Wexner Center Staff, Artists Receive Awards, Recognitions

Underscoring the Wexner Center’s sizable impact on the contemporary art field, several artists who have created and presented work at the center (often under the auspices of our expansive artist residency program) have been prominently recognized by national and international cultural media over the last several months. The media has also generously acknowledged the expertise and contributions of the Wexner Center’s curatorial team. To wit:

• Bill Horrigan, the Wexner Center’s Director of Media Arts, is one of the three advisers for the next Whitney Biennial contemporary art exhibition, opening in March at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The New York Times wrote in November that “the influence of each adviser is evident....There is a significant documentary component, reflecting Mr. Horrigan’s interests, that includes [2008 Wexner Prize recipient] Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, a documentary about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.” If you miss that film there, come see it here in The Box video space in February.

• Horrigan’s touring exhibition Chris Marker: Staring Back, featuring about 200 of the legendary French filmmaker’s photographs, received numerous glowing reviews in New York-based publications and online outlets when it traveled to New York in the fall following its premiere here in the summer. Holland Cotter of The New York Times called it a “meditative, deep-fall show,” and Art in America noted in its December issue that “if [Marker’s] newfound popularity in North America has a single source, it would have to be Bill Horrigan....who for over a decade worked closely with Marker to ensure his visibility on this side of the Atlantic.” The show is on its way to Zurich in the spring.

• Our winter 2007 exhibition Sadie Benning: Suspended Animation—featuring portrait paintings and her dual-projection video piece Play Pause (created at the Wexner Center during Benning’s extensive artist residency here)—was just named one of the top 10 exhibitions of the year by Artforum; in her writeup in the December issue, Lynne Cooke (curator of the Dia Art Foundation in New York) called Play Pause “the smart and sassy centerpiece of Benning’s first museum show, organized by Jennifer Lange” (who is associate curator of media arts at the Wexner Center), noting that Benning “creates a singular visual form for a journey into a subculture.” Also making Cooke’s top 10 list was our show Zoe Leonard: Analogue (another of the center’s artist residency projects) which premiered at the Wexner Center last spring before being seen at Documenta this summer in Germany.

• Our upcoming Mary Heilmann show, making its only Midwest stop here in summer 2008 on its highly acclaimed national tour, is “like spending a day at the beach,” wrote Hammer Museum (L.A.) curator Ali Subotnick, who put the exhibition into her top 10 in Artforum, as did MOCA L.A. curator Ann Goldstein. (The show made it onto the cover of both Art in America and Artforum in November, with Peter Plagens writing in the latter that Heilmann's vibrantly colorful abstract paintings are "often joy-inducing and sometimes breathtaking.”)

• Films shown at the Wexner Center in 2007 also showed up on the Artforum lists, including Brand Upon the Brain! (directed by Wex fave Guy Maddin), named one of the best films of the year by John Waters (who in turn is on the Wexner Center’s International Arts

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Advisory Council). In related news, Maddin will be producing a new feature film under the auspices of a Wexner Center artist’s residency in 2008–09. And Charles Burnett’s belatedly released 1977 film Killer of Sheep, which screened here this fall, was named a top 10 by film critic Amy Taubin.

• In performing arts, The Blow, which played here this fall as part of our Next@Wex indie music series, was noted by David Byrne on his top 10 list for Artforum; Andrew Bird, who opened here for Wilco and has played here in his own right, was given a top 10 tip o’ the hat by musician Marissa Nadler; and Parisian choreographer-philosopher Jérôme Bel, who performed here for the second time in November, was given a top 10 nod by art history professor and author Claire Bishop, who called the Bel experience “total exhilaration.”

• Wexner Center Residency Award artist Kerry James Marshall—who will be featured in an exhibition opening in February that marks the culmination of an extended residency in which he’s been working with local teens—keeps garnering raves from the international media. In a July review of his latest series of drawings, The New York Times wrote, “Kerry James Marshall’s brilliant print series, ‘Rhythm Master,’ with its black-on-white cartoon drawings of a self-lacerating African-American street culture, suggests that the time for sweeping change has arrived.” This series of drawings (now spelled Rythm Mastr) is the basis of the Wexner Center exhibition, in which the characters have been transformed by Marshall into puppet/sculptures and will be brought to life in the galleries in the mode of a Japanese Bunraku puppet performance, manipulated by about 20 local teens. The exhibition (titled Every Beat of My Heart, on view February 2–April 13) will feature puppets, the set, drawings, and video documentation of the project. The exhibition and community project is being organized by the Wexner Center’s Director of Education, Shelly Casto, in her inaugural gallery show.

• Several artists who have both created and presented new work at the Wexner Center were named USA Fellows by United States Artists foundation this fall—accompanied by an unrestricted $50,000 grant—including Ann Hamilton (OSU professor, internationally known artist, and former Wexner Center Residency Award recipient); choreographer Bill T. Jones, the 2005 Wexner Prize recipient and also a former Wexner Center Residency Award artist (he also won a Tony earlier this year for his choreography for the Broadway hit Spring Awakening); Elizabeth LeCompte, director of The Wooster Group, a vanguard theater company that has performed at the Wexner Center several times (and which received a Wexner Center Residency Award in the late ’90s to create its show House/Lights); filmmaker Julie Dash, who was a Wexner Center Residency Award artist in the mid-’90s; and others who have the Wex in their history, including artist Paul Chan and composers/musicians Don Byron and Jason Moran.

• 1997 Wexner Prize recipient Martin Scorsese received his first Academy Award in 2007 as best director for The Departed, which was also named best motion picture of the year. He also received a Kennedy Center Honors Award December 2.

• Filmmaker Todd Haynes—a Wexner Center Residency Award artist more than a decade ago—landed on the cover of the New York Times Magazine on October 7 for I’m Not There, his widely acclaimed, unconventional Bob Dylan biopic. The film screened here to a sold-out house in early December, featuring an introduction and Q&A session with Christine Vachon, the film’s producer—herself a Wex Residency Award artist with Haynes. The Wexner Center has also paid tribute to both Haynes and Vachon with their own film retrospectives.

• Singer/songwriter Feist, who made her Ohio debut at the Wexner Center in November (to a nearly full house in Mershon Auditorium), has been nominated for 2008 Grammys for Best

New Artist, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (for 1234), and Best Pop Vocal Album (The Reminder). Rock band Wilco, which sold out Mershon Auditorium in October (in a return visit to the Wex), picked up a nomination for Best Rock Album (for Sky Blue Sky). Jazz composer and musician Terence Blanchard, who has performed here and who has worked with 2008 Wexner Prize recipient Spike Lee on soundtracks for various films, was nominated for two Grammys for A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina)—music that was also used for and inspired by Lee’s When the Levees Broke, the aforementioned documentary about Hurricane Katrina that will be screened in the Wexner Center’s The Box video space in February. Other bands or musicians nominated for 2008 Grammys who have been to the Wex include African street band Konono No. 1 and jazzman Joshua Redman. The Grammys will be broadcast February 10.

• The Wexner Center’s graphic designers earned 2007 Creative Best awards from the Columbus Society of Communicating Arts this fall for three Wexner Center exhibition catalogues. The Zoe Leonard: Analogue catalogue received an Award of Excellence as well as a Judge’s Choice award for the book and Wexner Center Design Director Chris Jones. Judge Scott Stowell, founder of the design studio Open in New York, praised the book binding (“kind of a facsimile of what they do in a library when the books get really old....kind of plain cloth with this really simple type”) and wrote that “I just couldn’t stop going back and picking it up....I just think it’s a beautiful object and a really interesting way to approach a book of photography.” The catalogue for our summer exhibition Robert Beck: dust (creative director Jones with designer Erica Anderson) and for Sadie Benning: Suspended Animation (by Jones) each received an Award of Merit.

• Finally, Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin was re-elected to a second term as chair of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in the fall. She has now served on the New York-based Warhol board for eight years along with a distinguished group of artists, museum directors, curators, business executives, and academic leaders. Now celebrating its 20th anniversary year and with over $250 million in assets, the Foundation makes approximately $12 million in grants per year to advance the contemporary arts and freedom of expression through a variety of programs and initiatives that benefit virtually every state in the country.