The Wexner Center for the Arts Presents its Summer 2024 Exhibitions

Jonas N.T. Becker: A Hole is not a Void

The artist’s largest museum exhibition to date will offer new photography, video, sculpture, and installation work.

A Hole is not a Void focuses on themes of land, labor, and extraction and reflects Becker’s (they/them) work connecting their experiences as a native of the Appalachian region to broader questions of environmental injustice and inequity. This includes two ongoing series that respectively transform topographical relief maps into painting surfaces and coal dust into photographic imagery.

The exhibition will also include the premiere of Class Struggle (2024). The short film, created with support from the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio, examines generational transmission of political beliefs, focusing on Becker and their mother playing the 1978 board game Class Struggle.

Born in West Virginia, Becker explores how systems of power place value on the body and the landscape and how private interests exploit both across generations, as well as the inextricable relationship between the personal and the political.

Becker’s 2018 short film Holographic Mountain will screen in The Box May 13–August 31.

Tanya Lukin Linklater: Inner blades of grass (soft) inner blades of grass (cured) inner blades of grass (bruised by the weather)

Immersive visual and performance art make up the first US survey exhibition—and largest presentation of work to date—by Sugpiaq artist and writer Tanya Lukin Linklater (she/her).

The exhibition explores Lukin Linklater’s multidisciplinary practice over the past decade and features a Wex-commissioned project informed by her visit to Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks in Newark, Ohio, the nation’s newest United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site.

Viewers will encounter other new works that cite Indigenous art lineages, embrace ancestral belongings, and consider how weather organizes communities as well as environments. As Lukin Linkater notes, “I look to my Alutiiq/Sugpiaq knowledges in relation to our homelands, waterways, atmospheres and our minds.”

During the exhibition’s opening and closing moments, visitors can experience a multiday series of improvisational open rehearsals with dance artists in the galleries. In August, Inner blades of grass will also culminate with a gathering of Indigenous artists, musicians, poets, and performers.

Related Event

Summer Exhibitions Opening Celebration
Friday, May 31, 5–8 PM

From 5 to 8 PM, guests are invited to a public reception with light hors d’oeuvres, DJ, cash bar, food trucks, and open galleries. At 5:15 PM, a conversation with Jonas N.T. Becker takes place.

About the Artists

Jonas N.T. Becker has exhibited internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; FotoFocus Biennial at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati; the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago; Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles; and Lancaster Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, California.

Awards include the Magnum Foundation Counter Histories Fellowship (2022–23); Lucas Artist Residency Fellowship at Montalvo Art Center, Saratoga, California, (2016–19); Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, Switzerland (2015); and Six Points Fellowship (2011–13).

Becker is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a 2023–24 Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme External Fellow at Ohio State. They live and work between West Virginia and Chicago.

Jonas N.T. Becker: A Hole is not a Void is organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts and curated by former Head of Exhibitions director and lead curator at Michigan Central Kelly Kivland and former Curator Lucy I. Zimmerman, with support from Curatorial Assistant Jonathan Gonzalez and Curatorial Intern Madelyn Thompson.

Tanya Lukin Linklater has recently participated in the Aichi Triennale, Japan; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; New Museum Triennial, New York; and Toronto Biennial of Art. Her work has also been shown at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; among other institutions.

Her first collection of poetry was Slow Scrape (published by The Centre for Expanded Poetics and Anteism in 2020 and by Talonbooks in 2022). The catalogue Tanya Lukin Linklater: My mind is with the weather was just released, copublished by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Oakville Galleries; and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin.

Lukin Linklater’s Alutiiq/Sugpiaq homelands are in southwestern Alaska. She is a tribally enrolled member of the Native Villages of Afognak and Port Lions in the Kodiak archipelago. 

Tanya Lukin Linklater: Inner blades of grass (soft) inner blades of grass (cured) inner blades of grass (bruised by the weather) is organized by Kelly Kivland, former head of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts and director and lead curator at Michigan Central, with support from Curatorial Assistant Jonathan Gonzalez.