Big Car

De Aquí y De Allá (From Here and There)
2018-03-24 14:00 - 15:00 (America/Indiana/Indianapolis) | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Latino artists talk about their experiences living in two culture and how it shapes their art practice. This session will feature Alexis Zarco.
Alexis graduated from Shortridge IB High School, and is eager to learn anything and everything possible about art and the community. He is serving at Big Car Collaborative as an AmeriCorps member, focusing on building and sustaining relationships for the better of not only the community, but for immigrants and refugees as well. When not at The Tube Factory, you’ll probably find Alexis at Super Tortas, making fresh Mexican food as he’s been doing since ’08.

have your cake and eat it too (congratulations)
2018-04-06 18:00 - 22:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Herron School of Art and Design Painting Thesis exhibition featuring: Chase Palmer, Tillman Reyes, Genevieve St. Arnaud, Lydia Crouse and Tom Day.
About Lydia Crouse
Crouse describes her work as “a romanticized collision of my honest identity—an individualized American woman— with elements from our glorified popular culture. All the while embracing my own naiveté, experience, and passion with skepticism and humor.”
About Tom Day
Day’s work centers around culture and bridging societal gaps through portraiture. “I paint people in attempt to learn about other cultures, but mostly to understand them,” says Day. ” Although there are many social divides in the world, I’m wanting to convey a sense of togetherness and equality of the human race.”
About Chase Palmer
“Today, we are more frequently exposed to a multitude of imagery than ever before,” says Palmer. “We are surfing the internet, looking at the social media postings of our friends and even strangers, and taking photographs on our phones. While looking at so much imagery on the internet, we are unconsciously reading more frequently than any other previous culture. We do this while working, commuting, socializing, or lounging at home, and while munching on conveniently obtained artificially flavored junk foods that are slowly suffocating our disgusting arteries.”
Palmer’s dilemma as a young contemporary artist is how does he accurately reflect this culture? His answer: Paint it all at once. “In my work, I assault the space with an over-construction of activity made up of various painterly inventions that come from improvised intuition. All of this comes from a process that is completely automatic and improvised,” says Palmer.
“The question of how to approach painting a figure is so shrouded in questions. Whenever I paint the figure in a traditional manner, I feel like a deadpan mechanical printer that has mastered the long-outdated technology of applying pigmented glue to canvas. I invent my own space that exists solely in the world of images. I layer these invented compositions over a more traditional subject in order to mimic augmented reality technology that is becoming more present in our smartphones, video games, and GPS technology. However, in my work, the digital does not replace reality, paint does.”
About Tillman Reyes
Reyes work serves as a “record” of a place in time. His paintings, installations, and sculptures highlight a seemingly insignificant event in everyday life, recreated in a gallery setting.
About Genevieve St. Arnaud
St. Arnaud’s artwork is an interpretation of her childhood through the perspective of a young woman finding her identity away from home. Her pallet is warm and inviting to characterize the optimism in youth with the use of color and texture to spark senses and emotions from childhood. She also incorporates non-traditional materials such as fabric, paper, thread and wire in the works to exemplify a feeling or place. “For example, patterned fabric can be soft and comforting, and remind me of home. Yet, wire can be aggressive and give a feeling of anxiety or edge. I use materials that serve as the base of many functioning objects to signify origin. I combined the paint and mixed materials to represent the push and pull between the past and present. Just as I remember these childhood moments in fragments, I apply mixed media in various parts,” says St Arnaud.
Process is important to her practice. “There is a self-discovery that occurs when I compare new and old materials. I use memorable stories, and photographs to inspire my collage-like paintings”, says St. Arnaud. “By combining my inspiration and materials I am able to transform a past moment. The moment becomes an understanding or vision of how I see it now.”
Symbolism also pervades her work to represent the innocence of childhood. These symbols at times are a stand in for important figures in her life. “Such as a strawberry signifying my mother. I merge my abstract collages with distinct imagery to recreate a scene or memory,” says St Arnaud. She invites the audience to be a part of her stories so they can understand the growth she’s made in discovering her authentic identity since leaving home. “When I revisit a memory I find that not only has my view of the memory transformed, but also so have I.”

Danielle Graves-Pure and Sexless
2018-04-06 18:00 - 22:00 | Listen Hear, 2620 Shelby St, , Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
It’s common, in the checkout lane at the grocery store, to see nearly naked women on magazine covers. Companies use bodies to sell stuff and sex on the Internet. And parts fly everywhere in video games. Still, something that remains taboo is art that addresses double standards between the sexes and celebrates the female body. This is why the work of Danielle Graves is important, especially in Indianapolis.
“You enter to find that corporate labels have interfered with incorruptibility. That contradiction has met desire. That an idealistic heaven has met an idealistic hell—a good girl has gone bad. She partners with purity to be sexualized—runs with her sexuality to be sanitized. She is made harmless yet is harmful—sinning for pleasure and indulged upon for corporate gain. She, like many — all — women before her, is a body pressured to be pure, a body that is a sexualized commodity of society, a body that has no will. Pure and Sexless is about finding comfort in the absurdity,” says Graves about the exhibit and the accompanying installation, Virgin Mary Vagina, in the unisex restroom at Listen Hear.
Our culture needs to develop further confidence in celebrating and looking directly into the heart (or in the case of the bathroom at Listen Hear, vagina) of what makes women different. The commissioned installation focuses on the part of the body that politicians and religious leaders most want to control. So if these pieces rub you the wrong way, we encourage you to reflect on why. —Shauta Marsh, curator
Virgin Mary Vagina, in the bathroom, a commissioned piece made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, will remain after this exhibit ends. (*Parental advisory*)
About Danielle Joy Graves
Graves was born and raised at the intersection of 114 and Mr. Rickard’s road. She currently resides in Indianapolis. She received her BFA in Illustration at Herron School of Art and Design and has pushed far from it. From soft sculpture to paper mache, Danielle is working towards creating a world not far from her reality.

WQRT Public Meeting
2018-04-09 19:00 - 20:30 | Listen Hear, 2620 Shelby St, , Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Learn more about helping out and creating programming for the radio station, 99.1 WQRT.

Christos Koutsouras: Land Art (Telling Trees)
2018-05-04 08:00 - 2018-07-14 17:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Deeply rooted in place, Land Art (Telling Trees) is inspired by a large-scale fire that tore apart the island of Samos, Greece — the birthplace of the artist. Koutsouras first approached this theme in 1994 after a fire destroyed much of the vegetation on the island. When a massive fire again hit Samos two years ago, he returned to this theme and finished the work he started 20 years ago. Koutsouras envisions the white trees he painted juxtaposed with the black landscape as a visual reference to the act of fire. He shares that his objective was, from the beginning, to talk into the people’s consciousness and show the force of the action. Koutsouras wanted to do more than just create an image. This was a work in progress over several years, starting with a spontaneous reaction back on time.
Land Art (Telling Trees) includes large photographs manipulated by Koutsouras in different ways. Some pieces are painted on, others drawn upon with pencil, and some left intact. The work captures the destruction and rebirth of the forests and fields of Samos from fires that swept through the landscape. He created other works by wrapping paper around the burned trees of Samos and rubbing charcoal imprints. The exhibition also ties Samos and Indianapolis (two places Koutsouras has lived at different times throughout his life) together with a sculpture made from two pine trees from the west side of Indianapolis blown over by straight winds. The 40-year-old trees were saved from rot or becoming mulched by Indy Urban Hardwood.
The upstairs video room features a documentary about Koutsouras and other Greek artists by filmmaker Dia Kontaxis, a professor at the University of Miami. Her work has screened at museums, galleries and festivals including Venice (Art Biennale), New York (Tribeca Film Festival), Montreal (Art Fifa), Paris, Athens, Ankara, Lleida, Taipei and Miami (Art Basel). In another video piece located in the monitors outside of the video room and downstairs, Koutsouras paints the charred trees white to contrast with the blackness of the landscape.
Koutsouras, who studied painting in Germany, often pulls from the instruction of an inspirational teacher and tries to make each work into its own narrative. Each piece must have a beginning, middle and end. The result in this show: a story of the destructive and restorative forces of nature.
The exhibition was made possible by The Efroymson Family Fund, Managed Health Services – MHS, Sun King Brewing Company and Indy Urban Hardwood.

Juan William Chávez: Mesa Hive:Indianapolis Bee Sanctuary
2018-08-03 18:00 - 2018-10-20 18:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Mesa Hive: Indianapolis Bee Sanctuary
Opening reception August 3, 6-10pm
These connected projects — related to bees, beekeeping, culture, and community — include an outdoor living sculpture and a resulting exhibit developed by Juan William Chávez, an artist and cultural activist based in St. Louis, during his six-week residency at Tube Factory.
The Indianapolis Bee Sanctuary is a 5-year project in the green space adjacent to Tube Factory that promotes environmental stewardship with the philosophy that a better environment for bees is a healthy environment for humans. This is fostered through Chávez’s pollinator-friendly hexagon design and is associated with a multi layered community outreach program. Located in the Tube Factory’s community garden, the Bee Sanctuary features a multi-color hexagon pattern concrete floor that houses two beehives. Surrounding the hives is a hexagon-shaped cedar eco wall filled with organic soil and is filled with an abundance of native plants and flowers for bees throughout the seasons. The Bee Sanctuary invites the public to wear beekeeping suits to observe and interact with the hives through a multi layered community outreach program that embraces the urban ecosystem, arts education and job training. The Bee Sanctuary embraces the concept of working as a hive. Chávez teamed up with TeenWorks Indianapolis on the construction of the sanctuary. TeenWorks is a six-week summer employment and college readiness program for high school seniors. Along with helping build, TeenWorks young people experienced several educational workshops that focus on ecology, plant biology, landscape design, beekeeping and entrepreneurship. Public programming continues over the next five years related to the Bee Sanctuary.
In Tube Factory’s main gallery, Chávez exhibits Mesa Hive, a multimedia Installation that highlights the process and construction of the Indianapolis Bee Sanctuary. The installation is presented on a large Mylar survival blanket with carefully arranged objects and artifacts created and harvested during the construction process. These objects are juxtaposed with new paintings made by Chávez during the residency. The survival blanket is inspired by Chávez’s Peruvian heritage. It references Mesa, a multicolored bundle containing various sacred objects used for healing in Andean shamanic rituals typically associated with a Huaca, a monument or natural location that represents something revered. The exhibition also includes photo and video documentation of TeenWorks, Chávez, and Big Car artists — led by Elliot Thornton — working on the sanctuary. Documentation includes preparing over 300 hexagon concrete pavers and beekeeping and gardening activities in partnership with Bee Public and Solful Gardens. Mesa Hive is curated by Shauta Marsh.
“I’m inspired by artist Joseph Beuys’ works with bees. He viewed bees as a symbol of society due to the nature of how they live and work together. He was also fascinated by the alchemy of honey production and used honey in many of his works. The collectiveness of the hive is a powerful and natural way of living and working. Working together to transform ideas and space plays a major role in my work. Bees teach me how to work within a group, how to build space as a group, how to transform ideas to make honey, and the alchemy of the studio within an ecosystem. For me bees and humans are the same. We enjoy a lot of the same plants and smells. We need them and they need us. A better environment for the bees is a better environment for humans, and as humans we forget that we are part of an ecosystem. Bees remind me of that, which keeps me grounded and connected.
Over the last five years in St. Louis we’ve been honing our concept and practice of a bee sanctuary and feel we were in a position and had the right partnership to try to take that concept to a different city. We are super excited that Indianapolis and the Tube Factory were an ideal partnership for this project.” – Juan William Chávez
The project is made possible by Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, PNC, Penrod Arts Fair, The Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs, Sun King Brewing and Managed Health Services.
About Chávez
Juan William Chávez is an artist and cultural activist who creates and shares space in the built and natural environments to address community-identified issues. At the heart of Chavez’s practice is his studio research, which includes drawings, films, photographs, craft, labor, architectural interventions, and unconventional forms of beekeeping and agriculture. Chávez utilizes art as a way of researching, developing, and implementing projects of creative placemaking and social engagement. His exhibitions feature his studio research in the form of multimedia installations. Chavez has exhibited his work at venues such as ArtPace, Van Abbemuseum, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, 21c Museum Hotel, Laumeier Sculpture Park and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. His interdisciplinary approach to art has gained the attention and support of prestigious institutions like the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, ArtPlace America and Art Matters Foundation. Chávez holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Danicia Monét: Blue Black
2018-10-05 18:00 - 22:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
A photo exhibition exploring black and brown bodies, the power of touch and the many forms of intimacy.
Danicia Monét is an arts & culture ambassador and urban planner pursuing her PhD on the User-Experience of Race. Her research uses a multidisciplinary approach to examining Black & Brown bodies in public space as she focuses on the context of Race & Space – Growing Critical Cultural Capacity in the Built Environment.
The exhibit runs through October 13 in the Jeremy Efroymson Gallery at Tube Factory, Monday-Friday 9am-6pm Saturdays 11am-3pm.

URBANSCREEN-German Influencers
2018-10-06 20:30 - 23:00 | Athenaeum, 401 East Michigan Street, IN, 46204, United States
In celebration of the Year of German-American Friendship, Bremen-based German artist collective URBANSCREEN will illuminate three iconic buildings in the United States with their light-art, thereby highlighting different aspects of German-American relations.
To celebrate Indianapolis’s strong German-American roots, URBANSCREEN will illuminate The Athenaeum Foundation, Inc. with images of influential German-American personalities-including Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein and Kurt Vonnegut. Uribanscreen’s innovative approach integrates architecture with digital artwork, producing an experience that uniquely evokes the stories and accomplishments of remarkable German-American lives.
About URBANSCREEN
URBANSCREEN is an internationally active design-studio for cross-disciplinary media installations. As early pioneers of projection mapping, we’ve been both witnessing and influencing the development of innovative technology-enhanced communication in the fields of artistic production, brand experience and interior installation for more than 13 years. We work with curators, corporate-clients and agencies and combine a high degree of technical expertise with plenty of enthusiasm and a genuinely open mind. Our creative studio unites professionals from the fields of media art, 3D-design, architecture, cultural studies, sound design and management. With our multi award-winning works, we create unforgettable experiences for audiences all over the globe.
Photo: URBANSCREEN, still from “555 KUBIK, how it would be if a house were a dream.”
Funded by Wunderbar Together and German Federal Foreign Office
Implemented by Goethe-Institut
Supported by BDI – Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie

What It's Like To Be Sarah
2019-01-04 18:00 - 22:00 | Listen Hear, 2620 Shelby St, , Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Sarah Matthews sound experience comes to Listen Hear First Friday in January. This sensual, immersive soundscape is a one-night exhibition that includes sound clips of a woman’s sexual responses during pleasurable intimacy with a partner. Her installation, LUST, invites participants to listen to a positive sexual experience from a woman’s perspective in order to consider the importance of female sexual empowerment in today’s hyper sexualized and heteronormative world.

WQRT Rhinestone Country Film Series-True Stories
2019-03-20 18:45 - 20:30 | Duke’s Indy, 2352 S West St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Music icon David Byrne was inspired by tabloid headlines to make his sole foray into feature-film directing, an ode to the extraordinariness of ordinary American life and a distillation of what was in his own idiosyncratic mind. The Talking Heads front man plays a visitor to Virgil, Texas, who introduces us to the citizens of the town during preparations for its Celebration of Specialness. As shot by cinematographer Ed Lachman, Texas becomes a hyperrealistic late-capitalist landscape of endless vistas, shopping malls, and prefab metal buildings. In True Stories, Byrne uses his songs to stitch together pop iconography, voodoo rituals, and a singular variety show—all in the service of uncovering the rich mysteries that lurk under the surface of everyday experience.
Presented by Upland Brewing Company.

Artists Talk-Osamu James Nakagawa and Conner Green
2019-03-23 16:00 - 18:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Join us for the closing reception of Fences/Imperia and a discussion with Nakagawa and Green.
About the artists:
Osamu James Nakagawa was born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Tokyo. He returned to the United States, moving to Houston, Texas, at the age of 15. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of St. Thomas, Houston in 1986 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Houston in 1993. Currently, Mr. Nakagawa is the Ruth N. Halls Distinguished Professor of Photography at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Integrative Photographic Studies. He lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana.
Nakagawa is a recipient of the 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2010 Higashikawa New Photographer of the Year, and 2015 Sagamihara Photographer of the Year in Japan. Nakagawa’s work has been exhibited internationally, solo exhibitions include: Eclipse, PGI, Tokyo (2018); Kai, sepia EYE, New York (2018); OKINAWA TRILOGY: Osamu James Nakagawa, Kyoto University of Art and Design (2013);GAMA Caves, PGI, Tokyo; Banta: Stained Memory, Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa, Japan (2009); Kai: Osamu James Nakagawa, SEPIA International Inc., New York (2003).
His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; George Eastman Museum; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Sakima Art Museum, Okinawa; The Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Grand Rapid Museum of Art and others. Nakagawa’s monograph GAMA Cavesis available from Akaaka Art Publisher in Tokyo, Japan.
Conner Green (born 1984) is an artist from Indianapolis, IN. He studied art and literature at Indiana University and received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Much of his work combines disciplines, incorporating found sculptural and print-based elements. His work explores concepts of institutional critique, myth, desire, and master narratives. He finds all of these concepts rife for excavation in the consumer-based material world and the built environment. His process allows for a certain degree of chance or disorder to come into play, which he believes enables the phenomenal world to speak for itself.
Made possible by the Arts Council of Indianapolis.

Bauhaus Imaginista - Collected Research
2019-04-05 18:00 - 2019-06-22 15:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Jeremy Efroymson Gallery
“Bauhaus Imaginista” is a major international project that marks the German art school’s 100th anniversary. Operational from 1919 to 1933, Bauhaus is famous for the approach to design that combined high art and industry. This exhibition rethinks the school from a global perspective, and reads its entanglements against a century of geopolitical change.
The exhibition presents the 4 Gegenstande (Objects) in order to communicate the essential elements of bauhaus imaginista.
“The Bauhaus Manifesto” (1919) is shown through a specially commissioned essay film, exploring the hybrid and transnational influences that shaped its conception and the school’s origins. Marcel Breuer’s collage ein Bauhaus film (1927) was reproduced in the Bauhaus Journal No. 1, an edition of the journal will be reprinted and displayed in the gallery as a stacked multiple available for audiences to take away. Paul Klee’s “Carpet” drawing will be shown in reproduction on a study table detailing the artist’s North African journeys. Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s “Reflective Light Game” is shown through a film projection.
Photo: Paul Klee Rug (kilim), (1927); Hans Snoeck Private Collection, New York
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).
Admission is free
VISIT US
Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturday 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Tube is also open until 10 p.m. each First Friday.
Closed Holidays

WQRT Rhinestone Country Film Series- Nine to Five
2019-04-10 18:45 - 21:00 | Duke’s Indy, 2352 S West St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Frank Hart is a pig. He takes advantage of the women who work with him in the grossest manner. When his three assistants managed to trap him in his own house, they assume control of his department and productivity leaps, but just how long can they keep Hart tied up?
Presented by Upland Brewing Co.

99.1 WQRT Noise-A-Thon 2019
2019-04-17 18:00 - 2019-04-18 18:00 | Listen Hear, 2620 Shelby St, , Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
WQRT’s 24 hour Noise – A -Thon is back! Tune in or join in as we celebrate with live experimental music from artists around the city of Indianapolis raising funds to keep WQRT rolling into the future. The phone lines will be open for calls from all committees as well as live interviews from all artists participating. The Noise-A-Thon is intended to showcase all the intriguing experimental artists in our community on the most uniquely weird station.
SCHEDULE OF PERFORMANCES/ ARTIST ANNOUNCED SOON!
http://wqrt.org

Yvette Mayorga-High Maintenance
2019-05-03 18:00 - 2019-08-04 15:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Yvette Mayorga’s multi-media installation High Maintenance is a flamboyantly chilling revelation, offering unsettling insights into how the forces of violence, make-believe, and consumerism infiltrate the contemporary immigrant experience, and subvert our understanding of identity.
Drawing inspiration from the politics of America’s southern border with Mexico, her own life as a first generation Latinx-American, and her parents’ often dangerous experiences as immigrants in the 1970s, Mayorga’s work examines how pain and uncertainty are covered with a veneer of celebration.
High Maintenanceconjures up an absurdist, Rococo Candy Land, where frivolity intersects with fear, as soldiers and ICE agents come face to face with quinceanera cakes, white swans, and Polly Pocket adventure sets.
Every aspect of Mayorga’s built world is adorned with spectacular, rapacious iconography. Monumental fashion accessories and gendered toys interrogate the true meaning of “status,” while decadent, Colonial aesthetics remind us how fragile national identity is, and how frequently it depends on appearances.
Is this a place of joy or fear? Does it welcome us in all our diversity, or demand our assimilation? Like the guileless inhabitants of Mayorga’s thickly impastoed paintings, the second we enter this uncanny, celebratory-looking tableau, we realize we are caught between a nightmare and a dream.
In partnership with Nopal Cultural and University of Indianapolis.
Made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Christ Church Cathedral, The Arts Council of Indianapolis, Managed Health Services – MHS,and Sun King Brewing Company.
Yvette Mayorga lives and works in Chicago. She earned her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. Recent solo exhibitions include the Lubeznik Center for the Arts, EXPO Chicago 2018, The Vincent Price Art Museum, The Chicago Cultural Center, and The National Museum of Mexican Art. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, The Guardian, Art News, and Teen Vogue, among others.

Kader Attia- The Body’s Legacies (Part 1: The Objects)
2019-05-07 19:00 - 21:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Attia’s recent film The Body’s Legacies (Part 1: The Objects) is an extensive account of testimonies by academics, scholars, collectors, and museum directors from Canada, the US, Ivory Coast, and many other locations, relating the histories behind bodies and artifacts from the world over.
This screening is part of the Bauhaus Imaginista: Collected Research exhibition.
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).
Kader Attia (b. 1970, France), grew up in Paris and in Algeria. Preceding his studies at the École Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré and the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and at Escola Massana, Centre d’Art i Disseny in Barcelona, he spent several years in Congo and in South America.
The experience with these different cultures, the histories of which over centuries have been characterised by rich trading traditions, colonialism and multi-ethnic societies, has fostered Kader Attia’s intercultural and interdisciplinary approach of research. For many years, he has been exploring the perspective that societies have on their history, especially as regards experiences of deprivation and suppression, violence and loss, and how this affects the evolving of nations and individuals — each of them being connected to collective memory.
His socio-cultural research has led Kader Attia to the notion of Repair, a concept he has been developing philosophically in his writings and symbolically in his oeuvre as a visual artist. With the principle of Repair being a constant in nature — thus also in humanity —, any system, social institution or cultural tradition can be considered as an infinite process of Repair, which is closely linked to loss and wounds, to recuperation and re-appropriation. Repair reaches far beyond the subject and connects the individual to gender, philosophy, science, and architecture, and also involves it in evolutionary processes in nature, culture, myth and history.
In 2016, Kader Attia founded La Colonie, a space in Paris to share ideas and to provide an agora for vivid discussion. Focussing on decolonialisation not only of peoples but also of knowledge, attitudes and practices, it aspires to de-compartmentalise knowledge by a trans-cultural, trans-disciplinary and trans-generational approach. Driven by the urgency of social and cultural reparations, it aims to reunite which has been shattered, or drift apart.
Kader Attia’s work has been shown in group shows and biennials such as the 12thShanghai Biennial; the 12th Gwangju Biennial; the 12th Manifesta, Palermo; the 57th Venice Biennial; dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel; Met Breuer, New York; Kunsthalle Wien; MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; or The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York — just to name a few. Notable solo exhibitions include “The Museum of Emotion”, The Hayward Gallery, London; “Scars Remind Us that Our Past is Real”, Fundacio Joan Miro, Barcelona; “Roots also grow in concrete”, MacVal in Vitry-sur-Seine; „The Field of Emotion“, The Power Plant, Toronto; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; “Repairing the Invisible”, SMAK, Ghent; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; “Sacrifice and Harmony”, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; “The Injuries are Here”, Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts de Lausanne; “Contre Nature”, Beirut Art Center; “Continuum of Repair: The Light of Jacob’s Ladder”, Whitechapel Gallery, London; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.
In 2016, Kader Attia was awarded with the Marcel Duchamp Prize, followed by the Prize of the Miró Foundation, Barcelona, and the Yanghyun Art Prize, Seoul, in 2017.

Shelley Selim: The Women of Bauhaus Discussion
2019-05-15 18:30 - 20:30 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus art school, join curator Shelley Selim and learn more about the trailblazing women of this famously influential academy. While often overshadowed by their male counterparts, recent renewed interest has brought to light the female students and teachers of the Bauhaus and their incredible contributions to the Modernist movement.
Shelley Selim is Associate Curator of Design and Decorative Arts at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. She provides curatorial oversight of the museum’s design and decorative art collections, as well as its two historic homes—the Lilly House and the Miller House and Garden. Her recent projects include Meadow, an interactive installation by artists Studio Drift now on display at the IMA’s Efroymson Entrance Pavillion, and a reinstallation of the IMA’s Design Gallery—the largest permanent collection gallery devoted to modern and contemporary design of any museum in the country.
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).

Wendelien van Oldenborgh- Two Stones
2019-05-28 19:00 - 21:00 | Listen Hear, 2620 Shelby St, , Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Two Stones explores the trajectories and ideals of the Bauhaus-trained, German architect Lotte Stam-Beese and the Caribbean activist and writer Hermina Huiswoud through dialogues and appearances by contemporary protagonists. Both Stam-Beese and Huiswoud spent time working in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and both ended up being active in the Netherlands after WWII.
Two Stones was filmed in the 1930s constructivist district of KhTZ in Kharkiv, Ukraine, the first large housing project on which Lotte Stam-Beese worked, and in Stam-Beese’s celebrated 1950s Pendrecht, designed during her period as Rotterdam’s main architect / urban planner.
In the 1970s, Hermina Huiswoud was agitating against the Rotterdam housing rule, which limited Caribbean Dutch inhabitants to settle in any of the city’s districts if their presence would exceed 5% of the population.
Resonances as well as dissonances between the distinct trajectories of the two women and their expectation from communist ideology, are sensed through thoughts and experiences of the protagonists, who all have a personal or professional relation to the issues at hand.
This screening is part of the Bauhaus Imaginista: Collected Research exhibition.
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).

Zvi Efrat- The Most Beautiful Campus in Africa
2019-06-04 19:00 - 20:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
A short film that critically illuminates the design by the Israeli architect and former Bauhaus student Arieh Sharon for the University of Ife campus, Ile–Ife, Nigeria, built in 1962 as part of an Israeli assistance program in West-Africa. Zvi Efrat, architect and architectural historian, is a partner in Efrat-Kowalsky Architects (EKA) and was head of the Department of Architecture at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, from 2002 until 2010. He studied at Pratt Institute, at NYU, and at Princeton University. He has taught at several universities, lectured worldwide, published extensively, and curated numerous exhibitions, among them Borderline Disorder at the Israeli Pavilion of the 8th Architectural Biennale, Venice, in 2002, and The Object of Zionism at the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel in 2011. His book, The Israeli Project: Building and Architecture 1948–1973, was published in Hebrew in 2004.
This screening is part of the Bauhaus Imaginista: Collected Research exhibition.
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).
Photo: Keren Kuenberg

Lugao Kasberg: Balay Means Home
2019-06-07 18:00 - 22:00 | Guichelaar Gallery, 1125 Cruft Street, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Curated by Danicia Monét
Lugao Kasberg is a Mangyan-American artist based in New York City. His earliest memories were with family and community speaking his native Hanunó’o-Mangyan tongue in the Philippines. Balay means home in his traditional Hanuó’o language. Growing up in Indianapolis, IN as an indigenous person he experienced the hardships of poverty, depression, and abuse when his parents separated. Through the strength of family, education, entrepreneurship, and the arts he learned the importance of hard work and dedication as he was determined to attain a better life while also helping others.

During high school and college Lugao orchestrated community outreach initiatives which helped hundreds of youth explore, share, and celebrate art. This effort also ignited his love for film, photography, and documentation. As a successful commercial artist in New York City he was involved in creating works for some of the top brands in the world. After feeling creatively drained and unfulfilled in 2018 Lugao decided to reunite with his Mangyan family in the Philippines and live in the village.

He documented his journey through film, photography, and audio recording. Lugao is the first of his eight Mangyan-siblings and mother to return to their ancestral land after leaving for the United States in 1992. He shares the importance of family, community, and the connection to the land. Mangyans are the indigenous people of Mindoro Island in the Philippines. They have inhabited the land for thousands of years by practicing sustainable farming and developed tightly knit communities with their own language, writing systems, and government.

Like many other indigenous people, Mangyans also face issues of discrimination, land rights, and access to resources. As a solution, Lugao is using his platform to create visibility while also helping to grow the culture by developing initiatives for the youth and community through education and the arts. One such initiative is “Rice 4 Kidz”. This endeavor has had an impact by serving over 55,000 hot meals to one thousand Mangyan schoolchildren with the help of rice sponsors, faculty, and international community during the hunger months of August through October. Service being at the core of his work, Lugao aspires to bring positive change to this present generation for future generations.

To learn more about the artist visit
http://www.lugao.co
Instagram: @Lugao.co and @lugaokasberg

Otolith Group- O Horizon
2019-06-11 19:00 - 20:30 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
The title refers to the surface layer of soil, changed in the area around Santiniketan as the result of Tagore’s introduction of new flora in development of the campus. In studying this trajectory, the film extends The Otolith Group’s ongoing consideration of the Anthropocene, a premise that denotes that the current geological age is one wherein human activity spurs the primary changes on climate and the environment. With O Horizon, The Otolith Group also proposes that Tagore’s project maps onto the notion of terraforming—a term originating in science fiction and now more widely used—whereby a party (typically but not always an interloper) reshapes the atmosphere of a place for their own needs.
O Horizon reflects upon modernist theories of dance and song developed by Tagore and the experimental practices of mural, sculpture, painting, and drawing developed by India’s great modernist artists affiliated with Santiniketan: K.G. Subramanyan, Benode Behari Mukherjee, Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij. O Horizon draws together visual arts, dance, song, music, and recital to assemble a structure of feeling of the Tagorean imagination in the 21st Century.
This screening is part of the Bauhaus Imaginista: Collected Research exhibition.
Project partners:
Goethe-Institut, Bauhaus Kooperation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Funded by:
Die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien, Auswärtiges Amt, Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
On the occasion of 100 Jahre bauhaus (100 Years of Bauhaus).

99.1 WQRT Rhinestone Country Film Series-Urban Cowboy
2019-06-26 18:45 - 21:30 | Duke’s Indy, 2352 S West St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
“You a real cowboy?” John Travolta traded disco for a mechanical bull in this adaptation by James Bridges and Aaron Latham of Latham’s article on Western nightlife. Texas country boy Bud (Travolta) moves to Houston to work on an oil rig with his Uncle Bob (Barry Corbin), and he swiftly becomes indoctrinated in the nighttime rituals of drinking, dancing, and showing off cowboy duds at Gilley’s, the enormous local honkytonk. There he meets and marries the sassy Sissy (Debra Winger), but the honeymoon quickly ends when Sissy starts spending too much time learning the men-only skill of mechanical bull-riding from ex-con Wes (Scott Glenn); Bud throws her out and hooks up with slumming Pam (Madolyn Smith). Under the paternal tutelage of Uncle Bob, Bud then learns not only how to master the bull but also what it takes to be a real man rather than just an ersatz cowboy. With a story, cast, and setting that were essentially Saturday Night Fever country-style, Urban Cowboy was poised to be a summer 1980 hit. Although its box office did not live up to Fever’s legacy, Urban Cowboy did spawn a soundtrack album of country-and-western hits and helped spur a Western fashion vogue; people from all regions began sporting cowboy boots, and mechanical bulls started replacing passé disco floors. The first of Travolta’s many comebacks, Urban Cowboy provided the star with a more “manly” image after his Moment by Moment (1978) fiasco, but it was neophyte co-star Winger who got even better notices. With its Western milieu and retro view of relationships, Urban Cowboy stands as a sign of the nascent Reagan era, as ’70s icon Travolta learned bull-riding himself and replaced his white polyester with a black Stetson.” ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
Presented by Upland Brewing Company

Wildstyle Paschall: Culture, Indy HipHop Music
2019-07-05 18:00 - 22:00 | Listen Hear, 2620 Shelby St, , Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Wildstyle Paschall’s multi-media installation “Culture, Indy Hiphop Music”, is a captivating look into the unseen counter culture of America’s most popular music genre centered in the capital of a Midwestern city more known for cornfields, a 500 mile race and various amateur sports. The ever-evolving cultural movement created by people of color exists in Indianapolis, isolated from much of the financial success and mainstream consumerism seen in larger cities.
As a lifelong musician and long time hiphop producer, Paschall is a product of 1980s and 90s hip hop culture. During a time
when hiphop storytelling, music, and culture expanded internationally, he was concerned that even by 2015 significant accounts of the rich culture created in central Indiana was not being archived to shared with outsiders as well as passed down to future generations.
“Culture, Indy Hiphop Music” takes the viewers and puts them on stage with independent hiphop artists performing and creating music to see their passion and dedication to the art through picture and video.

Aurora PhotoCenter at Tube Factory: Keliy Anderson-Staley
2019-07-05 18:00 - 22:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Aurora PhotoCenter officially launches this summer, joining Indianapolis with an inaugural community-focused workshop and exhibition by renowned tintype artist Keliy Anderson-Staley.

This exhibition will be open July 5-19 in the Jeremy Efroymson Gallery.

In June 2019, Anderson-Staley set up her tintype studio at Tube Factory and made 70 tintype portraits over a four-day period. This exhibition showcases portraits made during Anderson-Staley’s visit to Indianapolis, as well as subjects photographed in other American cities from New York to Cleveland to Houston to San Francisco. A selection of historical tintypes from the collection of the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites provide context for the modern portraits and show how the medium shaped our identity as a state and nation from photography’s earliest days.

To make a tintype, a light sensitive collodion emulsion is mixed and poured onto each plate shortly before a portrait is made. Tintypes need long exposure times, so the subject must remain completely still for up to 30 seconds to produce a sharp image. People sitting for tintypes often don’t smile, as it is difficult to hold a smile perfectly still for the length of the exposure.

Unlike the instantaneous digital selfie of today, a tintype portrait is an intimate collaboration between the photographer and the sitter, resulting in a one-of-a-kind portrait and experience. These portraits are rich in atmosphere and detail, emphasizing an often intense and mesmerizing gaze. Anderson-Staley’s beautifully textured tintype portraits use 19th-century technology to depict the wholeness of what “American” means today.

Keliy Anderson-Staley was raised off the grid in Maine, studied photography in New York City, and currently lives and teaches photography at the University of Houston in Texas. Her images are in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art (Maine), and Museum of Fine Arts-Houston. Her work was published in a solo issue of Light Work’s Contact Sheet and has been shown at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, SFO Museum, Akron Art Museum, Bronx Museum of Art, Southeast Museum of Photography and the California Museum of Photography, as well as at a number of non-profit art institutions and galleries around the country. In 2016 she completed a major public commission for the city of Cleveland, producing fifty large-scale portraits for installation in the airport tunnel of the rapid transit line. A book of her portraits, On A Wet Bough, is available from Waltz Books. She is represented by the Catherine Edelman Gallery.

Founded by local artist-photographers, Adam Reynolds, Craig McCormick, and Mary Goodwin, Aurora Photo Center serves as a creative bridge between artists and the greater photographic community with a regional, national, and international perspective. Aurora will be a place where artists meet, create, share work, and find inspiration.
In its first year, Aurora will focus on awareness of photography as a medium for art and social expression. By hosting partnerships and pop-up-style events, Aurora will work to build a community in central Indiana around the medium of photography through exhibits, conversations, and workshops. As Aurora grows and receives non-profit status, it will establish a dedicated gallery space, along with darkroom and studio facilities for both community education and working artists.
“Photography was once a medium permanently documenting history, family, and places. Today it is a momentary medium ruled by innuendo,” says Craig McCormick, Aurora co-founder. “Through Aurora, we hope to explore how photography becomes art in fast and slow times.”
Partnering with Big Car Collaborative in the Garfield Park neighborhood, Aurora’s inaugural event will feature Anderson-Staley’s ongoing tintype portrait series, [hyphen] American. Based out of Houston, TX, Anderson-Staley has spent the past decade travel- ing the country with a portable 19th century tintype studio capturing a typological portrait survey of the human faces that make up today’s America. Her next stop is Indianapolis, where she will be holding a tintype workshop and portrait sessions open to the community, followed by a curated exhibition of her tintype portraits from Indianapolis and beyond.
“Keliy’s project is an open invitation for Indianapolis to come together in a collective portrait of our city,” says Aurora co-founder Mary Goodwin. “It gives us a chance to re-examine what it means to be ‘American’ today.”
[hyphen] American will be on display in the Tube Factory’s Efroymson Gallery July 5-26 with an opening reception on July 5. Keliy Anderson-Staley will be in Indianapolis June 13-16 making tintype portraits. She will host a workshop on tintypes on June 15.

Masters Retrospective II: Social Practice & Placemaking
2019-08-02 18:00 - 22:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
The second cohort in UIndy’s MA in Social Practice Art exhibits their work from the last year in many neighborhoods in Indianapolis and from around the state, including interactive and participatory projects in the gallery.
*Closing Reception: Friday, August 16, 5-7 pm (Remarks at 6)
Gallery is free to attend & open during regular Tube Factory Artspace hours.
Eve Eggleston presents a series of social practice art projects to raise community awareness of the plight of the pollinators. This recent body of work re-purposed refuse in upcycling at Rabble Coffee in Indianapolis. Her current project is using beehives for education about urban agriculture, sustainability, environmentally healthy practices, and pollinator value at IPS 39: William McKinley as part of their Learning Nature Center and at Jason Micheal Thomas’s urban farm, Indy Urban Awareness Gardens. William McKinley hosts a live honeybee hive in their gardens and is a part of a curriculum to understand honeybees and other pollinators. Through working with their Garden Club, ran by several teachers and Keep Indianapolis Beautiful, the hive will provide pollination for their gardens and orchard. This project also included a full day of lectures, demonstrations, and activities for every class to familiarize the students with these issues. Part of this discussion was learning to understand not only the benefits of honeybees, but all pollinators. To address native bee populations, her thesis project expanded to include creating pollinator hotels with the Green Team of Groundwork Indy. These ongoing projects are always looking to expand. Please contact Eggleston with any inquiries or any opportunities.
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Indianapolis artist Kindness AK is shaped by internal and external conflicts that have a tendency to manifest itself physically through the creative arts. Although some people would choose one specific platform to focus in, she is unconsciously drawn to multiple artistic mediums and media. Her many life experiences, ranging from scientific, therapeutic, and artistic, have become embedded tools which she uses to rediscover and accept a more competent, accountable, and positive self-narrative. The M.A. in Social Practice Art program has helped her align her passions by exploring how placemaking can encourage healing-centered engagement through community building and self-reflection. Her exploration is through a series of projects that are based on personal and professional interest. Projects displayed include Transformative conversations, Affirmation mirrors (individual and community), Trafficking, and Lyles Station. These projects all in one way or another narrate how to enhance or identify the already “existing power of resiliency” within the self and/or community to hopefully initiate more access to social justice. Her broader objective is to increase resiliency and empowerment, using art as a tool to promote critical reflection and build a more culturally inclusive lens of social justice and healing.
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Writer and memoirist Sarah J. Wilson has deepened her exploration of Indianapolis’ Eastside neighborhoods through her social practice and placemaking projects. She grew up there and continues to live there. By collecting artifacts and oral history, she has expanded her creative practice in writing and memoir to more directly engage residents on the Eastside and investigate its complicated and enduring history. This summer, she has worked on the Eastside to collect local history and artifacts, especially from youth and the aging population, to create interactive social practice projects to commemorate this history and to celebrate its future.

Jessica Uçul: White: Trash, Washed, Lies
2019-08-02 18:00 - 22:00 | Guichelaar Gallery, 1125 Cruft Street, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
White: Trash, Washed, Lies features work made from the artist’s personal collection of photography and video.

About the artist
Jessica Uçul is an American artist who uses a variety of media, including found and archival imagery and everyday objects to make photographs, collages, videos, and sculpture. Uçul’s work maintains a regard for kitsch as a cultural expression of loss. Born and raised in Franklin, Indiana, Uçul received her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts. She currently lives and works in Indiana.

Cry Salon
2019-08-10 19:00 - 22:00 | Listen Hear, 2620 Shelby St, , Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Featuring readings by Sammi Skolmoski, William Joseph Gass, and Jeremy Kennedy / Soundtracked by John Dawson and Jared Landberg

About Performance:

Sammi Skolmoski, William Joseph Gass, and Jeremy Kennedy will present their contributions to the recently released book “Cry List”, a collection of essays on the topic of crying, along with a variety show other of poetic conversations, and short plays. The soundtrack for the evening will be provided by John Dawson and Jared Landberg.

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Bios:

Sammi Skolmoski is a writer and fiber artist born, living, and probably dying in Chicago. She is the managing editor at Featherproof Books and a contributor at Reductress, the Hard Times, Bandcamp, and elsewhere. Her first book, a translation of several shooting screenplays by the Dardenne brothers from their original French, came out in June.
William Joseph Gass (St. Louis) has worked in the direct patient caregiving industry since 2012. His wordage has been featured in publications including and from Art Papers, Universal Love Upload, and Penny-Ante, among others. He is happily partnered with Dr. Monica Sentmanat and their pets Reagan (MacNeil) and Adele (Bertei).
Since the late 1990’s, Jeremy Kennedy has been creating and exhibiting sound, artwork, and concepts in both community and academic settings. Before moving to Los Angeles in 2009, the largely self-taught artist spent over a decade living and working in Bloomington, Indiana. Kennedy is an active visual artist, writer, and sound-maker, as well as co-founder and playwright with P/Sicho Street Theatre Company, and a founding editor of Rebel Hands Press.
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About: Cry List
Contributors: Chelsea Rector, Jamie Iacoli, Jeremy Kennedy, Sammi Skolmoski, William Gass
Photography: Ang Wilson
Crying is nothing other than itself. Metaphor is a construct that brings crying out of itself… These essays are accounts of crying, and the essay lists are not metaphors. It is a way for the authors to say that these things have takenthem, emotionally, directly. No metaphors. What these essays account is the form of agitation we call crying. From joy to sorrow, the items listed explore the questions, what does it take/what makes us cry?. The lists are a conceptual framework, organizing the otherwise indomitable act of crying.
The essays each list five items that make the authors cry… Unlimited in range, about the tangible or abstract, the essays also ask you, the reader, to think about when you cry. “Cry List” is a collection of insights on opening the hermetically sealed core of crying through connection with another form of expression that appears outside the body. Scored throughout with watery photographic notation, “Cry List” assembles a world of feeling, tangential to objective reality.

Saya Woolfalk: Empathic Cloud Divination
2019-09-06 18:00 - 2020-01-11 15:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
In this new exhibition, New-York-based multi-media artist Saya Woolfalk explores our understanding of the human condition — a state of affairs governed by seemingly unavoidable conflicts such as birth, growth, and death. This show explores how technology has allowed us to ease our suffering by making change less difficult and transformation more enjoyable. Perhaps the ultimate human technological advancement would be the elimination of mortality by extending human life indefinitely in a biological, digital, or other virtual state. Recent advances suggest our species may already be on the cusp of achieving this evolutionary landmark.
Woolfalk’s exhibit at Tube Factory includes her signature installations, sculptures, prints, video art works, and the works of artists who influence her practice. It builds on one of her first projects, No Place (a play on the translation of the word utopia), where she collaborated with filmmaker and anthropologist Rachel Lears. Both then in their mid 20s, they invited people into Woolfalk’s studio to talk about their ideas of utopia and created work from there.
“Similar to the way you would construct a folktale, we took these ideas and we constructed the culture of the NoPlaceans. People would come to the studio, put on costumes and enact the things that they were imagining,” says Woolfalk who created a six-chapter ethnographic film about this future utopian world based on people’s visions.
To explore the conceptual boundaries of this cultural moment, this also led Woolfalk to create a fictional transhuman species known as the Empathics, which she describes as a race of women who are able to alter their genetic make-up and fuse with plants. “If you have a utopia, then how do you actually make that utopia real? I worked with biologists at Tufts University to think about what in nature could occur in order for people to mutate to become more like plants.”
Woolfalk’s Tube Factory installation will extend the story of the Empathics, blending multi-media aesthetic phenomena, spirituality, cultural hybridization, capitalism, technoscience, and artificial intelligence to conjure a broad network of interconnecting philosophical strands. Informed equally by science fiction and anthropology, the morally ambiguous future that the exhibit shares is open to the interpretation of its viewers. “Going from modularity to monumentality is how I approach my practice. I work in ways that are incredibly small and I also work in ways that are incredibly big. The work functions like collage.”
Should we fear the world Woolfalk and other transhumanist artists are mapping? Should we embrace it? Should we shrug it off as a Pollyannic fantasy, doomed by the human idiot factor? Woolfalk seems to be implying a potentially disturbing fourth option: Some of us — particularly those with special status or outlandish means — have already started to transform. Is this art, or a warning shot across the cultural bow of the human race?

About the artist
Woolfalk (b 1979, Japan) is a pioneer within an emergent, international aesthetic movement examining transhumanism — a theoretical belief that humans will mobilize technology to transcend their biological limitations and evolve into a non-human, or “posthuman” race. With each body of work, Woolfalk continues to build the narrative of The Empathics and questions the utopian possibilities of cultural hybridity. She has exhibited at museums, galleries, and alternative spaces throughout Asia, Europe and the United States including solo exhibitions at the Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ (2012); the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA (2014); the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (2014); SCAD Museum, Savannah, GA (2016); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY (2016); Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE (2016); the Mead Museum of Art, Amherst, MA (2017) and group shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA., the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among many others.
“When I started making work it was very important that it was not autobiographical,” says Woolfalk. “The work is not about me at all. The work is about talking to people about their ideas and trying to understand what’s going on in the world then taking that material and adapting it into installation based spaces that people can experience.”
Made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Efroymson Family Fund.
Part of the Social Alchemy Series, this exhibition is in partnership with the New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art.
Image: Saya Woolfalk, Encyclopedia of Cloud Divination, Plate 2, 30”x40”, 2018.

Power Plant Grant Information Session
2021-03-25 18:30 - 21:00
Learn more about the new annual Power Plant Grant program made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts on March 25, 6:30pm, April 1, 6:30pm or April 15, 6:30pm. The grants provide visual artists who live, work, or run spaces in Indianapolis with grants ranging from $2,000 to $10,000. Applications for this round are due by April 26, 2021.
Eligible applicants are visual/multidisciplinary artists who create original work in painting, drawing, sculpture, book art, ceramics, fiber, printmaking, digital/media works, film, video, photography, performance art, sound art, social practice and/or hybrid or interdisciplinary practice of any/all of the above.
Artists must be over 21 at the time of the application, and may not be full-time students.
Artists must live and/or work in Indianapolis.
Employees or board members (or immediate family members of employees or board members) of Big Car Collaborative are not eligible for this opportunity.
Teams, partnerships, and unincorporated individuals running spaces are eligible. Nonprofit organizations are not.

Words & Music-In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
2021-03-31 18:00 - 19:00
In this first installment of Words & Music: An audio series exploring the life and work of Indiana writers, Hoosier authors Susan Neville, Adrian Matejka, Kevin McKelvey, and Jim Walker discuss the sublime beauty and challenges of Indiana through the lens of William H. Gass’s 1968 fiction story, “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.”
The episode features excerpts of the story as well as a conversation about what it means to be a writer living and working in Indiana. This launches an eight-part series made possible by Indiana Humanities and produced by WQRT and Big Car Collaborative.
You can listen live via the streaming link or listen on regular FM radio in Indianapolis by tuning in to 99.1 FM. After it debuts on the station, it will be available for listening online. We’ll share that link here.
About the participants in this show (all Indiana writers):
Susan Neville is the author of six works of creative nonfiction and her collections of short fiction include The Town of Whispering Dolls, winner of the Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction; In the House of Blue Lights, winner of the Richard Sullivan prize; and Invention of Flight, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She teaches at Butler University.
Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. He teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington and served as Poet Laureate of Indiana for 2018-19. He is the author of five award winning books and his first graphic novel, “Last On His Feet” is forthcoming from Liveright in 2022.
Kevin McKelvey is a place-based poet, writer, designer, and social practice artist. He teaches at University of Indianapolis and directs the M.A. in Social Practice Art and oversees the undergraduate major in Environmental Sustainability. At University of Indianapolis, he founded Etchings Press, a student-run publisher, helped start a community garden and microfarm, and has contributed to numerous interdisciplinary efforts for students and the community.
Jim Walker is a poet, artist, and teacher who believes everyone deserves open access to the joys of art, creativity, and great public places. A co-founder and executive director of Big Car Collaborative, Jim worked previously as a journalist (writer, photographer, editor, and designer). He’s a student of cities and enjoys spending time with his family, supporting his Garfield Park neighborhood, walking, biking, travel, reading, and baseball.
