We recently connected with Malina Simone Bacon and have shared our conversation below.

Malina Simone, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I graduated from Ball State in 2004. I was pretty sure I was going to move away from Indiana. My friends were moving. Temara was probably going to New York to be an artist. Staci was going to New York or Austin to be in the entertainment industry. Kisha was probably going to Chicago to be in the arts and entertainment industry. Everyone was going to what seemed like a bigger city to do the things that Indiana didn’t provide. I can’t be an artist in Indy, they talked about. I can’t be a model, I can’t act, there’s nothing here for me as a creative.

This was 2004 and my thought process was a bit different. I wanted to go to a new city because it sounded exciting and I wanted my career to be awesome and bright, too. I wanted to not be afraid to leave and be sure about my path but I had a tugging suspicion I couldn’t get rid of. If all of my friends in the creative field are moving to the cities that have more support for that, they’re all going to be competing with themselves and the other people from every other city going to the same place. They’re all small fish in these huge ponds. Why don’t I create here what they’re looking for there? Isn’t there more of an opportunity to be a big fish? Or to create the pond?

That sounds like foresight but at 22 I had absolutely no clue what that meant I should do. So I did two things. I worked in radio and I started organizing my own activities for other people who were creative and decided to stay in Indy.

I co-organized a series of open mics in the heart of Broad Ripple that outgrew a Starbucks. We had the largest clean open mic at the Indianapolis Convention Center. I was charging for arts programming all around the city and bringing hundreds of people together. Taking donations or charging at the door to give that money to the artists and hosts. Still shy, still unsure, but testing thoughts and ideas in real time. Responding to the needs of my community right away.

So that was happening as my side job and personal arts hustle for years. Doing whatever I thought of and wanted to do and could do with my spare time and spare money outside of work.

I landed a job at Emmis in downtown Indianapolis in radio sales. My job was to look in the phone book for people who might be interested in advertising on the radio and to call them and ask them that question. I also had to file invoices and sales reports in giant cabinets – those existed in the early 2000’s. (Paper existed. In giant cabinets with drawers. And that’s how people kept records).

But sometimes I would get lost on the wrong floor and end up in production. I’d see people on air and people reading scripts and their floor had nothing to do with sales. They were just being creative. So I accidentally spent more time up there. They let me write scripts! They let me on air! I got to read commercials and I got to coordinate concerts. So in the marketing and promotions department, I had a decent time, it was fun but it didn’t feel like we were changing the world. And in the sales department, I’d escape the ferociousness of some of the sales leaders. I hated making cold calls. I couldn’t make any more cold calls. I didn’t know why we were begging people to buy radio ads. What is the ultimate purpose of this? What impact are these radio sales making to communities of artists on the ground?

I learned everything at the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the next role I’d find. Everything about what “the arts” mean in terms of how a city works. It was very interesting to take my studying in advertising to a company that does advertising and then to a nonprofit who doesn’t consider advertising but is responsible for a lot. At the arts council I learned who cities call artists. I learned which arts organizations they deem are important and worthy of a lot of money and which organizations they deem grassroots and need a different type of support. I learned about grants and funding and the layers of hierarchy within the arts sector and where the government comes into play with their little bit of funding.

I got to work on public art installations. Significant public artworks like Ann Dancing on Mass Ave, Tom Otterness’ pieces at the Convention Center and temporary pieces that would appear and challenge the city’s intellect.

I identified that my career lanes were civic pride, arts and culture and conversations about race. I was intrigued that race, diversity, this inclusion topic was a through line between all of the jobs I’d had. It was something people were trying to figure out everywhere – diversity, equity and inclusion. Diversity as a topic in the workplace came about in the 60’s and the whole DEI thing – which is diversity, equity and inclusion as a movement toward those things racially – came upon all of us right around the time I graduated college. The early 2000’s. Right around the time cities wanted to draw people back downtown and save the urban core.

So professionally, the race topic was starting to get louder. About as loud as it was internally or personally. It got to the point as to where it was happening inside of me and outside of me just as much so I couldn’t not address it. It is happening to us. It is the lens from which I’m seeing a lot of life. I am an expert in nothing except curiosity about it and what it is and so here I am. A person interested in the arts and the power it holds to influence. A person who’s been hyper aware of her Blackness because of her contexts and is interested in the power it holds to influence. And a person who loves her city. My lanes are civic pride, arts and culture and conversations about race. And I get to wrap all of that up into marketing because they’re all stronger together. And it enhances one to talk about the other.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

It wasn’t until I began my career at the Arts Council of Indianapolis (former name), that I had a title for which to describe much of the work I’d been doing in, for and with my community. Early on, Dad called it “taking care of your neighborhood,” simply. We’d use music and paint to beautify our shared public spaces and we even created a pocket park to designate Watson-McCord as a place. After college, I naturally wanted to find ways to keep my friends paid and keep them in Indy. All my friends were artists so both of those were very hard to accomplish easily. Artists are what I know to be true. It’s how I’ve wanted to support those around me and how I’ve wanted to spend my time professionally. And, I’d learn to connect that it’s also everything people love about their favorite cities.

For a long time, I’ve focused pretty purely on improving my place – whether city, neighborhood or home – by way of the arts. In 2004, I organized literary arts programming that offered safe space and opportunity to artists, many of whom for the first time. Called The Sanctuary, and a smaller version in Broad Ripple called The Cypher, these early efforts let me experiment with the arts as a tool for inspiration and for individual viability. Later, my roles at the Arts Council let me learn the infrastructure, funding mechanisms and traditions of the arts sector in central Indiana. That time gave me the confidence and a breeding ground for my niche: equity in the arts industry. Since then, I’ve gone on to help many Indiana-based arts organizations with their efforts to include new audiences and gain new perspectives. My work even led me to the City of Indianapolis where I was engaged to study and report the arts’ role in population growth for Indianapolis for our bicentennial year in 2020.

Fall 2020, I co-founded GANGGANG with my husband Alan who comes from a largely celebrated family of musicians. GANGGANG is a creative advocacy firm working to center beauty, equity and culture in cities by activating the creative economy. For nearly 4 years, we’ve advocated for the worth of artists and brokered unprecedented investment into the arts sector in our city. Indiana is now receiving positive arts press from global publications. We are tracking data with Visit Indy and are proving our mission that an emphasis on the arts does make a city more beautiful, cultural and equitable.

I have dedicated my career to finding meaningful and just opportunities for artists in all spaces, across all disciplines and regardless of anything.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

The biggest thing society can do to support artists is to recognize them as heroes to society itself. We are not ourselves without the arts. We are less able to heal, be inspired, to commune or celebrate. We use the arts to enhance our every minute and we must acknowledge the significance of that role. Cities need the arts to be vibrant, therefore it’s our responsibility to create to a new narrative that works to sustain the artist. America’s mantra that the artist should starve is an offensive contradiction to their value.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn race.

Getting into DEI requires hearing a fundamental truth – that racial hierarchy is not only a construct but was constructed. Creating race-based human enslavement was a grand mistake by people trying to improve their place, their city, their nation. Someone had the thought, I need the mind, skill and bodies of THESE people but in order to get that, I need to trick them – and everyone hereafter – into thinking that they are less valuable than all others. I need for myself to think that and then I’m going to convince others that THESE people were actually even made for cruel treatment.

The idea worked so well that even after enslavement worked, his idea is still blinding us today. Right here, in this room, we’re living within that terrible, painful idea to say that Africans specifically would be the least among these.

Mankind created a massive manipulation system that allowed for mental and physical enslavement based on race, and America wouldn’t exist without that. We are a mere 140 years after the end of that physical enslavement. And we’ve created an environment in which we don’t talk or learn about the beginning of it. Or before it. No one wanted us to know then, and probably not now. When I take a step back at this massive production, I have to wonder – was there not an out? An escape plan? Is no one investigating the origins of this racist behavior so that we might find a proper solution?

My young and early wisdom are so new that I’m reminded of Frederick Douglas’ reference to how young the United States are.
“America is a speck of time, compared to great nations,” he said. “We have an opportunity to hope for a nation that greatly needs it”, he said. America is young. America, as a country, our country, is still in its impressionable stage, says the author. America founded itself recently, much like I founded my startup recently, and it’s not even 250 years old. When you look up the oldest countries in the world, we’re not on the top 10 list. Nor are we on the top 25 list. This is incredibly fascinating to me. We are a baby nation!

Throughout time, the world has seen many “nations.” Nations can be countries, they are large groups of people that create ways of life and traditions in a geographic place. When Africans landed in ships here in Virginia, the ones that were alive were described as a nation of artists. The enormous tribes that existed and built empires and castles and cathedrals, those were great nations that made a way of life over thousands of years. Our country, America the Beautiful, is only 248 years old.
The thought of being a toddler country means 1) we want to have fun and 2) we are at the end of the “founding fathers” initial concept of how this country should be run. That means that the society they constructed very intricately, painfully and purposely, is still what we’re practicing and living within, right now. It’s what we can all feel breaking.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ganggangculture.com
• Instagram: @malinasimone @ganggangculture
• Facebook: GANGGANG Culture
• Linkedin: GANGGANG Culture
• Twitter: @ganggangculture
• Youtube: GANGGANGculture
• Other: https://malinasimone.com

Image Credits

Polina Osherov for GANGGANG