It doesn't take long for visitors to see the stories the southside of Muncie has when they notice the neighborhood's appearance, said Kory Gipson, co-owner of the Common Market.
Casey Toomey’s grandma, Carolyn, baked cakes — “beautiful cakes with royal icing flowers” — to celebrate family and friends. She never sold them. It was her gift to those she loved.
With Thanksgiving break slowly upon us, the familiar taste of a home-cooked, or store-bought, Thanksgiving meal starts inching closer to our mouths — the sizzling hot, golden-brown turkey basting in the oven, the smell of grandma’s homemade pumpkin pie and the sound of everyone laughing together at the dinner table.
“Start with what you like.” That was Kerry Davis’ first lesson for his wife, Betty Davis, when she began collecting art alongside her husband.
Dressed in a white-and-black striped long sleeve shirt with a solid yellow patch and black overalls, Kylee Larson sets her iPhone on her tripod and turns on her microphone pack to start filming a video for her kids’ art YouTube channel, Kylee Makes It.
![The work of 38 Black visual artists will flood the walls of the former warehouse of Stutz Business Center in downtown Indianapolis. “We're bringing some new life into the space and transforming a room [by] bringing a lot of creativity to it on the walls, the floors and with the visual art itself,” Mali Simone Jeffers said. Ellen Neiers, Photo Provided](https://snworksceo.imgix.net/bsd/810a038d-ff60-476d-81ed-02bf65659621.sized-1000x1000.png?w=1000&ar=4%3A3&fit=crop&crop=faces&facepad=3&auto=format)
After a racially discriminative job listing for a new creative director for gallery exhibition “DRIP: Indy’s #BlackLivesMatter Street Mural” was posted last February, Mali Simone Jeffers and Alan Bacon decided to pull out of being guest curators for the exhibit.
When Erica Markley’s 9-year-old daughter was born, she knew she didn’t want to expose her child to harmful petroleum byproducts from store-brand soaps that could damage her sensitive skin.
Sunlight beams through the wide glass windows onto masked customers waiting to have their hair washed and styled at various hair salons in Muncie. Stylists, muffled by masks, talk with clients about families and long days at work while dryers blow and water pours into shampooing basins.
Born and raised in Detroit, the city where “everybody can sing,” Aaron Paige, Ball State assistant professor of music, said music has been a prominent part of his life for as long as he can remember.
On a Thursday night in June 2020, Mali Simone Jeffers, a 2004 Ball State alumna, and her partner, Alan Bacon, brainstormed ways to support artists and entrepreneurs who are “people of culture” in Indianapolis.
