Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Dear IMA Team and Readers of the Blog,

We’ve been wanting to write a short note to you all ever since the evening of the IMA’s 125th Anniversary Gala. What a night! A great show of energy and commitment to the museum, a rare chance to spend time with a brand new, permanent work from a major living artist and really just a great party.

Type A piece up for auction at the 125th Gala

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Chocolate: The Exhibition at the Indiana State Museum satisfies with its vintage ads, wrappers and boxes along side a history of the tasty treat and its spread throughout the world. The sweetest surprise was sitting on giant chocolates in their wrappers (actually cushioned seats) at the end of the exhibition. The exhibit highlighted decorative objects used to serve chocolate, as well as the design of chocolate’s packaging. However, I didn’t see any chocolate art.

Edible art? Artists use unusual mediums these days, including chocolate. Artist Jean Wertz Zaun specializes in creating chocolate sculptures and paintings that are to be kept and cherished as works of art in their own right. In fact, last August, Zaun was commissioned by the Henry Ford Museum to create a chocolate painting to enhance their showing of Chocolate: The Exhibition. And among others, the Toledo Museum of Art commissioned 37 of Zaun’s works in chocolate to enhance their Van Gogh Fields exhibit in 2003. View a gallery of her museum commissions here.
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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.

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One thing that I find interesting about writing for this blog is that I really have no idea what or even who is going to proceed or follow me. I get a date on the calendar that my post is going to go up, and that’s about it. So I was surprised to find out that Meg was so very interested in crunching numbers because today I’m writing about how I take care of our “Numbers 0-9,” by Robert Indiana. A marketing ploy, serendipity, coincidence, or the pervasiveness of numerality: you decide.

Anyway, I’m going to tell you how I help to keep our numbers clean and looking good (I get lots of help). For the past few years I’ve invited IMA summer interns working in other departments to help me and the conservation interns wash the “Numbers” (you can go here to Flickr to see a ton of images of our sculptures and Indiana’s various versions of the same sculpture on exhibit around the world).

Washing these 8 foot tall painted aluminum artworks is a fair amount of work, even when you have the good help I had. It’s a fairly straight-forward process to clean the sculptures: we simply wash them gently with soap (I use Orvus ) and water. Really, that’s it, some soap and water, a few ladders and lots of me acting like Mr. Miyagi and demanding perfect motions when doing the work.

Beyond the actual work it’s also a time when I can provide a real example of some of the maintenance we complete on the outdoor sculptures to interns in the other departments. After all (and this number is for Meg), there are over 50 artworks scattered throughout the IMA’s grounds, and soon to be a lot more over in the 100 Acres.

There are two other things that I wanted to mention, one is that you can go here and see a drawing by Robert Indiana that shows what the organization of the numbers meant to him and why we arranged them so. I’m always intrigued by this notion that just by putting two numbers together you can achieve a kind off greater meaning.
The second thing I wanted to mention is the fine Wikipedia article that Jasmine made about the numbers this spring. I have it on good word that invitations for Lunch with the IMA’s director have been sent out to the 5 that made Wikipedia articles of IMA sculptures. I’ve been digging around to see if others have been made, but haven’t found any. Speaking of that, I hope our IT department doesn’t check how many times a day I look at Wikipedia on this computer….

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 »