The Wexner Center for the Arts is the Ohio State University's "multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art." The Wexner Center is a lab and public gallery, but not an art museum, as it does not collect art. However, when the center was constructed, it replaced the University Gallery of Fine Arts, and assumed possession and stewardship of the University Gallery's permanent collection of roughly 3,000 art works. The collection serves a secondary role in the center's programs in the visual, media and performing arts. The Wexner Center is made available to Ohio State University students and scholars for study, and is open to the public. The Wexner Center opened in November 1989, named in honor of the father of Limited Brands founder Leslie Wexner, who was a major donor to the center.
History The precursor was the University Gallery of Fine Art which was curated by the university's fine art director. In 1970, under Director Betty Collings' leadership, the gallery began hosting major contemporary artists and acquiring the collection that would become the Wexner Center as a response to student grievances about the Kent State shootings. In the 1980s, Jonathan Green became director and acquired art that expressed activism. The gallery's final exhibit was “AIDS: The Artists’ Response” in 1989 prior to the opening of the Wexner Center. The $43 million Wexner Center, commissioned by Ohio State University, was named after the father of Leslie H. Wexner, chairman of Limited Brands, an Ohio native and Ohio State alumnus who pledged $25 million to the project. Peter Eisenman won the design competition for the Wexner in 1983 over four other, more experienced finalists: Cesar Pelli; Michael Graves; Kallmann McKinnell & Wood; and Arthur Erickson. (Each was paired with a local architect.) Progressive Architecture magazine devoted a whole issue to the building even before it was finished. The Wexner Center opened on November 17, 1989, and architects like Philip Johnson, Richard Meier and Charles Gwathmey convened in Columbus to mark the building's completion with a public forum on the state of American architecture. The event was hailed by The New York Times as "one of the most eagerly awaited architectural events of the last decade." During its three-year renovation between 2002 and 2005, the Wexner relocated its galleries in a former coffin factory two miles away, while the performing arts and film programs continued at the center. It typically drew 200,000 to 250,000 visitors a year before the renovation. In November 2005, the Wexner Center reopened. Following the release of the Epstein files, which revealed Les Wexner's close ties with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, protestors submitted a formal name review and called for Wexner's surname to be removed from the center.
Architecture
The Wexner Center's 108,000 square feet (10,000 m2), three-story building was designed by architects Peter Eisenman of New York and the late Richard Trott of Columbus with landscape architect Laurie Olin of Philadelphia. It was the first major public building to be designed by Eisenman, previously known primarily as a teacher and theorist. Based on the controversial theory that art should be "challenged" by its environment rather than displayed neutrally, the museum raised Eisenman's profile and he went on to design and build a number of other major projects including the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. When determining the site, Eisenman and Trott rejected four options from OSU in favor of their own site between Weigel Hall, home of the School of Music, and Mershon Auditorium, a 3,000-seat hall. The design includes a large, white metal grid meant to suggest scaffolding, to give the building a sense of incompleteness in tune with the architect's deconstructivist tastes. Eisenman also took note of the mismatched street grids of the OSU campus and the city of Columbus, which vary by 12.25 degrees, and designed the Wexner Center to alternate which grids it followed. The result was a building of sometimes questionable functionality, but admitted architectural interest. The center's brick turrets make reference to the Ohio State University Armory and Gymnasium, a castle-like building that occupied the site until 1958. Included in the Wexner Center space are a film and video theater, a performance space – the Mershon Center stage, which seats 2,500 for dance, music, theater, multimedia productions and lectures –, a film and video post production studio, a bookstore, café, and 12,000 square feet (1,100 m2) of galleries. The galleries are placed linearly in the building space to emphasize progression. The Fine Arts Library was located to the lower level of the building. Devoid of natural light, the architects employed an alternating warm and cool fluorescent lighting to mimic daylight and a grey palate that put the focus on the collection. In 1993, the Wexner Center installed Maya Lin's large-scale site-specific installation Groundswell. The work reinterprets Eastern and Western landscape forms in shattered tempered glass to fill in three sites of the building's design. That year, the building won the American Institute of Architects' National Honor Award. The 2005 renovation originally enlisted the help of a local firm, then switched to Arup. In addition to the building envelope, the scope of renovation includes HVAC, lighting, electrical, plumbing, fire protection systems. The renovation works had a minimum impact on the original architectural design while improving environmental, daylight and climate control. With the restoration of the center as a whole, the bookstore, film and video theater, and café sections were all revamped, equipment and layout-wise.
Programs
Exhibitions
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