Brave By Reflection
January 5, 2026 — Fall 2026
COMPANION is pleased to present Brave By Reflection — the inaugural exhibition in a new, annual partnership with the Indiana Senate Democratic Caucus designed to bring Hoosier artists and their perspectives into the day-to-day Statehouse experiences for Senate Democrats and their guests. The exhibition opens January 5, 2026, for the second session of the 125th Indiana General Assembly and a year of America 250, recognizing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Brave By Reflection borrows its title from a phrase in Thomas Paine's Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet published in January 1776 that is frequently credited with inspiring the American Revolution. Like his writing, this collection of artworks hopes to inspire curiosity, compassion, and enthusiasm for our neighbors and their lived experiences, past, present, and future.
The small group exhibition features four contemporary Indiana-based artists: Kaila Austin, Mailinh Hồ, Julian Jamaal Jones, and Joshua A.M. Ross. Presented together for the first time, the artists’ distinct practices reflect on individual and collective identity, labor legacies, and the power of perspective. Their use of traditional, foundational materials - oil, watercolor, fabric, and colored pencil - set a familiar stage for embracing far more complex narratives. In their own way, each artist harnesses the transitory nature of convention and process. Collectively, they illuminate the delicate and humble pursuit of future harmonies.
A reception celebrating the new program, the inaugural exhibition, and the artists will be held on Tuesday, May 12, 2026, in the Minority Caucus Room at the Indiana Statehouse. Brave By Reflection is on view through fall 2026.
For inquiries, please contact braydee@thisiscompanion.com.
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Kaila Austin, Unidentified Baby Brooks (Mary Penick), 2022
Kaila Austin [ American, b. 1991 ] is a social practice artist, recovering neighborhood histories through public arts and archival practices. Since 2019, she has run Rogue Preservation Services, a historic consulting organization that allows her to work with historically African American communities. She uses the arts to mobilize their histories and save their ancestral spaces.
On Indianapolis’ Southside, she has worked with descendant families, using painting and storytelling as catalysts to create engaging conversations around history, place, and an artist’s role in bringing these expansive stories to light. Through her work, her community recovered their history as the first African American soldiers in the United States, long-standing communities founded during the Underground Railroad period, and their legacy as their neighborhoods have expanded and retracted over the past 180 years.
Austin’s work at the intersections of heritage preservation, the public arts, and community advocacy earned her the 2023 Artist-Activist of the Year award from the Arts Council of Indianapolis. She was an inaugural Fellow with Artists At Work presented by THE OFFICE and the Herbert Simon Family Foundation.
Mailinh Hồ, Sandhill Crane Pines, 2025
Mailinh Hồ [ American, b. 1997 ] is a Vietnamese-American painter living and working in Indianapolis. Her oil and watercolor works explore the complexities of contemporary identity through playful iconography and portraiture. Through her self-portraiture, she encourages viewers to examine the contemporary dynamics of race and gender shaped by diaspora through her experience as a first-generation Vietnamese-American. Rather than reject either side of herself, her work seeks to reconcile her Vietnamese heritage and American upbringing and celebrate the two together. Hồ received her BFA in painting from Herron School of Art + Design.
Julian Jamaal Jones, Hot Nights, 2025
Julian Jamaal Jones [ American, b. 1992 ] is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who memorializes Black culture through fresh perspectives and a commitment to creative freedom within traditional frameworks. Drawing from the historical language of African American quilting, Jones employs abstraction and vibrant color to both honor tradition and reframe it, bypassing preconceptions and opening conversations around his lived experience as a Black male in white spaces. The Black church, Hip Hop culture, and jazz music background his practice at every layer. This collection of small textile and oil pastel works pays specific homage to the influence of jazz and Hip Hop music on the intuitive, improvisational, and rhythmic nature of his process.
Julian Jamaal Jones earned his BFA in Photography from the Herron School of Art + Design and his MFA in Photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Blue Spiral 1 Gallery in Asheville, NC; PLAYGROUND Detroit in Detroit, MI; Soft Times Gallery in San Francisco, CA; Chilli Art Projects in London, UK; Tube Factory Artspace in Indianapolis, IN; Wabash College in Crawfordsville, IN; Jac Forbes Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA; the Richmond Art Museum in Richmond, IN; the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts & Fiber Arts in Cedarburg, WI; COMPANION Projects in Indianapolis, IN; and Welancora Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. His artworks are held in the permanent textile collections of Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, MI; the Richmond Art Museum in Richmond, IN; and Wabash College in Crawfordsville, IN.
Joshua A.M. Ross, Reflection of a Ideal, 2025
Joshua A.M. Ross [ American, b. 1992 ] explores the interplay between drawing and photography through notions of performance, occasioning sculptural and spatial interventions. His artworks incorporate creative participants, fabrics, and bodily limbs as critical focal points interlaced with representational and abstract scenes. His research-based practice is an entrenched phenomenological approach that investigates institutional, bodily, and spatial structures that organize and influence perception. His multidisciplinary practice employs and appropriates a variety of materials and media developed through relationships to methodologies inherently related to his research and archival experiences with photography.Ross has exhibited work nationally and internationally, most recently closing a two-person exhibition titled Ode To Sunflower at Wonzimer in Los Angeles, 2025. Notable exhibitions include Shadow Tracer at the Aspen Museum of Art in Aspen, Colorado, 2022-2023; Loitering is Delightful at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 2019-2020; Slippers at Queens LA, 2019; and a series of performances titled Telathon at Human Resources Los Angeles, 2019. Ross holds an MFA in Art from the University of California, Irvine, and a BFA in Photography from Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana. He currently lives and works in Indianapolis, IN.
Documentation by Anna Powell Denton