Downtown installations going up for August Exhibit Columbus opening

The opening weekend for this year’s Exhibit Columbus installations is still two weeks away, but you can see the work happening around the downtown.

Exhibit Columbus works in two year cycles, with a symposium year of planning and discussions with selected designers, followed by a year with installations at various architectural and significant locations around the city. This is the fifth two-year cycle for Exhibit Columbus, which launched in 2016. The theme of this year’s Exhibit Columbus is “Yes and”, a phrase used by storytellers and improv artists to encourage more conversation and creativity.

This year’s program will include 13 installations around the community including creations by four recipients of the J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize, six University Design Research Fellowship teams, the High School Design Team, Communication Designer, and Bartholomew Consolidated Schools STEM program 5th and 6th graders.

Organizers say that the work going on has included the stripping of old siding from the Crump Theatre for the Accessing Nostalgia exhibit, cleaning up and repurposing the former Irwin Block Building site on Fifth Street for the public Ellipsis installation, and a steel horse being constructed at the Bartholomew County Historical Society near Fourth Street.

Opening weekend will be Aug. 15th and 16th and will feature five public events.

You can get more information on all the installations at exhibitcolumbus.org

Photo: Work is ongoing on an exhibit named “The Steel Horsie” at the Bartholomew County Historical Society, created by Andrew Fu, Aaron Goldstein, and Aleksandr Mergold of the New Jersey Institute of Technology Hillier College of Architecture and Design. Photo by Hadley Fruits courtesy of Landmark Columbus Foundation.