(This story has been updated with new information.)
A year and a half ago, Big Car Collaborative announced plans to transform a 40,000-square-foot former industrial building on its property into the centerpiece of a community-facing contemporary art museum in a city that lacks such an amenity. Now, the nonprofit creative organization is carrying its plan one step further: It will brand its five-acre Garfield Park campus — including that soon-to-be-fully-renovated structure — as the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis.
CAMi, as the space will be called, will hold its grand opening celebration May 1 to 3. The new name will unite outdoor and indoor facets in and around the 1125 Cruft St. headquarters that Big Car has been building for the last decade. That includes homes that artists rent or co-own; a park; the Tube Factory artspace, which has hosted exhibits for the past decade; the radio station WQRT 99.1 FM; and the former industrial building that opened more than 100 years ago as a dairy barn.
In a departure from formal art museums, CAMi is gathering together several facets of contemporary art-making in an intimate setting, so visitors will spend time in a space that integrates multiple artistic mediums, working artists, a kitchen and areas to reflect and relax.
“We want to think about how museums can be more than what people might expect,” said Jim Walker, Big Car executive director and co-founder.
And as Walker and co-founder Shauta Marsh, Big Car’s program director and chief curator, build CAMi’s reputation, the married couple also hopes to boost resources for artists and break down barriers for visitors who might not usually be comfortable in traditional museum settings.
“What we’re hoping to do is keep a foot planted in community as well as the high art world. So we just want to be that bridge between those two things,” Marsh said.
CAMi plans to commission artists rather than collect work
When the museum opens in May, the 40,000-square-foot CAMi main building that will anchor the campus will showcase $7.3 million in renovations that merge charm from the structure’s past lives with the needs of a contemporary art space. According to Big Car, the 125-year-old structure started life as a barn for Weber Milk Co. and later became part of a complex belonging to the Tube Processing Corporation, a components manufacturer for aerospace and engine industries. The company donated the building to Big Car in 2021.
In its new life, the CAMi main building will house: six galleries, a performance and event space, 18 artist studios, two audio studios, offices, five storefronts for creative businesses, a cafe and a culinary area.
CAMi doesn’t plan to collect or sell artwork but instead will invest in commissioning exhibits by international, national and local artists.
“The artists can make the kind of work that they want and not have to make work that’s (going to) sell,” Walker said. “We pay the artists for their time and their ideas and efforts and creativity.”
The businesses that set up shop in the storefronts also will help creatives connect with audiences in new ways. The spaces will be located in a public-facing side of the CAMi main building, and tenants will be able to set their own hours, Walker said.
The storefronts will “support that kind of creative energy that we want but they also give more energy to the outside space, too,” Walker said. “This makes it a lot more inviting and porous and open to the park.”
The non-traditional approach reflects a more common model in the museum world in the past 25 years or so, said Paula Katz, the Indiana State Museum’s senior curator of art who served as executive director of Indianapolis’ previous contemporary art museum, iMOCA, from 2015 to 2018. That facility closed in 2020 due to challenges it faced during the COVID pandemic.
“The museum in and of itself — that language has been seen historically as a place where you’re a repository,” said Katz, who’s working with Marsh to bring the art of Glasgow, Scotland-based artist Clara Ursitti to CAMi in the future. “Now, in a more contemporary way, it’s a way, I think, of denoting a very high level of work and engagement that’s different than sort of a more pop up experience or a more casual experience.”
Why Big Car decided to call its campus CAMi
Walker and Marsh see the rebranding as a continuation of the work Big Car has been doing for two decades. Founded by a group of artists in 2004, the creative organization was headquartered in Fountain Square and then Lafayette Square before moving to Cruft Street in Garfield Park in 2015.
The Tube Factory artspace — now called the Tube Gallery — opened in 2016 and has hosted myriad exhibits since, including Chicago-based artist Carlos Rolón’s 2017 exploration of boxing and domestic culture and Kaila Austin’s 2023 exhibit that sought to understand a lost mural by Indianapolis artist John Wesley Hardrick.
Big Car has extended its vision to installations across the campus, too. Marsh and Walker have hired artists to create work in Terri Sisson Park and the Chicken Chapel of Love, for example.
The roots for uniting all of these facets into CAMi began to take shape when Big Car received $3 million from the Lilly Endowment in 2019 to begin renovations on the large industrial building, Walker said. Indianapolis has lacked a contemporary art museum since iMOCA — later known as Indianapolis Contemporary — closed, which fueled conversations about CAMi, said Marsh, who served at the institution for almost six years and as executive director for about the last four. She departed in 2015.
CAMi intends to become a tourist draw
Walker and Marsh see CAMi as attracting both Indianapolis residents and tourists. Adaptive-reuse spaces around the country are often a draw for visitors who want to explore places off the beaten path that residents enjoy, said Chris Gahl, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Visit Indy.
While tourists enjoyed special exhibits of contemporary art, driving visitors to Indianapolis’ contemporary art museum year-round proved difficult, given iMOCA’s moves and often transitory status, he said.
In 2001, a group of arts patrons founded the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, known as iMOCA, as a museum without walls. Three years later, the institution moved into the Emelie Building on Senate Avenue and later to the Murphy Art Center in Fountain Square while also showing work in other spaces. The organization departed the Murphy in 2016 and eventually decided against attaching itself to a building.
In 2019, iMOCA rebranded as Indianapolis Contemporary and laid out a plan to show art installations tailored to different buildings before shutting down the next year.
With a full campus to explore, CAMi will give visitors plenty to do, Gahl said.
“We have been missing this piece of the puzzle to promote and market Indianapolis as a progressive, sophisticated arts-minded city, and now we have (CAMi),” he said. “It will be unexpected for many of our visitors, and that gives us a competitive edge.”
CAMi’s proximity to downtown and Garfield Park — two tourist destinations — positions it as a convenient spot for those visiting Indianapolis for leisure or work, Gahl said. Those organizing conventions here often look for off-site spaces with a strong Indianapolis identity to hold events.
“It’s the idea that you have a board of directors, and you want a unique place to host the evening event or the lunch or to get people outside of the walls of the convention center,” Gahl said.
Those types of rentals could give CAMi a needed revenue stream, a necessary way to diversify income to keep a contemporary art museum afloat, Katz said. With that in mind, Walker and Marsh have positioned CAMi to pull in money from individual funders and philanthropic organizations as well as renting out studios, storefronts and the larger event space, which is flexible enough to be used by theater companies and other performing arts organizations.
“Oftentimes, if you’re a traditional exhibition space … you’re constantly trying to replenish your funds without a way to get more funds without having your hand out. And I think they’re being really smart about having event space and creating ways to generate income that are not off the backs of the artists,” Katz said. “I’m really excited about the model they’ve created.”
Big Car will remain the organization that owns and operates CAMi and other community projects like Spark on the Circle, the mini-pedestrian seasonal park on Monument Circle.
Big Car has about $1.7 million left to raise to help pay for furnishings and pay back an Impact Central Indiana bridge loan from the Central Indiana Community Foundation for construction, Walker said. That money is part of a total $13 million Big Car has invested in the block where CAMi sits going back to 2015, he said.
Major funders so far include the Lilly Endowment, Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation, Efroymson Family Fund, Katharine B. Sutphin Foundation and the Herbert Simon Family Foundation as well as others.
If you go
Grand opening celebration: May 1-3 at CAMi, 1125 Cruft St. See work by Puerto Rico-based artist Ivelisse Jiménez and Indianapolis artist Cory Robinson.
To apply for a studio or storefront or to donate, visit camindy.org.
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