Oscar Toloza
December 2025
Oscar Toloza (b. 1992, Reseda, CA) is a Salvadoran-American painter based in Indianapolis. Raised in Logansport, IN, his early passions for video games, music, and self-taught artistry eventually led him to fully commit to visual art in 2019.
Working across acrylics, oils, graphite, spray paint, and tattooing, Toloza’s work explores themes of perseverance, animal instincts, and humanity’s bond with nature. His style blends surreal dreamscapes with vivid color palettes.
Inspired by Eastern art and pre-Hispanic traditions, he creates a visual bridge between past and present, offering a space for those who navigate multiple cultures. This year, he has fused his love for art and music through live-painting performances at festivals like WAKAAN and DERPFEST. Oscar recently completed his apprenticeship with the Latino Artist Mentorship Program.
You can read more about Oscar here.
Machaili Gray
May 2025
Machaila Gray (b. 1998) is a multidisciplinary artist. She is a visual story-teller who channels feeling and imagination into vivid illustration and three-dimensional work. She attended Herron School of Art & Design and graduated in 2021. Through her journey as an artist, she continues to master intentionality with her work—using art not just as a means of escape, but a way to express what cannot be easily said.
Machaila Gray, better-known in the arts community as SegaJupiter. is self-taught and enjoys exploring new and different modes of creative expression that heightens her own experience and approach to her artistry. She has been showcased in various local art scenes in Indianapolis including Hoy Polloy Art Gallery, White Rabbit Cabaret, and State Street Pub. She was also an exhibiting artist for BUTTER 2024.
Angelita Hampton
July 2024
This month, the Gallery not only showcased a new series of brilliant political works but also started a new annual Indianapolis tradition: “Frida by Colors,” an annual exhibition by artists of color inspired by revolutionary Frida Kahlo! There was no one more fitting to launch this new series than local self-taught mixed media visual artist, art educator, and curator Angelita Hampton, who approaches her work as a creator and participant, allowing the process and experience to play a part in aesthetic generation, producing unexpected or accidental results that guide her in new, often non-traditional directions. She combines complex layers of vibrant color and texture with portraits that mimic the unfinished impressions of stamps and stencils. Her work can be seen like a worn or weathered painting on the rough landscape of walls.
Born on July 7, 1907, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a revolutionary artist and organizer. As an artist, she is particularly well-known for her portraits, self-portraits, and other works that were inspired by Mexican history, culture, politics, and social realities but were often accompanied by strong autobiographical elements. While the tradition of magical realism is evident in all of her work, later in life, Kahlo would categorize her work as “revolutionary realism,” as a contribution to advancing “the line set down by the Party.” Hampton, who spent years living in Mexico, speaks on her kinship with Frida:
“I have long since considered Frida Kahlo as my kindred spirit…I often romantically imagine that she was the me of another time and place. From her artistic aesthetics and personal style, to her love of her garden and beloved pets, to her political inclinations, the sense of kinship abounds. Quite notably we also share nearly a lifetime of chronic and debilitating pain. Both of us with lively and joyous spirits, I too, have struggled to find the energy and strength to create when my body is weak and failing me. I often think of her experience as motivation to push through and continue creating.”
India Hines and Dailyn Eades
June 2024
We were excited to host a collaboration between India Hines, a self-taught artist born in Denver and raised in Indianapolis, and abstract painter and art curator Dailyn “Dai” Eades that asked: “Do you feel what I feel?” The show was characterized by captivating colors and striking forms that hint at the rainbow flags waving in the air throughout our city each June. The rainbow flag continues to serve as a symbol of the LGBTQ community’s continued resilience and collective resistance.
Hines and Eades bring people from our fragmented communities together, emerging from a reflection on their own processes of healing to illuminate the infinite shapes that life takes and the possibility of using the creative capacities and outlets that already exist for us to produce a world that accommodates that variety.
From a young age, India has viewed art as a vital outlet for their thoughts and emotions, always dreaming of becoming a full-time artist. They primarily work with ink, watercolor, and occasionally, oil paints. Inspired by spirituality and the power of the subconscious mind, India employs intuitive strokes and lines to create figurative faces using organic shapes. Their work reflects a personal journey of growth and healing amidst societal pressures, celebrating resilience, identity, and love.
Dai uses a plethora of different textures and media, with acrylic assuming a primary position and without discounting the tools used. Rather, Dai values creating through trusting the process by allowing every color choice, brush stroke, and texture to speak for itself. They aim to create work that reflects the complex array of emotions they experience. Thus, for Dai, creating has been healing for her inner child and allowing herself to “just be” while not overthinking. She utilizes art as a coping skill to navigate the world around her.
Jacob Church
May 2024
An original exposition of a new collection of works by Jacob Church, the Gallery hosted the first of a two-part series, “Sunshine: Prologue.” The exhibit included paintings, drawings, and wearable pieces by the self-taught visual artist and designer. While his artwork addresses a range of topics, Church uses the social and physical surrounding environment to transform his hometown of Richmond, Indiana into a bustling site of color at his annual art festival at a gallery just outside the town.
Church’s art challenges us to overcome the alienating conditions of our society that divide and atomize us in myriad ways. By doing so, it can help change our perception that our battles for survival are individual ones into the reality that they are collective ones and that, by creating unity, we can overcome any obstacle that stands in the way of piece or blocks our sunshine.
Church’s work organically connects to the Indianapolis Liberation Center, which serves as a community collective to bring together our different struggles and eliminate the brutal conditions of exploitation and oppression.
This was the first time the Gallery hosted a closing reception as well.
Charlotte L. Brown Parrott
April 2024
On Friday, April 26, the Gallery held the opening reception of “Whispers of Change” by artist 31 Woman, also known as Charlotte L. Brown Parrott. This show by the award-winning activist, author, and digital artist resonated with the words of the great African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral:
“The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation on the ideological or idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history and a determinant of history.”
31 Woman uses contemporary determinations of history, most notably “artificial intelligence,” to help determine the course of history. More specifically, “Whispers of Change” uses AI to produce an immersive environment that sounds out the silent power of art to communicate meaning and inspire transformation.
“Whispers of Change” is not just an exhibition; it’s a movement utilizing art and technology to foster conversations that matter, connecting us deeper with the world and each other. Portions of proceeds will benefit her program, “Me Too Chronicles.” It was another reminder that, at the Fonseca-Du Bois Gallery, art serves as a powerful weapon in the hands of the masses as we struggle for freedom.
GANGGANG
March 2024
The Gallery showed GANGGANG’s “Perceptions,” interactive art exhibition centering the lives and experiences of five formerly-incarcerated Hoosiers.
Featuring photography and charcoal illustrations, “Perceptions” humanizes the journeys of these five previously incarcerated people who focus on themes of identity, grief, overcoming and adaptation to a new normal. This exhibition will showcase the photography of Jay Goldz and hyper-realistic drawings by William Minion, while including voices of our five storytellers through audio voice-over to deliver their messages.
In partnership with the Marion County Re-entry Coalition (MCRC), GANGGANG connected with these five storytellers to create a platform them to share their reality. The coalition identified and helped steward these storytellers and creatively worked with them and GANGGANG to produce the show.
Among the featured speakers during the opening was Vernon T. Bateman, who gave a brief and remarkably powerful speech. Learn more about Vernon here.
Fonseca-Du Bois Gallery
February 2024
We can trace the origins of the Fonseca-Du Bois Gallery back to Friday, February 2, 2024, with the opening of “Paint it Black.” That day, we unveiled a mural of Shirley Graham Du Bois that was collectively painted under the guidance of Edith Conchas.
he mural represents the legacy on which the Liberation Center stands and provides a new revolutionary energy to the space.
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an artist, intellectual, and organizer in her own right. Her bravery encourages us in our struggle. She never cowered in the face of state repression. Her commitment to liberation, peace, freedom, and fighting anti-communism was such a threat to the ruling class that the U.S. government surveilled her constantly and even withheld her passport for years. That same commitment is why she inspires us to be as brave and fearless as she was.
Accompanying the mural were a series of prints produced by Gallery Coordinators and Volunteers honoring some of the many unsung Black revolutionaries in U.S. history.
Artists Against Apartheid
January 2024
A few months after the most recent heroic Palestinian uprising, we hosted Artists Against Apartheid, a network of over 15,000 artists and cultural workers dedicated to using their practices to build the movement for the liberation of Palestine. They are musicians, writers, poets, actors, filmmakers, painters, dancers, chefs, sculptors, directors, and more—and know that all artists have a responsibility to build a better world.
They take up the legacy of “Art Against Apartheid, a multinational collective of artists fighting apartheid in South Africa and supporting the resistance that eventually overthrew the apartheid system—a resistance that, at the time, the U.S. labeled as ‘terrorists.’”
Each work in our exhibition speaks in its own way to the power of art to transform our sense of the present world and possible worlds, the horrors of Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism, the joy of resistance and the beauty of the coming victory. They present a horizon that lets us imagine what true liberation and democracy look like not just in Palestine, but here in Indianapolis.
Alejandra Carrillo
December 2023
In December 2023, we featured the work of artist and activist Alejandra Carrillo, titled. “The Struggle for Indigenous Liberation.” Carrillo’s work was recently featured at the Eiteljorg Museum’s Día de Muertos festival and the Mexican Consulate in Indianapolis.
A graduate of the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University Indianapolis, Carrillo’s artwork centers on the plight of indigenous women striking back at a system designed to hold them at the bottom of society or even out of sight. Carrillo boldly brings to the fore the struggles of indigenous women not simply as colonized subjects, but as strong and instrumental leaders of our collective liberation against capitalism and white supremacy.
The exhibition was accompanied by a panel with non-alcoholic drinks, wine, and beer available for donations. Those in attendance heard from Carrillo about both the works and the larger, real-life meanings behind them.