The “Amped at IU” exhibit, which opens Friday at the McCalla School, will display historically significant guitars from the Jim Irsay Collection and celebrate the history of guitars.
Brian Woodman, director of university collections at the McCalla School, said the goal is to highlight guitars that haven’t had much public viewing before.
“The emphasis is on being able to tell a lot of the early history of guitars and allows us to show things that were probably familiar to people,” he said.
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On display is a guitar Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street band signed, models of the Beatles’ guitars and a pickup winder that helped generate voltage for amplifying guitars in the 1950s. There is also a Martin guitar dating back to the 1850’s and a 1910 U-Harp guitar that often accompanied mandolins.
“It has strings that you would almost play more harp-like — they don't have frets — and then a fretted area,” he said. “It kind of looks like a double necked guitar you'd see these days, only one of the sides doesn't have frets.”
Another unusual guitar is the 1969 Ampeg Dan Armstrong Lucite guitar. The guitar is see-through and weighs nearly 10 pounds.
“We've all seen them on television before, but you haven't ever really gotten to see them up close, and you can get really good sort of a feeling of what they really look like, especially in color, because a lot of times the footage is in black and white, and then also, just like the three dimensionality of the object,” Woodman said.
The installation cost $10,000 to $15,000. But Irsay isn’t charging IU to put the guitars on display.
“He (Irsay) is paying the expenses of getting the guitars down just so people can see them,” Woodman said.
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Instruments from Traditional Arts Indiana and the IU Jacobs School of Music will also be available.
“[We] put them in conversation with the guitars next door, with the Irsay guitars so you get sort of a larger history of guitars beyond just what Irsay has collected,” Woodman said.
The exhibit will open Friday, Sept. 27 at the McCalla School. Jacob’s School of Music students will perform, using guitars from the Irsay Collection. Guitars played by artists ranging from Prince to Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney will be on display only for the first day of the exhibit. The other guitars will remain through September 2025. The exhibit is free and people can RSVP online.