Special Projects

When you open The Chicken Chapel of Love’s hand-carved wooden doors inscribed with the latin phrase Vide cor meum (See My Heart), you’re greeted with stained glass windows filtering the east-rising sun, gilded gold, neon lights, red velvet curtains, taxidermied roosters, warm wood church pews, wax candles of all colors — some lit, some melted. The space represents the heart of humanity, the heart of the chicken. Our destinies and fates are overlapping and intertwining like those with whom we choose to share our lives.

The Pan Endemic series are individual artworks commissioned by Shauta Marsh, Co-founder and Director of Programming, at Big Car Collaborative. Due to the pandemic, Tube Factory artspace, our commissioning contemporary art museum has been closed to the public since March of 2020. This work and others to come are an effort to continue to support visual artists and share their work with the public. This series is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Art & Vinyl is an ongoing project that aims to bring the work of Black artists from the Indianapolis area to the forefront and contribute to a fuller picture of Contemporary art in an engaging virtual exhibition.

The People’s 500 was an exploration of the relationship between the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the people of Indianapolis, marking the 100th Running of the Indianapolis 500 that opened in May of 2016. In October of 2015, Sugarmann chose 100 residents of the Indianapolis community from a pool of applicants to drive two laps in a pace car — the drivers uniting to complete the equivalent of a single running of the Indianapolis 500. Sugarmann and his crew photographed and interviewed each of the drivers, the resulting documentation serving as the material of the exhibition. Sixteen of the drivers were selected as 16 large scale photos, video, and a sculptural piece.

Rest In Paradise by Chicago based artist Carlos Rolón is window installation at Listen Hear commissioned by Big Car co-founder Shauta Marsh in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. May of 2020 their killings sparked demonstrations across the world and provoked a long over-due reckoning in the United States about systemic racism.

temporary artist housing & cultural spaces — ongoing

With this multifaceted, multiyear project, Indianapolis-based arts organization Big Car Collaborative — with our partners, the University of Southern Indiana, Indiana State Museum, Historic New Harmony, and others –– have created a series of radio show, exhibits, and conversations exploring, learning, and sharing how utopia has informed places and pursuits over time.

Curated by a committee of neighborhood artists in collaboration with Big Car Collaborative and the Garfield Park Arts Center, this exhibition will feature artwork in a variety of mediums by local artists that reside in Garfield Park.

Librería Donceles is a floating Spanish-language second-hand bookstore created by Pablo Helguera in 2013 that was housed at Listen Hear from August 5 until October 22, 2016. The bookstore, which is comprised of over 6,500 volumes and has traveled to major U.S. cities like New York, Phoenix and Chicago, was created in part to address the lack of literature available to growing Spanish-speaking communities.

Hocking spent three weeks in Indianapolis gathering materials from the site, documenting, researching, and creating his installation. He hauled over 100 massive hunks of burned Styrofoam, multiple plastic blobs melted by fires, fragmented fast food signage, nifty anthropomorphic food-character murals, and dozens of other artifacts. He brought this all to Tube Factory. And he worked onsite while living in Big Car’s neighboring artist residency home. The resulting installation uses the main gallery as a kind of ceremonial site — the burned Styrofoam mountain could be a dystopian temple or future glacier.

Located in the main Tube Factory gallery space, the exhibit was a co-curatorial project between Mari Evans, Carl Pope, and Shauta Marsh. It consists of a commissioned installation piece by artist Carl Pope related to Evans’s photos, poetry, and book of essays, “Clarity as Concept: A Poet’s Perspective.”

“In Mexico there is a common expression that relates to migration to the US: “Ni de aqui, ni de alla.” Not from here or there. As Mexicans who have built lives in the US we often face challenges on both sides of the border.

New Harmony was the site of two utopian experiments in the early 1800s. Today, New Harmony brims with art, history, architecture, and a strong sense of place. With our partners, we will explore, learn and share how the pursuit of utopia has formed places and pursuits.

Jerry Lee Atwood’s custom Western wear stands at the apex of contemporary culture and fashion history. It serves as a bridge between traditions of the past, established by great Western wear clothiers like Nuta Kotlyarenko (known professionally as Nudie Cohn), or Manuel Arturo José Cuevas Martínez Sr., best known simply as Manuel, and our modern pop-culture pantheon.

ince moving to the United States, Khan has been working in art and poetry as a way to connect with the immigration experience. She frequently highlights and references the places she comes from: “I grew up in West Africa and Indonesia, my father is half Afghan, half Russian, and my mom is Filipino, Chinese, Spanish, and Indigenous.” In this piece, Khan uses woodburning to inscribe symbols on a table she created with discarded materials. Using symbology, she tells the story of her life milestones: adolescence, immigration, marriage, motherhood, divorce, and homeownership. The pandemic gave us the time we wanted and time we didn’t — to reflect on the past and what we want to accomplish in the future. Khan’s Small Rebellions helps bring us together as we experience the same milestones, the same pause. 

With the lean, long jab and agile step of a boxer, Adrian Matejka delivers this knockout dramatization of the larger-than-life life of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. In dexterous interpolating voices, and in forms ranging from enveloping sonnets to prose letters and interviews, Johnson emerges as a scrappy, hard-edged hero—troubled by his own demons but determined to win the “fight of the century,” a fight that underscored the bitter realities of racism in America. These poems don’t pull no punches.

Chicago-based artist Carlos Rolón/Dzine presented a dually charged exploration of boxing and domestic culture, inspired by the tactility and performative qualities of boxing, and its relationship to contemporary art at Tube Factory artspace. Though it was the third iteration of the exhibit, it featured a newly commissioned performative installation of live sanctioned Golden Gloves fights, organized by Indy Boxing and Grappling and sponsored by Top Rank Productions. A robe was also commissioned from Rolón for the boxers to wear before the fights. When the ring was not in use, the robe was on display in the ring.

Several cultural and community partners worked together to complete a mural honoring Indianapolis-based poet and artist, Mari Evans — one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement.

Big Car participated a long-term partnership 2009-2015 with the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) via our Design For Good program.

We conducted series of artist exchange exhibitions in Bloomington, Indy, and Iowa City. Outside/In is about discovery, spontaneity and the importance of perspective and place.