A creative laboratory

Over 20 years of generous investment in the artistic process.

Mark Bradford

As a research and development laboratory for the arts in all disciplines, the Wexner Center has offered significant support to artists in myriad ways since its inception in 1989. Residencies and commissions sponsored by the Wex have allowed hundreds of artists working in all disciplines from around the globe to create new work or explore new creative directions. The center’s support for artists underscores a core commitment to inspire cultural curiosity and fuel the creative expression of our time, while complementing Ohio State’s mission as a leading research institution. Works produced under the auspices of Wexner Center residencies and commissions often premiere here and then travel the globe, and they virtually always allow for meaningful interaction among the artists, the university community, and the public at large.

Josiah McElheny

Among the diverse artists who receive production assistance each year, recipients of the Wexner Center Artist Residency Award constitute a special category. A handful of artists spanning all creative disciplines are selected annually by the center’s director and curators to receive this distinction. Celebrating its 20th anniversary this season, the Artist Residency Award program (previously known as the Wexner Center Residency Award program) offers the most substantial support: considerable financial resources, along with technical, intellectual, professional, and moral support to develop new work. A total of $200,000 annually is earmarked for distribution across the center’s disciplines—visual arts, performing arts, film, and, soon, education. Each residency is specifically tailored to the particular needs and rhythms of the artist. We in turn bring the full resources of the Wexner Center and Ohio State to their pursuits, often brokering collaborations across campus—not only with faculty, staff, and students in the arts and humanities, but with those in the sciences, as well as in business, law, and medicine—and in the broader local community.

Young Jean Lee (left)

Wexner Center Residency Artist Award recipients to date have hailed from four continents and numerous countries, including China, Argentina, France, Germany, Iran, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, and the United Kingdom, in addition to the United States and Canada. Frequently, the work produced under the auspices of the Wex travels on to major national and international venues. Wexner Center Artist Residency Award recipients have gone on to receive MacArthur Foundation fellowships, National Medal of Arts awards, Tony Awards, “Bessie” Awards (New York Dance and Performance awards), Oscar nominations, Cannes Film Festival awards, Film Independent Spirit awards, and the Wexner Prize, among other recognitions.

Find the full list of Artist Residency Award recipients (since 1991-92) at right. Artist Residency Award recipients for 2011–12 and their projects are discussed below.

Wexner Center Residency Awards 2011-12

Visual Arts

Ernst Caramelle, an Austrian artist based in New York and Germany, visited the center in January 2012 to create a wall painting that now envelops the Wexner Center’s lobby area. On view until July 1, this painting is composed of geometric forms rendered in delicate watercolor hues, using deceptively simple means to transform and complicate the space it occupies. Always interested in questions of perception, Caramelle has worked and exhibited in a variety of media since the 1970s, including painting, video, collage, and large-scale installations.

Media Arts

• Dani Leventhal, a Columbus native now based in New York, is working on an ambitious new project (tentatively a multi-channel video installation) at the Wexner Center. She began her residency early in 2011, editing a series of short films based on footage from a recent trip to Israel, at the Wexner Center. She returned in late October 2011 to engage in a public discussion with filmmaker Jacqueline Goss, in whose film The Observers Leventhal stars. In conjunction with that screening, Leventhal showed two of her short videos about the troubling and beautiful moments she experienced in Israel. Also during that visit, Leventhal led a class with Ohio State's Film Studies program and participated in studio visits with students in the Department of Art. In addition, she offered a lunchtime conversation for students, faculty, and staff at the OSU Hillel Wexner Jewish Student Center.


• New York–based French filmmaker Marie Losier worked on her documentary film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye while in residence in the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Studio Program in June 2011. Filmed over the course of seven years, her intimate film follows the relationship of taboo-busting music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his partner and collaborator, Lady Jaye. The film centers around the daring sexual transformations the pair undertook in their “Pandrogyne” project, where they sought to become two parts of the same person. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye went on to screen in many different cities and received several international awards. Losier returns to the Wexner Center April 20–21, 2012, to introduce her groundbreaking work. Losier has also begun work on a portrait of Warhol superstar Mario Montez with her Artist Residency Award.


• Columbus-based filmmaker Matt Meindl is working on a new experimental animation, which he expects to finish in the spring of 2012. The work will be featured in an upcoming public program at the Wex.


• Michael Robinson, who is based in New York, will be shooting a 16mm feature-length film with his Residency Award. He worked in residence at the Wexner Center in October and December of 2011 and will return in March to continue work on his project. While in residence in October, Robinson presented his work to a group of Ohio State faculty and students and conducted studio visits with graduate students.

Performing Arts

The Builders Association

The Artist Residency Award in the performing arts for 2010–11 and for 2011–12 made possible the production of The Builders Association’s HOUSE / DIVIDED, a multimedia theater show about the contemporary foreclosure crisis juxtaposed with text drawn from John Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath. This show had its world premiere at Ohio State in October 2011. Over the course of a year, and three residency periods, the NYC-based group worked with students and staff from various departments and schools across Ohio State, from business to architecture to agriculture to theater, to develop and refine ideas for the show. Their residency was also supported in part by a Creative Campus Innovations grant awarded to this project from the Washington, D.C.–based Association of Performing Arts Presenters, one of six projects receiving awards from a highly competitive pool of 240 university and college applicants. HOUSE / DIVIDED is continuing on to the BAM Next Wave Festival in New York in October 2012. More details can be found here.

COMMISSIONS AND OTHER TYPES OF ARTIST SUPPORT

Throughout the year, the Wexner Center also is involved in commissions of new work by additional individual artists and companies, some of whom also come to work in artists’ residencies at the center. During the 2011–2012 season, we provided support to filmmaker and New York-based Ohio native Kevin Jerome Everson, who spent time in the Film/Video Studio Program in May 2011 completing Chevelle, a meditation on the American auto industry that showed continuously in the Box space during the month of January. Composer/guitarist Bill Frisell’s collaboration with filmmaker Bill Morrison The Great Flood was co-commissioned by the Wexner Center and will be performed here March 31, 2012. Choreographer John Jasperse’s dance work Canyon, co-commissioned by the Wex and BAM Next Wave Festival, will be performed here April 26–28. And in the fall of 2011, Paula Hayes designed and installed a permanent roof garden for the Wexner Center, which sits above the center’s underground Film/Video Theater just outside the Wexner Center’s entrance. These are but a few of the recent projects created under the auspices of Wex residencies and commissions.

Film/Video Studio Program

Among the most active “labs” at the center is our Film/Video Studio, a video and sound editing facility that also provides access to on-site staff expertise. Each year, about 20 visiting filmmakers and video artists from around the world are invited to work in the Film/Video Studio. (Some of these artists have been Artist Residency Award recipients.) Films and videos created or post-produced at the Wexner Center are often screened here, but also frequently shown at prestigious film festivals, museums, and galleries around the world.

Press release (pdf)

Wexner Center Artist Residency Awards

Visual Arts


Film/Video (Media Arts)


Performing Arts

Saturday, February 4th

• FILM/VIDEO
  • THE BOX
    Solar Breath (Northern Caryatids)
  • UCLA FESTIVAL OF PRESERVATION
    Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
• EXHIBITIONS
  • David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy
  • Sarah Morris: Points on a Line
  • Ernst Caramelle