Reimagining the Hardrick Home

I was born in a small neighborhood on the Southside of Indianapolis. It is where I live now, and where I will continue to live, in some form, for the rest of my life. At least, I know that my legacy will live here. 

If you know anything about our city, you know that Washington Street is something like the Mason-Dixon Line. It segregates Indianapolis across many lines at once: race, class, immigration, gender, sexuality. All of that. The South Side has long had a reputation of being a place where Black people, like me, had no place to belong. Recent research I have been working on has revealed that this common belief in our community is simply a myth. We helped to build the Southeast Side, and are now pushing to preserve our legacy here for generations to come.

I was born in Twin Aire, just half a mile north of the Norwood neighborhood where I now work. In the 60s, my mother’s family were poor, Irish coal miners, who migrated from West Virginia when the mines failed. In their search for new homes, they settled into a community that reflected the morals of the culture they came from, as people tend to do. 

Kaila Austin, “Aunt Lizzie Feared the Storm” (2022)

While the neighborhood was filled with the legacy of white supremacy, my mother went to Indianapolis Public Schools and spent most of her life in an integrated world. On the Southeast Side, my mother would have had friends, neighbors, and classmates from all over the world. However, that didn’t translate to the rest of our neighborhood, and as a result, my world was very small. My community made it clear in words and actions that they could not see humanity in my older brother and I. 

I spent a lot of time on our porch, learning to watch people and sit quietly, not willing to risk the unpredictable world that came outside. By elementary school, my treatment became so harsh that the administration decided that I would no longer attend recess with my peers. Instead, I was sent to sit in the art room and draw. After that, I never stopped drawing. My sketchbook and I became inseparable; it was how I translated both my internal self and a world that I felt I had no place in. Now I am a portrait painter, creating classical history paintings that place Black people in a space and a time, and telling our stories as something significant: a need unmet in my day-to-day life. 

When I moved back to Twin Aire in 2019, I wept for days, never really seeing how I could fit into this space again. What I failed to take into account, however, was that I am now an adult, and I can shape the world that I want to see. And so, after a decade of working in museums, I decided to just go back to painting. Back in my home again, I needed the arts more than ever. I needed to draw again. 

I got commissioned for a project that allowed me to merge painting with the work I do in museums and archives. The goal of the project was to record the stories of twelve grassroots leaders in the five communities that make up my neighborhood, and to paint their portraits, as part of a public, digital archive called the Memory Keepers. I learned more about my community in the last year than I ever thought there was to know, and more than our city ever expected.

The work being done by my team in Indianapolis to revive the history of the US Colored Troops in the Southeast quadrant has had a ripple effect on how heritage preservation is approached in poor, Black and Brown Communities around the city. Norwood, a small African-American community less than half a mile from where I was born, has shocked the city with its ability to be simultaneously remembered and forgotten. 

Kaila Austin

Where is Norwood?
Located at the intersection of the Big Four Railroads, Norwood is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, and has more than 30 descendant families of the US Colored Troops (USCT) still living in the original lots their ancestors purchased over a century ago. Because of their stability in this area, these families all have archives that date back to Emancipation. These archives have allowed my team to help reveal the story of Norwood’s ancestors back to the Kentucky Plantations they left to fight for the Union Army: the stories of a Free Black City, established in 1872 just outside of the limits of Indianapolis. 

In spite of this long standing and impactful story, there are no stories of Norwood in our archives, no tales of the valiant USCT told to our children as bedtime stories, no myths of triumph over unimaginable circumstances. Even families have forgotten their heritage, writing off the memories of their elders as the mistakes of a faulty mind, and tossing away the photos, bibles and diaries that tether them to the past. A past they rightfully fought for during the Civil War, and a past their descendants continue to fight for now. 

In January 2022, the City of Indianapolis opened the Community Justice Campus, a 140 acre, $675 million jail complex on the Northern boundary of this community. In March 2022, the community was informed that a new Coroner’s facility would be placed on the home of John Wesley Hardrick, Indiana’s first African American painter, born in Norwood in 1891. 

But by mobilizing the history of their incredible community and this iconic painter, Norwood was able to push the Coroner's facility outside of their boundaries. And in collaboration with the City, the Hardrick Home will be donated for reuse, as determined by descendants of the USCT in Norwood——a monumental win for Indianapolis.

Who was John Hardrick, anyway? 
John Wesley Hardrick was born in Norwood in 1891. Thanks to Ms. Ada Harris, the principal of Norwood Colored School No. 5, starting in preschool, Hardrick was in an arts-based school. By six years old, he had an affinity for watercolors, and by 11, he had won an award from the Negro Business League and was displayed here in Indianapolis. Early on, Hardrick gained the patronage of several prominent artists and entrepreneurs. He trained under Otto Stark at Manual High School and became the first African American to enter the John Herron School of Art and Design. Some of Hardrick’s major patrons were Madame CJ Walker and the Carl Lieber family. 

Walker and the Liebers paid for Hardrick’s attendance at Herron, where he was the protege of the “Hoosier Group,” which included his teacher Otto Stark, TC Steele, and William Forsyth. While finishing his degree, Hardrick married Georgia Howard and had three daughters. In 1917, he exhibited with William Edouard Smith (who went on to train under Henry Ossawa Tanner) in the Tenth Annual Exhibition of Indiana Artists at Herron. In 1924, Hardrick ended up sharing a studio with the prolific Hale Woodruff on 547 ½ on Indiana Ave. In 1927, he won Silver at the Harmon Foundation awards in Chicago for Little Brown Girl, which became the first piece by an African American artist in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

John Wesley Hardrick, “Little Brown Girl” (1927), IMA Collection

Despite the socio-political climate of the Klan in Indianapolis in the 20s, Hardrick continued to climb up the ranks of the Black art echelon during the peak of the Harlem Renaissance. In spite of the difficulty of raising children and balancing multiple jobs, he continued working to make a name for himself, and won the Hoosier Salon in 1929, 1931 and 1934, no small feat for an African American. In 1940, he was invited to be part of the World’s Fair, Negro Exposition, in Chicago. He seemed to be on an upward climb, until the death of his wife the following year. At that time, Hardrick moved back to Norwood with his four children, Rowena, Rachel, Georgia, and Raphael, who was only 11 at the time. He lived in his family home until his death in 1968, when the property was purchased by Citizens Energy Group.

The recovery of the massive 44-acre Hardrick Property for the benefit of the USCT descendant community is an incredible win for Black Indianapolis. The Norwood Project will give the community a space to organize their history and plan for the future. Thanks to the help of reporters Brandon Drenon and Domenica Bongiovanni at the IndyStar, our team has been able to locate the descendants of the Hardrick family, recovering a never-before-seen archive waiting for 100 years. The Norwood community has archives that have never been seen in 150 years. Now we have a physical place to tell these stories.

What can we imagine for our community, now that we have the space to dream? 

Kaila Austin, “Warseli Looks Forward” (2021)

Creating a Framework for Arts-Based Heritage Preservation
There are a number of things I’ve learned over the last year that have helped me understand creative placemaking’s role in heritage preservation. In order for the projects in Norwood to work with no archival record to support our knowledge, we had to be creative in finding ways to establish the history as significant. But before you can get started with any of that big work, you have to do the little work of figuring out who you are, what your needs are, and how that reflects your community on a larger level. Here are three steps to get you started. Keep in mind: it is a long journey. 

On learning about you: Start questioning yourself: where are you from? How did you get here? Where did your family come from? You’ve got to be able to look backwards and see how you got here before you ask anyone else how they got here. You’ve got to figure out your why before you start asking anyone else. People will notice if you haven’t dug deeper, and they will notice if they are being tricked. Be authentic. (But don’t think you have to have this 100% figured out when you get started. Part of the fun is learning about yourself along the way.)

I started this project as an exploration of myself within my community, of learning how to create the communities we’d like to live in. At the time, in the second year of the Pandemic, I just really wanted to feel connected to people again. As we all became vaccinated, I had the opportunity to sit down with people, to learn from them, and to start to see myself in this space differently. 

This brings us to our next point: start to think about where you want to be. What are you dreaming of? What do you want your legacy to be? What do you need to be the best version of yourself? For me, I wanted to be connected. I wanted to be welcomed into a community with open arms. And I found what I was looking for in a much larger way than I was expecting. 

Almost more important than looking inward is figuring out who the best people to surround yourself with are. Along this road to find something that I felt like was missing, I realized that the community that I was looking for was with me all along. I simply had to seek them out and ask for connection. Some questions to consider: Who can you lean into when you need it? Where do you go for silence, for fun, for collaboration, for rest? Who makes you feel, and how do they do it? Are these connections the ones that you need to grow in the way you’d like to? If not, how can you fill in those gaps? There are a lot of things that you can learn about yourself by looking at who you surround yourself with. 

Now that you’ve started looking inward, you can more accurately look back out into your community. 

On learning about your neighborhood: The first step to this is just making the time to get to know your community on a personal level. I have to admit that I got a door opened for me with the Memory Keepers project. I was given the phone numbers and placed right on the doorsteps of the most influential people in Southeast Indianapolis: grassroots leaders who had chosen to step up to protect their communities because there was a need, not because there was incentive. 

I found them all bold, inspiring people, with multifaceted lives that wove all of our histories together, creating a quilt work of stories. Only by listening to all these stories together could you get a full idea of what it means to live, work, and play here in your neighborhood. Go to neighborhood meetings, volunteer for clean ups, get good at footwork. Show up, and then show up some more. Let them know you mean it. Trust building is the most essential part of this. If you want someone to tell you their story, to be vulnerable, to make art, you must make them feel safe enough to do so. Be reliable. Look closely. Write things down. Remember to show up. Again, people always know if you are not being genuine, and they will respond accordingly. So go into things curious. 

Seriously. Be curious. Walk around your neighborhood. Or maybe someone else’s, just as a cross reference. Does anything look out of place? There may be more layers to the story of your community than you are thinking. Is there a Frederick Douglass Elementary in a neighborhood in a predominantly white community? Is there a Spanish Mass at an Irish Catholic Church? Is there one house at a weird angle down the street that has always caught your eye? Once you find something, start asking questions. Some people don’t like questions, but some people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked. 

When you go into these meetings, these churches, these old school houses, asking people to talk about their lives, go in there with the intention to LISTEN to your neighbors. Sometimes, don’t talk at all. Let them go. Listen, nod accordingly, and pay attention. They wouldn’t tell you if it didn’t mean anything. If you give them the space, you can learn a lot from the silences in between thoughts and words. The way that they fumble, or the quickness they speak with. All of this has meaning. 

On finding a good neighbor: The older, the better. Find someone who knows what they’re talking about but doesn’t talk too often. Find someone who makes the room quiet down when they begin to speak: those are powerful people. Find someone who is at the meetings. They are upset, but they still show up. (Their feelings, once you listen, are normally pretty justified.) Find someone who’s been here for longer than you can imagine. One hundred years is a long, long time. What was it about your community that made them stay? 

When you meet with them one-on-one, bring them a gift. Seriously! It doesn’t have to be big, just thoughtful. It also helps prove you’re listening. 

Stop, collaborate
Before you even get started, give up the idea that you could do this alone. It won’t work. The community as a whole must be in charge of these projects from the bottom up. They are the first and last line to all decisions that are made. So get good at saying what you mean and meaning what you say (or at least, admitting when you’re wrong and conceding gracefully, because this happens too.) For this to work, we have to figure out how to work together.

As the community gets on the same page, as a group there are many things you’ll have to figure out: what are your values? What values do you want to have in common with your collaborators? What do you want to be different? 

And then do the footwork, again. Find people doing the same work you are. Find people doing radically different work. Both are needed. Reach outside of your bubble. Go National. Go International. Join organizations, go to conferences, hop on Zoom. Do whatever you can to keep reaching outward, even when it feels hopeless (and it will). Find all the help that you can get, and don’t be afraid to ask over and over again. Persistence and longevity is the true mark of equity. You’ll be on this path for a while, but it will be well worth the end result.