Bill Horrigan (1951–2025)

Bill Horrigan (1951–2025)

Bill Horrigan, who helped shepherd time-based art from the cinema to the gallery by establishing Columbus, Ohio’s Wexner Center for the Arts as a major destination for film and video long before mainstream institutions welcomed such work, died on May 15 following a lengthy battle with amyloidosis. He was seventy-three. Horrigan joined the Wexner in 1989, when it opened, as the founding director of the noncollecting institution’s film and video program. He quickly gained a reputation among artists as an open and supportive collaborator and among audiences as a bold and brilliant programmer. “I was always kind of fearful of Columbus disappearing,” he told Helen Molesworth and Jason Simon in a2024 interview forArtforum. “Unless we did our jobs really well and did something that advanced Columbus or sustained Columbus, we were just treading water. So I thought whatever we did do should be of interest to the world.”

Bill Horrigan was born on November 2, 1951, in Joliet, Illinois, one of eight children. In high school, he happened by the film club’s showing of a silent movie. “I was just watching it, and then I started listening—this priest was giving a lecture and he was talking about cross-cutting—and I just found it interesting,” he told theColumbus Dispatch’s Peter Tonguette in 2023. The incident was indicative of what was to be for Horrigan a fruitful lifelong habit of allowing his instincts and interests to guide him. After obtaining his Ph.D. in classical film from Northwestern University, he worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (“I thought, ‘Why not?’” he told Molesworth and Simon) and at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles (“I thought, ‘California, why not?’”) before arriving at the Wexner.

At the Wexner, Horrigan established the Art and Tech Production Studio (now called the Film/Video Studio Residency Program), which offered artists the chance to work with equipment and receive tech support they could not otherwise afford. He organized the first American institutional exhibitions for Mark Dion, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, and Chris Marker, with whom he forged a long-running collborative partnership that was largely conducted over fax, working with the French filmmaker on several notable projects, includingSilent Movie,1995, Marker’s first installation for a US institution, andStaring Back,2007, both of which toured internationally. Horrigan additionally developed projects with artists including Allison Anders, Beth B, Sadie Benning, Phil Collins, Josiah McElheny, Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon, Annie Leibowitz, Shirin Neshat, Catherine Opie, Paper Tiger Television, Julia Scher, and John Waters, among others.

As a programmer, Horrigan dazzled. Having inaugurated the Wexner’s public programming with a showing of the 1949 King Vidor–directedThe Fountainhead, based on the Ayn Rand novel of the same name, he responded to the censorship of Robert Mapplethorpe works that was then taking place in Cincinnati, roughly a hundred miles south, with sex-radical programming that included Curt McDowell’sRonnie(1972), Carolee Schneemann’sFuses(1967), and Barbara Rubin’sChristmas on Earth(1963). “There was a joke that in Cincinnati you do it and you get arrested, but here in Columbus you can do ten times worse and nobody even cares,” he told Molesworth and Simon. “You want to be at the institution that would demonstrate through its programming that we stood up for the values that were being prosecuted.” Horrigan would bring his boundless zeal and catholic tastes to bear on the Wex’s programming for the next three decades, presenting Golden Age film classics, little-seen foreign language films, and salacious comedies cheek-by-jowl with bleeding-edge experimental films, animated shorts, and obscure documentaries. He proved to have a keen ability to discern audiences for even the most esoteric films or those that one might not expect to find viewers in a Midwestern college town, in the 1990s presenting a series of Iranian films that brought Iranian artists to the city, and presenting works of New Queer Cinema before the form was widely known. “I remember once we showed a film about a famous bluegrass artist,” Horrigan told theDispatch’s Tonguette. “Somebody said, ‘Why are you showing that?’ And I said, ‘Well, I think people might like it.’ And it was a huge hit.”

A frequent contributor to art- and media-related publications, Horrigan delighted Wexner attendees with the institution’s program calendar, for which he penned a brief, pithy description of each film being presented, leaning on the skills he developed writing notes in college and at the Film Center in Chicago—again, simply because he was interested. “I liked the writing,” he told Molesworth and Simon. “It was a good exercise and it was self-improvement. I sound like Gatsby. But it was.” His sixth sense regarding which audiences might like to see a given film extended to the places such cohorts might be found: Before the advent of the internet, programming calendars were posted at Larry’s, a local college watering hole; a Warhol series was advertised in flyers posted all over town featuring a provocative still fromBlow Job(1964).

Among Horrigan’s freelance media projects were the 1989 Video Against AIDS touring program, which he cocurated for the Video Data Bank. He served on the curatorial advisory team of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the same year curated the inaugural exhibition of Access to Life, a collaboration between Magnum Photos and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Horrigan became curator at large at the Wex in 2010 and retired in 2023.

“I’ve been able to do a ton of stuff,” he told the Dispatch’s Tonguette. “I’m super-grateful to the institution for letting me do that.”