"I think it adds to the pedestrian experience and adds to the character of a neighborhood." That is what one recent transplant to the area told a TV reporter last November, standing at the corner of College Avenue and Westfield Boulevard, looking up at a thirty-foot LED skeleton of steel and scrap metal that half the neighborhood was calling a masterpiece and the other half was calling Slenderman.
The sculpture is named Gavin-Divergence. It has been standing at that corner for close to a year now, and if you live in Broad Ripple you have an opinion about it whether you asked for one or not. Meanwhile, a public art planning process is unfolding a few blocks away, where residents can help shape what comes next.
How Gavin-Divergence Came Together
J. Taggart Birge, co-founder of the real estate firm Birge & Held and head of the Birge Family Foundation, privately funded the entire installation. Indiana artist Jason Myers built it out of recycled scrap steel and standard building materials, and a public-private partnership between the Broad Ripple Village Association, the Indianapolis Art Center, and the Penrod Society handled the zoning, the permitting, and eventually the maintenance. The Indianapolis Art Center now owns the piece outright.
After the zoning hearing, Birge told reporters that an entire generation of Broad Ripple kids had grown up without seeing new investment in what he called the original arts and culture district, adding that Carmel had poured millions into public art while Broad Ripple sat neglected. He wasn't wrong about the neglect. But a single donor picking a corner and commissioning a piece is a different process than a neighborhood deciding what it wants, and the gap between those two things is exactly what happened next.
The Process That Came After
Five months after Gavin went up, the Broad Ripple Village Association and the Indy Arts Council announced something with a much less dramatic name: a Public Art Master Plan. Launched in April 2026, it is a community-driven effort to figure out where future public art should go, how it should get funded, and who gets to decide.
The planning boundary is bigger than most residents probably assume. It runs from Meridian Street to the White River, and from Kessler Boulevard north to Broad Ripple Park, which means this isn't just a conversation about the commercial strip along Broad Ripple Avenue. It covers a good chunk of the surrounding residential blocks too.
The outreach has been unusually thorough for a neighborhood planning effort. Organizers held two public meetings this year, on May 5 and July 7 at the Indianapolis Art Center, and beyond that they went to where people already were. Volunteers with the Penrod Society and staff from the Indy Arts Council set up at the Broad Ripple Farmers Market, at Third Thursdays, and at Sip & Stroll events, collecting input from residents who would never have shown up to a formal meeting. Add in twenty-five stakeholder interviews and roughly three hundred online survey responses, and this is a far wider net than the process that produced Gavin.
What The Survey Actually Found
Here is the part that should surprise anyone who followed the Gavin controversy on social media. Julia Muney Moore, the Indy Arts Council's director of public art, has said that the survey turned up a finding she didn't fully expect: most of Broad Ripple's existing public art is already in good or excellent shape. The neighborhood's reputation for neglected art turns out to rest on a small number of very visible problems, not a widespread pattern.
Two pieces in particular carry most of that reputation:
- Zero, a fourteen-foot kinetic metal sculpture by artist Anthony Howe installed near the Monon Trail and Westfield Boulevard in 2018, whose moving parts stopped moving years ago.
- Implication of Three, a twenty-foot ceramic-tile monolith by Tim Ryan installed on College Avenue north of 67th Street in 2006, meant as a visual gateway into the neighborhood and now missing enough tiles that neighbors commonly call it an eyesore.
Contrast those with Here Comes Everybody, Ryan's cluster of three tiled obelisks at the pedestrian entrance to the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired's campus along the Monon. That piece got quietly refreshed thanks to fundraising by a retired school horticulture instructor, and it is holding up fine. The lesson residents seem to have absorbed from watching these three pieces age differently: maintenance is not glamorous, but it is the difference between a landmark and an eyesore, and it doesn't have to come from a foundation. It can come from one person who cares enough to organize it.
That is reflected directly in what survey respondents said they want going forward. Restoring and maintaining what already exists ranked as one of the strongest priorities in the responses collected so far, ahead of splashy new commissions. And when residents were asked what kind of new art they'd actually want to see, the most popular answer wasn't another dramatic centerpiece like Gavin. It was art that functions as a gathering space, something you can sit on, lean against, or let your kids climb, alongside pieces that tell specific local stories: the White River, the Monon Trail, the neighborhood's music scene, its longtime local businesses.
What Happens Between Now And Thanksgiving
Broad Ripple was designated Indianapolis's first Cultural District, and that history is part of why this process has gotten more careful attention than a typical neighborhood plan. As of this fall, the effort is moving out of its listening phase and into drafting. A draft version of the Public Art Master Plan is expected to be released for public comment this fall, with the final plan targeted for completion by Thanksgiving 2026. Whatever gets commissioned first as a result of the plan is expected to break ground in 2027, not this year.
That leaves a real window for residents who haven't weighed in yet. Anyone with a strong opinion about where new art should go, or which of the neighborhood's tired pieces deserves fixing first, can still email [email protected], and updates on the draft comment period are being shared through the mailing list on the Broad Ripple Village Association's own planning page. If you missed the spring meetings and the survey window, the public comment period on the draft plan is your next chance to share your views directly with the planners.
None of this means the debate over Gavin is settled. Public art is supposed to generate an argument, and this one clearly did its job. But the neighborhood learned something from that argument that it's now trying to apply on purpose: whether the next piece feels like it belongs here depends less on who's paying for it and more on whether the people who walk past it every day had a say before it went in the ground.
That is a small, specific kind of civic maturity, and it says something about the neighborhood beyond what any single sculpture could. Broad Ripple isn't just accepting whatever shows up at a busy intersection anymore. It's building the process to decide for itself.
If you're watching how a neighborhood like Broad Ripple makes decisions about its own future and wondering what that means for your own plans here, Meridian x Main knows this corridor block by block. Schedule a consultation and let's talk about what's next.
