The Wexner Center for the Arts presents Maria Hupfield: The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan) in Spring 2025

Exhibition Details

The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan) is a living sculpture, engaging with peoples, site, space, ideas, materials, and responding to the unique architecture of the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Designed by Peter Eisenmann in 1982, the building is structured around the 12 ¼-degree divergence between the planning grids of Ohio State’s main campus and its home city of Columbus. Hupfield’s exhibition overlays, twists, and thinks with the architecture. At the center is a platform holding sculptures and performance props crafted from industrial felt adorned with silver jingle bells and tin cone jingles.

Felt is a primary material for Hupfield. She exposes its tactile and sound-dampening qualities and unravels its material associations with the Western art-historical canon, returning felt to its practical utility. This stage bears geometrical markings: a language used in Indigenous cultures across the world, and an abstraction adopted by European and North American artists whose work has formed the canon of art history.

The center’s gallery spaces will hold a sensory exploration of water and place, of whirlpools (biimskojiwan in the Anishinaabe language) that anticipate the appearance of Fabulous Panther (miszhibizhiw)—in Anishinaabe oral traditions (aadizookaang), the most powerful underwater being known. Hupfield explains, “I look forward to bringing the legend of the mighty water spirit from the Great Lakes to the banks of the Scioto River in Columbus, Ohio.”

Ignited by new performances and punctuated with documents of past performances, The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan) is a generous invitation to think with other beings, with materials, and with time and space.

Maria Hupfield: The Supernatural Powers of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan) is curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, a curator, writer, editor, and the executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation.

About the Artist

Maria Hupfield merges performance art, design, and sculpture, drawing from Indigenous storytelling traditions through art, scholarship, collaboration, and social justice. Hupfield was the inaugural ArtworxTO Legacy Artist in Residence with the City of Toronto, a recipient of the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement, and Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize, among others. Her work has been exhibited, performed, and collected across North America. She is co-owner of Native Art Department International with her husband, artist Jason Lujan. Hupfield is Martin clan and an off-reservation member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario. Since 2019, she has been a Canada research chair in transdisciplinary Indigenous art and an assistant professor of Indigenous digital arts and performance in the Department of Visual Studies and the Department of English & Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

About the Curator

Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, and editor. She is the inaugural executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, the artist-endowed foundation dedicated to the creative legacies of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Between 2010 and 2017 Le Feuvre was head of sculpture studies at the Henry Moore Institute, directing the research component of the largest artist-endowed foundation in Europe, leading programs of education, research, collections, publications, and exhibitions focused on sculptural thinking. She has curated more than 60 exhibitions as an institutional and independent curator, played a pivotal role in shaping academic and arts organizations, edited over 30 books and journals, spoken at museums and universities across the world, and has published more than 100 essays and interviews with artists.