18 December 2010

occam's razor sketchbook page 35



click on image to enlarge

one hundred years of solitude



“Before reaching the final line…he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men… and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since from time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

12 December 2010

Banksy is the pseudonym



Banksy is the pseudonym[2][3] of a British graffiti artist, political activist and painter, whose identity is unconfirmed.[4] His satiricalstreet art and subversive epigrams combine irreverent dark humour with graffiti done in a distinctive stencilling technique. Such artistic works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world.[5]

Banksy's work was born out of the Bristol underground scene which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. According to author and graphic designer Tristan Manco, Banksy "was born in 1974 and raised in Bristol, England.[6] The son of a photocopier technician, he trained as a butcher but became involved in graffiti during the great Bristol aerosol boom of the late 1980s."[7] Observers have noted that his style is similar to Blek le Rat, who began to work with stencils in 1981 in Paris and members of the anarcho-punk band Crass who maintained a graffiti stencil campaign on the London Tube System in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Known for his contempt for the government in labeling graffiti as vandalism merely because it does not serve a profit to them, Banksy displays his art on public surfaces such as walls and even going as far as to build physical prop pieces. Banksy does not sell photos of street graffiti directly himself;[8][9] however, art auctioneers have been known to attempt to sell his street art on location and leave the problem of its removal in the hands of the winning bidder.[10] Banksy's first film, Exit Through the Gift Shop, billed as "the world's first street art disaster movie", made its debut at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.[11] The film was released in the UK on 5 March.[12]

haiku

doing illustrations for a book that doesn't exist

i see revolution in your eyes

there are no limitations

28 November 2010

'sex kitten' holds her own

HOWL

For Carl Solomon


I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.


II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!


III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel strange

I'm with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humour

I'm with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night


Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

23 November 2010

Your girlfriend is really beautiful...did you know she's a bird?



“Runaway”, the album’s emotional center, debuted at this year’s VMA’s, where it served as a subtle retort to Taylor Swift’s condescending and much hyped “I-Forgive-Kanye” moment. Kanye is one of the great innovators of the sung-rap-song movement that has dominated urban radio the last few years, but here he takes it to new extremes. Built on a heartbreakingly lonely piano loop, the song finds Kanye bemoaning his personality flaws and features a tight verse from Clipse MC Pusha T. But what sets it apart is the false ending. Well past the five minute mark the music gives way, only to return with that same piano loop and Kanye West going bananas with his vocoder for about four minutes.

21 November 2010

Tiffany Bozic Studio Visit



Long time Fecal Pal and fellow Ohioan, Tiffany Bozic opens her first NYC solo show Confiding to Strangers November 11th @Joshua Liner Gallery. We stopped by her studio a couple weeks back to have first look at her paintings before they were crated and shipped off across the country. Enjoy the photos and video.

Tiffany is lucky enough to get to travel to parts of the natural world very few ever have. Her husband, Jack, is a scientist who studies small mammals and birds. Africa, Papa New Guinea, far off uninhabited islands in the South Pacific, Tiffany has experienced what few others have... The last couple years of travel are evident in her new works below.

http://www.fecalface.com/SF/index.php/features-mainmenu-102/studio-visits-mainmenu-121/2369-tiffany-bozic-studio-visit

Beijos.



Letícia on

15 November 2010

New artwork at Cafe Zuppa for November



Artwork by Joshua Witten

November 2010

For the entire month of November we will be showcasing the art of Joshua Witten. This Indianapolis artist produces lithographs, paintings, and pencil drawings with playful imaginative imagery. His artwork is crisp and geometric and often has a graphic design quality. All artwork is for sale.

09 November 2010

Tango



Tango, Oil on Two Canvases, 60 x 96", 2009.

http://www.jamesjean.com/blog/

04 November 2010

a day in the life : Gogol Bordello





If you look closely you can see me...at the very front on the right side ;)

01 November 2010

Wall Street Journal on the LA Art Boom




Besides being rich and famous, Christina Aguilera, Tom Hanks, James Franco, Nicole Richie, Kim Kardashian, Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger, and Hollywood power broker David Geffen have something else in common. They are getting into contemporary art. Big time.

The Wall Street Journal
reported today on a decades long evolution that Los Angeles has become a major Art Capital of the World, looking at the boom in endowments and celebrity presence at galleries and museums around Los Angeles County.

A key example, a major red carpet affair for the new building at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, named after the Fiji Water and POM Wonderful billionaires who donated $45 million to LACMA in 2008.

Tally that up with the introduction of Jeffrey Deitch as the Director of MOCA and Eli Broad building a museum to display pieces from his collection of 2,000 artwork, with the already established names in the Getty Center, HAMMER, Gagosian, and REDCAT, its very difficult to argue the new global importance that Los Angeles now presents in the world of art.



Read the WSJ piece here.

29 October 2010

my art + cafe zuppa!



November 01 - November 30, 2010

at cafe zuppa

"Witten's work takes on a deliberate anachronistic turn, comparing mythological and ancient historical concepts with popular cultural references." -Dan Swartz


19 October 2010

13 October 2010

Andy Warhol Enterprises


Press Release

April 22, 2010

INDIANAPOLIS, IN, April 22, 2010—The Indianapolis Museum of Art today announced that this October it will premiere the first major museum exhibition to comprehensively examine Andy Warhol’s lifelong investigation of the themes of commerce, consumerism, reproducibility and the business of art making.

Andy Warhol Enterprises will demonstrate the enormous diversity of Warhol’s significant body of work, featuring more than 100 works in a wide range of media, including paintings, drawings, sculpture, film and video, as well as an extensive selection of archival materials. The exhibition opens Oct. 10, 2010 and will be on view in the IMA’s Allen Whitehill Clowes special exhibition gallery through Jan. 2, 2011. The exhibition is made possible by support from the PNC Foundation, which receives its principal funding from The PNC Financial Services Group (NYSE: PNC).

To help manage his highly successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol formed Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc. in 1957. The aesthetic approach, techniques and business acumen he developed during that time informed his artistic production from the early 1960s until his death in 1987. Throughout his career as an artist, filmmaker, “Factory” director, band manager, magazine publisher and television entrepreneur, Warhol intentionally blurred the line between art and commerce, slyly calling into question the very values of art itself in such statements as, “Good business is the best art.”

“Though perhaps best known for his veneration of celebrity, Andy Warhol also spent a large part of his career exploring and developing themes related to money and commerce,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, The Melvin & Bren Simon Director and CEO of the IMA. “With our society’s focus on the economy and material excess, this exhibition is timely in its exploration of issues that will resonate with Americans today. We are pleased to be able to present this important exhibition with the support of our cultural partner, PNC.”

The majority of works in the exhibition will be on loan from The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. PNC has a long-standing relationship with the Warhol Museum and, recognizing the value of this cultural asset, has taken leadership in supporting Warhol exhibitions at the Naples Museum of Art and the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C. Andy Warhol Enterprises also will feature a number of loans from other institutions and private collections around the country.

“PNC is partnering with the IMA to present this unique and thought provoking collection showcasing Warhol’s talent as a way to enrich our local art community,” said Stephen Stitle, PNC regional president for Indiana. “The appeal of Warhol’s work spans generations, and this comprehensive exhibition will attract art lovers, families and visitors from across the Midwest.”

The exhibition will examine works from each of the major decades of Warhol’s artistic career, from his commercial illustrations and shop window designs of the 1950s, to his groundbreaking paintings and sculptures of consumer products and celebrities of the 1960s, to his commissioned portraiture and entrepreneurial ventures into various media such as magazines, film and TV in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Over the course of his career, Andy Warhol transformed contemporary art,” said Tom Sokolowski, director of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. “Employing mass-production techniques to create works, Warhol challenged preconceived notions about the nature of art and erased traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture.”

Among the highlights of the exhibition are examples of Warhol’s influential series of Dollar Bill silkscreens from 1962, which represented his fascination with money, while also introducing the method of silkscreen that would become his signature technique. Iconic works that address themes of consumerism, such as his 1962 Campbell’s Soup Box sculpture and examples of his Brillo Box sculptures of 1964 will also be included. A selection of eleven paintings from his Dollar Sign series of 1981 will also be featured, in which Warhol celebrated this emblem of commerce in highly varied styles and palettes.

“According to IMA exhibition curators Sarah Urist Green, associate curator of contemporary art, and Allison Unruh, assistant curator of contemporary art, “Warhol was visionary as an artist, but also as an entrepreneur – his creative ventures fused the worlds of art, fashion, design, music, television and film, and represented a truly innovative approach to the cultural economy. In both his art and his life, Warhol raised thought-provoking questions about the intersection of art and commerce, and his investigation of such issues is still at the heart of much contemporary art practice today.”

Exhibition Catalogue
To accompany the exhibition, the IMA will produce an illustrated catalogue published by Hatje Cantz, offering an in-depth examination of Warhol’s engagement with the themes of commerce and art on iconographic, thematic and conceptual levels. The catalogue will feature a number of original scholarly essays, including contributions by the two organizing IMA curators, Sarah Urist Green, associate curator of contemporary art, and Allison Unruh, assistant curator of contemporary art. An essay by renowned scholar Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, and an interview with Vincent Fremont, one of Warhol’s close associates, will further illuminate aspects of Warhol’s engagement with the commercial market. The catalogue also will include reproductions of archival material from the Warhol Museum.

Contemporary Art at the IMA
The IMA’s robust contemporary art program is evolving as a model for encyclopedic museums as they engage the art of our time. With a renewed focus on its contemporary collection, the IMA has been actively seeking out the works of new and emerging artists through both gift and acquisition, and in addition organizing major traveling exhibitions and commissioning site-specific installations.

About the PNC Foundation
The PNC Foundation, which receives its principal funding from The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. (NYSE: PNC), focuses its philanthropic mission on early childhood education and community and economic development, which includes the arts and culture, in communities in which it has a significant presence.

About the Indianapolis Museum of Art
Encompassing 152 acres of gardens and grounds, the Indianapolis Museum of Art is among the 10 largest encyclopedic art museums in the United States, and features significant collections of African, American, Asian, European and contemporary art, as well as a newly established collection of design arts. The IMA offers visitors an expansive view of arts and culture through its collection of more than 54,000 works of art that span 5,000 years of history from across the world’s continents. The collections include paintings, sculpture, furniture and design objects, prints, drawings and photographs, as well as textiles and costumes.

Recognizing the inherent connections among art, design and nature, the IMA offers visitors experiences at the Museum, in 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, which will be one of the largest contemporary art parks in the United States when it opens in June 2010, and at Oldfields–Lilly House & Gardens, an historic Country Place Era estate on the IMA’s grounds.

The IMA completed a $74 million expansion project in May 2005. The construction added 164,000 square feet to the Museum and includes renovation of 90,000 square feet of existing space. In order to present major exhibitions of its own and to accommodate major traveling exhibitions, the expanded Museum was outfitted with new 10,000-plus-square-foot Clowes Special Exhibition Gallery on the Museum’s first level. In November 2008, the IMA opened the renovated 600-seat Tobias Theater. Nicknamed, “The Toby,” the theater is a venue for talks, performances and films.

Located at 4000 Michigan Road, the IMA and Lilly House are open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday and Friday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. The IMA is closed Mondays and Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s days. For more information, call 317-923-1331 or visit www.imamuseum.org.

Source: Indianapolis Museum of Art