VENUE INFO

Click below for address and more

• Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art

Mark Palmenter, one of two partners in a contemporary consulting and design studio, and a board member of iMOCA. (Frank Espich / Indy Star)

He looks impeccable, what with the smart gray slacks and the fitted zip-up sweater, the thin black frames and pointed black shoes, his spiked hair and a mauve dress shirt the final flourishes of taste.

He's diminutive, too, but is also clearly a man who rises to meet occasions.

Sitting on a stool inside the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, where he is a board member, 30-year-old Mark Palmenter begins the freewheeling history of his life and times, talking about design, entrepreneurship, Harvard, and coming back to Indianapolis from New York to start a design studio.

"New York is such an animal, like a totally different city in terms of how it operates," said Palmenter, an Evansville native. "It was just fun to be able to come back to Indianapolis and have a chance to start up an entirely new company. It's just all of my interests wrapped into one, because it's a start-up, it's contemporary and design-oriented, and it's fun."

Hotbed Creative, where Palmenter is a partner in business development, is a contemporary design studio that provides strategic consulting, market research, niche and guerrilla marketing and branding. The company is in part what drove him back to Indiana almost a year ago, after six years of undergrad and business school at Harvard, then three years working for American Express in Manhattan.

Put simply: "You can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond in a city like Indianapolis," he said.

But he's also a young professional looking to make a difference in a nontraditional way, which is where iMOCA comes in. The gallery's block-form installation, "Muse and Drudge," by Adam Pendleton, seems a suitable backdrop for his explanation, exhibiting the same graphic artistic cool that Palmenter sells for a living.

"IMOCA was founded by my business partner (Stephen Schaf). So we work very closely with iMOCA to create a lot of the marketing that they do, and we're working on a research project now to understand what drives people's perceptions of a contemporary art museum in Indianapolis. It is so rare to have a museum like iMOCA in a city this size. It really has become a launching pad for major arts."

Palmenter's interest in iMOCA, in other words, goes hand-in-hand with what he does for Hotbed Creative. Contemporary art is, after all, contemporary thinking, which is how he came up with a novel idea for helping promote the space.

He knew he wanted to give back to an organization he had ties with, so he held his birthday party at the museum, invited 50 or so friends, movers and shakers, and asked for donations to the museum in lieu of gifts. The party raised about $1,000.

"Which is not huge, but $1,000 matters," he said. "The competition for iMOCA is the IMA, is movie theaters, is sporting events. A contemporary art museum in Indianapolis is ... unexpected."

Exploring humanity

A new exhibition opens from 5 to 8.p.m. today at iMOCA. Curator Christopher West said, "Is You Is or Is You Ain't," which features video installations from a number of artists, explores what it means to be human. Located at 340 N. Senate Ave., iMOCA is free and open 11.a.m. to 6.p.m. Thursday through Saturday. For more information, visit www.indymoca.org.