Big Car project will bring art into community

With a $50,000 grant from the Great Indianapolis Neighborhood Initiatives “Imagine Big” program, Big Car will bring a series of eight community art projects to eight different neighborhoods across Indianapolis in 2009-2010. Big Car is a locally based non-profit arts collective with a gallery in Fountain Square.

The series, titled “Made for Each Other,” is designed to connect art with the community and engage people of all walks of life in helping create shows, performances and events within the context of Indianapolis neighborhoods.

Made for Each Other will start with an exhibition at Lafayette Square Mall in October celebrating the rich cultural diversity of the neighborhood, followed in November by a collaborative community art show in Fountain Square connected with the Spirit & Place Festival.

Organizers said projects in Made for Each Other will bring neighbors together to help with the planning, creating and celebration of each project – bridging gaps between art, artists and art institutions and our neighbors in the community. The artwork will be inclusive, interactive, and dynamic. Most will be temporary, but some – depending on ideas that arise when neighbors and artists collaborate – will likely be longer lasting.

“The end result will be bringing the community together and developing a broader audience for art in our city,” said Big Car curator and co-founder Jim Walker, who is coordinating the series. “And now, more than ever, is the time to be working hard together to make this happen in Indianapolis.”

Projects will take place in urban areas across the city: Southeast (Fountain Square), Near Eastside, Martindale-Brightwood, Near West (Haughville), West Indianapolis (southwest of downtown), Lafayette Square, Crooked Creek and the Binford Boulevard area.

Walker wants the series to take public art in some new and important directions. First, he said, it will move public art from the realm of cultural tourism in Downtown locations to community locations in city neighborhoods across the city.

For this series, the target audience is no longer visitors, Walker said. It is people who live nearby. Second, the social nature of these projects will more directly connect members of the community with the final product. The work located in each community will be about these communities in authentic ways. The work will be made based on ideas and input from neighbors engaged in the communities. And the community will be part of the creation and celebration of the projects, Walker added.

“We are calling it Made for Each Other because the projects are just that – made for and by each other in our community,” Walker said.

More at www.bigcar.org