Wexner Center for the Arts galleries, store to reopen August 11

August 7, 2020—The Wexner Center for the Arts will begin welcoming visitors back Tuesday, August 11, in sync with the reopening of buildings across The Ohio State University’s campus. The Wex’s galleries and store will be open Tuesday–Sunday, 11 AM–4 PM (open until 7 PM on Thursday). Admission to the galleries will be timed and require a ticket. Tickets will be available online or by calling our ticket desk at 614-292-3535 beginning Monday, August 10. Face coverings are required in all areas of the center. The store remains open 24 hours a day online.

For more information on visiting, or to review our cleaning and safety protocols, please visit our website.

“The safety, health, and comfort of our guests and staff is of paramount importance,” notes Johanna Burton, Wexner Center Director. “We’ve spent the summer preparing for a safe physical reopening while providing a full roster of virtual events; while our doors were closed, the Wex was still wide open online. We understand that the ever-changing situation with COVID-19 may necessitate revisiting or re-inventing our plans, but hope that visiting the Wex even under new and evolving conditions will offer a welcome respite in these challenging times.”

For the fall season, all in-person films, performances, and public programs remain suspended. However, our robust virtual lineup of film streams (both free and ticketed), free interactive learning opportunities, performances, lectures, discussions, and more will continue in full force throughout the fall.

On view in our galleries through August 23:

Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs

This installation is the world premiere of this shot-on-Super 16mm film. Kahn’s timely work follows two teens leaving the city on their bikes in an allegorical epic for an entire generation that must make a new way forward.

Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs is curated by Lucy I. Zimmerman, Associate Curator of Exhibitions and supported by a Wexner Center Film/Video Studio residency.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze

“Frazier has always addressed the untenability of how things are with an art that pushes beyond the purview of representation, one that prioritizes the assembly of communities and archives over commodities.”—Artforum on The Last Cruze and Frazier

The latest body of work by artist LaToya Ruby Frazier introduces a major new chapter in her investigations of labor, family, community, and the working class across a variety of geographic settings. It centers on the workers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. After more than 50 years of automobile production and a commitment to manufacture the Chevrolet Cruze until 2021, the facility was “unallocated” by GM in November 2018. Employees in Lordstown have been faced with the difficult decision to transfer to plants in other parts of the country. 

The exhibition is curated by Karsten Lund, Associate Curator, and Solveig Øvstebø, Executive Director and Chief Curator, the Renaissance Society, Chicago. The presentation at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the second venue for the exhibition, is coordinated by former Senior Curator Michael Goodson and Chief Operating Officer Megan Cavanaugh. 

Sadie Benning: Pain Thing

The work of Sadie Benning has been shown at the Wex since the early 1990s. A recipient of a 2003 Wexner Center Artist Residency Award, they return with a new work of striking scale and ambition.

Pain Thing is a single installation consisting of 63 small wood panels, grouped into 19 discrete sequences, each with its own title, and extending throughout two galleries. Acrylic paint and photo transparencies are applied to each panel, all subject to layers of meticulously applied resin. The overall result complicates the relationship between flatness and dimension, just as it raises questions of narrative and memory.

Sadie Benning: Pain Thing is curated by Bill Horrigan, Curator at Large.