For 25 years, Ben Nicholson filled a single sketchbook with hand-drawn investigations into geometry hidden inside Pythagorean mathematics, medieval labyrinths, Islamic calligraphy, the Hebrew alphabet, and Dante's Divine Comedy — and Ex Materia Ex Nihilo brings this work before the public for the first time, alongside a second body of work: wooden Kufic labyrinth cubes that hold sketchbook pages and anchoring artifacts at the gallery's center, enlarged pages on the south wall for immersive close viewing, and 200 hand-drawn labyrinth variations spanning the east, west, and north walls — a taxonomy of one of architecture's most ancient and persistent forms, where somewhere between a fava bean and the name of God, number becomes meaning.

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Justin Cooper is an Indianapolis native who has worked as an artist for over 25 years. For CAMi, he presents Yard Works: Geometric Botanical Studies, continuing a series begun in 2019 that translates the plants, flowers, and wildlife of his Garfield Park backyard into geometric form, now expanded to include houseplants and native Indiana wildflowers. Drawing on his interest in nature's underlying patterns and an isometric approach that lets forms read as both concave and convex, Cooper renders individual flowers as digital shapes, then reassembles them into multi-panel compositions tracing the rhythm of successive growing seasons. Each design is burned into birch wood panels, then built up in layers of translucent oil glaze that let light strike the luminous grain beneath and bounce back to the viewer — an effect recalling stained glass and wood inlay, and reflecting both the vibrancy of the living flowers and the human distortion of the natural world.

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Indianapolis artists Andre Parnell, Ash Robinson, Bryn Jackson, and Mariah Ivey spent the past year embedded with four local community partners — Arts for Lawrence, Little Red Door, CAMi, and the Center for Black Literature and Culture at the Indianapolis Central Public Library — bringing their individual skills and creative thinking to bear on artistic civic engagement projects through Artists At Work (AAW), a national program that has employed 98 artists and culture workers across 12 states since 2020 in partnership with over 100 cultural and community organizations, on the belief that artists' ability to thrive creatively and financially is central to the civic and cultural well-being of the places they call home. This exhibition offers a look into each artist's practice as it has evolved over the course of the program.

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Ivelisse Jiménez’s practice presents visual propositions concerning the construction of meaning in dialogue with the inhabited space. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Puerto Rico, including Prague Art Biennale, Ecuador’s Cuenca Biennale, and  Special Project Rooms at ARCO Madrid. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors grant, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant, and Venice Italy Arte Laguna 1st Prize in Painting. Her work is part of collections at Museo del Barrio NY, Bronx Museum NY, Museo de Arte de PR, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de PR, CAB de Burgos, Spain, among others. Jiménez holds a BA in Humanities from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras and an MFA from New York University. After living and working in New York for twenty years, she now has her residency and studio in Puerto Rico.

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Indianapolis-based Cory Robinson builds on his CODEX series that employs a system of form typologies in varying combinations to generate unique compositions in both two- and three-dimensional works. Kept Secrets: Open Code uses this preordained design language to explore layered personal histories through recontextualized objects. The gallery is organized around three distinct spatial environments: the Church, the Court, and the Garten.

Made possible by the Efroymson Family Fund

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Borrowing its text from assorted excerpts from the Mark Fisher-edited essay collection The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson (2009), Untitled (m.j. the symptom) examines the King of Pop as a complex set of contradictory signifiers, a funhouse reflection that is as distinct, spectacular, and compromised as the culture that produced him. So say Kraftwerk in their haunting 1977 song “Hall of Mirrors”: “Even the greatest stars / find themselves in the looking glass.”

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If someone loves contemporary art enough to help create CAMi, what kind of work do they surround themselves with? To find out, curator Shauta Marsh visited the homes of several donors and asked to borrow these works to share. This gallery features pieces from the collections of Jeremy Efroymson; Howard Schrott and Diana Mutz; Joanna Nixon; Diane and George Seybert; Charlie and Peggy Sutphin; and a couple who wish to remain anonymous.

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More than 20 architects, designers, and other experts in the built environment suggested their favorite buildings in Indianapolis that we then paired with Indianapolis-based artists. The artists then played some aspect or aspects of the buildings as sort of instruments to create a part of a combined soundscape or a sort of song.

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Every city has an official version of itself. Indianapolis has the Indianapolis Motor Speedway — monument, mythology, Greatest Spectacle in Racing.

This is not that. The Speedway’s Attic is unofficial. It is unsanctioned. The stories here are hard to believe. But believe them. They are true, all of them.

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For their first collaboration, Jess Dunn and Sylvia Thomas were prompted to create a piece focusing on the new renovation for the Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi) campus. In an attempt to interpret history and the building itself, the artists combined their backgrounds in animation and music composition to create an experimental documentary. Through exploring archives, primary source documents, and artifacts found inside the building, the artists learned this site took on many forms: from the land of the indigenous peoples who first inhabited it, to farmland, to various industrial developments, and now its current state as a premier contemporary arts complex.

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Born in Indianapolis, Mae Alice Engron (1942–2007) was a pioneering Black abstract expressionist. A Herron School of Art alumna, she turned to painting at age 40 after a workplace injury. Known for her "controlled drip" technique using poured ink and oil, she blended organic forms with vibrant Neo-Expressionism.

Engron broke barriers for Black women in pure abstraction, exhibiting alongside icons like Robert Indiana and Alma Thomas. Her work was featured in groundbreaking shows from Indianapolis to Los Angeles, cementing her legacy as a seminal visionary. Today, her paintings are held by the Smithsonian and the Indiana State Museum.

This exhibit features lesser known works purchased in the last two years at auction and is in partnership with Engron’s daughter, Michelle Daniels.

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Eighteen artists whose work explores Indianapolis and Indiana as intersections of place, culture, and identity. Through their work curator India Hines highlights the complex dimensions of life here through artists’ relations to local histories, community spaces, inner landscapes, and the city’s influence on their lived experiences.

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French Surrealist Félix Labisse created something strange starting in the 1960s: a universe where women pilot impossible machines through realms that don't follow normal physics. His iconic blue women — the "Selenides" — are warrior goddesses. And they're navigating more than space. They move through desire, mythology, and what might be parallel dimensions of time.

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Inner Voice Transplant explores the links between subjects as disparate as ancient Egyptian practices of dream interpretation; jiāngshī (Chinese hopping vampires); and the first voice-box transplant, which took place at the Cleveland Clinic in 1998.

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