Nancy Holt’s site-responsive sculpture Pipeline, installed inside and outside at the Wex, addresses fossil-fuel extraction, bringing critical attention to systems providing the power fueling our world.

Nancy Holt: Power Systems features the most extensive inquiry yet into Nancy Holt’s studies of systems. The exhibition launches in summer 2024 with a presentation of Pipeline, which calls attention to the physical and economic systems powering buildings and to the impact of fossil fuel extraction.

Holt visited Alaska in March of 1986 at the invitation of the Visual Arts Center of Alaska, with the hope she might create a work of art in celebration of the region’s beauty. Holt was instead struck by the infiltration of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System through the landscape. In response she made Pipeline, a sculpture made of steel pipes that twist in and out of the gallery, winding down to the floor where one section of pipe leaks—an incessant drip of oil pooling thickly on a white base. Pipeline points to the unchecked audacity and devastating consequences of the energy industry.

In the 1980s Holt’s exploration of systems focused on the fabric of the built environment with functional sculptural installations she termed System Works. Using standard industrial materials designed for heating, ventilation, lighting, drainage—as well as the raw materials of fossil fuels and waste—the System Works are connected to internal architectural organs, calling attention to our reliance on these modern systems and their complex relationship to the natural world.

In early 2025, the Wex’s presentation of Nancy Holt: Power Systems expands into the galleries with additional sculptures, installations, and works on paper focused on literal and metaphorical flows of power.

"The sculptures are exposed fragments of vast hidden systems, they are part of open-ended systems, part of the world."
—Nancy Holt

Nancy Holt: Power Systems is curated by Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation and developed in partnership with Holt/Smithson Foundation.

Explore spirituality, movement, and feminism in a solo exhibition pairing recent work by Columbus-raised artist Ming Smith with the photographic series that started her career in 1972.

Visitors will experience Smith’s reflective approach throughout the galleries. The works on display also expand beyond photography. The centerpiece, a multimedia commission that animates a series of photographs using projection, marks an entirely new direction in her practice. Also on view are recent collages and color photographs—all set to an ambient soundscape created by Smith’s son, Mingus Murray.

The exhibition also includes nearly 30 photographs from Smith’s Africa series, taken during her travels to Senegal, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, and Egypt over the span of three decades. The series began in 1972 on Smith’s first trip to Africa, when she traveled to Dakar, Senegal, on a modeling assignment. The expansive series of photography documents everyday scenes from across the continent as they happened and shares a narrative of the places she visited from her perspective as a Black woman. As Smith has stated: “I was affected by the spirituality of the people. Somehow it seemed that our cultures are very different, but we are very much connected.”

Ming Smith: Wind Chime is part of the FotoFocus Biennial: backstories. Learn more about the program and related events.

This exhibition is part of a simultaneous presentation of work by Ming Smith, also at the Columbus Museum of Art and The Gund at Kenyon College.

Explore a world of heightened sensuality informed by Yoruba cosmology and queer activism in the work of Nigerian British photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode.

Beginning in the early 1980s, Fani-Kayode (1955–1989) developed a photographic practice that refused categorization, cutting across cultural codes, gender norms, and artistic traditions. Born into a prominent Nigerian family, Fani-Kayode emigrated to London in the 1960s, seeking political refuge during civil war. As an art student in the United States, he came to negotiate his outsider status along multiple axes, balancing his family heritage and immigration status alongside his own queer sexuality and exposure to underground subcultures. Channeling these multiple facets of his identity into photography, Fani-Kayode generated a remarkable body of images over the course of a career cut tragically short by his death in 1989.

Organized in partnership with Autograph (London), Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is the first North American survey of Fani-Kayode’s work and archives. This major exhibition brings together key series of color and black-and-white photographs along with archival prints and never-before-exhibited works from Fani-Kayode’s student years. Often created in collaboration with his partner Alex Hirst (1951–1992), Fani-Kayode’s photographs treat romantic love with spiritual reverence, translating the emotional intensity of same-sex, multiracial desire into richly evocative symbolic language. Today, his art remains a potent source of inspiration, presciently anticipating contemporary photographic approaches to identity, sexuality, and race.

This exhibition is part of the FotoFocus Biennial: backstories. Learn more about the program and related events.

About the artist and curator
Rotimi Fani-Kayode
Mark Sealy

Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is organized by Autograph, London, and the Wexner Center for the Arts and curated by Professor Mark Sealy, Director of Autograph. The exhibition received generous development support from Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

ADDITIONAL THANKS
With thanks to former Wexner Center Associate Curator of Exhibitions Daniel Marcus.

THIS PRESENTATION IS MADE POSSIBLE BY
FotoFocus
Carol and David Aronowitz

EXHIBITIONS 2024–25 SEASON MADE POSSIBLE BY
Bill and Sheila Lambert
Crane Family Foundation

FREE GALLERIES MADE POSSIBLE BY
Adam Flatto
PNC Foundation

WEXNER CENTER PROGRAMS MADE POSSIBLE BY
Greater Columbus Arts Council

The Wexner Family

Institute of Museum and Library Services

Mellon Foundation
Every Page Foundation
Ohio Arts Council
, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts
CampusParc


Nationwide Foundation

Ohio State’s Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme

The Columbus Foundation
Axium Packaging

ADDITIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BY
Ohio State Energy Partners
Ohio History Fund/Ohio History Connection
David Crane and Elizabeth Dang

Melissa Gilliam and William Grobman
Rebecca Perry Damsen and Ben Towle

We strive to host inclusive, accessible events that enable all individuals, including individuals with disabilities, to engage fully. If you have questions about accessibility or require an accommodation to participate, please contact Accessibility Manager Helyn Marshall at accessibility@wexarts.org or via telephone at (614) 688-3890. Requests made by two weeks in advance will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the Wexner Center for the Arts will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
Become a Member

Interact with the Wexner Center’s interior and exterior spaces in unexpected ways with new Wex-commissioned installations by Columbus-based practice Outpost Office.

Led by Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann, assistant professors at Ohio State’s Knowlton School, Outpost Office designs installations, events, and buildings that challenge architecture’s tendencies toward permanence and accumulation. They do so by embracing an impermanent, open-ended, and responsive practice. In that spirit, their Wexner Center–commissioned work unfolds in several phases.

Beginning in late August 2023, the first phase includes the large-scale project Drawing Fields No. 7. A GPS-controlled robot will paint yellow and lavender curvilinear patterns on the tree-lined Wex plaza lawn. Part of an ongoing series, the project employs techniques of algorithmic creativity. A playful entry to campus, the drawing provides a respite to the rigorous geometry of the nearby Wexner Center, weaving vibrant threads of color to activate the grove with loose wefts and warps. Inherently ephemeral, the patterns disappear over several weeks with growth, rain, and sun.

In November 2023, Outpost Office will add a subsequent installation, Color Block No. 2. This large-scale, modular furniture activates various in-between spaces both inside and outside the Wexner Center. People are encouraged to interact with the pieces, rather than simply viewing them, changing the dynamic usually experienced in a gallery or museum. The installation challenges both conceptual and physical institutional boundaries. Museum architecture often imposes divisions between gallery spaces and public areas. This division is blurred in the Wexner Center’s building. Exhibition spaces and architectural features converge, making the Wexner Center a milestone in postmodern architecture. New spaces created by Color Block No. 2 extend these characteristics. These spaces for collaboration, socializing, and informal learning draw visitors’ attention from the building’s exterior to its interior.

The culmination of a virtual residency that unfolded before and during the pandemic, Sustento asks: What is sustenance and why is it important?

In the spring of 2019, Puerto Rican artist Awilda Rodríguez Lora came to the Wex and posed this question during a memorable performative talk. That inquiry was both timely and prescient. Puerto Rico was still recovering from the devastation of 2017’s Hurricane María, and the world was a year away from a cascade of tragedies brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Following that talk, Rodríguez Lora’s relationship with the Wex continued with a virtual Performing Arts residency and performances. Working with a constellation of collaborators in Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and the Wex’s Department of Performing Arts, she continued to investigate the question of sustento or sustenance. The video Sustento is the culmination of this project. It features Rodríguez Lora performing in the Wex’s Performance Space, while an animated avatar twin is created in ACCAD’s motion capture lab.

Sustento poses the universal question of how we humans can sustain ourselves in the face of constant demands and oppression. Rodríguez Lora reveals that sustento is human connection, family, action, community, the body, action, bread, water, our loves, love, impulse, movement, and energy. It is intangible but necessary.

Presented both in Spanish with English subtitles and in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. (21:13 mins. HD video with 5.1 sound)

"We’re all trying to push through, to keep doing the things we love, or keep loving, or being there for somebody. SUSTENTO is what keeps us moving."
Awilda Rodríguez Lora, Performance Is Alive
Project Statement: Sustento

Sustento is a practice of the body that is only possible through collaboration, a performance for the survival of a Black Caribbean queer artist who envisions just futures for all. Future is movement towards the present: Sustento is about being present. Through moving images and sound design, we will witness the journey of La Performera, Awilda Rodríguez Lora, narrated by her future self. Sustento is a sea of beings who inspire vulnerability as an artistic action of creation, a feminist practice aimed at a future where everyone can exist in their joy and truth.
Can the future Performera tell us the story of the now? Can we be present while recognizing the trauma in the survivor, the warrior, the exhausted, the exotic, the dancer, the virus, the love, and the grief?

An avatar of La Performera was created by Vita Berezina-Blackburn as part of a three-year artistic residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, La Rosario, and the Motion Lab at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) at The Ohio State University with techno-dramaturgy by Norah Zuniga Shaw and Livable Futures. Supported by the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Northwestern University. Directed by Macha Colón, performed and choreographed by Awilda Rodríguez Lora, Sustento explores time travel and movement as a strategy of hope. Let us move as the living beings we are. THANK YOU for being present

The culmination of a virtual residency that unfolded before and during the pandemic, Sustento asks: What is sustenance and why is it important?

In the spring of 2019, Puerto Rican artist Awilda Rodríguez Lora came to the Wex and posed this question during a memorable performative talk. That inquiry was both timely and prescient. Puerto Rico was still recovering from the devastation of 2017’s Hurricane María, and the world was a year away from a cascade of tragedies brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Following that talk, Rodríguez Lora’s relationship with the Wex continued with a virtual Performing Arts residency and performances. Working with a constellation of collaborators in Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) and the Wex’s Department of Performing Arts, she continued to investigate the question of sustento or sustenance. The video Sustento is the culmination of this project. It features Rodríguez Lora performing in the Wex’s Performance Space, while an animated avatar twin is created in ACCAD’s motion capture lab.

Sustento poses the universal question of how we humans can sustain ourselves in the face of constant demands and oppression. Rodríguez Lora reveals that sustento is human connection, family, action, community, the body, action, bread, water, our loves, love, impulse, movement, and energy. It is intangible but necessary.

Presented both in Spanish with English subtitles and in Spanish with Spanish subtitles. (21:13 mins. HD video with 5.1 sound)

"We’re all trying to push through, to keep doing the things we love, or keep loving, or being there for somebody. SUSTENTO is what keeps us moving."
Awilda Rodríguez Lora, Performance Is Alive

Project Statement: Sustento
Sustento is a practice of the body that is only possible through collaboration, a performance for the survival of a Black Caribbean queer artist who envisions just futures for all. Future is movement towards the present: Sustento is about being present. Through moving images and sound design, we will witness the journey of La Performera, Awilda Rodríguez Lora, narrated by her future self. Sustento is a sea of beings who inspire vulnerability as an artistic action of creation, a feminist practice aimed at a future where everyone can exist in their joy and truth.
Can the future Performera tell us the story of the now? Can we be present while recognizing the trauma in the survivor, the warrior, the exhausted, the exotic, the dancer, the virus, the love, and the grief?

An avatar of La Performera was created by Vita Berezina-Blackburn as part of a three-year artistic residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, La Rosario, and the Motion Lab at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) at The Ohio State University with techno-dramaturgy by Norah Zuniga Shaw and Livable Futures. Supported by the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Northwestern University. Directed by Macha Colón, performed and choreographed by Awilda Rodríguez Lora, Sustento explores time travel and movement as a strategy of hope. Let us move as the living beings we are. THANK YOU for being present.