The Marsh Supermarket on East Memorial Drive in Muncie opened in 1955 as Wise Food Market. Local Ross Supermarkets purchased the chain in 1997, then Marsh bought Ross in 2000. The company operated the former Wise store as a Savin*$ discount operation until it closed in 2006. Today, the storefront is home to a flea market.
“Abandoned Marsh” was my project to stylistically document the Marsh Supermarkets closed by Sun Capital Partners, an investment firm that owned the home-grown company for the final decade of its eighty-six year history. The last Marsh supermarket closed in 2017.
The company’s stores built from around 1980 to 2004 or so were easily identifiable because of their angular greenhouses and dark brick massing. Instead of taking pictures of the buildings, I decided to create 18×24 vector files in Adobe Illustrator, focusing on the complexity of their angles and how shadows and highlights interacted.