New version of 89-year-old lost mural represents a salvaged legacy

Kaila Austin poses in front of an early version of her “Workers” artwork that reimagines a lost 1934 mural painted by John Wesley Hardrick. (IBJ photo/Dave Lindquist)

John Wesley Hardrick was an accomplished Black artist whose work and legacy in Indianapolis nearly slipped through the cracks on more than one occasion.

Kaila Austin is an artist and art historian who’s working to make sure Hardrick and his Near Southeast neighborhood are remembered.

Austin is reimagining one of Hardrick’s murals, for instance, for an exhibition that opens Friday at Tube Factory Artspace, 1125 Cruft St.

In 1934, Hardrick painted “The Workers” for Crispus Attucks High School. The mural depicted foundry workers pouring molten ore into molds.

“John Hardrick was the only African-American painter in the state of Indiana who was chosen to do a Works Progress Administration work,” Austin said.

But the school’s principal never displayed “The Workers,” deciding that students at the all-Black school should aspire to more celebrated tasks than what Hardrick himself experienced toiling in a local foundry. The present location of Hardrick’s painting is unknown.

Hardrick’s signature painting, “Little Brown Girl,” was donated to the John Herron Art Institute—precursor to the Indianapolis Museum of Art—in 1929, but it was lost for decades before being returned to the IMA in 1994.

And 44 acres where Hardrick’s family lived in the Norwood community of the Near Eastside neighborhood almost became a morgue and coroner’s facility not far from where the Indianapolis-Marion County Community Justice Campus opened 2022.

Austin became a Hardrick expert shortly before the city unveiled its morgue plans.

Indianapolis native Austin graduated from Indiana University with an art history degree in 2017 and she moved back to her hometown in August 2019. When the pandemic put everything on pause, Austin decided to explore her environment.

“I decided I would start engaging with my community more,” Austin. “I started a portrait project that ended up being called the ‘Memory Keepers.’ ”

She painted portraits of Near Southeast residents, including Flinora Frazier, who was happy to talk about the history of Norwood.

“She said, ‘Well, my grandfather escaped slavery at 13 and joined the U.S. Colored Troops and founded this church on the corner of our neighborhood,’ ” Austin said of Frazier, who’s now 94.

Frazier’s grandfather, Sidney Penick, fought for the North during the Civil War and eventually founded the Penick Chapel AME Zion Church, 1146 Earhart St., in the 1880s.

Austin said 30 families who descended from Black Civil War soldiers continue to live on original properties from the 19th century.

“Process as Practice” is part of Austin’s work with six Reconstruction-era Black neighborhoods to record and preserve history.

Norwood was home to Hardrick, who lived from 1891 to 1968 and studied under Hoosier Group impressionist Otto Stark.

Frazier was a schoolmate of one of Hardrick’s sons.

“They remembered that there was a painter in the attic over there, but he was ‘Uncle John,’ ” Austin said. “They didn’t know it was anything special.”

When Austin launched her “Memory Keepers” project, she didn’t expect to learn such profound history lessons. And she didn’t expect to have a front-row seat when Norwood residents convinced the city to cancel the morgue project.

Today, the 44 acres where Hardrick grew up near the intersection of Prospect Street and Keystone Avenue are being redeveloped as a public park.

If things go as planned, a wall on a building in that park will be the final destination for Austin’s “Workers” mural.

“Process as Practice: Reimagining the Lost Hardrick Mural”

• When: Oct. 6 to Dec. 17.
• Where: Tube Factory Artspace, 1125 Cruft St.
• Admission: Free.
• Info: Visit bigcar.org.