THE MUSEUM PARTY!

The Members Council of the University of Iowa Museum of Art (UIMA) will host the fifth annual "Museum Party!" from 8-11 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 11, at hotelVetro, 201 S. Linn St. in Iowa City. The event, co-chaired by Kristin Hardy and Paulina Muzzin, will raise funds to support the museum's flood relief efforts, exhibitions and programming.

The evening will include a strolling feast of hors d'oeuvres, live entertainment by local band the Diplomats of Solid Sound, featuring The Diplomettes, and brief remarks by UI President Sally Mason, honorary chair of the event with her husband, Ken Mason.

Throughout the evening, UIMA staff members will be available to explain available sponsorship opportunities to "Party!" attendees. The UIMA sponsorship program, now in its second year, gives museum contributors the opportunity to direct their support to specific events or exhibits.

Last year's switch to this sponsorship program was a resounding success. According to museum and UI Foundation officials, the Oct. 20, 2007, "Museum Party!" and associated fundraising appeals generated a record $173,000 in gift commitments.

"These sponsorship opportunities give our donors a greater sense of ownership of museum events and activities," Pat Hanick, the UI Foundation's director of development for the UIMA, said. "This approach also allows contributors to direct their support where it's most meaningful to them, as well as to the museum."

More than 600 art patrons contribute to the UIMA throughout the year. The UIMA relies on non-university financial support, including annual gifts and its endowment fund at the UI Foundation, for nearly 40 percent of its annual budget. These gifts provide meaningful cultural programs and stimulating exhibitions, and they secure the museum's vitality for future generations.

Tickets for "The Museum Party!" are $100 (fair market value of the evening is $25). Call 319-335-3676 by Tuesday, Oct. 7, to make reservations.

"The Museum Party!" is made possible with support from generous sponsors and hosts. "Party!" Sponsors for 2008 are: James P. Hayes and Rob and Paulina Muzzin. Hosts are: Gerry Ambrose and Kristin Hardy; Lowell Doud; Gerry and Leesa Elseman, Vision Industrial Sales, Inc.; David and Jayne Hansen, Endodontic Associates of Iowa City, P.C.; McComas-Lacina Construction Company; McDonald's Restaurants; Alex, Lauren, Lily and Kevin O'Brien; Phelan, Tucker, Mullen, Walker, Tucker and Gelman, L.L.P.; Pleasant Valley Flower Shoppe; Rohrback Associates, PC, Architects; Kim Schulz, M.D., Infinity Skin Care and Spa; Shive-Hattery, Architecture-Engineering; Kristin Summerwill; Alan and Liz Swanson; Pamela J. White; and Candace Wong.

The UI Museum of Art was evacuated from its building in June due to the flood. Many exhibitions and events slated to be held at the UIMA have been moved to alternate venues. For more information on the UI Museum of Art and the latest schedule information, visit http://www.uiowa.edu/uima.

The UI acknowledges the UI Foundation as the preferred channel for private contributions that benefit all areas of the university. For more information about the UI Foundation, visit its Web site at http://www.uiowafoundation.org.

For UI arts information and calendar updates, visit http://www.uiowa.edu/artsiowa. To receive UI arts news by e-mail, go to http://list.uiowa.edu/archives/acr-news.html, click the link "Join or leave the list (or change settings)" and follow the instructions.

STORY SOURCE: University of Iowa Arts Center Relations, 300 Plaza Centre One, Suite 351, Iowa City, IA 52242-2500

MEDIA CONTACTS: Maggie Anderson, Museum of Art, 319-335-1731, margaret-anderson@uiowa.edu; Patricia L. Hanick, University of Iowa Foundation, 319-335-3305, pat-hanick@uiowa.edu; Peter Alexander, 319-384-0072; cell: 319-541-2846; peter-alexander@uiowa.edu.

Photo illustration by Drew Schiller: The Plaid Sweater, Grant Wood, 1944. Oil on Masonite.

Looking Ahead

Things are slowly but surely progressing here at the UIMA. As detailed in today's newsletter, the Museum staff will be moving from Macbride Hall (where we've been sharing offices with the Museum of Natural History) to the Studio Arts Building (the old Menards) in the coming weeks. That facility is currently housing the studio arts area of the School of Art and Art History.

This larger space will reunite the staff with the Museum collection files, which contain detailed information about the history of each artwork in the UIMA collection. This information is needed for research and to explore the possibility of traveling exhibitions from the UIMA collection. In addition, the space will have room for storage of materials salvaged from the Museum building, including tools, furniture, and goods from the Museum Store and Coffee Bar.

The move to the Studio Arts Building is very temporary, and does not allow access to any work from the UIMA collection. Plans are currently underway to create two more long-term temporary spaces that would provide student access to key works from the UIMA collection. First, Special Collections at the UI Libraries has provided room for two boxes of prints, a key component of many classes, including a "History of Prints" class being taught this fall. This space could be available as soon as next week. In addition, creating a secure space at the Iowa Memorial Union for parts of the African and Ceramics collections, as well as the UIMA staff, is being explored. It is unknown how long that process will take, as the IMU is itself recovering from flood damage. Until this project is complete, the UIMA staff will remain at the Studio Arts Building temporarily -- possibly a year or more.

The long-term future of the Museum is still to-be-determined, but UI President Sally Mason has expressed a firm commitment to the arts at Iowa and the Museum of Art. She has said that art will not go back into the old UIMA building because it is too risky -- instead, we can expect and look forward a new, state-of-the art Museum facility. This is a very long-term project that will require much planning, so stay tuned, and we'll keep you updated with new information as the things progress!

"Save the Pollock" group on Facebook

Tom Nixon, an Iowan living in Minnesota and attending graduate school, has created a Facebook group "Save the Jackson Pollock." Tom talks about how he feels about selling the Pollock on his blog here. He also gives a link to the Facebook group -- so if you're on facebook, join up!

Also, more coverage of the regents' request for a study on the potential sale of the Jackson Pollock:

KCRG TV9
ArtInfo.com
A Local Row blog
The Art Law blog

Before the Pollock uproar...

Wow, what a week last week was! With all the coverage of the regents requesting a study to assess the worth of the Pollock, the Wednesday media tour of Art Building West and the Museum of Art was a bit overshadowed. But in case you missed it, here are some links to the coverage:

The Des Moines Register
The Press-Citizen and here
The Gazette

To summarize: The past couple weeks, the University of Iowa has been leading the media through some of the flood damaged buildings, giving everyone a chance to see how the cleanup is progressing and ask questions. Last Wednesday, UIMA Interim Director Pamela White joined UI School of Art and Art History Professor Steve McGuire to lead the media through the Museum of Art (UIMA) and Art Building West (ABW), respectively. Jane Meyer, senior associate director of athletics, who has been on loan to UI Facilities Management to oversee the UI's building-by-building post-flood cleanup efforts, and Ann Rosenthal, a senior engineer with UI Facilities Management, joined them.

Ann stressed that the major difference between the arts campus buildings and the other buildings the media has toured, such as Becker Communications Building, the English-Philosophy Building, and Adler Journalism Building, is that the damage to the arts campus was much worse. There was more water inside the buildings -- 4-6 feet in the case of ABW -- and it took longer for the buildings to be accessible. So, the future of the arts campus is still quite unknown. "We don't have all the deadlines. We don't know how this is going to come through with insurance and FEMA," said Jane Meyer (pictured below in ABW).
Steve McGuire talked a bit about how art and art history students will be affected. Most of the studio art classes will be held in the old Menards building out on Highway 1, and art history classes will be in various locations throughout campus (mostly in Seashore Hall). Buses have been arranged to take students out to the old Menards, and class schedules have been altered to make time for transport.
Above: The inside of ABW, completely stripped down. Below: Two pictures of the outside, where you can see just how high the water was. Ann Rosenthal said that there some debate about whether the water marks should be left on the building. Some people think it should be restored to its original state, while others believe that the flood is now a part of the history of the building, and as such its marks should remain. What do you think?
Pam White (pictured below) talked about how the Museum will be striving to have a presence on campus this fall by holding events and exhibitions in alternate locations and potentially touring parts of the collection to other Iowa museums. Plenty going on nowadays!

Pollock Furor

Yesterday at a Board of Regents meeting (this board is appointed by the governor to oversee the state-run universities -- UI, ISU, UNI), Regent Michael Gartner requested a study of the worth of the UIMA's famed Jackson Pollock Mural, below. The Iowa City Press-Citizen broke the story, and Pam White, the UIMA interim director, director of the Pentacrest Museums, a lawyer who teaches the class "Art Law and Ethics," and head of Museum Studies at the UI, spent the better part of her afternoon talking to other members of the local press to explain some of the very complicated issues surrounding such a decision. If you haven't seen the stories from today's paper, you might want to check them out: Des Moines Register, The Gazette, Corridorbuzz.com.

We've also gotten quite a bit of attention nationally. There was an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and two quite prominent arts bloggers are on the case: Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes, and Lee Rosenbaum of the Culture Grrl blog. (You might remember Tyler Green from his interview right after the flood with Pam. Lee Rosenbaum has written extensively about other museum's struggles to hold on to their collections.)

This news comes right on the heels of a great article on the rescuing of the Pollock by Michael Judge in the Wall Street Journal a little over a week ago.

If you are interested, the American Association of Museums has guidelines for museum ethics, standards and best practices, and a list of accredited museums on its website. (The UIMA would lose its accreditation if the Pollock was sold to pay for flood damages.)

We're curious to hear what you think about this issue. Post a comment (instructions here) and let us know, eh?

Michael Judge on the Pollock

Just wanted to make sure you all saw Michael Judge’s great article on the Museum and the saving of the Pollock in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. Here's the first paragraph:

"There's nothing here but a few two-by-fours attached to a massive expanse of drywall. Then I see it, a small white plaque with black lettering that reads 'Jackson Pollock / American, 1912-1956 / Mural 1943 / Oil on Canvas . . .' "

Click here to read the full story.

My Crow's Nest

In our UIMA e-newsletter that went out Tuesday, we put out a call for flood stories. Below is our first response, from Shanti Roundtree, an editor with the local publishing company Buckle Down. When I asked Shanti if I could post her story, which she wrote shortly after the flood in June, she wanted to make sure we knew that her home managed to avoid floodwaters -- though she did have to evacuate for about a week to avoid living on an island cut off from the rest of the city. She considers herself VERY lucky.

The flood was extremely hard for us all. Having such a birds-eye view of the river was, for me, especially troubling. Every otherwise normal thing felt so much more ominous, so foreboding. A lifelong lover of storms and showers, for a long time after the flooding, I was literally mortified at the mere touch of a raindrop. I've never felt more helpless as when I realized that, instead of surf and river rapids, I was beginning to see furniture and debris wend its way downstream with regularity. These effects were once a part of people's homes and intimate lives. The river made me into a voyeur. Transfixed, as much as it bothered me, I could not force myself to turn away. Part of my vigil was to make sure that the flotsam remained, outside of trees and carcasses of fish, ever inanimate...If I can name it as such, perhaps that proximity to the river is where my writing passion derived from...

I live off of Riverside Drive and from my porch I have a clear view of the Dairy Queen, the Jail, and the Iowa River that divides them. In June, the river sought to join them.

I'm still amazed at people's reactions to the crisis. Hundreds of Iowa residents can access their normal routes, limited as they already might have been: to the mall, to their gas station, their jobs. Their homes are 'on a hill', high and far away from the University. They are not intimate with the rivers or creeks, save the occasional treat trip to a downtown festival or an anniversary dinner at Verde's. To these, far east or far west-siders, the flood begins and ends each night with a pop of pixels on a screen.

In my own circle of friends, many sentiments echo the same tone, "We knew You'd be O.K." Initially, the thought was nearly universal that I'd be okay.

As a result, people fell on either side of the spectrum. A precious and appreciated few people lent significant moral support, offered me plane tickets, places to stay, resources, sandbag help, and other tangibles.

Before leaving home, I watched the waters continue to rise and flow, carrying with it chairs, oils, branches, and other flotsam. I witnessed the depth of the falls minimize by the day: once a frothy prolonged drop turned to a distance it takes to pour a cup of coffee. The violence of the river astounds me still. Having spent many Sunday afternoons near the underside of the bridge, reaching in with my lure to pluck wipers and pumpkin seeds from the current, I felt I knew the river. Musky salt-licked air and the 'choffing' sound of surf against mossed rock always soothed me and steeled me against the impending work week.

Now churning, swirling, eddying--the flow turned unreliable. Unpredictable and unfamiliar to me as an inferno would be, oxygen-fed and kindling-lit.

On June 13th, a Friday, The Iowa River first burst forth on the east side of its banks and roved closer to the university community. From my porch vantage, I saw the brackish waters pool, then push toward parked Cambuses, gas pumps, the city jail. Sandbag after sandbag, slumped one on top the other, seemed a feeble border to keep the surge out. Yet, hopeful, stolid, and soon to be sun-reddened, the Iowans persisted. Citizens lopped bags, end over end, through many sizes of waiting hands. Volunteers, quite tenderly cradling each with the prayer that it would do its part and then tossing the bag on, in timed rhythm, toward the growing wythe. Thrown bags, the size of 9 month-olds, huddled in anticipation, with sweat as the mortar.

From my porch I could see this. Then, the waters broke on the west side of the river, onto my side. The creeping current revealed three secrets of the topography of Riverside Drive. The roadway crowns in front of the Kum and Go, Myrtle Street, and the alley driveway that enters South Riverside Court. Save this giant thumbprint of dry space, the whole of Riverside Drive seemed covered in standing water.

For what I needed to see next, the grassy slope abutting Myrtle was an even better crow's nest than my porch. I flip-flopped across the paved alley, down the sloping sidewalk and tar, and upward through the moist grass.

The brow of the hill overlooked the university and its sandbaggers. From a distance, their retaining wall seemed made of rough ashlar instead of webbed bags of silt.

For a while, I sat, watching the arching machinations of the Iowans at the waters' arc. I observed the movements of the river. Iowa had breached across the car-lot, the four lanes of Riverside Drive, and lapped against the grass at the base of my perch. Rippling through the water, were several fish--lunker carp, to be exact. As they looked for worms and beetles in the sediment, they flopped, sucking air very audibly before each eventual submerge.

In time, a family of two came closer. I saw the father first, still dripping from having waded through the waters which flowed from further down Riverside. As he strode over the shrinking area of dry concrete in front of Kum and Go, the Asian man began tucking in his white polo. His daughter, hair in pony-plaits, walked as he walked from one side of the river's embrace to the other. Calf-deep, the father created swirls for his daughter to wade through. She removed, from the crook of her elbow, a parcel which she then gently unfolded into a sheet. This she handed to her father who was already beside the fish, standing poised and very still.

I got up.

Walked back to my house.

Finished packing my cases with summer clothes, wedges, food, and watermelons.

Lunged them all into the car.

Drove down South Riverside Court.

U'eed in front of Kum and Go, and geared it up Myrtle Avenue.

Splashing through the water on the other side of the river, I was one of the last to drive over the Burlington Street bridge.

When news of the flood became national, people across the country were curious about the damage, FEMA, and my safety. Once satiated, folks mostly breezed me another email or two, then almost immediately fell back in line relying again on me to help them out through whatever chronic life-crisis they had been dealing with before.

Meanwhile, I'm living in a good friend's basement, can't return home for several days yet, and when I do--the stench will be deplorable as my neighbor's basement apartment had been flooded with rainwater before the river's breach.

In short, I'm fine.

I'm Okay.

-- Shanti Roundtree

Your Story

We know we're not the only ones who have been effected by the flood. So many have lost homes or places of work, and so many more have participated in the volunteer efforts surrounding the flood, from sandbagging to cleanup. We want to hear your stories -- tell us how you've been effected by the flood, your thoughts for moving forward, or just general ruminations. Send stories to margaret-anderson@uiowa.edu, or respond to this blog post with a comment. (Instructions here.)

If you haven't yet read the story of the UIMA evacuation, you can find it here.

News articles -- What are your thoughts?

The UIMA has been getting a lot of attention for rescuing the collection. We've also been getting attention concerning the future of the Museum -- and people have some very strong opinions! Here are excerpts from some of the local articles written about the Museum. Make sure you check out the comments on the articles to read what other have said.

And while you're at it -- why not let us know what you think? How do you think the University should handle the arts campus? Should we go back to the river? If not, where should the new building be? Downtown? Another location on the arts campus?

From The Gazette, article by Diane Heldt:
"The University of Iowa Museum of Art likely will never return to its flood-damaged home on the Iowa River's west bank, UI President Sally Mason said.

Mason said UI officials must consider whether Lloyd's of London, which insures the collection, would continue to do so if the collection is returned to a building in a floodplain.

'Will that building be used as an art museum? I don't think so at this point,' Mason said. 'I'm trying to prepare people to think in terms of an art museum not in a floodplain.' "

Daily Iowan article by Jennifer Putnam and Lauren Skiba:
"Now that the waters have receded, UI Vice Provost Tom Rocklin said, if the museum has to move, it might come down to money.

'A big concern is where the funding is going to come from,' he said.

At this point, the university has made no plans on funding. Because of that and other concerns, Rocklin said, officials have not made a formal decision yet on whether the museum will be relocated.

'First, we need to get a full understanding of risks at the current location,' he said.

If the move is found to be the best outcome, interim Art Museum Director Pamela White said fundraising will be required. She believes, though, that keeping the art safe trumps cost-effectiveness."

Daily Iowan Editorial
"With the UI Museum of Art having faced so much destruction in the flood, the best move it can make is to move.

Relocating the museum would ensure that it comes back even better than the wonderful place it has been. The new museum would be refined and revamped. It would stand as our triumph in the face of the flood. Hopefully, lengthy discussions and evaluations can be avoided - because the community, the Arts School, and the UI need the museum back. Obviously, until all the risks of the museum's current location are fully evaluated, there can be no official decision. But the only real risk that matters is this: The current location is susceptible to future flooding. Imagine the new UI Art Museum erected in the heart of downtown Iowa City.

This image is no mirage. As reported by the DI, the museum's then director was in communication with a local developer to explore the potential of this move last year. However, nothing came of that discussion. This year, now that the city has withstood the floodwaters, these talks should begin again. The museum's new home ought to be in downtown Iowa City.

Iowa City prides itself as a community that thrives on the arts: the music festivals and street performers downtown; the Literary Walk on Iowa Avenue; the sculptures on the Pedestrian Mall; even the artisans who can make an easy buck selling their handmade bead jewelry. The arts make us, quite literally, who we are. They are our greatest source of culture and identity. The downtown community will flourish with the arrival of the Art Museum.

The museum is all the city is missing. We have the historic Prairie Lights Books to hear renowned authors. We have many concert venues for acclaimed musicians. We have great restaurants, crazy bars, and unique shops. We have bricked sidewalks for banjo players and interpretive dancers. But imagine if we had the resources of a university art museum in that same area, too.

Instead of being tucked away in its quaint location along the Iowa River, the new UI Art Museum would stand tall as a trademark of the downtown vibe. A sort of harmony could be forged between the culture of the city and the art of its inhabitants, between the community and the campus.

The flood has receded, but the museum's relocation would mark a comeback and a final victory over the disaster. It would stand as a monument and commemoration, reminding us that although the flood gave us a multimillion dollar beating, we have risen above it. We could look to the museum as a sign of the community's strength. We will have prevailed using a building made up distinctly of what we are.

We all need "art for art's sake," but we need the museum for the community's sake."

Flood update

Just a brief update to the story of the UIMA evacuation that we posted earlier:

In the weeks following the flood, conservators entered the Museum and removed the remaining objects to the secure art storage facility in Chicago with the rest of the collection. The conservators' early evaluations of these works are overwhelmingly positive: They believe that fewer than 10 objects were actually touched by the flood waters, and that none of the art works sustained lasting damage. We'll keep you posted as we learn more about the next steps for the UIMA collection in the coming weeks.