Indianapolis Creative Risk Fund | 2024 Cohort

Greg Rose (they/them) – IG @hay_kidd

Greg Rose is an Indianapolis-based conceptual artist and curator whose practice centers on the narratives and lived experiences of marginalized folx—honoring the past, present, and future.

Drawing inspiration from the “Chitlin Circuit,” a network of venues that permitted Black and Brown performance artists to thrive during a period of financial insecurity, Greg’s project aims to uncover, acknowledge, share, and reignite this system of Black art infrastructure through a national community building strategy that connects artists, arts administrators, and venues toward greater financial stability and national recognition. Through the Creative Risk Fund, Greg created new works and curated simultaneous arts projects in Indianapolis and Jackson, MS, emphasizing the creative brilliance of local talent. The project begins to build a pipeline of creative connections among two seemingly unrelated places.

Jeri Warner (she/her)

Jeri Warner is an emerging textile artist who employs fiber, dyed fabrics, photography, and decayed elements to produce visually compelling artworks.

Jeri’s project, Layers of Decomposition, explores the beauty in the cycle of decomposition and recreation that exists in nature. Through submerging fabric in soil for extended periods of time, Jeri allows the earth to change the fabric’s form, creating images that reveal both the fragility and expansiveness of life. Layers of Decomposition is a practice in patience, flexibility, and improvisation, as the creative process often requires trial and error and produces unexpected results. Jeri sees the works created through the Creative Risk Fund as only the beginning of this creative exploration.

Samantha Ortiz (she/her) - Website

Samantha Ortiz is a Brazilian-American visual artist and recent immigrant working at the intersection of slow fashion and fine arts—incorporating a variety of media and techniques, like knitting and painting, and exploring the power of human form and its self-healing.

Slow fashion is an awareness of the processes and resources required to make clothing, respecting people, animals, and the environment. Active meditation is the ability to remain in a meditative state while a physical action is involved. Samantha’s project, From My Meditation To Your Meditation, is an exploration in slow fashion that combines the technique of spinning with active meditation for the production of plant-based hand-spun yarn that is spiritually and environmentally conscious. The resulting outputs will offer a more values-aligned product for creators working in textiles.

Sylvia Thomas (she/her) - Website

Sylvia Thomas is a multidisciplinary writer, poet, and performance artist whose work explores themes such as grief, joy, and community through the lens of a queer, transgender woman living in the Midwest.

Her project, Out of the Closet: The History and Poetics of LGBTQ+ Hoosiers, infuses poetry and oral history work on LGBTQ+ experiences in Indiana with fiber arts. Sylvia conducted interviews with several LGBTQ+ people across Indiana, leveraging an oral history model. Using textile objects sourced from the interview subjects, Sylvia Thomas created “All Materials Are Mirrors”, a carousel of three tactile poems sewn or stitched into the fibers of the sourced materials. Sylvia plans to tour the project to various events and activations to spark meaningful dialogue on the needs of LGBTQ+ Hoosiers and communicate a more nuanced perspective on how the LGBTQ+ community is sewn into the fabric of America, the Midwest, and Indiana specifically.

Joshua Thompson (he/him)

Joshua Thompson is a classical pianist and music sociologist who specializes in the research, programming, and performance of composers of African descent.

Joshua leveraged Creative Risk funding to support his production Black Keys, a multisensory music experience that takes audiences through over three centuries of Black classical arts through the lens of music, dance, and narration. To bring this musical odyssey to life, Joshua partnered with Kenyetta Dance Company, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, vocalist Ashlee Baskin, and saxophonist Jared Thompson. Black Keys premiered on April 20, 2024 to a sold out audience at Butler University’s Schrott Center for the Arts. Joshua’s most ambiguous project yet sold out a month before curtain and received widespread acclaim for building eager audiences in the classical music tradition—a genre often claimed to be dying.

Stream Black Keys here.

Lauren Curry (she/her)

Lauren Curry is a dancer and facilitator who intentionally pulls together creatively rewarding and financially responsible opportunities for artists across disciplines, seeking to create stability in an often unpredictable “gig” arts economy.

Lauren’s project explores performance centered on improvisation and the “unstudied” creative impulse. The goal of this experiment is to uncover the Afrocentricity inherent in improvisational traditions in music and dance and to, for a day, replace the still-dominant Eurocentric approach to artmaking with something different and equally valid. The concept brings together musicians, vocalists, and dancers for only a day of work and culminating in an evening performance. Lauren aims, through this project, to animate an Afrocentric perspective on the artmaking process that replaces hours of rehearsal with hours of improvisation.

Mina Keohane (she/her) – Website

David Melsheimer (he/him)

Fred Erskine (he/him) – IG @low_end_freddie

Mina Keohane is a musician who explores the area between chaos and control as well as the connections we have to the built environment. David Melsheimer is a technical engineer. And Fred Erskine is a carpenter and musician famously known from the band Hoover.

Mina, David, and Fred have teamed up on an aleatoric musical composition at the intersection of music, play, visual art, and science. The team constructed large-scale dominoes made of ceramic bricks and various types of wood, producing a diverse set of timbre and pitches. The dominoes will trigger Rube Goldberg devices, creating sounds both intentional and cacophonous. They intend to slightly alter the arrangement of the dominoes at each performance, creating a unique listening experience each time. The first official performance will take on October 4th at the Harrison Center. Mina, David, and Fred have ambitions of producing a much larger scale version of this project on Monument Circle and its extended streets for a grandiose musical performance-art event.

Clockwork Janz (they/them) – IG @clockworkmakesmusic

Rob Funkhouser (he/him) - Website

Clockwork Janz is a multitalented musician and composer whose practice is rooted in tonal and rhythmically driven-music, improvisation, and theatrical performance. Rob Funkhouser is a composer, performer, and instrument builder who is interested in interrogating the interstitial spaces between established genres.

Clockwork and Rob teamed up to create a hotdog cart that is also a calliope. Calliopes are organs powered by steam that you find at circuses and riverboats, invented by William Hoyt of Dupont, IN in 1851. They intend to honor a bit of Indiana history through a whimsical invention that is equal parts instrument and food vendor. They plan to tour farmers’ markets, county fairs, and pride festivals across the state, feeding patrons’ bellies, ears, and spirits. Rob and Clockwork took on two incredible risks with just one project—pursuing a food venture and constructing something entirely new.

Nhat Tran (she/her) - Website

Nhat Tran is an Indianapolis-based artist who is among a small handful of Americans artists specializing in urushi painting and sculpture.

Nhat’s project experiments with a newly developed variant of urushi, known as “Jou Ki-urushi Glass Urushi” that can adhere to glass due to the incorporation of synthetic resin. Nhat tested the variant on three different configurations of plexiglass—a set of circles and squares; a set of 3D moldings and bent forms; and a set of larger-scale irregular shapes. The goal of the experiment was to determine if Jou Ki-urushi could durably adhere to plexiglass, which required several technical considerations and innovative thinking. The resulting artworks reflect an expansion in Nhat’s creative lexicon and a trailblazing development in the practice of urushi painting.

Ventiko (she/they) - Website

Lukas Felix Schooler (he/they) - Website

Ventiko is a critically acclaimed conceptual artist working in photography, film, performative experiences, and social practices whose work focuses on de/re-constructing societal positions on identity, specifically sexuality, persona, gender, and the state of the “modern woman.” Lukas is an award-winning artist working in sculpture, installation, performance, and theater arts whose work often illustrates conflicting histories within the context of growing urban spaces and the contrasting identities of the individual within the masses.

Their project, Nervosity, is an outdoor, multimedia installation that explores the intersection of mental health and gender identity. Lukas and Ventiko will expand Sylva Dean and Me, an ongoing performance art project, by fabricating two new wearable sculptures and a sound sculpture (“Meter”) that creates live soundscapes through percussive beats and resonant frequencies, accompanied by two opera singers. Although both artists have an extensive history in sculpture and performance art, Nervosity represents the first time they will work with sound as an integrated component of a final work.

Nervosity includes sound by Rob Funkhouser and is performed by Kelly Gerard, Jurion Jaffe, Simina Mansfield and Beverly Roche.