The Wexner Center for the Arts Announces its Autumn 2024 Exhibitions

Ming Smith: Wind Chime

This solo exhibition will pair recent work by Columbus-raised artist Ming Smith, the first Black woman photographer to be added to the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection, with the series that started her career.

Nearly 30 black-and-white photographs from Smith’s Africa series, taken during her travels to Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Egypt over the span of three decades, are included in the presentation. The series began in 1972 on Smith’s first trip to Africa, when she traveled to Dakar, Senegal, on a modeling assignment.

The expansive series of photography documents everyday scenes from across the continent as they happened and shares a narrative of the places she visited from her perspective as a Black woman. As Smith has stated: “I was affected by the spirituality of the people. Somehow it seemed that our cultures are very different, but we are very much connected.”

The works on display also expand beyond photography. The centerpiece, a multimedia commission that animates a series of photographs using holographic projection, marks an entirely new direction in her practice. Also on view are recent collages and color photographs—all set to an ambient soundscape created by Smith’s son, Mingus Murray.

Ming Smith: Wind Chime is organized by Kelly Kivland, former head of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts and director and lead curator at Michigan Central.

The Wex is one of three central Ohio institutions celebrating the artist's extraordinary body of work this autumn.

Ming Smith: Jazz Requiem – Notations in Blue, coming to The Gund at Kenyon College June 25–December 15, offers a new body of work exploring Smith’s relationship with sound. Ming Smith: Transcendence, which presents the titular series in its entirety for the first time to highlight the artist’s connections to her hometown, will be on view along with Smith's August Moon series at Columbus Museum of Art September 19–January 26, 2025.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion

Beginning in the early 1980s, Nigerian British photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989) developed a photographic practice that refused categorization, cutting across cultural codes, gender norms, and artistic traditions. His work reveals a world of heightened sensuality informed by Black queer club culture and Yoruba spirituality.

Born into a prominent Nigerian family, Fani-Kayode emigrated to London in the 1960s, seeking political refuge during the Biafra War. As an art student in the United States, he came to negotiate his outsider status along multiple axes, balancing his family heritage and immigration status alongside his own queer sexuality and exposure to underground subculture.

Channeling these multiple facets of his identity into photography, Fani-Kayode generated a remarkable body of images over the course of a career cut tragically short by his death at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Organized in partnership with Autograph ABP (London), Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is the first North American survey of Fani-Kayode’s work and archives. The exhibition brings together key series of color and black-and-white photographs along with archival prints and never-before-exhibited works from Fani-Kayode’s student years.

Often created in collaboration with his partner Alex Hirst (1951–1992), Fani-Kayode’s photographs treat romantic love with spiritual reverence, translating the emotional intensity of same-sex, multiracial desire into richly evocative symbolic language. Today, his art remains a potent source of inspiration, presciently anticipating contemporary photographic approaches to identity, sexuality, and race.

“This isn’t just about a moment of queer life,” explains Curator Dr. Mark Sealy. “It's through a lens of queer life, but the work opens the door to all kinds of imaginative ways of thinking and being in the world. This work is now coming up on 40 years old, yet it feels incredibly contemporary.”

Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is organized by Autograph, London, and the Wexner Center for the Arts and curated by Autograph Director Dr. Mark Sealy.

Spring 2025 Exhibition Preview: Nancy Holt: Power Systems

This summer, Nancy Holt’s 1986 expansive sculpture Pipeline will be installed inside and outside the center, in prelude to the exhibition Nancy Holt: Power Systems. Opening early next year, Power Systems explores the artist’s consistent examination of the systems that structure daily life. Pipeline brings critical attention to the physical and economic systems powering buildings and to the impact of fossil fuel extraction.

Holt visited Alaska in March of 1986 at the invitation of the Visual Arts Center of Alaska to create a work of art celebrating of the region’s beauty. Holt was instead struck by the infiltration of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System through the landscape. In response she made Pipeline, a sculpture made of twisting steel pipes that wind inside and outside the building, with one section incessantly dripping oil and pooling thickly on a white base. Pipeline points to the unchecked audacity and devastating consequences of the energy industry.

Holt: Power Systems will feature additional sculptures, installations, and works on paper focused on literal and metaphorical flows of power. More details will be shared in the coming days.

About the Artists

Harlem-based, Detroit-born artist Ming Smith attended Howard University in Washington, DC. She was the first female to join Kamoinge, a collective of Black photographers in New York in the 1960s and the first black woman photographer included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

She participated in MoMA’s exhibition Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography; Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85; and Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, organized by Tate Modern in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; and The Broad in Los Angeles.

Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York; and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, among other institutions.

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1955, Rotimi Fani-Kayode emigrated with his family to London in the 1960s, escaping the Biafra War as political exiles. He relocated to the United States in 1976 to pursue undergraduate art studies at Georgetown University and continued his studies at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute.

Returning to London in 1983, Fani-Kayode became an active participant in the Black British art scene, exhibiting at London’s Brixton Art Gallery, among other community-oriented spaces, and publishing his photography in the queer magazines Ten.8 and Square Peg. In 1988, he became a founding cosignatory of Autograph, an institution devoted to supporting Black photographers and photographic inquiries into race, rights, and representation.

Nancy Holt (1938–2014) was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. An innovator of site-specific installation and the moving image, Holt recalibrated the limits of art. She expanded the places where art could be found and embraced the new media of her time. Across five decades she asked questions about how we might understand our place in the world, investigating perception, systems, and place. Holt’s rich artistic output spans concrete poetry, audio works, film and video, photography, ephemeral gestures, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, artists’ books, and public sculpture commissions. Holt described herself as a “perception artist”; throughout her oeuvre she repeatedly challenges us to look beyond what we think we know.