When Near Westside Indy resident Nasreen Khan applied for a Public Art for Neighborhoods grant in 2021, she had her Haughville community in mind. However, she wanted members of her community to be in the driver’s seat. That is, she wondered what would happen if the art project was determined by the residents, rather than by the artist.
“And that was my pitch to the (Indy) Arts Council,” she said. “I just had an idea that public art is hardly ever determined by the people who it’s ostensibly for.”
Khan wanted to create a mural that celebrated the neighborhood’s history and depicted notable people and buildings at the Haughville branch of the Indianapolis Public Library. Her project received a $2,500 grant.
On Jan. 31, the Public Art for Neighborhoods grant application will open. It’s an opportunity for Indianapolis-based musicians, dancers, visual artists, poets, filmmakers, comedians – in other words, creatives of all types — and non-arts community organizations to pitch projects that will improve their neighborhoods. Participants are expected to partner with their neighborhoods and/or with neighborhood-based organizations to accomplish their projects. Grants range from $500 to $5,000.
Applicants proposing to complete their work in neighborhoods deemed to be public arts deserts, which are areas lacking in public art, by the Public Art for All census published in 2022 will be given special consideration for the grants, said Julia Muney Moore, the Indy Arts Council’s public art director. The Arts Council will administer a total of $105,000 through the Public Art for Neighborhoods grants.
While Khan’s Haughville neighborhood, located just west of downtown Indy, is not considered an art desert, Khan is fiercely proud of her neighborhood for its history and diversity. She went to her local library with her son a lot during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The nationwide Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, also informed her thinking on the mural. The protests had occurred very recently, seemingly very near. But the icons of Black history seemed, somehow, far away.
“We started the mural, and I began to realize that like so many of the public murals and public art that had to do with race or place were people like Malcolm X, or Madam C.J. Walker or Martin Luther King, people like very far away from the lived experience of the residents,” said Khan, who has lived on the near westside since 2017.
She came to this realization after talking to Israel Solomon, a Black painter whose art reflects his background and his familiarity with Indianapolis. Khan hadn’t grown up in the U.S. like Solomon had. She had grown up in Senegal, West Africa and in Indonesia.
“We began to think about what were symbols of success within the neighborhood and what we could do to counter the idea that leaving Haughville, leaving the place that you’re born and raised, is the only definition of success. So that’s where it started.”
In addition to helping Khan conceptualize the mural, Solomon helped her create it.
“He taught me about building depth into a mural, and painting alongside him was the mentorship that I needed artistically,” she said. “I remain incredibly grateful to him. He’s one of the artists in the city that I would say, leads quietly.”
Another artist who helped out a great deal was an artist by the name of Mako. “He’s an abstract artist with an Ethiopian background,” Khan said. “A lot of the geometric shapes that you see in that mural are are interpreted from African textile.” Artist Samuel Penaloza, a Haughville artist, also painted large sections of the mural.
Before the first paintbrush touched the walls of the library’s children’s section, however, Khan set in motion a process of identifying the local movers and shakers in Haughville that were worthy of representing in the mural. She also wanted to find out the locations and buildings that were worthy of depiction. For that, she reached out to her community for suggestions. Some of the canvassing took place in community meetings and some through social media. She also handed out flyers.
One of the names that came up was that of Lucius Newsom, the co-founder of the Lord’s pantry at Nana’s house. He’s also a retired Black Baptist minister who found a spiritual awakening in the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, and converted to Catholicism later on in life.
“He was a pioneer, even though he’s not recognized for it in urban gardening and agriculture,” Khan said.
Newsom’s face, along with that of other local icons, is on the mural. Local landmarks such as the Westside Bait & Tackle Shop and the Holy Trinity Church — the only Slovenian Catholic church in the US — also appear.
Khan also points to the Talavera tiles, which are a hand-painted clay tile made in Mexico, and symbolize the contributions of Mexican Americans to the Haughville community.
Challenges during the mural painting forced Khan and her cohorts to think creatively. When they began painting, they realized that the wall in the children’s section of the library was larger than they had planned for — and more than their $2,500 grant could cover.
“So we just put out an appeal citywide for people to donate paint,” said Khan, who sees the utility in providing grantees a limited amount of funding, as it forces artists to involve their communities in their projects.
Community members, including library staff, also donated their time to help paint the mural.
“Some funds come back to the people.”
The Public Art for Neighborhoods program asks for donations on a much larger scale, leveraging for-profit development for the public good.
“The whole idea of the grant is that the city gives incentives to developers who are doing certain projects in certain neighborhoods,” said Moore. In the process of developing Indianapolis neighborhoods, “some funds come back to the people” in the form of public art, she said.
The grant program was set in motion by a Public Arts for Neighborhoods ordinance, which was approved in 2016. It set in motion a process utilizing Tax Incentive Financing (TIF).
“So the developers have a choice,” Moore said. “They can take 1% of the value of the incentives that they get from the city — and that’s millions and millions of dollars – and either use it to put public art on the outside of their buildings so that people in the neighborhood can enjoy it, or they can just take that value as a cash contribution to the Public Art for Neighborhoods fund. And it is those collected cash contributions that we use to make the grants.”
The first round of grants, in 2020-2021 focused on easing the social isolation that had come over Indianapolis in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We only had like $50,000 at that time,” Moore said. “But we felt it was really important to use those funds to help people use the arts to mitigate whatever the effects of the pandemic were for them. So we had noticed that a lot of communities — a lot of artists and musicians — were volunteering to give free concerts for their neighborhoods to help keep peoples’ spirits up and bring people together in outside locations.”
Most public art deserts can be found in areas away from downtown Indianapolis
In making decisions about what projects to fund this year, the grantmakers will refer to the Public Art for All census published in 2022. It was conducted by Rokh (a research and design firm), produced in partnership with Art Strategies, and commissioned by the Indy Arts Council. To do the census, Rokh hired canvassers to drive and walk 6,500 linear miles through the city, block by block, to map artworks. They also did research on the artists who created the works, when the artists’ names were available.
The census inventoried and analyzed more than 3,000 works of public art in Indianapolis– from traditional murals and sculptures to roadside memorials and graffiti. The Indy Arts Council describes the project as the first step in “a public art equity audit to help ensure equitable investments in public art, artists and communities.”
Among its findings are the existence of public art deserts in Indianapolis. According to the Public Art for All census, public art deserts are defined as “areas still lacking accessibility to public art.” These areas come in three types: areas where public art is “completely unavailable”; areas in which public art isn’t available within one mile (called “semi-deserts”) and finally areas that are “zones that have less than 80% area median income and no artwork within a mile.”
“We are prioritizing projects that are going to make public art deserts less ‘desert-y,’” Moore said.
According to the census, most of those public art deserts can be found in areas away from downtown. The report goes on to add that the number of artworks downtown could be termed a “public art swamp” — where the public art is too concentrated, incoherent, and incongruent with the demographics of the local residents.
The census’ author and lead researcher, Danicia Monét, said she is excited to see that the Arts Council’s grants will prioritize projects in public art deserts.
“They are taking an opportunity to invest in these areas that are lacking public art, recognizing that public art is an asset to neighborhood health and wellness,” she said. “I’m looking forward to more cultural narratives being shared in the built environment.
“A lot of people have been doing a lot of this work out of their own pocket, whether it’s through a neighborhood fund, or a singular neighbor who is just creating something on their own property or adopting a vacant lot. I’m really looking forward to them being supported by a broader initiative because it’s not cheap, both physically or financially, to do public art,” Monét said.
Any kind of art, as long as it’s open to everybody
The census also raised other issues that will factor into how Public Art for Neighborhood grants are distributed.
“We’re also looking at some other equity issues that were raised in that census,” Moore said. The report, for example, found that 67.5% of attributable public art was created by white artists and 54.9% was created by men. “We’re looking at projects that commission BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ and women artists because they don’t traditionally get a lot of the money for this.”
The maintenance and the deteriorating condition of public art was also highlighted in the census.
“We are allowing neighborhoods to apply for maintenance,” Moore said. So if there’s artwork in the community that everybody loves, but it’s in really bad shape, they can apply for funding to fix it up.”
Moore wants artists of all types to apply for the Public Arts for Neighborhoods grants — from sculptors and painters to dancers and comedians. One example of a project that received funding in 2021, was musician Clockwork Janz and artist Josh Haines’ Garfield Park Neighborhood cookbook. For every recipe submitted, Janz composed music and Haines created an illustration.
“It doesn’t have to be traditional public art,” Moore said. “Any kind of arts activity in a public space is fine. If you wanted to do a free concert for your neighborhood, if you wanted to do dance classes for kids in a community green space … any of that as long as it has to do with the arts, and it’s open to everybody.”
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