From the Director Maxwell L. Anderson

The finances of art museums are now front page news. We took the very painful step of eliminating 21 positions at the end of February and captured other savings to cope with an endowment that lost 24% of its value since fall 2008. While we are guardedly optimistic that these measures will get us through the fiscal year that begins on July 1, 2009, there is no probability to anything financial these days. We will deliberately monitor our revenue and expenses in the months to come.

Your help has been indispensable in safeguarding free general admission and in enabling important acquisitions, vibrant programming and top-flight professionalism in collections care, educational offerings and other extensions of our mission. So the Board and staff thank you. We thank all of our donors, from foundations to corporations to individual members, for your commitment to the IMA and your leadership in the cultural community, with a special giving section in this issue of Previews. We are grateful to those benefactors who helped us realize our goal of 125 Gifts to the IMA in celebration of the Museum’s 125th anniversary. Three oil paintings by 17th-century Spanish master El Greco, a 1976 color screen print by Andy Warhol, and an evening dress from 1926-27 by French fashion designer Jeanne Lanvin, among others, join the IMA’s rich collection and serve as another reminder of the great American tradition of growing major museum collections through gift and bequest.

On a new note, as the IMA confronts the combination of a reduced endowment and free public access, we are laying the groundwork for future government support that we lack today, unlike the majority of our peers among Midwestern art museums. This year we received more foreign funding than support from our municipal and state governments.

Though we face declining resources, by operating efficiently we are able to press ahead on multiple fronts. On May 21, contemporary video artist Eve Sussman will share insights into her wide-ranging experiments in film and video, in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Adaptation: Video Installations by Ben-Ner, Herrera, Sullivan and Sussman & The Rufus Corporation. Each of the five video installations in this exhibition explores the question of transformation from source material to finished project. In today’s world, adaptation is a necessity, not a virtue.

This summer, we give you extraordinary film experiences with our annual Summer Nights films playing under the stars and the Indiana International Film Festival. The IMA will play host to the IIFF’s more than 80 film screenings, taking advantage of The Toby as an ideal location for culturally adventurous works.

Both on the Web and in the pages to follow, we give you a behind-the-scenes look into our acquisition and deaccessioning processes with a new series on provenance case studies, along with an online database at imamuseum.org that provides comprehensive information about deaccessioned artworks. From the artist’s studio to its place in the IMA’s galleries, find out how the history of ownership of a work of art is tracked, and soon you will be able to see how funds from the sale of artworks enable acquisitions of others.

In the Allen Whitehill Clowes special exhibition galleries, we give you the world premiere of the special exhibition European Design Since 1985: Shaping the New Century showcasing brilliant everyday design from the 20th- and 21st-centuries.

We give you gardens and grounds to stroll, complete with new honeybees to help pollinate the restored vegetable gardens at Oldfields.

Most importantly, we give you free general admission and access to art. A gift you can freely extend to others. What will you give back to the IMA and the arts in Indianapolis?