Indianapolis has a thriving art scene that’s eager to educate and expose the community to different mediums. Newfields, The Harrison Center and Gallery 924 are just a few notable contributors to the rich art life in the Circle City. Another contributor to the Indy art scene is Tube Factory Artspace, located in the Garfield Park neighborhood, and is free to the community to visit.
The Tube Factory is a 12,000 square foot museum that falls under the umbrella of Big Car Collaborative, a nonprofit art and design organization. This year, the museum will add an additional 8,000 square feet of exhibition space to its portfolio of local, regional, national and international contemporary visual and musical artists.
“Big Car is a local nonprofit formed in 2004, so we’ve actually been around about 20 years,” says Hannah Hadley, grant and marketing coordinator for Big Car Collaborative. “Our mission at Big Car is we bring art to people and people to art, sparking creativity in lives and supporting communities. Tube Factory is a program that brings art to people and people to art. Our exhibits are free to visit, so we’re really big on making art accessible.”
Current exhibits include Julie Xiao: A Journey; Wong Kit Yi: Inner Voice Transplant; Benjamin Berg: I Can See the Pixels; and more.
Xiao, the artist behind “A Journey,” also works for Big Car, and her exhibit is a 30-foot-long scroll telling a story of self acceptance and belonging. The “Jellyfish Person” is the central character in her large-scale ink and gouache works. Throughout Xiao’s immersive exhibit, audiences will follow — and may identify with — Jellyfish’s pursuit of finding a place to feel welcomed at, to fit in, and to feel at home.
In the “Inner Voice Transplant” exhibit, audiences will explore the links between subjects as disparate as ancient Egyptian practices of dream interpretation; jiāngshī (Chinese hopping vampires); and the first voice-box transplant, which took place at the Cleveland Clinic in 1998.
In Berg’s exhibit, “I can See the Pixels,” he’s not interested in doing things the correct way — he’s more curious about what happens when you do them incorrectly. He tries to misuse technology just enough to make it misbehave, but not too much that it breaks down entirely.
“It is a really cool exhibit where Burg takes images and then kind of runs them though his really old computer programs,” Hadley says. “It’s like a 1980s era format. You can see all the pixels and the interesting aspects of different photos he’s put through these computer programs.”
Also inside Tube Factory is Normal Coffee, which is owned and operated by Big Car, but founded, managed, and staffed by people from the neighborhood. Normal Coffee serves up Tinker Coffee.
Tube Factory Artspace is located at 1125 Cruft St, Indianapolis, Indiana, 46203. It’s open Wednesday-Friday from 9 a.m.-6 p.m., and Saturday-Sunday from 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Additional information about current galleries and artists can be found online at tubefactory.org. The Tube Factory also hosts free First Friday events every month from 6-10 p.m.