Several cultural and community partners will celebrate the completion of a mural honoring Indianapolis-based poet and artist, Mari Evans—one of the founders of the Black Arts Movement.
The mural, located on the north end of the Davalan/Hoosier Building, is scheduled to be completed mid-August. The public can visit the mural at 448 Massachusetts Ave. during and after the process.
Evans selected artist Michael Jordan, aka Alkemi, to paint the large, photo-realistic portrait. The project is funded by a grant from The Indiana Arts Commission as part of the Indiana Bicentennial Celebration and with support of The Efroymson Family Fund. Born in 1919 in Toledo, Ohio, Evans has called Indianapolis home since 1947.
Big Car Collaborative chief curator Shauta Marsh started meeting with Mari Evans in March of 2015 to start a series of projects raising awareness of Evans. “We are excited about championing a project that highlights Mari Evans’ work because we noticed that not enough people in our city and state know about her and her unique and powerful voice,” said Marsh.
“Mari’s work paved the way for minority writers. And she truly represents the diversity of our state as a powerful role model for young people. While male artists like Kurt Vonnegut and Wes Montgomery are memorialized in public art pieces around Indianapolis, Mari’s legacy was not yet visible. We’re thrilled to be able to help change that.”
Big Car chose the historic Davlan building for the mural’s location due to the high traffic of the area and its proximity to a mural of Evan’s contemporary, Kurt Vonnegut. The building’s co-owner and partner on the project, Eric Strickland, views the mural as an important addition to Mass Ave, “It ensures that culture and diversity remain an important aspect of the district,” says Strickland.
Another partner on the project, The Links, Incorporated, is providing cake and refreshments for the celebration. The Links is a volunteer service organization of concerned, committed and talented women who, linked in friendship, enhance the quality of life in the larger community, and is concerned primarily with enriching, sustaining and ensuing the identities, culture and economic survival of African-Americans and persons of African descent.
In addition to the mural, Big Car’s Tube Factory art space will host an art exhibit focusing on Evans. It will feature a commissioned text-based piece related to her essay work from Indianapolis artist Carl Pope. The exhibit opens Nov. 5 at Tube Factory art space (1125 Cruft St.).
About Mari Evans
Mari Evans’ mother passed away when Evans was 10 years old. Her father immediately felt the need to encourage her in any way he could, cultivating her talent of writing that would later serve as her main career focus.
After attending public schools in her hometown of Toledo, Ohio, Evans attended the University of Toledo in the 1940s where she studied fashion design, but left without a degree. Her interests shifted to writing poetry and by 1969 she was a writer-in-residence at Indiana University where she taught courses in African American Literature.
An influential member of the 1960s Black Arts movement, which included Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni and Etheridge Knight, Mari published in 1969 her first work Where Is All the Music?, followed by her more famous I Am a Black Woman (1970). During this time Evans also worked as a producer, writer, and director of The Black Experience (1968-1973) – a history documentary that aired on prime time in Indianapolis.
Evans has taught at a number of other institutions including Cornell, Northwestern, Washington University in St. Louis, Spelman College, the University of Miami at Coral Gables, and the State University of New York at Albany. But she is best known for her poetry with her work appearing in more than one hundred anthologies. Most of that work focuses on the celebration of Africa and the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement as well as other themes bringing to light the reality of the African American experience. These projects were largely influenced by close friend Langston Hughes, who pushed Evans to write with confidence and to evolve into a well-respected figure in the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The most important of her countless awards for writing came in 1981 when she received the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award.
