Creative Risk Fund: What Remains

2025 Indianapolis Creative Risk Fund Recipients

A program of Herbert Simon Family Foundation, the Indianapolis Creative Risk Fund provides funding to individual artists, artist collectives, and collaborations of individual artists to take creative risks and pursue experimental projects.

Each of this year’s recipients situates themself in a unique personal and creative challenge, unearthing new ways to tell familiar stories, embracing vulnerability, critiquing the status quo, and undertaking risks that are both personal and political. They explore themes and experiences surrounding environmental sustainability, displacement, systemic racism, substance use disorder, disability, and anti-violence through fresh and innovative artmaking approaches, inviting audiences into a contemplative experience that both challenges and inspires.

The 2025 Indianapolis Creative Risk Fund recipients were selected by a panel of local artists, arts administrators, and past recipients. Each of these nine recipients received a grant of $20,000 to pursue their project.

Forward Motion is a contemporary chamber ensemble that performs music blending newly composed classical music styles with a pop-adjacent aesthetic. Their project What Remains is a multi-sensory performance experience that combines an original silent short film, produced by Katelyn Calhoun, with a live musical score staged at a drive-in theater. The film and score are a contemplative reminder that we are surrounded by wonders of the natural world, wonders worth exploring. Stunning visuals fused with adventurous music thread together a story of nature’s beauty and our place in it. The ensemble takes on several creative challenges through this project, including exchanging their usual improvisational approach for the structured and demanding process of composing alongside the creation of an original film, and staging the performance in a drive-in setting with technical and environmental complexities.