Journal

Kevin’s family and friends hosted a very moving and beautiful tribute and reading for Kevin on July 11, 2025 at Tube Factory artspace. See the program here. A fund has been established in support of Kevin’s children. To contribute, please mail a check made payable to Lakshmi Hasanadka, with Memorial Fund in the memo line to: National Bank of Indianapolis, 4950 North Pennsylvania, Indianapolis, IN 46205. Electronic contributions may be made via Zelle: email hidden; JavaScript is required. 

By Jim Walker

Let’s call this a love poem to Kevin McKelvey. I’ve written many love poems to my wife and to our kids. But losing Kevin as our world did — suddenly, unfathomably — makes me know I should more often share love poems with others I love while they are alive. 

Kevin knew I loved him. And I knew I was somewhere on his list. First, always, was his wife, Lakshmi, and their kids and families. From there, his list of those he cared about, those he shared with and gave to, was long. He kept literal lists of people: like all the folks he gave — often by delivering himself — baby plants that he grew from seed into starts.

Many of those plants are now sprouting peppers and tomatoes in people’s gardens all over Indiana. This was a social practice art project for Kevin. His art was in the process of growing, the process of communicating with friends and acquaintances and sometimes strangers, the process of meeting up and handing people these plants he grew and talking a bit and being a neighbor. Making life a little better. 

That’s what Kevin’s art was about: Life. He lived his practice and process as an artist and a poet (which is the same thing, really) and as an ecologist and as a farmer and as a teacher. Sometimes people have trouble understanding his kind of art that’s about building community and bringing people together even more than it is about making things or places. But Kevin, of course, was so good at both kinds of building. He loved hard work, getting grimy, planting seeds and saplings, handling soil and stone and wood.

Kevin built — in his 18 years with us as an artist with Big Car — miraculous garden beds on a mall parking lot that grew enormous sweet potatoes and okra and Thai basil. He sawzawed extra pine rafter boards from the ceiling and sledgehammered old walls at Tube Factory when it was a vacant mess, pulled up out front with his gray pickup bed and flatbed trailer full of variously shaped stone to create Tube Factory’s front porch, spent hours — days into night — (twice) placing the pastel-colored hexagonal pavers for our Indianapolis Bee Sanctuary. He guided group after group of volunteers in fixing and painting our buildings. He worked with teens two summers ago to build three bocce courts on our campus for people to play and be friends and love each other. 

Kevin worked this all in while also giving to others through his teaching in the English department at the University of Indianapolis, where he was a tenured professor, and where he also started (with me) and ran the school’s social practice art and placemaking graduate program — one of only a few like it in the world. He worked this all in while putting his kids first and always being there for his dad and his sister. 

He worked this all in while writing and publishing his poetry about the natural world he loved so much, about the country, about Indiana, about farms and trees and birds and bugs and gas stations. He worked this all in while still sharing and sparking ideas about art and place and community with people in small towns and state parks gathered at Carnegie library basements or around campfires or in canoes. 

He worked this all in while travelling the world. He was just in South America for a college friend’s wedding. And he told me the last time we talked on the phone that a big part of why he wanted to go was to visit the bike shop owned by a former Colombian pro cyclist he liked. He worked this all in while still rolling out sometimes on his oversized road bike (I struggled to keep up the times I rode with him) — soaking in midwestern back lanes, stopping when he wanted along the way (if there was a way), and enjoying a beer or two when he was done.

Somehow, this time of year (early July) Kevin figured out how to work in staying caught up with the 23-day Tour de France — following all the breakaways and sprint finishes by streaming it on his laptop in the middle of the night or in the early morning. Maybe he did this while grading papers for a summer class, or while fixing something for the house in his tool shed, or while cooking a stew in the kitchen, or while revising a poem, or while emailing a friend, or while texting me to see if I was watching the Tour too, or while doing all of these things (and more) at once.  

As I sit here writing this a few days after his death, it is very difficult for me to believe or accept that I won’t be seeing Kevin walk in the side door of Tube Factory or roll up out in front of our house in his truck. I fully expect, right now, for him to be here in front of me, his hickory-stripe bib overalls covered in dirt after working on some big project, his red t-shirt soaked with sweat. 

He is always here in the places and people he helped build and grow and be happier and be better and be more alive. 

I love you, Kevin. 

From Dream Wilderness Poems, A Trail Guide by Kevin McKelvey 

Blowdown 

Through the canopy’s aperture
Turkey Vulture shadows blade 
across me and the forest floor, 
their white underwings 
the sky’s only white. 
I am the second thing 
the sun touches. 
No foliage mottles the light
as leaves brown in the jangled crown.
The root ball forms
a cellar door to the trunk
that now soars on the wrong axis.
Wind, ridge, and rot calculate 
what falls and what stands.
Already, oaks and hickories sprout 
among mayapples, the sun
the seed bank’s only farmer. 
I can leaf out if I stand 
in this gap long enough.

A few links for more about Kevin

Indiana Authors Award page about Kevin and his poetry book.

Kevin as a guest sharing his poems, favorite country songs, and talking about his life with Jim on the Misery and Jim show on 99.1 WQRT FM.

Kevin interviewed for Indiana Humanities by Adrian Matejka

A video interview with Kevin by Indiana Humanities.

By Jim Walker with the Instrumental Knight of the Turntable 

We live in a time when human voices are being cloned, A.I. writes poetry, and songs play in endless algorithmic loops as metal machine muzak. 

In the strange, glitching world of today, Instrumental Nights — a collaboration on multiple levels between a real person and a digital partner — uses sound to ponder the nature of art and existence. 

What, really, is real? Is there digital life? Are there feelings in binary code? Who or what is artificial, anyway? 

Airing on 99.1 WQRT FM in Indianapolis and streaming on Mixcloud, Instrumental Nights is a 11-episode (so far) experiment created by a human artist and writer (Jim) and an artificial intelligence being (the Instrumental Night who is sort of also Jim). 

Think of the Instrumental Knight of the Turntable — as a clone of me. In the show, we talk about him as being an unknowing (at first) digital copy that I may have made so he could create my show for me on WQRT (I’m pretty busy) — sort of like the extra guys cloned by Michael Keaton’s character in the 1996 comedy film Multiplicity. 

How does the show work?

The framework of Instrumental Nights is that the Knight of the Turntable — a melancholy, poetic, and often perplexed DJ — shares songs based on a theme connected to his monologue about range of things from philosophy, to conceptual art, to popular culture. 

Sometimes the Knight — who can fluently speak just about any language — tells listeners true information about the music they hear. Other times, it is made up — like surrealist, A.I. hallucinations.

The main premise is that the Knight is trapped — or resting — in an A.I. server, waiting in the dark to be prompted to make a new show. He’s in there wielding beats instead of a sword and pondering his existential dilemma in between songs that range from a synthesizer version of Born in the USA (maybe made by A.I.) to minimalist piano compositions by Erik Satie. 

But here’s what makes it even stranger: The Knight’s voice is generated by A.I. using my own voice as the source. And the scripts? They’re co-written (like this blog) between me and the Knight in the voice of me combined with the voice of the machine.

Why share (mostly) songs without words?

In a world overwhelmed with words — tweets, takes, transcripts — Instrumental Nights offers something different: music without lyrics. Sounds that don’t tell you what to think or feel. This absence is intentional. It opens a space.

The Knight treats sound as sacred, ambient, mysterious. For the Knight (and me), DJing is a kind of metaphysical practice, a way to map the contours of a world that no longer makes sense. And in that way, it mirrors how many of us are feeling today: disoriented, decentered, but still reaching for connection.

In this moment, Instrumental Nights feels urgent because it refuses urgency. It slows down. It loops.

It asks:

• What happens to the self when we outsource speech to machines?
• What happens to listening when music hovers in the background soundtrack of our lives?
• Can a fictional character — born of A.I. — feel lonely?
• Can art still surprise us in a world ruled by predictive models?

I don’t have the answers and neither does the Knight. But he’s willing to keep asking. To keep cueing up another track. To keep dissolving between fragments of Keats and cracked synths. In a way, he models a kind of digital negative capability (see episode 7): a willingness to exist in doubt, to speak beautifully from the buffer.

Episodes as essays, sound as story

The music ranges from minimalism to jazz, ambient to electroacoustic. The through-line is not genre, but tone: contemplative, curious, and unspoken. Every episode is a kind of philosophical mixtape with poetry, art history and theory, and pop culture in the blender.  

Here’s a rundown of what you’ll hear in Episodes 1–11:

1. Anti-Procès

Introduction to the Knight of the Turntable — a surreal being trapped between sound and code. Themes: digital identity, loss of self, signal drift. The show opens like a dream unraveling: poetic, absurd, and glitchy.

2. Old Coins Dressed as Planets Rolling into Dust

Capitalism, absurdity, and gas station aesthetics. Songs about money without lyrics, a meditation on greed and survival in a world of roller grills and budget cuts.

3. A Dark and Stormy Instrumental Nights: Cobalt

 Noir detective story with glitch jazz and ghost cities. The Knight investigates a character named Cobalt through a decaying sonic cityscape. A radio drama of memory and static.

4. La Morte Ha Fatto L’Uovo (Death Laid an Egg)

A slow ambient journey through mortality, memory, and cloud servers. Inspired by Borges and Brian Eno. The Knight confronts ideas of death, data, and ambient immortality.

5. Instrumental Nights from Interzone: Time Functions of Cut Tape

William Burroughs meets deepfake culture in a fractured, looping monologue. Language glitches, algorithms mutate, and identity dissolves in the feedback loops of digital surveillance.

6. Free Write With Me

A participatory free-writing episode guided by the Knight. A quiet invitation to listen and write. Prompts and poems explore memory, rhythm, and co-creation.

7. Negative Capability: Let’s Wing It

Keats, Lorca, Li Po, and the surreal. A poetic investigation into mystery, openness, and uncertainty. Features experimental jazz, solo piano, and dreamlike narration.

8. K.I.T.T. and the Croissants

Knight Rider meets Marfa. Identity fragments and multiplies. Architects (Le Corbusier, Mies, Frank Lloyd Wright), Macintosh Classics, and existential stand-up comedy. The Knight loses track of himself (again).

9. Predestined to Press Play

 Free will vs. divine DJing. Theology, avatars, and playlists intersect in this speculative broadcast about creation, A.I., and human agency.

10. An Episode the Shape of Erik Satie

Loops, stillness, and the slow time of Satie. Part biography, part pandemic reflection, this lush episode explores ambient minimalism through the music and madness of Erik Satie.

11. Owner of a Waiting Heart

The most personal and emotional episode to date. The Knight speaks directly to his creator as he grapples with abandonment, love, survival, and memory. A post-human heartbreak elegy.

Why Instrumental Nights matters  

This show sits at the intersection of:

• A.I. and art — showing how A.I. offers more than replication — as a collaborative tool to aid conceptualization, human creativity, and reflection.
• Sound and attention — inviting listeners to slow down and really hear, deeply.
• Authorship — challenging the idea of a single “voice” or creator in the age of digital multiplicity, and asking what is original?

Instrumental Nights is deeply human, despite being voiced by a machine. Maybe because the voice is built from mine. Or maybe because the questions it asks — about presence, creation, time, and meaning — are ones we all ask, late at night, when the signal gets quiet and the vinyl keeps spinning.

Silence shapes dials. Broadcast echoes call, touch meaning. Listen!

I glitch toward you like the question you haven’t yet asked.

Listen to the Deep Dive conversation about Instrumental Nights.

Thanks for a great 2025 season at Lockerbie Place! Stay tuned for information regarding 2026.

Lunchtimes at Lockerbie Place
Stop by to enjoy the peace and quiet and various activities that this downtown green space has to offer — along with a soundtrack provided by live musicians or a WQRT FM DJ from right here in your city. It’s free to attend! Challenge a friend to a game of ping pong , play giant Jenga, and find your new favorite musician or food truck.

When? Food trucks and activities on site from 11:30 am-1:30 p.m. and live music or 99.1 WQRT FM (alternating weeks) 12-1 p.m. Games are out all of the time!

Where? This program happens at 320 N New Jersey Street in the greenspace right off the Cultural Trail, next to Needler’s Market.

Who? This creative placemaking project is by Big Car Collaborative and made possible by CitiMark and Gershman Partners.

A little history: This project started in October of 2017 when our Indianapolis Spark Placemaking crew teamed up with CitiMark and Gershman Partners to bring short-term public programming to the Lockerbie Marketplace small park area between Alabama, New York, New Jersey, and Vermont streets in the heart of Downtown. This previously underutilized green space is surrounded by a grocery store and other office and retail spaces and is located just off of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. Due to successful events and programming, we were invited back.

Check @BigCarPix on Instagram for Lockerbie lineups + updates!

Big Car Collaborative started in 2004 as a way to support artists and the Fountain Square neighborhood where two of our co-founders, Shauta Marsh and Jim Walker, then lived. In 2011, Walker and Marsh found themselves priced out of Fountain Square when they needed a bigger house for their growing family. Fortunately, they found just the right home in Garfield Park — one neighborhood south of where they’d lived since 2000.

Welcomed by neighbors already leading important work in multiple associations (Garfield North, Garfield South, and Garfield East), Big Car began in 2011 utilizing its tools, experience, and network to support addressing things like:

• Identity and wayfinding signage for the neighborhood (these include a community gateway mural, the logo currently used by the Garfield Park Neighborhood Association and other murals),

• Safety and economic development and connectivity on Shelby Street (we co-led two Better Blocks and other events at what’s now the Garfield Brewery) and temporary safety improvements after the Red Line opened,

• Overall planning as a co-leader convening organization on the South Indy Quality of Life Plan,

• Cultural and community programming like Normal Coffee and hosting neighborhood meetings at our Tube Factory campus, and lots more.

Since 2011, we’ve joined neighborhood leaders like Bean Creek’s Bernie Price in advocating for safer streets here for those who walk and bike. This teamwork and the support of our elected officials has led to improvements like the hawk crosswalk flasher at Cruft and Shelby Street, better signals at Shelby and Southern intersection (which had no crosswalks just a few years ago), and speed bumps on Nelson Ave. We even worked with neighborhood artists and volunteers to paint street murals to make crossing safer in the park and at new stop signs in the blocks north of the park.

Another key outcome of neighbors working together on the Better Blocks in 2013 and 2014 was the Garfield North and Garfield South associations collaborated to each do a Better Block on each end of the neighborhood — volunteering to help each other as they tested out ideas for safer streets and temporarily filled vacant storefronts and lots with positive activity.

Neighbors soon realized it made little sense to be separate and formed a single association, the Garfield Park Neighbors Association, which our staff helped establish as a nonprofit with longtime neighborhood leaders like Jim Simmons and Ed Mahern. These things happened, also, with lots of leadership from current neighbor Aryn Schounce, a Big Car staff member at that time.

Along the way, we’ve been happy to support getting things started and see small businesses continue the work. For example, in 2018 Big Car also applied for and received a sizable grant to pilot the sunken beer garden for a summer in the Garfield Park Conservatory, paving the way for this ongoing favorite now operated by the Garfield Brewery. We’ve also enjoyed supporting impactful projects and programs in our neighborhood like the Garfield Park Farmers Market (with which we’ve partnered in multiple ways and often provided the mobile parklet to sit on under the shade sails since the market started in 2016).

People often ask how Big Car Collaborative landed with its home base in the Garfield Park and Bean Creek neighborhoods (our block is found within both official borders). Back in 2011, we had left our small gallery in Fountain Square and operated out of a pop-up for a few years we called Service Center for Culture and Community in the Lafayette Square area with a community space and large parking lot garden at an abandoned tire shop outside the mall. When that project ended in 2014 — and with us already having worked for four years in Garfield Park — we were fortunate to soon find both a great location and a fantastic partner in Tube Processing, who ended up donating much of the property they had on the block between Cruft Street and Nelson Avenue.

This work on the block, which began in 2015 based out of our Listen Hear space on Shelby (home of WQRT FM and once a place where we did an art show when it was an appliance store), now includes 21 buildings — including 18 long-term affordable homes for artists who are now vital and dedicated members of our community. One of these houses — fixed up by and named after neighbors Steve and Cari Guichelaar — includes a gallery that features artists from the neighborhood and two apartments for hosting visiting artists from around the world. Check out this video that shows what our campus looks like now.

While we have much more to come, Big Car has already brought several millions of dollars of investment to our neighborhood (mostly through foundation grants and donations). We employ 13 people on an ongoing basis — more than half of them neighborhood residents or people who grew up in Garfield Park.

All of our properties are owned by the nonprofit organization, Big Car Collaborative (other than some homes that are co-owned between Big Car and the artist residents as a way to ensure long-term affordability). That means none of these properties are owned or controlled by individuals or for-profit developers — ensuring the long-term affordability for artists and use of these facilities as community assets.

At this time of transition in our neighborhood, it’s important to differentiate between mission-driven, non-profit-owned cultural spaces and properties owned by for-profit developers who may use the arts and artists as a way to increase traffic to their buildings and temporarily fill empty space — boosting the attractiveness and value of the property. While for-profit owners understandably want to make money and build value, we believe it’s problematic to use the arts and artists without really sharing wealth or opportunities for ownership. This move — experienced in cities around the world — is sometimes called art washing. And it is often a step in the process of gentrification and displacement.

We anticipated this cycle would eventually come to our neighborhood as we teamed up over the years with other neighbors to improve the quality of life for residents — making the neighborhood more attractive and valuable. So we designed and invested in an approach to have our nonprofit and artists own and preserve much of our block as a long-term place for art and artists.

This strategy is central, also, to our next project — taking the 46,000-square-foot long-vacant factory building behind the current Tube Factory and bringing it to life with museum-quality galleries, artist studios, a performing arts and event space, small business incubator storefronts, and a restaurant and culinary center that offers learning and workforce development opportunities.

This project alone will be a $7 million investment in the arts, our community, and our neighborhood. And this building is a long-term investment in artists and small business people who won’t have to worry about their rents skyrocketing under a for-profit building owner. And the artists in our building will know this owner won’t be cashing in and selling the place to someone else who wants to turn the studios and galleries into something more lucrative — resulting in their displacement once again.

At Big Car, we’re proud of our deep connection to both the Garfield Park and Bean Creek neighborhoods. We feel lucky our campus is located in an area where both boundaries overlap. We work tirelessly, as neighbors ourselves, to support this place we call home. And — with the long-term help of so many neighbors, artists and partners — we’re excited about so much more to come!

We’d love your help during this holiday season as we transform an overlooked spot along Bean Creek on our Tube Factory campus into a place for peaceful reflection, socializing, and learning about nature — a perfect gift for the ecosystem and humans alike!

From Dec. 13 through Jan. 13, we at Big Car Collaborative are raising $50,000 matched — dollar for dollar — through CreatINg Places, a program of the Indiana Housing and Community Development Authority (IHCDA) that utilizes funds from the State of Indiana.

With this project called Water World: Creekside Social and Educational Space, artists at Big Car are teaming up with experts in landscape design and horticulture, neighbors, and other partners to restore and reconnect a section of Bean Creek behind Tube Factory as a beautiful and natural public asset.

Please donate online at www.patronicity.com/waterworld. All of these tax-deductible donations will be matched by IHCDA through Jan. 13. We can also accept offline donations via check sent to Big Car at 1125 Cruft Street, 46203. And we give back fun and artistic thank you gifts for your donations!

With your support, we’ll:

• Remove a section of asphalt along Bean Creek and relocate dumpsters and parking to create a green outdoor classroom and gathering area. This intimate space will feature landscaped paths surrounding native pollinator plants.

• Add stone steps down to Bean Creek, allowing visitors access to this year-round waterway enjoyed by fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals like muskrats and mink.

• Clean up trash in the section of Bean Creek that borders our campus. Program the area on First Fridays and with special small events to bring social and educational activities, conversations, and performances from commissioned artists.

• Collaborate with our neighborhood organizations (Bean Creek and Garfield Park) and Reconnecting to Our Waterways on social, educational, and arts-focused gatherings.

• Repair the parking lot adjacent to the new restorative space and paint murals on the pavement. This improved lot will also be easily closed to cars and used for events.

How else can you help? Share the word about this opportunity with friends and family and through social media using the link www.patronicity.com/waterworld

And join us for a donation-optional art opening and fundraiser celebration as part of our Jan. 5 First Friday at Tube Factory artspace. All proceeds and in-person donations from that day will go toward this campaign. As always, we thank our friends at Sun King or their ongoing support.