Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 9 of 9: The Year in Everything Else
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 it all comes down to this: all the other pics fit to print. Obviously we had to lead off with the cheese sculpture. Next up: the entrants in the annual CANstruction contest! The charitable organization holds eponymous events nationwide in which engineers and other clever planners compete against each other to build the best sculpture made entirely from canned goods, preferably in recognizable shapes and not ordinary stacks with boring titles like “Oh No, We Overordered Mushroom Soup Again”. 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. Thus these temporary installations live on only if everyone takes pictures of them. Rather than the fair's official theme of The Year of Baseball, the CANstruction competitors celebrated the Harvest Pavilion's headline exhibit, “Rewind: A VHS Revival”. So this year, the cans are all about the movies! […]#indianastatefair — Public Fediverse posts
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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 8: Morning Midway Meandering
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, the Midway was the only part of the fair that mattered. The food was a nice change of pace, but was more of a necessity than a highlight, at least until I discovered elephant ears. The adults wanted to see the exhibits and didn't care if I was bored stiff. I liked animals, but our family never adapted to toxic barn stench. Sometimes the special events and scheduled entertainment were okay, but I didn't scour their schedule for appointments and never attended a concert there until I was 29. No, far as I was concerned, the Midway was the be-all-end-all of the State Fair experience -- the rides, the games, the fun houses, and especially the video arcade they added in the mid-'80s. […] -
Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 7: The Year in Antiques
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 fair’s regular features is the antiques competition, chiefly displayed on the second floor of the Indiana Arts Building. No one’s ever posted the rules, criteria, rankings, or anything expository beyond signage implying, “Here are some antiques not for sale.” Contestants bring in ancient items they unearthed somewhere, a secret council convenes far from inquisitive eyes, prize ribbons are placed next to some of them, yadda yadda yadda, they’re at your Indiana State Fair. Amid the quilts and ’50s baby dolls and blue-and-white dishware, a few items with historical value and/or pop culture cachet will catch our attention, especially comic books published before I was born. We congratulate the winners of this year’s Antiques We Noticed Most Contest! […] -
Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 6: The Year in Art
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 in rattling our bones on the Midway rides. We enjoy seeing what new works of paint, photography, building blocks, and 4-H instructional posters 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. Whether adults or kids, the illustrators, sculptors, clothing designers, doll-makers and other artisans come from all demographics, work in multiple media, and bring ideas from pop culture as well as from their own influences and home lives. They each contribute in their own ways to the Hoosier State creative legacy. […]https://midlifecrisiscrossover.com/2026/08/28/indiana-state-fair-2026-photos-part-6-the-year-in-art/
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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 5: The Year in Lego
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... Lego is a frequent sight at our State Fair. 4-H kids and competitors in other art contests routinely turn in works of Lego as their favorite sculpting medium. Some submissions are store-bought kits; some are original creations. There’s nothing emphatically Hoosier about them. To my knowledge we have no Lego factory and no Legoland theme park. Indiana was not a beachhead for Danish explorers. Not even the old Lego Indiana Jones set have anything to do with Indiana per se, much as we might wish to contrive otherwise. But at our State Fair there’s always room for Lego. This year we attended the fair so late into its run -- the last day was this past Sunday -- that the rest of this miniseries is now a retrospective instead of a concurrent update. Figuring in advance that that'd happen, I tried to convince myself to take fewer photos so I could wrap up our short-term State Fair memories as quickly as possible and I could get back to all the other pending posts I've been procrastinating. I even thought to myself going in, "You do not have to snap pics of every Lego ever." Here we wound up anyway, having once again accumulated enough Lego works for a standalone gallery. Behold the power of bright building blocks! […] -
Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 4: The Year in Cakes
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... ...such as cakes! Back in 2019 we discovered for the first time in our entire fair-attending lives that the main 4-H Building wasn't their only exhibit hall. Next door Centennial Hall was formerly a dormitory -- and is still inaccurately and unhelpfully labeled as such -- and contained entire competitive categories that we'd never seen before. The cakes in particular were awesome sights to behold. Then the State Fair went on hiatus in 2020, because 2020. Without that annual reinforcement of the lesson we'd learned, we totally forgot about Centennial Hall until this year. We were only pointed toward it because the contents of the main 4-H Building were restructured, rearranged, and/or relocated elsewhere. For some reason the entire second floor appeared to have been converted into an indoor driving range for 4-H golfers. Thankfully we were redirected to Centennial Hall and discovered the joy of 4-H cakes all over again -- the results of hours of effort, imagination and concentration on the part of whoever was blessed with these amazing colossal talents. A shame we couldn’t eat any of their works, merely behold them. Call it the Great Hoosier Bake-Off. […] -
With all the storms and the flooding spread out over several weeks, the Indiana State Fair was hit hard. I finally got there for a few hours on almost the last day. #statefair #indianastatefair #chickens #cheesesculpture #HoosierMast
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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 3: The Year of America’s 250th
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 one splashy theme recurred throughout the various exhibits of arts, crafts, cookery, and antiquing across all participating buildings: the 250th anniversary of July 4th, 1776, generally considered the date of birth of the United States of America. Granted, not all citizens observed the only semiquincetennial party our nation will ever have, particularly among a statistically significant percentage of the terminally online. No, America isn't perfect and never will be, which is kind of the point, no matter who's in charge. If you only love people, places, or things that are perfect, then how many absolutely perfect people, places, or things do you genuinely love? If you count more than one, you've gotten it wrong. As it happens, our road trip this year began over the Independence Day weekend and showed us evidence of folks proud to celebrate offline, about which I'll get to post about here someday when I get caught up on sharing our travelogues, Lord willing. Anne, for one, was excited to see America cross that milestone without preemption by the Second Coming, collapsing under a giant meteor, or being conquered by a conspiratorial Canada/Mexico tag-team invasion. She braked at every roadside attraction that acknowledged its happening and was overjoyed to see that same enthusiasm here at the fair. […] -
Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 2: The Year in VHS
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 once again the most interesting exhibit was hosted in the Harvest Pavilion: "Rewind: A VHS Revival". Same as last year's tribute to LP cover art, the curators started with a simple premise -- in this case, "Remember movies on videotape? Those were awesome!" -- and didn't tailor everything to Indiana specifically, so much as it hearkened toward ye olde American entertainment monoculture. They assembled a collection of simulated video-rental store shelves, videotape boxes, movie posters, painted recreations of posters and iconic images, a few educational sections about filmmaking, and so on. Their contributors offered some offbeat choices, so it wasn't all just Spielberg and Star Wars. […]https://midlifecrisiscrossover.com/2026/08/23/indiana-state-fair-2026-photos-part-2-the-year-in-vhs/
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Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 1: Our “Taste of the Fair” Tour, Worst to Best
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. Each time 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 tenderloin 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. […] -
Bloomington woman wins grand champ, best of show for garden produce at Indiana State Fair https://www.allforgardening.com/1421341/bloomington-woman-wins-grand-champ-best-of-show-for-garden-produce-at-indiana-state-fair/ #4H #affiliate #agriculture #AgricultureU0026Forestry #fair #fairs #food #forestry #fruits #FruitsU0026Vegetables #garden #gardening #Indiana #IndianaStateFair #local #LocalAffiliateFood #LocalNews #Marimo. #news #Overall #OverallPositive #positive #state #StateFairs #u0026 #vegetables
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Here are some of the chickens of the Indiana State Fair. It's nice to see the chickens after they have been absent for many years due to bird flu. Today is the last day, so I have to wait another year to see these beauties again. #indianastatefair #statefair #hoosiermast #chickens
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I went to the opening day of the Indiana State Fair (now until Aug 17, closed Mondays) at the State Fairgrounds in Indianapolis. The replaced knee held up for 4.5 miles, though I had to take a break from walking today. #indianastatefair #fair #hoosiermast
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The Indiana State Fair is over for another year (sad face). #IndianaStateFair #sunset #midway #HoosierMast
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Seen at the Indiana State Fair. Descriptions in ALT. #indianastatefair #statefair #fairfood #food #cheesesculpture #chicken #HoosierMast
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There was harness racing at the Indiana State Fair today! This clip was from practice before the races started. The first horse was a pacer, while the second horse (#7) was a trotter. The Fair ends August 18 and is closed on Mondays. #indianastatefair #statefair #racing #HoosierMast
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Harness racing is happening at the Indiana State Fair today! #horses #IndianaStateFair #racing #harnessracing #photography #video #Indianapolis #hoosiermast
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More pictures from the Indiana State Fair. Descriptions with each picture. #IndianaStateFair #fair #cheesesculpture #shuttles #foodstalls #midway #photography
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This video shows a sow nursing her very large litter of piglets at the Indiana State Fair. One of the piglets gets left out and squeals its protest (turn up the volume). #indianastatefair #pigletsnursing #video #photography
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The highlight of my year is when the Indiana State Fair comes to town. Since I walk with a cane, I make several trips and each time I concentrate on one area of the fair. Today, it was animals. #indianastatefair #statefair #llamas #horses #goats #cattle #fairanimals #photography #fairphotography