Medina Triennial - Other Means

The Medina Triennial is the first recurring international contemporary art exhibition of its scale to be rooted in a U.S. community like Medina—a post-industrial town situated along a bend in the Erie Canal. Grounded in the ecologies, histories, and communities of Western New York, the Triennial makes ambitious contemporary art accessible while connecting local knowledge to the urgent questions of our time. In 2025, Other Means was brought on to design the visual identity for the Triennial and its inaugural edition, “All That Sustains Us,” which opened in June 2026.

Low bridge, we must be getting near a town

The waterway’s sequence of locks produces a spatial rhythm defined by vertical transitions, stepped topographies and incremental shifts in elevation. In Medina, the canal passes over the road. These physical qualities of stepping and passage ultimately informed the Triennial’s visual language.

System

The visual identity for the Medina Triennial is derived from a simple gesture informed by the Erie Canal’s lock system and the elevation changes it navigates. Typography steps above and below preceding words and phrases, turning language into building blocks that pose the central question of the 2026 Triennial: “What does it take to keep things going?”

The typeface is a redrawn version of Folio, modified with shortened descenders that allow individual lines of text to be tightly set on top of each other. The character set was expanded to include fractions, enclosed numerals, and a suite of arrows that were used on the website and in signage across town.

OM Bauer Folio

Stepping Type

Typesetting works analogously to the Erie Canal locks, progressing through vertical increments that cause the text to look as if it’s “cascading” through each sentence or paragraph.

Color

The village of Medina is known for its sandstone and the Erie Canal, two examples of nature transformed into infrastructure. Medina sandstone has a unique color palette that fluctuates between deep reddish browns, grays, and tans. The water flowing through the canal varies in color as it reflects the sky and its surroundings.

Instead of referencing photographs of the actual canal, which often show the water as a dark brown, we looked at antique, hand-colored postcards, where photographers used oversaturated pigments to reflect the feeling of the water.

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Website

The Medina Triennial’s website demonstrates a relationship to place. Elevation shifts and the varied color palette appear across the user experience as buoyant headlines float in and out of view.

A Directory of Artists and Sites

Built to support the Triennial before, during, and between editions, the Medina Triennial website spotlights a list of globally renowned participating artists and various relevant sites around Medina—functioning both as an operational visitor guide for on-the-ground Triennial-goers and an evolving archive for future editions.

The Triennial spans 10 sites across Medina, which are mapped on the website and indexed to all artists on view at that site—from Mary Mattingly’s Floating Garden on the Erie Canal to the main exhibition site, the Historic Medina High School, which hosts the bulk of the participating artists.