Steven Yazzie and Nancy Baric: The Nearness of Distance
2025-03-07 18:00 - 2025-04-20 15:00 (America/Indiana/Indianapolis) | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Jeremy Efroymson Gallery
“My Child, I will feed you, give you good health, and I will give you strength and courage.”
“These are the opening words of Steven J. Yazzie’s 2015 video, Mountain Song, which appear scrawled across the inky blank screen in white letters. The work evokes that of an epic poem akin to Homer or Virgil, signifying a journey that lies before the one who watches and listens to it. Vacillating between testimonies from Indigenous community members and archival audio bytes of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969, the piece creates a tension between power structures, sacred knowledges, and the struggle between living in balance with the natural world and the relentless march of colonial progress through the mechanism and machinations of capitalism – pushing humanity to reach new heights at the expense of the natural order and health of the world.
Yazzie focuses in on the devastating impacts that uranium and its mining have had not only on Indigenous communities, but on the environment writ large, linking uranium to Indigenous cosmologies and histories – referring to the chemical element as an invisible monster. The development of uranium extraction and its weaponization forced/es a wedge between traditional ways of living, replacing a way to live with a colonial sickness that poisons the land, pollutes the water, and creates a level of radioactivity within the consciousness. When Yazzie writes “My child, what I am dressed with is what you are dressed with. I am your home and mother and father,” in the fourth and final verse of his poem, he reminds us that what we do to the earth, to our mother, our father, we do unto ourselves. A caution that the monsters we awaken cannot be put back into slumber.
The idea of monsters and the monstrous continues in the 2021 film by Nancy Barić, Electric Water. The film creates a pastiche of memory, histories, and connection – looking at her own heritage and ancestral arrival to North America from the Adriatic Sea and the origin stories and cosmologies of the Haudenosaunee and their connection to Niagara Falls. Barić illuminates the power of water, in natural understandings, capitalistic understandings, and spiritual understandings. In tying her connection to place, Barić speaks of Nikola Tesla, whose shared country of origin as her families also creates a binding of herself and her genetic memory to the site of Niagara. Tesla’s invention and design of the first hydro-electric power plant at the Falls, which he envisioned for good and to provide power for free to the people, was corrupted by the long tentacles of capitalism. Capitalism and its reach exist like a mutant creature – distorting, corrupting, and poisoning what it touches.
In the film, Barić interviews Rick Hill, a member of the Haudenosaunee community – who grew up near the Falls. Hill shares portions of the Nation’s story of origin, talking about the Creator and his malevolent brother known as Flint. For every good thing the Creator brought into being, Flint would create a wicked counterpart, monsters. During a time of duel between the brothers, they threw and thrashed each other around cataclysmically shifting and shaping the landscape, which Hill believes is what molded the Falls in its current form. To counteract the monsters of his brother’s making, the Creator brought to life Thunder Beings, that with the clap and shock of their existence, drove the monsters back into the ground; Beings which left the Falls when tourism took over – heading west to the Rockies – returning to bring rain every season. The film illuminates the severed connection to culture through colonial abuses and extractive methodological approaches to ‘progress.’ Through the commercialization of the natural world, the spiritual connection is cut – fissured in ways that create barriers to the holy relation to place. Barić and Yazzie show the fissures that occur when the pollution, extraction, and forced control over the earth take over, urging a return to the stories and power of living in balance.”
–Eric Joyce
Steven Yazzie — Mountain Song (11 mins) Mountain Song is part of a series of video/film installation work exploring Diné/Navajo sacred mountains. Structured in four verses, the film explores indigenous knowledge, mystery, resource exploitation (uranium), and post-colonial reflections on community life. Conversations I recorded with elders, friends, and community members are set against the backdrop of a personal journey to a sacred Diné/Navajo mountain, Dibé Nitsaa, in southern Colorado, eventually ending at a mountain outside my backyard where I once lived in Phoenix, Arizona. Concurrently throughout the film, the radio chatter of the first humans landing on the Moon in 1969 (Apollo Mission) can be heard. The intersection of moon landing audio, indigenous stories, and aerial views of tribal territories echo memories of our shared histories while complicating the experience of the perpetual outsider with subjective indigeneity.
Nancy Baric — Electric Water (25 mins), an experimental documentary and a meditation on the poetics and politics of water, moving between my heritage from the Adriatic Sea and the Haudenosaunee perspective on Niagara Falls. While our connection to water is disrupted by pollution, dams, and the tourist’s gaze, there are stories and insights that lead back to water’s power and teachings.
Steven and I met and quickly realized there was a shared world view especially regarding our relationship to land and water. I feel that the two films speak to each and offer a great opportunity to provide a dialogue due to commonality from an Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspective and one of which also extends to the audience. The two films explore issues of representation, ecology and stewardship, and are examples of connection/disconnection due to colonialism. The films together also offer hope for a better future through mutual care.
Steven Yazzie — is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, installation, video/film, and community collaborations. His work explores the complexities of post-colonial indigenous identity and an ever-evolving community relationship, with a fundamental view that land is the source of life, story, conflict, and healing.
Nancy Baric is Montreal-based artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of cinema and installation. Her practice explores the relationship between ecology, human perception, and intuitive procedures.

Jason Wesaw: Sovereign Spirits
2025-03-07 18:00 - 2025-08-25 19:30 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Potawatomi (Turtle Clan) artist Jason Wesaw’s exhibit consisting of sculpture, drawings, prints, and installation is linked to the beliefs of his culture related to land, specifically the ground where Tube Factory now sits. This land has been part of Potawatomi lands at different times in history before the United States existed. For this reason, Wesaw used earth and materials from Terri Sisson Park on the Tube Factory campus to create some of the works in this fully commissioned show.
Tube Factory’s chief curator, Shauta Marsh, looked to Wesaw because she felt his work offers a form of time travel — connecting us to a time before and to the present and ways to envision a future with shared connections and value tied to the land. And, in doing so, Wesaw brings people together today and across generations. “An overarching tenant of my practice is a commitment to examining relationships,” he said. “Relationships act as a guidepost for me, whether it’s connecting to family and community, to spirit and my observations in the natural world, or to materials: those which are considered modern art mediums, or found and harvested materials.”
Two pieces anchoring Wesaw’s Sovereign Spirits exhibit to the place where the Tube Factory sits are the tall flowing installations of shimmering satin and taffeta ribbon.
“They address the way that I interact with the underside of life, the places beneath the surface where spirit moves in subtle and powerful ways that only focused reflection and observation can reveal,” Wesaw said.
Wabshkya Sen or White Stone, is a piece about the help we receive through ceremonies that bring us healing and good health, both physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Bean Creek draws attention to the urban stream just outside the walls of the gallery, where we can be reminded that the cleansing, moving spirit of the water can often be found sharing its life force if we simply pause long enough to let our senses guide us to her flowing banks for a quiet moment.
Wesaw will also create an installation composed of black ash baskets or Gokpenagenek. A quintessential and ancient art form amongst the Potawatomi, black ash baskets are not merely functional or decorative objects, they weave together ancient cultural knowledge about the importance of maintaining relationships to the land and each other with a value system based upon reciprocity.
“These baskets are a reflection of our community’s ongoing presence on this Land and they remain a treasured art form practiced by the Potawatomi and many other Tribal Nations. Many of the baskets on view in this collection were made by ancestors of the Pokagon Potawatomi people of northern Indiana and southwest Michigan, with others having been made by their descendants who now carry on this beautiful, customary art form,” Wesaw said.
The intimate, small-scale oil pastel drawings that line the wall illustrate Wesaw’s process of observation and structure, ideas that often are fleshed out even further in his larger works. The textile pieces from his ongoing Blanket Series explore ideas around the transfer of knowledge that occurs between spirit, nature, and human beings, what he sees as a subtle, gentle ceremony of offerings and giveaways.
In the textile and ceramic works, lies an interest in the power of ornamentation, with materials like dyed deer tail and shiny, small objects drawing your gaze closer into the work. Collectively, the work in Sovereign Spirits shows a wide breadth of materials being used, but there is a united spiritual aesthetic of the pieces, regardless of the time, space and dimension in which they are constructed.
“In a quest for connection and common ground,” Wesaw said. “Where is it you look to find the source which helps you move with meaningful purpose, fulfillment, and Love? With Sovereign Spirits, I hope to take you on a journey where you can explore the power of Self, including the connections we have to the communities around us, the longing we feel to belong, and our desires to understand our place amongst all of creation. As we so casually ask for help or guidance from a higher power in difficult times throughout our lives – we must also understand that when spirit comes looking for something from us – that we need to be ready to give back without hesitation or fear; in essence, to have faith. The work in this exhibition recognizes the role of land, water, and skies as we seek a deeper, clearer understanding of Spirit and Self.”
The exhibition’s title, Sovereign Spirits, resonates with meaning across history. “Sovereign is a word most-often used to describe the undisputed authority of political entities, or to imply supreme power and autonomy. Indeed, this is a word that the Potawatomi — and all Tribal Nations — have become eerily familiar with in our centuries-long fights to maintain our traditional culture and inherent human rights, in a country founded on freedoms for all,” Wesaw said. “By stripping away themes centered around history or distinguishing labels like ‘Indian’ and ‘Native American’, what we may find as those layers are peeled back is a deep awareness of the natural world around and within us, and the connection we have to beings other than humans. In an increasingly fast-changing world where the land and people are being eaten up as a resource, there is a humble acknowledgement we can make in understanding the power of reciprocity and the place Spirit holds in the physical world we are living.”
About the Artist: Jason Wesaw works in an array of media including ceramics, textiles, works on paper, and traditional cultural pieces. His projects relate stories about the Potawatomi people’s ancient and evolving connection to the Land, the Sky, the Water, and Beyond. He balances being an artist with working in his Tribal community as a Peacemaker and participating in traditional cultural ceremonies across the Great Lakes. Wesaw is Potawatomi (Turtle Clan) and lives near the historic Pokagon Potawatomi settlement of Rush Lake in southwestern Michigan. His work is in the permanent collections of the Eiteljorg Museum, Grand Valley State University in Michigan, the University of Notre Dame, the Field Museum in Chicago, the Indiana State Museum, and many other regional institutions. He was recently a Mellon Artist-in-Residence at the Newberry Library for the ‘Indigenous Chicago’ exhibition and is a core artist in the current “Woven Being” group exhibition at The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University.
Learn more about Wesaw by visiting his Instagram account @jasonwesaw.
The exhibition is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Efroymson Family Fund, the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The show is part of a long term project, Social Alchemy, conceived by Big Car co-founders Shauta Marsh and Jim Walker and artist and philanthropist Jeremy Efroymson, explores historical and contemporary examples of utopian experiments, fictional utopias and dystopias, and social and cooperative-living design projects.
About Tube Factory artspace: Tube Factory is a contemporary art campus and community center. There are four galleries on the campus, two are commissioning galleries. Admission is free. It is also the home base for Big Car Collaborative’s work across Indianapolis and beyond. Tube Factory features rotating exhibits, interactive projects, community space, a reference library, an outdoor gathering space, and much more to find through exploring. Tube Factory is an independent, noncommercial, nonprofit public place.
Tube Factory is run by the 501(c)(3) arts nonprofit, Big Car Collaborative. As an artist-run nonprofit organization, we utilize tools of culture and creativity to build community and social cohesion — connecting people as a way to boost quality of life. We support our community by supporting artists.
Much of our work happens on a single block where we own or co-own more than 20 properties — including a long-term affordable housing program for artists and Tube Factory — a contemporary art museum with a cafe, studios, and community space. At our campus of adaptive reuse buildings and public greenspace, we host community and cultural programs to promote social connectivity, cooperation, and creativity.
We also facilitate people-focused placemaking and place keeping projects across the city and beyond through Spark. Tune in to our experimental, community-focused radio station, WQRT 99.1 FM — also streaming at wqrt.org. Learn more at BigCar.org and TubeFactory.org.
About Indiana and Tribal Land (from the Indiana State website):
There are two tribes that have land in Indiana.
The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi received a small portion of their land back from their removal in Indiana. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi is a federally recognized tribe. It is one of 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States. The Bureau of Indian Affairs contacted Chairman John Warren to state that their tribe, Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, had been approved on November 18, 2016 to receive 166 acres of land in trust in South Bend, Indiana. The tribe successfully put a few housing units and tribal government buildings to assist their tribal members living in Indiana. It also built a 175,000 square foot and 1,800 Class II gaming devices, four restaurants, a player’s lounge, a coffee shop, two bars, a retail outlet and approximately 4,500 parking spaces including an enclosed parking structure.
The second tribe that has land in Indiana is the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. The tribe was given land to put a Cultural Extension Office for their tribal members living in Indiana to attend specific gatherings, ceremonies and education events at this office located in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
There are approximately 25,000 other tribal members who live in Indiana, from the Apache, Cherokee, Navajo, Comanche, Lakota Sioux, and other federally recognized tribes.
Information via: faqs.in.gov/hc/en-us/articles/360033547051-Are-there-any-Native-American-tribes-in-Indiana

Flore Laurentienne at Tube Factory artspace
2025-03-26 19:00 - 21:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Flore Laurentienne is performing at Tube Factory artspace on Wednesday, March, 26, 2025 from 7-9pm EST.
Tickets are $10 and can be purchased HERE via Eventbrite.
In addition, Indianapolis composer and instrumentalist Rob Funkhouser will open the concert.

Each performance is a chance to step into a world where music and nature intertwine—a rare and intimate experience.
Flore Laurentienne is an open window to the technicolor soundscapes of Mathieu David Gagnon – the Canadian composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist who shapes vast orchestral sound to interpret the rugged wilderness and waters of his native Québec. The namesake of an inventory documenting St. Lawrence Valley flora, Flore Laurentienne illumes the science and spirit of his surrounds through expansive string orchestrations melded with the textures and experimentation of early analogue synths.
Following the compass and critical acclaim of his Volume I debut, Flore Laurentienne returned in October 2022 with Volume II to resume his voyage into environment and emotion. Recorded with string and clarinet ensembles along with Gagnon’s signature modulation, Volume II explores forces of water as metaphorical markers to navigate passages of life and loss, . Reflecting the parallel tenors of nature and humankind, Volume II locates another estuary in Flore Laurentienne’s tides toward contemporary sonic romanticism.
In his approach to composition hued by leitmotif and constraint, Gagnon challenges himself to extract beauty from simplicity in homage to the changing faces of natural landscapes. The presence of familiarity and flux in Volume I is heightened through the vivid instrumentation of a fifteen-piece string orchestra, which Gagnon brings together with an array of 1960s and 70s synthesizers, including the Minimoog Model D, the EMS Synthi and combo organs – an innately ambitious project which forges the composer’s distinctive path in the expansion of classical music archetypes.
Flore Laurentienne was nominated in seven categories at the 2020 ADISQ in Québec, winning the ‘Arrangement of the Year’ and ‘Sound Recording and Mixing of the Year’. In 2020, Volume I was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize and received four nominations at the Felix Awards for ‘Revelation of the Year’, ‘Songwriter of the Year’, ‘Critic’s Choice Album of the Year’ and ‘Instrumental Album of the Year’. In 2021, Flore Laurentienne was nominated for the** Juno Awards** ‘Instrumental Album of the Year’ in recognition for his contribution to Canadian music. In addition, Fleuve No. 1 opened the Chanel fashion show at Paris Fashion Week 2022.
Awards & Recognition
Nominated at the 2021 JUNOS Awards for Instrumental Album of the Year
Nominated on the 2020 Polaris Prize Short List for Volume 1
Winner at the 2020 ADISQ for Arrangement of the Yearfor Volume 1
Winner at the 2020 ADISQ for Sound Recording and Mixing of the Year for Volume 1
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Best New Artist
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Album of the Year – Critic’s Choice for Volume 1
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Author or Composer of the Year for Volume 1
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Revelation of the Year for Volume 1
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Songwriter of the Year for Volume 1
Nominated at the 2020 ADISQ for Album of the Year – Instrumental for Volume 1

Rob Funkhouser is a composer, performer, and instrument builder who can never quite sit still. His work is concerned with ideas of place, memory, and pattern and he is interested in interrogating the interstitial spaces between established genres.

Current State 2025: Herron's Electronic Music Showcase
2025-04-27 11:00 - 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Featuring more than 20 performers, CURRENT STATE is a live concert event putting the talent of Herron School of Art and Design music students on display.

Students from Herron’s undergraduate music technology program will present original works drawn from a wide array of musical styles including electronic pop, house, hip-hop, noise, experimental, and beyond.

Herron’s music technology program is proud to partner with Big Car Collaborative, whose Tube Factory artspace will serve as a stage for this exciting afternoon of live music.

Open Bocce Play!
2025-04-27 12:00 - 15:00, 2025-05-04 12:00 - 15:00 | Terri Sisson Park, 1125 Cruft Street, Indianapolis
Grab some friends or neighbors and come by to enjoy Tube Factory’s Bocce court! The outdoor court is located to the left of 1207 Cruft Street, down Cruft past Tube Factory. Enjoy the weather, Terri Sisson Park, and our community with open bocce ball!

Ben Hall: Trunk Rattle Sound Bath
2025-05-02 18:00 - 2025-06-15 17:00 | IN
Trunk Rattle Sound Bath merges ongoing areas of Ben Hall’s research into polyrhythm (the simultaneous use of two or more contrasting rhythms), sonic immersion, and ancestral resonance through the lens of embodied listening. The title draws from the cultural experience of low-end frequencies booming from car trunks — windows shaking with no discernible rhythm, the body absorbing it all. “Vibrational frequencies are in everything,” Hall says. “Our bodies. We are observing by vibration even when we shut down. Our nervous system is still there, thrumming.”
With this new body of work, Hall focuses on not just what is played or heard, but what is felt, what is transferred through vibration, what buzzes and rattles in the body long after the source has passed. The body is a resonant shell for the vibrations that occur all around us. “The 17th-century Dutch physicist Christian Huygens observed the entrainment of pendulums,” Hall explains. “He noted in 1655 that if two pendulum clocks were placed near each other, they would synchronize. They wanted to be in rhythm with each other — but it was, and is, not instant. That move toward synchronization, toward harmony… The experience of rhythm, of immersion in sound, of allowing your body to be an entire resonating chamber is to allow that process to begin each time — and allow for the vibration to be you.”
Inspired by the mbira, a traditional African thumb piano with metal tines and built-in buzzers used in spiritual ceremonies to connect with ancestors, Hall draws a throughline from West African sonic cosmologies to Midwestern street corners. “Those buzzes are supposed to be the actual frequencies that cut through to the ancestors,” he says. “The consequence of the sound is what communicates with another world.” In this way, the sound bath is not a cleansing ritual in the New Age sense, but a full-bodied immersion in histories.
Hall makes the connection between the mbiras of tradition and the trunk rattle of modernity. “When you are at the red light next to the Buick,” Hall says, “you’ll notice that the rattling and buzzing is not consistent with the rhythm created by the bass frequencies coming from the vehicle. Often, it will seem that the rattling of your windows — a different distance, a different material from the sound maker — is not even related at times to the rhythm, as though the frequencies you’re hearing in the passing vehicle are somehow coincidental to the vibration in your home.”
Trunk Rattle Sound Bath invites visitors to consider rhythm not only as musical but as a way of knowing, of feeling, of remembering. “When a frequency, a sound (but also a rhythm, a repetition) occurs to us at a different frequency than the one we live in,” Hall says, “we are receiving energy. Frequency is just another way to say energy.” Whether through sound, image, or movement, Hall’s work opens a space for that energy to circulate — and for the body, buzzing like a loose antenna, to receive it. “Vibrational frequencies are in everything,” Hall declares.
About the artist: Ben Hall is an artist and composer based in/from Detroit, Michigan. He was profiled in Fred Moten’s 2017 book, Black and Blur and frequently works as a critic and essayist with a research focus on the visionary American composers Milford Graves and Bill Dixon. He formerly served as a senior research fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College from 2018-2022. He has presented prints, drawings, film, sculpture and works for sound in numerous exhibitions including the solos Jives & Gambles at Essex Flowers in NYC and Slow An Alarm Until It’s A Tone at MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit). He is currently compiling material for the forthcoming publication, A Black Liberation Music Guide.
Curator: Landon Caldwell
Live performance: June 8, 12pm by Hall’s ensemble, Oceanic Beloved.
This exhibition is made possible by the Indy Arts Council and the City of Indianapolis, the Indiana Arts Commission, Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Efroymson Family Fund.

Sketch Club with India Hines
2025-05-07 15:00 - 17:00 | IN
If you love sketching and are looking for community, come hang out and draw with our longterm artist in residence, India Hines.
India Hines, a self-taught artist from Denver, CO, and raised in Indianapolis, IN, uses ink, watercolor, and oil paints to explore spirituality and the subconscious. Their intuitive process results in figurative faces and organic shapes that reflect a journey of growth, resilience, and love. India’s art is deeply meditative, rich with emotional depth, and narrates stories of overcoming adversity. Active in community projects and exhibitions, India believes in art’s power to unite and continues to push creative boundaries while exploring personal growth and self-discovery

Open Bocce Ball!
2025-05-11 12:00 - 15:00, 2025-05-18 12:00 - 15:00, 2025-05-25 12:00 - 15:00, 2025-06-01 12:00 - 15:00, 2025-06-08 12:00 - 15:00, 2025-06-15 12:00 - 15:00, 2025-06-22 12:00 - 15:00, 2025-06-29 12:00 - 15:00 | Terri Sisson Park, 1125 Cruft Street, Indianapolis

NIGHTJAR: Derek Mong
2025-05-21 18:30 - 20:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Derek Mong will begin reading at 7pm.
After Lynch’s reading and a brief break, the open mic will begin.
Open mic prompt: Write a poem about a beautiful catastrophe.
About Derek Mong:
Derek Mong is the author of When the Earth Flies into the Sun (October 2024), The Identity Thief (2018) and Other Romes (2011)—all from Saturnalia Books. A chapbook, The Ego and the Empiricist (2017), was a finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Contest. His collaborative translation, The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin—completed with his wife, Anne O. Fisher—received the 2018 Cliff Becker Translation Prize.
A poet, essayist, and translator, Derek’s work appears widely: the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, At Length, Pleiades, Verse Daily, the Missouri Review, Two Lines, Poetry Northwest, and in the anthology, Writers Resist: Hoosier Writers Unite (2017). He has blogged for Kenyon Review Online, where he wrote a series of Leaves of Grass beer reviews, and written essay-reviews for Gettysburg Review. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Zócalo Public Square and, along with his wife, edits At Length, a literary journal devoted to long work.
New poems and essays have appeared in the Houston Chronicle, the LA Times, Zócalo Public Square, Free Inquiry, Always Crashing, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and the Boston Globe. His latest long poem, “Midnight Arrhythmia,” was published in Action, Spectacle.
An Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Wabash College (Crawfordsville, Ind.), Derek holds degrees from Stanford University (M.A. Ph.D.), the University of Michigan (M.F.A.), and Denison University (B.A.). Born in Portland, Oregon and raised outside of Cleveland, Ohio, he currently lives in West Lafayette, Indiana with his wife and son.
@derek_mong
NIGHTJAR creates an inclusive space for all by bringing together spoken-word performers and page-based poets writing in narrative, lyric, and experimental forms. Every third Wednesday, C.S. Carrier and Michelle Niemann host a reading and invite audience members to share their own poetic responses.

Will Higgins: Museum of Fabulosity
2025-06-06 18:00 - 2025-09-21 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
June 6 through Sept. 21 | Guichelaar Gallery at the Tube Factory artspace campus | 1135 Cruft St.
“It’s widely held that Indianapolis is a boring place with a dull, vanilla past.
That notion is wrong.
Yes, the city is a “good place to raise a family” and yes, it’s a “sports capital.”
But it’s also freaky.
People don’t realize this because staid, well-meaning chamber-of-commerce types have swept the weird bits of Indianapolis’ history, the truly interesting and truly human stories, under the rug.
Finally, along comes the Museum of Fabulosity to look under the rug.
Included in this pop-up museum, made to resemble a small-town history museum, are 16 amazing stories, many so strange they may seem made-up. But they are not made up. They are all absolutely true. They are paired with amazing photographs and also fabulous objects that approximate long lost Indy icons — boxing gloves worn by Lou Thomas the night he killed Arne Andersson; the chair Cannonball Adderly tipped back in the night he discovered Wes Montgomery; James Snow’s Panama hat; Jinx Dawson’s skull; Max Emmerich’s spikes…”

— Will Higgins

SOMA
2025-09-05 18:00 - 2025-10-19 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Main Gallery
This exhibition explores the supernatural and ethereal states of somatic responses. Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, where soma was a fictional drug used to pacify civilians in a state of existential bliss and disassociation. Exploring the socialized perceptions of figures occupying space, Soma takes on confronting perceived utopia and dysmorphia in this exhibition.
In the works, moments of adolescent innocence are paired with surrealist and folkloric expressions of figuration. Satirically, this speaks to resisting and transcending moments that are out of alignment as people grow; without physically being dismissed.
Featured artists:
Jo Archuleta (Kansas City, Missouri)
Tommy Lomeli (Helena, Montana)
Katherine Looney (Kansas City, Missouri)
October Sharify (Chicago)
Isaac Tapia (Kansas City, Missouri)
Cesar Velez (Kansas City, Missouri)
Guest Curator: Yashi Davalos
Davalos is an Afro-Puerto Rican-Mexican, Atlanta Native, based in New Orleans. Her practice began in the Americana Deep South. She attended HBCU, Savannah State University, where she studied Vocal Performance. Yashi’s curatorial research centers socio-cultural epistemology, the south and the global south, through an interdisciplinary arts praxis.
Davalos was the 2023-2025 curatorial fellow and interim grants and awards coordinator at The Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. She was previously a member of collective run gallery The Front New Orleans. Davalos has designed and facilitated programming in collaboration with various institutions including Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Prospect New Orleans, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, UMKC Music Conservatory, and MDW Artist Coalition. Her art has been exhibited throughout New Orleans, ATL, KCMO, and at MECA Art Fair in the Dominican Republic. Yashi’s writing has been published via Sixty Inches From Center, Burnaway, and Intervenxions at Latinx Project NYU.
Artist Bios:
Jo Archuleta (b. Taos, New Mexico 2000) is an artist living and working in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work explores the complexity of identity and mythology of womanhood found within leisure, desire, pleasure and the specificity as a state of being. By acknowledging rules within the landscape of femininity, gender roles and their societal expectations. Archuleta has found that there are multiple approaches to transgressive and transformative definitions of these identities. Her specific approach to this critique has been to use humor, jokes, and satire. Archuleta is interested in exploring how the figure is perceived and how she sees herself, a constant battle between self-awareness and self sabotage. The figures seduce and confront complexities within the vapidness of beauty, vanity, and ego while also using self-consciousness as repulsion. The women in her work wear masks, perform softness, weakness, shallowness, and confidence; all while cowering within their own insecurities.
Tommy Lomeli (b.1993) is an emerging ceramic artist born in Stockton, California. Lomeli holds a BA from CSU Sacramento and an MFA from the University of Kansas. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the International Sculpture Center’s 2024 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award, and first place at NCECA’s 2023 National Juried Student Exhibition. He was a 2024 Charlotte Street Foundation Artist in Residence. He is currently a 2025 Taunt Fellow at the Archie Bray Foundation.
Katherine Looney (b.1989 (she/her)) is a Black and Native American visual artist living in Kansas City, Missouri. She usually works with oil paints when creating colorful portraits. Many of her works are based on photos she has taken of her friends and family. She was a part of Charlotte Street Foundation’s 2023 Artist INC cohort. She was also a 2024 recipient of Charlotte Street Foundation’s Artboards Award. Katherine has a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
October Sharify (b.1999) is an oil painter based in Chicago, Illinois. Their longtime interest in history and theology blends in their work with feminine aesthetics and spiritual imagery. October has a developmental disability and believes that this is both a detriment to their work and integral to their process. October has an African American and Persian cultural background, and often turns to the visual language of their respective cultures’ past for inspiration. “I enjoy working with a limited palette, and I mix my own custom colors to use consistently across my work. Blue to me is a very atmospheric color and my favorite time of day has always been twilight. World-building and paintings that evoke a feeling are very important to me and this exists in every piece that I make.”
Isaac Tapia was born in Mexico, where he lived until moving to the U.S. when he was nine. Isaac focuses on portraits that elevate important, yet often underrepresented, members of his community and celebrate the complex narratives of contemporary migration. He blends photography, audio interviews, and traditional oil portraiture techniques to convey rich, multilayered stories and create opportunities for identification and connection. Isaac’s paintings have been exhibited throughout Kansas City — including at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art — and his work has traveled in shows across the Midwest with the Mexican Consulate and La Onda and the M.A.S.A. Collective. He had a residency and exhibition at Casa Lu Sur en Mexico City in December of 2024. Isaac is a founding member of the M.A.S.A. Collective, and is one of the resident artists at the Charlotte Street Foundation. He is also one-half of the mural duo IT-RA Icons, which has painted murals across the country.
Cesar Velez is a self-taught painter and first-generation immigrant from Mexico based in Kansas City, Missouri. Velez’s work draws from his personal experience growing up in the South and Midwest United States as an undocumented immigrant (now DACA Recipient) living amongst American peers.
This exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Efroymson Family Fund.
IMAGE: Big Fish, Cesar Velez, oil on canvas, 24×30, 2022

Keren Cytter: Rose Garden
2025-09-05 18:00 - 2025-11-02 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Video Gallery
Cytter’s short 2014 film explores the unsettling duality of American culture’s ideals regarding being protectors of life and harbingers of death. This title is a reference to both the 1964 Joanne Greenburg book I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, which deals with mental illness and the 1971-84 Marine Corp recruitment campaign “We Don’t Promise You A Rose Garden.” These references are meant to clue the viewer in that the seemingly ordinary setting hides a distorted reality. As the tension builds, multiple guns and disjointed conversations between characters escalate the sense that the calm is about to be shattered. A chaotic shooting spree unfolds against the backdrop of normal daily life. The chilling final scene serves as a grim conclusion addressing violence and its pervasive presence within American culture.
Run time: 8 minutes and 55 seconds
Please note: This work contains adult themes and gun violence that some may find triggering.
About the artist
Keren Cytter (b. 1977) creates films, performances, drawings and photographs on topics of social alienation, language representation, and the function of individuals in predetermined cultural systems through experimental modes of storytelling and human perception. Mostly characterised by a non-linear, cyclical logic Cytter’s films consist of multiple layers of images; conversation; monologue, and narration systematically composed to undermine linguistic conventions and traditional interpretation schemata. Recalling amateur home movies and video diaries, these montages of impressions, memories, and imaginings are poetic and self-referential in composition. The artist creates intensified scenes drawn from everyday life in which the overwhelmingly artificial nature of the situations portrayed is echoed by the very means of their production.
Cytter was awarded the Joseph Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021), Absolut Art Award, Stockholm (2009), Ars Viva Prize, Kulturkreis der Deutschen Wirtschaft, Berlin (2008) and the Bâloise Art Prize at Art Basel (2006).
Recent solo exhibitions include Hot Lava Night, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany (2023); Double Standard, LLS Paleis, Antwerp, Belgium (2023). Cytter’s work was showcased in a major survey exhibition at the Ludwig Forum Aachen (2022), featuring: films, soap operas, plays, sculptures, drawings, novels, zines, life coaching guides, children’s books and a festival. Cytter’s videos were shown in solo exhibitions at Winterthur Kunstmuseum, Winterthur (2020); Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2019); Museion Bolzano, Bolzano (2019), Künstlerhaus – Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2014); State of Concept, Athens (2014), Tate Modern, London (2012), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2011); München Kunstverein (2011); Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2010); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010); X Initiative, New York (2009); Le Plateau Paris, Paris (2009), Witte de With, Rotterdam (2008), MUMOK Vienna, Vienna (2007); Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2005); Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich (2005) and Kunst-Werke Berlin, Berlin (2006).
Keren Cytter’s work has been shown in numerous group exhibitions such as MOMENTUM 10, Momentum Biennial, Moss (2019); Masculinity, Düsseldorf Kunstverein, Düsseldorf (2019); SUR/FACE: Mirrors, Museum Angewandtekunst, Frankfurt, (2017); Instructions for Happiness, 21er Haus, Vienna, State (in) Concepts, KADIST, Paris (2017), Vision on Vision- Lemaitre video collection, SEMA Museum, Seoul (2017); Busan Biennial, Busan (2016); Creating Realities – Encounters Between Art and Cinema, Pinakothek der Moderne and Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015); Political Populism, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2015); John Bock, Keren Cytter, Paul Pfeiffer, Gillian Wearing and Akram Zaatari, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2013); Expanded Cinema, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2011); Videonale 13, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn (2011); Found in Translation, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2011); Morality, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Revolution, van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2010); Scenväxlingar / Scene Shifts, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2010); 8th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Future Generation Art Prize: 20 Shortlisted Artists, PinchukArtCentre Kiev (2010); Time Out of Joint: Recall and Evocation in Recent Art, Whitney Museum, New York (2009); The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009); Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2009); Fare Mondi 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, (2009); VideoZone: Video Biennale, Tel Aviv (2008); Shifting Identities, Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich (2008); Yokohama Triennial, Yokohama, (2008); Torino Triennale, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli (2008); Television Delivers People, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); The Second Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2007); The first Hertzelia Biennial, Hertzelia (2007); The 9th Lyon Biennial, Lyon (2007); All Hawaii Entrees/Lunar Reggae, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2006).
Her films have been screened in numerous film festivals such as The Wrong Movie, Berlinale, Berlin, Germany (2024); Villae film festival, Villa d’Este, Tivoli, Bolzano Film Festival, Bolzano (both in 2019); European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruck (2018); A Retrospective at Bergamo Film Festival, Bergamo (2016); Rotterdam Film Festival, Rotterdam and KunstFilmBiennale Köln, Cologne (both in 2009); Berlin International Film Festival, Expended Forum, Berlin (2008); Berlin International Film Festival, Expended Forum, Berlin and Glasgow Film Festival, Glasgow (both in 2007).
This exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

JON MUELLER + TOM LECKY: ALL COLORS PRESENT
2025-10-06 19:00 - 21:30 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Tickets are $7 and can be purchased at the door
A sound and visual meditation
Jon Mueller’s singular performance idiom is an awe-inspiring display of elegant athleticism, preternatural focus, brute restraint, and ecstatic, monastic reverie. Paired with Tom Lecky’s photographs, it becomes a deliberate focus on form, shape and detail. It requires and demands a state of inner quietude from witnesses. Yet, from this seemingly metronomic exercise blossoms every possible tint and hue of infinite spectral sound.

​​An apt reference point resides within the broad, decades-spanning catalog of Table of the Elements. Like Tony Conrad’s surging Outside the Dream Syndicate, the aural and conceptual headwinds are real, but the perceived affronts of provocation are not. These works are not endurance challenges, nor are they threadbare minimalist upholstery. They are not obstacles. They are invitations. Within their simplicity and formalism await a sympathetic repose, a comfort. These are gestures of generosity.

Mueller studied jazz drumming with Hal Russell at Columbia College in Chicago, and singing with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music in New York. A prolific performer, he tours extensively and has appeared at festivals and venues throughout the United States, Canada, England, Europe and Japan.

In addition to his solo work, Mueller has collaborated and performed with groups such as Mind Over Mirrors, Volcano Choir, Collections of Colonies of Bees, and Pele. He has also worked with artists including Olivia Block, Aaron Turner, Faith Coloccia, Dawn Springer, Chris Hefner, Jason Kahn, Hal Rammel, Asmus Tietchens, Z’EV, Rhys Chatham, Jarboe, James Plotkin, Duane Pitre, and Raymond Dijkstra. He has released music on renowned labels such as Table of the Elements, Type Recordings, Important Records, Taiga Records, SIGE Records, and American Dreams.
www.rhythmplex.com IG: @jonmueller

Tom Lecky has worked in photography, music (as Hallock Hill), the book arts, prose and poetry writing, and literary criticism. His creative work concentrates on memory, place, and environment, the work of the imagination, perception, and the intersections of abstraction and representation. He often interweaves appropriated texts and images with his own, evoking a conversation with the history of book design and illustration.

These creative pursuits are linked to Tom’s career as an internationally recognized expert in the field of rare and antiquarian books and manuscripts. He has worked in the auction world – notably in a 17-year run as a specialist and Head of Christie’s New York Books and Manuscripts Department – and as an advisor to collectors and institutions. He is the owner of Riverrun Books, and the founder of the rare book and manuscript appraisal and advisory firm Lecky Art Group. www.tomlecky.com
IG: @tom.lecky
