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• Indianapolis Museum of Art

R. Craig Miller, the new Curator of Design Arts & Director of Design Initiatives at the Indianapolis Museum of Art is shown is shown here in front of what will soon be the Design Center, a hybrid store with 20th, 21st century design that will also be involved with current exhibitions. Miller is shown here with a Little Albert chair by Ron Arad. (Michelle Pemberton for The Star)

Click here to watch an audio slideshow of our interview with R. Craig Miller

When R. Craig Miller joined the IMA on Oct. 1, it was a homecoming of sorts -- even though he's spent his career in New York and Denver.

Three decades ago, IMA director Maxwell Anderson and Miller were graduate students studying together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Miller later founded the Met's modern design collection.

In 1990, he left to become curator of design arts at the Denver Art Museum. There he organized two major exhibitions on design in Italy and the United States, and is finishing up a third on European design that will debut at the IMA in February 2009.

Miller, 61, has traveled the globe finding pieces to add to the Denver collection, and will start that task anew for Indianapolis. He's served as a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Rome, and in 2006, I.D. Magazine, the journal of international design, named Miller to its list of the 40 most influential people in the field.

What's it like to be working for your old friend Max Anderson?

It's very exciting, and a little overwhelming at the same time. ..... Max and I both were trained at the Met. We share the same values about the roles of curator, about the role of an art museum in our society. It makes it much easier because we come from the same background.

Why leave Denver for Indianapolis after doing so much for its program?

It was while I was at the American Academy in Rome ..... when I was working on the European design show. It was one of those moments when you're out of the United States and you're in a different culture. You sort of say, "Is it time I did something new?" I always remember Tom Hoving (the Met's former director) telling me when I first came to the museum that you need to constantly reinvent yourself if you're going to stay fresh.

I've been in Denver for 17 years. I basically did what (DAM director) Lewis Sharp asked me to in terms of building a collection. ..... Then Max called and said they were thinking of starting this new design department. And it became a very intriguing possibility.

I was working on this very big show on European design. Max initially called, saying the museum wanted to reserve the first slot for the show, and they wanted to use it as a way to begin to build a reputation for Indianapolis not only nationally, but internationally, in the design field. So it happened rather quickly as a sort of marriage.

You have two roles here at the IMA. Could you describe them and how they cross-pollinate?

It's going to be very interesting to see how that evolves. I'm the curator of design arts, which means I'm in charge of the decorative art collection, from the historical right up to the present. And I'm also the director of design initiatives, which is a new 8position that Max has created, and is rather unique in our museum because it spans so many things.

It goes back to the history of the museum in the late 19th century, when it was affiliated with the Herron design school. And that was when museums had that sort of dual mission of having a school where you were educating people and raising the level of craftsmanship of your workers and designers. In a curious way, the museum was really a design center.

You're creating a new kind of opportunity in the American museum where we're raising the taste of the museum public and exposing them to what is the best and newest in design worldwide. So again it's an educational mission, but a different kind .....

In this case, we now have a solid museum-going public and they would be coming and seeing what is happening in design, and they would be able to buy the objects and take them home and have them in their everyday lives.

What do people mean by the term modern design?

In the 19th century, they used the term "fine arts," which was painting and sculpture, and "applied arts," which were arts that you used. So that includes everything from glass, ceramics, metalwork. And now with the whole explosion of the industrial revolution, it includes computers, typewriters, lighting, iPods -- anything that is a part of our daily life. So the design arts is an enormous encompassing field.

And that's one of the things we want to do is collect that material and show the public that this is a different kind of art. I often say design is the most democratic of the arts, because it's the most accessible to the public.

So is it true that this distinction between everyday art and art like painting and sculpture is fairly recent?

It started when museums started -- in the late 18th, early 19th century. So this division began to emerge. ..... As museums became more established, you began to codify and develop systems, so collections were divided by medium and also by country or whatever.

One of the interesting things that's happening now is the dissolving of this line between the fine arts and the design arts. You're seeing a lot of designers ..... who approach design objects much more as works of arts than functional everyday objects.

Talk a little bit about the exhibit you're working on that's going to be here in early 2009.

(EuroDesign 1985-2005) is part of an ongoing 8series of shows I did in Denver on contemporary 8design. This show will be the first exhibition by any museum in the world to look at contemporary Western European design.

We're covering the two decades from 1985 to 2005, roughly. So the catalog is now in production. We're beginning to design the show because it will open at the IMA. And we're beginning to gather the objects and bring them into the museum.

Is that going to be the coming-out party for design at the IMA?

It's going to be part of a whole series of design initiatives. This is one of the new things that Max and the trustees have really embraced at the museum, that design is going to play a major role in this institution. So there is the whole project that is happening in the (nature art) park with the two pavilions that are being built there with sculpture. And there are a lot of other things that Max is now looking at -- the design center downstairs, the exhibition, the new department. All this is going to be part of a much bigger program that's driving the museum.

What are your goals for the IMA in five or 10 years?

As the curator of design, I'm going to be looking at the historical concepts and seeing how we might reshape those, how we might use them in a different way. The European design show is going to be a way of launching the department globally. And we're going to begin to build an important 20th- and 21st-century design collection for this museum.

And obtaining all those works is going to be a years-long process?

What I'd like to do is lay the foundation for a very important collection, and then successors in future decades can build on that and expand it. We have very little of a 20th-century design collection right now. So that's the big task. I faced a similar thing when I went to Denver. And in the period I was there, we acquired 11,000 objects for that collection.

Have you heard that Indianapolis has a chip on its shoulder with regard to its arts and culture?

I think that's going to change with Max and the new energy that's here. And it will spread to other cultural institutions in the city. But the museum is going to be out front pushing, and creating a national and international reputation for Indianapolis.