Big Car Collaborative

Last night was the reception of the ‘Tierras’ group show at Big Car Collaborative’s Guichelaar Gallery! I am honored to have two of my works on display in a space where art meets community. One of my greatest joys is to share pieces of my home with people and I cannot thank enough everyone who came and listened. Huge congratulations to all the artists and to Alejandra and Leyda for curating one of the most beautiful and touching shows I have seen. The show will be up through March 28th and you even get to participate through an interactive installation! Stop by to check us out!

March 7 we will open Potawatomi (Turtle Clan) artist Jason Wesaw’s exhibit at Tube Factory artspace consisting of sculpture, drawings, prints, and installation linked to the beliefs of his culture related to land, specifically the ground where our campus now sits. This land has been part of Potawatomi lands at different times in history before the United States existed. For this reason, Wesaw used earth and materials from the campus to create works in this show. “An overarching tenant of my practice is a commitment to examining relationships,” Wesaw said. “Relationships act as a guidepost for me, whether it’s connecting to family and community, to spirit and my observations in the natural world, or to materials: those which are considered modern art mediums, or found and harvested materials....Sovereign is a word that the Potawatomi — and all Tribal Nations — have become eerily familiar with in our centuries-long fights to maintain our traditional culture and inherent human rights, in a country founded on freedoms for all,” he said. “By stripping away themes centered around history or distinguishing labels like ‘Indian’ and ‘Native American’, what we may find as those layers are peeled back is a deep awareness of the natural world around and within us, and the connection we have to beings other than humans. In an increasingly fast-changing world where the land and people are being eaten up as a resource, there is a humble acknowledgement we can make in understanding the power of reciprocity and the place Spirit holds in the physical world we are living.” About the Artist: Jason Wesaw works in an array of media including ceramics, textiles, works on paper, and traditional cultural pieces. His projects relate stories about the Potawatomi people’s ancient and evolving connection to the Land, the Sky, the Water, and Beyond. He also works in his Tribal community as a Peacemaker and participates in traditional cultural ceremonies across the Great Lakes. His work is in the permanent collections of The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Grand Valley State University, University of Notre Dame, Field Museum, Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites, and many other regional institutions. He was recently a Mellon Foundation Artist-in-Residence at the Newberry Library for the ‘Indigenous Chicago’ exhibition and is a core artist in the current “Woven Being” group exhibition at Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University. The exhibition is made possible by National Endowment for the Arts , The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Efroymson Family Fund, Ruth Arts, the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Please join us at Tube Factory artspace in celebrating the?Year of the Wood Snake?with traditional dance performances, fireworks, activities like cut paper art, lantern/fan painting, origami & more. Food available for purchase. For more information, click below. Indianapolis Chinese Performing Arts Inc (ICPAI) at 6-7pm. 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, among others. The New Year celebration is usually celebrated for multiple days—not just one day as in the Gregorian calendar’s New Year. In 2025, Lunar New Year begins on January 29. China’s Lunar New Year is known as the Spring Festival or Chūnjié in Mandarin, while Koreans call it Seollal and Vietnamese refer to it as T?t.Tied to the lunar calendar, the holiday began as a time for feasting and to honor household and heavenly deities, as well as ancestors. The New Year typically begins with the first new moon that occurs between the end of January and spans the first 15 days of the first month of the lunar calendar—until the full moon arrives.

Join us at The Big Table! Help us bring culinary arts and togetherness to Indianapolis with our culinary incubator kitchen and Big Table social space. We're raising funds to build out and furnish active and vibrant public culinary and communal dining areas in the new contemporary art museum opening on our Tube Factory artspace campus in 2025. In this 40,000-square-foot building located on the near southside of Indianapolis, visitors will experience a large commercial kitchen and adjacent learning lab space where we'll offer culinary training and cooking classes. This?area will also help serve as an incubator and training ground for local food businesses. Likewise, the culinary area will serve as the kitchen for the adjacent nonprofit museum cafe and catering for events and receptions in the building. The cafe will be located in the spacious and historic former barn to serve as our main entrance. This are will include artist-made big tables for communal dining and additional comfortable seating for gathering and socializing. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gDrANfcY

Six artists based in Indianapolis have just received $10,000 each to create new, often risk-taking visual art projects through Power Plant Grants — made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, based in New York — fund visual artists and artist groups producing public-facing work that is experimental and brings new energy to the city’s arts community. Big Car is one of 36 organizations across the United States working to support artists via funds from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts’ Regional Regranting Program. Indianapolis artists are brilliant. It’s exciting to read the Power Plant Grant proposals each year and see six of them move from an idea into reality. We so appreciate the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts seeing the potential and investing in our artists! Funded Power Plant projects for 2024: Dailyn Eades: “Hopawaaka: A Vision Quest of Contemporary Indigenous Art” Eades’ project focuses on her personal connection to the Shawnee Tribe and tying it to Indiana history through a new body of abstract paintings paired with ceramic sculptures using clay from the Shawnee Reservation in Oklahoma. Gina Lee Robbins: “On the Count” Lee Robbins will create a meditation on the number of individuals incarcerated in the United States through the creation and exhibit of a ceramic installation. The work will include 2,000 hand formed torso-shaped ceramic pieces individually pierced 1,000 times by Robbins, to represent the almost two million people currently incarcerated in all 50 states. Miracle Hall: “Ecology UNKEMPT” Hall’s “Ecology Unkempt” is an art and media project which highlights resilience in urban environments by drawing parallels between native plants and individuals who live in the city and at times under challenging circumstances. Quinn Tailor: “Stitching Together Queer Generations” Tailor’s “Stitching Together Queer Generations” will be a co-created public art display consisting of five quilts representing attitudes towards the present and future, across generations within the LGBTQIAA+ community. Tanía Michelle Wineglass: “Curiouser and Curiouser” Wineglass will create a series of 30 pieces illustrating classic fairy tales using African American people as the central focus. Using a collage of colorful imagery surrounding each character, the subjects will appear in black and white creating a stark contrast between background and foreground, enhancing the artistic juxtaposition of story and subject in each piece. Michael Runge: “Echo House”: Runge will create a polycarbonate sculptural installation visible from the I-70 overpass at the 65/70 split on the near east side of Indianapolis. The sculpture will reference the houses that were demolished and the families that were displaced during the highway’s construction in the late 1960 and early 1970’s.

Meet the facilitators and speakers of our signature #??????????????????????: ???????????? ???? ???????????? training! Learn placemaking essentials for creating a thriving #PublicSpace from instructors who will help you turn your vision into an actionable plan. Hurry and register today—there's just ONE WEEK left to sign up! https://bit.ly/3Xnew95 ? Elena Madison, Director of Projects, Project for Public Spaces ? Emily Putnam, Senior Associate Projects, Project for Public Spaces ? Nathan Storring, Co-Executive Director, Project for Public Spaces ? Alessandra Galletti, Landscape Architecture Consultant, Place+Scape ? Melissa Lee, CNU-A, Principal of Community Health, Public Works Partners, LLC ? Jim Walker, Founder & Executive Director, Big Car Collaborative

Indianapolis has emerged as an art and culture hub of the Midwest within the last decade, and the Levitt VIBE Indianapolis Music Series is one recent addition to this cultural vitality. The inaugural year of this series has brought a burst of energy and community to the Near Southside neighborhood every Sunday afternoon, activating the city’s oldest public green space, Garfield Park. With the goal of bringing art to people and people to art, Big Car Collaborative is the team behind Levitt VIBE Indianapolis, in partnership with Arte Mexicano en Indiana and Indy Parks and Recreation. We’re excited to share more about their story on our Levitt Now blog: https://lnkd.in/enF4AWsN #LevittVIBEIndianapolis #BigCarCollaborative #ArteMexicanoenIndiana #IndyParks #LevittFoundation #LevittVIBE #Indianapolis

Check out the coverage by Domenica Bongiovanni in The Indianapolis Star of Mary Jo Bayliss's "The Village,"?a 9-foot-tall, 24-foot-wide fabric art sculpture that the public/ Taylor Swift fans will help create. We commissioned the work from Bayliss and it is influenced by fan iconography from Swift's work. This is part of our creative placemaking program, SPARK Placemaking. SPARK on the Circle is a partnership with Downtown Indy, Inc., Inc., City of Indianapolis, and the Indiana War Memorials Foundation Commission — and funded by the Capital Improvements Board. https://lnkd.in/eyVSJWnf Located in the Northwest Quad of Monument Circle, November 3 is the last day of SPARK on the Circle this year.

It’s a big year for SPARK on the Circle! Thanks to YOUR support, the park in the heart of the city took home “The People’s Choice Award” at the Indy Chamber Monumental Awards! SPARK is made possible by so many great partners including Downtown Indy, Inc., Big Car Collaborative, City of Indianapolis - Department of Metropolitan Development, and Merritt Chase with support from the Capital Improvement Board and Indiana War Memorials Commission.

Congratulations to Wendy Red Star on her MacArthur Foundation Fellowship! So fortunate to have curated an exhibit with her in 2014. I had first seen her work as part of the The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art Contemporary Art Fellowship show.?And when I worked with Red Star, Jennifer Complo McNutt was a great supporter and mentor for me—she facilitated the artist talk. As true today as much as then, Brose Partington ensured the art entrusted to us is well presented to the highest standards. It’s difficult to get attention for artists, curators and projects working outside the high art world centers. So I’m excited and sharing— even if it is a decade after our show together that she receives accolades—-it proves we Big Car Collaborative Tube Factory artspace are moving in the right direction to focus on contemporary art with our new campus.