The Indianapolis Museum of Art transforms itself in a $74 million expansion with new facilities, new exhibits and a new approach to serving patrons.
Sutphin Fountain hasn't moved. It really hasn't. Yet somehow it doesn't look the same -- and not just because it's been cleaned and renovated.
It's because everything around it has changed.
A fixture at the Indianapolis Museum of Art since 1972, Sutphin Fountain is the centerpiece of the newly expanded Indianapolis Museum of Art, the axis around which $74 million worth of new facilities and landscaping were designed.
You can see the results for yourself when the new IMA, which is 170,000 square feet larger than in the past, makes its public debut with an open house May 6-8.
It's an opportunity to take a peek before the museum's new admission fee goes into effect May 12 -- $7 for adults, $5 for seniors and students. (Museum members and children 12 and younger will be admitted free. The museum also will offer free admission to everyone on Thursdays.)
What you'll find is a museum that looks substantially different than it once did. Gone is the temple on the hill -- the building perched atop a long flight of concrete steps and across a wide stone plaza. Originally designed in the late 1960s to evoke a sense of grandeur, over the years it had come to evoke a sense of distance from the community at large.
Gone also is the attitude that seemed to radiate from the place: that the IMA was exclusively for those with money, academic credentials or artistic accomplishments. Along with substantial physical changes, the museum is in the process of remaking its image, with everything from new visitor services and education programs to a marketing campaign.
Staff members call it "the new IMA."
The transformation process began in 1997, when the IMA's board of governors hired architect Jonathan Hess to solve the temple-on-the-hill problem. He has brought the museum down to earth, with three new ground-level facilities designed to invite people in rather than put them off.
"When the museum was originally conceived," said Hess, a partner in local architectural firm Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf and the leader of the IMA project's design team, "the models were pretty well established -- Lincoln Center, for example. But that concept is dated at this point, and it isn't necessarily seen as being very visitor-friendly, especially for a museum that's looking to be inviting to a broad community."
That's precisely the kind of museum that the IMA's board of governors set out to create when the expansion project was first discussed in the mid-1990s, said Bret Waller. As director of the museum from 1990 until his retirement in 2001, he worked with Hess and the board on the project's design and development.
"We felt that once people made it to the galleries where the art was exhibited, we did a pretty good job," Waller said. "But getting there wasn't so nice."
A more welcoming place
The board identified several ways to make the museum more visitor-friendly, said former chairman Richard Wood. Among them were increased gallery, conservation and storage space to allow for larger exhibitions and more displays of items from the permanent collection, as well as a restaurant, a special-events facility and improved parking.
Similar needs have been driving expansion projects at other museums throughout the country. Earlier this month, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis opened a 130,000-square-foot expansion, which includes new galleries, a theater and a restaurant and cafe. Last November, the new 630,000-square-foot Museum of Modern Art opened in New York, complete with new exhibition spaces and a restaurant. And in 2001, the Milwaukee Art Museum opened a new 142,000-square-foot pavilion, with galleries, a lecture hall and a cafe.
But more than space needs drove the project here, Wood said. The goal, radical as it seemed to those who preferred the status quo, was to create a new IMA.
The first step was to create a place that would make visitors feel welcome, said Hess. The Efroymson Entrance Pavilion, a 56-foot-tall, glass-enclosed cylinder, is the museum's new gateway.
It contains a ticket counter (though you won't need it for the reopening weekend, since admission is free), a coat check, an information desk and restrooms. Through its windows, you can gaze out at the newly landscaped grounds -- and Sutphin Fountain.
An escalator leads to the first of three gallery levels in the adjacent Wood Gallery Pavilion. Connected to the museum's existing gallery building, it adds 44,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 50 percent increase in gallery capacity.
The museum will now be able to host large-scale shows such as the International Arts and Crafts Exhibition, which will make the first of its two U.S. stops at the IMA, starting in September. It also means that the museum will be able to show more things from its permanent collection of 50,000 works -- and acquire new pieces while knowing there will be ample space to display them.
The first stop in the Gallery Pavilion is the Pulliam Great Hall, home to "Wall Drawing No. 652," the Sol LeWitt abstract painting that used to adorn the stairwell leading to the main lobby from the old garage. The new location showcases the work's drama and vibrancy.
An X-periment
The Davis X Room, just off the Great Hall, is intended to introduce visitors to the artworks in unexpected ways. Developed in partnership with Indiana University's Visualization Interactive Spaces Lab and its Advanced Visualization Lab, the room features "etx," a table that uses wireless technology to help people make connections among artworks, and "Cabinet of Dreams," a virtual-reality display that allows users to remove objects from a simulated "cabinet" and examine them in a 3-D computer-generated setting.
The X Room encourages visitors to learn about artworks through technology, says Linda Duke, the IMA's director of education. She expects it to have special appeal for the younger visitors museum officials hope to attract.
The X Room is an experiment, she says. "If people don't like or use the things in it, we won't develop them any further."
Meet the robots
At the opposite end of the Great Hall is the Star Studio, another educational space that features both a small gallery and an adjacent studio where artists and visitors can interact through hands-on art activities. Opening in the gallery space on May 6 is "Amorphic Robot Works: The Feisty Children," which features child-sized robots that interact with visitors.
But the majority of space on the first level of the pavilion is made up of the newly configured American Galleries, devoted to American Indian art, Western art, Indiana artists' works and various schools of American painting from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
Other sections on the first level feature the museum's European collections, including its Old Masters, as well as its renowned Neo-Impressionist and School of Pont-Aven collections.
The second and third levels of the Gallery Pavilion contain galleries that will reopen gradually over the next 18 months.
Amid all of the gallery space, there's also room for visitors to take a breather. "I've been in too many museums where there's no place to take a break when you get tired," Hess said, "so we included plenty of space between galleries for benches and chairs where people can sit down for a few minutes."
To give visitors a break from artificial lighting, Hess also included a skylight and windows along the front of the pavilion, which spill natural light into the wide passageways that connect galleries. The windows also look out over the grounds -- and Sutphin Fountain.
In fact, the best view of the fountain is from the Gallery Pavilion -- inside Puck's, the IMA's new fine-dining restaurant on the first level. It's run by Wolfgang Puck's catering operations, as are the adjacent IMA Café, which offers casual dining, and a coffee cart outside the restaurant entrance.
"Every major museum in the country has facilities where people can take a rest and get something to eat," Wood said.
All of the Puck facilities are accessible from the Entry Pavilion. So is the new museum store, which is twice as large as the old Alliance Gift Shop.
From the Gallery Pavilion visitors can enter the new Deer-Zink Events Pavilion, a single-story, wood-and-glass facility that will allow the museum to host dinners and receptions for up to 500 people. The pavilion also will allow the IMA to hold after-hours events that include controlled access to specific exhibitions.
One of the most surprising aspects of the Events Pavilion is its acoustics. At the insistence of donor and immediate past board chairman Randolph Deer, who is extremely sensitive to crowd noise, the spacious pavilion was designed to be reverberation-free. Behind a ceiling that's made up of more than 4,000 hand-cut white oak slats, acoustic insulation and a large empty space absorb sound, leading to a room that's remarkably quiet, even when crowded. What's more, its banks of windows showcase the grounds, including yet again a view of Sutphin Fountain.
Easy access
Both the Efroymson Entrance Pavilion and the Deer-Zink Events Pavilion are accessible from the new parking garage. Rather than clutter up the landscape with an above-ground structure, said former board president Lori Efroymson Aguilera, the board asked Hess to tuck it out of sight. The 250-space garage is under the front lawn.
"We had the beauty of nature all around the museum," said Efroymson Aguilera. "We wanted everything to fit into the surroundings."
As a result, the grounds on top of the garage and surrounding the new facilities have been completely re-landscaped. Gone are the chain-link fence and high bushes that used to make the place look more like a military institution than an art museum. In their place are low stone walls, wrought-iron fencing and low-growing bushes designed to make the museum visible from both 38th Street and Michigan Road.
The heart of the new landscaping is an allée of trees that visually connects the gallery pavilion with Michigan Road, using Sutphin Fountain as its reference point.
Of the combination of new facilities and new landscaping, IMA's interim director Larry O'Connor said, "This is a pivotal event in the museum's history. It solidifies our plan to play off the convergence of art and nature on its site."
O'Connor, an IMA board member who took on the interim position last December after director Anthony Hirschel resigned, said the reopening festivities will provide "a wonderful opportunity to make over the perception of the museum."
Transformation in progress
That makeover began in 2002 when the IMA unveiled the renovated Lilly House and surrounding Oldfields estate gardens, which share the museum's 52-acre site. And it will continue with the development of the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, which the museum board and administration are planning for a 100-acre property just west of the IMA campus.
Along with these physical facilities, the museum is making philosophical and operational changes that are intended to transform the museum's image from a place for the elite to a place for everyone. The need to do that became apparent in the wake of a recent survey that verified what museum officials suspected -- that Indianapolis residents felt the museum was disconnected from the larger community.
To help reshape that perception, the IMA has hired the New York-based firm LaPlaca Cohen, specialists in museum marketing.The result is a multimedia campaign that uses the IMA's initials to re-brand it. For example, for a recent issue of The New York Times, LaPlaca Cohen created an ad with the headline I AM A NEW WORLD OF ART. Other ads that will run regionally are based on the theme "It's My Art."
"This is an opportunity to tear down the wall that has separated the museum from the community," said Arthur Cohen, a founding partner of LaPlaca Cohen. "The message we're trying to communicate is that not only are people welcome at the museum, but the expansion project is all about them."
Welcome mat is out
That's key to the institution's future, said John Thompson, the IMA's current board chairman. A board member since 1996, Thompson is determined to get the word out that the new IMA welcomes everyone.
"The expanded galleries provide an opportunity to have a broader, more inclusive collection of art that a broader, more inclusive audience can enjoy," said Thompson. "Whether it's African-Americans or Asian-Americans or younger people, the museum needs to find ways to reach out to a broader public."
Achieving inclusiveness will rely on making people feel welcome, he acknowledged. One thing the museum has done to meet that goal is retrain the omnipresent security guards. They've been taught how to talk about the artwork on display in the galleries, as well as protect it.
If people have good experiences at the IMA, Thompson said, they'll return -- and bring other people with them:
"Feet on the grounds, feet in the galleries, people pulling up and going to Puck's -- that will be a mark of success to me. I'd like to see all of those feet representing a broad spectrum of the community."
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050424/ENTERTAINMENT01/504240351
Sutphin Fountain hasn't moved. It really hasn't. Yet somehow it doesn't look the same -- and not just because it's been cleaned and renovated.
It's because everything around it has changed.
A fixture at the Indianapolis Museum of Art since 1972, Sutphin Fountain is the centerpiece of the newly expanded Indianapolis Museum of Art, the axis around which $74 million worth of new facilities and landscaping were designed.
You can see the results for yourself when the new IMA, which is 170,000 square feet larger than in the past, makes its public debut with an open house May 6-8.
It's an opportunity to take a peek before the museum's new admission fee goes into effect May 12 -- $7 for adults, $5 for seniors and students. (Museum members and children 12 and younger will be admitted free. The museum also will offer free admission to everyone on Thursdays.)
What you'll find is a museum that looks substantially different than it once did. Gone is the temple on the hill -- the building perched atop a long flight of concrete steps and across a wide stone plaza. Originally designed in the late 1960s to evoke a sense of grandeur, over the years it had come to evoke a sense of distance from the community at large.
Gone also is the attitude that seemed to radiate from the place: that the IMA was exclusively for those with money, academic credentials or artistic accomplishments. Along with substantial physical changes, the museum is in the process of remaking its image, with everything from new visitor services and education programs to a marketing campaign.
Staff members call it "the new IMA."
The transformation process began in 1997, when the IMA's board of governors hired architect Jonathan Hess to solve the temple-on-the-hill problem. He has brought the museum down to earth, with three new ground-level facilities designed to invite people in rather than put them off.
"When the museum was originally conceived," said Hess, a partner in local architectural firm Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf and the leader of the IMA project's design team, "the models were pretty well established -- Lincoln Center, for example. But that concept is dated at this point, and it isn't necessarily seen as being very visitor-friendly, especially for a museum that's looking to be inviting to a broad community."
That's precisely the kind of museum that the IMA's board of governors set out to create when the expansion project was first discussed in the mid-1990s, said Bret Waller. As director of the museum from 1990 until his retirement in 2001, he worked with Hess and the board on the project's design and development.
"We felt that once people made it to the galleries where the art was exhibited, we did a pretty good job," Waller said. "But getting there wasn't so nice."
A more welcoming place
The board identified several ways to make the museum more visitor-friendly, said former chairman Richard Wood. Among them were increased gallery, conservation and storage space to allow for larger exhibitions and more displays of items from the permanent collection, as well as a restaurant, a special-events facility and improved parking.
Similar needs have been driving expansion projects at other museums throughout the country. Earlier this month, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis opened a 130,000-square-foot expansion, which includes new galleries, a theater and a restaurant and cafe. Last November, the new 630,000-square-foot Museum of Modern Art opened in New York, complete with new exhibition spaces and a restaurant. And in 2001, the Milwaukee Art Museum opened a new 142,000-square-foot pavilion, with galleries, a lecture hall and a cafe.
But more than space needs drove the project here, Wood said. The goal, radical as it seemed to those who preferred the status quo, was to create a new IMA.
The first step was to create a place that would make visitors feel welcome, said Hess. The Efroymson Entrance Pavilion, a 56-foot-tall, glass-enclosed cylinder, is the museum's new gateway.
It contains a ticket counter (though you won't need it for the reopening weekend, since admission is free), a coat check, an information desk and restrooms. Through its windows, you can gaze out at the newly landscaped grounds -- and Sutphin Fountain.
An escalator leads to the first of three gallery levels in the adjacent Wood Gallery Pavilion. Connected to the museum's existing gallery building, it adds 44,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 50 percent increase in gallery capacity.
The museum will now be able to host large-scale shows such as the International Arts and Crafts Exhibition, which will make the first of its two U.S. stops at the IMA, starting in September. It also means that the museum will be able to show more things from its permanent collection of 50,000 works -- and acquire new pieces while knowing there will be ample space to display them.
The first stop in the Gallery Pavilion is the Pulliam Great Hall, home to "Wall Drawing No. 652," the Sol LeWitt abstract painting that used to adorn the stairwell leading to the main lobby from the old garage. The new location showcases the work's drama and vibrancy.
An X-periment
The Davis X Room, just off the Great Hall, is intended to introduce visitors to the artworks in unexpected ways. Developed in partnership with Indiana University's Visualization Interactive Spaces Lab and its Advanced Visualization Lab, the room features "etx," a table that uses wireless technology to help people make connections among artworks, and "Cabinet of Dreams," a virtual-reality display that allows users to remove objects from a simulated "cabinet" and examine them in a 3-D computer-generated setting.
The X Room encourages visitors to learn about artworks through technology, says Linda Duke, the IMA's director of education. She expects it to have special appeal for the younger visitors museum officials hope to attract.
The X Room is an experiment, she says. "If people don't like or use the things in it, we won't develop them any further."
Meet the robots
At the opposite end of the Great Hall is the Star Studio, another educational space that features both a small gallery and an adjacent studio where artists and visitors can interact through hands-on art activities. Opening in the gallery space on May 6 is "Amorphic Robot Works: The Feisty Children," which features child-sized robots that interact with visitors.
But the majority of space on the first level of the pavilion is made up of the newly configured American Galleries, devoted to American Indian art, Western art, Indiana artists' works and various schools of American painting from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
Other sections on the first level feature the museum's European collections, including its Old Masters, as well as its renowned Neo-Impressionist and School of Pont-Aven collections.
The second and third levels of the Gallery Pavilion contain galleries that will reopen gradually over the next 18 months.
Amid all of the gallery space, there's also room for visitors to take a breather. "I've been in too many museums where there's no place to take a break when you get tired," Hess said, "so we included plenty of space between galleries for benches and chairs where people can sit down for a few minutes."
To give visitors a break from artificial lighting, Hess also included a skylight and windows along the front of the pavilion, which spill natural light into the wide passageways that connect galleries. The windows also look out over the grounds -- and Sutphin Fountain.
In fact, the best view of the fountain is from the Gallery Pavilion -- inside Puck's, the IMA's new fine-dining restaurant on the first level. It's run by Wolfgang Puck's catering operations, as are the adjacent IMA Café, which offers casual dining, and a coffee cart outside the restaurant entrance.
"Every major museum in the country has facilities where people can take a rest and get something to eat," Wood said.
All of the Puck facilities are accessible from the Entry Pavilion. So is the new museum store, which is twice as large as the old Alliance Gift Shop.
From the Gallery Pavilion visitors can enter the new Deer-Zink Events Pavilion, a single-story, wood-and-glass facility that will allow the museum to host dinners and receptions for up to 500 people. The pavilion also will allow the IMA to hold after-hours events that include controlled access to specific exhibitions.
One of the most surprising aspects of the Events Pavilion is its acoustics. At the insistence of donor and immediate past board chairman Randolph Deer, who is extremely sensitive to crowd noise, the spacious pavilion was designed to be reverberation-free. Behind a ceiling that's made up of more than 4,000 hand-cut white oak slats, acoustic insulation and a large empty space absorb sound, leading to a room that's remarkably quiet, even when crowded. What's more, its banks of windows showcase the grounds, including yet again a view of Sutphin Fountain.
Easy access
Both the Efroymson Entrance Pavilion and the Deer-Zink Events Pavilion are accessible from the new parking garage. Rather than clutter up the landscape with an above-ground structure, said former board president Lori Efroymson Aguilera, the board asked Hess to tuck it out of sight. The 250-space garage is under the front lawn.
"We had the beauty of nature all around the museum," said Efroymson Aguilera. "We wanted everything to fit into the surroundings."
As a result, the grounds on top of the garage and surrounding the new facilities have been completely re-landscaped. Gone are the chain-link fence and high bushes that used to make the place look more like a military institution than an art museum. In their place are low stone walls, wrought-iron fencing and low-growing bushes designed to make the museum visible from both 38th Street and Michigan Road.
The heart of the new landscaping is an allée of trees that visually connects the gallery pavilion with Michigan Road, using Sutphin Fountain as its reference point.
Of the combination of new facilities and new landscaping, IMA's interim director Larry O'Connor said, "This is a pivotal event in the museum's history. It solidifies our plan to play off the convergence of art and nature on its site."
O'Connor, an IMA board member who took on the interim position last December after director Anthony Hirschel resigned, said the reopening festivities will provide "a wonderful opportunity to make over the perception of the museum."
Transformation in progress
That makeover began in 2002 when the IMA unveiled the renovated Lilly House and surrounding Oldfields estate gardens, which share the museum's 52-acre site. And it will continue with the development of the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, which the museum board and administration are planning for a 100-acre property just west of the IMA campus.
Along with these physical facilities, the museum is making philosophical and operational changes that are intended to transform the museum's image from a place for the elite to a place for everyone. The need to do that became apparent in the wake of a recent survey that verified what museum officials suspected -- that Indianapolis residents felt the museum was disconnected from the larger community.
To help reshape that perception, the IMA has hired the New York-based firm LaPlaca Cohen, specialists in museum marketing.The result is a multimedia campaign that uses the IMA's initials to re-brand it. For example, for a recent issue of The New York Times, LaPlaca Cohen created an ad with the headline I AM A NEW WORLD OF ART. Other ads that will run regionally are based on the theme "It's My Art."
"This is an opportunity to tear down the wall that has separated the museum from the community," said Arthur Cohen, a founding partner of LaPlaca Cohen. "The message we're trying to communicate is that not only are people welcome at the museum, but the expansion project is all about them."
Welcome mat is out
That's key to the institution's future, said John Thompson, the IMA's current board chairman. A board member since 1996, Thompson is determined to get the word out that the new IMA welcomes everyone.
"The expanded galleries provide an opportunity to have a broader, more inclusive collection of art that a broader, more inclusive audience can enjoy," said Thompson. "Whether it's African-Americans or Asian-Americans or younger people, the museum needs to find ways to reach out to a broader public."
Achieving inclusiveness will rely on making people feel welcome, he acknowledged. One thing the museum has done to meet that goal is retrain the omnipresent security guards. They've been taught how to talk about the artwork on display in the galleries, as well as protect it.
If people have good experiences at the IMA, Thompson said, they'll return -- and bring other people with them:
"Feet on the grounds, feet in the galleries, people pulling up and going to Puck's -- that will be a mark of success to me. I'd like to see all of those feet representing a broad spectrum of the community."
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050424/ENTERTAINMENT01/504240351
