Bill Horrigan, a curator who built Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts into a destination for film and video art, in the process paving the way for other museums to embrace work made in those mediums, died on May 15. A representative for the Wexner said he died following a long battle with amyloidosis.
Horrigan worked for 34 years at that Columbus museum, where he built up a closely watched film and video program that gained the attention of world-famous artists. The French filmmaker Chris Marker became close to Horrigan, affectionally calling the curator his “American producer,” and Julia Scher did a building-wide commission under Horrigan’s leadership.
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“He understands live art,” Scher retired in 2023. “He understands watching and knows how it moves you, how you move in it. He’s never been afraid of untested limits.”
Yet his contributions also extended beyond moving-image work: he organized the first American institutional exhibition for Mark Dion, an artist known for his installations that appear like museum presentations, as well as Wex presentations focused on contemporary Brazilian art and installations by Gretchen Bender and Shirin Neshat. He also served as a curatorial adviser for the 2008 Whitney Biennial; helped organize the programming of Video Data Bank, a video art distribution company; and led the 1989 edition of Video Against AIDS, continuing his efforts to raise awareness for AIDS while conservative politicians denied the disease’s reach.
Born in Joliet, Illinois, Horrigan came to film via a club at high school, where he first encountered silent cinema. He received a doctorate degree from Northwestern University’s film department, then landed at Minneapolis Walker Art Center, whose film programming he helped oversee, after being tipped off to the opening by the preeminent film scholar B. Ruby Rich. Following his stint at the Walker, he worked for the American Film Institute’s festival in Los Angeles.
His time at AFI brought him into the world of video art. “It turned out that across the hallway from my office there was the video department, and I ended up being involved in various projects, the biggest of which was their annual video festival, a world I knew almost nothing about,” he told Artforum in 2023. “Video in the AFI Festival was interesting because they had no particular generic preferences or biases.”
He joined the Wex in 1989, becoming curator-at-large in 2010. The offerings he staged there varied widely, from a survey of visual art by filmmaker John Waters to an exhibition of photographs by Annie Leibovitz. In an interview with the Columbus Dispatch, he once described his approach as, “Let’s do whatever we want and see who shows up.”
When he left in 2023, Donna de Salvo, herself a former Wex curator, called him a “legend.” Curator Helen Molseworth, who also worked with Horrigan at the Wex, used that same exact word to describe him on Instagram last week.