Sketch Club with India Hines
2025-12-12 15:00 - 17:00, 2026-02-27 15:00 - 17:00, 2026-03-13 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Indiana/Indianapolis) | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
If you love sketching and are looking for community, hang out and draw with Big Car long-term artist-in-residence, India Hines. Open to all levels and artists of any kind! Beginners are welcome. Just drop by and draw 🙂

NIGHTJAR: All Open Mic
2025-12-17 18:30 - 21:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Doors at 6:30 pm, Reading at 7 pm
Open Mic Prompt: Bring your best haiku.
Read a poem or short piece that is 317 words maximum, and challenge yourself to share new work!
—
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.

January 2026 First Friday at Tube Factory on the the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) Campus
2026-01-02 18:00 - 22:00 | Contempory Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Come join us for First Friday festivities on Jan. 2 from 6 to 10 p.m. at the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) campus!
Continuing exhibits in the Tube Factory building include:

Amy Kligman’s Shrines of the Luminous Halo in the Main Gallery
Selected Works by Ilana Harris-Babou in the Video Gallery

Of note, January is the last month to see Shrines of the Luminous Halo and Harris-Babou’s selected works!
And, come check out our CAMi expansion!
As always, enjoy coffee, Sun King beer, and wine available for purchase from Normal Coffee.

NIGHTJAR: Kristine Esser Slentz
2026-01-14 18:30 - 21:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Doors at 6:30 pm, Reading at 7 pm
Featured Poet: Kristine Esser Slentz
Open mic prompt: Write a poem on how technology affects a close relationship.
Read a poem or short piece that is 317 words maximum, and challenge yourself to share new work!
—
About the Featured Poet:
Kristine Esser Slentz is a queer writer of Maltese descent, raised in the Chicagoland area. A cult escapee and GED holder, she is the author of EXHIBIT: an amended woman, depose (FlowerSong Press, 2021, 2024) and the forthcoming collection face-to-faces (ThirtyWest Publishing House, 2026). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saturday Evening Post, TriQuarterly, Five Points, TEDx, and elsewhere. Kristine is the co-founder, organizer, and host of Adverse Abstraction, a monthly experimental artist series in New York City’s East Village. She also produces and performs in Verse & Vision, a stage production currently in a micro-residency at NYC’s Dada and headed for an upcoming run at the IndyFringe Festival. Follow her art on Substack at Carnations & Car Crashes.
—
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 (this month is an exception, as it’s on the second Wednesday), C.S. Carrier and Michelle Niemann host a reading and invite audience members to share their own poetic responses.

Sketch Club with India Hines
2026-01-16 15:00 - 17:00 | Contempory Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States

Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) Storefronts & Studios Open House
2026-01-24 13:00 - 15:00 | Contempory Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Are you an artist, designer, or creative entrepreneur looking for a community where you can make, share, and grow your work? The Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) is now accepting applications for studio and storefront spaces in our new building opening May 2026 on Indianapolis’s near south side.
To help prospective applicants learn more, we’re hosting an open house where you can tour the spaces, ask questions, and explore what it means to be part of the CAMi campus.
Open House Details:
Saturday, Jan. 24
1–3 p.m.
Starting location: Tube building (1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN 46203)
Staff will be available to provide direction, share information about available spaces, and answer questions about the application and selection process.

Pavlina Vagioni: AVÁSIMO (BASELESS)
2026-02-06 08:00 - 2026-03-18 15:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Friday, Feb. 6 – Wednesday, March 18, 2026 | Tube Video Gallery

Stock market data from the 2008 financial collapse — Dow Jones, Nikkei, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 — is translated into a musical score. An electronic female voice, processed through vocoder, follows the score with precision. The voice is feminine, like the voices designed to assist us, to serve, to comply. When algorithms are built to help, they are so often given women’s voices. The system speaks through the voice it expects obedience from. A human voice enters, not in obedience but in lament. It responds to the data, departs from it, grieves what the numbers cannot feel. It exists within the system while refusing to be ruled by it. The video displays symbols from the Phaistos Disc, an undeciphered Minoan script possibly from a matriarchal Bronze Age society, now scrolling in the format of a stock ticker: ancient mystery conscripted into capitalism’s visual language. Beneath the voices, a sustained drone sounds: the ison of Byzantine chant tradition, a single fixed pitch that served as tonal anchor for sacred music. Here it becomes the cost basis, the entry point, the fixed reference against which all market movement is measured, the illusion of stable ground in a system without foundation. Matriarchal symbols forced into patriarchal economic display. Female robot voice obeying the algorithmic score. Human female voice refusing, responding, lamenting. The drone continues beneath it all, as cost basis always does, indifferent to what rises or falls above it. At the close, the human voice fades; the machine inherits its tremor. Nothing holds still. Avásimo: without basis. The ground was never there.

2026, Single channel audio & video animationAudio duration: 3’17”
Concept, Artistic Direction: Pavlina VagioniOriginal Score: Audra Verona LambertArrangement & Transcription: Pavlina VagioniVocoder & Electronic Processing: Vangelis YalamasVocals: Pavlina VagioniMixing: Vangelis YalamasVideo Animation: Tasos Tsiaboulas

About the Artist: Pavlina Vagioni is a Greek-born interdisciplinary artist based in Houston, TX, whose work spans sculpture, painting, sound, and digital art. She has exhibited at notable venues across the US and Europe, including the Byzantine Museum, Hellenic American Union, Kappatos Gallery (Athens), TANK Space, Lawndale Art Center (Houston), Carillon Gallery (Fort Worth), and Opening Gallery (New York). Vagioni completed a residency at the School of Visual Arts and created a public art project at Houston’s ION Building. Her work is recognized internationally and held in multiple private and public collections, including the MOMus–Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki, Greece).

February 2026 First Friday at the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi)
2026-02-06 18:00 - 22:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Join us at the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) (formerly known as Tube Factory) campus on Feb. 6 from 6-10 p.m. for First Friday!
We have three new exhibits opening:

Blue Blood: Félix Labisse’s Goddesses, Demons, and the Space Between in the Tube Main gallery
Pavlina Vagioni: AVÁSIMO (BASELESS) in the Tube Video gallery
Stephanie Williams: Common Matter in Guichelaar Gallery

Artists and small businesses are welcome to join guided tours of our expansion to explore the storefronts and studios. (Applications for the spaces are due on Friday, Feb. 13 and can be submitted at camindy.org/opportunities.)
Also enjoy Sun King beer, wine, and coffee available for purchase from Normal Coffee.

Stephanie Williams: Common Matter
2026-02-06 18:00 - 2026-02-18 15:00 | Contempory Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Guichelaar Gallery | Feb. 6 – 18, 2026
Stephanie Williams’ exhibition Common Matter brings together ceramic wall sculpture and framed photography to trace the repeating structures that appear across nature and human design. The show includes modular ceramic forms that shift between geometric and organic designs, alongside photographs which explore cosmic patterns at the microscopic level. Across mediums, the work invites viewers to look closely at how familiar patterns emerge at different scales, from crystalline structures to engineered surfaces.
Williams explores the idea that the universe is built from recurring visual and mathematical “rules” that show up in both organic building blocks and artificial systems. The work considers proportion and measurement as a universal expression of those “rules” (including spiral and growth patterns associated with the Fibonacci sequence) and asks how the macro and the micro mirror one another.
This body of work is informed by diverse influences, from historical cosmologists such as Johannes Kepler to Williams’ daily encounters with the patterns embedded in the world around her. Over time, she has become increasingly interested in how micro-patterns replicate themselves in both large and miniature form, and how humans often echo these same micro-patterns in their design, technology, and impulse to create.
Williams’ studio practice is rooted in ceramics, using a combination of throwing, handbuilding, and slipcasting. The photographic work extends the investigation of her exhibition’s thematic concepts through digital microscopic imagery and black-and-white analogue film.
Ultimately, Common Matter asks viewers to reflect on their existence within the universe and their relationship to it at a fundamental structural level. In the spirit of Carl Sagan’s observation that humanity is “a way for the universe to know itself,” the work suggests that the patterns we notice (and the ones we recreate) are not separate from us, but part of what we are.
About the artist
Stephanie Williams is an Indianapolis-based artist in Big Car Collaborative’s CAMi Long-Term Artist Residency program. She graduated from the Herron School of Art and Design in 2019 and has exhibited in a variety of spaces and galleries across Indiana. Williams has worked at American Art and Clay Company (AMACO) going on ten years.

Blue Blood: Félix Labisse's Goddesses, Demons, and the Space Between
2026-02-06 18:00 - 2026-03-15 15:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Friday, Feb. 6 – Sunday, March 15 | Tube Main Gallery
French Surrealist Félix Labisse created something strange starting in the 1960s: a universe where women pilot impossible machines through realms that don’t follow normal physics. His iconic blue women — the “Selenides” — are warrior goddesses. And they’re navigating more than space. They move through desire, mythology, and what might be parallel dimensions of time.
On the south wall of the gallery are three pieces from Labisse’s Selenide series: La Femme avec un couteau (The Woman with a Knife), La Reine de Saba (The Queen of Sheba), and Judith, referencing the stories and myths behind each warrior.
On the east and west walls are 16 prints from his Histoire naturelle series (1944)—hybrid creatures blending human, animal, and vegetable forms, each with Labisse’s own descriptive poems. These fantastical beings prefigure his later libidoscaphes (1962), desire-vessels that merge spacecraft with sexual organs and mythological beasts, navigating inner realms of “inadmissible desires masked by propriety.”
Part Jules Verne, part surrealist fever dream, part absurdist comedy, Labisse uses consciousness itself as a vehicle for traveling through forbidden dimensions where eroticism could actually warp reality. The nudity of Labisse’s female subjects is an armor. These women are preparing — for ceremonies, for magic, for battle. Their landscapes exist nowhere and everywhere at once: moon, ocean, future city, ancient temple. Set in mythic space, the women are real–piloting libidoscapes, navigating time, and fighting wars. Labisse enables us to see them through our own myths and knowledge of history. And imagine that perhaps because we see them, they are real. Imagine they are waiting, blue-skinned and patient, for the rest of us to catch up.
Labisse connected to science fiction, painting and drawing what he imagined. But in his work can be found an idea more radical—that artists might actually access non-linear temporal streams, tapping into futures and parallel timelines.
About the Artist
Félix Labisse (1905-1982) was a painter, illustrator, and theater designer who transformed mythology into what he called a “personal demonology.” Born in Northern France, he spent his early years in Douai and later Ostend, Belgium, where he met his mentor James Ensor while studying at the École de Pêche.
His childhood shaped everything: the Gayant carnival with its giant mannequins, living through WWI occupation from ages 9-13, and obsessively reading 19th-century science fiction. By 1933 he’d moved to Paris, where he quickly made a name designing theater sets (for Jean-Louis Barrault and later Jean-Paul Sartre) while painting and befriending other Surrealists—Robert Desnos, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux. But Labisse never quite fit André Breton’s official Surrealist movement. He was doing his own thing: Flemish Expressionism meets occult symbolism meets erotic mythology. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1966 and kept working until he died in 1982.
—-Curator Shauta Marsh
Research assistance: Louise Martin
Part one of a four part exhibition series on the artist.

NIGHTJAR: Kenn Hunn
2026-02-18 18:30 - 21:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Doors at 6:30 pm, Reading at 7 pm
Featured Poet: Kenn Hunn
Open mic prompt: Write an ode or elegy to something absurd.
Read a poem or short piece that is 317 words maximum, and challenge yourself to share new work!
—
About the Featured Poet:
Kenn Hunn recently earned their MFA in poetry at Butler University. They are chronically online (but in a fun way), a habitual Midwesterner exploring identity, pop culture, and their latest hyperfixation.
—
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.

Lunar New Year Celebration: Fire Horse
2026-02-21 18:00 - 21:30 | Contempory Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Welcome the Year of the Fire Horse with us and the Indianapolis Chinese Performing Arts (ICPAI) at our annual Lunar New Year celebration!
Enjoy vibrant traditional dance performances by ICPAI and take part in hands-on activities throughout the night, including fireworks, paper cutting, lantern decorating, fan painting, and bracelet making. Food will be available for purchase from the Hachi Machi Asian food truck.
Tickets are $14.64 apiece and can be purchased via Eventbrite.
Schedule of Events:

Activities: 6 – 9:30 p.m.
ICPAI Performances: 7 – 8 p.m.
Fireworks: 9 p.m.

About Lunar New Year:
Lunar New Year is one of the most important celebrations of the year among East and Southeast Asian cultures, including Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean communities. Unlike the single-day Gregorian New Year, this holiday is traditionally celebrated over multiple days.
In 2026, Lunar New Year begins on February 17. Known as the Spring Festival (Chūnjié) in China, Seollal in Korea, and Tết in Vietnam, the holiday is tied to the lunar calendar. It originated as a time for feasting and honoring deities and ancestors.
Image: Julie Xiao, Fire Horse (2025)

March 2026 First Friday at the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi)
2026-03-06 18:00 - 22:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Join us at the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) (formerly known as Tube Factory) campus on March 6 from 6-10 p.m. for First Friday!
We have one new exhibit opening:

Crossroads in Guichelaar Gallery (curated by CAMi long-term artist resident India Hines)

And we have two exhibits continuing:

Blue Blood: Félix Labisse’s Goddesses, Demons, and the Space Between in the Tube Main gallery
Pavlina Vagioni: AVÁSIMO (BASELESS) in the Tube Video gallery

Food will be available for purchase from the Frank N Steam hot dog cart. Rob Funkhouser and Clockwork Janz’s 2024 Creative Risk project, Frank N Steam — a calliope funded by the Herbert Simon Family Foundation — makes it’s Maiden Voyage March First Friday at CAMi. A true culinary and artistic delight, Frank N Steam offers $5 Hot Dogs, $7 Coney Dogs, and free a soundscape.
Also enjoy Sun King beer, wine, and coffee available for purchase from Normal Coffee.

Crossroads
2026-03-06 18:00 - 2026-04-19 15:00 | Guichelaar Gallery, 1125 Cruft Street, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Guichelaar Gallery at CAMi
Indiana is known as the “Crossroads of America.” Curator India Hines selected 18 artists whose work explores Indianapolis and Indiana as intersections of place, culture, and identity. Through their work Hines highlights the complex dimensions of life here through artists’ relations to local histories, community spaces, inner landscapes, and the city’s influence on their lived experiences.
Ava Tankersley
Bri Powell
Cameron Omega
Fernando Casanova (Fernando)
Jesús Andrade Mares
Joshua Mark Phillippe
KC Coverdale (KC)
Sophie Sturgeon
Kionne Bybee,
Kipp Coverdale
Kyle Bob Morgan
Sofia Casanova
Matt Fertig
Mazzy Booth
Tristan Roy
Robert Bentley (Hanz One)
Neil Cain (Neil Clifton Cain)
Sunshine Gambill (Sunshine Ray)
Quintin Griffin
Curator – India Hines
India Hines is part of the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMI) Long Term Artist Residency. Self-taught, their work is rooted in intuition, spirituality, and the subconscious, treating art as a transformative experience rather than purely an aesthetic object.
Working across ink, gouache, watercolor, oil, and mural, India creates figurative forms and organic shapes that feel both dreamlike and ancestral. Their process is deeply meditative and often begins without a fixed plan, allowing emotion, memory, and spiritual guidance to lead the work. Through this intuitive approach, their art explores balance, lineage, and the unseen forces that shape identity.
This exhibition was made possible by the Indy Arts Council and the City of Indianapolis.
Image: Cameron Omega, I won’t forget, I remember, Acrylic on Canvas, 24×36, 2025.

www . RachelOrmont . com Film Screening
2026-03-12 20:00 - 22:30 | Contempory Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Join us at CAMi for a special free screening of Peter Vack’s film www.RachelOrmont.com on Thursday, March 12 from 8 to 10:30 p.m.
The film is an unflinching psychedelic techno-satire about a woman who unknowingly grows up in captivity working for an advertising agency, starring Betsey Brown (Assholes, The Sweet East), Dasha Nekrasova (Succession, The Beast, Materialists), and Chloe Cherry (Euphoria).
“Boasting a daring lead performance and a wicked sense of humor, this satirical sci-fi comedy delves into themes of performance, digital existence, consumer culture, and contemporary sexuality, offering a provocative and unsettling reflection of our hyper-connected society.” — BLEEDING EDGE
“A filthy and absurd midnight movie determined to fry brains and flip stomachs; a film so terminally online that even the milder scenes would, as the kids say, “kill a Victorian child.” — Pop Matters

Content Warning: This film contains graphic sexual content and nudity. This screening is 21+ only.

Run Time: 120 min.

NIGHTJAR: Auboni
2026-03-18 06:30 - 21:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Doors at 6:30 pm, Reading at 7 pm
Featured Poet: Auboni
Open mic prompt: Write a poem that describes the world you want to live in.

Read a poem or short piece that is 317 words maximum, and challenge yourself to share new work!
—
About the Featured Poet: Auboni Essence is adaptable and agile but above all, Auboni is authentic. Auboni is the difference between writing about sadness and having the scars that show she lived through it. She’s the difference between pondering joy and her cheeks being sore from smiling. From performing in quaint, cozy rooms to dazzling stages, every platform turns into Polaris because she’s always headed north and the mic is forever warm. They love music. You can catch Auboni out dancing until their feet get weary, singing until their voice is hoarse or wringing their hands stained with ink from the last writing session. They never have to find the right thing to say because the truth doesn’t care who tells it.
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.

April 2026 First Friday at the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi)
2026-04-03 18:00 - 22:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Join us at the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) (formerly known as Tube Factory) campus on April 3 from 6-10 p.m. for First Friday!
We have two new exhibits opening:

Cory Robinson: Kept Secrets : Open Code in the Tube Main Gallery
Tony Cokes: Untitled (m.j. the symptom) in the Tube Video Gallery

And we have one exhibit continuing:

Crossroads in Guichelaar Gallery (curated by CAMi long-term artist resident India Hines)

Food will be available for purchase from the Thai Out food truck.
Also enjoy Sun King beer, wine, and coffee available for purchase from Normal Coffee.

Cory Robinson: Kept Secrets : Open Code
2026-04-03 18:00 - 2026-09-13 17:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
TUBE GALLERY at CAMi | APRIL 3 – SEPT. 13
CAMi is open Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekends. We are closed on Monday and Tuesday.

In this exhibition, designer Cory Robinson builds upon his CODEX series, which employs a system of form typologies in varying combinations to generate unique compositions in both two- and three-dimensional works. Kept Secrets: Open Code uses this preordained design language to explore layered personal histories through recontextualized objects. The gallery is organized around three distinct spatial environments: the Church, the Court, and the Garten.
The Church features five large, tufted rugs installed in a continuous curved sequence, evoking the apse of a cathedral. Produced in collaboration with a software-driven production partner, the designs translate the flat graphic language of the CODEX Series into textile compositions—digitally precise in conception yet softened and humanized in their yarn-rendered finish. The space engages the mystery and contemplative atmosphere associated with liturgical environments, using the unlikely medium of tufted yarn to construct images meant for quiet reflection. Robinson, who grew up in a rural, working-class community in central Indiana, was not raised religious and felt this positioned him as an outsider. Over time he has come to redefine his personal meaning of “church,” and here considers the work of Light and Space artists such as James Turrell, who—often inspired by sacred architecture—manipulates environments to alter perception and elicit the divine.
The Court presents two exaggerated, throne-like chairs flanking the entrance to the Church. Their conceptual origins lie in the artist’s complicated relationship with the American justice system—specifically, a teenage courtroom experience in which he was publicly dismissed by a judge as a “smartass kid.” That moment destabilized his faith in law and order as neutral principles, and the installation explores the symbolism of thrones in relation to justice and power. The thrones incorporate multiple historical and cultural references: the ball-and-claw carving tradition of 18th-century Philadelphia furniture, the golden throne of Tutankhamun, and notably, tattoo subcultures, in which Robinson has observed phrases and ornamentation that reflect adherence to particular codes of law and order. The armrests terminate in carved wooden knuckles engraved with the phrases Open Eyes and Slow Burn — references to surveillance culture and a public increasingly desensitized to crisis. Together the thrones ask: who defines the law, who benefits from it, and how are its symbols constructed and maintained?
The Garten is the most personal and quietest of the three environments. A grouped installation of sculptural lighting objects made from salvaged redwood, it is rooted in the artist’s lifelong affinity for plants and their coded visual languages. As a child, the “garden” for Robinson was the expansive acreage of genetically modified corn that surrounded his home. His affinity for cultivating plants developed as a hobby throughout adolescence and adulthood, and his studio practice grew to consider biomimetic design and how leaf shapes, branching patterns, and other forms repeat and vary across species. Robinson’s decision to work with redwood was galvanized during a visit to his grandfather’s home in the early 2020s, where he discovered a pile of redwood boards in the garage—remnants of a long-abandoned home improvement project. While he had previously avoided the material for its softness, it suddenly acquired new sentimental value. Warm and organic in contrast to the Court’s gold-leafed authority, the Garten asks gentler questions—how do leaf shapes create beauty in functional objects, and how do objects speak to one another the way plants animate a living space?
—Shelley Selim
About the Artist: Cory Robinson is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer whose practice navigates the intersection of fine art, functional design, and public engagement. With a career spanning over two decades, Robinson’s work is characterized by a relentless curiosity regarding materials, manufacturing processes, and the narrative potential of objects.
Curator: Shauta Marsh with support from Shelley Selim, Mort Harris Curator of Automotive, Industrial, and Decorative Design, Detroit Institute of Arts
This exhibition was made possible by The Efroymson Family Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation, The Arts Council of Indianapolis and the City of Indianapolis.

Tony Cokes: Untitled (m.j. the symptom)
2026-04-03 18:00 - 2026-09-13 17:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
TUBE VIDEO GALLERY at CAMi | APRIL 3 – SEPT. 13
CAMi is open Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekends. We are closed on Monday and Tuesday.
Borrowing its text from assorted excerpts from the Mark Fisher-edited essay collection The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (2009), Untitled (m.j. the symptom) examines the King of Pop as a complex set of contradictory signifiers, a funhouse reflection that is as distinct, spectacular, and compromised as the culture that produced him. So say Kraftwerk in their haunting 1977 song “Hall of Mirrors”: “Even the greatest stars / find themselves in the looking glass.”
About the Artist
Tony Cokes makes politically resonant works in a visual language all his own. Since the 1980s, his work has surfaced the latent ideologies of popular culture, confronting issues of structural racism, power, visibility, and the defiant pleasures still found under capitalism. Cokes samples and remixes fragments of our media landscape to subvert its governing codes. His tightly choreographed video essays layer found text over vibrant colors and dissonant soundtracks, exploiting the gaps between sensory regimes to heighten and complicate the reading experience. Quoted passages from current events or critical theory take on a new tenor when set to music, resulting in propulsive animations that appeal to the mind and body alike. Cokes’s immersive works make text feel visceral and let rhythm spur new insight: as his art attests, “it is possible to dance and think at the same time.”

2026 Levitt VIBE Indianapolis Music Series: April Concert
2026-04-12 12:00 - 15:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Big Car Collaborative and Arte Mexicano en Indiana are excited to present the third season of the Levitt VIBE Indianapolis Music Series, part of the national Levitt VIBE program supported by the Los-Angeles-based Levitt Family Foundation! This year, we’ll continue bringing FREE, family-friendly live concerts to the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) campus.
When: Noon to 3 p.m. on April 12 (AND May 3, June 7, July 12, Aug. 9, Sept. 13, Oct. 11, and Nov. 8)
Where: Outdoors on the CAMi campus in the Terri Sisson Park greenspace located at 1125 Cruft St. Concerts will be moved inside the Tube building in the case of bad weather (rain, storms, extreme heat). We’ll announce this change on the morning of the concert. But the shows will always happen — just outside or in.
Who: Big Car Collaborative and Arte Mexicano en Indiana produce the 2026 series with the Levitt Family Foundation. Made possible by additional support from Jungclaus-Campbell, Efroymson Family Fund, Eskenazi Health, and Lumina Foundation.
Why: To bring additional liveliness to our neighborhood with free outdoor music experiences and fun, and creative social gatherings.
April 12’s lineup:

81355 (BLESS)
Kenyettá Dance Company
Iván Maceda
Food truck: That Vegan Joint (vegan comfort and Mexican food)

And:

Open picnicking (people can bring their own food and drink)
Some provided seating (attendees encouraged to bring lawn chairs or blankets)
CAMi campus galleries open
Bean Creek Outlook and Terri Sisson Park nature spaces open

Special thanks to Levitt Family Foundation, Jungclaus-Campbell, Efroymson Family Fund, Eskenazi Health, and Lumina Foundation for their generous support of the 2026 Levitt VIBE Indianapolis Music Series! And, thank you to Girls Rock! Indianapolis for their role as a promotional partner!
Learn more about Levitt VIBE Indianapolis at bigcar.org/vibe.
The Levitt VIBE Indianapolis Music Series is supported in part by the Levitt Family Foundation, which partners with changemakers and nonprofits across the country to activate underused outdoor spaces through the power of free, live music — bringing people together, fostering belonging, and invigorating community life. Presenting high- caliber talent and a broad array of music genres and cultural programming, Levitt concerts are welcoming and inclusive destinations where people of all ages and backgrounds come together.

NIGHTJAR: Michael LL Collins
2026-04-15 18:30 - 21:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Doors at 6:30 p.m., Reading at 7 p.m.
Featured Poet: Michael LL Collins
Open mic prompt: Write a poem (maybe a haiku or series of haikus) that makes music come to life
Read a poem or short piece that is 317 words maximum, and challenge yourself to share new work!
—
About the Featured Poet:
Michael LL Collins is an Indianapolis-based poet, writer, and literary critic. He was a close friend and protege of Etheridge Knight and one of the last participants of Knight’s Free Peoples Poetry Workshop at the Chatterbox. Michael has written several chapbooks of haiku inspired by Etheridge Knight and co-hosts Sometimes Y, a monthly poetry open mic at the Chatterbox, with Mat Davis.

Sketch Club with India Hines
2026-04-24 15:00 - 17:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
If you love sketching and are looking for community, hang out and draw with CAMi long-term artist-in-residence, India Hines. Open to all levels and artists of any kind! Beginners are welcome. Just drop by and draw 🙂

CAMi Grand Opening Weekend Day 1: First Friday
2026-05-01 18:00 - 22:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Friday, May 1 | First Friday + Public Opening Day | 6-10 p.m.
Join us for the first day of the CAMi grand opening weekend!
Visitors will be able to socialize, meet exhibiting artists, and check out inaugural shows in our six gallery spaces that total more than 10,000 square feet in the new building.
Campus exhibits will include:

Ivelisse Jiménez’s Campo de Resonancia in the Efroymson Gallery

Jess Dunn & Sylvia Thomas’ Drafts in the Katharine B. Sutphin Media Gallery

You’re Standing Inside the Instrument: A Score for 19 Buildings in the Listen Hear Gallery

Will Higgins’ The Speedway’s Attic in the Research Gallery

Mae Alice Engron in Guichelaar Gallery

Cory Robinson’s Kept Secrets : Open Code in the Tube Gallery

Tony Cokes’ Untitled (m.j. the symptom) in the Tube Video Gallery

O.P.T.I.O.N.A.L. Office of Provisional Thinking, Indeterminate Outcomes, Nonessential Activities, and Life — a conceptual art office where visitors are encouraged to get creative

From the Collection Of…. an exhibit highlighting work in the collections of some of the folks who helped make CAMi possible

On First Friday visitors will be able to grab dinner from Chef Dan’s Cajun and Southern cooking food truck, and buy wine, beer, or coffee from our bar and cafe in CAMi, Stall, and Normal Coffee.

Thank you to our opening week presenting sponsors Herbert Simon Family Foundation, Central Indiana Community Foundation, and 12 Stars Media; signature sponsor Glick Philanthropies; and supporting sponsors, Cunningham Restaurant Group, Sun King Brewing, MIBOR REALTOR Association, Indianapolis Airport Authority, Levitt Family Foundation, and Agile CFO Solutions!

Mae Alice Engron
2026-05-01 18:00 - 2026-07-19 17:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
GUICHELAAR GALLERY | MAY 1 – JULY 19
CAMi is open Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekends. We are closed on Monday and Tuesday.

Born in Indianapolis, Mae Alice Engron (1942–2007) was a pioneering Black abstract expressionist. A Herron School of Art alumna, she turned to painting at age 40 after a workplace injury. Known for her “controlled drip” technique using poured ink and oil, she blended organic forms with vibrant Neo-Expressionism.
Engron broke barriers for Black women in pure abstraction, exhibiting alongside icons like Robert Indiana and Alma Thomas. Her work was featured in groundbreaking shows from Indianapolis to Los Angeles, cementing her legacy as a seminal visionary. Today, her paintings are held by the Smithsonian and the Indiana State Museum.
This exhibit features lesser known works purchased in the last two years at auction and is in partnership with Engron’s daughter, Michelle Daniel.

Will Higgins: The Speedway's Attic
2026-05-01 18:00 - 2026-08-16 17:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
RESEARCH GALLERY | MAY 1 – AUGUST 16
CAMi is open Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekends. We are closed on Monday and Tuesday.
Every city has an official version of itself. Indianapolis has the Indianapolis Motor Speedway — monument, mythology, Greatest Spectacle in Racing.
This is not that. The Speedway’s Attic is unofficial. It is unsanctioned. The stories here are hard to believe. But believe them. They are true, all of them.
Drawing on original research into newspaper archives, oral histories, and the margins of the official record, Will Higgins, an award-winning journalist, assembles the stories that didn’t make the monument: the “hillbilly machine gunner” who charged race fans 25 cents to see Mrs. Adolph Hitler’s underpants; the French race driver who drank six pints of wine mid-race — and won; the race fan who mooned fifty thousand people and then personally delivered the photographic evidence on his paper route the next morning.
The Speedway’s Attic brings this research into physical form through objects, photographs, illustration, and text. The result is less a sports history than a portrait of American appetite — for speed, spectacle, and spectacle’s underbelly. These stories are funny, and some are damning, and a few are quietly moving. Together they map what a city chooses to remember, what it lets fade, and what keeps surfacing anyway.
About the artist
Will Higgins (b. 1956) was first a history major then a tennis pro then repo man. Later, as a journalist, he covered KKK rallies in the rural Midwest, war in Iraq, a terrible run of homicides in Gary, Ind. but also things like a woman finding on her back stoop what she believed (wrongly, it turned out) was a two-headed ant and contemplating how best to monetize it. Higgins is the founder of the Museum of Fabulosity, the American Association of Linear Bocce and the American Society of Presidential Urine Collectors.
Photo: Casey Cronin, Speedway’s Attic, 2026.

You're Standing Inside the Instrument: A Score for 19 Buildings
2026-05-01 18:00 - 2026-09-13 17:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
LISTEN HEAR GALLERY | MAY 1 – SEPTEMBER 13
CAMi is open Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekends. We are closed on Monday and Tuesday.
More than 20 architects, designers, and other experts in the built environment suggested their favorite buildings in Indianapolis that we then paired with Indianapolis-based artists. The artists then played some aspect or aspects of the buildings as sort of instruments to create a part of a combined soundscape or a sort of song.
Eight of these audio creations will play at once in the Listen Hear gallery inside CAMi, a space typically dedicated to sound-based art exhibits. All 19 audio pieces will rotate at different times, creating a soundscape that varies throughout the run of the show. The audio pieces are all paired with static videos of the exteriors of the buildings by Jim Walker.
The 19 buildings are: Newfields, the Athenaeum, the Indiana State Capitol, Friedens United Church of Christ, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Irwin Library at Butler University, the IU Indianapolis University Library, Indianapolis International Airport, Christian Theological Seminary, Garfield Park Conservatory, the Indianapolis Artsgarden, the Pyramids, the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, Madame Walker Theatre, Barton Tower Apartments, Crispus Attucks High School, Indianapolis City Market, Jungclaus Mill, and the new CAMi Main Building.
Curator: Jim Walker with support from Landon Caldwell
Artists:
Oreo Jones (Walker Theatre)
Rob Funkhouser (City Market)
Landon Caldwell & Mark Tester (Jungclaus Mill)
Aaron Coleman (Crispus Attucks )
Laurel Judkins and Craig VonDeylen (Irwin Library )
Sofi Parker (Newfields)
Regan Wakeman (Athenaeum)
Carrington Clinton (Indianapolis Artsgarden)
Mina Keohane (Indiana State Capitol)
Rachel Leigh (Friedens United Church of Christ)
April Knauber (Indianapolis Motor Speedway)
Jim Walker (CAMi Main)
Bree Flannelly (IU Indianapolis Library)
Jordan Munson (Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument)
Charlie Redd (CTS)
Clockwork Janz (Garfield Park Conservatory)
John Flannelly (Pyramids)
Sharlene Birdsong (Indianapolis International Airport)
Andy Fry, Devon Ashley & Vess Ruhtenberg (Barton Tower)

Jess Dunn & Sylvia Thomas: Drafts
2026-05-01 18:00 - 2026-10-18 17:00 | Contempory Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
KATHARINE B. SUTPHIN MEDIA GALLERY | MAY 1 – OCT. 18
CAMi is open Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekends. We are closed on Monday and Tuesday.

For their first collaboration, Jess Dunn and Sylvia Thomas were prompted to create a piece focusing on the new renovation for the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) campus. In an attempt to interpret history and the building itself, the artists combined their backgrounds in animation and music composition to create an experimental documentary. Through exploring archives, primary source documents, and artifacts found inside the building, the artists learned this site took on many forms: from the land of the indigenous peoples who first inhabited it, to farmland, to various industrial developments, and now its current state as a premier contemporary arts complex.
For Drafts, Dunn and Thomas compiled their research directly into the video, collaging archival maps and footage, artifacts left behind on site, and field recordings taken within Garfield Park and on the campus. These remnants, in addition to animation and a co-composed music score, echo the layers and textures that have formed the building’s identity.
The animation of the horse as a throughline in the piece references the stables used by the Weber Dairy, which existed in the original and oldest part of the building until 1947 when the Tube Processing Factory purchased the land. As CAMi expands to embrace natural elements and remember the heritage of the land, the artists believe the horse is a symbol of humanity’s simultaneous connection to nature and development. This juxtaposition amongst the other visual layers reveals the many iterations of history and industry tied to CAMi’s location.
About the Artists
Specializing in animation, Jess Dunn treats illusion as both inspiration and medium. Their work explores the mechanics of motion, finding the “magic” in the gaps between frames where perception shifts. From childhood flipbooks to complex stop-motion, their practice has evolved into the creation of immersive worlds that bridge physical and digital spaces. Through an experimental process, they often build custom circuits to distort visions via voltage manipulation or, conversely, allow raw materials to speak for themselves. The result is a living, multi-sensory environment built for exploration.
Sylvia Thomas is an artist and writer from Indianapolis. Her work focuses on sex, gender, grief, and euphoria. Over the last 10 years, she has exhibited and performed her work across North America and Europe, including the 2025 CLAVO art fair in Mexico City and a presentation for the United Nations Envoy on Youth in 2021. Sylvia is a long-term artist in residence for Big Car Collaborative, a 2024-25 Creative Renewal Arts Fellow through the Indy Arts Council, and a recipient of the 2023 Indianapolis Creative Risk Grant through the Herbert Simon Family Foundation.

Ivelisse Jiménez: Campo de Resonancia
2026-05-01 18:00 - 2027-01-17 17:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
JEREMY EFROYMSON GALLERY |MAY 1, 2026 – JAN. 17, 2027
CAMi is open Wednesday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the weekends. We are closed on Monday and Tuesday.

Ivelisse Jiménez is “interested in how experience exceeds language, how what is sensed, felt, or intuited often resists being named.” This is the power abstraction holds. In a world moving very fast and not always in directions any of us choose, her work proposes sustained looking as resistance — practice for the kind of attention the world needs more of, not less.
Campo de Resonancia — Resonant Field — is a large-scale installation built from hand-painted transparent and colored vinyl and reclaimed plastics. Though discarded by Indianapolis residents and altered by Jiménez, the plastics hold a history like the CAMi building itself, started in the late 1800s by Weber Dairy.
Campo de Resonancia asks every person who enters to first pass through something that has no single meaning, no narrative arc, no instruction about how to feel. Conceived as a “permeable labyrinth,” the work offers no single vantage point. You are absorbed into it. You cannot see this work the same way from two positions. It is a field of conditions. You are one of the conditions.
The materials are not neutral. Plastics are “deeply entangled with human survival, convenience, and innovation, yet inseparable from environmental degradation.” There is no resolution to this contradiction. So Jiménez works inside it.
Puerto Rico receives what the ocean carries with no elsewhere for it to go. Her reclamation of discarded plastics is not a conceptual gesture — it is a practice shaped by proximity. The beauty is a complication. When something you recognize as garbage becomes luminous, you are not being told waste is fine. You are being asked to stay with the contradiction longer than you are comfortable. What Campo de Resonancia carries into this landlocked city, among other things, is the ocean.
For this commission, the materials came from here — from people making an ordinary gesture, letting something go, that became an act of collective construction. What you move through is partly made of what Indianapolis decided it was done with. The first thing you encounter in this new museum space is a work built, in part, from what you gave.
Campo de Resonancia creates a situation — a “space of attentiveness” — where something can happen between you and the material, between you and the light, between you and the stranger moving through the same layered field. What happens there is yours.
About the artist
Ivelisse Jiménez’s practice presents visual propositions concerning the construction of meaning in dialogue with the inhabited space. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Puerto Rico, including Prague Art Biennale, Ecuador’s Cuenca Biennale, and Special Project Rooms at ARCO Madrid. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant, and Venice Italy Arte Laguna 1st Prize in Painting. Her work is part of collections at Museo del Barrio NY, Bronx Museum NY, Museo de Arte de PR, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de PR, CAB de Burgos, Spain, among others. Jiménez holds a BA in Humanities from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras and an MFA from New York University. After living and working in New York for twenty years, she now has her residency and studio in Puerto Rico.
Spanish Translation:
Ivelisse Jiménez está “interesada en cómo la experiencia supera al lenguaje, en cómo lo que se siente, se percibe o se intuye a menudo resiste ser nombrado.” Este es el poder que sostiene la abstracción. En un mundo que se mueve muy rápido y no siempre en direcciones que alguno de nosotros elige, su obra propone la mirada sostenida como resistencia — práctica para el tipo de atención que el mundo necesita más, no menos.
Campo de Resonancia es una instalación de gran escala construida con vinilo transparente y de colores pintado a mano y plásticos recuperados. Aunque descartados por residentes de Indianápolis y transformados por Jiménez, los plásticos guardan una historia como el propio edificio de CAMi, fundado a finales del siglo XIX por Weber Dairy.
Campo de Resonancia le pide a cada persona que entra que primero pase a través de algo que no tiene un solo significado, ni un arco narrativo, ni instrucciones sobre cómo sentir. Concebida como un “laberinto permeable,” la obra no ofrece un único punto de vista. Uno es absorbido por ella. No se puede ver esta obra de la misma manera desde dos posiciones. Es un campo de condiciones. Usted es una de esas condiciones.
Los materiales no son neutrales. Los plásticos están “profundamente entrelazados con la supervivencia humana, la conveniencia y la innovación, pero inseparables de la degradación ambiental.” No hay resolución para esta contradicción. Entonces Jiménez trabaja dentro de ella.
Puerto Rico recibe lo que el océano trae, sin ningún otro lugar adonde ir. Su recuperación de plásticos descartados no es un gesto conceptual — es una práctica moldeada por la proximidad. La belleza es una complicación. Cuando algo que reconoces como basura se vuelve luminoso, no se te está diciendo que el desperdicio está bien. Se te pide que permanezcas con la contradicción más tiempo del que te resulta cómodo. Lo que Campo de Resonancia trae a esta ciudad mediterránea, entre otras cosas, es el océano.
Para esta comisión, los materiales vinieron de aquí — de personas que hicieron un gesto ordinario, dejar ir algo, que se convirtió en un acto de construcción colectiva. Lo que atraviesas está hecho en parte de lo que Indianápolis decidió que ya no necesitaba. Lo primero que encuentras en este nuevo espacio museal es una obra construida, en parte, con lo que tú diste.
Campo de Resonancia crea una situación — un “espacio de atención” — donde algo puede suceder entre tú y el material, entre tú y la luz, entre tú y el desconocido que se mueve a través del mismo campo de capas. Lo que sucede allí es tuyo.
