Project and Grant Title: HeART & Sole of DOWNTOWN BATESVILLE:

Promoting Livability and Connectivity amongst History, Heritage, and Arts

 

What is the National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Grant?  

“Our Town is the National Endowment for the Arts’ creative placemaking grants program. These grants support projects that integrate arts, culture, and design activities into efforts that strengthen communities by advancing local economic, physical, and/or social outcomes.

Successful Our Town projects ultimately lay the groundwork for systems changes that sustain the integration of arts, culture, and design into local strategies for strengthening communities. These projects require a partnership between a nonprofit organization and a local government entity, with one of the partners being a cultural organization." - Source: https://www.arts.gov/grants/our-town

Our Project Description:  HeART & Sole of Downtown Batesville

 

To support downtown revitalization and promote rural urbanization, we propose a living street project promoting and embracing our heritage while encouraging creativity and new ideas. The project converts an underutilized, utilitarian space into a vibrant pedestrian-oriented plaza that will spur and connect to continued downtown growth and development and attract younger generations to live in our community. Simple design features such as flush curbs, movable planters, catenary lighting combined with murals and public art installations transform this space into a walkable programmable event space while accommodating current day-to-day uses.

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PUBLIC ART SELECTION PROCESS:

A selection team made of 10 Batesville Community members put out a National Call for Artists on the website CaFE’  www.callforentry.org and with various other arts forums and groups .  We received over 165 proposals for the public art projects from both national and international  artists.  We narrowed it to a top 10 and interviewed ( via Zoom because of the Covid Pandemic) and chose Yulia Auvgustinovich from Colorado for one location and Andrea Grimsley and Chaz Kaiser, both Indiana artists, for the other.  Please find out more information below about the

specific projects and the artists.

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