Finding Indiana : Our Search for Place

The interactive exhibit, Finding Indiana: Our Search for Place, is the culminating product of a collaborative, interdisciplinary, community-oriented seminar in which a diverse group of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, art, drawing, and biology majors investigated the cultural and physical landscapes of Indiana as part of the Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry (VBC). The VBC is a university-based, community outreach program named for its founder, Virginia B. Ball. Joe Trimmer, director of the VBC writes, “For Virginia, education and community were interconnected. And for that reason she worked to create bridges between scholars and citizens. More to the point, she worked to enable scholars to become engaged citizens, and citizens to pursue lifelong learning.” One of the most climactic examples of this engaged scholarship is seen in the project, Finding Indiana, where in collaboration with our community sponsor, the Minnetrista Cultural Center, we researched, created, and built an exhibit designed to foster a sense of inquiry and empower the viewer with tools to evolve their own perceptions of place.Working in small collaborative teams, we initially crisscrossed the state of Indiana, collecting objects, images, faces, and stories relating to both current issues and historical events, consistently focusing on the significance of place in shaping whom we are. When teams were not on the road, we spent long hours in the VBC and wood shop designing, modeling, scripting, imaging, and eventually building, a traveling exhibit which was showcased first at Minnetrista and then sent on tour to various sites throughout Indiana. Reflecting on this fifteen-week odyssey, we found that our pilgrimages did more than enrich our understanding of the people and places of Indiana; they helped us understand ourselves. Interpreting the world as a meaningful order in which the individual can find his or her place in the midst of nature and community requires this rich interdisciplinary and collaborative methodology and the direct and intimate experiential perspective that ‘people-in-place’ have of their own lives and their own places. As one student aptly put it, our semester “was a study in being human.”

Volume Editors
Marilys R. Nepomechie & Robert Gonzalez

ISBN
0-935502-54-8