Wexner Center for the Arts

The Wexner Center for the Arts is The Ohio State University’s "multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art". The Wexner Center opened in November 1989, named in honor of the father of Limited Brands founder Leslie Wexner, who was a major donor to the Center.

The Wexner Center is a lab and public gallery, but not a museum, as it does not collect art. However, when the Center was constructed, it replaced the University Gallery of Fine Arts, and assumed possession and stewardship of the University Gallery's permanent collection of roughly 3,000 art works. The collection serves a secondary role in the Center's programs in the visual, media and performing arts. While it is made available to University students and scholars for study, and occasionally drawn upon for exhibitions at the center or elsewhere, it is largely dormant.

The $43 million Wexner Center, commissioned by Ohio State University, was named after the father of Leslie H. Wexner, chairman of Limited Brands, an Ohio native and Ohio State alumnus who pledged $25 million to the project.Peter Eisenman won the design competition for the Wexner in 1983 over four other, more experienced finalists: Cesar Pelli; Michael Graves; Kallmann McKinnell & Wood; and Arthur Erickson. (Each was paired with a local architect.) Progressive Architecture magazine devoted a whole issue to the building even before it was finished; architects like Philip Johnson, Richard Meier and Charles Gwathmey convened in Columbus to mark the building's completion with a public forum on the state of American architecture.

During its three-year renovation between 2002 and 2005, the Wexner relocated its galleries in a former coffin factory two miles away, while the performing arts and film programs continued at the center. It typically drew 200,000 to 250,000 visitors a year before the renovation. In November 2005, the Wexner Center reopened.

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