from all over the world and from all time periods.

Now, numerous other institutions have bigger buildings or more artwork, so let me add a few other amenities that the IMA has: a reference library, studio/education space, retail and dining areas, the 500-seat Deer-Zink events pavilion, and The Toby, a 600-seat theater to augment our warm-weather outdoor amphitheater.

IMA's campus and LOVE

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Protection Services

For those that don’t know, in one of my posts last spring I offered lunch with the IMA’s director, Max Anderson, in exchange for making a Wikipedia article about one of the IMA’s outdoor sculptures.  To make a long story short, 5 people made articles and just last week Max fulfilled his end of the bargain by having lunch with the Wikipedians at Pucks.  I joined them and so did Daniel and Despi.  The conversation was wide ranging and engaging and the lunch was good, too …. Mmm, Puck’s beet salad and flat bread.

The Wikipedians, Max, and I.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Conservation, Local, Technology