Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

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

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It’s things like this that remind me how lucky I am to work where I do. How many workplaces do you know that have a talent show!? You won’t see this in any of our galleries, at least not anytime soon, but it’s all amazing stuff!

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“Has anyone seen our intern?” This blog series follows the IMA’s Public Affairs Intern, Jennifer Anderson, as she escapes the office space for a little R&R in the galleries…

If you were out Sunday afternoon in Indianapolis and happened to see a sculpture flying mid-air across town, don’t worry — you weren’t imagining things.

The sculpture, East Gate/West Gate by Sasson Soffer took flight at around 6 pm and safely landed about ten minutes later. The work is one of four outdoor sculptures the IMA has loaned to Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis — otherwise known as IUPUI. Three of the sculptures were relocated earlier in the year, but East Gate/West Gate was too big to transfer via truck. Measuring 24 x 40 x 30 feet, the sculpture could only be moved via helicopter. Read the rest of this entry »

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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