Special Projects
ONSITE AND Offsite curatorial projects and partnerships
The Guichelaar Gallery and Residency House, located next door to Tube Factory at 1135 Cruft Street, is a contemporary art space operated by Big Car Collaborative APLR artists. It also serves as a home for visiting artists.
Terri Sisson Park, designed by Rundell Ernstberger’s Daniel Liggett in close collaboration with Big Car Collaborative staff artists, features many ways for visitors to experience and enjoy art and nature while also socializing with others. It’s open to the public during daylight hours.
The park greenspace borders and connects the two contemporary art museum buildings on our campus, nature, and local waterways. And these welcoming and restorative spaces have really helped establish our block as a campus. They directly tie in with the idea that the museum serves as a center for peace and restoration in the community.
The Efroymson Family Fund made the naming of Terri Sisson Park possible. Terri Sisson is the mother of Big Car co-founder and Tube Factory curator, Shauta Marsh. Dedicating the park to Terri, who passed away in 2022, is especially fitting because the park is a shrine to motherhood.
“Otherhood and Motherhood are two main themes that thread through this greenspace,” Marsh says. “It’s a place for people who have no one. It’s a space for people who have more people in their life than they know what to do with.”
“My mother was a bottomless ocean of love and patience,” Marsh says. “She saw the best in people. And that’s the spirit the world really needs. That’s why we will celebrate her with the naming of this park. It was the meaning of her to hold a space for everyone, for total strangers, for friends, for family.”
Meggan Gould’s Sorry, No Pictures examines photographic tools and technologies and their constant teeter on the edge of obsolescence. Gould takes apart and re-contextualizes the smallest aspects of the medium, including the iconography of camera dials, the design of viewfinder patterns, and the ubiquitous Epson inkjet printer test pattern. Intertwined with personal narrative, the artist uses “playful resistance” in her work to question the role of corporations and manufacturers of photographic technologies — from Kodak to Flickr — in shaping photography, image-making, vision, and the language surrounding the medium.
Many have experienced grief with the loss of someone close to them, but what if that someone was yourself?
Transgender people have lived and existed in many forms for many centuries. Today, there are many possible (physical, emotional, and mental) changes made by Trans people to feel affirmed in their own body. To “come out” or “transition” has required some Trans people to abandon a self they do not recognize. This act of abandonment and process of grieving one’s self is common for many Queer and Trans people who were not raised in affirming environments.
Arte Mexicano en Indiana and Big Car Collaborative are partnering to present the works by Mexican Daniela Martín del Campo & and Colombian Artist Gloomy Zauros. GOLDEN MYST represents a unique visual and spiritual experience, where chromatic limitation becomes a window to reflection and contemplation: the deep black of the ink, the shimmering gold and the immaculate white of the paper.
Simpson and Big Car Co-founder/Director of Programming, Shauta Marsh discuss her most recent book “Noopiming: A Cure For White Ladies” Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity.
When you open The Chicken Chapel of Love’s hand-carved wooden doors inscribed with the latin phrase Vide cor meum (See My Heart), you’re greeted with stained glass windows filtering the east-rising sun, gilded gold, neon lights, red velvet curtains, taxidermied roosters, warm wood church pews, wax candles of all colors — some lit, some melted. The space represents the heart of humanity, the heart of the chicken. Our destinies and fates are overlapping and intertwining like those with whom we choose to share our lives.
The Pan Endemic series are individual artworks commissioned by Shauta Marsh, Co-founder and Director of Programming, at Big Car Collaborative. Due to the pandemic, Tube Factory artspace, our commissioning contemporary art museum has been closed to the public since March of 2020. This work and others to come are an effort to continue to support visual artists and share their work with the public. This series is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Art & Vinyl is an ongoing project that aims to bring the work of Black artists from the Indianapolis area to the forefront and contribute to a fuller picture of Contemporary art in an engaging virtual exhibition.
Rest In Paradise by Chicago based artist Carlos Rolón is window installation at Listen Hear commissioned by Big Car co-founder Shauta Marsh in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. May of 2020 their killings sparked demonstrations across the world and provoked a long over-due reckoning in the United States about systemic racism.
With this multifaceted, multiyear project, Indianapolis-based arts organization Big Car Collaborative — with our partners, the University of Southern Indiana, Indiana State Museum, Historic New Harmony, and others –– have created a series of radio show, exhibits, and conversations exploring, learning, and sharing how utopia has informed places and pursuits over time.
Curated by a committee of neighborhood artists in collaboration with Big Car Collaborative and the Garfield Park Arts Center, this exhibition will feature artwork in a variety of mediums by local artists that reside in Garfield Park.
Librería Donceles is a floating Spanish-language second-hand bookstore created by Pablo Helguera in 2013 that was housed at Listen Hear from August 5 until October 22, 2016. The bookstore, which is comprised of over 6,500 volumes and has traveled to major U.S. cities like New York, Phoenix and Chicago, was created in part to address the lack of literature available to growing Spanish-speaking communities.
Hocking spent three weeks in Indianapolis gathering materials from the site, documenting, researching, and creating his installation. He hauled over 100 massive hunks of burned Styrofoam, multiple plastic blobs melted by fires, fragmented fast food signage, nifty anthropomorphic food-character murals, and dozens of other artifacts. He brought this all to Tube Factory. And he worked onsite while living in Big Car’s neighboring artist residency home. The resulting installation uses the main gallery as a kind of ceremonial site — the burned Styrofoam mountain could be a dystopian temple or future glacier.
Located in the main Tube Factory gallery space, the exhibit was a co-curatorial project between Mari Evans, Carl Pope, and Shauta Marsh. It consists of a commissioned installation piece by artist Carl Pope related to Evans’s photos, poetry, and book of essays, “Clarity as Concept: A Poet’s Perspective.”
“In Mexico there is a common expression that relates to migration to the US: “Ni de aqui, ni de alla.” Not from here or there. As Mexicans who have built lives in the US we often face challenges on both sides of the border.
New Harmony was the site of two utopian experiments in the early 1800s. Today, New Harmony brims with art, history, architecture, and a strong sense of place. With our partners, we will explore, learn and share how the pursuit of utopia has formed places and pursuits.
Jerry Lee Atwood’s custom Western wear stands at the apex of contemporary culture and fashion history. It serves as a bridge between traditions of the past, established by great Western wear clothiers like Nuta Kotlyarenko (known professionally as Nudie Cohn), or Manuel Arturo José Cuevas Martínez Sr., best known simply as Manuel, and our modern pop-culture pantheon.
ince moving to the United States, Khan has been working in art and poetry as a way to connect with the immigration experience. She frequently highlights and references the places she comes from: “I grew up in West Africa and Indonesia, my father is half Afghan, half Russian, and my mom is Filipino, Chinese, Spanish, and Indigenous.” In this piece, Khan uses woodburning to inscribe symbols on a table she created with discarded materials. Using symbology, she tells the story of her life milestones: adolescence, immigration, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and homeownership. The pandemic gave us the time we wanted and time we didn’t — to reflect on the past and what we want to accomplish in the future. Khan’s Small Rebellions helps bring us together as we experience the same milestones, the same pause.
With the lean, long jab and agile step of a boxer, Adrian Matejka delivers this knockout dramatization of the larger-than-life life of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In dexterous interpolating voices, and in forms ranging from enveloping sonnets to prose letters and interviews, Johnson emerges as a scrappy, hard-edged hero—troubled by his own demons but determined to win the “fight of the century,” a fight that underscored the bitter realities of racism in America. These poems don’t pull no punches.
Chicago-based artist Carlos Rolón/Dzine presented a dually charged exploration of boxing and domestic culture, inspired by the tactility and performative qualities of boxing, and its relationship to contemporary art at Tube Factory artspace. Though it was the third iteration of the exhibit, it featured a newly commissioned performative installation of live sanctioned Golden Gloves fights, organized by Indy Boxing and Grappling and sponsored by Top Rank Productions. A robe was also commissioned from Rolón for the boxers to wear before the fights. When the ring was not in use, the robe was on display in the ring.
Several cultural and community partners worked together to complete a mural honoring Indianapolis-based poet and artist, Mari Evans — one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement.
Big Car participated a long-term partnership 2009-2015 with the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) via our Design For Good program.
We conducted series of artist exchange exhibitions in Bloomington, Indy, and Iowa City. Outside/In is about discovery, spontaneity and the importance of perspective and place.