In the great green garden-room
There was an elephant ear alocasia
And some blue and white balloon flowers ….”

Brilliant red of the native sourwood tree with the clear yellow of Photinia in the background. IMA/Oldfields border garden near orchard.

Arisaema and sourwood leaves

It has been a long gentle slide through a beautiful autumn here in the gardens.  Cool sunny days and no heavy rain storms meant outstanding leaf color on trees and shrubs around the campus.  But the bright yellow has now fallen from the sugar maple outside the Deer-Zink Pavilion, the needles of the great pyramidal dawnredwoods around the Sutphin Fountain are going to russet orange, and the red maples on the mall above the parking garage are just past peak color.

Yesterday morning folks in my neighborhood were needing to really scrape frost from the car windows.  The last of the summer’s annual plantings are being pulled out.  Hostas are cut down, and autumn windflowers are spent.  Only some purple monkshood and blue tartarian asters have blossoms among the perennials.  And I have not been able to make myself dig this year’s surprise performer Canna ‘Ermine’ still pushing white bloom spikes 6 feet above the perennial border in the Tanner Orchard.

Canna Ermine

But it is, “Goodnight garden, and off to bed.”  The elephant ears from the Garden for Everyone are cut back and ready for their long winter nap in the hort office basement with their banana buddies.  I’m sure they are dreaming of the sunny tropics – or at least humid Hoosier July.

Bananas in the basement

A few more leaves to rake and compost, then a long winter trying to convince my colleagues to allow a few native black cherry seedlings to grow up in the gardens, “… but you heard Dr. Tallamy say black cherry supports vastly more Lepidoptera than redbud….”

Leaf pile

Post script for true plant nerds:
If Susan Sarandon can do the original version of Goodnight Moon on YouTube, is a horticultural version by Tracy DiSabato-Aust far behind for the next Perennial Plant Association conference?

Interview with Oguri

What’s your mission, or hope, as an artist?
Dance. Basically I feel inspired to dance. I began dancing with Body Weather and Tatsumi Hijikata’s  work, but it was not to learn a kind of tradition or to be a ‘dancer’. I was attracted by the spirit and community. Body Weather does not teach one how to move but is an investigation of the body through working with and learning from others and explores the connection of body to space. A lot of people connect Butoh with the atomic bomb and Hiroshima, and I want to make it clear that that is a misunderstanding. Of course that is a very strong human experience and everything is related, but Butoh is not a direct expression for that. Rather the dance is a possibility for human understanding. Butoh is revolutionary, but it just means ‘dance’. Dance doesn’t have a goal. I work between my body and myself.

How did Caddy! Caddy! Caddy! come to be?
Because of my interest in William Faulkner.

How does Caddy! relate to the Japanese performing arts tradition?
I found Faulkner through Japanese literature. Oe and Nakagami  were inspired by him, and if they are like my fathers, I wanted to meet my grandfather. When Faulkner visited Japan in the mid-1950s after World War II, he said I am like you. I come from the south–the losers country. There is physicality in Oe and Nakagami’s work, and for me that is dance.  I find the same thing in Faulkner’s work.

What influence has Butoh had on you as a performing artist?
Butoh is respect of Tatsumi Hijikata’s dance. In Japan, there was folkdance, ballet, and modern dance. There was a society where performers presented seven-minute pieces for a classy, sophisticated audience. Hijikata comes along half naked and shines the light in the audience’s eyes. He brought the idea of homosexuality and sex and eroticism on stage. He killed a chicken on stage, and the little girls fainted and he was kicked out. After he was expelled, people sought him out because he seemed so cool, and at the time, many people had the same antiestablishment sense. He did a lot of collaborations and events, but it was very avant-garde, very strong cutting edge work.

This year’s Spirit & Place theme is “Inspiring Places.” Does Caddy! take its sense of place from Faulkner’s writing?
William Faulkner lived his entire life in one small county town. From there he created hundreds of characters and lives full of memories and imagination. He invented a fictional place, Yoknapawtawpha, that the reader feels and travels through. In the dance we carry the spirit of the stories.

Can you describe what it’s like to perform this piece?
I have the opportunity to be in Faulkner’s imagination, to dance his stories in space and explore many different characters and the strength and depth of humanity.

What do you ask of the audience who attends this performance?
If you have a chance, please read Faulkner.

Caddy! Caddy! Caddy! The William Faulkner Dance Project is Saturday, November 7 at 7 pm in The Toby. Tickets are $10 for the public and $7 for IMA members. Purchase tickets online

BONUS: Show any Toby ticket stub and receive half off the ticket price for Caddy!

A full house (Photo by IMA Photography Dept.)

Osso (Photo by IMA Photography Dept.)

DM Stith and Osso (Photo by IMA Photography Dept.)

But I hope we have that same problem Saturday night November 7 at The Toby for Caddy! Caddy! Caddy! What’s that, you say? Caddy is an elusive character in the novels of William Faulkner. We describe the performance as southern-gothic-meets-Japanese-avant-garde. Ill-fitting wigs, chalky white faces, and 4-point barbed wire are the visuals. Slow, grotesque movements are the path to the unconscious. Oguri (below) is the single name of the Los Angeles-based dancer who created Caddy!

Oguri (Photo by Steven A. Gunther)

Oguri is a master of butoh, a radical yet subtle style of Japanese dance. The first person to perform butoh was Tatsumi Hijikata, in 1950s Japan. Here’s how Oguri himself tells it: “In Japan, there was folkdance, ballet, and modern dance. Performers presented seven-minute pieces for a classy, sophisticated audience. Hijikata comes along half naked and shines the light in the audience’s eyes. He killed a chicken on stage, and the little girls fainted and he was kicked out. After he was expelled, people sought him out because he seemed so cool, and at the time, many people had the same antiestablishment sense.”

Hear ye, hear ye. If you are antiestablishment in Indy, I am summoning you to The Toby this Saturday for Caddy!, which invites you to consider your nightmares. To look into “the mirror which thaws fear.” To observe disconnection. To confront pain.

The Nutcracker it is not. And, anybody with a ticket stub from a recent Toby event gets in half-price; students of any age are free with ID. I dare you to be there…

Visit the IMA Blog tomorrow for a full interview with choreographer and dancer Oguri.

I had originally authored this as a paper to be published in print form, but I think it will actually work better in a blog format like this one.  I’ve really appreciated the feedback and input readers have contributed to my last few posts, and would love your thoughts on this text as well.

Perhaps the most prevalent concern shared by peers about adopting similar approaches to transparency is a latent fear of the unknown, or a feeling that sharing the gritty details with the public will be too overwhelming and therefore misconstrued.  I’m happy to say that the wheels haven’t fallen off the IMA’s apple cart yet, hopefully this series will illuminate some of the benefits we’ve seen from taking these steps.

Walking the Talk – Part 1

The concept of Transparency has received significant attention in the media and online recently.  This attention comes at a time when public doubt in corporations, government and corporate executives is at an all-time high. High profile failures of some of the nation’s largest and most trusted institutions have shaken our assumptions about what had always seemed to be untouchable industries. Museums have always jealously guarded their trusted place in the public’s perception, but is there a risk that this trust will someday be lost?  As caretakers of this trust, what is the best way to foster open communication about the challenges and opportunities that face us as we try to achieve the mission of our museums?  As comprehensive and easy access to operational information becomes the norm, how can museums embrace this as an opportunity and confront internal fears about sharing their performance metrics with the public?

A Working Definition of Transparency

To begin, we must first come to a common understanding about Transparency. Institutional Transparency is a concept that is notoriously difficult to define precisely.  Principally, Transparency can be defined as the open sharing of information regarding a museum’s operations and performance.  But questions soon arise regarding what to share, when to share, and how to share it. These issues are much more significant for museums to consider when crafting an organizational stance about Transparency.

Museums and museum staff members are always striving for the best. We craft strategies that seek to make our program offerings vital and engaging to our community.  We seek to build our collections by acquiring important works of art.  We take extensive measures to protect and preserve the works in our care. We attempt to run more and more efficient operations by carefully crafting our budgets while, at the same time, seeking to increase our earned and contributed income so that we can continue to be effective in fulfilling our mission. If we’re honest, we would all agree that we succeed in some of these areas and fail in others.  We are not afraid to admit among ourselves that we are not yet the perfect museum which we strive to be, yet we seldom talk about these challenges to our constituents and donors.  We share a common fear that exposing these negative facts about our museums will result in condemnation from the press, a loss of respect in the community, and perhaps most significantly financial loss from decreasing membership or donor revenue.  As a result, our staff works hard to control the flow of information and shield the museum from negative consequences, crafting careful rationalizations which attempt to address and make up for our short comings.

Transparency in our institutions has a goal of counteracting these tendencies | realities with a type of radical authenticity.  Our culture values authenticity and looks for it in our public officials and the institutions we trust. For a museum, authenticity means sharing both the good and the bad in addition to the reasons, circumstances, context and challenges that face us everyday. Transparency then, is the ongoing discipline of practicing radical authenticity and demonstrating to the public whatever degree of integrity and operational excellence our museum possesses at the time.

This notion flies in the face of the conventional wisdom of our public relations and marketing departments who for years have sought to protect us from negative public sentiment and donor frustration. Some express concern that too much Transparency would be a bad thing.  Like any tool or technique, too much of a good thing can indeed be harmful.  When considering issues of Transparency we must do so thoughtfully and carefully, with a goal of maintaining an institutional integrity which is beyond reproach and at the same time, maintain a commitment to an open and authentic relationship with our constituents.

Several common challenges will help illustrate these issues. Museums must consider carefully, for example, their stance on sharing the purchase price of works of art in their collections.  Does doing so, enhance or harm the public’s understanding and relationship with these works of art?  Will sharing this information allow the museum to evaluate or improve its performance in some areas?  What impact, if any, would this action have upon the broader practice of art collecting? At the IMA, we have chosen NOT to share the purchase price or valuation of accessioned works of art in our collection. In addition, we have chosen that we WILL share the valuation of works slated for deaccessioning as well as the prices realized from their sale at auction and then listing the ways these proceeds are used towards the acquisition of new art for the collection.

Deaccessioned Artworks from the IMA's Website

Museums often depend on catering and space rental revenues to contribute to their operating budgets. To make a blanket statement saying that we will always share comprehensive financial information for all of our departments would mean that we would reveal financial information which would damage our competitive advantage against other catering and rental operations. Obviously, doing so is not in the best interests of the institution.

Rather than attempting to determine which information is eligible to be shared, perhaps the best approach is to instead discuss which sorts of information should not be shared. This would certainly cover sharing information which would break laws, breach contracts, violate trust or compromise privacy. Each of these situations would constitute a loss of integrity on the part of the museum.  This leaves a vast set of information that does not violate these caveats resulting in a freedom to share many different facets of museum operations.

Is it possible for a museum to share too much information? Do we risk placing an inordinate amount of emphasis on the sharing of information without a clear understanding of the expectations of our audience? Blogger Jeff Brooks examines this in his posting about the IMA’s Dashboard.

“It would be easy to say it’s too much, that it’s too arcane, too detailed, too boring for donors to care about.

But remember, one person’s boring factoid is another’s hobby. Or hobbyhorse. By putting it all out there, the Indianapolis Museum is telling its public that anyone who cares is an insider. Is it possible someone will go ballistic about their electricity use, or their ownership of possibly plundered art? Sure. But it’s not likely. And their openness defuses these things — much more effectively than trying to keep secrets.

If the information is too much, nobody will look at it. Even so, the very fact that they’re sharing it makes people respect the museum more. And who knows what info-sated donors might choose to do for an organization they feel trusts and respects them?” - Jeff Brooks, “Museum opens the books to anyone who cares”, Donor Power Blog, December 3, 2007,

Looking at the question from a different perspective raises an interesting rule of thumb. If an investment of staff time and effort will be made measuring certain statistics, then museums should choose to measure those things which will offer insight to change or improve our future performance, and shy away from those measurements that will not impact staff actions no matter what the results.  Perhaps this seems too obvious at first glance, but the careful selection of statistics that matter is part and parcel to operating as a transparent institution.  Creating a needle in the haystack model of information sharing does not result in better information for the public, or museum staff for that matter.

In the coming weeks we’ll continue to look at a variety of issues at play when seeking to implement transparency in practice at your museum.  Next week we’ll focus on the underlying reasons why transparency is a good idea, and one that all museums should seek to adopt.

Again, we’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions to these ideas.  The IMA has a few years of experience in this area, but we still find that we’re learning more and more each day.  I’m sure if you focus hard enough, you’ll find some discrepancies or deficiencies in our efforts… in fact, we hope you do!  At least then we’ll know about them and can take steps to fix them!  Thanks in advance!  -Rob

The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

Blog: Vogel Appliance Blog

Flashy? No. Practical? Oh yes. If you’ve ever wondered how much dish soap you really need, this blog is for you.  This local appliance blog gives you tips and tricks that might help you save serious moolah come the winter season. And it’s coming soon.

ArtBabble Video: Jean Shin: Common Threads

IMA Work of Art:

Still Life with Profile of Laval by Paul Gauguin

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What a great evening at the IMA! Saw Osso, DM Stith, and The BQE with Q&A w/Sufjan Stevens. All were incredible!

Even though I miss my gaudy tropicals terribly I know their demise means the autumnal show is ready to start. And who doesn’t love a good show?

This year the colors are simply spectacular, the reds super intense like the color of first lust, the oranges brilliant as Vegas showgirl costumes, and the yellows absolutely glowing like so many rhinestones on a Porter Wagner jacket. It’s just been a great year to walk about and soak it all in. And it’s lasting a pretty long time too.

I suspect our cooler wetter summer has something to do with the great color. But did you ever wander why the trees and shrubs especially change color? The fact that the trees produce less chlorophyll allowing the red and yellow pigments (carotenoids) to show is fairly common knowledge. The trees also produce more red-purple pigments (anthocyanins). But is that all there is to it? I get regular e-newsletters from my former boss when I interned at the Cincinnati Zoo, Rob Halpern (thanks for the link Katie). He now has his own design/consulting business (ZHCD) and includes in each month’s newsletter a group of links to interesting and sometimes bizarre plant news. In fact these have been such a hit they now have a website devoted to them, plantworldnews.com. Anyway, one of Rob’s recent newsletters included a link about fall color. One theory suggests the reds in autumn color dates back 35 million years when the trees and their insect pests survived a series of ice-ages. Could it be the trees are warning the aphids “my leaves are about to die don’t lay your eggs on me”? It’s a fascinating story you can read in its entirety here. Let me also just say I really wish Rob would sell t-shirts or something with his logo. It’s brilliant.

Okay, enough chatter about color. Let’s look at some color.
Maples of all forms are great this year.

Cornus kousa are well beyond their usual color.

The always reliable Lindera angustifolia are spectacular. I love the glossy oranges and reds these plants develop. And when the leaves do turn brown they hold on til Spring, providing a nice cover for birds and your neighbors prying eyes.

Hydrangea quercifolia is glorious.

How about Hamamelis virginiana in full fall color and full bloom?

Another large shrub looking great this year is Aesculus parviflora draped in bright golden foliage. This native of the Southeast is perfectly happy in the Midwest. And is perfect with the late blooming Aconitum.

Parrotia persica is a tree I would love to see more often. The fall colors are fantastic. Once the leaves drop you have the added value of beautiful bark all winter that, like men, will just get better and better looking with age.

The Liguidambar styracifula ‘Slender Silhouette’ we put in Nonie’s Garden developed the glorious yellows, reds, and burgundys these trees are famous for. While the species becomes a broad pyramidal tree the cultivar Slender Silhouette remains a narrow 4 to 6 feet wide at maturity. I like the clean modern lines of these very vertical plants against the backdrop of the broad horizontal curves of the Efroymson Entrance Pavillion (which isn’t evident in this photo).

Not every year is good for fall color in hostas, but this year the Hosta sieboldiana ‘Elegans’ in Hosta Curve is beautiful in bright amber shades of gold. Lilies even look good.

Just walk around the gardens and everywhere you look there is a beautiful view.

Now let’s compare that fall color to one of Porter’s jackets. Oh, the tragedy of it all. Listen close.

And you can see how, I mean, it’s painted, this bravura, I mean this coil and the light and then the incredible translucency of the peeled fruit. It’s hard to imagine now how it must have looked... Well, we are always going to be looking at and celebrating that the stuff of the world, you know.

Still Life with a Chinese Porcelain Jar by Willem Kalf

Recently, this work  has caught my attention again, as I’ve had the opportunity to spend a bit of time in the galleries here at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. I love the process of “getting to know” a work of art; the way it becomes like a familiar friend, and yet somehow, each time completely delightful and new.  It has me thinking about what catches my attention in each one, and some similarities between the very disparate works that I love. The first thing to come to mind? FOOD.

Some of my favorite works of art, both in this museum and elsewhere, feature fruit prominently. I suppose this could be attributed to “celebrating the stuff of the world,” as Mark Doty said. Undeniably, there is a universal connection between the human experience and the pleasure of eating good food. Artists have used food extensively as symbols in their work throughout the history of painting. For me, it has to do with the beauty of so many things we eat. I am amazed by the endless interpretation of something as simplistic as a bowl of apples.

Here are a few of my favorite food-related works of art from around the country.

I saw this painting in a Gauguin exhibition at the Met. It’s one of my favorites of Gauguin’s, both in style and subject, and I came to appreciate it more after I learned about his body of work and influence on the painters of his time in Gauguin and the Generation of the 1890s.

Two Tahitian Women with Mangoes by Paul Gauguin

I originally was introduced to the work of Ellsworth Kelly by way of his color field paintings. But the images I can’t get out of my head are his simple line drawings of fruit.

Apples by Ellsworth Kelly

And finally, for something completely different, there is something so jubilant and inviting about the cherry perched atop the spoon in this famous sculpture from Minneapolis.

Spoonbridge and Cherry, by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

Needless to say, I also loved listening to Alice Waters of Chez Panisse speak about food and nutrition when she was here last year.

What works of art with food do you love?

Image Courtesy of Freefoto.com

Soft Drink. Pop. Soda. What do you call that sweet, fizzy drink that comes in cans, out of fountains, and sometimes in bottles? I call it coke.

In Southern Indiana where I grew up, a Sprite is a coke, a Dr. Pepper is a coke, and a Pepsi is also a coke. The Coca Cola brand has resonated so much in my hometown that it has become the generic term for the entire category of product. Coke is in good company. Kleenex, Xerox, Google, and even Q-Tip have all created such strong brand identities that their trademarked names are now nouns. (Definition of brand identity.)

Brands like Coca Cola appear to be every marketer’s dream. They seem to need very little advertising and messaging. However, the truth of the matter is that Coca Cola still spends millions of dollars every year on tv and print campaigns for Coke Classic. So what’s up with that?

Like lawns, buildings and cars, brands need maintenance. No matter how great of a brand a product or company has, it needs to be updated and rearticulated in order to resonate.

In 2009, Coca Cola launched a beautiful, if slightly strange, series of commercials featuring bucolic fields filled with young people and singing, furry creatures. The tagline: “Open Happiness.” In a time of recession and war, the ad communicates that sipping a coke will lead to an imaginary world filled with smiles and giggles. Pretty simple. Very timely.

Like Madonna, Coca Cola is great at reinventing itself for the times. During the 1980s, responding to the end of the Cold War and inspired by the Reagan administration, Coca Cola launched their ultra American campaign. “Red, White, and You.” This is the 1980s at its best – patriotism and tight-rolled jeans

Learning from mistakes of the past (ahem New Coke), Coca Cola focuses on maintaining the quality of the product – the essence of their brand identity- while concurrently aligning their advertising to the changing times. Just like Joan Rivers, every few years the product gets a facelift.

So what do Coca Cola Classic and the IMA have in common?

Well, if you haven’t seen it already, the IMA is undergoing it’s own facelift or brand refresh. Over the course of the next few months we’ll be transitioning from our old brand identity:

to our new:

The IMA is a dynamic organization with a lot going on. We hope that the new look and feel of our brand will communicate the energy of the museum. Like Coca Cola, we know that the classic formula is always the best. So while the marketing may change a bit, the IMA and its mission will remain the same. We’ll still have over 50,000 works of art; we’ll still be free to the public; and we’ll continue to inspire creativity through art, nature and design.

All of this talk about brands got me thinking…What brands do you think are the best? Are there examples of museums with great brands? Let me know your favorites.

Born mid-1995 in Southern California, GeoCities lived on the world wide web and worked it’s way into the lives of millions by introducing casual internet surfers to pop-ups, pop-unders, animated gifs, and broken html markup until it’s death in 2009.

Survivors include Yahoo, WebCrawler, AOL, Twitter, and countless others. GeoCities was preceded in death by Jeeves, Compuserve, Netscape (the browser), and Angelfire.

Memorial services will be held at http://web.archive.org. Burial will be at http://geocities.yahoo.com/. Relatives, friends, memes, trolls, and search bots are welcome.

There are several websites that made a splash via GeoCities. Kate confessed to having a fan page of some sort at one point in time… and I had a few pages lurking out there somewhere too, though I’m struggling to remember what they were. Without GeoCities, we wouldn’t have the Icy Hot Stuntaz. Thankfully, the content will never die. Find a nice collection of screen captures of classic GeoCities websites at Internet Archaeology.

The Pharmacy prescribes the following links to combat Monday online anemia.

http://www.beardrevue.com

Blog: beard revue

It’s all about the beards, people. This blog has a simple description: ‘Review, commentary & discussion for the beard enthusiast. Up the beard ratio!’

ArtBabble Video: Creation of a Tibetan Mural

IMA Work of Art:

Madre Jerónima de la Fuente from Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World

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rjstein: TAP is selling out regularly… Waiting lists and iPods not getting enough charge. Great problem to have! Time to buy more iPods!