Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

One thing we’ve learned from the recession is that movies are now considered “recession proof”.  People need the escape.  This can easily be seen from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which had a $160 million 5-day opening.  It was also the fastest movie to ever reach $350 million world-wide. I was somewhat surprised to find out that this movie would be offering an IMAX 3D experience as well.  Typically I think of the animated movies which can fairly easily crank out a 3D version of themselves.  However, digitally adding 3D scenes to a filmed movie requires a great amount of work from the production companies.  Why do it? Money of course.

Monsters vs. Aliens © Dreamworks Animation

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To say that social media is a growing field would be quite the understatement. Whether you’re an avid tweeter blowing up my Twitter feed (cough cough, John Mayer!) or a soccer mom that uploads the latest school pictures onto Flickr, almost everyone I know actively participates in at least one social networking site – even my grandma is on Facebook.

But it’s not only individuals using these sites. Here at the IMA, as most of you know, we embrace social media as a useful tool in reaching our audiences and fulfilling our mission. And we’re not the only ones – LACMA, SFMoMa, and Walker Art Center are just a couple of our peers actively engaging online audiences. Even the Art Institution of Chicago recently announced here, that they’ll soon be launching a Twitter account.

But as museums and museum employees continue to grow their online activity – both personal and institutional – we’re faced with the challenge of exploring policies and guidelines online activity. Should there be employee policies in place for personal use of such sites? Should museums implement a clearly detailed policy for institutional use of such sites? And if so, what would either one of these policies look like and what purposes would they serve? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m celebrating 4 years at the IMA today and it’s hard not to reflect on that.  It may not be a very long time in terms of a career, but it makes for a lot of audio, video and web projects, not to mention exhibitions and new innovative projects.

The first in-house video I worked on at the IMA was re-editing an African Pottery Techniques documentary shot in Burkina Faso.  At the time, it was a pretty big step for the museum – to actually do this in-house, quickly, easily and for free.  When I compare that to our latest  video release on Orly Genger’s installation “Whole”, I kind of laugh.  We shot this video in HD, incorporated Time Lapse, used a lift for certain shots and then published to YouTube.  Check it out below.

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First things first, let me start by highlighting one of the The Nugget Factory’s latest productions – Welcome to the IMA.  This is piece we produced in part for the 125th Gala, this past weekend, to appear in the new Indianapolis Airport and for other multi-purpose uses.  Please enjoy.

And speaking of the 125th Gala, we uploaded images from this incredible event to our Flickr account.  Have fun.

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I’m a number geek. Give me a calculator and a list of digits, and I’ll be happy for hours. If using the calculator was an Olympic sport, I might be a contender for the gold. I’ve got lightening fast fingers and my addition button is wearing out from all the use it gets. From attendance to web stats, revenue to ROI, I’ve been crunching numbers like Michael Phelps breaks world records.

As numbers twirl around my head like 10-year old Chinese gymnasts (they are definitely NOT 16 that’s for sure), I thought I’d share with you some of my favorites. You can find a lot of these stats on the IMA’s dashboard, but some of the numbers are not accessible to the public…until now. In the Museum’s ongoing dedication to full transparency, here’s IMA by the numbers: Read the rest of this entry »