Thousands called for Charles L. Venable’s removal after the museum posted a job listing which mentioned “maintaining the Museum’s traditional, core, white art audience.”
Indianapolis Museum of Art
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1,500+ Call for Museum President’s Removal After Job Posting Cites “Core, White Art Audience”
An offensive job description seeking a new director for the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields drew ire from artists, IMA patrons, and former and current museum workers.
Posted inArt
Recognizing the Contributions of Regionalism at the Turn of the 20th Century
INDIANAPOLIS — In the mid-1970s, when my new, Hoosier husband first took me to visit Indianapolis, the city seemed haunted by the ghosts of middlebrow culture.
Posted inArt
Finding Art in the Smallness of Everyday Enthusiasms
INDIANAPOLIS — The domestic and personal are generally accorded critical attention when cast as dysfunctional; Michelle Grabner presents the domestic as a relatively positive creative force.
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Smithsonian Joins Forces with 14 Museums to Pool Data on American Art
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has launched the American Art Collaborative, a consortium of 14 museums across the country coming together to create what you might call the art-world version of the Digital Public Library of America.
Posted inArt
Free for Over Half a Century, Indianapolis Museum of Art Will Begin Charging Admission
In March of last year, the new director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Charles Venable, cut 29 jobs to relieve a budget problem. While the museum’s endowment is one of the 10 largest in the country, Venable apparently still believes more must be done to ensure the financial success of the institution, namely, moving from free general admission to $18.
Posted inOpinion
High Profile Exits Raise Questions About Indianapolis Museum
The new director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s short tenure has been marked by a spate of departures.
Posted inOpinion
Indianapolis Museum of Art in Jeopardy?
In the last few years the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) has developed a deserved national and international reputation. The IMA’s 100 acre Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, which opened in 2010, is one of the largest contemporary sculpture parks in the world, and one of the only such parks with a commitment to contemporary and non-permanent installation art. The following year, the IMA was chosen to present the US pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, arguably one of the most important art shows in the world. Their 2011 exhibition of outsider artist Thornton Dial represented the first-ever retrospective of his work, and received widespread acclaim, including glowing reviews in the New York Times and Time magazine. These are exceptional accomplishments for any museum, much less one offering free general admission and located in a state whose population is smaller than the five boroughs of New York City — the IMA is simply an anomaly in the United States. And this spring the museum and its new director, Charles L. Venable, are back in the spotlight, but not for more accolades.
Posted inOpinion
Robert Indiana’s LOVE in the Indianapolis Snow
This is Robert Indiana first large-scale “LOVE” sculpture (1970 by Lippincott) ever made and it is in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Posted inArt
Getting to Know the Indianapolis Art Scene
Indianapolis, Indiana, does not often come to mind when thinking about art scenes, especially for those who live in global hubs like New York City, London, Berlin and Los Angeles. People in those cities tend to believe that next to nothing occurs outside of them. Having moved from Indiana to Brooklyn two years ago (I’m from Richmond, where Indianapolis is referred to as “the big city”), I wanted to explore Indianapolis’s art scene with fresh eyes.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week on Required Reading … Thornton Dial is getting ready for a major show in Indianapolis, Spy magazine is posted online by Google, thinking about animated GIFs as art, is the US military creating a fake online “army,” visualizing art thefts, Linda Benglis profiled in the New York Times
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New Orleans Museum Gloats Over Super Bowl Bet with Indianapolis
“This painting is on loan to the New Orleans Museum of Art for three months from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which has the largest collection of Turner’s work outside Great Britain. The loan is a result of a Super Bowl wager between the directors of the two art museums …