Autumn 2024: Ming Smith, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and Nancy Holt

For autumn 2024, the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University will debut two photography-centered exhibitions in its galleries, respectively featuring works by Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Columbus, Ohio native Ming Smith. These will be on view September 21–January 5, 2025. 

But first, on Friday, August 16, the center will unveil a preview installation for a spring 2025 gallery exhibition focused on conceptual artist Nancy Holt.  

Wex guests can get a first look in the galleries during an autumn 2024 Exhibitions Opening Celebration Friday, September 20, 5–10pm. This will include a 5:30pm conversation with exhibiting artist Ming Smith and Dr. Mark Sealy, a curator and cultural historian as well as the director of Autograph ABP (London). 

Ming Smith: Wind Chime 
This new solo exhibition pairs recent work with the photographic series that started Smith’s career in 1972: Africa. 

Begun during the artist’s first trip to Africa while on a modeling assignment, the series documents everyday scenes from her travels across the continent as they happened over three decades, 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.” 

The works on display also expand beyond photography. The centerpiece, a multimedia commission that animates a series of photographs, 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.  

Wind Chime is presented simultaneously with exhibitions of work by Ming Smith at the Columbus Museum of Art and The Gund at Kenyon College.

Ming Smith: Wind Chime is organized by Kelly Kivland, former head of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts and director and lead curator at Michigan Central.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion
Organized in partnership with Autograph ABP (London) and curated by ABP Director Mark Sealy, this is the first North American survey of the work and archives of the pioneering artist, whose career was cut tragically short by his death at the height of the AIDS epidemic. 

The 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. 

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 the Biafra War, before traveling to the US to study art. He came to negotiate his outsider status along multiple axes—as a Nigerian, an immigrant, a queer artist, and a denizen of an underground subculture—channeling these multiple facets of his identity into photography.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode: Tranquility of Communion is organized by Autograph, London, and the Wexner Center for the Arts and curated by Autograph Director Dr. Mark Sealy.

Spring exhibition preview—Nancy Holt: Pipeline
Through twisting steel pipes that produce an incessant drip of oil, Holt’s 1986 sculptural work calls attention to the physical and economic systems powering buildings and to the impact of fossil fuel extraction. 

Pipeline will be installed in the lobby and outside the center. In early 2025, the artist’s work will expand into the galleries with Nancy Holt: Power Systems, featuring additional sculptures, installations, and works on paper focused on literal and metaphorical flows of power.

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