Exploring the history of the Ohio State Wexner Center for the Arts
The Wexner Center for the Arts is nothing if not cutting-edge, always looking at what’s new, innovative and vital in contemporary art. But sometimes, it’s fun to look back: Just how did the Wex become the Wex?
The winter exhibition at the Ohio State University art center, “To Begin, Again: A Prehistory of the Wex, 1968-89,” presents a variety of the works that were collected by the University Gallery of Fine Art, predecessor to the avant-garde Wexner Center.
This exhibit is the largest to date of works from the university’s permanent collection and includes pieces by more than 70 artists including Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper and Frank Stella.
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Organized by Associate Curator of Exhibitions Daniel Marcus, the exhibit is presented in roughly chronological order, beginning in lower-level Gallery A with artworks and memorabilia from the 1960s and ‘70s.
This was a period during which the University Gallery was presided over by its Fine Art Director Betty Collings, an artist herself who navigated the gallery through the protests and turbulence of the late ’60s and ’70s and began to acquire what became the bedrock of the collection.
On view here are Sol LeWitt’s stark wall hanging “Incomplete Open Cube;” Agnes Denes’ impossibly long and detailed “Pascal’s Triangle Drawing No. 3 from Pyramid Series”; early digital art by OSU’s Charles Csuri, a pioneer in the genre; and an array of significant correspondence, notes, calendar entries and more from the archives of Collings, an active artist now in her 80s.
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Moving upward to the next gallery, viewers enter a bit of psychedelia, works from the mid-1970s and ’80s. Especially striking is Joan Brown’s “Woman Preparing for a Shower,” a 1975 enamel on canvas work with the main subject dressed in a blue polka-dot robe and shower cap, assisted by a dog standing on his hind legs to offer her a checkered towel.
Other significant works in this section include Betty Collings’ large-scale inflatable sculpture “Dance” (1975-76), resembling an enormous shiny white snake that looks to have swallowed some equally enormous garlic bulbs; and Robert J. Stull’s “Songhai,” a colorful and abstract mixed-media sculpture honoring the Songhai Empire of Central Africa in the 15th and 16th centuries. Stull was a professor of Black Studies and chairman of the division of art that oversaw the gallery — and husband to artist Bettye Stull, a well-known Columbus curator.
In the 1980s, Collings was succeeded as director by Jonathan Green, who stressed activism in the acquisition and presentation of art. The upper-level galleries offer a variety of works responding to current events and crises and, as a text panel states, expressing artists’ “shared revulsion at the persistence of violence, racism and sexism in America.”
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Here viewers will find large-scale pieces by socially engaged artists; a 36-foot long mural created on campus in 1984 by graffiti artist Futura2000 (now Futura); Frank Stella’s massive abstract wall sculpture “Puerto Rican Blue Pigeon (1976); Eva Hesse’s wall sculpture “Area” (1968); hanging fabric posters recalling “RAPE,” the first national touring show to address sexual violence; and Adrian Piper’s “Four Intruders Plus Alarm Systems” (1980), an interactive, large black cylinder with a soundtrack playing stereotypical comments regarding white receptions to Black art.
In 1989, University Gallery presented its final official exhibit: “AIDS: The Artists’ Response.” In “To Begin, Again,” works from that exhibit are shown along with photographs of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt when it was brought to Ohio State and displayed in the Woody Hayes Athletic Center.
By that time, initial funds for the university’s new contemporary art center had been donated by Leslie H. Wexner and an architectural competition set in motion.
The Wexner Center for the Arts — with its daring Peter Eisenman design that is both futuristic and referential to Ohio State’s past — opened in November 1989. Performance artist Spalding Gray described it as a “spaceship that crash-landed on the prairie.”
That spaceship has navigated viewers to some of the most interesting and groundbreaking art of the day. It is intriguing that “To Begin, Again,” which begins with the protests and activism of the 1960s, is presented during the 2020s, a similar era of social unrest.
How interesting it will be to see how the Wex presents today’s art in a future exhibit that looks back.
At a glance
“To Begin Again: A Prehistory of the Wex, 1968-89” continues through May 8 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, 1871 N. High St. Gallery hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. Admission: $9; $7 senior citizens, OSU faculty and staff; free for members, college students, veterans and active military personal and age 18 and younger; free for all Sundays and from 4 to 7 p.m. Thursdays. Call 614-292-3535 or visit www.wexarts.org.
At 4 p.m.March 2, at the Wexner Center, graffiti artist Futura will speak with fellow artist Zephyr about their work and their association with Ohio State University.
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