Guests grabbed free multicolored cupcakes, drinks and Chocolate Moose ice cream at the IU Art Museum’s 75th Anniversary Big Birthday Bash on Tuesday.
Every floor of the museum was used for special programming during the four-hour event.
Guests walked from floor to floor to music from the IU Swing Dance Club, which performed and gave dance lessons in the atrium. In the galleries, the Bloomington Writer’s Guild performed poetry on demand, African storytelling took place, and Jacobs School of Music student Shuang Liu played the harp.
The Hutton Honors College provided craft activities like origami and Chinese calligraphy, and the Art Museum Student Organization set up a photo booth complete with props. Guided tours led by IUAM staff took place every hour.
“We wanted a variety of programming,” said Laura Scheper, IUAM’s manager of special programs and events. “This is an experiment. We thought it would be fun to have live programming in all four galleries. This is the biggest event we’ve done since I started here a year ago.”
Before the doors opened, Scheper printed 600 programs to hand out to guests. They were almost gone 45 minutes into the celebration. She did most of the organizing for the event and spent Tuesday busily ensuring every table, sign and person were in place by 5 p.m.
Though guests may have come for the free cupcakes and ice cream, Scheper said she hopes they took away more than that. The art museum strives to have the best possible collections, and it is always coming up with new ways to connect people with the museum.
Just last year, almost 10,000 IU students and more than 4,500 K-12 students from across central Indiana toured the museum, said Abe Morris, manager of public relations and marketing for the museum, she said.
Few universities can match the museum in quality, Morris said. They hope to continue using the museum to further the educational mission of IU.
“The IU Art Museum’s collection is world-class,” Morris said. “It’s an extremely rare thing to have an art museum of our caliber in a town the size of Bloomington.”
Morris said he credits the excellence of the museum to former president Herman B Wells and Henry R. Hope, the museum’s inaugural director. Later directors up to current director David Brenneman have kept the museum’s spirit alive, Morris said.
The museum’s 75th birthday celebrations didn’t end Tuesday, Morris said.
A new online guide will be launched featuring more than 750 of the museum collections’ greatest hits, many of which have never been available online before. A new printed guide will also be released.
Rainworks, a new project consisting of rain-activated artwork in front of the museum, around campus and around town, will be installed to welcome students back to school in the fall. The museum is also starting First Thursdays, which entails extended hours and special programming the first Thursday of every month.
The event’s goal was to encourage people to look at how far the museum has come since its opening in 1941 and at what is yet to come, Scheper said.
“It’s been very exciting to work here just in the past year with having our new director David Brenneman come on board,” Scheper said. “It’s a massive infusion of energy. It’s a great time for the museum, and I really look forward to the years ahead. There’s so much energy here tonight, you can feel it.”
