The Wexner Center for the Arts is home to exhibitions, performances, screenings, artist residencies and education programs that work together to promote the university’s mission of education, research and community service. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese sat down with the Director of Marketing Content, Erik Pepple, to discuss how people can get involved with the Wexner Center and their current initiatives.
As the Director of Marketing Content, Erik works as part of the content team which covers advertising, blog materials, original promotional materials, press releases andsocial media. But, within that there are also co-promotional opportunities, co-sponsorships and community partnerships. “We all view these as part of the same continuum of storytelling that anything that goes out from this office is a story about the Wexner Center, a story about our partnerships, and a story of our collaborators like the SPPO Department and other units throughout the university and in the Columbus community.”
The Wexner Center, being focused on outreach, is cognizant that there are multiple ways to engage people, so they try to utilize as many of those as they can based on resources, bandwidth and their ability to partner and collaborate. To create these moments of engagement, the programming team, the learning and public practice team, the curatorial team, the executive director and the advancement and development department work together to see where to take a program and how to shape something around their ideas.
“One of the things the Wex prides itself on is to provide access with no expectation of the person — just the person being able to experience something that either they’re already interested in or it just piqued their interest in a way that they want to explore. We want the experience to be a reciprocal exchange, so we will open the door to get people in and then, in return, we are providing an access point for people to take what they see and learn back to their day to day lives.”
Exhibitions at the Wex are all now free. Anytime they are open, the galleries are free for people to come in and experience what is there. They turn their shows over three to four times a year so there is always something new percolating in the galleries.
The Wexner Center has the mechanisms and the means to bring in exhibitions that might otherwise not make it to the Columbus community, and being nestled in a large research university provides opportunities for collaboration with university units and the represented artists. The most recent example being the SPPO department and filmmaker Sara Gómez. Faculty and students from the department were given the opportunity to engage in conversation and a Q&A with Gómez on topics pertinent to both parties after watching her film.
“A great deal of our programming is happening in dialogue with one another so we are trying to find ideas that can bounce off each other. If there is something in the gallery, you can come back in a couple days and there might be something in our theater that is in conversation or is dealing with a similar theme. The programming and curatorial teams are mindful of finding things that can embed in an intentional and understandable way for a university or research community. There is a mindful effort to really provide an area and a forum for voices and points of views and perspectives that might not necessarily have a venue with consistency, and together with everyone at the university, we can help push that into the cultural conversation.”
Heading into the next fiscal year, the Wexner Center is planning to roll out a much fuller in-person year of programming across the board. In addition to the in-person programming, people can get excited the Wex is ramping up audio and video production! Their podcast will be back in a much bigger way in the next year and additional video production surrounding all of the stories that happen with the Wexner Center will be available on their website.
Erik Pepple lends himself as a great first resource for information regarding the Wexner Center. Everyone is welcome to reach out to him with questions or assistance in collaborating with a visiting artist. To see more about what the Wexner Center offers, please visit their website.
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Dr. Laura Podalsky, Professor of Latin American Studies, gave the following reaction to the collaboration efforts between the Wexner Center and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese:
As noted by Erik Pepple, the Wexner Center for the Arts houses “the world under one roof.” As a result, those of us interested in Latin America, Spain and Portugal have been able to experience an amazing array of exhibitions and performances over the years --from the single-artist retrospective of Brazilian Hélio Oiticica (2001) to the multi-artist Cruzamentos exhibit on contemporary Brazilian art (2014); from Argentine playwright Mariano Pensotti’s El pasado es un animal grotesco (2012) to Amor a la Muerte(2023), a performance collaboration by Lemi Ponifasio, Elisa Avendaño Curaqueo, and Natalia García-Huidobro. Films, too! We’ve been able to enjoy restored classics like the 1953 O Cangaceiro (Brazil), Mexican sci-fi-horror films from the 1960s, and a retrospective of the films of Cuban director Sara Gómez as well as new, more experimental films like Portuguese filmmaker Silvia das Fadas’s Luz, clarão, fulgor in March 2023.
Alongside this exciting programing, the Wexner has worked with SPPO to organize additional events to allow SPPO students and faculty to meet with established and emerging artists in more intimate settings. As a specialist in Latin American cinemas, I have been particularly gratified by the opportunity to interact – in classroom visits and other small gatherings— with amazingly talented practitioners including Argentine filmmakers Lucrecia Martel (March 2018) and Matías Piñeiro (April 2015); Brazilian directors Kleber Mendonça Filho (January 2017), Walter Salles (November 2017) and Nelson Pereira dos Santos (April 2013); and Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa (February 2008). Such co-curricular events have immensely enriched my students’ engagement with and understanding of contemporary filmmaking practice in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world.
The Wexner Center for the Arts has been a phenomenal resource and active collaborator with our department for many years. We look forward to future events in the coming academic year!
