Lesley Weidenbener: ‘I’ve had to give up fear’

The Butter Fine Art Fair is underway this weekend at The Stutz. The annual event features artists of color from Indiana and beyond and has become a larger celebration that includes art, food and provocative conversation.

I love art and am a huge admirer of artists. For me, Butter is a special event. I’m headed back this year with my husband and four friends.

I’m also an admirer of people who have audacious ideas that they push into reality. So I was excited that Malina Simone Bacon, the co-founder of GangGang, the organization that created Butter, agreed to be the keynote speaker at an Aug. 12 event celebrating IBJ’s fifth annual 20 in their Twenties class. (Watch at IBJ.com/videos.)

Her message to these upcoming leaders was so important: Give up fear.

“To do leadership from a position of vulnerability and compassion—and to do it over and over, when it’s cool and when it’s not, when there’s funding and not, when it’s dangerous and not—I’ve had to give up fear,” she told the group.

“And I’m inviting you to try the same. Fear is tiring, it’s draining, it’s expensive, it’s a barrier to creativity, and it hinders the connecting of people. Yes, fear can also act as a guide, a vehicle even for honoring our creator and even a natural protectant,” she continued. “But I’m talking about the fear that prevents collective progress.”

Walking through fear, she said, is a requirement of leadership.

And she knows. Bacon, who is married to GangGang co-founder Alan Bacon, was a member of IBJ’s 2016 Forty Under 40 class and has been a member of IBJ Media’s Indiana 250 in three of the program’s four years—with good reason.

GangGang became a force in the central Indiana art scene soon after its founding in 2020. It helped secure performers for Swish, the Indianapolis Arts Council-organized festival that complemented the 2021 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. The program paid 600 musicians to perform at a time when the pandemic was wreaking havoc with their incomes.

Since then, GangGang has created Butter, curated the “We. The Culture” exhibition at Newfields, developed a Music in Transit performance series with IndyGo, developed a first-ever Tip-Off Ceremony for NBA All-Star Weekend and staged the I Made Rock ’N’ Roll music festival.

And on Thursday, after IBJ went to press, GangGang was scheduled to announce that it will expand Butter to Los Angeles. Butter LA will take place Feb. 26-March 1 in conjunction with Frieze Los Angeles, an international art fair launched in 2019 that focuses on contemporary art.

About half of the artists exhibiting at the 2026 event are expected to be from California, with about a quarter from Indiana and the remaining quarter from elsewhere. The announcement follows a Los Angeles pop-up version of Butter that ran July 26 to Aug. 17 at the Context Projects gallery, which was staged in partnership with art curator Khalil Kinsey, who is chief operating officer and chief curator of the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection developed by his parents.

The pop-up included work by Indiana artists Gary Gee, Ashley Nora and Samuel Levi Jones. Pop-up versions of Butter are planned for Chicago in October and Miami in December.

Mali Bacon told the 20s honorees that while GangGang’s impact might appear sudden or explosive, it was actually the result of a vision that began decades before. “I laid the groundwork for this arts startup in my 20s, co-founded it in my 30s and am scaling it in my 40s,” she said.

She urged honorees to think about their own passions and use them to help build the city of Indianapolis with this question always in mind: “How would I lead if I wasn’t afraid?”•

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Weidenbener is editor of IBJ. Email her at [email protected].