City Gallery awarded grant from ArtPlace America

Indianapolis, share our joy!  “ArtPlace America announces today the award of a $100,000 grant to the Harrison Center for the Arts (HCA) for the City Gallery. City Gallery was chosen from over 1,200 applications as an exceptional example of creative placemaking.”

 

ArtPlace America is a collaboration of leading national and regional foundations, banks and federal agencies committed to accelerating creative placemaking – putting art at the heart of a portfolio of strategies designed to revitalize communities. We at the Harrison Center and City Gallery have enjoyed years of community and city support.  We are grateful for our partners here in Indianapolis who know us and who have given thousands of dollars in support of our work in the city.  The ArtPlace grant marks the first time that our work has been recognized and funded at a national level.

 

We’re continuing our mission to promote the beauties of  living, working and playing in urban Indianapolis.  We believe that place (in our case, Indianapolis’s core neighborhoods) is important, and that a vibrant arts scene is a community and cultural development catalyst.  ArtPlace funding will allow us to, among other things, produce over 30 celebratory place-based  exhibits, festivals and community events, including a new singer-songwriter festival this fall.  We’ve had several of our summer interns arrive this week, including Paul Smallman, our new “brand ambassador” from Baltimore, who is also an accomplished singer-songwriter.  Paul has the daunting charge of writing a song a week telling the stories of urban Indianapolis.  Friday afternoon, we all sat together in the office and listened to his first composition, Different Speech, a moving ballad referencing Robert Kennedy’s announcement of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. which took place just a few blocks from us in what is now MLK Park. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to have these bits of our neighborhood history captured in song.

 

The official announcement and community celebration of the ArtPlace America award will take place on June 8th at our 12th Annual Independent Music + Art Festival (IMAF), a day-long festival that includes 12 local and regional bands and over 100 modern crafters and artists with an expected attendance of over 7000.  But we wanted you to know first!  Thank you to ArtPlace America for this unprecedented opportunity, and thank you to all of our partners here in Indianapolis who work tirelessly to make this world class city such a great place to live. We’re proud to be working alongside you.

School at 23rd & Park plays vital role in neighborhood renewal

In the 1970s, the neighborhood now known as Fall Creek Place was informally known as “Dodge City, because of the increased number of shootings; soaring crime rates, rampant drug abuse, and a serious abandoned and deteriorating housing problem contributed to the blight.  At a grassroots level, however, neighbors were working in their own ways to bring about change.  Percy Scruggs, an African American boy scout leader from Alabama, opened the first Community Outreach Center in the neighborhood.  Russ Pulliam once said of Scruggs, “He never talked about diversity or racial reconciliation.  But he practiced it, bringing together blacks and whites in a common cause to help a neighborhood.”

In the 1990s, former governor Mitch Daniels, then an executive at Lilly, and a group of friends and fellow businessmen decided that Indianapolis needed a different kind of school that could be a redemptive force for reconciliation in the city.  They picked the bleakest area of the city they could find, found space in an abandoned IPS building at the corner of 23rd and Park and opened the Oaks Academy.  The Oaks was founded on the idea that all children are capable of the duty and delight of learning, and that a rich, high quality education should be available to all.  The leaders envisioned and developed a rich classical curriculum, celebrating the “gold” of our great cultural heritage, integrated and organized along the historic timeline.  Students study the art, politics, history, literature and philosophy of the Ancient World in second grade, Greece and Rome in third, the Middle Ages and Renaissance in fourth, on through the modern era in sixth grade.  Everything repeats in middle school.  The approach seems to be working.  The school’s ISTEP pass rate is currently 100%, with most students testing one to two grades above grade level.  At the end of every school year, all students march down 23rd and Park, costumed, and dancing to music from the era they have studied.  It is an exuberant display of joyful learning and one of my favorite events of the year.  If you live in the Fall Creek area, come watch this year’s parade at 7:00 p.m. tonight (May 17).   It is one of those little snapshots that reminds me that there is hope in the world.

 

In the spirit of Percy Scruggs, the Oaks has always been intentionally committed to racial and socioeconomic reconciliation and unity.  The student body is roughly 50% low income, 25% middle and 25% high, and 39% African American, 45% Caucasian, and 16% Biracial, Asian and Hispanic.  At the Oaks Academy, faculty and staff are deeply committed to caring for each individual student.  Head of school Andrew Hart says, “No matter who you are, no matter what neighborhood you come from, no matter where the decimal point is in your bank account, what we say to every parent who comes in here is that there is one thing you need to be sure of: Your child will be known, and your child will be loved.” And it is true.

The days of “Dodge City” are a memory.  Fall Creek Place, the neighborhood that surrounds the Oaks Academy,  is now one of the most beautiful and desired neighborhoods in our city.  In the early 2000s, the city developed an aggressive home ownership program to address the problem of abandoned housing and absentee landlords. Under the leadership of the King Park Area Development Corporation, development and sales have far exceeded projections.  Today, more than 400 new families join many long-time residents in calling the neighborhood home.  Fall Creek Place has won four national awards for excellence in planning, design and community development, and has been featured in eight national magazines.  Thanks to our Indianapolis Community Development Corporations, city leaders and neighbors like you who see needs and do something about them.  Our city becomes more beautiful every day as we all work together.

May we have your Emma Converse painting?

The daffodils have bloomed on Delaware, our tulip tree is in flower here at the Harrison Center, we have broken out our summer sandals, and spring finally seems to be here to stay.  For our local university students, spring means that the end of the school year is nigh and for senior art students, their senior shows.

We first met University of Indianapolis senior and studio art major, Emma Converse, last year when she naively agreed to coordinate the Harrison Center’s 11th annual Independent Music and Art Festival (IMAF).  Converse booked bands, invited artists, and seamlessly coordinated our biggest event of the year, attended by over 7000 people. However, one look at her paintings convinced the Harrison Center staff that Emma also was an extraordinarily talented painter and we wanted her paintings of Indianapolis at night to be in the City Gallery during IMAF.  Visitors and patrons loved her work, and by the end of the day she had sold almost every painting, and received 8 commissions and an offer for a solo show.

But Emma is an undergraduate student who now has a senior show to produce (coming up next week) and almost no work to put in it . . . because it has all sold.  So, one of my jobs this week was to collect her work from her buyers so that she can have something to hang.  And, wow!  People love their Emma Converse.  Everyone was reluctant to part with their pieces, even for a couple of weeks and one person I asked, simply replied, “No.  Absolutely not.”  That painting had become a centerpiece, conversation starter, and the focal point of the house, a most treasured object.  One by one the enchanting paintings have come in, lovingly wrapped and carried by their proud owners, and I understand what the fuss was about.

We are lucky, in Indianapolis, to have several great university art programs, where art students are already producing outstanding work.  This month we have had the privilege of showing Print and Thread, the textile work of Herron School of Art + Design seniors Rachael Rush and Liz Wagoner, in the Hank and Dolly Gallery.  Liz’s meticulously detailed silk screens and Rachael’s pieces honoring her aging grandmother are particularly moving for me.

We congratulate Indianapolis’s newly graduating artists, some of whose work will be hung in the Harrison Center in the next couple of months.  Let’s buy their work now while we can afford it, thankful for the next generation of artist leaders in our city.