WINTER 2008: February 2–April 13
Solitaire: Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Joan Semmel
In the 1960s and 1970s, Lee Lozano, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Joan Semmel each painted ambitious canvases at a time when the very activity of painting was coming under fire from the most advanced circles of the New York art world. This show explores the highly individual practices of these artists and offers three small retrospectives, bound together as a group exhibition, that present fresh historical and critical perspectives on these important but relatively underrepresented American artists. This exhibition is organized by the Wexner Center and curated by Helen Molesworth; it will be accompanied by a catalogue.
Wexner Center Residency Award project
Kerry James Marshall: Every Beat of My Heart
The Wexner Center plays host to a longterm collaborative project, community initiative, performance, and exhibition revolving around the work of internationally known artist Kerry James Marshall. In his work, Marshall explores the everyday lived reality of urban African Americans in works that are both visually stunning and socially engaged. His residency project will use as its springboard Marshall’s comic book narrative Rythm Mastr, an epic tale about love, vengeance, and redemption featuring black superheroes. Marshall will present the narrative in performance form with puppets based on African sculpture and Japanese Bunraku puppetry. To achieve this, he will collaborate with a select group of Columbus teens over the course of several months. Ultimately, they will bring Rythm Mastr to life in the galleries using the puppets during scheduled performance times in early February 2008. During the run of the exhibition, the puppets will be displayed in the galleries as sculpture; the exhibition will also feature drawings and video documentation. Shelly Casto, the Wexner Center's director of education, is the exhibition's curator.
Adi Nes: Biblical Stories
Photographer Adi Nes is one of Israel’s most widely recognized artists, known for his staged portraits and tableaux that pursue questions of identity. In this selection of 11 large-scale photographs from his latest body of work, Biblical Stories (2003-2006), Nes recasts figures from the Old Testament, finding within the original Bible narratives those moments in the characters’ fates that found them dispossessed or exiled. Casting ordinary people from Tel Aviv as the biblical figures, Nes draws from classical painting and contemporary iconography, from Caravaggio to Dorothea Lange, in imagining the characters of tribal myth as denizens of Israel’s urban underclass, a new class of “homeless” in the heart of the Jewish homeland. This show is organized by the Wexner Center and curated by Bill Horrigan, the center’s director of media arts.
SUMMER 2008: May 10–August 3
Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond
Based in Columbus, Jeff Smith is one of the country’s most acclaimed and influential comic book artist/writers, best known for the epic graphic novel Bone. In 2005, Time magazine called Bone, which Smith wrote and drew, one of the 10 greatest graphic novels of all-time. This exhibition—a partnership between the Wexner Center and Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library—will include approximately 75 original drawings: primarily original black-and-white pages from Bone, with a smaller selection of full-color Bone covers and post-Bone work, including original drawings from Smith’s recent Shazam series for DC Comics. The exhibition will also include a selection of original work by comic artists that Smith cites as direct influences, such as Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Carl Banks’ Uncle Scrooge comics, Will Eisner’s The Spirit, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, and E.C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre. The exhibition is organized by Lucy Shelton Caswell, Professor and Curator of Ohio State’s Cartoon Research Library, and David Filipi, the Wexner Center’s Curator of Film and Video. The catalogue features an introduction by Caswell, and essays by Filipi, Sandman creator Neil Gaiman, and cartoonist and scholar Scott McCloud.
Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone
This nationally touring show is the first retrospective of work by influential New York-based painter Mary Heilmann. A pioneer of infusing abstract painting with influences from popular culture and craft traditions, Heilmann is one of the most important yet least recognized artists in the United States today. One of the very few female abstract painters of her generation, she has nevertheless maintained a steadfast commitment to producing eccentric, engaging, visceral paintings. Featuring 75 works from the last three decades, the exhibition also explores Heilmann’s interest in ceramics, decorative arts, film, and music. It is organized by the Orange County Museum of Art. The show also tours to Contemporary Art Museum in Houston this fall, and to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in 2009. A catalogue featuring essays by Elizabeth Armstrong, Johanna Burton, Dave Hickey, and Al Ruppersberg accompanies the exhibition.
Jane Hammond: Fallen
Now on a national tour, Jane Hammond’s Fallen features a large field of colorful, handmade leaves, each inscribed with the name of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. The leaves in the piece—made of paper and fabric—are based on leaves gathered by Hammond between 2004 and 2007, and the spread of leaves grows as soldiers die. Fallen was first exhibited at Galerie Lelong in New York in 2005, and shortly after was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art (and is on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis this winter). The current iteration of Fallen includes more than 3,500 leaves; the first version opened with 1,511. Based in New York, Hammond has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the country, and her work is in public collections around the world.
2009-10 Season
Luc Tuymans
The Wexner Center for the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are co-organizing the first major retrospective in the U.S. of the work of Belgian artist Luc Tuymans, one of the most highly regarded artists of his generation. Tuymans represented his country at the 2001 Venice Biennale, participated in Documenta XI, and was recently featured in a major exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. Using a muted palette to create images that can be enigmatic and disarmingly stark, Tuymans explores issues of history and memory, photography and painting. At the same time, his works evoke a powerful sense of history, investigating such themes as colonialism in the Belgian Congo, the Holocaust, and Christ’s Passion. Co-curators: Helen Molesworth and Madeleine Grynsztejn. The show opens at the Wexner Center and will then tour to SFMOMA and the Dallas Museum of Art. The catalogue features essays by Molesworth, Grynsztein, and Bill Horrigan.
