Theater of Inclusion

TOI Blog

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Vidal Sassoon and Fall Creek

After scanning through brief words from Thomas Edison, George Bernard Shaw, and Bruce Lee I settled on a quote from Vidal Sassoon – “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” I held my phone up to display the quote to my daughter who promptly asked, through a mouthful of blueberry […]

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From the Archive

In the third week of August 2005 Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the United States killing 1,836 people. A few months later Rebecca and I were working on a project in Mobile, Alabama. We drove along the coast from Mobile to New Orleans and found the devastation still intact: missing towns, washed out […]

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M. Ramirez

There is absolutely nothing wrong in thinking about your life as an evolving work of art. Seriously, I won’t go into it here but if you explored “conceptual art” you’d easily find the stuff you think about in your spare time passing as art. I’m not putting you or conceptual art down. Actually, I mean […]

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The Amazement is Here

The creative process is an experience the mind produces. It’s not something “out there” somewhere. It’s not a thing to go after. It’s woven into our brain functioning. It’s always present. Most of us lack an awareness of this simple truth. We call some people “creatives”. We talk about a “creative class” of people. But […]

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Wish You Were Here

I wish all of you could see this happening – young artists at work. Creative liberty is the intuitive goal driving the production of art here. And, of course, not one kid in our after school studio would describe it this way. But our job isn’t to wait until they can wrap language around their […]

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Big Deal Hands

Hands are a big deal. This past summer Rebecca and I worked on a public mural, commissioned by Indiana Sports Corp for USA Diving. This was to commemorate the 2016 USA Olympic Diving Team Trials. The event took place here in Indy at the IU Natatorium during the month of June. Rebecca and I set […]

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E. Murray

Today, at Indianapolis Public School # 58, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson, we explore the work of the painter Elizabeth Murray. We’re interested in how Ms. Murray’s images might inspire us as we produce our own visual artwork? “We” are a group of elder elementary students who are just a few months away from becoming […]

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Glass

Our work with artists of any age starts with the materials on hand. An open studio begins with graphite, color pencils, oil pastels. Some of our residencies were centered on laundry drying racks and construction flagging tape. Other residencies required a heightened awareness of light, photography, and words. An example of this was our legacy […]

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Putting The Pieces Together

The creative process is full of stuff that doesn’t seem to fit together – at first. Often when our brain is truly at work we find ourselves in an alphabet soup of ideas and what appears to be random thoughts. Our left brain goes to work immediately trying to figure out where all these things […]

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Listening to Worms

In the studio at three a.m. the work begins to make sense to me. I start writing sentences that reflect what’s going on with the paint, oil pastels, the graphite, and the new forms. It’s all of one thing – the discipline, the refusal to quit, the difficult themes, and ambiguous subjects that keep me […]