Spring Exhibition Series Coming Soon!
Join us for the Spring Exhibition Series Opening Reception on April 11, from 5–8 PM, as we celebrate our incredible new exhibitions! Art Center galleries connect the community with artwork of local, regional, and national artists.
Rotating exhibitions fill our six galleries and are always free and open to the public.
Find yourself here, at Indy Art Center, where it’s always Everybody’s Art!
College Invitational
The 2025 College Invitational exhibition is a diverse, expansive, and sometimes challenging collection of artworks. With students from over 25 universities across 20 states represented, this exhibition is a survey of art school ecosystems from all across the United States. Art school offers makers a unique environment to explore, play, make mistakes, and receive critical feedback. This is the formative time in an artist’s career in which they hone their visual identity. Art students are often granted studio spaces by their university to make these investigations and discoveries. This dedicated space affords freedom to the students to work at large scale and in cumbersome or particular media that may not be suitable in a home-studio environment.
It’s also important to consider the landscape of higher education in America as you move through the galleries and examine the pieces made in these academic environments. The cost to attend college is higher than ever, often leaving students burdened with massive student loans. The economic reality of the creative-job market upon graduating can often feel bleak. And yet, students continue to enroll, continue to pursue art degrees, and continue to make truly amazing artworks. This perseverance is a signal of hope for the future. The commitment to an arts education is a testament of resilience and strength innate to artists. Artists, and art, will persist.
Image: Jennie Cao, Seventh Heaven
Resistance to Cruelty That Never Ends
Afghans and Ukrainians are intimately aware of their countries’ rich and extensive history. Countless empires and regimes have come and gone through their lands to impose their own values and control. Yet, the beauty, hope, pride, and freedom of their people and cultures have stubbornly persisted and continue to persist in perpetuity.
In this critical period in their countries’ histories, two artists and curators collaborate on an artistic juxtaposition of their cultures to gain a greater understanding of the spirit of resistance in the face of unrelenting odds.
Special thanks to Patchwork Indy for making this exhibition possible.
Image: Abdul Qahar Behzad, Behzad Library (Detail, right) & Iryna Bondar, Numbers (Detail, bottom left)
Sam Dienst: Eggsistential Crisis
This show explores the symbolic and metaphorical ideas that Sam Dienst has around eggs.
Eggs represent untapped potential to the artist and innately allude to the future. Sam turned 30 last year, which is by no means old, and yet as a woman it felt consequential. She hopes very much to have a family of her own, and the proverbial ticking clock feels very real in both body and mind. Dienst also hopes to own a home some day, but currently her financial standing is nowhere near that goal. All of this feels in part because she has chosen the uncertain path of being an artist. This is not a show about regrets however, it is simply an exploration of the existential questions Sam faces about how she is living her life and how money, time, and artistic goals are intertwined in planning for the future. Eggs, to the artist, are the perfect symbol of fertility, potential, time, and money.
Eggs being particularly expensive as of late feels perfectly in line with the artist’s own biological eggs (and their potential to become children) also feeling limited by money and resources. The balancing of where Sam puts her energy is difficult to weigh. This show is about both the beauty of the process of art making juxtaposed with the artist’s ambivalent feelings around the journey of being an artist and a woman in her particular socio-economic position. Dienst encourages viewers to find their own symbolic and metaphorical interpretations of the works.
Image: No Place
Craig McDaniel: Winter Becomes Spring
My art aims for four key qualities: beauty, poignancy, magic, and wit.
This exhibit is a special opportunity to display samples of my recent art in several media and at a variety of scales. I hope you’ll delight in viewing several of my large-scale narrative paintings, as well as a few oil pastel on paper drawings, and an example of my experimental alphabet word-image art.
In the final analysis, I hope color reigns supreme!
Artist Bio: Craig McDaniel received the MFA degree in painting/drawing from The Ohio State University, where he studied on a University Fellowship; he received the MFA degree in creative writing from University of Montana. Committed to community engagement and the curatorial process as strategies for cultural empowerment, with Jean Robertson, McDaniel served as Founding Co-Director of the Southern Ohio Museum, Portsmouth. Retiring from teaching at December 2019, McDaniel is now Professor Emeritus of Fine Art, Herron School of Art & Design | Indiana University – Indianapolis.
With Jean Robertson, he is co-author of several volumes, including Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art After 1980 (Oxford University Press, 5th edition published in June 2021). Among his awards, McDaniel was a recipient of a 2020-21 Creative Renewal fellowship from the Indianapolis Arts Council. Recent exhibits include paintings at the RJD (Richard J Demato) Gallery, Romeo, Michigan, and drawings displayed in the Holiday show at Edington Gallery, Indianapolis.
Image: Falconry with Crystal Ball, Detail
Perpetual Panorama
The JoeWill Series: Perpetual Panorama is a two person exhibition of artworks by twin brothers Joe and Will Lawrance. Through diverse media, themes, and subjects this series tells the stories of two burgeoning Indianapolis-born artists whose lives tragically ended as young adults. Joe and Will Lawrance, born in 1985, were identical twin brothers that shared a deep, powerful bond to one another. The two were so interconnected and inseparable that their names morphed into the compound name, JoeWill, as a means of referring to their collective identity.
Within this collection of paintings and drawings by JoeWill, you will find the artists’ exploration of place- marked in still life works, landscape paintings, and imagined or abstracted spaces. The
works in this gallery are all direct products of the lived experiences of JoeWill. These works map the spaces- literal and psychological- that Joe and Will each traversed.
The works featured in this exhibition stand as powerful testament to the deep connections between physical environments and the internal, emotional landscapes of the artists themselves. Far more than mere depictions of nature, these paintings and drawings provide rare glimpses into the multifaceted experiences and perspectives that shaped Joe and Will’s creative visions. Through paint, ink, and various media, the artists have woven together the tangible and the intangible, inviting viewers to contemplate not just the scenes before them, but the very essence of how we, as humans, interpret, respond to, and are transformed by the spaces we inhabit. These landscapes serve as vivid, affecting records of two lives fully lived and explored.
Image: Joe Lawrance, Metropolitan Montage, Detail