“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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Book

Sosa will produce and exhibit a dozen multimedia artworks — portraits, dioramas, and textile pieces — with accompanying text in Spanish and English. The work is based on decades-old photos of Hispanic individuals and families with roots in Latin America who chose to call Indiana their home. The artworks will be displayed in high-traffic areas in multiple parts of Indiana. Also, during scheduled discussions and public meetings, these images will foster dialogue to address issues of identity and immigration, migration and borders in our own lives.

Sosa’s goal is for these works to help us think more about identity, survival, energy, and movement. Today’s Júziers will hopefully connect with “their” origin stories: a collection of faces and narratives that is easy to explore and make their own. His approach is focused on the belief that images will reflect or provide access to a period’s views and actively participate in acknowledging those views de vida in the first place. A history of images has an impact on remaking, which itself constitutes a valuable record and purpose of people’s lived lives.

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.

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.

https://www.instagram.com/kailataustin/

https://www.instagram.com/theroguehistorian/

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.

http://www.landoncaldwell.com

https://www.instagram.com/landonscaldwell/

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. “

www.instagram.com/philipcampbell

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.

www.boxxtheartist.com

www.instagram.com/boxxtheartist

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.

https://silviavimos.blogspot.com/

https://www.instagram.com/willkaypacha/

Masquerade Americana is a fusion of peoples and traditions. It is grounded in the American quilting tradition, which is about piecing together disparate parts and leftover things, weaving these fragments into a new whole. Like many healing rituals, in order for the community to benefit, multiple individuals must take part in its construction. The complete work of art includes three distinct, but united components; the installation, poetry crafted for the series, and community-based activities. The public exhibition will include various community events such as poetry readings, dances, and discussions, community altars to name a few in order to expand the circle of healing. Masquerade American dances so that Black American women can remember, honor, cherish, and reclaim their ancestral power, as well as access and use it.

Everything I Hear Will Outlive Me, led by Landon Caldwell, is a mobile sound installation designed for pop-up installation in outdoor green spaces. “The piece is centered on a philosophy of connection to the environment as a means of empowerment; through design, through placemaking, through community, through presence and mindfulness. The mobile nature of the piece frees the piece of the limitations and the vacuum of the venue and opens the piece up to the happenstance of the real world”. Learn more here.

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.

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.