Big Car outlines plans for contemporary art museum in ‘Big Tube’ space

As renovations progress at a 40,000-square-foot former factory near Garfield Park, the leaders of Big Car Collaborative are sharing plans for a contemporary art museum that will be the building’s centerpiece.

Although the structure’s makeover was delayed a few years and not-for-profit arts organization Big Car already hosts exhibitions at its Tube Factory space near the intersection of Shelby and Cruft streets, the larger building—nicknamed “Big Tube”—is poised to be the spiritual successor to the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. IMOCA debuted in 2001 as a “museum without walls” and dissolved in 2020.

Big Car co-founder Shauta Marsh worked as IMOCA’s executive director when that museum occupied a Fountain Square storefront. Big Tube will devote five exhibition spaces, including the largest at 4,200 square feet, to modern art.

Marsh said the new museum will focus on the themes of community, memory and mythology.

“I’m going to commission artists who might challenge ideas we have about things,” she said. “People don’t always like contemporary art because it deals with issues that are sensitive right now in real time. I always say this space is a ‘brave space.’ There is room for safe spaces, but we want to commission shows that are going to pull people in, and hopefully they’ll think about what they’re seeing.”

Beyond the contemporary art museum, Big Tube will be the site of a 4,800-square-foot performance space, a commercial kitchen, a restaurant, five business incubator storefronts, two audio recording studios (including the new home of radio station WQRT-FM 99.1) and 20 studios for visual artists.

Big Car hosted a formal groundbreaking ceremony for Big Tube in June. Expected to open in fall 2025, Big Tube is a $6.5 million renovation project, plus an estimated $500,000 for furnishings. Marsh and Big Car co-founder Jim Walker said more than half of the cost is covered. They’re attempting to raise another $2 million to reach 100% and to launch a maintenance endowment.

A co-chair of the capital campaign is Katie Jacobsen, president of Tube Processing Corp., the company that donated the Big Tube building to Big Car in 2021.

The oldest part of the building dates to the late 1800s, when it served as a barn for Weber Milk Co. The building grew piecemeal and became headquarters for Tube Processing, a manufacturer of jet-engine components for the aerospace industry.

While workers entered Tube Processing from a southern entrance along Nelson Avenue, the primary entrance to Big Tube will be accessed by a northern promenade originating at Cruft Street just east of the existing 12,000-square-foot Tube Factory art space.

Big Car’s affordable artist housing program, the Artist and Public Life Residency, includes houses on both Cruft Street and Nelson Avenue. Beehives, a chicken coop and a 400-square-foot structure known as the Chicken Chapel of Love are part of the Tube Factory campus.

“It’s life renewed,” Tube Processing executive Jacobsen said of Big Car’s plans for the former factory. “It’s taking the old in the past and bringing it back, supercharged. I think this community deserves that.”

Known for spearheading the creative and recreational attractions of Spark on the Circle, Big Car has a two-decade history of bringing art to the public. In 2004, the husband-and-wife team of Walker and Marsh joined fellow artists in establishing Big Car in Fountain Square’s Murphy Arts Center.

Big Car operations moved to a former tire shop near Lafayette Square Mall in 2011, and Tube Factory opened at 1125 Cruft St. in 2016. In contrast to being tenants at the Murphy Arts Center and the former tire shop, Big Car owns its real estate in Garfield Park.

That’s made a wealth of difference, Walker said.

“We were able to do what we normally do, which is test out ideas at a smaller scale and then scale them up,” he said. “From 2016 until now, we’ve been doing it at this scale, which is 12,000 square feet. We’ll have another year-and-a-half or so to be ready to transition to this larger-scale thing. But it’s been a 20-year process of testing these ideas.”

The road to reuse

Walker and Marsh gathered ideas for Big Tube by visiting adaptive reuse art spaces in multiple cities. In Detroit, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit took over a former auto dealership. In Bentonville, Arkansas, the Momentary occupies a former Kraft manufacturing facility. A former textile factory became the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

A $3 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. in 2018 allowed the Big Car team to think big.

But transforming the Big Tube building wasn’t quick or cheap. Environmental remediation work and the pandemic contributed to delays, and a projected price tag of $2 million more than doubled because of a spike in construction costs.

Big Car used $1.8 million of the Lilly grant for the Big Tube project.

Lourenzo Giple, deputy director of preservation, planning and urban design for the Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development, is an architect and a member of Big Car’s board.

Despite setbacks affecting Big Tube, Giple said he agrees with a preservation adage that states, “The most sustainable building is the one that’s already built.”

“There’s a curiosity that comes from [the Big Car co-founders] that says, ‘We want to explore the human condition, how humans interact with space,’” Giple said. “That’s exactly what they’re doing again at the Big Tube.”

Indianapolis-based Jungclaus-Campbell is general contractor for the renovations. Blackline Studio architects worked with Big Car staff on the design.

To date, donors to the capital project include Lilly Endowment Inc., Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation, Efroymson Family Fund, Herbert Simon Family Foundation and the Indianapolis Foundation.

Walker said Big Car is seeking long-term sustainability for its artist-led campus.

“We want to make sure the project lives far past Jim and I,” Marsh said. “Once we get this building done and once we get our exhibits funded, we want an endowment to maintain these properties and to keep the integrity of the ideas behind it.”

Giple said Big Car’s work with 18 affordable-living spaces for artists reflects a commitment to the neighborhood.

“For the lack of a better term, Jim and Shauta tap into the ‘weird’ of a space,” Giple said. “All of the culture exists in that space of the weird, because it is against the norm. In assessing that space and saying, ‘We are working with the culture,’ they are protecting it and making sure that it’s held sacred.”

The Seybert legacy

The Tube Processing Corp., predecessor to the Big Car campus, was founded by Edward Seybert in 1939 and flourished under the leadership of Edward’s son, George Seybert.

A high-profile supporter of the Indianapolis Art Center, George Seybert sold the building that became Tube Factory to Big Car for $40,000 two years before his death in 2017 at age 79.

Jacobsen, the current Tube Processing president and George Seybert’s daughter, said the smaller building wasn’t a major part of the company’s operations. The Richard Green Nut Co. occupied the spot into the 1990s, when Tube Processing acquired the building.

Tube Processing eventually exited its two buildings in the Garfield Park neighborhood for a 155,000-square-foot facility at 604 E. Legrande Ave., about a block north of the intersection of Raymond and East streets.

Aerofab, a division of Tube Processing, is listed at No. 18 on IBJ’s list of top manufacturers in central Indiana.

Jacobsen said her father maintained affection for Garfield Park.

“It hurt him to leave,” she said. “I know he is overjoyed with what is happening over there. What Jim and Shauta have done is tremendous.”

Big Car also has a fan in Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett.

“Tube Factory fills a significant gap in the art landscape of Indianapolis,” Hogsett said during the June event marking Big Tube’s groundbreaking. “It provides a space dedicated to contemporary art and its creators, who make up a crucial part of any thriving art scene.

“These artists also play a huge role in our communities. Through their art, they provide our residents with new avenues of understanding and new ways of looking at the world around them. Their art serves to bring us together and to help us understand one another. And this is paramount in today’s day and age, when we are simultaneously the most connected and the most divided we have ever been.”

Filling the Tube

When discussing Big Tube’s future as a contemporary art museum, Marsh said IMOCA’s accomplishments shouldn’t be dismissed.

“IMOCA did not fail,” said Marsh, who served as the organization’s executive director from 2011 to 2015. “IMOCA built an audience, and it fostered love and meaning of contemporary art. … It’s still relevant, and it always will be because it contributed something to Indianapolis that influenced so many people who are working in our city today.”

The primary gallery at Big Tube will be spacious enough to accommodate large-scale installations, which have been relatively rare at Tube Factory.

In 2017, artist Carlos Rolón filled the building with his “50 Grand” show. Live boxing matches were part of the exhibition, and Rolón replicated his family’s wood-paneled basement where televised bouts were the main attraction.

Tube Factory pays artists directly for producing shows in the space, which sidesteps a reliance on gallery sales for artists. Big Car plans to spend $10,000 to $50,000 for exhibitions at Big Tube.

Overall, Big Car has operated with an annual budget of about $1 million.

On July 12, Tube Factory will host an opening reception for an exhibition titled “Ekvnv (Land), the Sacred Mother from Which We Came,” by Oklahoma-based artist Elisa Harkins.

Marsh said Harkins’ work, which will occupy all gallery spaces at Tube Factory, can be considered a preview of what’s to come at Big Tube.

Marsh also described “Ekvnv (Land)” as likely some of the most important work she does in the role of curator.

Part of the exhibition is focused on the desecration of burial mounds in New Harmony, something Marsh learned about while researching past utopian experiments in the town near Evansville.

“The Harmonists had dug up the burial mounds, taken things they found interesting to put in their cabinet of curiosities, and they also buried their dead on top of the native dead,” Marsh said of activities that happened about 200 years ago.

Marsh worked with Harkins, a Cherokee and Muscogee descendant, on the exhibition for more than five years.

“You don’t always come across issues or a situation like that,” Marsh said.

Walker said Big Car’s interactions with the public range from jumbo Jenga games at Spark on the Circle to thought-provoking shows such as “Ekvnv (Land).”

“You have easier entry points, but you want to still have challenging things and experimental things,” he said. “That’s where you need a museum dedicated to the idea of sharing contemporary art. Other museums in town do that, but it’s not the main thing they do.”•