Transcript
Narrator 0:00
[Music] Speaking about his work as the Indianapolis Museum of Arts Curator of Audience Experience, Scott Stulen indicated that Indianapolis is on track to become a model city to which future civic leaders will look for inspiration. At the Richard M. Fairbanks Symposium held at the University of Indianapolis on February 5, 2016, Stulen told an audience of arts professionals and city leaders that he receives calls every week from people around the country wanting to know the formula that has made Indianapolis a thriving center of art and culture, what has made Indianapolis culturally successful, and how should the city continue to propel artistic innovation forward. Panelists and speakers throughout the Symposium touched on two key themes that define the Indianapolis model. The first is recognizing Indy’s unique assets and crafting city art strategies that celebrate and enhance that distinctiveness. The second is allowing the past to help shape the present. Director of Landmark Columbus, Richard McCoy speaks on how incorporating a city’s history can allow for present artistic inspiration that is modern and fresh yet connected to a culturally unique past.
Richard McCoy 1:10
I think one of the things we need to do is to look back at our mission and to look back at who we were, to think about where we’re going. We spent a lot of money on what we did in the past. Let’s value it, and let’s consider it. Roland Hobart’s mural—hey, Roland—this is his mural from 1973. It was the winner of the first Urban Walls Competition. This was an effort by then Mayor Richard Lugar to make a new effort downtown. This is a mayor in Indianapolis who’s trying anything he can to get people to consider getting close to downtown, much less live in it the question we have today. And so this was an effort to create a project that had graphic designers and architects to make artworks of an architectural scale. To make artworks that weren’t necessarily even called public art at that time. But what they’re trying to do is to say, how do we revitalize a building? How do we revitalize this space? Let’s make it beautiful. The challenge here is, you’re only seeing half of Roland’s mural. So this mural lasted until the early 1980s on both sides of this wall, and then has since sort of fallen into a state of disrepair and damage. There’s a minor effort underway to have the mural repainted, but maybe we can talk about that another time. But so again, Indianapolis does pay attention to mission, does pay attention to what it’s thinking about. So this is a mural that was produced by big car. I hope I’m not stealing one of your slides, Jim. This is Jose De Gregorio and Aaron, Andy Fry’s mural that was produced across from the Hotel Alexander. This is public art working in the same way. This is a kind of graphic innovation intervention at an architectural scale. So to me, this is so interesting to see a mission carried forward, an idea carried forward, and it’s still working in a way for urban renewal.
Speaker 1 2:53
Julia Moore of the Arts Council of Indianapolis follows up on McCoy’s comments by giving two examples of how both recognizing indies assets and considering the past when planning the present, have helped build Indy’s arts climate and enhance the city’s reputation.
Julia Moore 3:07
So for the Super Bowl 46 in 2012 the Arts Council of Indianapolis created 46 new murals for around Indianapolis. It was a huge project. Spent nearly half a million dollars, both private and city funds, mostly private, and some of the murals instantly became icons of the city, like the Kurt Vonnegut mural. Who hasn’t seen that and who doesn’t associate that with Indianapolis? Very, very important. We also had another music, another mural of Indiana jazz musicians by Pamela Bliss. This one, Eduardo Mendieta had a mural on Mass Ave that’s now become a local icon. If you go down on, if you’re coming out of the Virginia Street garage trying to take a right turn on Delaware, you see this wonderful mural of a city facade being unrolled. That’s by Michael Cooper. So all of these have become icons of the city, and it was because of a sporting event. And this is a lasting legacy. It’s huge there. It immediately made neighborhoods more vibrant. Kicked off a lot of interest in having more murals all over town, and the quality instantly raised the bar on what murals could be. Murals that always had kind of like a, yeah, you put a mural in a neighborhood and it makes people happy, and then, you know, blah, blah, blah. But the idea that a mural could actually be a real artwork was really brought back into Indianapolis, where it hadn’t been a focus for a very long time. So, and now, all of a sudden, we had a murals program, and people still talk, oh, Indianapolis, yeah, I know your murals program. We don’t have a formal murals program. We really don’t, but people think we do, which I think is really great. The second idea is, we don’t do a very good job of promoting our arts, so what we need to do is point to the arts. Literally point, “arts are there.” So developed an idea to actually say, “hey, something arts is going on here,” and that’s where the big red arrow comes in. So it was a physical sculpture. Actually, there were two, one in wood and one in steel. It was carried around town, shipped on a trailer and then dropped at each of these events. It appeared in 47 locations total. And if you saw the arrow, you knew that something exciting was going on there. There were, you know, campaigns, where’s the arrow now? There were, you know, monthly postcards that went out to just say, you know, this is everything that’s coming out. It was a huge media impact. The arts organizations and venues enjoyed unbelievable boosts and reputation. Memberships rose, attendances increased, and new partnerships were formed between organizations that still last to this day. So the idea of working together to call attention to this vibrancy, you know, Kira had said, we don’t make a good idea. We don’t blow our horns a lot. Well, we blew our horn in 2005 and I think it really, really changed the city about how we view the arts in Indianapolis,
Narrator 5:57
Indianapolis has generally been successful with its arts initiatives, although city and cultural development does not come without a few roadblocks. In a conversation with Dave Lawrence, CEO of Indy’s Arts Council, former Vice President of the IndianapolisCity/County Council, John Barth discussed his hopes that a version of his vetoed percent for arts proposal will eventually be passed by the city. Lawrence and Barth agree that the success of this initiative in the future hinges on learning from what was done in the past, and on focusing on what is unique about Indianapolis, which, in Barth’s opinion, is its neighborhoods.
John Barth 6:33
Something that I was hoping would happen as an outcome of the Percent for Art, for neighborhoods, passing was that, and having it focused on neighborhoods is that I don’t think we do enough in Indianapolis to make sure that our neighborhoods are distinct and really clear. There’s so much history in so many neighborhoods, but they haven’t had the branding or the connection to their path that I think would be great for the future of the city to understand where we came from, and there’s so much cultural history with folks coming here from around the world and founding businesses, creating neighborhoods, creating churches, really, if the folks now want as a component of their funding through this program to say, “Oh, we want to recognize the cultural history of our neighborhood” and help that be define who they are now. I think that would be so neat. I mean, my own family coming here from Ireland, opening a factory at 16th and Sherman. I mean, there’s many stories like that where there are Irish neighborhoods and in German neighborhoods where that is a defining thing, and there’s names on the streets that people don’t realize that name is because this guy came came, you know, from Hamburg or whatever. That’s important. So I’d love to see this pass be signed in that kind of deep sort of connection to the past, or blossom from it.
Narrator 7:45
In the weeks following the Fairbanks symposium, Mayor Joe Hogsett signed new Percent for Art legislation into law, thus fulfilling the dreams of many public arts advocates and starting a new chapter in the history of public art in Indianapolis.
Ted Frantz 8:00
This podcast was produced by the Institute for Civic Leadership and Mayoral Archives and the Department of Communication at the University of Indianapolis. It is made possible by the support of the Richard M Fairbanks Foundation, Indiana Humanities, and the Lily Endowment. For more information, please see our website, uindy.edu/mayoral.