CATEGORY
Art
Entropic Peace in Isolation: Revisiting Yayoi Kusama’s Fireflies on the Water in 2020
The Toledo Museum of Art exhibition program brought together a special presentation of Yayoi Kusama’s Fireflies on the Water installation, just for a global pandemic to hit soon after. Despite what seemed to be a major set-back, COVID-19 has instead transformed Fireflies on the Water into a deeper reflection into what isolation and the individual mean in the chaos of 2020. What was once an incomprehensible escapist dream is now a sober dissolution into universal existentialism.
The Road to the Future: Life is a Highway and the Evolution of Toledo Car Culture
Rumor has it that Henry Ford himself thought about opening a major plant right here in Toledo; and while that plant ended...
Meeting Frans Hals in Toledo: A Dutch Family Reunion
As we strolled about the museum this past weekend, pausing at length before a pieced-together painting of an unusually happy family, the Midstory team...
Community by Rebecca Louise Law at the TMA: The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Between May 29 and June 12, community members came together for roughly 1,800 volunteer hours, stringing together 520,000 dried and fresh flowers, plants, and...
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Think
Why Design? Principles to Shape a World in Unrest
The saying goes that you can only have two of three options: good, fast, cheap. In a world challenged by COVID-19 and other underlying unrest in 2020, however, designers are tasked with satisfying all three to solve complex societal issues. This piece outlines how formal and informal design can shape a world in trouble, and attempts a more human response to extraordinary circumstances. Cover graphic by Whitney Baxter for Midstory.
Film
The Humans Behind Labor Politics: A Review of American Factory
In Moraine, Ohio, a suburb of Dayton, a former GM plant was bought by Chinese automobile glass manufacturer Fuyao in 2014, a...
Books
Publishing the Midwest
In a time of growing distrust of both public institutions and one another in America, storytelling might just be the remedy. Stories,...
Local Journalism Project
News Deserts, New Media, New Normal: An Introduction to the Local Journalism Project
For decades, the bike-riding paperboy hurling the daily news at doorsteps was a staple in the average American city. Over morning coffee,...
Books
The Rural Struggle for Survival: A Review of American Salvage
The fourteen short stories in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s 2009 finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, American Salvage, introduce rural characters of all shapes and colors. What binds them is their focus on finding what they need to survive, whether it be a companion or a barrel of gasoline. The opinions expressed in this review are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect any official organizational stance. Cover graphic by Jessie Walton for Midstory.