wexner center for the arts


About Us


Artists' Residencies

A program that makes the Wexner Center unique.

Residencies at the Wexner Center offer support to artists and often provide opportunities for interaction with the Ohio State community and the public at large. They are an essential part of our mandate to be a creative research laboratory for all the arts.

Wexner Center Residency Awards are our most substantial and high-profile residencies. They are given annually in our main program areas—performing arts, media arts (film/video), and visual arts—with some projects extending over two or more years. Residency Award recipients for 2010-11 are Paul Sietsema in visual arts, The Builders Association in performing arts, and Art Spiegelman and Sam Green in media arts.

Other artists participating in exhibitions and performances also may receive commissions and often engage in residency activities (such as workshops, master classes, and discussion sessions with students and the community) during their time at the center. In addition, about 20 visiting filmmakers and video artists from around the world are invited to use the facilities of our Art & Technology studio and editing suite each year.


Wexner Center Residency Awards 2010-11

Visual Arts

Artist Paul Sietsema, who lives and works in Los Angeles, will use this year's award in visual arts to support the development of new works in advance of a Wexner Center exhibition scheduled for 2012. Sietsema begins each of his projects with a period of extensive research and then produces a suite of related works that usually includes a film plus associated drawings and sculptures. As part of Empire (a 2002 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art), for example, he built a maquette of art critic Clement Greenberg’s apartment in New York, based on photographs published in a 1964 Vogue magazine article, and crafted a 24-minute film from footage of this constructed interior space and views of reconstructed architectural projects from other eras. Sietsema is committed to getting to know history on material and metaphorical levels by immersing himself in past eras through his labor as an artist. He then interweaves the results of that labor with artifacts from the present to produce what he calls "an exploded" model of history’s messy progress in which disparate eras speak to each other and to viewers in varied ways.

Sietsema has presented his projects in solo exhibitions at such venues as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, as well as in group exhibitions including Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh in 2008. His exhibition here will be the most comprehensive survey of his work to date, combining films and other pieces from a number of past projects with new works supported by the residency.


Media Arts

Two notable artists share this year’s award in media arts (film/video), and both are visiting the Wexner Center this fall. Artist and author Art Spiegelman is one of the leading figures in the development of the contemporary graphic novel and has remained a leading innovator in his field. With such titles as Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986, 1991) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), he is known for leading the graphic novel into the subjects and themes of great literature. His residency is a collaboration between the Wex and Ohio State's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, and he intends to develop a new project based on research in the Cartoon Library & Museum's collection. He'll talk about his work on Sunday, October 17, in conjunction with the 2010 Festival of Cartoon Art. (Click here to go to the webpage about the event in the inSight section.)

Documentary filmmaker Sam Green has worked in the Wexner Center's Art & Tech post-production studio on past projects and also visited to introduce The Weather Underground, his Oscar-nominated look at the young American radicals of the 1960s and 1970s that earned accolades at the Sundance Film Festival and the Whitney Biennial. Green, who is based in San Francisco, returns to town on November 19 to present his latest project, Utopia in Four Movements, a kind of "live documentary" that combines film with live music and commentary (see the onScreen pages for more info). In addition to that presentation, he will be returning to the Art & Tech studios in the upcoming year to work on some of his new projects.


Performing Arts

The Wexner Center has an active and long-standing relationship with The Builders Association, a multimedia theater ensemble based in New York City, and we're pleased to welcome them back to Ohio State this season. The company arrives in January 2011 for a joint creative residency with the Wex and Ohio State's Department of Theatre. The residency will enable the Builders to develop their next production, ROAD TRIP (GRAPES of WRATH), with close involvement from students. The piece tells a contemporary story of the evicted, focusing on a family that has lost its upscale California home to the mortgage crisis. The narrative contrasts the Joads’ journey West during the Great Depression (from the classic novel and movie Grapes of Wrath) with a modern journey East, as the California family hits the road in a SUV, finding community and stranger-than-fiction tales of the resurgence of nomadic life in contemporary America. Stay tuned for more news about ROAD TRIP during the January residency and watch for the finished work on our 2011–12 schedule.

Audiences here may remember several earlier and equally intriguing productions by the Builders. In 2003 we hosted the world premiere of ALLADEEN, a show that explored the phenomenon of global job outsourcing, following a brief creative residency with the Builders and moti roti, the London arts organization that collaborated on the piece. The Builders received a 2004–5 Wexner Center Residency Award, along with support from campus partners at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD), to develop and launch another project, SUPER VISION, which examined surveillance technology in the computer age. Most recently, the Wexner Center was among the co-commissioning partners for CONTINUOUS CITY, a multimedia vision of the disconnections that arise in our accelerated culture of digital interconnectedness, presented here in 2009.