Harrison Center's City Gallery awarded grant from ArtPlace America
Indianapolis, share our joy! “ArtPlace America announces today the award of a $100,000 grant to the Harrison Center for the Arts (HCA) for the City Gallery. City Gallery was chosen from over 1,200 applications as an exceptional example of creative placemaking.”
ArtPlace America is a collaboration of leading national and regional foundations, banks and federal agencies committed to accelerating creative placemaking – putting art at the heart of a portfolio of strategies designed to revitalize communities. We at the Harrison Center and City Gallery have enjoyed years of community and city support. We are grateful for our partners here in Indianapolis who know us and who have given thousands of dollars in support of our work in the city. The ArtPlace grant marks the first time that our work has been recognized and funded at a national level.
We’re continuing our mission to promote the beauties of living, working and playing in urban Indianapolis. We believe that place (in our case, Indianapolis’s core neighborhoods) is important, and that a vibrant arts scene is a community and cultural development catalyst. ArtPlace funding will allow us to, among other things, produce over 30 celebratory place-based exhibits, festivals and community events, including a new singer-songwriter festival this fall. We’ve had several of our summer interns arrive this week, including Paul Smallman, our new “brand ambassador” from Baltimore, who is also an accomplished singer-songwriter. Paul has the daunting charge of writing a song a week telling the stories of urban Indianapolis. Friday afternoon, we all sat together in the office and listened to his first composition, Different Speech, a moving ballad referencing Robert Kennedy’s announcement of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. which took place just a few blocks from us in what is now MLK Park. We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to have these bits of our neighborhood history captured in song.
The official announcement and community celebration of the ArtPlace America award will take place on June 8th at our 12th Annual Independent Music + Art Festival (IMAF), a day-long festival that includes 12 local and regional bands and over 100 modern crafters and artists with an expected attendance of over 7000. But we wanted you to know first! Thank you to ArtPlace America for this unprecedented opportunity, and thank you to all of our partners here in Indianapolis who work tirelessly to make this world class city such a great place to live. We’re proud to be working alongside you.