A note from the editor:
Laura Holzman is an art history and museum studies professor at Indiana University Indianapolis. This is her take on this week's Culture Journal, a series that shares a week in the cultural lives of Indy residents.
If you are interested in submitting a journal, please send an email to Mirror Indy arts and culture editor Jennifer Delgadillo at jennifer.delgadillo@mirrorindy.org and tell us about yourself.
Day One:
2 a.m. The howl of the tornado siren jolts me awake. Soon the rain pelts the roof, the windows, the house. Eventually it passes. How much rain did we get? What kind of flooding risk will there be?
I’m thinking about the coal ash ponds in the floodplain near the White River and Lick Creek, which I was reading about for Indy Toxic Heritage: Pollution, Place and Power, a project I’m working on about the human side of pollution and environmental justice advocacy.
9 a.m. I’m sitting in on an information design course at Herron School of Art and Design, where I also work. It’s an enormous treat to be a student for a few hours each week.
12:30 p.m. Melissa Mongiat, co-founder of the Montreal-based art and design studio Daily tous les jours, is giving a talk in the auditorium. One of the studio’s projects is in the gallery down the hall. I can’t stop smiling as she talks us through so many delightful interactive public installations. It’s a reminder of the power of public space, the beauty of serendipity and the possibilities that come from strangers learning to work together.
1:15 p.m. In the classroom for exhibit planning and design, which I teach through the museum studies program in the school of liberal arts. Today we’re organizing the concept for an exhibit about archaeology and the history of our campus in the Near Westside. We’re in the messy part of the planning process, which is a lot of fun because it’s filled with so much potential.
4 p.m. Exhausted after class. I catch a wave of energy while meeting with a student who wants to chat about a research project. I didn’t know I’d be thinking about film theory today!
Day Two:
10:30 a.m. Planning meeting for the Indy Toxic Heritage project. We’re finalizing details for some story sharing workshops, where we invite participants to discuss and document their experiences with environmental damage and/or advocacy for environmental justice. We’re developing an exhibit, and we want to center community perspectives.
12:15 p.m. Lunch with a colleague from the music and arts technology department. As we talk, I think about the amazing privilege, opportunity and responsibility we have in training the next generation of multidisciplinary artists. It can be easy to lose sight of this in the day-to-day.
3:30 p.m. Indy Toxic Heritage meeting with partners from Indy Parks and Recreation. We’re figuring out which Indy Parks locations will host the exhibit when it opens later this year.
Day Three:
8:05 a.m. I sit down at my desk with a coffee. My kid is on his way to school with his dad and the house is quiet. With no meetings scheduled, I might actually get one of those long blocks of uninterrupted time that I dream of to do some thinking and writing.
Day Four:
10:15 a.m. Off to the Indy Toxic Heritage story-sharing workshop at Ujamaa Community Bookstore. It’s invigorating to spend the morning in conversation with others while surrounded by books and plants. Everyone here is so generous — they tell stories of difficult experiences and offer inspiring examples of advocacy and resilience. We’ll document these and other stories in a crowd-sourced community archive that anyone can contribute to (and use!).
1:30 p.m. Across town for a yoga practice that my neighbor organized. Megan Zirkelbach and Alexa Halstead lead us through a flow that’s the exact blend of energizing, centering and restorative that I need right now. Spending time on my mat feels like a gift. I’ve been practicing for 25 years, sometimes more consistently, sometimes less consistently, but I rarely get to do this in the middle of a Saturday.
Day Five:
3 p.m. It’s a beautiful day so we spend the afternoon in Holliday Park. My kid finds friends from school on the playground and skips along the trail down to the White River.
Day Six
11:10 a.m. I meet up with a Herron colleague and Judith Glaser, a designer and professor visiting from Germany. We walk over to the Eiteljorg Museum for lunch and have a great conversation about our teaching. On our way into the museum I see a former student who’s now working there.
2 p.m. I’m at “EFAC” (Sidney & Lois Eskenazi Fine Arts Center), Herron’s building on Indiana Avenue, to meet with an MFA student. I set a timer for 30 minutes to keep us on track. We discuss the new work that she’s showing in the gallery. We end up talking for an hour!
5:15 p.m. Off to Pride Park for another story-sharing event.
Day Seven:
9 a.m. Glad to be back at one of my regular yoga classes for the first time in about a month.
3:45 p.m. Time to prep for tomorrow’s exhibit planning and design class. In the rhythm of the semester I’ve come to value the combination of steadiness and variation from one week to the next. It’s grounding and it keeps me on my toes.
Laura M. Holzman is Professor of Art History and Museum Studies and Public Scholar of Curatorial Practices and Visual Art at Indiana University Indianapolis.
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