Bill Horrigan, a curator who constructed Ohio’s Wexner Middle for the Arts right into a vacation spot for movie and video artwork, within the course of paving the best way for different museums to embrace work made in these mediums, died on Could 15. A consultant for the Wexner mentioned he died following a protracted battle with amyloidosis.
Horrigan labored for 34 years at that Columbus museum, the place he constructed up a carefully watched movie and video program that gained the eye of world-famous artists. The French filmmaker Chris Marker turned near Horrigan, affectionally calling the curator his “American producer,” and Julia Scher did a building-wide fee below Horrigan’s management.
“He understands reside artwork,” Scher retired in 2023. “He understands watching and is aware of the way it strikes you, how you progress in it. He’s by no means been afraid of untested limits.”
But his contributions additionally prolonged past moving-image work: he organized the primary American institutional exhibition for Mark Dion, an artist identified for his installations that appear as if museum displays, in addition to Wex displays centered on modern Brazilian artwork and installations by Gretchen Bender and Shirin Neshat. He additionally served as a curatorial adviser for the 2008 Whitney Biennial; helped set up the programming of Video Information Financial institution, a video artwork distribution firm; and led the 1989 version of Video Towards AIDS, persevering with his efforts to boost consciousness for AIDS whereas conservative politicians denied the illness’s attain.
Born in Joliet, Illinois, Horrigan got here to movie by way of a membership at highschool, the place he first encountered silent cinema. He acquired a doctorate diploma from Northwestern College’s movie division, then landed at Minneapolis Walker Artwork Middle, whose movie programming he helped oversee, after being tipped off to the opening by the preeminent movie scholar B. Ruby Wealthy. Following his stint on the Walker, he labored for the American Movie Institute’s competition in Los Angeles.
His time at AFI introduced him into the world of video artwork. “It turned out that throughout the hallway from my workplace there was the video division, and I ended up being concerned in numerous initiatives, the most important of which was their annual video competition, a world I knew nearly nothing about,” he instructed Artforum in 2023. “Video within the AFI Pageant was attention-grabbing as a result of they’d no specific generic preferences or biases.”
He joined the Wex in 1989, changing into curator-at-large in 2010. The choices he staged there assorted broadly, from a survey of visible artwork by filmmaker John Waters to an exhibition of pictures by Annie Leibovitz. In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch, he as soon as described his strategy as, “Let’s do no matter we would like and see who reveals up.”
When he left in 2023, Donna de Salvo, herself a former Wex curator, known as him a “legend.” Curator Helen Molseworth, who additionally labored with Horrigan on the Wex, used that very same precise phrase to explain him on Instagram final week.
