Masters Retrospective II: Social Practice & Placemaking

The second cohort in UIndy’s MA in Social Practice Art exhibits their work from the last year in many neighborhoods in Indianapolis and from around the state, including interactive and participatory projects in the gallery.

*Closing Reception: Friday, August 16, 5-7 pm (Remarks at 6)
Gallery is free to attend & open during regular Tube Factory Artspace hours.

Eve Eggleston presents a series of social practice art projects to raise community awareness of the plight of the pollinators. This recent body of work re-purposed refuse in upcycling at Rabble Coffee in Indianapolis. Her current project is using beehives for education about urban agriculture, sustainability, environmentally healthy practices, and pollinator value at IPS 39: William McKinley as part of their Learning Nature Center and at Jason Micheal Thomas’s urban farm, Indy Urban Awareness Gardens. William McKinley hosts a live honeybee hive in their gardens and is a part of a curriculum to understand honeybees and other pollinators. Through working with their Garden Club, ran by several teachers and Keep Indianapolis Beautiful, the hive will provide pollination for their gardens and orchard. This project also included a full day of lectures, demonstrations, and activities for every class to familiarize the students with these issues. Part of this discussion was learning to understand not only the benefits of honeybees, but all pollinators. To address native bee populations, her thesis project expanded to include creating pollinator hotels with the Green Team of Groundwork Indy. These ongoing projects are always looking to expand. Please contact Eggleston with any inquiries or any opportunities.

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Indianapolis artist Kindness AK is shaped by internal and external conflicts that have a tendency to manifest itself physically through the creative arts. Although some people would choose one specific platform to focus in, she is unconsciously drawn to multiple artistic mediums and media. Her many life experiences, ranging from scientific, therapeutic, and artistic, have become embedded tools which she uses to rediscover and accept a more competent, accountable, and positive self-narrative. The M.A. in Social Practice Art program has helped her align her passions by exploring how placemaking can encourage healing-centered engagement through community building and self-reflection. Her exploration is through a series of projects that are based on personal and professional interest. Projects displayed include Transformative conversations, Affirmation mirrors (individual and community), Trafficking, and Lyles Station. These projects all in one way or another narrate how to enhance or identify the already “existing power of resiliency” within the self and/or community to hopefully initiate more access to social justice. Her broader objective is to increase resiliency and empowerment, using art as a tool to promote critical reflection and build a more culturally inclusive lens of social justice and healing.

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Writer and memoirist Sarah J. Wilson has deepened her exploration of Indianapolis’ Eastside neighborhoods through her social practice and placemaking projects. She grew up there and continues to live there. By collecting artifacts and oral history, she has expanded her creative practice in writing and memoir to more directly engage residents on the Eastside and investigate its complicated and enduring history. This summer, she has worked on the Eastside to collect local history and artifacts, especially from youth and the aging population, to create interactive social practice projects to commemorate this history and to celebrate its future.