When Germane Barnes, director of Miami-based Studio Barnes, was selected to create an installation for the 2025 edition of Exhibit Columbus in Indiana, he pursued a medium that draws people together like almost none other: music.
The project, which opens to the public on Saturday 16 August, is titled Joy Riding. Located at the Jackson Street Garage in downtown Columbus, Indiana, Joy Riding reimagines the humble parking garage as a series of larger-than-life sub-woofers – the bass-pumping speakers that you’ll find in the trunks of cars in the predominantly Black communities of Chicago, where Barnes was born and raised. At a party this evening (15 August), a DJ will spin tunes blasting through the fully functioning sub-woofers, while listeners can perch on speaker-shaped seating.
The Studio Barnes team
For Barnes, Joy Riding dovetails perfectly with this year’s Exhibit Columbus theme, ‘Yes And’, a term borrowed from improv theatre that encourages shared, ongoing storytelling. ‘It's the joy that comes when you are in high school... getting your first car, passing driver's ed and taking the keys from your parents and saying, “I'll be back,”’ Barnes tells Wallpaper*. ‘That freedom from when you get to put your hands on the steering wheel and it's just you and the car.’
Joy Riding was the result of some site-specific serendipity. Studio Barnes, one of four 2025 J Irwin and Xenia S Miller Prize recipients, was instructed to rank four potential sites by preference: the historic Crump Theater, the former site of the Irwin Block Building, the First Christian Church Sunken Courtyard and the garage, which was actually the Studio’s third choice.
‘We were given the parking garage and ran with it,’ Barnes says. ‘The parking garage made us think about cars – about idling, what do you do in the car when you're with your friends. And there's already a very long history [in Indiana] with cars, with The Indy 500. There's also a very big car culture in the Black community. So, we thought this was a great way to blend all these different topics into one cohesive proposal.’
The custom speaker design was created with the help of Portland, Oregon-based fabricator Matchless Builds. It consists of a nine-foot by five-foot steel powder-coated frame base with a second frame that holds wood-panel doors that open to reveal the speakers, which are made of dense plywood to withstand the elements and the weight of people sitting on them. A state-of-the art sound system within the speakers is operable by both traditional wires and Bluetooth, Barnes says.
Though programming is still being finalised as we write, pop-up events are in the works at Joy Riding – including a car show in collaboration with local car clubs across the state, and an old-fashioned drive-in movie night.
'Our interpretation of “Yes And” was really around the performance of the car and how people either interact with that performance or are a part of that performance,' says Barnes.
‘[We hope to] make people understand what it means to just have that utter freedom, especially during this time when there are so many unfortunate things happening around the globe,’ he adds.
Joy Riding will make its debut during the Sunset Preview Party on Friday 15 August. Exhibit Columbus runs from 16 August through 30 November 2025.
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