The storied Indiana town of Columbus has completed the nearly two-year-long cycle of presentations and public events leading up to its biennial Exhibit Columbus architecture festival, a staple of the Midwest’s cultural calendar. Despite the COVID-19 headwinds, the show is still on track to open Aug. 21. It will feature mostly outdoor installations from 13 participants sited throughout the city, work from two photography fellows, and an original graphic-design scheme that ties the exhibition together. All this, plus a full suite of summer and fall events, will center on an intriguing—and remarkably relevant—curatorial theme: the past, present, and future of the Mississippi River watershed and the communities inhabiting it.
“What we had in mind was this idea of ecological connectivity,” says Mimi Zeiger, the critic, educator, and writer (for ARCHITECT, among other publications) who is co-curating the festival alongside designer and SOM Foundation executive director Iker Gil. Given the exigencies of the pandemic, the Los Angeles–based Zeiger and Chicago-based Gil had to work remotely through most of the months of planning, hammering out the premise of the show—which they titled New Middles—and drafting a list of participants. “We looked for participants who could reflect on our contemporary moment rather than fixed solutions,” Gil says. The objective, he continues, was “to reveal existing—but forgotten—histories and explore a multiplicity of narratives.
The starting point for this collaborative investigation was inevitably Columbus itself, a “middle” city with a unique backstory (and in no way to be confused with its larger Ohio counterpart). In an episode that has now entered American architectural lore, local industrialist J. Irwin Miller launched a program to draw international architects to his hometown on the White River in 1957. Over the ensuing decades, Miller’s initiative subsidized the construction of schools, offices, churches, and public buildings by the likes of I.M. Pei, Eero Saarinen, and Robert Venturi. “Columbus has been long been celebrated,” Zeiger says, “but what happens there also has meaning for other places of similar size and scale.”
This year’s Exhibit Columbus tries to tease out that prospective meaning, using the city and its architecture as a pedestal on which to mount a broader exploration of the region.
In pursuit of the curators’ agenda, the show’s participants follow a remarkable variety of paths. From the London-based, Miller Prize–winning Sam Jacob Studio comes a series of colorful banners, flags, and wayfinding posts decked in abstract forms, all part of a project called Alternative Instruments; the mix of Midwestern craft traditions, Venturian semiotics, and meditations on utopian philosophy will be scattered throughout Columbus, creating a kind of mysterious, poetic system for navigating the city.
Another Miller Prize recipient, Dream the Combine of Minneapolis, will use the Michael van Valkenburg– and Stanley Saitwotiz–designed Mill Race Park as the site for its work, Columbus Columbia Colombo Colón. Visitors will drift through a landscape comprising 58 poles, each representing a place somewhere on Earth that shares Columbus’s controversial namesake, along with interpretive materials examining the fraught legacy of the Italian explorer.
The 2021 High School Design Team challenged budding architects from the local Bartholomew Consolidated School System to build a ground-up pavilion from scratch during what has doubtlessly been a most unusual summer break. Tunnel Vision, the team’s response, is among the more head-on approaches to Zeiger and Gil’s riparian New Middle concept and is a large, distinctly riverlike funnel composed of archlike blue strips, with QR codes affixed to panels that link to video content documenting the city’s architectural history as well as proposals for continuing its growth. The work will be erected on the grounds of the Columbus Middle School, itself a latter-day creation of the Miller-era architecture program constructed in 2007.
Public functions on the schedule include an opening party, musical performances, an evening of short films (to be shown at the outdoor Midnight Palace installation from Chicago-based Future Firm), and online and in-person panels with the University Design Research Fellows, who contributed seven installations.
For its creators, the process has been more than a little daunting. Although Gil and Zeiger have been to the site repeatedly in the past, neither has able to visit until recently, just as the installation process was underway. Exhibit Columbus contributor Olalekan Jeyifous grew up in the area, but hasn’t been to Columbus proper since childhood; he’ll be mounting a series of sculptural and multimedia works entitled Archival/Revival in the Pei-designed Cleo Rogers Memorial Library, doing it more or less sight unseen.
The whole undertaking, Zeiger notes, is “surprisingly ambitious under the current conditions.” For Columbus and middle cities everywhere, now seems as good a moment as any to go big.
Exhibit Columbus 2021 is on view Aug. 21 to Nov. 28, 2021, in Columbus, Ind. The evening run of short films at Midnight Palace takes place Aug. 19 and a preview party will be held Aug. 20.
