KAILA AUSTIN
INDIANAPOLIS, 2024 - 2025
Kaila Austin is a social practice artist, working to enliven community history through the public arts and archival practices. She attended Indiana University, a triple major in Art History, African American African Diaspora Studies and Painting. In 2016, she was named a top emerging museum professional through the Association of African American Museums for her work in exhibit interpretation and design. She currently works for the organization as a Mellon Fellow creating new Paths to Accreditation for African American Museums.
Since 2019, she has run Rogue Preservation Services, LLC, a historic consulting organization that allows her to work with historically African American communities, using the arts to mobilize their histories to save their ancestral spaces. Currently, her organization is assisting six US Colored Troop Veteran founded, Reconstruction era neighborhoods in Southeast Indianapolis to protect and sustain their communities as they face disruption from the Community Justice Campus, a 140 acre, $1 billion jail complex established in 2022. Because of her work at the intersections of heritage preservation, the public arts and community advocacy, she was named Artist-Activist of the Year by the Arts Council of Indianapolis.
COMMUNITY PROJECT
For three years, artist and historian Kaila Austin has been working with the descendants of the United States Colored Troops in the Southeast Quadrant of Indianapolis. During her time with Artist at Work, Austin will utilize the Southside USCT Coalition as a catalyst to create art and nature-based programming for a site honoring the late Harlem Renaissance painter, John Wesley Hardrick. The site acts as a unique opportunity to tell the story of the community’s past and create new dreams for the future of Black descendants in Indianapolis.
ORGANIZATIONAL PARTNER
The Southside US Colored Troops Coalition is founded and maintained by the descendants of African American Civil War Veterans who founded six Reconstruction era communities in Southeast Indianapolis: Norwood, Barrington, Hosbrook, Babe Denny, Bean Creek and Zuniville. Over 200 descendant families have been identified in the Southeast quadrant, many of them still living on the lots their ancestors purchased over 150 years ago, making them some of the oldest African American communities in the United States. Because of the stability of these communities, many descendant families have archival documents dating back to 1839 that allow them to prove the legitimacy of their communities and push back against the urban development that is threatening to push them from their ancestral homes.