Washington High School’s Bird Cage and Loogootee’s JFK Gym are featured in a new photo exhibit from the Indiana Historical Society.
The two gyms, full of high school basketball history, are among those included in The Hoosier Hardwood Photo Project: A Journey to Indiana’s Historic High School Gyms.
The exhibit showcases the work of photographers Michael E. Keating and Chris Smith.
Smith says the journey to document some of the places where high school basketball has lived, began in 2013. By this past summer, he says they’ve traveled over $10,000 miles, visited 130 gyms and watched countless hours of basketball and shot more than 150,000 digital frames.
Keating when as far to say that quote “Basketball is kind of like a religion in Indiana, and the gymnasiums are the places where that religion is practiced.
The images also reveal a wide-range of Hoosier basketball moments. They say you can feel the intensity of the crowd in the catwalk-style balcony of the Bird Cage, and take a moment to reflect on the storied career of Jack Butcher inside the former Loogootee High School gymnasium.
The Hoosier Hardwood Photo Project opens Saturday, Oct. 1 and runs through Saturday, Nov. 12, at the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana History Center in downtown Indianapolis. The exhibit is included with admission to the Indiana Experience, open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday.
For more information about this exhibit, call (317) 232-1882 or visit IHS online at . THE HOOSIER HARDWOOD PHOTO PROJECT