Art that brings us together

We believe art and creativity can help break down differences, encourage empathy, and make people happier. We value collaboration, accessibility, and flexibility. We see the public work we do as our art medium. And we see the people in the communities where we work as our collaborators.

Our art practice centers on working with people — sometimes called social practice art or socially engaged art. We have chosen this path as the sort of activists who passionately believe in the democratization of art and creativity — and in using our abilities, talents, and know-how to help make the world (starting with our city) a better place.

Everybody deserves access to art, to creativity, to activities that challenge our minds. And artists should help make creativity an integral part of people’s lives. Better than anyone, we know the joy of using our imaginations. And we have a moral imperative to share this joy. We see the importance of prioritizing art projects that get to people where they are instead of challenging them to figure out how to find the art in some walled-off place.

As one way to be relevant and important to the broader community, artists can choose to invest in the community directly. Rick Lowe, founder of Houston’s Project Row Houses, told the New York Times: “I was doing big, billboard-size paintings and cutout sculptures dealing with social issues, and one of the students told me that, sure, the work reflected what was going on in his community, but it wasn’t what the community needed. If I was an artist, he said, why didn’t I come up with some kind of creative solution to issues instead of just telling people like him what they already knew. That was the defining moment that pushed me out of the studio.”

And Lowe’s realization connects to the philosophy of Frances Whitehead, an embedded artist who works directly with the City of Chicago. She calls her work “post-normal” and doesn’t make things; she makes things happen. And, as a “double agent” working both sides of the system, she reaches and helps the broader community in Chicago. “I’m interested in the artist not as a trickster or activist, but as a cultural disrupter, as a change agent,” she said. “If culture is the problem, then who better to solve it but cultural workers?”

It comes down to a choice: Should we preach to the choir, making work that merely points to our community’s challenges? Or do we use our skills as artists to do something about it?

We believe…

As an art and design organization that utilizes tools of culture and creativity to build community and social cohesion, we have a moral obligation and duty to ensure that we create and support systems that include, welcome, and embrace all people regardless of race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, class, or age.

Our vision is informed by ways we can view ourselves as collaborators and neighbors to facilitate a collective mindset that supports structures where…

• All people regardless of race, ethnicity, color, national origin, ancestry, economic or social class, citizenship, age, religion, faith, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, disability, veteran status, and any other identities represented amongst our community are able to fully participate in the performance, presentation, and enjoyment of the arts in Indianapolis.
•  Efforts are made to gather the input of people of all backgrounds to better determine what the citizens of our city want from the arts and community organizations.
• Public spaces and places in our city are welcoming and accessible (physically and programmatically) for everyone. This means making places people can access physically (remove barriers, gates, fences and make it safe and easy to access by foot, bike, and public transit) and financially by removing cost burdens that exclude some people.

On placemaking and placekeeping

What is placemaking?
Placemaking is about making places inviting, inclusive, flexible, adaptable, comfortable, and fun for people. At Big Car and our Spark Placemaking program, we utilize creative strategies to make places feel more like home. Placemaking is site and community specific work. It is grassroots work that requires community engagement and collaboration. True placemaking is, at its core, about creating and setting in motion the kind of open and free, public social infrastructure we need to be better connected with each other. Studies show that connected people are less lonely, healthier, safer, happier, and more successful (lots about this here). And a community of connected people is more trusting, empathetic, inclusive, sustainable, resilient, and civically involved. These are the primary goals of placemaking for us.

What isn’t placemaking?
Placemaking isn’t just doing the top-down, designer-as-god stuff that was already happening — like building boring, uncomfortable, inactive, and empty public spaces — but now calling this something new and fashionable. It’s not doing studio art outside instead of in a studio. Placemaking isn’t art or murals primarily expressing the vision of artists plopped in public places.

Placemaking is defined by what happens — what people do —  in a place. It is not defined by how a place is beautified or decorated.

Pictures of real placemaking projects will always have people in them. The other stuff that doesn’t is place building or place decorating. Those are fine — but are very different things than placemaking.

Our placemaking work has been featured in two books published by Routledge in the United Kingdom (Arts in Place and Creative Placemaking). Project for Public Spaces, the international leader in placemaking, is an ongoing partner and their team sees us as a truly unique organization in the United States. We have received placemaking grants from multiple national funders (including Southwest Heart of the Community, National Endowment for the Arts Our Town and Art Works). We are invited to share about our work around the country and the world. And we have worked in placemaking and public programming in multiple cities in Indiana and beyond.

Big Car began working in placemaking with a variety of activations of public spaces in Fountain Square starting in 2002. And we expanded our work around Indianapolis starting in 2008. We were the first organization in Indianapolis to take this approach to working in public places and call the work “placemaking.”

Some people have concerns about placemaking as “place taking” and it working, worldwide, as a tool for gentrification and displacement. While the term “placemaking” has some challenges, we are determined to use the term properly and — most importantly — do placemaking right (considering it “placekeeping” as well for existing residents and communities) and utilize these tools for the public good.

Our history with placemaking

Lots of people are talking and writing about placemaking — and the relatively new idea of artist-led creative placemaking — as approaches to improving cities and communities by better using the spaces and places people share.

This, of course, has been central to our work at Big Car since we formed in 2004 — even if some of the terminology didn’t exist then. Our original mission and the work that furthered it was about bringing positive energy to the Indianapolis neighborhood where we lived and worked, Fountain Square.

Even before we opened our gallery and performance space, we helped organize and operate an annual event that brought artists and vendors into the streets, that turned a parking lot into a temporary public square (it is now a permanent public square). Later, in summers, we managed an outdoor movie series that turned yet another parking lot in the neighborhood into a place to gather and enjoy films.

We supported a neighborhood-wide mural project, the idea of another Fountain Square resident who was a member of our collective. Meanwhile, we brought what is now a strong and economically powerful tradition to the neighborhood — celebrating the first Friday of each month with art openings and parties.

And, the energy we helped create prompted Fountain Square to get connected to The Cultural Trail, ensuring its ongoing success. This is how creative placemaking can be part of turning a place around. Prior to 2000, Fountain Square was not very vibrant. Many of the commercial buildings stood abandoned or poorly utilized. Nearby homes, many empty and boarded up, rotted. Public spaces were parking lots. Sidewalks were neglected and shrunk to make more lanes for cars that sped through the area.

But the neighborhood had character. It had a funky refurbished theater. It had artists. It seemed poised to be something they have in other cities. And the Murphy Art Center — an artist-led creative placemaking project if there ever was one — became the tipping point for the area. Phil Campbell, a painter and gallery owner, took a vacant and water damaged block-long former dime store and transformed it into a home for artists and creative businesses. It took about 10 years and the steady support of groups like Big Car, but, by 2013 — when the Cultural Trail celebrated its completion — Fountain Square was truly vibrant. It had arrived.

Bringing positive energy and investment to a neighborhood, as we learned, has its downsides. Over the last 25 years, many long-time neighbors and artists who moved in later — including our staff members and our organization — found themselves priced out of homes and commercial spaces.

Many of the affordable housing deals made in Fountain Square around 2000 had expired after 20 years. Affordable homes, apartments, and live-work studios for artists went market rate. We learned from this and worked to secure long-term ownership of both homes and commercial property by our nonprofit and by artists in our new neighborhood of Garfield Park starting in 2015.

After we saw we may not long have a home in Fountain Square, we moved to a pop-up location from 2011 to 2014, called Service Center for Culture and Community. This placemaking-driven social practice and cultural project activated a former tire shop and parking lot as a public gathering  and art space in the International Marketplace area. Here, we learned from direct experience what both placemaking and tactical urbanism were all about. 

Our work with Spark

In 2015, we also took a huge step into creative placemaking work when we received — with the City of Indianapolis — an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for Spark Monument Circle.

The big idea was to test — over a stretch of three months — prioritizing Monument Circle for people by being open days and evenings with places to hang out and arts happenings to enjoy. While we didn’t close the Circle completely to traffic, we did narrow the driving lanes to one, expanding the pedestrian zone and making the space feel (and be) safe and comfortable at a human scale.

Our artist-led work activating the Circle included free, low-key programming and infrastructure: drop-in games, music, bistro-style seating on custom platforms we built known as parklets, our Wagon of Wonders mobile museum, historical characters, fitness experiences, guided tours, events and programs that sparked conversation and social connections, and much more (see this video).

While we saw much success and positivity in 2015, the City changed administrations the next year and struggled to find funding to bring Spark back to the Circle until 2022. Then, Downtown needed a boost after the major challenges of COVID.

So, that year, we began to test ideas again — this time working in close partnership with the Downtown Indy Alliance. We offered  a summer season of regular activities — live music, commissioned poems and short films, line dancing — in a few limited spaces while the Circle remained open for traffic. We did close the entire southwest quad for a weekend music and harvest celebration festival in October. There, we saw the potential of this one quadrant staying closed as a park.

After a group visit to Detroit to explore its downtown parks and talk with leaders there, the City, Downtown Indy and Big Car were ready to try something bigger. And, with an excellent design from the landscape architecture firm, Merritt Chase, we closed, in 2023, the southwest quadrant to traffic from July until November.

While Merritt Chase helped in crucial ways with physical design and choices of furniture and materials, Big Car made this a true placemaking project by leading the program design aspects — including the approach for active, daily management of the SPARK park on the Circle. Our work is about setting up, operating, and maintaining the public space in ways that are best for people to relax, socialize, and enjoy and participate in the arts and creativity. Our job is to be active and consistent, every day, in offering SPARK Monument Circle a place for people.

The approach to SPARK on the Circle has proven very successful with more than 70,000 people enjoying the park each year.

And this is all possible at the Circle only because we have the support and partnership of Downtown Indy and the City of Indianapolis who support the needs related to the infrastructure, cleanliness, safety, stakeholder and community engagement, and broader oversight and management of the Circle as a public space.

We have continued this approach to SPARK on the Circle, as it is called now, since.

What is meant by vibrancy?

As Project for Public Spaces says, vibrancy is people. If somebody completes what they say are placemaking or creative placemaking projects and they don’t have pictures with people in them, what they’ve likely done is beautification, or creative decoration projects. Placemaking is about setting the table for making things happen for humans, it is about making places to do things.

It isn’t about making the physical location passively artsy or pretty. It isn’t about involving artists to put a little icing on the cake. Adding some decorative elements to a vacant lot or old building and then walking away will make things nicer for those who pass by. But this does not create true vibrancy.

A placemaking project isn’t successful if it can be enjoyed in just one way — with the eyes for example. Big Car loves murals, work on them often, and we see how powerful they can be. But we understand that murals are only one part of a creative placemaking project. And, if vibrancy is the goal, other aspects of placemaking — spaces made for people — need to be connected to murals.

Ultimately, placemaking is about making a shared place right, comfortable and welcoming for people. This is hard to do without spending some time and money. But the investment is worth it as successful placemaking projects accomplish multiple things.

The projects that really work make places for people who have been part of the idea and contributed to the design of it, places where people can socialize, learn and teach together, connect with the location or neighborhood and understand it better, support the area’s economy, and contribute creatively in engaging and collaborative ways.

When placemaking succeeds, we get people sharing spaces in positive and creative cultural and social ways. In other words, we get vibrancy. And true vibrancy — as we’ve seen in Fountain Square, Garfield Park, and with our work downtown — supports people, neighborhoods, and cities in tangible and lasting ways.

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Further reading on the topic: Project for Public Spaces series on placemaking