Visit Still Crazy: Forty Years of the Crazy IN Style Artists on view in the Bachman Gallery, 1040 Ridge Rd, Munster, IN through November 14.
There are places where art is supposed to happen. Northwest Indiana is not widely considered to be one of those places. Here, the landscape has historically been more interested in steel than sculpture; mills coughing smoke into the sky; freight trains grinding through town. Rail corridors, viaducts, vacant lots, shuttered factories. And yet, in the borderlands of Chicago, young artists were watching as railcars hurtled though East Chicago and Hammond, emblazoned with colorful graffiti and bold tags. A crew of young Hispanic Hoosiers, CISA – Crazy IN Style 
Artists – took the letters, the scale, the attitude, the competition and ran them through the machinery of the Midwest, through their own lives, and the result was something distinctly their own.
CISA became a loose network of nearly a hundred (graffiti) writers pushing, competing, and improving upon their own ideas. The education was brutally efficient. Letters mattered; style mattered; as did showing up. If your work was lacking in style, somebody would tell you. If somebody else's work was better, you had to figure out why. The wall was the classroom. Your reputation was the résumé.
On abandoned walls and forgotten corners, murals began appearing where nothing was supposed to grow. Walls that had spent decades collecting grime, advertisements, and weather suddenly had color. A kid walking to school could encounter a giant piece of art without paying admission to a museum or knowing the name of the artist. A neighbor sitting on a stoop could see a mural and understand exactly who it was speaking to. No docent required; no audio guide; no gift shop, just a wall.
And that matters because CISA's work has never been simply decorative. Good public art doesn't lie about its neighborhood. CISA doesn't. There is hardship here. There is also absurdity. There is beauty, but not the postcard kind. There is pride without pretending everything is fine.
Deindustrialized Northwest Indiana has spent decades trying to figure out what it is about. CISA didn't wait around for somebody to write a new identity for the region. They picked up a can and found a wall.
Brandon Johnson
Exhibitions Manager
South Shore Arts' programs are provided with support from the Indiana Arts Commission, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
SOUTH SHORE ARTS AT THE CENTER FOR VISUAL & PERFORMING ARTS
1040 Ridge Road :: Munster, Indiana 46321 :: 219.836.1839