On a recent visit to the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) in the Garfield Park neighborhood, Rita Avellar, 49, made art out of clay in the Art Café by Line+Form. Before having her items baked in the polymer clay oven, she had a cup of coffee in the Normal Cafe, which serves espresso drinks and sandwiches. She brought her dog, Herkey, a Shichon, with her.
While Avellar regularly checks out all the exhibitions on display, CAMi, operated by the nonprofit Big Car Collaborative, is more than just a museum to her.
You might describe CAMi as a “cultural campus,” as Big Car does on its website. Along with the museum — a redeveloped 125-year-old dairy and industrial building — the campus has Tube Factory artspace (now called Tube), 18 homes for visiting and resident artists, an amphitheater, the Chicken Chapel of Love, public greenspace and a park.
What matters for Avellar, who came to the U.S. in 2014 from Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, is that Big Car has made a place that makes her comfortable.
“I always tried to find places that I could go and feel welcome in different ways because I love art, I love culture,” she said.
If you too are a patron of the arts in Indy, you might be onto something if you think that everything in Indianapolis is a cultural campus now. Here are a few examples:
- The Children’s Museum is building new galleries and adding an arts corridor to “complete its neighborhood campus.”
- The Cabaret is planning to turn the Metzger building into a “new campus with an outdoor public performance plaza, a museum and listening room.”
- In 2005, the Indy Art Center created a 9 ½-acre Artspark on its grounds, designed to be a gallery without walls, with interactive sculptures, gardens and open air studios.
- In August, the Hi-Fi started work on its new entertainment “complex,” including a performance space and artist development room.
- The new Crooked Creek Cultural Campus, located on eight acres at 62nd Street and Michigan Road, is in its early development and community engagement phase.
- The Fort Ben Cultural Campus, managed by Arts for Lawrence, includes the historic Theater at the Fort, a Visual Arts Center that houses a ceramics studio, an art gallery and a resident artist studio.
A campus has room for many experiences
The things that make CAMi’s five acres into an enticing “cultural campus” are, by design, what Big Car’s executive director, Jim Walker, calls a “total work of art.”
There is a therapeutic element tied to this idea.
“The campus, the green space and the buffer zones that are between spaces and even the entrance area of the new building, that’s all for that purpose of that restorative aspect,” Walker explained.
A crucial component of the CAMi cultural campus is variety, Walker said, pointing to the storefronts and shops that are part of the building design.
When the Indianapolis Museum of Art changed its name in 2017 to Newfields, the rebranding highlighted its multiple buildings, an art park and gardens in addition to its main building on its 152-acre campus.
“That use of the word campus lends itself to a sense of welcome,” said Le Monte Booker, the president and CEO of Newfields. “It’s a place where you can come and really learn about art history as well as the various species of plants and flowers and bushes and life that we have here.”
Booker said the term is really meant to send a message to the audience that Newfields is more “than just a museum.”
At its annual meeting in May, Newfields unveiled its five-year strategic plan, which codifies community outreach as part of its mission.
“I think that we have a responsibility to determine how we can give back, how we can make our community better, and that extends beyond just art and nature,” Booker said.
The neighborhood admission program is one of the ways Newfields might be said to be “giving back” by offering free memberships to the residents of the neighborhoods that immediately surround the museum campus.
A campus, but make it a neighborhood
The Children’s Museum also gives free memberships to residents of surrounding neighborhoods: Crown Hill, Highland Vicinity, Historic Meridian Park, Mapleton-Fall Creek, Meridian Highland and Historic Watson Park.
Neighborhood outreach and investment are a priority for the Children’s Museum, said Vice President of Advancement Jeannie Infante, because the museum is part of the neighborhood.
To Infantine, “neighborhood campus” goes beyond describing the museum’s physical plant. It also shifts from focusing on growth, whether that means growing the museum’s footprint or building bigger, shinier things.
“We’re already the world’s largest children’s museum,” she said.
Outreach into Indy neighborhoods, aside from being part of the Children’s Museum mission, is a financial necessity, Infantine explained. If depending mostly on wealthier parts of the greater Indianapolis area was ever an effective strategy in terms of financial sustainability, it’s certainly not now when, say, Hamilton County families have an abundance of nearby free playgrounds and waterparks.
“Families can choose to either drive down from 116th Street right to 30th Street, or they could go to the park that’s around the corner that’s part of their tax dollars,” Infantine said.
The Children’s Museum’s investments in nearby neighborhoods, several of them historically Black, is the outgrowth of a decision made after Jeffrey Patchen took the helm as CEO in 1999, when the board considered moving the museum to White River State Park.
Instead, the museum stayed put and made improvements in the community, which had experienced decades of disinvestment. Its Mid-North Promise Program offers career guidance, educational support and financial resources, including free memberships.
The opening of the outdoor Riley Children’s Health Sports Legends Experience in 2018 — adding 7 1/2 acres of outdoor space — was an outgrowth of decisions made almost two decades before. With this outdoor attraction, the museum quite literally moved beyond its own walls, onto an outdoor campus.
Defining the edges of their campus to feel more open to the surrounding neighborhoods was baked into the Children’s Museum’s successful application for its state-funded READI (Regional Economic Acceleration & Development Initiative) grant. The museum announced it will use this $1 million grant for new galleries and an outdoor arts corridor.
Infantine, formerly the director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, has seen certain buzzwords move through the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors and thinks “campus” is one of them.
“Funders are increasingly interested in projects that have some connectivity and collaboration to them,” she said. “But terminology is really only meaningful when it describes real work.”
Things seemed to be working well enough for Christian Flores, 31, and his two daughters, Lauren, 8, and Berenice, 3, when they visited the museum for the first time this summer.
They saw “Take me There Peru” and “Treasures of the Earth,” among other exhibits. They wanted to check out the Riley Children’s Health Sports Legends Experience, but it was very hot that day so they will have to wait for their next visit.
“But I think they will love it too, since there are a lot of activities outside the museum,” Flores said.
Singing, dancing and ready to expand
The Cabaret is also one of 10 Indianapolis cultural organizations that received a READI grant this past summer. The nonprofit arts theater at 924 N. Pennsylvania St. will use its $1 million award to fund its $8.9 million expansion to build a creative campus.
Julie Goodman, the Cabaret’s chief advancement officer, is responsible for marketing and fundraising. She emphasized the goal to expand their footprint in the Metzger building would allow them to add 100 seats to the theater. More seats means bigger events, like hosting the biennial American Piano Awards competition, featuring young classical and jazz pianists from around the world.
While the planning for how they will expand The Cabaret — which shares the Metzger building with the Indy Arts Council — isn’t finalized, Goodman describes the goals in broad terms.
“I think the concept is for us to also be more intentional about our external presence in the neighborhood and lean into our role as a cultural anchor, as a cultural destination,” she said.
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