In the spotlight: A look back at 2022’s local arts and cultural highlights

The spotlight for the area’s arts and culture in 2022 ranged from the stage to music to film and more.

Here’s a quick look back at just some of the top happenings, in no particular order.

• The impact of an arts leader who moved to reach a wider audience: Kathryn Armstrong served the local nonprofit Columbus Area Arts Council as executive director from 2016 until May, when she left for a post in Michigan. But she took an organization that had long presented concert-style events and nimbly changed it in an age of competing Live Nation events and the at-the-time upcoming Brown County Music Center. In fact, she launched just what she initially promised: events such as the 50 50 Community Art Project that have made residents art participants and not more ticket buyers and onlookers — and did it successfully even amid a community that sometimes failed to understand the departure from such risky music events.
• “Columbus” film stars return: Kogonada, director of the much-acclaimed “Columbus” film starring the local Modernist architectural marvels, told a crowd of about 300 people at North Christian Church that movie leads and directors rarely ever return to the site of a completed film after its opening. But, in late September, there they were — the unconventional director with film stars John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson — speaking from the heart about their love for local residents, their emotional connections during their three-week stay here during the 2016 shoot, and more. The event also highlighted the organizing Landmark Columbus Foundation’s continued ability to make architecture, design and community a matter of the heart.
• An orchestral icon’s retirement: Columbus Indiana Philharmonic Artistic Director David Bowden’s impact over 35 years with the city’s first professional orchestra hardly can be easily reviewed in a few sentences. But his work in building an ensemble that became even something of a corporate recruiting tool among locally courted business leaders speaks volumes far beyond concertos and crescendos.
• Big sold-out dinner theater in tiny Hope: Applause, applause for Actors Studio of Hope and Passion for Acting Theatre Company for continuing to draw sizable and often sold-out crowds for dinner theater comedies, dramas, you name it. Some of the sellouts began as far back as a decade ago with such productions as “Steel Magnolias.” And more recent shows that played before a total of 900 sold-out seats over three weekends have been comedies such as “Church Basement Ladies.” Small town, huge hits.

• Ethnic Expo’s return: We include this not only for its sheer attendance draw in the thousands on the second weekend in October, but for what it represents beyond cuisine, music and dance: a small, cosmopolitan city’s commitment to celebrating diversity in a world that sometimes can feel narrow-minded. The fact that the two-day international festival made a solid return from the pandemic means the world to a city built on international business and culture.

• Hot acts in the hills: The return of live concerts at Brown County Music Center, from classic pop acts such as Gordon Lightfoot with a sellout show to Kevin Costner and Modern West — cheered on by none other than Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood — is a big deal when considering that local concertgoers otherwise have to travel much farther, and pay far more, to catch shows in Indianapolis, Louisville, Kentucky, or Cincinnati, Ohio.

• A budding Sixth Street Arts Alley: The screamingly multi-colored downtown short strip drew as many as 200 to 300 people to some outdoor gatherings this year — a sign that Daniel Martinez’s and Lulu Loquidis’ inspiration, with the help of the Columbus Area Arts Council, is poised to offer more colorful entertainment.