The Wexner Center for the Arts is looking for a Web and Interactive Coordinator. The position will be posted on Ohio State’s HR site beginning Friday, July 10 and will be posted for a week. This is an opportunity to lead our growing digital presence at the Wexner Center, overseeing all aspects of site maintenance and improvements, social media strategy, and electronic content production. Experience with CMS, development and design are important, as well as a strong passion for contemporary art (performing arts, film/video, visual), and developing tools to engage an audience. You will manage 1-2 student employees and will be a key member of the Wexner Center’s marketing team. We welcome folks with museum or arts org experience, but someone who thinks digitally is more important. Please remember, only applicants who submit materials through the OSU HR web site will be considered.
Fine print:
On the Ohio State HR web site, Wexner Center positions are listed as “Office of Academic Affairs-WCA”. Associate Editor (working title: Web & Interactive Coordinator) – job opening ID 345891
Catharina Manchanda, senior curator of exhibitions, hit three art (and architecture) hotspots in June: Chicago, Venice, and Munich. Following are some musings and highlights from those trips.
Punta della Dogana on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy
(Image via Mike Blanchette on Flickr)
First stop: The Art Institute of Chicago’s “Modern Wing,” designed by Renzo Piano (who was awarded the Wexner Prize in 2001), which opened with great fanfare in May. The new building has an elegant and bright central hall, and visitors can appreciate the museum’s collection of modern and contemporary art in spacious new galleries, offering also dramatic views of the city skyline. Some of my favorite installations include Picasso’s maquette Head of a Woman in front of one of the windows. It sets up a dialogue with the urban environment since the monumental version of the Picasso sculpture is a downtown landmark. In the contemporary galleries, I lingered in a gallery with early works by Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. The installation poetically underscored the element of fragility in both artists’ works. If you visit the Art Institute this summer you will also find an entire gallery devoted to works by Kerry James Marshall, who had a solo show at the Wexner Center last year.
Watch as Robin Rhode creates artwork on a wall inside the Wexner Center for the Arts. Catch Air: Robin Rhode is currently on view at the Wex through July 26.
We’ve commissioned local rock poster artist Clinton Reno to create an original piece for the Soundtrack Available: Music in American Film series, and he didn’t disappoint. Individually screen-printed, numbered, and signed works are available in our Store for $10. Read more about Mr. Reno and his stellar work in a recent Dispatch feature here.
Our favorite “Party with a Purpose” is almost here: Comfest. Make sure that you stop by our booth this weekend. We’ll broadcast our booth location and contests throughout the weekend via Twitter, so make sure you’re following.
While at the festival, you can purchase a Soundtrack Available: Music in American Film discount ticket package and save $9 . Plus, if you buy it at the festival you will receive a free limited edition screen printed poster by local artist Clinton Reno.
During the Gallery Hop on August 1, the Mahan Gallery will have an opening for “This is a Comic Book,” an overview of current threads in comics as represented by some of the more interesting voices in the field. Featuring artists such as Ron Rege Jr., Lauren Weinstein, Anders Nilsen, and Columbus’s own Phonzie Davis, the exhibition hopes to hint at the full spectrum of possibilities within the medium while casting a few questions at the propriety of its possibly tongue-in-cheek title.
The show will be accompanied by a small run catalog-zine featuring writing by Anne Elizabeth Moore, former editor of the Comics Journal, and the Wexner Center’s own film and video curator, Dave Filipi.
Books by the comics creators will be available for purchase courtesy of the Wexner Center Store. More information, including a full artist list, can be found here.
James Payne works at the Wexner Center store. He co-curated this exhibition with Colleen Grennan.
image credit:
Panayiotis Terzis King Top: Bluetooth, 2009
17 x 23.5 inches, watercolor on paper
I volunteer one night a week at the Kaleidoscope Youth Center, an LGBTQ drop-in center across the street from the Wexner Center. I was raised to volunteer, my parents always did (my 85-year-old mom still does, despite severe mobility issues) and my sister and her family always do, too. Yeah, giving money is great and necessary, but in my book, face time with teens is the best gift for both of us and demands much much more of me. I have much affection and respect for teens and can remember how my own teen years severely lacked interesting, engaged, living (as opposed to zombie) adults who were accepting and fun to simply sit down and play Uno or work on an art project with. No judgements, no pressure. The few grown-ups like that within my orbit were creative types, and they were pivotal not only to my career and lifestyle choices but actually helped me to survive those years. I will always be grateful for those one or two individual adults who believed in me in key moments.
Here in my department we had a very dull looking black cart that was always getting “lost” partially because it was so anonymous looking (or so I thought). It occurred to me that the teens at KYC might enjoy the opportunity to enhance/vandalize this cart with paint markers, so I brought it over for a week and put a sign on it: SHOW the LOVE: enhance the cart with lots of paint markers. Click here to see more photos.
Thank you, Kaleidoscope Youth Center. All of you are superstars!
