Tag Archives: Indiana State Fair

Indiana State Fair 2023 Photos, Part 5 of 9: The Year in Art, 3-D Division

August 29, 2023 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A quasi-stained glass sculpture of Deadpool's upper half. He has his swords on his back. His hands are cupped in a heart shape.

Glass Deadpool loves you!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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…

…and as we discussed last chapter, we are now “enjoy the exhibit halls more than the carnival rides” years old. Beyond all those Lego kits and original creations, sculpture and dioramas came in other media and forms throughout the fairground art competitions.

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Indiana State Fair 2023 Photos, Part 4 of 9: The Year in Lego

August 27, 2023 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
a massive Lego black Star Desroyer, which had to have taken a few thousand bricks.

Lego Eclipse-class Super Star Destroyer, which first appeared in the Star Wars Expanded Universe graphic novel Dark Empire.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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…

When we were kids, the Midway’s amusement-park rides and rigged carnival games were the most important part of the fair. The adults who brought us to the fair wanted to see the exhibits a lot more than we did. We’re now older than they were at the time, and have come to enjoy the opportunities for art appreciation across the fairground exhibit halls. It’s fun seeing the latest round of multimedia works from artists of all ages, skill levels, and facilitating organizations, be they 4-H or local collectives. One of the commonest media among the younger demos is Lego, that blessed sculptor’s tool that’s rigid and flexible, comes with instructions and lends itself to freewheeling flights of fancy.

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Indiana State Fair 2023 Photos, Part 3 of 9: The Year of Basketball

August 27, 2023 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
One side of the Midway's gateway arch surrounded by basketballs, greenery, and one creepy clown head.

A veritable garden of basketballs growing at the Midway entrance, guarded by a creepy clown head.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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…

As we mentioned last time, this year’s fair theme was The Year of Basketball. We aren’t sports fans, but we realize we’re vastly outnumbered in this state. I’ve seen a few basketball films, we attended a Pacers game exactly once, and a high school buddy once took me to an early-’90s Butler/Purdue game where the players spent more time beating on each other than shooting the ball. Otherwise, this chapter was assembled for You, The Viewers At Home, or at least those among you who can better appreciate the exhibits and nods than we did. At least we got to see some authentic props from one film we’ve seen, so there’s that.

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Indiana State Fair 2023 Photos, Part 2 of 9: The Year in Food Art

August 26, 2023 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Cheese sculpture! Refer to caption.

Apropos of Indiana, a cheese sculpture of a cow dunking a basketball, much as one might dunk a donut in her milk.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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…

Our favorite part is the new food, but some of their most ingenious uses of food are available neither for purchase nor consumption. Exhibit A: the annual cheese sculpture at the Agricultural & Horticultural Building. Each year sculptor Sarah Kaufmann spends days carving hundreds of pounds of cheese into recognizable, cartoony shapes. This year Kaufmann couldn’t make it; in her place the State Fair welcomed food artist Nancy Baker, whose works have appeared in such TV competitions as Food Network’s Halloween Wars and Disney+’s Foodtastic (hosted by Nope‘s Keke Palmer), and who in an episode of The Kelly Clarkson Show graciously made a pie with her celebrity interviewer’s face on it.

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Indiana State Fair 2023 Photos, Part 1: Our Year in Food

August 20, 2023 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Me holding a Nutellephant Ear.

It’s a Nutellaphant Ear! You’ll understand why I had to text a photo to coworkers live from the scene.

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.

Most years, we’re all about the food. On Thursdays vendors are encouraged to offer $3 specials, typically a bite-sized portion of an existing menu item or a chintzy, non-special drink. Our favorite part is the “Taste of the Fair” competition, in which vendors showcase ostensibly new dishes in hopes of enticing foodies and/or impressing attendees who seek more to fair-life than eating the same corn dog again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) The TotF lineup is announced weeks in advance so everyone can plan their meals and experiments accordingly. If you didn’t feel like wandering the fairgrounds in search of the new items, fans could pick up a handy Taste of the Fair participants’ map at the Indiana State Police information booth. (This map was nowhere on their website, nor did State Fair officials bother to wake up their app, which hasn’t been updated since 2021. The map was an exclusively in-person freebie.)

Of the 30 Taste of the Fair contestants, we tried 11 of them across an 8-hour time span divided into two trips (long story) and walked off several of those cumulative calories doing laps around the fairgrounds. In time-honored internet listicle tradition, we’ve gone to the trouble of ranking them against each other. Enjoy!

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Indiana State Fair 2022 Photos, Part 6 of 6: Random Acts of Fairness

August 22, 2022 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
State Fair logo!

Special thanks to the trio of young strangers who made these jazz hands possible after Anne took their group photo for them first.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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…

It all comes down to this: all the other scintillating sights and poorly aged horrors from our State Fair walkabout that didn’t need their own chapters.

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Indiana State Fair 2022 Photos, Part 5 of 6: The Expo Hall Baby Farm Animal Takeover

August 21, 2022 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment
piggies napping!

These little piggies went “zzzz zzzz zzzz” all the way home!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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…

When I was a kid, Expo Hall was one of the most interesting buildings to visit at the fairgrounds. Back in those days, various small businesses (indie shops, booksellers, home repair services, satellite TV providers, educational toys, and so on) lined up booths in the hall and gave out tons of promotional freebies — free pencils and pens, free stickers, free candy, free rulers, free flimsy coloring books, and so on. As an adult I lost enthusiasm when company reps stopped the freebies and focused their energies on annoyingly intrusive huckstering and hard sales pitches for boring products, with one or two exceptions. Last year the booths were noticeably sparser, longtime welcome participants like the great South Bend Chocolate Company were nowhere in sight, and those who did show up seemed more desperate and/or shady than ever. The childhood charm was next to nonexistent, and the place was probably about 1-2 years away from takeover by NFT shills.

It’s therefore hard to blame State Fair officials for shaking up the status quo and trying something completely different this year. All the salespeople were ejected from Expo Hall and replaced with a different kind of spectacle: baby farm animals!

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Indiana State Fair 2022 Photos, Part 4 of 6: The Year in Lego and Other Arts

August 21, 2022 By in Indiana, Misc. Media Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
corn truck mural couch!

Someone prettied up a truck and set up an outdoor living room in front of it.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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…

Anne and I are at that age when we’re more interested in visiting the exhibit halls than we are in rattling our bones on the Midway rides. We enjoy seeing what new works of paint, photography, building blocks, and science have been offered up for the various competitions. The State Fair holds its massive celebrations on behalf of our farmers, but Indiana has no shortage of artists, either. They come from all demographics, work in multiple media, bring ideas from pop culture as well as from their own home life, and all contribute in their own ways to the Hoosier State hometown legacy.

In this case the largest artwork on the fairgrounds was an entire truck turned into a stationary mural. It was supposed to draw attention to an entire exhibit of tricked-out vehicles called the Mural Derby, but all the other participants were parked away from the main thoroughfare and out of sight behind the giant Ferris wheel, where we had no idea they existed till I looked it up just now, days after the fact. But at least we witnessed the one truck, which was nifty.

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Indiana State Fair 2022 Photos, Part 3 of 6: The Year in Canned Food Art

August 20, 2022 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
canned Baby Yoda!

Canned Grogu for the win!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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…

One of the many creative events each year is the Canstruction contest, which isn’t necessarily exclusive to local 4-H youngsters. Canstruction is a charitable organization that holds nationwide events in which engineers and other clever planners compete against each other in building the best sculpture made entirely from canned goods, preferably in recognizable shapes and not ordinary stacks with boring titles like “The Can-Can”. After the judging and the public displaying are over, all those meticulously planned figures are torn down and the components are donated to local hunger relief charities, who in turn forward them to needy families totally unaware their next few meals used to be Art.

Possibly in keeping with this year’s “Fun at the Speed of Summer” theme, each team of contestants made vehicles or vehicular acccessories out of cans, starting with the floating space crib in our lead photo. Some machines were built for more speed than others.

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Indiana State Fair 2022 Photos, Part 2 of 6: The Year of Speed

August 19, 2022 By in Indiana Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
ECTO-1!

Sure, we’ve seen the Ghostbusters’ car at numerous conventions over the years…but this was our first time seeing one in mood lighting.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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…

For years every State Fair had a special food theme — the Year of Popcorn! The Year of the Tomato! The Year of the Soybean! The Year of Dairy! And so on. After they ran out of major Indiana crops to spotlight, management switched to selecting inedible themes, unrelated to food and often more intangible. This year’s logline was “Fun at the Speed of Summer”, a combined celebration of the Indianapolis 500 and the various automotive companies who’ve had factories and other major presences in the Hoosier State over the past century or more. In other words: hooray for cars!

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