For a city its size Indianapolis has more than its fair share of recommendable tourist attractions. I started out this morning at the National Art Museum of Sport (NAMOS), not to be confused with the NCAA. The museum is 20 years old, and has already moved three or four times. Currently it's located on two floors of a conference center at the Indiana Univesity campus. As I was walking along the first long hallway, I thought I saw a sculpture of doughnuts and coffee until I realized they were real doughnuts and coffee for young people attending a VISTA conference in the building. It's not often that you run into this kind of real life at a museum.
But this is not your normal museum. I've been trying to figure out how to describe it. At first I remembered the old saw, "Martial justice is to justice what martial art is to art." But that's too draconian for this museum. It's more like Johnson's observation of a dog walking on two legs--don't think about the dog doing this badly, just think that the dog is doing it at all.
My favorite piece in the museum is a huge portrait of Larry Bird today, with versions of him in the background as he was in his youth in French Lick. It's a bit hokey, but Larry Bird is so revered in Indiana that I found the portrait very fitting. And there was a beautiful bronze of basketball legend Bob Cousy making a shot soaring above the offense.
And who knew that Muhammad Ali was also an artist?? In 1975 NAMOS hosted a reception at NYC's Roselad where Ali donated three paintings to be auctioned, with the proceeds going to the United Nations. This museum has one of those paintings entitled "Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee." It's "primitive" rather than "fine" art and quite interesting. According to the wall notes, as a child Ali used to travel with his artist father to paint murals in churches near Louisville.
From NAMOS I went to Indiana Museum of Art (IMA), which is large and full of fun things to see. As one enters the first floor galleries, there is very long two-story Sol Lewitt that gets your art appreciation juices flowing. I skipped many of the galleries and concentrated instead on "Paired Photographs," a fascinating juxtaposition of black and white photos from all over. There were perhaps 50 pairs of photographs. My favorite was a Richard Avedon of Pablo Picasso along with a Lucien Clerque one in which Picasso is holding his cigarette as if it were a paintbrush. But I also liked very much photographs taken in the 1930s as part of the Federal Artists Program. Wouldn't it be nice if Obama funded something like that today?
At the center of the museum, there is a three-story pavilion with a Robert Irwin installation of geometrically shaped flourescent bulbs. Three diagonal stripes run from top to bottom of the installation. After watching it for a few minutes I realized that these "stripes" were actually the escalators. Cool.
Above is a Duvor (a Ghanaian communal cloth) created out of aluminum caps and liquor bottles, then tied together with copper wire. It's designed to resemble W. African strip woven textiles, which it does. It isn't until you get right up to it that you realize it's made of bottle caps, not brightly colored cloth.
I have a picture of myself in front of a similar one at the St. Louis Art Museum, taken on my first road trip adventure, two years ago. And I've seen a few others of these at museums on this trip, too. They really hold a wall! 
It was fun to walk into a small gallery and see a large Kara Walker piece. She's the young(ish) African-American artist whose work I keep seeing on this trip. It also was fun to get off the escalator and see an electronic strip of Jenny Holzerisms running atop the elevator. I watched it for a while. My favorite is "Private Property Created Crime." Indeed.
Up in the contemporary gallery, there is a huge wall featuring "Seven Spades," a construction of 100 household objects plus a deck of cards with seven spades. I desperately wanted to take a picture of it, but such is not allowed. You'll just have to trust me.
The picture above is of "Memory Cloud," a group of hundreds of translucent plastic photo viewers suspended on metal chains. Each one has a 35 mm slide transparency of just plain folks out there. They were all taken by Judith Levy, who created this entry-worthy exhibition.
Well, enough high culture. After two art museums, it was time to get real. So I took David Gellman's advice and headed out to the Indianapolis Speedway, where I took the 11-minute drive around the 2 1/2 mile race track. The stadium is HUGE. One of the factoids I learned from the audio tape on the tour is that the speedway was built in 1909 back when automobiles were just beginning to be produced. There weren't real roads back then, and auto manufacturers needed a place to test drive their product. Hence the roadway.
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