Tanya Lukin Linklater and Jonas N.T. Becker

For summer 2024, the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University will present two exhibitions deeply engaged with critical issues of climate, environment, and cross-generational identity.

These solo shows, both featuring work supported by Wexner Center Artist Residency Awards, will be on view in the galleries June 1–August 21. An opening celebration, which includes a conversation with Jonas N.T. Becker, will take place May 31.

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.

For press: Inquiries about this and other Wex programming can be directed to Melissa Starker, mstarker [​at​] wexarts.org.

Exhibitions support
The 2023–24 Exhibitions season is made possible by Bill and Sheila Lambert, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Carol and David Aronowitz, and Crane Family Foundation.

The presentation of Tanya Lukin Linklater: Inner blades of grass (soft) inner blades of grass (cured) inner blades of grass (bruised by the weather) is made possible by Teiger Foundation and Canada Council for the Arts.

Free galleries are made possible by American Electric Power Foundation, Mary and C. Robert Kidder, and Bill and Sheila Lambert.

Additional support for free galleries is provided by Adam Flatto, CoverMyMeds, and PNC Foundation.