A couple months ago, I got invited to help put on an experiment in collective art-making. I was working with two smart, creative thinkers here on the IU campus. Carmel Curtis is the interim director of the IU Moving Image Archive – she initiated the project. And Linda Tien is the director of the Grunwald Gallery at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture, and Design. We invited people to the Grunwald to make film strips without cameras—which is to say, we had strips of blank film that they could draw on. While they were making their art, I interviewed three people—Amy Oelsner, Stephanie Littell, and Ileana Haberman—about times in their lives when they resisted the status quo. These weren’t big, public shows of resistance, but changes in their own lives. After the conversations and the film-drawing, Carmel and her team of film archivists spliced the film together and we all watched the abstract film everyone had made. In today’s episode, I’m sharing the interviews. If you want to see the film, you can watch it here.

And I have an announcement: Here at WFIU, we are hard at work on a new project that will keep up the longform conversations with artists and thinkers that you love on Inner States. But will also do more reporting on what’s going on in the arts here in Southern Indiana. That means this podcast feed’s going to go quiet for a while. But don’t unsubscribe! We’ll announce the new project here in a few months. And I’m hoping to get at least one more Inner States episode out to you in the meantime.