One can’t help but guess that Bangor’s civic leaders felt that an imposing rendering of Mr. Bunyan would bring them karmic notoriety among tourists.  It works – the snapshot is likely all I’ll ever recall about Bangor.

Some small towns have taken to pinning every shred of civic hope on the ability to boast the biggest strawberry, lava lamp, or bull.  The sculpture-as-tourist-trap approach to salvaging the economies and identities of rural America is documented with pathos and hilarity in the 2010 documentary World’s Largest, shown last July at the Indianapolis International Film Festival.

Our own city is making more serious strides in the public art realm, including the IMA’s 100 Acres, the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library’s thinmanlittlebird, and Cardinal, designed by Jeff Laramore for the new JW Marriott Hotel plaza downtown as part of the face-lift spurred by the 2012 Super Bowl.  How refreshing that the sculpture was installed, this past March, months before the building itself is finished.  (I’m eager to hear what my fellow citizens think of this piece – please comment).

And one year from now, artist Fred Wilson will unveil an intriguing installation on the lawn of Indy’s City-County building as a response to an existing work of public art: an African-American male freed slave figure that’s part of the Indiana Soldiers’ & Sailors’ Monument, circa 1901. The conversation that’s sure to be prompted by works like Wilson’s E Pluribus Unum is a manifestation of the social capital leveraged by art in the public square.

And if an over-sized strawberry sculpture can revive a dying rural town, that’s grand too.

Simply put, what I like most about my job is that I get to look at works of art. I probably spend more time looking in one week than most people do in a whole year. When I’m looking, I always start with trying to figure out from what and how a work is made. For me, these are the most interesting questions to investigate. If you can’t put together at least some rough answers, then you really can’t make any further assumptions (art historical or otherwise), and you’re certainly not going to be in a good position to make good conservation decisions.

I rarely ever get to the question of whether or not I like an artwork; in conservation, answering that question doesn’t really get me anywhere.

This week I’ve had the exceptional opportunity to look at a rare corner cabinet with carvings by Emile Bernard. This cabinet is one of only four known examples produced by the Pont-Aven School (one is at the Norton Simon, one is at the AIC, and the other in Paris). It made quite a big splash when we acquired it this year.

In an effort to better understand the construction of the cabinet, I’m working alongside the IMA’s Pont-Aven specialist, Ellen Lee, The Wood-Pulliam Senior Curator, and Jérôme Séré, ebéniste restaurateur de mobilier (cabinetmaker and furniture restoration specialist) who specializes in this type of cabinetry.

We’ve started our technical examination of the piece by measuring and inspecting each element, and then making radiographs of certain joins, and finally producing IRR images to look for under drawings. The IMA’s New Media folks were down in the lab yesterday to make a video about the work, so stay tuned for that. Also, the cabinet will be featured in the forthcoming IMA Magazine.

But today, I want to share a few sneak peaks of our work.  Here are some digital radiographic images I produced yesterday that show the refined joinery of the cabinet and the hardware used to make the cabinet doors swing open.

Bernard Corner Cabinet, Lowest Section, Top Proper Left

Bernard Corner Cabinet, Lowest Section, Bottom Proper Left

In the autumn of 2009, Andrea Zittel sent a request for proposals to students at the Herron School of Art and Design who wished to live on her latest piece, Indianapolis Island. The island is an 18′ x 20′ fiberglass living structure that will float in the lake of the new 100 Acres Art and Nature Park. We (Jessica Dunn and Michael Runge) collaborated to write a proposal and were chosen by Zittel and the IMA after several interviews and meetings.

We are really excited to be a part of this project and have many ideas dealing with the Give and Take nature of the project.

Here is a quick overview of our project:

Fabrication of the interior: We will be fabricating the entire interior of the island with modular, dual-purpose furniture including a bed which functions as a couch as well as storage space. We will also be building a bicycle generator so we can have electricity on the island.

Floating garden: Similar to a self watering container, we will be building floating garden pots that will grow vegetables we can eat while living on the island.

Floating messages: Visitors may send messages to the island inhabitants by floating paper messages via capsules visually reminiscent of the island’s shape.

Island trade: Every visitor who sets foot on the island will have the opportunity to give and take something from the island. This trade will will show a tangible example of the mark left on the individual and the space.

Follow our construction progress and our evolving (or deteriorating) mental state on our blog. You can also follow us on Twitter.

This photo was snapped just this morning down in 100 Acres by Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Lisa Freiman and promptly tweeted by CEO Max Anderson:

Steel workers gather for a photo opp. on top of Free Basket by Los Carpinteros

Take for instance how social media has reshaped the world of journalism. “Citizen journalism” is the concept of members of the public “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.” Examples of this can be seen through blogs, twitter, and camera phone images.

As a museum, we can employ this same idea. Staff, artists and visitors can capture events as they happen with their iPhone or a Flip Video. The following images were captured on artist duo Type A’s cell phones and then uploaded to Facebook:

The top ring of "Team Building (Align)" casts a shadow

Astronomer Brian Murphy of Butler U. and Andrew of Type A work out some calculations to place the second ring for "Team Building (Align)"

So, budding art journalists, here are some tips from caffienatedtraveller.com to get you started:

• Acknowledge the artwork and museum in the photo credits. It is time for bloggers to step up and put on a professional face.
• Post great images and not the family snap shots on your blog. Why discredit a good art exhibit.
• Flash photography? Don’t go there unless you have explicit permission from the museum. Not even when you think you’re alone.
• Leave the fanatical blogger psyche at the entry door. Spend some zen time in the moment, with the art and the space and then shoot.

In the meantime, I’ll be looking for your tweets, status updates and image uploads. And let’s continue to blur the lines together, shall we?

Practical shoes? (via boston.com)

This may have been our most treacherous episode of IMA TV yet. But we Nuggets strive to bring you the latest news from behind the scenes at the IMA, and gosh darn-it, we’ll get out hands (and high heels) dirty to do it.

Yesterday morning, we got the call with our assignment. So after donning hard hats, we trekked down to 100 Acres lead by intrepid project manager Dave Hunt. Adrenaline coursing through our veins, we entered the construction site for Los Carpinteros’ Free Basket. Surrounded by potentially threatening loud noises and up to our metatarsals in mud, we braved the elements to bring you this nice little IMA TV episode:

Los Carpinteros has developed a large-scale site-specific installation titled Free Basket for 100 Acres: The Virgina B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park that continues their interest in the juxtaposition of the practical and the imaginary. Free Basket draws on the form of the basketball court, turning it into an aesthetically surprising entity that also offers a site for the community to engage in recreational play.

A rendering of Free Basket

In developing their project, Los Carpinteros chose to draw on the rich history of sports in the city of Indianapolis. Their project seeks to bring together art, culture and sports, providing an interactive platform for the larger community that engages them in art. Free Basket will be Los Carpinteros’s first long-term public commission in the U.S. Click here for more info.

Los Carpinteros

Joep van Lieshout, with his studio Atelier van Lieshout, will present a group of 20 benches with drawings of large bones that will together form the shape of an enormous, stylized human skeleton.

The work grows out of ideas about native heritage and cultural development, with bones iconically referring to artifacts and remains from previous occupants. The artist, who encountered visitors sitting on rocks and other natural perches on his visit to Indianapolis, wanted to create benches as sites for resting in 100 Acres.

Artworks that are displayed outdoors face different risks than those that are kept inside. The pigeon, for example, is a dangerous bird to bronze sculptures; the acids in guano can actually corrode a bronze patina in a fairly short time. Another risk public artworks face is that we simply stop caring. When we stop noticing the artworks that surround us, their significance and cultural context is lost.

(via Flickr user travelbex)

Enter Wikipedia Saves Public Art (WSPA) which we created as part of our Fall IUPUI Museum Studies class (you might remember our student, Elizabeth Basile, blogged about her personal experience with the project back in December). The logic of this project is to put information about public artworks into Wikipedia so that people won’t forget or stop caring about them. Yes, there’s a lot of guano in Wikipedia, but with its millions of viewers a day and openness to participation, it’s a vital resource for the cultural sector.

Before we started WSPA, there were only a handful of articles in Wikipedia about public art in Indianapolis—not so good for a city that brags about having more monuments than any city other than Washington, DC. Through our efforts, there are now 57 articles (and more each week) about local public artworks on Wikipedia. Since we started WSPA, our articles have been viewed more than 66,000 times. Now we are thinking big about how WSPA can truly become a global project and how to get more people to make articles about public art in their own town.

Recently, we’ve had a lot of help from Lori Byrd Phillips (an IUPUI Museum Studies graduate student) and Sarah Stierch (a soon-to-be George Washington University Graduate student, who runs her own blog, Sarah – Your Favorite Museum Intern. Together, we’ve begun developing “The Process” to help Wikipedians and public art advocates translate information contained in public databases into Wikipedia articles. For example, did you know that volunteers working through Heritage Preservation’s Save Outdoor Sculpture! surveyed Indianapolis in 1992-1994 and found 205 sculptures? Information about all of them is available online through the Smithsonian’s public database.

Thanks to Magnus for making the application that allowed us to make this chart

But a lot has happened in Indy’s world of public art since the early 1990s. That’s why actually going out and visiting the artworks is important—to verify the information contained in the Smithsonian’s database, to make note of any changes, and to use the tools of 2010 to research and share information about those changes. In addition to finding artworks surveyed by the SOS! folks, you can research new artworks that have been installed across the city. We’re grateful to have our laptops, cell phones, and Web-based tools that have allowed us to create these cool things:

Here’s the Flickr map that we are using to plot the location of the more than 500 images we’ve taken of public art in Indianapolis. By mapping them in Flickr we also resolve their GPS coordinates.

Here’s the Google map that we’re using to plot the original 205 SOS! entries from the Smithsonian database. While the Flickr map is a lot easier to use, we are also experimenting with Google Maps because its satellite maps are so much better.

And here are two Gowalla trips we’ve made for Indianapolis:

IUPUI Public Art Collection Highlights Tour.

Top 10 Public Artworks in Indianapolis.

Gowalla is an iPhone-based app that has a lot of potential for helping to geo-locate and photo document public artworks. Look, for example, at the number of people that have checked in and taken a photograph at the Texas Rangers Monument in Austin.

These tools have helped us locate, document, and share information about hundreds of public artworks in just a few weeks. With this information we will continue making Wikipedia articles about public art in Indianapolis. As mobile technology spreads (particularly GPS-based technologies), opportunities to care for public art will also grow.

Wikipedia Saves Public Art. Logo designed in 2009 by Michael Mikulay.

With all of this in mind, we’re excited about travelling to Denver next Tuesday to participate in the one-day workshop, Wikimedia@MW2010. Perhaps we’ll have a chance to discuss how WSPA is an effective tool for documenting collections of public art that are not well known beyond their distinct local context. Also in Denver, we’ll be joining Rob Stein to listen to Max Anderson and Samuel J. Klein (Wikimedia Board of Directors) give the keynote presentations and then work through important issues and ideas raised by other participants. Our experiences with WSPA have given us a few ideas for the cultural sector that we’d like to share in advance of Wikimedia@MW2010:

* In the spirit of the Encyclopédie and in particular the Descriptions des Arts et Métiers, Wikipedia can become the central hub of information about the materials, tools, and techniques artists have used and are currently using in their practices. Likewise, Wikipedia can become the central hub of information for the materials, tools, and techniques art conservators use in their work. An ideal article about a public artwork would include a material and technical description that was linked to corresponding and accurate information within Wikipedia.

* Public art today is often made using “current technology,” which presents an entire new set of issues. For example, Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain in Chicago is comprised of thousands of LEDs. Many technologies used in art quickly become outdated or difficult to update after a few short years. What if we could develop a similar “Conservation Status” for technologies like what exists for endangered animal species like the Bengal Tiger?

* Cultural institutions and public repositories should be encouraged to share their out-of-copyright images of art and put them in Wikimedia Commons.

* Finally, wouldn’t it be cool if the article about Art21 and all of its seasons was as thoroughly detailed and researched as iCarly’s?

What WSPA really needs, though, is for more people to make articles about public art in Wikipedia. Why not try it? If you need some inspiration, check out the “Template”, “Showcase,”, and “Open tasks”. And be sure to use the “talk pages” to leave feedback, questions, or ideas so we can all work together to make the project better.

Everything we know about Wikipedia and the other digital tools discussed above, we’ve learned by using our computers to experiment and engage in dialogue with more experienced contributors. (Wikipedia even gives “newbies” a sandbox to play in!) If you care about cultural heritage, you’ll find many kindred spirits in Wikipedia. That’s why we’d like to see you on Wikipedia, where we can work together and maybe even enjoy some Wiki Love. In an effort to bring some of the energy from Wikimedia@MW2010 directly back to Indianapolis, we’ve invited Liam Wyatt (Vice President, Wikimedia Australia) to give a public lecture at the Herron School of Art and Design on April 19 at 1:30 p.m. in the Basile Auditorium.

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

The definition of public art differs depending on whom you ask and why you are asking. For example, must the government supply the funding for a project to officially be labeled as public art? Is graffiti public art (see also: Banksy)? Is my neighbor’s daughter’s sidewalk drawing a piece of public art? Is the Love sculpture even public art if it sits on the Museum’s private property? Raquel Laneria sheds some light on this murkiness in her Forbes article “Why We Love – And Need – Public Art.” But whatever the official definition – to me, its an art work in a public space that I can personally access – and I agree with those “nonprofits, federal organizations and private investors who believe it is something indispensable to city life,” and with Darren Walker, who is quoted in the article as having said, “public art is a public good.”

My collage of art, found within a three-block stretch of Washington Street in Indianapolis.

I recently attended the walking tour of George Rickey: An Evolution (I highly recommend it – the last guided tour is August 16) in downtown Indianapolis. Our guide, Mindy Taylor-Ross, prefaced the tour with some Arts Council info and mentioned that Indy was at one time pursuing a ‘percent-for-art ordinance,’ which would provide a more or less stable (though small) funding source for public art in Indianapolis. Many other cities, including Seattle and Chicago, already have similar ordinances. A percent-for-art ordinance states that a percentage of publicly funded capital improvement projects (usually between .5 and 2%) is reserved for the commissioning of public artworks, which generally end up inside the building or on its outlaying property. In my interpretation, this ensures that as long as the city spends money on building projects, public art projects will exists in these spaces. While I’m sure there are a lot of politics and red tape involved in this process, theoretically, this is a good idea. Though with the current government leadership such legislature is likely not a priority, perhaps it could be pursued once more when times are less rough. The Project for Public Spaces website indicates a few other funding sources for public art – public/private sector collaborations, percent and non-percent for art programs, soliciting developer participation, and several other alternatives.

For fun, I polled some friends to find out their favorite and least favorite public art works. Many respondents voluntarily said that the reason they liked it was because they can still vividly see it when they think about it. Pretty cool.

“Loved it”
Eero Saarinen, Gateway Arch (the St. Louis Arch); J. Seward Johnson Jr, The Awakening; Juame Plensa, Crown Fountain; James Yamada, Our Starry Night; Igor Mitoraj, Tindaro Screpolato; the Pineapple Fountain in Charleston, SC; Jim Benedict, Forks, Cheese, Hangers; Magdelena Abakanowicz, Agora.

“Not so much”
Julian Opie, Ann Dancing; Pablo Picasso, Untitled, Chicago. (especially with the baseball caps); Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen, Big Sweep.

What public art works do you like or dislike?

The Awakening

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!

These are all photos I took on my iPhone (hence the shady quality) of artworks brought in to our in-house talent show. The festival took place on Monday, May 18th, 2009. Enjoy…

Heather Hudson - Artwork

Pat Williamson - Paintings & Drawings

Gary Hutchison - Photographs & 2D Art

Jeff Julius - WWII Ships from Recycled Materials

Lindsay Lord - Handbags & Totes

Mary Schnellbacher

Matt Warner - Drawings, Painting & Photographs

Phil Hughes - Paintings & Pewter Miniatures

Joseph Vasquez - Fine Art Prints

John Todd - Ceramics

Carol White - Jewelry & Metalsmithing

Len Bibeau - Painting & Prints

I’ve tried to caption these things as best as I can, but surely I’ve made a mistake or two… please, feel free to chime in and talk about your art if I’ve featured it here (or if I missed you… it was not intentional, I promise!).

I should also mention, there was a performance part to the talent show, but photos won’t do much justice. People performed songs, and performed them amazingly well I must say! Maybe one day we’ll see a clip or two pop up on the internet… if so I’ll add those to the post.

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.

The IMA mapped a route along the White River that allowed for the fewest traffic interruptions, and the sculpture made a smooth landing with a welcoming crowd on IUPUI’s campus to greet it.

I bet you wish we had video of that, huh? Well, here it is, straight from the Nugget Factory:

The four IMA sculptures will join newly commissioned works of public art to be located along the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. The trail will connect neighborhoods, entertainment amenities and Indianapolis’s five downtown cultural districts. The western corridor of the trail, to be completed in 2011, will pass through the campus of IUPUI along Blackford Street and will run adjacent to two of the four sculptures from the IMA collection.

Sculptures on loan to IUPUI include:

East Gate/West Gate, 1973
Sasson Soffer (American, b. 1925)
stainless steel
24 x 40 x 30 ft.
82.56

Spaces with Iron, 1972
Will Horwitt (American, 1934 -1985)
cast iron and bronze
54 x 84 x 68 3/4 in.
81.220

Mega-Gem, 1989
John Francis Torreano (American, b. 1941)
heliarch welded aluminum plate, 36 cast aluminum anodized rosettes
7’2″ x 11′ x 7’2″
1997.6

Portrait of History, 1997
Shan Zou Zhou (Chinese, b. 1952)
Bronze
100 x 24 x 30 in.
2001.388

I searched the web for other interesting stories of relocating large pieces, but had a hard time finding anything. If you know of any, please comment about them. And if you have video or imagery — even better!!