Join others to create yarn pompoms that become part of a large-scale fiber art piece called The Village. This artwork will eventually be 24 feet wide and 8 feet high, and represents the best of Indianapolis Arts. It can't be made without assistance from each other.
You may have seen The Village at SPARK on the Circle from August through the Taylor Swift Eras Tour (here's an IndyStar article about it), and now that the weather is cold, this community artwork is coming indoors.
The Village is a large-scale fiber piece made of pompoms and latch hook sections put together by participants. Whether it’s two people making pompoms together, helping each other attach pompoms to the canvas, or afterward sharing this simple hand skill with friends and family, The Village encourages a sense of belonging.
Social Practice Art focuses on the interaction between participants. What is made is a souvenir. The activity has a long cultural history within the fiber arts—quilting bees, sewing circles, knitting groups, and any club over the centuries where women of all ages and cultural backgrounds gathered together to create.
The Village is composed of 13 individual panels that fit together to make one 24-foot by 8-foot composition. Mary Jo Bayliss takes individual panels into the community and pompoms are attached to the panel. These pompoms create texture and relief amid latch hook to create a design of heart hands, butterflies, snakes, guitars, and circles. After the piece is complete, it will be displayed at Tube Factory Artspace. Big Car Collaborative has sponsored this work, under the direction of Mary Jo Bayliss, with support from The Indianapolis Public Library, Ivy Tech Community College, and other community locations for social creation.
Registration is not required—drop in for a few minutes or the whole time. Check out the other days, times, and library branches where you can join in with The Village here.
If you're interested in collective creativity, check out this list of mostly-books about Social Practice Art. It's sure to inspire!
The first library to serve the neighborhood opened in 1957 as the Emerson Branch. This frame house near East 38th Street and North Emerson Avenue soon became too small to meet the neighborhood's needs, leading to the construction of a 7,500-square-foot branch at the same location in 1962. The Emerson Branch closed its doors in 2003 when the current 16,000-square-foot library opened as the East Thirty-Eighth Street Branch.
