Letter From Michiana: Chicago Imagists, still honking

The decided otherness of the Imagists’ defiant Midwestern aesthetic has always been a great honking aspect of their art.

Letter From Michiana: Turbid discoloration

The juxtaposition of U.S. Steel and Lake Michigan invites us to contemplate the extent to which our world is designed.

Letter From Michiana: Why’s You Come Here?

The first time I moved to Michiana — to Michigan City, Indiana — it was 1980. Everything about that move was counter-intuitive… I was moving from northern California…a state filled with Midwestern exiles.

Letter From Michiana: Our newest national park

This national park, you realize, is actually a last line of resistance, a green and blue membrane holding back the accumulated pressure human will has piled on the earth and insisted was progress.

Letter From Michiana: Waiting on a train: the pressure to suburbanize

Suburbanization could efface the remarkable compound of urban grit and natural beauty that makes Michigan City unlike any other community in Michiana.

Letter From Michiana: Standing up to Hoosier colonialism: Karen Tallian’s SB 553

Hoosiers in Michiana are long used to being treated like a colony. In the first place, where most of Indiana is landlocked, we live on one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. This has not only set us apart, it has set us up for exploitation

Mysteries common to us all: The art of Lois Main Templeton

By David Hoppe I first met Lois Main Templeton at the Faris Building in 1988. My wife and I had moved to Indianapolis with our pre-school son in March of that year. An ice storm descended on the city during our first night in the duplex we rented in Broad Ripple. When we awoke, morning […]