Storytelling Drawing

Storytelling Drawing is held weekly on Thursdays at 1:30 PM at the Polklore Micro-Museum, inside Polk Stables at 1533 Lewis St. in Indianapolis. It's a free session open to the public, so you can just drop in.

To get a sense of the place, you have to know what the Polklore Micro-Museum is. It's housed in the Cohatch Polk Stables co-working space and is dedicated to the history of the Martindale Brightwood neighborhood on Indianapolis's east side. The neighborhood was founded in 1872 as a working-class suburb, and the 1960s brought some heavy changes—most notably the 1959 interstate that cut right through it. The museum preserves that history through personal artifacts and augmented reality, and the storytelling drawing session fits right into that mix of local memory and making things by hand.

The project came together through the Harrison Center, a nonprofit arts organization that opened in 2000 and started working in the area around 2015 with its Greatriarchs program. The neighbors themselves chose which stories and artifacts to preserve, and then worked with a team of artists to collect oral histories, arrange the objects into an art installation, and build audio and video experiences powered by the Wintor augmented reality app. The museum also houses studios for the center's resident artists and a recording studio, so there's a lot of creative work happening under one roof.

If you're around on a Thursday afternoon, it's a low-stakes way to spend a couple of hours. The session is free and open to anyone, and it runs weekly at 1:30 PM at the Polklore Micro-Museum, 1533 Lewis St.