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| AMPERSAND III, Chryssa Indianapolis Museum of Art |
Recently I had the pleasure to travel to
Indianapolis to visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art, or IMA. I was really
surprised when I first arrived because I visit Indianapolis frequently and
never realized that there was an art museum, let alone multiple professional
galleries. I love museums of any kind, so the IMA was even more interesting,
especially since I have started to learn to view art in a different way due to
my many classes. The museum was split into different levels which included the
permanent collections, along with some that change more frequently. The main
collections included Contemporary, African, American, Asian, European, and
Design Art. Each had a wide variety of artwork made by some very famous
artists, to pieces made by more local ones.
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| Terrain, Julianne Swartz Indianapolis Museum of Art |
Since I am currently in a Contemporary
Art class, I decided to visit that level of the museum first, and want to focus
most of my thoughts on that specific gallery. Most people, in my experiences, who
are unfamiliar with art and the deeper meaning behind some pieces, tend to not
fully understand contemporary art. They would rather look at a bunch of
landscape paintings, or sculptures of people, almost like we are still in the
Renaissance Era. Now I had the pleasure of going to the museum with my
boyfriend, who is a business major, and the second we walked in you could tell
by the look of his face that he was wondering what we were even looking at,
because to him it was not artwork. After taking the Contemporary Art class, I
was able to view the work in this museum completely different than I had
before. The pieces were all so drastically different from each other, but they
all seemed to fit together to create a whole. Some of my favorite pieces were
those that were bigger and were sculptures.
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| Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie, Ghada Amer Indianapolis Museum of Art |
The very first piece I saw when I walked into the room was Barbie Loves Ken, Ken Loves Barbie, by Ghada Amer. It was a piece that challenged gender roles, and related the idea back to something almost everyone had played with as a child. Her goal was to challenge the viewer to think about who would be wearing the jumpsuits, since they were tailored differently from each other. I really thought that this piece fit with so many of the changes that are happening in society with the way we accept all genders and identities. Being in the Contemporary Art gallery, it was a great thought to try to connect all of the artwork with some sort of situation or idea that we are constantly dealing with today. The piece was visually pleasing, and it was easy to understand what the artist wanted from the viewer which I really look for in artwork.
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| Floor, Do-Ho Suh Indianapolis Museum of Art |
Another piece that I thought of
as one of my favorites would have to be Do-Ho Suh’s Floor. It was a large glass floor with which you could stand on and
it looked as if there were just a bunch of colored dots under the glass. If you
looked close enough you could see that they were the hands of small figures of
men and women that were posed as if they were holding the weight of me on the
glass. Although this piece really didn’t have much to it, it went back to the
idea of relating to something current in the world today. The only way we as a
whole are going to live a better life and get through it together is if we help
one another out. While this might not have been the artists direct meaning, I
once again was trying to focus on how the piece made me feel as opposed to just
viewing it for the visual aspect.
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| Floor, Do-Ho Suh Indianapolis Museum of Art |
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| Break of Day, Kate Gilmore Indianapolis Museum of Art |
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| Diabolo (neige et fleurs), Joan Mitchell Indianapolis Museum of Art |
Adding to the list of pieces that
affected my thoughts and feelings is Kate Gilmore’s Break of Day. Her piece included a video of her climbing a steep
plywood structure that she made which was painted white, and she would climb up
with clay pots that were filled with fuchsia paint, and then drop them down so
they would breakand spill paint everywhere. I normally am not attracted to
videos in art galleries, so I made a point to sit and watch for 10 minutes or
so. She repeated this until all 60 pots she had made were destroyed, so I
obviously couldn’t spend a lot of time watching the video. The artist stated
that her piece referenced “major movements throughout art history, ranging from
gestural Abstract Expressionism painting, to Minimalist objects, to Feminist
artworks and endurance –based performance art of the late 1960’s and 1970’s.”
This really reminded me about a lot of the artwork and ideas we had been
talking about in my Contemporary Art class, and made a full circle back to me
about what the whole Contemporary Art movement is. I was so unfamiliar before
this year about art that wasn’t a painting of a landscape or something that is
very easy to understand what it is. I was also unable to understand artwork on
a personal level as many Renaissance type paintings didn’t necessarily have a
deeper thought or meaning, which is what I was used to looking at in previous art
classes.
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| One Minute Sculpture: Theory of Painting, Erwin Wurm Indianapolis Museum of Art |
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| One Minute Sculpture: Theory of Painting, Erwin Wurm Indianapolis Museum of Art |
Although I didn’t mention a lot
of the artwork I saw in the museum, I thought it was more important for me to
reflect on the past few weeks of writing my blogs and learning more than I ever
thought I would about how to look at art in a deeper way. I know that if I went
to this museum a year ago, I would’ve just walked by everything saying oh that’s
cool, without even reading about the artist and what their thoughts were. I
believe that visiting the IMA was a way for me to really put into action what I
had been trying to do this whole semester when going to art galleries. I am
unable to put into words how thankful I am for learning about Contemporary Art
and how it has affected so many different artists and movements, and the IMA
captures some of the great artwork that has been made through the past few
decades.
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| Untitled (Mylar), Tara Donovan Indianapolis Museum of Art |
