Indiana State Fair 2025 Photos, Part 4: The Year in Lego

Lego Taj Mahal!

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

Lego is a frequent sight at our State Fair. 4-H kids and competitors in other art contests routinely turn in works of Lego as their favorite sculpting medium. Some submissions are store-bought kits; some are original creations. There’s nothing emphatically Hoosier about them. To my knowledge we have no Lego factory and no Legoland theme park. Indiana was not a beachhead for Danish explorers. The old Lego Indiana Jones sets have nothing to do with Indiana per se, much as we might wish to contrive otherwise. But at our state fair there’s always room for Lego.

The 4-H Building on the northwest corner of the fairgrounds usually has the highest concentration of Lego art:

Angular view from Lego Taj Mahal;s side so some of the gardens out front are visible.

The side of the Lego Taj Mahal with a view of some of the gardens.

Lego Coliseum.

Lego Statue of Liberty.

A humble Lego mill.

Lego Millennium Falcon.

Lego Milky Way, one of two on display, so I’m guessing this was a set. The other one was displayed upside-down.

Lego abstract paint rainbow.

Lego mansion labeled Brixton Manor, made with bricks of random colors.

Stately Lego Manor.

Lego Jurassic Park.

Lego museum with Lego triceratops fossil in the middle.

Over at the Indiana Arts Building, offerings included a Lego Natural History Museum.

I don’t know when this became a thing, but this year we learned that on the far northeast side — behind Pioneer Village and other farm-forward zones that we normally skip — the Normandy Barn was devoted to a Brick Art Experience, a legally permissible synonym for “Lego exhibit”. As a lifelong Hoosier who’s been to the fair dozens of times, this was my second time ever coming within fifty yards of the Normandy Barn.