There’s no shortage of bad news these days, from the U.S. and Mexico border to Iran’s Strait of Hormuz to the battlefields of Ukraine.
For four Indianapolis artists — Salma Taman, Alejandra Carrillo, Bailey Jörk and Iryna Bondar — the question isn’t whether to respond, but how.
‘Something that unites rather than divides.’
If you don’t know anything about Arabic, Salma Taman’s painting “A Beautiful Forgiveness” might seem abstract because it depicts characters from that alphabet. These characters form a phrase, which comes from the Quran: “Forgive with a beautiful forgiveness.”
“It’s not a forgiveness spoken out of obligation, nor one that masks lingering hurt,” Taman said. “But one that lets go without reproach or humiliation, and carries no desire for revenge. It is a forgiveness that is gracious, complete and sincere.”
The verse reflects divine will, according to Taman, who was born in Alexandria, Egypt.
“We have to always understand that none of us really has the Absolute Truth,” she said. “So have humility and have grace when you are having discussions and debates with others.”
But in times of war and political division, where humility is hard to find or absent, it isn’t always easy to find such grace.
“None of us are O.K. since the beginning of the war in 2023 of Gaza,” continued Taman, 42, talking about the Arab diaspora in the U.S. “We don’t feel like life can go as if nothing is happening. We’re scared for our people.”
Taman, who is the development director for Pattern, has curated shows in Indianapolis, including the April 2025 Arab American Heritage Month Celebration at Indy Global Village.
The exhibition brought together artists who are based in Indianapolis, but who have family roots in Arab countries.
“It was at the time when the war on Gaza had started, but the show itself wasn’t political,” said Taman. “We tried to find something that unites rather than divides. Even though we were all heartbroken, we tried to shed light on what else is in the Middle East.”
Are you an artist making political art? Tell us about it by emailing arts & culture editor Jennifer Delgadillo at jennifer.delgadillo@mirrorindy.org.
Alligators and detention facilities
Multimedia artist Alejandra Carrillo, 26, notes that many art galleries, exhibition spaces and museums aren’t interested in political art.
“At some point there needs to be a shift where that kind of work is accepted, because that’s the reality that we’re living in,” Carrillo said. “I find myself a little frustrated every now and then that I come across an open call, and they always put on their restrictions.”
Some of Carrillo’s pieces are explicitly political. One of these is a digital drawing titled, “Piel de Caimán” which means “alligator skin” in Spanish. It depicts a woman in a traditional Mexican dress and a sombrero, riding an alligator, with a Klan hood in one hand under the slogan “CHINGA EL FASCISMO.”
At the foot of the alligator, in the swamp water, is a MAGA hat.
Carrillo, who came to Indianapolis by way of Chihuahua, Mexico, started this drawing on July 1, 2025, in response to the opening of Alligator Alcatraz in south Florida. This migrant detention center in the Everglades has racked up a long list of human rights violations, according to Amnesty International.
Making this drawing was an emotional rollercoaster for Carrillo.
“Some days this drawing met me extremely burnt out, uninspired and hopeless; while others it met me enraged, determined and irritable,” she wrote in an email. “The same pit in my stomach is with me now that I share this drawing.”
Other works of hers are less overtly political and more introspective, such as the screenprint “Que Descanses Mija…” , which depicts her father riding a merry-go-round.
Carrillo made the screenprint for the Chicago print festival “Creando Mundos for Grabadolandia,” which took place at the National Museum of Mexican Art. “I was inspired by one of my dad’s favorite Mexican films as a little boy: ‘El Caballito Volador.’”
She dedicated this screenprint to him because of his hard work, sacrifice and encouragement.
“I hope one day we get to see a world where our Latine parents can also rest and heal their inner child,” she said. “That is when I know we’ll truly be free.”
The politics of motherhood
Bailey Jörk is a mom with two young children. She makes her art, she said, “between naps.” But in her acrylic on canvas paintings, which focus on the trials of motherhood in humans and other mammals, the political world sometimes intrudes on her imagination.
“Mother for Guernica” is such a painting. It depicts a young woman nursing a calf.
“The idea of breast milk … everybody’s nourished by it as soon as they’re in the world,” said Jork, 30. “It was representative of the nurturing of the city of Guernica after they had gone through so much.”
Jörk was inspired by the anti-war painting by Pablo Picasso which depicts the destruction of Guernica, a town in the Basque country of northern Spain, by German and Italian fascist forces. He painted it in 1937, just before the outbreak of World War II.
“In the painting, there’s a mom holding her deceased child,” she said. “You can feel the pain of every mom.”
“Mother for Guernica” was part of a recent exhibition at Patina Gallery titled, “Connective Tissue.”
“None of the pieces hits you over the head with a political statement,” Jörk said. “But all things are affected by the political system that we live in.”
A grandmother’s textiles for resistance
For Iryna Bondar, 29, it’s not always possible to separate politics from culture. The country where she was born, Ukraine, is under continual attack from Russia. The goal of the Russians, according to Bondar, is not just to conquer Ukrainian land but to destroy Ukrainian culture.
Ukraine has been under attack since 2014, when Russian troops invaded Crimea and Russian-backed militias seized cities and towns in the Donbas region. The attacks escalated after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.
“They destroyed anything that signified that you were Ukrainian,” she said. “I’ve heard and read stories of people burying flags or embroidered textiles.”
In reaction to this destruction, Bondar’s work took a sharp turn from portraits and watercolors to embroidery in 2023.
Bondar was inspired by the embroidery of her grandmother and her friends and started asking them what they knew about the pieces. She then started making her own.
One of them is titled “Kahovka Dam Breach.” It depicts when Russian soldiers blew up the Kahovka Dam in the early days of the war. In the aftermath, 80 villages were drowned, along with some of the country’s best farmland.
Following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bondar started a website that functions as a directory to help people find and support Ukrainian creators by purchasing their work.
Bondar’s family back in Ukraine also needs help: they depend on her support from her regular job as a data analyst as well as from her artmaking.
Get the backstory
Bondar graduated from Herron School of Art and Design in 2019 after coming to the United States in 2015 to study. She has been travelling back to see them over the past few years, but the stress of traveling back and forth from a war zone has left her exhausted.
“I’ve decided that I’m not going to travel at all in 2026,” she said. “Just through the stress of traveling, I lost a lot of weight … I told my family that I’m going to take a break, and then me and my partner are going to go together in 2027.”
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Dan Grossman is a Mirror Indy freelance contributor. You can reach him at dan@indycorrespondent.org.
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