Exhibit Columbus Continues City’s Legacy
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThe sixth annual Exhibit Columbus is currently underway and since its inception in 2016, the event has received international recognition. The 2021 exhibition features 13 international architects and artists, each with their own unique installation on display in the Bartholomew County city. Exhibit Columbus Director Anne Surak says everything is set in the context of the important architectural sites around Columbus.
“Columbus has over 80 significant works of architecture, art & design and landscape, and it’s everywhere,” Surak tells Around INdiana Reporter Mary-Rachel Redman. “That is what we invite these internationally-acclaimed designers to do. We invite them to Columbus to think about our history and these spaces and then to create new work in the context of that in public space.”
This year’s exhibition is titled New Middles: From Main Street to Megalopolis, What is the Future of the Middle City?
Lake Jeyifous, an artist from Brooklyn whose work has been featured recently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, is one of the artists featured this year. His contribution is called “Archival Revival,” which he says is designed to bring out interesting facts about the Cleo Rogers Memorial Library in Columbus.
Jeyifous’ four installations are paying tribute to African American artists and journalists with Indiana connections, such as Nigerian artist Felix Eboigbe, who was an artist-in-residence at Indiana University and Indianapolis poet and author Marie Evans.
“Columbus is a mecca for modernist architecture,” said Jeyifous. “This was a fantastic project that I was enormously excited and happy and grateful to be invited.”
Exhibit Columbus is free to the public and on display until November 28.
“It’s not just successful or critically acclaimed in that we are working with people at the top of the field and inviting them to make things, but it’s also that intersection of that experience with the people here that really makes it unique and something to come see,” said Surak.