AFA Autumn 2018

Autumn 90 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Fig. 4: Miller House and Garden, Columbus, Indiana. Courtesy of Newfields. step away from pigeonholing art into “isms” and instead find new approaches for contextualizing art and artifacts. The gallery’s thematic sections relate largely to the design process—inspiration, production, technique, materials, form, or function. While the themes are shaped by our post-1980 design collection, I felt they would be more vividly illustrated by incorporating older objects as well, so the gallery name has changed from “contemporary design” to simply “design.” One of the themes is materials, and how designers use them in new and innovative ways for their products. One of my favorite works in our collection is Dutch designer Wieki Somers’s High Tea Pot with Cover (2003) (Fig. 3) . While its form may seem grotesque—it was modeled from the skull of a wild boar—the materials used to create it add another layer of intrigue. Somers was commissioned to design the piece for an exhibition about abundance in contemporary dining culture. She chose to make the teapot from bone china—a type of porcelain containing bone ash that was first used in eighteenth-century fine dining—to call out its historic ties to opulence and make a wry reference to the teapot’s skeletal form. The accompanying cozy appears to be made of mink fur, another material associated with luxury and expense, but is actually created from the pelt of a muskrat, an animal considered an invasive pest in Somers’s native Netherlands. Opposite is a touch wall, where guests can touch some of the materials represented in the gallery. Another thematic grouping focuses on color. There are few designers who have harnessed color as ingeniously as Alexander Girard, so in this section it was natural to focus on the Miller House and Garden—the Columbus, Indiana, home he designed with Eero Saarinen and Dan Kiley between 1953 and 1957 (Fig. 4). The Miller family donated the home to the IMA in 2009, and as one of the country’s greatest examples of domestic modern architecture, I wanted its presence felt more in our galleries. To achieve this, the museum has embarked on its first venture into virtual reality (VR), with an immersive, interactive tour inside the Miller House. Donning the VR headset transports visitors into the home, where they can explore Girard’s brilliant use of color in the interior of this midcentury masterpiece.