2021 Exhibit Columbus Opens to the Public This Week

Press
Written By Richard McCoy

Opening August 21, the 2021 Exhibition offers moments of reflection, creativity, and innovation in Columbus, Indiana with thirteen site-responsive installations on public display through November.

Columbus, Indiana — Beginning this Saturday, Columbus, a small Indiana city with a global reputation for modernist architecture, art, and landscapes, celebrates the opening of the third exhibition of Exhibit Columbus, a exploration of art, architecture, design, and community that activates the unique cultural legacy of Columbus through a two-year cycle of events that features a Symposium, Design Presentations, and culminates in this free, public Exhibition. 

The 2021 Exhibition features more than a dozen newly-commissioned installations that each respond to the curatorial theme of this cycle: New Middles: From Main Street to Megalopolis, What is the Future of the Middle City? The exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, August 21 with a series of free conversations with all of the exhibition participants and curators. This program brings together an international collection of architects, designers, artists, and high school students with community members, volunteers, and fabricators to celebrate Columbus’ unique heritage.

2021 Opening Day begins with a schedule of events on Saturday, August 21. Kicking off the exhibition’s three-month run, the architects, landscape architects, artists, and designers who created the installations, along with Exhibition curators Iker Gil and Mimi Zeiger, will be on hand to interact alongside Columbus residents and visitors from around the world.

The exhibition is on view until November 28, with events scheduled throughout the fall. The installations are being installed this week and final images will be available in the coming days. 

2021 Opening Day Schedule of Events, Saturday, August 21

1–3:30 pm, Free open to the public

Exhibition Conversations Part One, at First Christian Church

First Conversation with University Design Research Fellows: Design as Memory and Play

Moderated by Janice Shimizu

Welcome and Celebration of the High School Design Team

Second Conversation with University Design Research Fellows: Design as Habitat and Terrain

Moderated by Daniel Luis Martinez

7–9:30 pm, Free open to the public

Exhibition Conversations Part Two, at Mill Race Park Amphitheater

Meet the Miller Prize Recipients

Moderated by Deepti Vijaykumar

Twilight Music in Mill Race Park

Featuring 2021 Exhibit Columbus graphic designer Jeremiah Chiu and Enrique Ramirez, with additional music from sound artists Shawn Chiki and Zach Williams of Onokio.

J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize Recipients

Dream the Combine (Minneapolis, MN)

Columbus Columbia Colombo Colón is an investigation of relationships. Christopher Columbus and the places named after him form a series of associations—of identity, property, and power. Designed to make the invisible visible, each vertical element represents a distinct place in the world. By navigating between each of the poles, visitors are invited to draw connections between different narratives and reflect on what is a collective story. Columbus, Indiana is not just a city, it is part of a larger complex of meaning. The persistence of these legacies is one that we all must grapple with.

Ecosistema Urbano (Miami and Madrid, Spain)

Cloudroom rethinks the physical space of education as teaching is reshaped by current and post-pandemic conditions. Created with input from students and staff at Central Middle School, the installation encourages new modes of learning and raises awareness about environmental challenges. 

The inflatable “cloud” creates a shady microclimate for learning, playing, connecting, and interacting. The design evokes a dome and an oculus, reminding visitors and students of architectural features. Connected to environmental sensors, Cloudroom illustrates climatic conditions as the inflatable changes colors. Texts are drawn from the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development and from a survey of Central Middle School students about their preoccupations, hopes, and dreams for the future.

Future Firm (Chicago, IL)

Midnight Palace is designed for occupants of the midnight city. It asks: What is a public space dedicated to those who live in the nocturnal hours? 

Columbus is a city of night owls: 39 percent of the population works in manufacturing, compared to 9 percent nationwide. Among this late-night group are second and third-shift workers, restaurant workers, truckers on I-65, parents of newborns, and residents with families overseas. 

A lattice-work of electrical conduit, Midnight Palace features a “wall of light” inspired by Columbus’ streetscape: high-pressure sodium fixtures, LED light bulbs, and soffit lighting. Paying homage to the Columbus Drive-In, which closed in 1992. Screens feature community partner programming: from cricket matches to short films. 

Olalekan Jeyifous (Brooklyn, NY)

Archival/Revival revisits transformative events held at the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, which opened in December 1969. An inaugural African Art exhibit opened in January 1970 and was a part of “Africa and Black and White America”, a two-month-long program developed by the Human Relations Commission. The same year, the commission organized the “Columbus Black Arts Festival”. All but one event was held at the library.

Archival/Revival features sculptural and virtual elements representing key figures revived from the Columbus Indiana Architectural Archives. Visitors can explore historical documents and artworks and consider their relation to present and future realities.

Visitors can use their mobile devices or tablets to interact with augmented reality (AR) artifacts.

Sam Jacob Studio (London, England)

Alternative Instruments responds to Columbus as a site, place, a history, but also a fiction. Suggesting how places and ideas are interconnected, the Washington Street installations draw parallels between Columbus’ midcentury architecture, European Modernism, and utopian impulses of early American Settlements.

Thomas More coined the term “utopia” in his 1516 novel. A story of a New World island modeled on accounts of European voyages, More’s imaginary “good place” is intertwined with expansionism and colonialism. 

Alternative Instruments uses civic design to create new narratives that point towards the future—referencing Americana roadside signs, weathervanes, and measuring chains used by the British to claim territory. Quilts recall vernacular craft, with phrases from Utopia and written in More’s fictional language.

University Design Research Fellows

Derek Hoeferlin (Washington University in St. Louis)

Tracing Our Mississippi, located next to the East Fork of the White River, asks visitors to understand local waterways in relation to the vast territorial scales of the fourth largest watershed in the world. By representing the Mississippi River watershed as a large-scale model of the river basins (including the Ohio River, which connects Columbus to the Mississippi), the installation emphasizes the relentless infrastructures controlling the Mississippi’s landscapes, communities, and resources. 

Join us for  Watershed Weekend (October 21-22), and the public program entitled Voicing Our Mississippi which will explore how people from across this broad ecological and cultural geography might be empowered to collectively question past methods of control and power.

Joyce Hwang (University at Buffalo)

To Middle Species, With Love amplifies habitat conditions for urban wildlife in Columbus—our co-inhabitants of the built environment. These bats, birds, amphibians, and reptiles—which we call “middle species” in contrast to “flagship” species—are common in our communities and ecosystems, yet often remain invisible in our imaginations.

Made out of Indiana hardwood, the installation provides bird perches and functions similarly to the bat houses used by the endangered Indiana Bat—one of 13 bat species in Indiana. Boulders offer habitat for smaller creatures. 

Humans may experience the sounds of high-frequency bat calls (recorded with ultrasonic detectors) via QR codes and headphones. Additional QR codes link to research projects from the Ecological Practices graduate studio at the University at Buffalo.

Jei Jeeyea Kim (Indiana University)

LaWaSo Ground is a contemporary memorial and a community ground of (La)nd, (Wa)ter, and (So)il. It acknowledges the silenced and suppressed voices of the past, and advocates for more diverse inclusion in the future. LaWaSo Ground echoes the topography of the limestone quarries found in the region and is reminiscent of Indigenous earthworks along the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys. Indiana limestone plays a complicated symbolic role given its widespread use in the construction of civic monuments across the United States. Indigenous artist Katrina Mitten, a member of the Myaamia Nation of Oklahoma, designed the engraved motifs. An homage to the belltower of First Christian Church, the tower marks significant times in the solar calendar, such as the summer and winter solstices.

Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller (Texas Tech University at El Paso)

Spectral considers the aerial activity above Columbus, such as commercial and military flight paths, and speculates on a future in which urban spaces engage with aerial imaging technologies. Recent technological advances make it possible for cities, landscapes, and public spaces to be monitored by military, federal or state organizations, and private companies. Beyond the visible spectrum, these technologies record and analyze sub-perceptual shifts in heat signatures, radio waves, and radiation. Low-cost and widely accessible, they transform the city into a multispectral environment, where previously invisible activities are newly detectable.

Constructed from infrared obscuring material, Spectral is a public gathering place—a “safe space” where visitors’ thermal activity is shielded from the view of multispectral cameras.

Ang Li (Northeastern University)

Window Dressing invites visitors to reflect on the architectural legacy of Late Modernism. Through a temporary cladding system of ornamental shingles, the installation recalls the façade of the Commons and Courthouse Center by Cesar Pelli and Norma Merrick Sklarek for Gruen Associates (demolished in 2008). 

Using mylar film, a lightweight precursor to mirrored glass developed by the aerospace industry, Window Dressing draws inspiration from community events that took place inside this air-conditioned civic interior—high school proms, fashion shows, and election nights. Throughout the course of the day, this dynamic architectural tapestry encourages multiple readings of its surrounding context that responds to changing atmospheres and events: wind and light, pedestrian traffic, and the civic rhythms of downtown Columbus.

Lola Sheppard and Mason White (University of Toronto and University of Waterloo)

This Appearance Is  ____ invites citizens into the space of appearance and disappearance. In the 1950s, political theorist Hannah Arendt described the public realm as “space of appearance,” which she viewed as a collaborative process of worldmaking. Today, our collective space feels at times fragmented. The installation is a study in our ability to retreat from and then rejoin the larger world—a test made all the more poignant after more than a year of pandemic restrictions. A maze of curved walls made of lenticular plastic sheets creates a unique optical condition, visitors can disappear almost completely within the installation. Sheppard and White collaborated with students at Lincoln Elementary School to develop new games for all ages.

Natalie Yates (Ball State University)

Calibrate is an apparatus for registering and perceiving multiple timescales of accumulated environment data gathered from across Columbus and the Ohio River watershed, from geologic time to real-time sensing data. Columbus straddles the edge of the Wisconsin Glacial Limit. Thousands of years of glacial motion altered the landscape, carving the meanders of the Ohio River watershed, producing major aquifers for groundwater, building agricultural land with rich soils, and depositing foundational sediments. 

The robotic drawing machine uses data sensing to draw layers that reveal rhythms in the environment, climate, current of the river, and how we move through space. These traces are unveiled through new technologies and provide new information about this familiar place.

High School Design Team

High School Design Team

Tunnel Vision looks at Columbus as a middle city and how it might grow. Rivers are the foundation of middle cities. Waterways shape how cities are formed and developed over time. Just as rivers flow along a path, the installation’s geodesic tunnel presents a linear experience that transports visitors through history.

Tunnel Vision offers a glimpse of the past, present, and future of architecture in Columbus. Visitors follow the river—represented in colored panels that tell a story of how Columbus revolutionized modern architecture. As visitors flow through the tunnel, informational videos, viewable by QR codes, teach guests about Columbus architecture. The city is also expanding; a final video speculates on future changes to the city.

Photography Fellows

The Exhibition will also highlight two Photography Fellows: Virginia Hanusik (New Orleans) and David Schalliol (Minneapolis). 

Environmental Graphic Design and Wayfinding

New Middles graphic designer Jeremiah Chiu of Some All None (Los Angeles) will create the exhibition’s graphic identity and wayfinding.

Press Contact
Elizabeth Kubany
elizabeth@kubany.co

Richard McCoy
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