Columbus is a winner along with Brown County’s Nashville and nearby Bloomington in the 2024 Newsweek Readers’ Choice Awards contest for best small-town arts scene. Nominations were made by an expert panel of travel writers, and the public voted for this honor.
The top 10 winners in this category are as follows:
1. Berea, Kentucky
2. Bay St. Louis, Missouri
3. Taos, New Mexico
4. Cody, Wyoming
5. St. Augustine, Florida
6. Columbus, Indiana
7. Salado, Texas
8. Bloomington, Indiana
9. Logan (Hocking Hills), Ohio
10. Nashville, Indiana
Erin Hawkins, marketing director for the Columbus Area Visitors Center and a former president of the board of the Columbus Area Arts Council, offered her perspective on the latest honor.
“Those of us who call Columbus home know how fortunate we are to have many opportunities to enjoy the arts in this community,” she said, “and visitors are blown away by our abundant collection of public art and the caliber of our performing arts offerings.
“Congratulations to all our outstanding arts organizations on this honor; it’s their great work that earned us these bragging rights.”
The city has regularly appeared in various national rankings of best smaller cities for the past decade or more, and still is mentioned as a top draw, of course, for its Modernist architecture structures done by globally noted designers.