December 2, 2011-January 14, 2012

Click here to see images from the opening reception

iMOCA will host the exhibition, Fast Forward featuring the current work of past Efroymson Contemporary Arts fellows: Linda Adele Goodine, Emily Kennerk, Arthur Liou, Anthony Luensman, Brose Partington, Jamie Pawlus, Melissa Pokorny, Jennifer Reeder, Tyson Skross, and Tom Torluemke.

It was a difficult but exciting task for curator Paula Katz. “Ultimately, it was a balance of selecting at least one recipient from each cohort of awardees and artists we may not have seen on display recently in Indianapolis or in gallery settings,” said Katz.

Now in its 7th year, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowships were established to increase public awareness of contemporary art.  The intent of the fellowship is to reward creativity and encourage emerging and established individual artists by supporting their artistic development.  Since 2004, $700,000 has been awarded to 35 individual contemporary artists in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio.  The Efroymson Fellowships are made possible with support from the Efroymson Family Fund, a fund of Central Indiana Community Foundation.

The 2011 fellowship recipients will be listed at the opening reception after being announced on December 1.

Click here to see images from John Waters appearance and exhibit.

Part of the Spirit & Place Festival
Made possible through a partnership of Big Car and iMOCA.

Shauta Marsh, curator of “Bodies of Waters” asked 17 artists to create original works inspired by the films of John Waters. She selected a mixture of local artists and internationally known pop surrealists for the exhibit.

It wasn’t difficult to garner interest in this project. Most people can connect to a John Waters character. He’s always had his finger on the pulse of humanity, shone a spotlight on its darkness and laced it all with comedy. This is how he became an icon and one of the best-loved filmmakers of our time. Waters truly understands the underdog and the seemingly unloveable.

What makes his messages stick, however, are the fims’ actors and the bodies they inhabit. Waters made drag culture mainstream by giving us Divine. He cast former adult star Traci Lords as well as women like Ricki Lake who battled weight problems. Their personal stories melded perfectly into the roles Waters selected for them. Just as he challenged his actors, he challenges us to consider what a body means and how important it is.

The  artists featured are Elizabeth McGrath, Glenn Barr, Amy Casey, Paul Chatem, Ken Garduno, Lisa Petrucci, Aunia Kahn, Yumiko Kayukwaw, Floyd Jaquay, Shaunna Peterson, Casey Roberts, Mab Graves, Philip Campbell, Kristen Ferrell, Jacqueline Pichardo, Angie Mason, and Danielle de Picciotto .

Films referenced in this exhibit: Cry-Baby, Pink Flamingos, Cecil B. Demented, Polyester, A Dirty Shame and Desperate Living.

Admission is free.

Click here to see pictures from the opening night of My Son The Future Time Traveler.

Cincinnati based artist Ryan Mulligan’s work has always revolved around magical thinking. His show My Son The Future Time Traveler opening at iMOCA June 3^rd is no exception. A 30 foot wall mural and “TV drawings” will take over the front gallery. In the back gallery of iMOCA, a time machine built for Mulligan’s 5 month old son, Hobbs.

The time machine deals with his new role of being a father and will feature collections related to the idea that one day his son will be a time traveler.

“These shelves of objects and clusters of paintings are my way of dealing with the fear that I can’t protect this little guy,” said Mulligan.  “That I can’t accurately communicate with him.  And that I’m not supposed to be his best friend; I’m supposed to take care of him.”

Most of Mulligan’s work is autobiographical. He’s kept the themes and obsessions that previously drove his work; becoming a parent has added weight to those obsessions. It gives Mulligan’s new body of work both intensity and lightheartedness.

Before his own fatherhood, his work revolved around his father. In 1985 when Mulligan was four years old his father was hit by a drunk driver.

“It scrambled his brains, says Mulligan. “Of course I didn’t really know him before that but everyone said he was different.”

His dad deteriorated as the years went by. In 1990 when Mulligan was in high school, his father beat up his mother. Mulligan’s anger at his father led to him create artwork.

“I spent the night writing on this display board then realized people shouldn’t read it so I tried to cover it up with house paint and then by beating it to a pulp. I realized it was art and I wanted to do it forever.”

By 2006 his father was in assisted living.

“All my work was all about figuring out how to deal with this. In college the anger stopped and turned into nuanced conversation about what it means to be a man. I figured out, the less story I told directly, the more universal it became.”

In 2008 his father died. Mulligan continued to use his art to cope with the loss. He dabbled in nearly every medium of art, from painting, to video, to performance. But found he was soon was successful in dealing with his father’s death. It had a negative effect on his drive to create work.

“ I had to realize that once the anger was gone, I could still make work.  I don’t think enough people are honest about that in their work.  Something motivates us, and it is almost always an internal motivator.”

Ryan Mulligan’s show, My Son Future Time Traveler ,will be up at iMOCA, 1043 Virginia Avenue, Indianapolis, In 46203, June 3-July 16 Monday-Thursday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. iMOCA will host an opening reception June 3^rd 6-11 p.m.

About Mulligan

Born and raised in rural Virginia, Ryan Mulligan attended Virginia Commonwealth University for his MFA and is now Assistant Professor of Art for the University of Cincinnati. He currently is the coordinator of the Art Foundations Program, and teaches students to continually explore their own lives as source material, and maintain a ceaselessly productive studio practice.

This exhibition is sponsored by:

The Efroymson Family Fund, the Christel DeHaan Family Foundation, Murphy Art Center L.L.C., Penrod Foundation, and HotBed Creative.

Hansel and Gretel: Never Eat a House

In the fairytale, a hungry Hansel and Gretel are lured to the witch’s house in hopes of a meal. By contrast, Hansel and Gretel: Never Eat a House from the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) is a feast of irreverent, thought-provoking contemporary art.

The exhibitions are part of collaboration with the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library and the Indianapolis Opera. iMOCA’s portion consists of modern takes on the dark fairytale from the Brothers Grimm–typical of the only Indianapolis museum dedicated to emerging contemporary art.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.
Above: Christoph Niemann

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September 26 – November 1, 2008

Doppio Songo Dell’ Arte (Art’s Double Dream)

Some of the beautiful artwork in Doppio Sogno Dell’Arte includes delicate engravings by Alberto Burri, explosions of color by Sam Francis and the geometrical dreams of Basaldella. Other artists represented include Enzo Cucchi, Victor Pasmore, Amaldo Pomodoro, Henry Moore, George Segal and Louise Nevelson.

The exhibit’s promotion of an art form without borders, as well as its emphasis on graphic design from the 1970s to the present, dovetails with the mission of iMOCA. It is the only museum in Indianapolis dedicated to showcasing original, groundbreaking contemporary and modern art.

After successful showings in Milan and Chicago, Doppio Sogno Dell’Artearrives in Indianapolis thanks to some Italian help. “I wish to thank Dr. Carlo Romeo, the Italian consul in Detroit, who has been instrumental in generously allowing iMOCA to present Doppio Sogno Dell-Arte,” Nagler said. “My thanks also to Paola Santini for alerting me to this high-quality show and helping us bring it to Indianapolis.”

iMOCA’s goals include stimulating minds and inspiring new discoveries.Doppio Sogno Dell’Arte will inspire viewers to think—perhaps dream—in new ways about graphic art.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.
Above: Alexander Calder: Presenza Grafica, 1972, etching and aquatint on zinc plate.

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July 22 – September 6

Chakaia Booker: The Making of a Public Art Exhibition

How does a tire become a work of art? Chakaia Booker: The Making of a Public Art Exhibition explores through video and finished sculpture how the artist created her works for her citywide installation Mass Transit. Follow the artist as she creates some of the pieces you can find around downtown Indianapolis in our videos featuring interviews with Booker herself. Meanwhile, the maquettes show different stages of a work before it can be considered finished.

The pedestal and hung pieces serve as a window into the creative mind of Chakaia Booker. While rubber tires appear crude and purely utilitarian at first glance, Booker sees greater potential in the material. She manages to transform the rubber tread into flowing forms that explore transformation, beauty, line, and texture. At the same time, the concept of using tires maintains references to Indianapolis racing and the city’s history.

Chakaia Booker was born in 1953 in Newark, New Jersey and now resides in NYC and Allentown, Pennsylvania. She attended Rutgers University and received a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology in 1976 and continued on to The City College of New York for a Masters in Fine Arts in 1993. Booker’s work has been exhibited in the 2001 Whitney Biennial, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. and the Akron Museum of Art in Akron, Ohio among many others. Mass Transit is Booker’s largest outdoor urban exhibition to date.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.
Above: Chakaia Booker: Black Hole, 2001, rubber tire and wood, 46″ x 50″ x 7.” Copyright Chakaia Booker, courtesy of Marlborough Gallery, New York.

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April 17, 2008

Is You Is or Is You Ain’t

Is You Is or Is You Ain’t helps us understand ourselves through what we aren’t when the collection of seven video works, ranging from satirical to heartbreaking, opens at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art on April 17th from 5 until 8 pm. Visuals available upon request.

The new exhibition draws its title from the Louis Jordan song Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby. One of its verses reflects the themes of the videos: “A man is a creature/that has always been strange/Just when you’re sure of one/You find that he’s gone and made a change.”

In this vein, the funny, poignant Mustache2 by the Indianapolis based film collective AnC follows a cabinet salesman who barely maintains a façade of optimism while advising a protégé to find his own way. With Dead White Men, Zoë Charlton assumes the poses of famous nudes in art to question her role in art and society as an African-American woman. Transvestites talk about relationships, sex and art world habits in Kalup Linzy’s KKQueens Survey. In Oh, Juliette, Karen Yasinsky uses line–drawing animation to capture the fraught emotional space between a man and a woman.

Other works explore danger—of the streets as well as the sensual. Winter in America by Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with Kambui Olujimi, reenacts the true story of a sidewalk robbery and murder with toy figures. Simone Montemurno transforms the threatening into the sensuous by gliding through a pool with a homemade shark fin on her head in Fin. Laura Parnes’ untitled work suggests how we’ve lost touch with our primal survival instinct by juxtaposing images of a blissful family overlooking a peaceful landscape with footage of wildlife stampeding from danger.

Curators for Is You Is or Is You Ain’t are Kristen Anchor and Jed Dodds of Creative Alliance at the Patterson in Baltimore and Christopher West of iMOCA. After its Indianapolis run, the exhibition will open in Baltimore in September and in New York at a time and date to be determined. Special thanks to all of the artists for their participation, Mari Spirito, Jack Shainman Gallery and Taxter & Spengemann.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.
Above: Simone Montemurno, Fin, 2006-2007, digital video.

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January 18, 2008

Adam Pendleton’s Rendered in Black and Events Are

The Rendered in Black sculptural installation occupying the main gallery space will consist of approximately 100 ten-inch, black-ceramic cubes in an improvised arrangement. Their presentation will play with the ideas of minimalism and performance art.

The Events Are series is made up of an expanding selection of culturally and historically significant images that are silk-screened and presented as small “paintings” with white backgrounds and black detailing. Works on display will include fragmented text from a Scalapino publication, an abstract painting by a student at Black Mountain College and a small Cy Twombly painting.

Artkrush observes that Pendleton’s work often splices together wildly disparate source materials to offer insights on how language and rhetoric shape human experience.

Pendleton has exhibited extensively throughout the U.S., notably at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2005); the Studio Museum in Harlem (2005-2006); and the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007). Last year he launched Performa 07 in New York with The Revival, which included Pendleton delivering a sermon based on the writings of playwright Larry Kramer and poet Paolo Javier; passionate jazz music; and declarations by poet Jena Osman and artist Liam Gillick.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.
Above: Adam Pendleton: Rendered in Black. Courtesy of the artist and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.

New Work by Jeff Gabel

Gabel specializes in scribbly, small-scale pencil drawings of people or faces, possibly imaginary, with a line of text explaining who they are or what they were thinking at the time they were observed. Gabel’s empathetic exploration of the contemporary American landscape finds moments in the everyday that transcend the banal.

The iMOCA show will include a large graphite and charcoal drawing which Gabel will create directly on the museum’s walls; a number of graphite drawings on gesso board; and a video piece, an illustrated audio-visual adaptation of Thomas Mann’s short story “Gladius Dei,” rendered from the original German into “a grammatically impoverished (yet profanity-rich) contemporary vernacular.”

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.

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July 13 – September 1, 2007

XANADU

Armageddon is set to a disco beat in Robert Boyd’s four-part video installation Xanadu, which kicks off the grand re-opening of iMOCA. Boyd, a New York-based artist, used rapid editing to combine images from vintage documentary films, TV and Internet clips, and cartoons into a history of apocalyptic thought–presented as a series of MTV-style music videos in a disco-like setting.

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, Rowland Design, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes Charitable Foundation, Stellar Gin, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and LevelSix.

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February 3 – March 24, 2007

Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellows

The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) is proud to exhibit artworks by ten talented local contemporary artists, all of whom have been awarded $20,000 grants from the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship program over the past two years. Since 2004, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, which is managed by the Central Indiana Community Foundation (CICF), has recognized some of the city’s most gifted contemporary artists. A reception for the artists will take place Friday, February 2, 2007, from 6:00 – 9:00 pm at iMOCA. The exhibition will continue through March 24, 2007.

In 2004, Fellowships were awarded to Indianapolis artists Gregory Hull, Linda Adele Goodine, Eric Nordgulen, Marc Jacobson, and David Russick. 2005 Fellows include Katrin Asbury, Stuart Hyatt, Emily W. Kennerk, Brian Myers, and Jamie Pawlus.

This award is unique because it is available to almost any central Indiana artist with very few restrictions. While the artists must be 25 or older and work in photography, painting, sculpture, new media or installation art, those applying for the award are not required to have a degree or a minimum amount of experience. Efroymson Fellows can use the money any way they choose — for living expenses, equipments and supplies, studio rental, travel essential to artistic research, or to complete work.

“The Efroymson Fellowships are intended to get funds directly to individual creative people in our city,” said Jeremy Efroymson, vice chair and one of three Efroymson Fund advisors. “By supporting creativity we can make Indianapolis a vibrant cultural center, a place where creative people choose to live.”

Exhibition made possible through the support of Katz & Korin, Efroymson Fund, 92.3 WTTS, IMC, NUVO, The Indianapolis Foundation, Allen Whitehall Clowes, Arts Council of Indianapolis, and Jim and Meg Irsay.
Above: Stuart Hyatt: Shrimp Attack. Courtesy of the artist.