Video art curator worked in the Wexner Center

Bill Horrigan, a curator who built the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio for a destination for film and video art, died on May 15th for other museums to use work. He died after a long fight against amyloidosis.

Horrigan worked in this Columbus Museum for 34 years, where he set up a precisely seen film and video program that attracted the attention of the world-famous artists. The French filmmaker Chris Marker came close to Horrigan and lovingly called the curator to his “American producer”, and Julia Scher carried out a construction commission under horrigans leadership.

“He understands live art,” Scher retired in 2023. “He understands watching and knows how it moves, how you move in it. He was never afraid of uncomfortable limits.”

However, his contributions also extended about the work of moving image work: He organized the first American institutional exhibition for Mark Dion, an artist who is known for his installations that appear like museum prices, as well as presentations of the Wexner Center, which focus on contemporary Brazilian art and installations of Gretchen Bender and Shirin Neshat. He also served as a curatorial consultant for the Whitney Biennale 2008; helped organizing the programming of the video database, a video distribution company for video art; And initiated the issue of video against AIDS from 1989 and continued his efforts to raise awareness of AIDS, while conservative politicians denied the reach of the disease.

Horrigan was born in Joliet, Illinois, and came into the film via a club at the high school, where he first met Silent Cinema. He received a doctorate in the film department of the Northwestern University and then ended up in the Minneapolis Walker Art Center, whose film programs he supervised after he was opened by the outstanding film scientist B. Ruby Rich. After staying at The Walker, he worked for the festival of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

His time at AFI brought him to the world of video art. “It turned out that there was a video department in the hallway from my office, and in the end I was involved in various projects, the greatest of which was her annual video festival, a world that I knew almost nothing” Art forum In 2023. “The video at the AFI Festival was interesting because they had no special preferences or prejudices.”

He joined the Wexner Center in 1989 and became a curator-at-large in 2010. The offers that he staged there was very different, from a survey to the visual art of the filmmaker John Waters to an exhibition with photographs by Annie Leibovitz. In an interview with the Columbus shippingHe once described his approach as: “Let us do what we want and see who appears.”

When he went in 2023, Donna de Salvo, himself a former curator of the Wexner Center, called a “legend”. The curator Helen Molseworth, who also worked with Horigan in the Wexner Center, used him on Instagram last week.