Exhibit Columbus Announces 2024–2025 Miller Prize Recipients
The 2024–2025 Exhibit Columbus Miller Prize recipients (left to right, top to bottom): Nina Cooke John, Studio Cooke John; Jen Wood and Emanuel Admassu, AD–WO; Germane Barnes, Studio Barnes; Charlie Vinz, Adaptive Operations. All photos courtesy Exhibit Columbus.
Exhibit Columbus, the flagship program of Landmark Columbus Foundation, has announced the full participant lineup for its fifth biennial cycle, which takes on the improvisational theater-riffing curatorial theme of Yes And, and is described as a “participatory call to work from existing materials to shape positive change.” Headlining the roster of participants are four J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize recipients, who will join past winners (Tatiana Bilbao, PAU, Olalekan Jeyifous, SO-IL, Frida Escobedo, and Oyler Wu Collaborative, to name just a few) to design site-specific installations at prominent public locations around Columbus, a small Indiana city with an outsized architectural pedigree. These temporary installations will serve as centerpieces of the 2025 Exhibit Columbus Exhibition, which is set to kick off next August and run through the end of November 2025.
The 2024–2025 Miller Prize winners, who will each partner with a local institution to realize their respective designs are: Charlie Vinz of Chicago-based Adaptive Operations, who will design a work at the Crump Theater, a historic Art Deco landmark in downtown Columbus; Jen Wood and Emanuel Admassu of Brooklyn-based AD—WO, who will transform a vacant lot that was once home to the so-called Irwin Block building, which was destroyed by fire in 2022; Germane Barnes of Miami-based Studio Barnes, whose design intervention will appear at a large parking structure on Jackson Street; and Nina Cooke John of New York–based Studio Cooke John, whose work will appear in the sunken courtyard of Eliel Saarinen’s National Historic Landmark–listed First Christian Church. (The church’s soaring freestanding tower emerged from a painstaking restoration earlier this year.)
“We selected these four Miller Prize participants to match at an interesting site based on their remarkable body of work and approach to design and culture. We’re excited to have all of the participants in town later this month to meet with members of the community as they begin to shape their ideas around the theme Yes And,” said the 2024–2025 cycle’s multidisciplinary, seven-member team of curatorial partners in a joint statement. The previously announced curatorial partners include past Exhibit Columbus participants Zack Morrison and Joseph Altshuler of Chicago and Urbana-Champaign–based architecture studio Could Be Design; Mila Lipinski, a Columbus native and associate at Jackson, Mississippi–based Duvall Decker; Raleigh, North Carolina–based writer and educator Rasul Mowatt; Chicago’s Preservation Futures, comprising the historian and architect duo of Elizabeth Blazius and Jonathan Solomon; and Indianapolis poet and artist Too Black.
In addition to the latest cohort of Miller Prize awardees, Exhibit Columbus has also announced six University Design Research Fellows (UDRF) teams/individuals, who were selected by the curatorial partners from a pool of nearly 50 proposals submitted through a national competition open to full-time university professors focused on design research. Like the Miller Prize winners, they will be partnered with a yet-to-be-announced Columbus organization and be assigned to a unique site around town where they will bring their research to life as part of the 2025 Exhibition. During the 2023 Exhibition, these UDRF installations, although smaller in scale than their Miller Prize counterparts, were among the most provocative—and memorable—of the event. The 2024–2025 UDRFs are: Kelley Van Dyck Murphy, Chandler Ahrens, and Constance Vale of Washington University in Saint Louis; Sarah Aziz of the University of New Mexico; Akima Brackeen of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; César A. Lopez, Jess Myers, Amelyn Ng, and Germán Pallares-Avitia of the University of Virginia, Syracuse University, Columbia University, and Rhode Island School of Design, respectively; Suzanne Lettieri and Michael Jefferson of Cornell University; and Aleksandr Mergold, Andrew Fu, and Aaron Goldstein of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Additionally, Los Angeles–based Sing-Sing Studio will helm the cycle’s communications design, and R. Spencer Steenblik, an architect and professor at Indiana University, will coordinate the local High School Design Team, a mainstay of the event.
A major component of the 2024–2025 edition of Exhibit Columbus, the 2024 Symposium, will kick off later this month with four keynote events, discussions with the Miller Prize recipients, and much more. Registration information can be found here.
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