Fall 2025 exhibitions

The Wexner Center for the Arts, the multidisciplinary contemporary arts space at The Ohio State University, will present three exhibitions for fall 2025. The artists featured—Nanette Carter, Eric N. Mack, and Veronica Ryan—bring an exploratory mindset to material, melding the practices of painting, sculpture, and assemblage as they address social and cultural issues with powerful personal resonance. The exhibitions will be on view August 22, 2025–January 11, 2026, and will launch with an August 22 opening celebration.

Nanette Carter
The language of abstraction has been at the center of Carter’s painterly and material explorations since the late 1970s. Coming from the lineage of the Black American abstract art tradition, Carter’s work has been influenced by artistic, art historical and other cultural expressions, from jazz to Abstract Expressionism and Japanese prints.

Following the lead of her mentor, Al Loving, Carter has experimented with unconventional materials such as industrial Mylar and grown more interested in the depth and complexity that a departure from the two-dimensional surface can afford.

Though abstract, Carter’s work expresses the way she experiences life in a world marked by violence, social unrest, political upheaval, and the invasive presence of media in our everyday lives. As she has stated, her work is concerned with “the drama of nature in tandem with the drama of human nature.” Her different series of works are produced in reaction to these events and issues of our time. Yet the idea of balance is equally important, serving as a counterweight to this impending sensation of collapse that she reflects in her paintings.

Carter’s presentation at the Wex will feature a selection of her recent works as well as a newly commissioned piece.

Eric N. Mack
Mack’s interest in expanding the vocabulary of painting yields installation that often combine disparate mediums, such as painting, textiles, sculpture, and collage. Accentuating these formal qualities, Mack examines the ubiquitous role of memory in identity formation, references Black pop culture, and probes the history of art, architecture, and fashion. Together, these elements inform an artistic practice that seeks to expand the boundaries of traditional art making to inform new ways of approaching, engaging with, and understanding everyday life.

With works like Lemme walk across this room, his immersive gallery installation of various fabrics for a 2019 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Mack asks, “What is the painting? What is the exhibition space? What is my physical relationship to sculpture? What does it look like for me to walk through an exhibition?” These questions are at the forefront of many of Mack’s artistic experiments and drive the recent works that will be on view.

Veronica Ryan
Co-organized by the Wex and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Veronica Ryan: Unruly Objects is the first comprehensive solo exhibition of the Turner Prize-winning artist in the US. It will travel to the Wex from the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, where it is on view for spring 2025.

Pulitzer Arts Foundation Curator Tamara H. Schenkenberg and Curatorial Assistant Molly Moog have pored through four decades of work by the British artist, known for her singular ability to convert common materials into revelatory works of art. The result is a collection of more than 100 sculptures, textiles, and works on paper that showcase the remarkable evolution of the artist’s practice.

Ryan’s sculpture is rooted in her academic training in the 1970s and ‘80s in London. However, over the course of her career, her artmaking has expanded to include traditional crafts learned from her mother, which Ryan regards as part of an intergenerational artistic legacy.  

Ryan incorporates materials such as bronze, marble, and plaster in her works, as well as unexpected everyday items like seeds, pods, orange peels, bandages, and plastic bottles. Her thoughtful reuse of organic materials in combination with mass-produced items suggests concerns around excess and consumption while also recognizing the unrealized potential of discarded objects. 

For press: Send inquiries to Melissa Starker, mstarker@wexarts.org.