Danny Beyer, sporting the new IMA Blog t-shirt

The IMA joined Flickr a little late in the game, but I feel like we are really starting to use it in some interesting ways.  My colleague Despi recently created a set featuring the new IMA blog t-shirts.  You’ll be hearing more about that.  Our conversation department has been active creating individual case studies on art objects.  You can learn about a recent Thornton Dial acquisition here (complete with video), or the treatment of a Saarinen Sideboard.  It’s an interesting glimpse into some behind-the-scenes action at an art museum and a new way of discovering engaging content.  Look for more of these conservation case studies in the very near future.

2009 will bring lots of activity to the IMA, especially in 100 Acres: The Virginia B.  Fairbanks Art and Nature Park.  The Nugget Factory will be working very closely with the contemporary department to document the art installations, capturing artist interviews and developing new visitor experiences.  On Flickr, we created a set dedicated set to Type A’s involvement in this space, here (I recommend the videos).  Under development, is the official 100 Acres Flickr group.  We’re still tweaking it, but please feel free to join and contribute your photography.

IMA’s Horticulture department was kind enough to place some new signs across the beautiful IMA campus.  We often spot photographers walking our grounds and we would love to see their perspective.  I hope these signs encourage or inspire our visitors to go online and shape IMA’s presence on Flickr.  I mean that.

We really want you to get involved in Flickr

IMA blogger Noelle, also just completed a Flickr article in PREVIEWS, the publication for members of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  I told you we love Flickr, perhaps a little obsessed.  If anyone is interested in a copy, leave a comment and I’ll send you one.

And finally, Museums and the Web will be hosting their annual conference in Indianapolis next April.  They’ve created a group requesting images of Indianapolis.  It will give conference attendees from all over the world (Australia, Japan and Holland) a chance to discover our city and check out the new airport.

I’m all Flickr’d out.  Have any Flickr ideas?  Let me know.

Here is an excerpt from Andrea’s description of the project.

Here at the IMA we are preparing for a new design center. One of the recently acquired pieces is a side board by architect and designer Eliel Saarinen. Saarinen was a Finnish architect who is better noted for his art nouveau buildings in the early years of the 20th century, and national romantic style than for his furniture.  Our side board was created in 1929, shortly after Saarinen immigrated to the United States. … The side board is a 49 5/16 x 77 9/16 x 20 13/16 in. rectangular chest on four legs, with four doors on the front of the piece, covering three compartments (two sides and one larger, central)and its surface is decorated with a diamond pattern of walnut and burl wood veneers. The diamond appliqué follows an alternating pattern of light and dark burled wood over most of the planar surfaces of the piece.  The piece when acquired has diverse cosmetic and structural issues to its surface. For this specialized treatment the IMA’s conservation lab invited conservator and wood specialist Mark Minor to work on the piece.  In addition to the stabilization and preservation of the cabinet, the goal of the treatment was to bring the artist/designer’s intent back to view—to reduce the muddiness of the varnish and clarify the grain/figure of the veneers.

Sounds cool, right?  Did you know that we also have another IMA conservation project on Flickr?  Don’t miss the treatment of a Thornton Dial work.

Remember how we said we were going to beef up content on Flickr? Well, it has begun with this set of images documenting the anoxic treatment of a work of art by Thornton Dial.

What is anoxic treatment? Well you either know or you don’t…so if you know, aren’t you dying to see how IMA conservators did it? If you don’t know…aren’t you dying to? Don’t miss out on this chance to expand your vocabulary and knowledge of art conservation.

You will see more conservation on Flickr as the year goes along. The photo-sharing site has proven to be a very useful tool to feature this kind of content. We hope that it is useful in sharing some behind-the-scenes insight for our visitors (and blog readers), but we also hope that those of you who are conservators from other places will find this to be a useful forum for discussion.

And if you visit Flickr you will also find:

• A brand new set of photos Daniel and I created during our visit to the ISEA 2008 conference in Singapore
• New answers to the question: “If you lived forever, what would you take with you?” (Of course inspired by the current exhibition, To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum)
• Photos documenting the Earthworks Camp, a collaboration between IMA and IPS

Thornton Dial is an African American artist whose work is in the southern vernacular tradition, which means he is self taught with no formal art education and lives and works in the South (Alabama to be exact.) He makes sculptures and assemblages (wall hangings with things protruding from the surface) using discarded everyday objects that would otherwise wind up in a land fill. So essentially Dial is also an environmentalist. If you look closely at his art, not too closely because there are sharp edges that can leave nasty cuts on delicate skin, you will see mattress coils, paint can lids, old shoes, used clothing, buttons, chicken wire (he is also a chicken farmer), and plastic twine. Almost nothing in the Dial household wound up in the trash. He nails objects to a very large canvas that has been attached to a board, adds enamel spray paint and covers the whole thing in Splash Zone compound, the material used to keep boats water tight.

Dial expressed his feelings on the war in Iraq in 2003 by producing a very large wall hanging, 71 x 114 inches that shows a torn image of the United States flag. He titled it “Don’t’ Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together.” He chose the flag because it represents the values that America stands for, freedom, liberty and equality. He showed it torn and tattered; because in that form it represents what Americans suffer when our government finds it necessary to aggressively protect these values.

Not only is this flag shredded, its painted red areas make it look like bloody bandages, which turns the entire canvas into a gory battlefield. The artist not only expresses the horror of war in this work but inserts images that suggest this country’s history of racial strife. Wrapped in these bloody bandages are figures representing a dead black soldier toward the upper middle left of the canvas and a white soldier on the far upper right. Although Dial shows them separate (a reference to America’s continuing racial problems), they are also equal.

Since these soldiers died for the same cause on the same battlefield, are wrapped in the same cloth and float on the same ground made from mattress coils, their racial differences no longer matter. The mattress coils are Dial’s pun – “We have created a hard bed and our only hope is the realization that we must lie in it together.”

The Indianapolis Museum of Art purchased Raggly Flag just a few months ago. It now hangs on the wall on the third floor bridge near the escalator. You should come to the IMA to see it (www.imamuseum.org for directions and opening times), because describing a work like this and showing you a picture is no substitute for the real experience. This work of art is truly an awesome sight to behold. Hopefully, you will enjoy it even better since you now know the meaning behind the objects that the artist chose to include in this piece.