Changes in the Heartland
Friday, July 7th, 2023: Stories, Travel.
Emotional Rollercoaster
My visits with family in Indianapolis are always emotional rollercoasters. We grew up in the farming country south of there, and visiting always reconnects me, not just with family baggage, but with those childhood roots, and the memories flood back, both bad and good.
I’ve seen a lot of changes over the years, I saw a lot of the city on this trip, and I had a lot of time to think about what I’d seen. My observations should resonate with anyone who’s spent time in other old Rust Belt cities, like Baltimore, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, St Louis, and Kansas City.
Aging in Exile
I never got to know our state capital until my mom and stepdad relocated there in the mid-1990s. First renting a studio in an old factory building alongside other artists and small entrepreneurs, they then bought a renovated Victorian carriage house in an old inner-city neighborhood that was becoming a cosmopolitan mecca. They opened the first fine art photography gallery in the state, and became prominent members of both the art scene and the small business community, meeting regularly for happy hour at the neighborhood dive bar where young artists served drinks as small business people unwound after work. Contrary to the state’s media image as a racist redneck backwater, their community was politically progressive and every bit as diverse in gender and race as my West Coast milieus.
The closing of the gallery, widowhood, COVID, and the aging process have exiled my mom from that community. She misses her old friends but, like me in my remote small town, seems reconciled to isolation. Her home is her memory palace – on the walls of every room, she can see work made by her, the internationally-known artists she studied with, and the local people who were once her friends.
Single-Family Homes
At home I’m blessed with a wilderness three times as big as the county Indianapolis is part of, in a national forest twelve times as big, with mountains ranging from 5,000 to nearly 11,000 feet. So forgive me if I start to lose my mind in the congested cities and plowed cropfields of central Indiana. The closest undeveloped area is over an hour from my mom’s house, a state forest featuring a sandstone rockshelter and hills up to 250 feet tall (!), and I always drive down there for a day hike. On this trip, with a drive lengthened by freeway construction that seems to have been going on for at least a decade, I only had time for an 8 mile walk through the lush hardwood forest.
The grounds of the art museum include a nature preserve with a lake and a loop trail that I always walk – a little sanctuary in the city where I can get away from the noise, traffic, and stress.
But after that, I just walked the streets around my mom’s house, almost every morning.
All of these old industrial cities feature the opposite poles of old money and a rooted but increasingly desperate blue-collar working class. The old-money mansions line a narrow corridor northwards from downtown, while the shabby, soot-stained single-family homes of blue collar neighborhoods form a ring around the city elsewhere, and it seems that at least one house on each block is abandoned and boarded up. The conservative middle class and those with children mostly live in the distant suburbs, while more cosmopolitan and childless professionals choose gentrified inner-city enclaves like my mom’s neighborhood, again in single-family homes on streets shaded by giant hardwood trees.
Rainbow Flags and Strollers
The focus of Mom’s neighborhood has always been the commercial street to the south, so at first I instinctively headed north through residential neighborhoods to avoid traffic. But my way was soon blocked.
After the industrial collapse of the 1970s, the city eventually recovered into a state of constant reconstruction. Despite attempts to create “greenways” and more walkable neighborhoods, the massive freeways surrounding downtown and spreading outward keep getting bigger, noisier, and dirtier – hence the soot from vehicle tires falling on everyone from rich to poor. As the home of the Indy 500, the “Racing Capital of the World”, it’s a driving culture, with drivers conditioned to treat freeways and streets alike as race tracks, unconsciously reckless and mostly oblivious to pedestrians, yielding an ever-increasing rate of traffic fatalities.
Enduring the hammering din of overhead traffic through a dark, filthy underpass, I meandered northward through a preserved historic enclave where stately three-story Victorians set back in big lawns share shaded streets with generic postmodern townhomes. As a Westerner raised on visions of organic Midcentury design and enlightened by indigenous lifeways, I find both traditional Euro-American and postmodern architectures repugnant. But every yard is lovingly landscaped, every lawn manicured by dark-skinned gardeners, many of whom were working as I passed. And to counterbalance the state’s right-wing reputation, every other property bears rainbow flags and posters promoting diversity and tolerance.
The farther north I went, the less ostentatious the homes, and the more I encountered nannies, and occasionally young parents, pushing babies in strollers.
Postmodern Apartments and Cobblestone Streets
Midway through the Old Northside, I passed a cheap-looking high-density development that was under construction twenty years ago. It must’ve been designated for low-income residents, because it’s already turning into a little slum amidst all the spotless middle-class properties, graffiti spreading across its courtyard walls and trash filling interior corridors.
In the following week I explored south, where, twenty-some years ago, a few disused multistory factories were converted to “lofts” – not the DIY artists’ lofts I knew in coastal cities in the 1980s, but upscale condos for affluent young professionals. Lowrise commercial buildings in this area have since been rapidly replaced by postmodern apartment complexes for the millenials who’ve been attracted to most of these Rust Belt cities by emerging tech jobs. Here, the big employer is Salesforce. It’s hard for me to imagine young people who would aspire to a career surveilling and manipulating consumers, but apparently schools are churning them out by the millions.
I could only walk a few more blocks south before I ran into light industry, but just before that I encountered the tiny, quaint enclave of Lockerbie, with a cobblestone street and the brick Victorian home of James Whitcomb Riley, the “Hoosier Poet” and a literary pop star at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Alongside more sophisticated fare, I was raised on his homely works – “Little Orphan Annie” and “When the Frost is on the Punkin” – which can still evoke our shared roots.
Sponsorship City
Next, I headed west on the Cultural Trail, a work of landscape architecture partly designed by my mom’s former friends and neighbors who have spearheaded the city’s ambitious greenway corridors. Like sidewalks, all these corridors are used primarily by riders rather than pedestrians – cyclists, riders of e-bikes or e-scooters – so people who walk need constant vigilance to avoid getting run down. Cities are getting more and more dangerous for pedestrians – cyclists and riders of e-bikes and e-scooters almost universally disobey laws prohibiting them from sidewalks, and laws go unenforced. Cyclists at least have the excuse that sharing the streets with cars and trucks is suicidal.
Wheeled transportation is necessary because despite gentrification, cities like this have evolved away from walkability. In New York and San Francisco, you’re never more than a few minutes’ walk from a bodega or corner store, and most neighborhoods still have hardware stores. Corner stores and neighborhood groceries are long gone from Indianapolis; my mom’s supermarket and pharmacy are each a mile away in opposite directions.
On my five-mile round-trip across downtown to the historic canal with its ducks and geese and the big river with its rim of flood debris, I was reminded that like the professional sports it’s crazy about, this is Sponsorship City. It seems that every public building, monument, sidewalk, stairway, wall, and overpass is permanently engraved with the names of rich white sponsors.
Several of my friends, like the designers of the Cultural Trail, have accepted philanthropy as an integral part of their institutional careers, but I find it deeply troubling that poor people face constant reminders that their environment belongs to the rich. Philanthropy, sponsorship, and the private naming of the public environment are just more examples of our obscene wealth disparity and the fundamental injustice and unfairness of our society.
With its early auto industry, Indianapolis was a major destination in the Great Migration of Black folks from south to north, hence its reputation as a breeding ground for jazz sax players. Its population is now half nonwhite and 30% Black, but you’d never know it from the sponsors’ names inscribed in the urban landscape.
My mom’s neighborhood has changed dramatically with high-density development and the influx of thousands of young office workers. Most of my friends in West Coast cities live in single-family-home residential neighborhoods which haven’t changed visibly since they moved there decades ago. I suppose one reason Indianapolis has changed so much is that the economy was so depressed for so long, and when it began to recover, inner-city neighborhoods were in ruin, but the old low-density pattern was no longer profitable for developers.
Digital Experiences
For decades, the city’s art museum, a few miles north of my mom’s neighborhood in a park on the banks of the river, was my refuge. Many works in the permanent collection moved or inspired me, they occasionally hosted impressive temporary shows, and there were a couple of contemplative contemporary installations that could always calm my troubled soul. But as usual, I was apparently in the minority. They were losing membership, attendance, and revenue, and like most urban museums, they’ve transformed the entire vast property, first to prioritize entertainment over art, and now to “add wokeness” to their collection. The art museum is now just one component of a sprawling family recreation complex.
I was shocked and saddened when they replaced an entire floor, a third of the exhibition space containing all the contemporary works I loved, with the kind of generic “immersive digital experience” that’s become popular with Instagrammers everywhere. Whereas the old galleries offered hundreds of eclectic works by hundreds of diverse artists, the digital experiences feature a single old white artist – household names like Van Gogh or Monet. At the same time, they closed the small but excellent Japanese art gallery and the Renaissance and Medieval European galleries. The latter eventually reopened featuring yet another immersive digital experience.
Museum of Curation
The other European galleries have been replaced with a big roomful of works by a local Black collective, and a series of smaller rooms where a more limited selection of European and American works are surrounded by curatorial content to educate the viewer on their historical and colonial contexts such as slavery, imperialist looting, urban redlining, etc. Since my last visit, this curatorial content had been enhanced by another underrepresented, marginalized collective including LGBTQ artists and scholars as well as people of color.
For example, the museum has long featured paintings of Black folks by Black artists. To these, the collective has added detailed commentary on the injustices endured by the artists and subjects, sometimes in the form of additional paintings or poems of their own.
The net result of all these reforms is that most of the art formerly on display has been moved to storage and replaced by curatorial content – including wall-sized panels of explanatory text and dubious “interactive” experiences where visitors are encouraged to document their reactions to what is now more curation than art. The few works of art returned to the galleries have been selected to address curatorial themes, rather than based on their value as art. Artists and art that played no role in social injustice are now implied to share the blame. The result is what should really now be called a museum of curation.
One-Sided Dialog
I was sympathetic with the new collectives and found their work competent and sometimes poignant. But the museum’s new curators, by selecting work from the collection on the basis of themes they’ve learned in academia, have relegated the collection’s most mysterious and challenging art to storage in favor of the didactic – work that can easily and instantly be explained to the undereducated viewer.
As a precocious white artist growing up with the privileges of my race, I was inspired to make mysterious work that challenges the viewer, rather than being primarily representational or decorative. But even purely representational or decorative work can raise questions. Instead of leaving the viewer to ask those questions – because they may be entrenched in a biased worldview – the curatorial content both asks the questions and provides answers for the viewer. It’s a false, static, one-sided dialog.
The viewer may end up being educated, but the original art tends to recede into the background as its mystery is explained. And what I consider the most important functions of art in society – to challenge and inspire – are sometimes lost in the process. The curators are unintentionally foregrounding their egos and careers, and the previously marginalized commentators are colonizing the galleries, but with reactionary rather than original work.
Who Knows Where It Will Lead?
As I was studying one of these “enhanced” exhibits, an elderly white docent came over and asked for my reaction to the new galleries. I briefly told her where I was coming from and how I’d followed the reforms over the years, put off at first but now understanding the direction they were taking. She nodded with a broad smile. “Don’t you just love it!” she enthused.
“It’s a start, but who knows where it will lead? Once they’ve started in this direction, the museum could turn into something completely different,” I replied. She seemed shocked and perplexed.
What I meant was that as an art museum, it represents a century and a half of selective collecting by rich white folks. The very idea of an art museum is a European institution which has been a tool of imperialism and colonialism for hundreds of years. For me as an underrepresented, marginalized white artist, the museum’s collection was a place of inspiration and solace. The biased and looted collection can’t simply be reformed to provide a similar experience for underrepresented minorities – it will have to be replaced by a different type of institution. All we can do is wait and see what that will be like.
Consumer Playground
Toward the end of my visit, I finally, reluctantly entered the massive new mixed-use real estate development near my mom’s home. They started by transforming a former low-rise art-deco factory – a soft-drink bottling plant – into a complex combining hotel, restaurants and food court, shopping, office space, and recreation. In rapid succession, they’ve added a cutting-edge virtual reality arcade, a taller office building housing a high-end restaurant and multiplex movie theater, and are now completing a high-rise apartment building. Having preserved the retro facades of the factory, they’ve appealed to both fashion-conscious millennials and nostalgic boomers. The complex has become a consumer playground, with a captive market of young people drawn by tech jobs to the thousands of new apartments that have turned this formerly quiet, single-family neighborhood into one of the most congested parts of the city.
This is the kind of culture I and my artist colleagues were rebelling against in the late 1970s and early 1980s – shallow hedonism amid the rampant collapse of the larger society, that inspired punk rock and transgressive performance art. It’s interesting to contrast this yuppie mecca with the new galleries at the art museum. I’m always mystified when women aspire to soul-killing jobs invented by men, when gays and lesbians aspire to destructive institutions – like marriage or the military – that have caused so much suffering among heterosexuals, and when people of color aspire to colonial institutions, like galleries and museums, developed by European imperialists.
Proud Hoosiers
Indianapolis is just the capital city for the state, which mainly consists of crop fields and small farm towns. Growing up in one of those, my friends and I had Black classmates and were shocked when one of those, a teenage girl, was stabbed to death in a nearby town which had been the national headquarters of the KKK. As rebellious young artists, my best friend and I couldn’t wait to get away from this backward place where there were no opportunities for us, but when we reached the West Coast we discovered our small-town Midwest origins – and especially the Hoosier state of Indiana – gave us a sort of awe-shucks authenticity the coastal people envied. So for decades, we freely confessed our Heartland heritage. After all, Abe Lincoln himself spent his boyhood and youth in our home state.
Then by the end of the 90s, politics had polarized everyone and everything, and our homeland emerged as a horrific backwater of racism and general intolerance. We had to rebrand ourselves as proud urbanites and Westerners, rejecting and suppressing our shameful redneck roots.
But now, our Hoosier friends are proud of the lives and freedoms they’ve been able to carve out in the midst of this state that’s condemned by the distant coasts. I’m proud of them, and especially of my heroic family as they struggle to survive, isolated in the midst of massive changes, the outcome of which no one can predict.
Very interesting analysis of the fate of curated shows and the impulse to replace art…whatever that means… but social Justice programs.