Indiana

Bloomington Speaker 1:
I think Indiana is one of those places that people forget about. They forget it’s on the map and they’re like, “Where is it? Oh, below Michigan. Is that where it is?”

Bloomington Speaker 2:
Well, and not being from Indiana, I definitely didn’t ever consider Indiana part of the Midwest, and it tuns out that Indiana is pretty much the heartland of the Midwest.

Bloomington Speaker 1:
We love it here.

Bloomington Speaker 2:
Yeah, Bloomington is full of creative energy. There’s tons of young entrepreneurs. A lot of our friends have started businesses around the same time that we did.

Bloomington Speaker 1:
I think there’s like, Bloomington has this great mix of – it’s very productive but it’s also really fun. It’s a great place to go waterskiing, fishing.

Bloomington Speaker 2:
Fishing.

Bloomington Speaker 1:
Fishing?

Bloomington Speaker 2:
Bass’in.

Bloomington Speaker 1:
Bass’in.

Both Bloomington speakers:
Yep.

Bloomington Speaker 2:
Any direction you go, 10 minutes out of town and you’re in either the water or the woods. There’s a great motorcycle community. Like, everybody’s on their motorcycles.

Bloomington Speaker 1:
There’s a moped club. They’re adorable. Here in Bloomington, the bike culture is really special. Every spring, we have the Little 500 and it’s a highly competitive, really cool race. And there’s a party all around campus and all around the actual race itself. And then in the fall, we have the Hilly Hundred, which is more of like a road bike in the country type of thing.

Indiana University brings in a really diverse group of international students. And, we actually have a really large population of Tibetan monks, the largest outside of Tibet. So that’s cool.

And then back in downtown Bloomington, there are so many things to do. There’s cute shops, there’s great restaurants. Specifically, there’s Hopscotch Coffee that’s two blocks from the square. And then there’s the Uptown that’s just right there. They have great cocktails as well.

Bloomington Speaker 2:
There’s Fourth Street, which has all the international restaurants.

Bloomington Speaker 1:
I would say one really classic institution of Bloomington is Nick’s English Hut. It just has a certain charm. People who went to college here 60 years ago, they come back, they go to Nick’s.

Bloomington Speaker 2:
And then there’s the music scene. There’s several venues in town and there’s live music all year.

Bloomington Speaker 1:
And then in addition to that, there’s the Jacobs School of Music, which, you know, is just down the street on campus. Oh, if you hit karaoke on a night when music students are there, it’s like the best show you can get in Bloomington.

Bloomington Speaker 2:
It’s insane.

And there’s several festivals that happen throughout the year.

Bloomington Speaker 1:
The Granfalloon is a celebration of Kurt Vonnegut, who is from Indianapolis. And every year, we have a celebration and there’s a concert that happens and it happens to be this evening.

Bloomington Speaker 2:
And then there’s the record label in town.

Bloomington Speaker 1:
They’re truly like this international gift and they’re whole reason why we’re getting live music all year-round.

Bloomington Speaker 2:
Secretly is not only involved in the music side but works really hard to make art really accessible for people. I mean, I feel like Bloomington, my stress level is less here. And in such a beautiful place that’s unexpected and it seems like a little secret.

Indianapolis Speaker:
When you think about Indianapolis, then you think about vibrancy, you think about art, you think about people, you think about our downtown, you think about sports. We’ve got a rich sports history. Sports are our thing. But what you might not know is that Indianapolis has an artistic legacy, which is why I’m here.

For a while, it seemed like we were giving much of our attention to fine visual artists. So, think painting and sculpting. There’s this whole other scene that hadn’t been given that much attention to, and I thought, “Molly, you’re in Indianapolis. If there’s a place where you can start that or do that, it’s here.”

That’s Anne Dancing by Julene Opie. I got to help put her there.

Here in Indianapolis, we have this very rich and deep music history and jazz history where Duke Ellington got his start, Wes Montgomery got his start, Madam Walker built her theater. She was the first female self-made millionaire in our country. Had her theater built in Indianapolis and was kind of the Rockefeller and the support system for many of our jazz musicians, many artists and many businesses on Indiana Avenue. So, it’s kind of like we’ve circled back and said: “Oh my gosh, duh, why are we not celebrating performing artists? Why are we not engaging hip-hop artists and dancers and elevating them to the place that we’ve done for our visual artists?”

We have our big institutions here in Indianapolis. We have the ISO, our symphonic orchestra; the Children's Museum, which is the biggest in the world. We also have these kind of collective and art incubation spaces and then gallery spaces as well.

We have Deckademic’s here, which is Indianapolis' first and only DJ school. I was actually in a DJ battle and I won one of the rounds. I was really proud – one round. I got kicked out after that.

We are second in the country in our number of public art memorials. You have to go by Monument Circle. There's this massive 280-foot soldiers and sailors monument. It’s kind of the epicenter of our city – best place to have lunch in the summer, right on the steps of the monument. And then we have our murals like the Mari Evans mural, the Kurt Vonnegut mural, the jazz musicians’ mural that points to Indiana Avenue.

So, music-wise, you can kind of find anything that you’d like here. We’ve got the old-school jazz clubs like AJ's and the Chatterbox. But then there's kind of this new music scene happening in Fountain Square that Hi-Fi's really leading the charge on. Hi-Fi is this really nice but also somehow gritty space and always consistently amazing bands.

I love our spoken word scene here. We have some of the most amazing and prolific spoken word artists. And you also have your coffee shops, like there's always writers and artists around, and there might even be a poetry pop-up in one of those.

Then there’s the foodie scene. Restaurant-wise, we are blowing up right now. Beholder is killing it. Milktooth is amazing. Turchetti’s just opened and I'm really excited to try it; it’s a sandwich shop. So, we've got the food scene on lock.

Indianapolis feels very eager. It feels like we want ideas, it feels like we're very welcoming of all types of people and all types of perspectives. You can have a conversation with anybody you'd like to here. We stay true to our core and tell that story in a very surprising and artistic way. Art kind of sparks emotion between humans. It’s the universal language, right? It's like love, whether it's through song or whether it's through a painting. And what would life be like without that? We've got this kind of sports thing covered and it's amazing, but if people could think about Indiana and think about Indianapolis and know it is one that's rich in history and arts and storytelling, then there's just much more to discover.