Power Plant Grant Projects
2025
Rob Funkhouser: Sonic Playground
Sonic Playground is a large, modular sound installation and interactive system that exists between sculpture and sound art. Built from wood and electronics joined with specialty hardware, the work can be endlessly reconfigured, serving as both artwork and platform for a new body of research into immersive, interactive sound. Featuring a multi-dimensional input array of tactile, positional, visual, and sonic sensors, it invites audiences to explore sound in playful, intuitive ways free from digital mediation. As part of this project, Sonic Playground will be installed in several public spaces, with each configuration designed to highlight a different mode of interaction through touch, movement, and real-time performance control.
Nasreen Khan: Botanical Bodies
Botanical Bodies is an interdisciplinary project that combines oral history, portraiture, and botanical symbolism to complicate dominant narratives about sex work while centering the voices of sex workers themselves. In collaboration with photographer Rachel Schwebach, Khan will conduct participant-guided interviews and photo sessions that inform final artworks rendered as woodburned and oil-painted portraits. Each portrait will obscure facial identity with botanically accurate illustrations chosen by participants, drawing on the Victorian “language of flowers” to encode personal histories in symbolic form. The project will culminate in a public exhibition featuring both the portraits and participants’ stories.
2024
Dailyn Eades: Hopawaaka: A Vision Quest of Contemporary Indigenous Art
Eades’ project focuses on her personal connection to the Shawnee Tribe and tying it to Indiana history through a new body of abstract paintings paired with ceramic sculptures using clay from the Shawnee Reservation in Oklahoma. Clay is a new medium to her so she will be learning from formally trained Indianapolis artist, Stephanie Williams. After her research and experimentation, she will give an artist talk and exhibit the new works she created through this process at 1000 Words Gallery, a non profit, Black owned art gallery located on the eastside of Indianapolis, deeply committed to uplifting emerging Black and Brown visual artists.
Quinn Tailor: Stitching Together Queer Generations
Tailor’s “Stitching Together Queer Generations” will be a co-created public art display consisting of five quilts representing attitudes towards the present and future, across generations within the LGBTQIAA+ community. These quilts will reflect Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z along with a quilt representing the combined community. Each quilt will be composed of half-square triangles, with colors corresponding to responses from a three-question survey given to self-identified LGBTQIAA+ individuals. The survey will ask about age, current world outlook, and future expectations. Age determines quilt placement, while responses to the other two questions are represented by color-coded triangles. This project combines traditional craft with data visualization, offering a unique perspective on generational attitudes within the LGBTQIAA+ community. By transforming individual responses into a collective artistic expression, the project aims to foster dialogue about shared experiences and diverse viewpoints across different age groups.
2024
Lauren Daughtery: Transformal Textiles
Textile Transformations will focus on themes of grief and loss, transformation, and empowerment through textile work. Using textiles related to a late child (crib sheets, clothing, colors associated with the nursery, etc), mothers will create their own textile work to memorialize their child and to provide a process-based approach for containing and transforming thoughts and emotions.
Textile work has been found to be beneficial in trauma work, allowing women to cope with grief, depression, and other physical ailments. Working in textiles provides sensory stimulation, promotes a feeling of centeredness or grounding, and can be used as a coping mechanism that can improve mood. This grant will support two iterations of Textile Transformations. Any mother who has experienced loss of a child due to miscarriage, birth trauma, post-birth complications, or any other means will be invited to participate. Sessions will be led by an art therapist and practicing artist alongside a licensed mental health counselor. There will be an optional exhibition for the participants.
Kelsey Simpson: Railroad City Bookmobile
Railroad City Bookmobile is an extension of the work that the locally based Gluestick group does within the Indianapolis community including teaching workshops, distributing free art supplies, publishing collaborative zines, and hosting an annual festival. As the digital world takes over, books and zine making are becoming more like art objects. Our plan is to fill a small vehicle with zines, comic books, and general interest books and distribute them across Indianapolis. In the long run we would love to make connections with community representatives and make return visits to certain locations. We envision ourselves having an item for everyone. We would love to connect with Hoosiers and ask what they would like to read or share with others. We want to see the bookmobile become a collaborative project with all who encounter it.
The Power Plant Grant will be used to purchase a vehicle and transform it into the Railroad City Bookmobile. This mobile workshop will make its public debut at a Read-in event with workshops and other creative opportunities for visitors at the Major Taylor Skatepark on the near westside of Indianapolis. Gluestick plans to document the Read-in experience and publish it as a zine to promote the Railroad City Bookmobile.
Reimagining the Hardrick Home: Public Art as Heritage Preservation engages the little-known history of Indiana's first African American painter, John Wesley Hardrick, born 1891 in Norwood on the Southeast side of Indianapolis. Working with the recently identified Hardrick Family collection and in collaboration with his descendants, my end goal is to replicate a Lost Mural that was painted at Crispus Attucks in the 1930s to be installed in the Pride Park in Norwood at its re-opening celebration. This grant will allow Austin to use the Hardrick Family Collection to do studies of his work, read his diaries, learn about his techniques, and research other artists working during the Harlem Renaissance. All of this to replicate a mural that was never seen and to which there are no known photos of.
Philip Campbell: From Me to You
From Me to You is a series of six handmade, art quilts (or security blankets) that will be exhibited in the Horizon House and then presented to patients at the Pedigo Clinic who are experiencing homelessness and in recovery from a substance use disorder. Each security blanket will be a unique combination of new fabrics combined with recycled textiles. “I deconstruct used clothing to make most of my work. Using this as a metaphor for healing ourselves: Sometimes in the process of repairing things that have broken, we actually create something more unique, beautiful and resilient. This tool is the process of recovery. “
Quinn Tailor: Stitching Together Queer Generations
Landon Caldwell: Everything I Hear Will Outlive Me
1000 Words Gallery has created a safe space for artists to grow and flourish through our monthly residency program. The space has been able to host over 10 black, emerging artists since the beginning of 2021. Their programs include artist development, art classes, art events, and community/partner engagement. We plan to expand our residency with more funding and make it open to more artists.
Korie Griggs: And So It Is
And So It Is is a hybrid book of memoir, poetry, and ritual that explores grief as both personal and collective. Rooted in Griggs’ experience as a Black, Indigenous, disabled grief worker and death doula, it weaves stories of loss, ancestral practices, and somatic wisdom into an archive of remembrance and healing. The book will be completed and launched through two community events — a reading and ritual at a community space, and an outdoor gathering with land-based practices for collective grief. And So It Is invites communities to grieve together, honor the dead, and discover how loss can become a source of connection, creativity, and care.
Jen Swim: Queering Clay
Queering Clay will create access for LGBTQIA+ folks to engage with ceramics by bringing free, mobile clay programming directly to LGBTQIA+ organizations. Over six weeks, Swim will offer instruction and hands-on experiences for participants who may not otherwise have access to clay. Alongside this community-focused program, Swim will develop a new body of large-scale ceramic works exploring themes of body, scale, and identity. The project will culminate in a two-part exhibition in Indianapolis, with one showcasing community partner creations, and another featuring Swim’s new work.
Gina Lee Robbins: On the Count
Elliot’s social practice and performance art project, Imagining Home: Liberatory Theatre and Speculative Solutions for Housing Justice aims to utilize critical dialogue, art and liberatory theater to examine the housing crisis in Indianapolis, specifically among the experiences of Black, Latine, Indigenous, LGBTQ2S+, and other historically marginalized communities.
By gathering community members affected by housing insecurity, as well as partnering with local organizations within the Indianapolis Housing Continuum of Care, we will engage in play, improvisation, imagination, and storytelling practices to collectively envision solutions and policies that can drive meaningful change. This project will employ a participatory approach, inviting individuals to become co-creators and active agents in the exploration of housing issues. Through a series of workshops, participants will be encouraged to develop their narratives through story circles, written accounts, performance, image-making, and other creative mediums.
2022
Individual Artists
Kaila Austin's: Reimagining the Hardrick Home: Public Art as Heritage Preservation
1000 Words Gallery has created a safe space for artists to grow and flourish through our monthly residency program. The space has been able to host over 10 black, emerging artists since the beginning of 2021. Their programs include artist development, art classes, art events, and community/partner engagement. We plan to expand our residency with more funding and make it open to more artists.
Lukas Schooler, Ventiko, and Lauren Curry: Ontogenesis
Ontogenesis is a new, multimedia, durational performance by Lauren Curry, Lukas Schooler, and Ventiko. Ontogenesis illustrates complicated emotions of a ritualistic homecoming where old connections are mourned and new connections are celebrated. The pilgrimage fosters interconnectedness through journeys of transformation by traveling the Canal Walk and engages the public.
Andrea Jandernoa: Ups and Downs: An Experience of Uncertainty in the Body
Jandernoa’s work centers around the relationship between the body and uncertainty through the use of sugar. This work was originally inspired by her own daily experience of unpredictability as a diabetic. However, the metaphors that exist within her work can be applied more broadly to our universal experiences of uncertainty in the body. With this grant, she will develop new sugar forms that invite audiences to express their own experiences of uncertainty and create meaning through interaction. Learn more here.
Lee Robbins will create a meditation on the number of individuals incarcerated in the United States through the creation and exhibit of a ceramic installation. The work will include 2,000 hand formed torso-shaped ceramic pieces individually pierced 1,000 times by Lee Robbins, to represent the almost two million people currently incarcerated in all 50 states. The production process is completed one state at a time, and once fired, the pieces will be hand-tied together in a chain with natural jute fiber. She plans on having temporary outdoor pop up installations of the work and showing them in-doors in non-traditional venues that will reach her desired audiences.
Tanía Michelle Wineglass: Curiouser and Curiouser
Wineglass will create a series of 30 pieces illustrating classic fairy tales using African American people as the central focus. Using a collage of colorful imagery surrounding each character, the subjects will appear in black and white creating a stark contrast between background and foreground, enhancing the artistic juxtaposition of story and subject in each piece. The new body of work will utilize traditional African American themes throughout to convey the historical realities of African Americans within the framework of enchantment and fairy tales. The 30 works will hang from ceilings and walls, framed in traditional African American quilt patterns used during the 18th century by enslaved peoples seeking freedom through the Underground Railroad. Additionally, she will create an auditory component for each piece.
Bryn Jackson and April Knauber: Markings of Remembrance
This collaboration engages a form of Filipino storytelling through abstract patterns found in ancestral body art, or tatak. By engaging stateside practitioners, ancestral objects, colonial-era manuscripts and contemporary texts, Jackson and Knauber see their ultimate goal to be creating space for collective remembrance and understanding of an artform nearly lost to hundreds of years of religious and political subjugation of the indigenous peoples of the islands now known as the Philippines.
Prior to the creation of new sculptural and video works, the project will consist of the formation of a cohort of Filipinos interested in researching their lineage and sharing their findings and personal experiences, continuing a long tradition of cultivating collective memory through oral history, which will inform a tailored curriculum through which the group will learn about the archetypal symbols central to various Filipino tattoo traditions. Jackson and Knauber will research and share individual histories, the islands from which their families migrated, the languages spoken within their families, and the roles family members held within their communities.
Evren Wilder Elliott: Imagining Home: Liberatory Theatre and Speculative Solutions for Housing Justice
Boxx the Artist: The Women In Between
The Women In Between will be a new body of work that explores printing dark skin tone hues on canvas and amplifying detail with acrylics. Historically, the chemicals used during this process were not adequate to capture a diversity of darker skin tones. Racial bias was systematically embedded through the color calibration process for printing with the use of "Shirley Cards" developed by Kodak as reference photos for technicians to balance hues that became an industry standard. This lacked range for dark skin, resulting in poorly printed photos. Despite advancements in technology, printing dark skinned hues still lacks details. Boxx the Artists’ collection will focus on the diversity of dark skin tones through canvas printing capturing the details through print and explore this systematic bias within printmaking using acrylics as a solution.
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Silvia Vimos Suarez: Stitches of Presence
Stitches of Presence is a space for gathering, recognition, and offering through hand embroidery. Suarez will convene Latina women living in the East Side Indianapolis to get together. During the gathering time, the women will recognize the value of knowledge and wisdom and share this knowledge among themselves and with our community. The gatherings will take place at the Irvington Public Library. The library is a symbolic place par excellence where the knowledge generated by humanity converges and circulates. For this reason, the intention of this project is to build presence in this public place through diverse symbolic gestures, contributing to the convergence of knowledge.
Hidden World is a spatial and interactive sound art collaborative exhibition series & residency focused on sound and its relation to ecology, community, and accessibility. This project builds on the work of Caldwell’s previous project Everything I hear will outlive me, a spatial composition that was presented at Hidden World along with another work, an interactive sound sculpture titled ‘Touch me so I know I’m still here’ at Gethsemane Green Space on the Eastside of Indianapolis.
Artist-Run Spaces & Groups
Quinn Tailor: Stitching Together Queer Generations
City Natives Gallery, located in Suite 210 on the 2nd floor of the Murphy Arts Center in Fountain Square, is a gallery and shop featuring contemporary fine art, apparel and more, curated by BRIDGE Collective. BRIDGE works with both emerging and established artists; providing professional gallery space, as well as imparting our expertise in artist services, formed over the last 20 years working as artists, curators, and arts administrators. This Power Plant grant will support an exhibit with Artist Carolyn Harper, Philadelphia-based textile artist to create a new piece about Indianapolis resident Kristine Bunch who was she was wrongfully convicted of arson and the murder of her young son and spent 17 years of her life in prison and released in 2012.
LaShawnda Crowe Storm: Masquerade Americana
1000 Words Gallery has created a safe space for artists to grow and flourish through our monthly residency program. The space has been able to host over 10 black, emerging artists since the beginning of 2021. Their programs include artist development, art classes, art events, and community/partner engagement. We plan to expand our residency with more funding and make it open to more artists.
Jasmine & Brit Indwell: This is Home
This is Home is a collaborative exhibition by Jasmine Tafoya Photo (Jasmine and Brit Indwell), celebrating the everyday magic of queer family life in Indianapolis. Through intimate portraits, interviews, and reimagined domestic spaces, the project will document five to seven LGBTQIA+ families, archiving their lives as both sacred and ordinary. Personal relics such as notes, recipes, drawings, and keepsakes will appear alongside photographs in multi-sensory vignettes of home. Debuting during Pride Month (June) 2026 with an exhibition and a companion magazine, Tafoya and Indwell — queer artists raised on Indy’s southside and now building a family of their own — offer this work as both celebration and archive.
Michael Runge: Echo House
Runge will create a polycarbonate sculptural installation visible from the I-70 overpass at the 65/70 split on the near east side of Indianapolis. The sculpture will reference the houses that were demolished and the families that were displaced during the highway’s construction in the late 1960 and ear;y 1970’s. Runge’s work seeks to turn an unpleasant barrier separating two dynamic neighborhoods in the city into something that draws people to it and instills a sense of wonder.
Zola Lamothe: Ransom Place: Unveiling a Forgotten Legacy
This project will center around recreating household and community scenes on the Indiana University Indianapolis campus where people’s homes, churches, and livelihoods once stood. Lamothe’s goal is that viewers will be able to not only witness the juxtaposition of what the land housed then and now but also bear witness to what was lost and wonder what could have been. The work will be released and shared with the community along with information about Indiana laws and future reform to avoid gentrification and displacement. In addition to the public gallery exhibition, Lamothe also plans to donate prints to the Through 2 Eyes organization that offers Indianapolis walking tours on the city’s history.
Lamothe hopes to release a photo book of the project that includes quotes and interviews from those who used to live in Ransom Place and their descendants. Her goal is for the book to be available in public libraries, the Indiana University Indianapolis bookstore, and the Indiana State Museum gallery shop.
Landon Caldwell: Hidden World
Quinn Tailor: Stitching Together Queer Generations
Chromatic Collective is an artist-run space in Broad Ripple that provides niche art supply and space for both emerging and established artists of all mediums to exhibit their work. The collective creates connections between artists and act as a creative resource for the public to interact with the arts.
2021
Individual Artists
Ozzy Graham: Extirpated Queer Histories of Indianapolis
A thoroughly researched print publication and online platform that includes new writings, graphics, and maps depicting 20th-century queer histories of Indianapolis by Ozzy Graham brings stories from the underbelly of queer life in 20th-century Indianapolis up to the surface of contemporary conversations on LGBTQ+ history in this city; these histories include the mass disappearances and murders of queer men, some of whom participated in sex work, between the 1970s-1990s; Stonewall Democrat and poppers manufacturer Joe Miller and former Marion County Prosecutor James Kelley; and Larry Eyler. The fruit of this arts-based research will consider the implications of former gay spaces being razed or rebuilt with an unrelated purpose, like the current rebuilding of the former Varsity Lounge. Learn more here.
Artist-Run Spaces & Groups
Studio Lauren Zoll: Purple Waste
Purple Waste Collective will design a neighborhood Mulberry tree fruit collection event at the Fitness Farm. Neighborhoods, families, artists will be invited to discuss, help harvest and create a Mulberry fruit collective. Together after harvesting berries, they will process Mulberries into ink. The ink collectively made will be poured onto the enameled glass sculptures. Lauren Zoll, has been preparing to create fruit-dyed Nano Titanium Dioxide enameled glass sculptures which are formed into shapes. Through an outdoor installation of Purple Waste, art will advocate for the environment by turning waste into tangible power.