Movie monsters and robots replace portraits and landscapes at Bloomington’s latest addition to the art scene. That’s because Delinquent Gallery co-owners Chris McVillain and Brian Aldridge wanted a space where they could showcase what they call “lowbrow art.”
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Historically, more often than not, artists have been men, while their subjects have been women. That’s why the reversal of those roles, in a short film shot in Bloomington and currently making the rounds on the international film festival circuit, still surprises contemporary audiences.
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Until he was nearly 30, Jerry Smith had never painted, but he wondered what it would be like to be an artist. “I just felt this need, this desire, to paint without even knowing much,” he says. Still, it wasn’t until his wife, Cindy, bought him a set of oil paints as a Christmas gift in 1971 that he finally picked up a brush.
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Monique Cagle—painter, photographer, fabric artist, and jewelry maker—knew it was time to find a dedicated studio space when her work started taking over her house.
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BY OLIVIA DORFMAN Local history takes the stage October 11–14 in Resilience: Stories of Monroe....
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A new memoir by Gerardo González, Indiana University School of Education dean emeritus, is a tribute to openness—the kind that happens when a nation welcomes new citizens and a person welcomes new ideas.
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An acoustic guitar player, Caesar Pacifici founded The Flying Cloud with British-born bouzouki player Brian Brooks. The group recorded an album for Adelphi Records and toured the British Isles and the United States. Then, the band split up and the two men fell out of contact for more than 30 years.
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In 1977, a group of Bloomington artists had a vision: to create an annual festival where local residents could enjoy and buy high-quality arts and crafts. Now, 41 years later, the Fourth Street Festival of the Arts & Crafts draws more than 42,000 patrons from the Midwest to its two-day juried show, held each year over Labor Day weekend.
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The Brown County Art Guild features the artwork of its members in shows throughout the year, and each fall collaborates with other community groups to host the Brown County Art Colony Weekend. This year the weekend will be held September 7–9.
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Music festivals are booming across the country, but the vast majority of acts still feature men. MidWay Music Festival is breaking that trend, giving female musicians more of a place on the stage.
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When Indiana University alumni make the trek back to Bloomington this year, they and their families will have even more to explore. That’s because the Quarry Festival of Books, sponsored by IU Press and Bloom Magazine, has moved from an end-of-summer event to one that coincides with homecoming weekend.
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Moira Smiley discovered the power of her voice in Bloomington. When she came to the Indiana University School of Music in 1994, she intended to major in piano performance. But as she connected with local musicians such as Malcolm Dalglish, she gravitated toward the study of folk music, folklore, and ethnomusicology, ultimately receiving her degree in early music vocal performance.
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Laura Brikmanis’ theater mural adorns the exterior of the Bloomington Playwrights Project’s Ted Jones Playhouse and you can find her bees on one side of the 2nd Street Artisan Alley building.
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How does a court commissioner from southern Indiana become a western swing music sensation and win the Academy of Western Artists’ Western Swing Album of the Year? Ask fiddler, Bret Raper, 57, whose first album, Somewhere Near Austin, earned him the coveted award in March.
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In October 1994, about 800 people gathered in downtown Bloomington for the city’s first-ever world music festival. Organized by Lee Williams, James Combs, and Shahyar Daneshgar, the festival was a one-night event featuring a dozen international performers on three stages.
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The Bloomington Blues & Boogie Woogie Piano Festival bounces back into town August 11–13 for its fourth annual showcase of American keyboard music.
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In the early 1950s, about the time Elvis Presley cut a record and changed the sound of popular music, anyone could walk into a recording booth at a drugstore, pay a couple of bucks, perform a song, and have it etched directly into vinyl. Now, Phonocraft Record Manufacturing has resurrected that technology, offering one-off and small-batch records.
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Cardinal Stage will wrap up its season with a production of the musical Fun Home, a story of repressed intimacy, disillusionment, and love against steep odds.
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Three escape room businesses—simulated entertainment experiences likened to live versions of the board game Clue—have opened in Bloomington within the last year. They’re among about 50 such businesses in Indiana, and more than 2,100 nationwide.
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Sportswriter Stan Sutton’s The Curse of the Indy 500: 1958’s Tragic Legacy centers on a massive crash that killed one driver and seemingly cast a jinx on many others. Chapter by chapter, Sutton recounts the accidents that, over the years, took the lives of a dozen other drivers in that year’s race
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