Big Car

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES
2023-01-02 19:00 - 22:30, 2023-01-03 19:00 - 22:30 (America/Indiana/Indianapolis) | Kan-Kan Cinema, 1258 Windsor St., Indianapolis, IN, 46201, United States
Recently declared the new greatest film of all time, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a singular work in film history.
The film meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick.
In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or as one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck
Director: Chantal Akerman
Writer: Chantal Akerman
Length: 202 minutes
Not Rated
(1975)

About Akerman
Chantal Akerman was born in 1950 in Brussels, and died in Paris in 2015. Akerman was a pioneer in feminist and experimental filmmaking. Born to Holocaust survivors from Poland, the generational trauma of this experience was a continuing theme in her work and in recent decades she explored her own Jewish identity. She made over 40 films during her life time, and is considerd to be one of the most important European directors of her generation.
Recent solo exhibitions have been shown at EyefilmMusem, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2020); MOCA, Toronto, Canada (2019); Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2018), a retrospective at La Cinemateque Francaise, Paris, France (2018); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015); The Kitchen, New York (2013); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium (2013); Museum for Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium (2012); a film retrospective at the Vienna Film Festival, Austria (2011); the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2009); List Visual Arts Center, M.I.T. Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008); Camden Arts Centre, London, England (2008); Tel Aviv Musem of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2006); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2004); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1995).

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES
2023-01-04 13:20 - 16:30 | Kan-Kan Cinema, 1258 Windsor St., Indianapolis, IN, 46201, United States
Recently declared the new greatest film of all time, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is a singular work in film history.
The film meticulously details, with a sense of impending doom, the daily routine of a middle-aged widow, whose chores include making the beds, cooking dinner for her son, and turning the occasional trick.
In its enormous spareness, Akerman’s film seems simple, but it encompasses an entire world. Whether seen as an exacting character study or as one of cinema’s most hypnotic and complete depictions of space and time, Jeanne Dielman is an astonishing, compelling movie experiment, one that has been analyzed and argued over for decades.
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte, Henri Storck
Director: Chantal Akerman
Writer: Chantal Akerman
Length: 202 minutes
Not Rated
About Akerman
Chantal Akerman was born in 1950 in Brussels, and died in Paris in 2015. Akerman was a pioneer in feminist and experimental filmmaking. Born to Holocaust survivors from Poland, the generational trauma of this experience was a continuing theme in her work and in recent decades she explored her own Jewish identity. She made over 40 films during her life time, and is considerd to be one of the most important European directors of her generation.
Recent solo exhibitions have been shown at EyefilmMusem, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2020); MOCA, Toronto, Canada (2019); Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2018), a retrospective at La Cinemateque Francaise, Paris, France (2018); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2015); The Kitchen, New York (2013); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium (2013); Museum for Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium (2012); a film retrospective at the Vienna Film Festival, Austria (2011); the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2009); List Visual Arts Center, M.I.T. Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008); Camden Arts Centre, London, England (2008); Tel Aviv Musem of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel (2006); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2004); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (1995).

Em Elise, Jane Sun Kim, Simon Plemon: delicate(s)
2023-01-06 18:00 - 2023-02-20 18:00 | Listen Hear, 2620 Shelby St, , Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
delicate(s), is a collaborative multimedia installation assembled by Em Elise, Jane Sun Kim and Simon Plemon. The installation is a hypnotic visual foraging into the emotional nature of memory and the physical residue it leaves on, in, and around the body.
Spiritually fused by a collective longing for depth in a time of social media’s staged memory and the dissociative “new normal” induced by a global pandemic, delicate(s) investigates, commemorates, and liberates the artists’ hauntings beyond a two dimensional plane.
Featuring suspended sculpture, fabric prints, hand-drawn charcoal wall illustrations, projected video, enveloping soundscapes, and personal relics, delicate(s) summons the senses and elicits reflection in its viewers.
How do we integrate our memories into the minutia of our daily lives? How do they shape the way we move, react? Do they control our perception of reality, our identities?
Artist bios:
Em Elise
Whether it be through image making, prose, video, ritual, embroidery, movement, sculpture, auditory experience, or often a combination of media, Elise consistently gravitates towards immersive creative outlets to go inwards, seek purpose, process trauma, and embrace a sense of divine interconnectedness. Fueled by spiritual encounters and soul feelings, Elise approaches artmaking as alchemical therapy: an embalming of oneself, transmutation of pain, and reclamation of the holistic body. From using instant film to immortalize fleeting moments of intimacy to divulging ancestral and gender-based wounds through found footage and video collage, Elise creates to empower vulnerability, amplify marginalized narratives, cultivate collective healing, and provide an anchor for those that feel lost as and out of place in this world as she often does. Elise is native to and currently based out of Indianapolis, Indiana but frequently practices in Copenhagen, Denmark.
connect: @sin__atras
Jane Sun Kim
Kim contemplates the tangled relationship between nostalgia and identity under the
weight of the sentimental, often burdensome past. Her work is an incantation of lost moments, intimate secrets, fading youth, an ever persistent recollection of the past clouding her psyche.
Through expired film displayed on translucent banners, suspended sculptures using synthetic hair from her father’s beauty shop, and imagery of passed friends on wavering sheer silk, she weaves together her understanding of self. Kim draws influences from her experience as a child from a Korean American immigrant family, film of her family’s unspoken past, and her struggle with repetitive thought patterns from obsessive compulsive disorder. Kim was born in Augsburg, Germany and raised in Seoul, South Korea and predominantly Indianapolis, Indiana and is a part of Big Car Collaborative’s Artist and Public Life Residency.
connect: @vulturesonly
Simon Plemon
Plemon’s artwork explores personal mythology and macabre identity through a
fantastical lens. Through the use of video, textile work, and experimental image making Plemon crafts a hauntingly liminal universe. Much of Simon’s work is an atmospheric blend of documentation and experience. Motifs of feminine handicraft, biblical imagery, and physical morbidity of the body regularly appear in Plemon’s work. When not creating physical pieces, Simon can be found curating local dance events or tattooing.
connect: @clownartist
Made possible by the Arts Council of Indianapolis, The City of Indianapolis and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Betsy Stirratt: Unearthing
2023-01-06 18:00 - 2023-03-19 18:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
In Unearthing, Stirratt explores how natural and cultural objects are presented in collections and museum settings, and how we preserve, classify, and display them.
From Stirratt: “I have visited many natural history, herbaria and medical museums in Europe and the US with the aim of understanding their objectives, collecting impulses, and labelling practices. With similar intent, I visited several regional historical sites and collections, including the Workingmen’s Institute in New Harmony, the Indiana University Paleontology Collection, and Angel Mounds. The resulting photographs and objects demonstrate the sometimes underestimated importance of local and regional history within the broader museum sphere.
The items within a museum or private collection are accumulated with a view to imposing order, classifying nature, preserving memory, or in some instances to signaling status. Items may be preserved for their cultural and historical importance, or for their aesthetic qualities. For some, collecting serves as a means of accumulating knowledge, or as inspiration for their imagination and memories. For me, it’s the embedded history of objects and places, and how history and folklore can inform our relationship with the world.
More specifically, I’m interested in the idea of both documenting collected items and using this documenting collected items and using the documentation process to create new artifacts: a coupling of curation and creation, as it were. Influenced by my many years as a gallery director and curator, I think about the way that art and objects are selected and placed in juxtaposition with each other and how they are subsequently perceived by viewers. It is important to acknowledge that the viewer’s experience is changed by the inclusion or exclusion of objects and the information that accompanies them.
The videos in the exhibit were made using three artists books that contain words and pictures about collections I have visited: specifically botany, anatomy and zoological collections. Each of the videos features the turning pages of the books in the Collected Series, interspersed with video and audio clips that I gathered from museum visits, educational films and from life.
Additionally, alongside the pieces inspired by museum collections and artifacts in this installation, I am including materials I have collected (e.g., a 19th c. herbarium, Victorian bird taxidermy, amateur butterfly collections) relating to my interest in history, natural history and the ways objects are preserved and presented within a curated setting. These items were gathered because almost all were created by an amateur who had some specific interest in the subject that he/she was preserving.
Collections and museums inform us about the world we live in, record the past and provide material memory across generations. Unearthing is an attempt to impose order on an unordered world, drawing upon hazy memory, inexact connections, and interpreted histories. The process of unearthing objects, both physically and metaphorically, can broaden our experience of the world, stimulating imagination and wonder about what we have around us.”
About the artist
Betsy Stirratt’s creative practice focuses on themes about nature, collections and the environment. She is the Founding Director of the Grunwald Gallery of Art at Indiana University Bloomington where she has curated exhibitions and published catalogs since 1987. Exhibiting her own work widely since 1983, solo exhibitions include La Maladie at The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago and Veiled Taxonomies at the Center for Book Arts in New York. Her work has been included in group exhibits at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and White Columns and Art in General in New York among others. She is the recipient of a Visual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
VISIT US
Wednesday -Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturday & Sunday 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Tube is also open until 10 p.m. each First Friday.
Closed Holidays
Made possible by The Arts Council of Indianapolis, The City of Indianapolis and the Christel DeHaan Family Foundation.

Words & Music: Maurice Broaddus
2023-01-14 17:00 - 18:00 | 99.1 WQRT, United States
Join Oreo Jones as he interviews Indianapolis-based Maurice Broaddus –a writer, community organizer and teacher. His work has appeared in magazines like Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Asimov’s, Magazine of F&SF, and Uncanny Magazine, with some of his stories having been collected in The Voices of Martyrs.

Broaddus’s books include the urban fantasy trilogy, The Knights of Breton Court, the steampunk works, Buffalo Soldier and Pimp My Airship, and the middle grade detective novels, The Usual Suspects and Unfadeable. His project, Sorcerers, is being adapted as a television show for AMC. As an editor, he’s worked on Dark Faith, Fireside Magazine, and Apex Magazine.

Words & Music is made possible by a grant from Indiana Humanities . And is a project of Big Car Collaborative , the nonprofit behind WQRT.
Learn more at MauriceBroaddus.com.
Words & Music is made possible by a grant from Indiana Humanities . And is a project of Big Car Collaborative , the nonprofit behind WQRT.

MLK Day Special with Snuggy Bear Presents
2023-01-16 12:00 - 18:00 | 99.1 WQRT, United States
Join Dr. Jarrod Dortch and special guests in this radio program that explores and celebrates the Black experience and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King.
About Snuggy Bear
Largely underrepresented in museums and galleries, “Snuggy Bear”, Dr. Jarrod Nicholas Dortch is part of a movement of Black artists and curators who are hosting exhibits and creating work that shines a light on Black culture. He has been affiliated with Big Car as a Community Artist and Gardener at the Tube Factory artspace. He is also a member of “The Eighteen” a collective of local artists who made history by painting the #BlackLivesMatter mural on historic Indiana Avenue in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana. Since this offering he has been part of exhibitions and programs at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and The Indianapolis Art Center, curated “Art and Vinyl” an annual celebration of Black art and music for Big Car and has received several grants to create artworks throughout the city. His work was displayed on downtown storefronts during the NCAA Men’s and Women’s College Basketball Tournament as part of #SWISH. Dortch serves as both a professor of communication and a business owner. He owns and operates Solful Gardens, a natural produce provider in Central Indiana that brings quality food access to urban areas that are underserved with an overall focus on food equity. He also has created Snuggy Bear Presents as a way to further disrupt the status quo of contemporary and fine art. With roots in art, community, and education, Snuggy Bear is leveraging these disciplines to help promote personal and communal growth one bespoke curation at a time.

Words & Music: Marguerite Young
2023-01-21 17:00 - 18:00 | 99.1 WQRT, United States
Join Big Car co-founder and executive director, Jim Walker as he interviews Indianapolis-based author Susan Neville about her research on and time spent with the often under appreciated writer, Marguerite Young.

From Poetry Foundation on Young:
Poet, novelist, and biographer Marguerite V. Young was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. In an interview with the Paris Review, Young recounted, “We were brought up to believe that to be born in Indiana was to be born a poet—a myth which I can’t accept now, but I did then. I remember telling my grandmother, when I was about seven years old, that I intended to be a poet.” Young studied at Indiana University and Butler University and earned an MA in Elizabethan and Jacobean literature at the University of Chicago. While at Chicago, Young took a job reading to Minna Weissenbach, a society woman and opium addict who was a patron of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The experience informed Young’s later writings. Young published her first book of poems, Prismatic Ground (1937), soon after graduating from Chicago; she taught in Indianapolis, at a high school, and at the University of Iowa before moving to New York City in 1943.

Young’s second collection of poems, Moderate Fable (1944), and her account of Utopian communities in New Harmony, Indiana, Angel in the Forest (1945), created a splash in the literary scene of Greenwich Village. It took her 18 years to finish her next book, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965), a sprawling epic detailing the inner adventures of Vera Cartwheel as she embarks on an imaginary journey to discover the truth of her beloved nursemaid, Miss MacIntosh. Running 1,198 pages, it is the longest novel in English published as a single volume. Young once described her imagination as “muralist,” telling the Paris Review, “I like to see the epic swing of the thing, the many as opposed to the one. I am a pluralist in that sense.” Young spent the rest of her life writing a biography of Eugene V. Debs that attempted to embed him in his social and cultural milieu. More than 2,000 pages long in manuscript, Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs (1998) was edited and published posthumously.Young taught writing at Fordham University and at the New School of Social Research for many years. Her admirers included Djuna Barnes, Anne Tyler, Anaïs Nin, Carson McCullers, and Allen Tate, among others. In conversation with Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, Young articulated the underlying connection among all her works as “the human desire or obsession for utopias.” She went on, “The structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered. … All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.”

About Susan Neville
Neville is the author of six works of creative nonfiction: Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning; Twilight in Arcadia; Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation; Butler’s Big Dance; Sailing the Inland Sea, and Light. Her essay on women in the Klan in Indiana, “Into the Fire,” is available as an ebook from Ploughshares. Her collections of short fiction and hybrid fiction include The Town of Whispering Dolls, winner of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction, In the House of Blue Lights, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize; Invention of Flight, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and Indiana Winter. Her stories have appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology and in anthologies including Extreme Fiction (Longman) and The Story Behind the Story (Norton).

Words & Music is made possible by a grant from Indiana Humanities . And is a project of Big Car Collaborative , the nonprofit behind WQRT.
Learn more at MauriceBroaddus.com.
Words & Music is made possible by a grant from Indiana Humanities. And is a project of Big Car Collaborative, the nonprofit behind WQRT.

Mvhayv Radio Marathon
2023-01-28 12:00 - 20:00 | 99.1 WQRT, United States
Mvhayv Radio is a language and cultural preservation project by multi-disciplinary artist, Elisa Harkins (Cherokee/Muscogee) based in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
All day we will air episodes 1-10 to celebrate kicking off a new season starting Feb 4 with episode 11.
Episode 1 – Can you dance to this?
Episode 2 – Songs to find your radical lover to
Episode 3 – TikTok
Episode 4 – All Indigenous
Episode 5 – Africa
Episode 6 – Muscogee (Creek) & Seminole Hymns
Episode 7 – All Indigenous spoken word, noise, and moccasin gaze.
Episode 8 – Music to bake cookies to.
Episode 9 – All Indigenous poems and music.
Episode 10 – All Indigenous poems and music.
Harkins work is concerned with translation, language preservation, and Indigenous musicology. Harkins uses the Cherokee and Mvskoke languages, electronic music, sculpture, and the body as her tools. Harkins received a BA from Columbia College, Chicago and an MFA from CALARTS. She has since continued her education at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited her work at Crystal Bridges, documenta 14, The Hammer Museum, The Heard Museum, and Vancouver Art Gallery. She created an online Indigenous concert series called 6 Moons, and published a CD of Creek/Seminole Hymns. She will open an exhibit at Tube Factory artspace July 5-October 19, 2024.
She is also part of Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ a performance group that features music and choreography by Harkins. With support from PICA and Western Front, songs from the performance have been collected into a limited edition double-LP which can be found on Harkins’ Bandcamp. Harkins resides on the Muscogee (Creek) Reservation and is an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
This program is made possible by National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Nathaniel Russell: HERE IT IS IT ALWAYS IS
2023-02-03 18:00 - 2023-03-19 18:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
For “HERE IT IS IT ALWAYS IS,” Russell shares new paintings, objects, and situations made improvisationally with recycled, found and reused materials. A visual artist, illustrator, and musician based in Indianapolis who has shown his work around the world, Russell utilized the Efroymson Gallery at Tube Factory during the month of January to build his work for this exhibition. With “HERE IT IS IT ALWAYS IS,” Russell continues to explore themes of hope, anxiety, compassion and our place in an ever-expanding universe.

Nathaniel Russell was born and raised in Indiana. After college, he spent several years in the San Francisco Bay Area making posters, record covers, and woodcuts. His work can be seen around the world in traditional galleries and informal spaces. Russell has also created many book and album cover designs, illustrations for the New York Times, and a viral series of fake flier projects.

Two of Russell’s murals are found on Big Car’s campus — You are Here on the Listen Hear building and Totally Pencil on Tube Factory. Russell also previously made colorful, oversized plywood cutouts for Big Car’s parking lot garden at Service Center outside of Lafayette Square Mall and shared a solo show, Thing, at Big Car Gallery in its early days in Fountain Square.

Opening receptions: Feb 3 & Mar 3, 6-10 pm in our Jeremy D. Efroymson Gallery.

VISIT US
Wednesday -Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturday & Sunday 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Tube is also open until 10 p.m. each First Friday.
Closed Holidays

Made possible by the Arts Council of Indianapolis, The City of Indianapolis and The Efroymson Family Fund.

African Dance with Uzuri
2023-02-08 19:30 - 21:00, 2023-02-15 19:30 - 21:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Join Uzuri Asad, artist in Big Car’s Public Life Residency, for a dose of culture, self-care, and community as we explore rhythms from West Africa and other parts of the Diaspora. Give your body and soul a moment to reflect and progress all at once, meet Asad on the floor!

Valentino Market
2023-02-11 12:00 - 17:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Looking for a one of kind gift for your beloved this Valentine’s Day? ERA Creates and Arte Mexicano en Indiana have teamed up to hand select vendors, art, crafts for you to show your love, YOUR love.

Kottu
2023-02-19 13:00 - 14:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Come spend a restful and slow Sunday afternoon with Yeabsera and Meskerem Tabb, artists in Big Car’s residency program, as they share the Ethiopian culture of hospitality through a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony.

Kottu (ካቱ) is an Ormic word that translates to come on in. The Tabbs will share traditional Ethiopian coffee from roasting to brewing while engaging in compelling conversations.

About The Coffee Ceremony
The coffee ceremony is considered to be the most important social occasion in many villages, and it is a sign of respect and friendship to be invited to a coffee ceremony. Guests at a ceremony may discuss topics such as politics, community, and gossip. There is also abundant praise for the ceremony’s performer and the brews she produces.
Regardless of the time of day, occasion (or lack thereof) and guests invited, the ceremony usually follows a distinct format, with some variations.
Beyond pure socialization, the coffee ceremony also plays a spiritual role in Ethiopia, one which emphasizes the importance of Ethiopian coffee culture. Coffee has a long history of association with Islam, and it is said that a transformation of the spirit takes place during the three rounds of the coffee ceremony thanks to coffee’s spiritual properties.
The lengthy Ethiopian coffee ceremony involves processing the raw, unwashed coffee beans into finished cups of coffee. It begins with the preparation of the room for the ritual.
First, the woman who is performing the ceremony spreads fresh, aromatic grasses and flowers across the floor. She begins burning incense to ward off evil spirits and continues to burn incense throughout the ceremony. She fills a round-bottomed, black clay coffeepot (known as a jebena) with water and places it over hot coals.
Then, the hostess takes a handful of green coffee beans and carefully cleans them in a heated, long-handled, wok-like pan. Holding the pan over hot coals or a small fire, she stirs and shakes the husks and debris out of the beans until they are clean.
Once the beans are clean, she slowly roasts them in the pan she used to clean them. During the roasting, she keeps the roast as even as possible by shaking the beans (much like one would shake an old-fashioned popcorn popper) or stirring them constantly. The roasting may be stopped once the beans are a medium brown, or it may be continued until they are blackened and shimmering with essential oils. The aroma of the roasted coffee is powerful and is considered to be an important aspect of the ceremony.
After the hostess has roasted the beans, she will grind them. She uses a tool similar to a mortar and pestle. The “mortar” is a small, heavy wooden bowl called a mukecha (pronounced moo-key-cha), and the “pestle” is a wooden or metal cylinder with a blunt end, called a zenezena. With these tools, she crushes the beans into a coarse ground.
By the time the beans are ground, the water in the jebena is typically ready for the coffee. The performer removes a straw lid from the coffeepot and adds the just-ground coffee. The mixture is brought to a boil and removed from heat.
At this point, the coffee is ready to be served. A tray of very small, handle-less ceramic or glass cups is arranged with the cups very close together. The ceremony performer pours the coffee in a single stream from about a foot above the cups, ideally filling each cup equally without breaking the stream of coffee. The dregs of the coffee remain in the pot. This technique prevents coarse grounds from ending up in the coffee cups.
In some cases, the youngest child may serve the oldest guest the first cup of coffee. Afterward, the performer serves everyone else.
Guests may add their sugar if they’d like. Milk is not typically offered. After adding sugar, guests bunna tetu (“drink coffee”), and then praise the hostess for her coffee-making skills and the coffee for its taste.
After the first round of coffee, there are typically two additional servings. The three servings are known as abol, tona, and baraka. Each serving is progressively weaker than the first. Each cup is said to transform the spirit, and the third serving is considered to be a blessing to those who drink it.

African Dance with Uzuri
2023-02-22 19:30 - 21:00 | IN

Betsy Stirratt Artist Talk
2023-02-25 14:00 - 15:30 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Join artist Betsy Stirratt as she gives a tour of her exhibit, “Unearthing,” provides background and answers questions about her work.
About the artist
Betsy Stirratt’s creative practice focuses on themes about nature, collections and the environment. She is the Founding Director of the Grunwald Gallery of Art at Indiana University Bloomington where she has curated exhibitions and published catalogs since 1987. Exhibiting her own work widely since 1983, solo exhibitions include La Maladie at The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago and Veiled Taxonomies at the Center for Book Arts in New York. Her work has been included in group exhibits at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and White Columns and Art in General in New York among others. She is the recipient of a Visual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Normal Pop-Up Market
2023-02-26 11:00 - 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Coffee, fancy toast, and one of a kind artworks and jewelry by Cierra Johnson, Angelita Hampton and Shanise Wright. Selected by Big Car staff artists Yeabsera Tabb and Adair Allen.

First Friday Night Market
2023-03-03 18:00 - 22:00, 2023-04-07 18:00 - 22:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Join us again for this upcoming First Friday for a wonderful evening in Garfield Park. We are celebrating local artists, musicians, food trucks and vendors by featuring them in our night market.
Come check out our creative endeavors here around Cruft Street, where you will have the opportunity to purchase local goods from amazing artists and food vendors here at the Tube.
During the winter months, the Night Market is held inside Tube Factory artspace. In the fall, spring, and summer months, vending is located outside.
If you are a local artist or maker, please contact email hidden; JavaScript is required for more information.

Chelsea Flowers: Grief Etiquette
2023-03-03 18:00 - 2023-05-07 22:00 | Listen Hear, 2620 Shelby St, , Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
When my dad was alive, he never really saw any of my artwork.
He heard me give one lecture.
But I’m not really sure he knew I was an artist.
I wonder what he’d think now that the work is about him?
I wonder what he’d think if he knew I laughed when I found out he died?
I wonder what he’d think if he knew I laughed during his funeral?
I was told I had no etiquette for grieving.
Two years later and I’m still trying to figure it out.
In an exploration of this concept, “Grief Etiquette” is an immersive installation about the non-linear stages of my grief, shown through archival imagery and sound.

Live performance by Flowers at 7:30pm on March 3.

About Chelsea Flowers
Based in Detroit, Chelsea A. Flowers is an artist who holds an MFA in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a BFA from Denison University in studio art, with a concentration in Black Studies. She has shown work and performed at various galleries including; ACRE Projects Space (Chicago, IL), Red Bull Arts (Detroit, MI), Roots and Culture (Chicago, IL), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), The Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH), Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry (Chicago, IL), Torrance Museum (Torrance, CA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, (Detroit, MI).
She has expanded her skills and research by attending ACRE (Steuben, WI), Ox-Bow School of Arts and Artist Residency (Saugatuck, MI), Real Time and Space (Oakland, CA) residencies. And is an alum of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her practice explores subversion to popular culture, how “otherness” is created through social and cultural critique of her environment. She explores these ideas through grief etiquette, comedic tropes, and participatory performance.

Image: “Untitled II: Grief Etiquette”
Detail image.

Wednesday-Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturday & Sunday 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Open until 10 p.m. each First Friday.
Closed Holidays

African Dance Class with Uzuri Asad
2023-03-08 19:30 - 20:30, 2023-03-15 08:00 - 19:30, 2023-03-22 19:30 - 21:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States

African Dance with Uzuri Asad
2023-03-29 19:30 - 21:00, 2023-04-12 19:30 - 21:00, 2023-04-19 19:30 - 21:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States

em elise: aegis(us)
2023-04-07 18:00 - 22:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
aegis(us): a moving image refuge for feminine endurance and holistic body reclamation
While her present artistic practice grew roots in classical cello and midnight poetry, Em Elise has always been fascinated by the body and its languages. She sees patterns of birth and death as ever present: from ephemeral relationships between lovers to the synchronicity between menstruation and la luna. In an age of shallow social media presentation and the dissociative “new normal” induced by a global pandemic, Elise has become obsessed with a search for depth which she often finds in grainy film, candid renderings, and recollection of guttural feelings. Featuring moving image projection, performance, immersive sound, and remnants of ritual, aegis(us) intertwines somatic experience, emotional perception, and spectral influence to mesmerize and purify.
aegis(us), Em Elise’s undergraduate thesis and debut solo exhibition, serves as a psycho-spiritual testament to feminine endurance and holistic body reclamation. Aegis, /ˈējəs/, being an emblem of protection, and us, a community bound by collective belonging. How does the body act as a conduit? When might the mundane become mystic? What happens when we slow down and surrender to the intuitive rhythms of the (super)natural world? Fueled by Elise’s tender affinity for sacred corporeal movement, nostalgic image making processes, and the liberation of rebirth, aegis(us) invites viewers to bathe in contemplation of the relationship between physical and energetic phenomena.

Artist Biography:
Em Elise approaches art making as alchemical therapy: a vessel for self embalming, transmuting grief, and holistic body reclamation. Driven by the heart pangs, moments of remembrance, and spiritual visitations she frequently encounters in transit, on the cusp of sleep, sky gazing, or when peering into the soul of another, Elise’s artwork provides an anchor for those that feel as alien in this world as she often does. Elise creates to embrace emotional excavation, reintegrate traumatic experience, and root in tender vulnerability. Whether immortalizing feelings of intimacy on instant film, divulging ancestral and gender-based wounds using analog video, or purging pain during ritual performance, Em Elise’s work fuels collective healing and vital authenticity in the face of oppressive social conditioning. Em Elise is native to and currently based out of Indianapolis, Indiana but frequently practices in Copenhagen, Denmark.
contact + connect: email hidden; JavaScript is required / @sin__atras / https://emelisecreating.tumblr.com/
Located in the Guichelaar Gallery, this exhibit is part of a Herron School of Art and Design Photography Senior Thesis series curated by Jane Sun Kim, a visual artist in our long term residency program, APLR.
The Guichelaar Gallery and Residency House located next door to Tube Factory at 1135 Cruft St. is a contemporary art space operated by Big Car Collaborative APLR artists. It also serves as a home for visiting artists.

Jason Gray: Cthutopia
2023-04-07 18:00 - 2023-05-21 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
“I remember sitting in church one Sunday near Easter, trying to pay attention to the sermon but failing. I was six or seven, maybe. My mind wandered as I looked around the sanctuary. I started to think about these two hallways that led away from the main room. The one to the right was familiar to me; the choir room was down there and I found myself there often, waiting for my grandparents to hang up their robes after service. The hallway to the left was a mystery. I had never been down it, nor seen many people go in or come out. This particular Sunday I started to imagine what was down there. I pictured the hall itself to be similar to the other side, with white walls and a white door. Opening this white door would lead you somewhere else, though. It led to a cave of sorts, with gray stone walls and a dusty floor: Jesus’ tomb. Jesus was in there too, frozen in carbonite like Han Solo.

As we get older, there seems to be less time for our imaginations to wander. We get bogged down with responsibilities and thoughts about what we need to do next. Our sense of wonder diminishes as we learn more about the world; we know the chances of discovering monsters or hidden worlds are slim. A lucky few get to live in their imagination, like writers and filmmakers, but most of us are stuck, grounded by real life.

The philosopher Michael Foucault used the term “heterotopia” to describe places that deviated from the normal world. A greek word meaning “other place”, a heterotopia is neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but something in between, a parallel world that is contrary to expected society and that can, at times, be disturbing. Foucault cited examples such as prisons, hospitals, and religious sanctuaries, where one is expected to perform certain rituals to enter. These spaces are an accepted part of society, places we deem necessary in order to exclude those that can disrupt our attempt at a utopia. What if there were places hidden from us that go beyond societal expectations and exist outside of our rules of physics and nature as we understand it?

In this body of work, I am exploring the dream that there are still places and things we have not discovered, things we may not even comprehend. Inside of familiar volumes such as instrument cases and terrariums, I am creating spaces that give a glimpse of some other world, somewhere weird and wrong. This is Cthutopia.”

About the artist
Jason Gray is a furniture maker residing in Indianapolis. Wood is the medium most often used, but he also dabbles in slip cast ceramics and looks for inspiration in found objects. He earned a BFA at Herron School of Art and an MFA at The University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Gray is the Lead Builder at Big Car Collaborative. He is the designer behind campus projects such as The Chicken Chapel of Love, The Chicken Palace, and Wandering Grove.

This exhibit is made possible by The Arts Council of Indianapolis, The City of Indianapolis and Allen Whitehill Clowes Foundation.

Jeremy Efroymson Gallery
Opening events April 7, 6-10pm & May 5, 6-10pm

Yeabsera Tabb-Tezeta
2023-04-07 18:00 - 2023-06-25 15:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
tezeta (teh-zeh-tah): an Amharic word that roughly translates to memory, nostalgia, or longing
This body of work is an exploration of the physical and figurative aspects of “place.” On one hand, the word “place” refers to our built environment, choices of design, and our interactions with the physical world. On the other hand, it refers to a sense of belonging that is cultural and emotional–still deeply tied to the physical world, but able to exist without it through memory. I invite the viewer to step into the threshold separating “here and now” from”‘then and there.”
Physical spaces such as markets, homes, and schools are where most of our memories are made, and the physicality of a space is significant in shaping our upbringing. I am deeply influenced and inspired by the colors, textures, and sounds that surrounded me during my childhood in Ethiopia.
When I came to the U.S. from Addis Ababa as a teenager, I found myself existing in a liminal space. I longed for the outdoor markets, casual coffee gatherings, and kids kicking soccer balls on narrow streets. This was where my sense of place rested and suddenly it was nowhere to be found. I had to completely reframe my understanding of place. By acknowledging the importance of place in shaping our identity, I explore what happens when we are separated from our places by distance and time. – Yeabsera Tabb
About the Artist
Yeabsera Tabb is an interdisciplinary visual artist with a focus in printmaking and textiles. Her work explores the intersectionalities and liminal space contained within one’s personal identity.
As an artist, Yeabsera often struggles to reconcile her pain, bewilderment, and anger with societal expectations to create beauty. Acknowledging anger, joy, and resistance, her work exists in a complicated middle ground, invoking the recognition and appreciation of disparate feelings and experiences.
After graduating with degrees in both Design for Social Impact and Fine Arts, Yeabsera held multiple solo and group shows in Indianapolis including a group show at Newfields. Additionally, she was one of 10 Black woman artists named as an Emerging Visionary Artist by Shea Moisture.

Main Gallery
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Wednesday -Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturday & Sunday 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Tube is also open until 10 p.m. each First Friday.
Closed Holidays

This exhibit is made possible by The Arts Council of Indianapolis, The City of Indianapolis and Allen Whitehill Clowes Foundation.

Miera Thoroughgood: Through My Eyes: A multimedia archive
2023-04-14 18:00 - 22:00 | Tube Factory artspace, 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
I’ve lived in Indianapolis for almost 4 years, it’s my home. I’ve explored many depths of this city. It’s a blur to me now. I see the same buildings and people every other day.
With my work, I explored the streets of Indianapolis that feel as if they were anywhere else in the world. It’s my escape. Time and space are limited in the photos. Indianapolis has been a lovely home, but I’m ready to leave and find other places, people, and spaces. —Miera Thoroughgood
Located in the Guichelaar Gallery, this exhibit is part of a Herron School of Art and Design Photography Senior Thesis series curated by Jane Sun Kim, a visual artist in our long term residency program, APLR.
The Guichelaar Gallery and Residency House located next door to Tube Factory at 1135 Cruft St. is a contemporary art space operated by Big Car Collaborative APLR artists. It also serves as a home for visiting artists.
