HERE: Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Maya Lin

While Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, and Maya Lin are peers, HERE marks the first time they’ve exhibited together. Through contemplative yet distinct formal vocabularies, the works featured in HERE cultivate new connections to our surroundings. Presented in celebration of the Wexner Center’s 30th anniversary, HERE fills our galleries while activating spaces beyond, with components appearing outdoors, across Ohio State’s Columbus campus, and around the community.

Ann Hamilton (b. 1956, Lima, Ohio), a two-time Wexner Center Artist Residency Award recipient, presents when an object reaches for your hand, a collaboration unfolding over the year between the Wex and Ohio State’s Thompson Library in conjunction with the university’s 150th anniversary. Hamilton used outmoded scanners whose shallow depth of field creates ethereal images of objects rarely seen by the public from various Columbus campus special collections. 

These images, together with scans of objects from personal collections, are presented in book-form stacks on tables in the center’s gallery and on the second level of Thompson's stacks tower. In the spirit of the university’s mission to make its archive available, visitors are encouraged to take a print from the stacks, either for themselves or to mail to an address of their choice at the mailing stations in either location. Two of the images (scanned from Ohio State's Museum of Biological Diversity) appear as large-scale murals, one in downtown Columbus at 82 North High Street and the other just outside the galleries on the north wall of the Mershon Auditorium. Watch for Hamilton at our Wex Wide Open and hear here events in November as she scans objects and takes portraits as part of her HERE project and her ongoing series O N E E V E R Y O N E. 

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950, Gallipolis, Ohio), known for her provocative use of language, presents new installations of earlier works, including her still timely series of posters, Truisms (1977–79) and Inflammatory Essays (1979–82). Truisms comprises nearly 300 slogans that express commonly held truths, such as “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE.” The Inflammatory Essays are composed of statements, often incendiary, influenced by diverse religious and political manifestos. Amid Truisms is a selection of marble benches recalling those seen in public memorials and parks that are engraved with poem fragments referencing the horrors of World War II. Atop the Inflammatory Essays, an LED work scrolls in blue, linking the galleries with the visual vocabulary of tickers, screens, and kiosks that Holzer has programmed throughout the city, including those on the prominent downtown corner of Broad and High.

For HERE, Maya Lin (b. 1959, Athens, Ohio) has created site-specific installations for the center’s more public lower lobby space and inside the galleries. Made with thousands of steel pins and accumulations of industrial glass beads contoured to mirror Ohio waterways, her projects consider how rivers and aquifers have both shaped and been shaped by human endeavor, asking us to question the impact of fracking and global warming. Before entering the building, visitors will encounter Lin’s Groundswell, the center's only permanent public artwork, inspired by the Native American mounds that marked the landscapes of her youth. The work was created with the support of an Artist Residency Award in 1992–93. 

HERE is accompanied by a robust gallery guide featuring essays from writers, curators, and educators with Ohio State connections. Kent State University Museum Director Sarah J. Rogers, who was instrumental in bringing Groundswell to the Wex while director of exhibitions here, writes on Maya Lin. Poet, scholar, and former Ohio State Professor of English Henri Cole ruminates on the work of Jenny Holzer. Artist, writer, and Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art Carmen Winant reflects on touch and feeling in Ann Hamilton’s art.

• Exterior and off-site locations