The Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus has appointed Julieta González as its next head of exhibitions. She will begin in the role in October.
González is a leading curator, with over three decades of experience at institutions across Latin America, as well as in Europe and the US and with more than 80 exhibitions under her belt. She is most recently the artistic director of the Instituto Inhotim in Brazil, a sprawling sculpture park founded by mega-collector Bernardo Paz. She is currently co-curating “Histórias latino-americanas,” scheduled to open in 2026 at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where she is curator-at-large for modern and contemporary art.
Prior to Inhotim she was artistic director and chief curator at the Museo Jumex and senior curator at the Museo Tamayo, both in Mexico City. She has also held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, Tate Modern in London, and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas in Venezuela.
“Julieta is a seasoned curator with a great capacity of research, you know, and having written some seminal catalogs of exhibition that you can’t even find [anymore],” Gaëtane Verna, the recently appointed executive director of the Wexner, told ARTnews. “I spoke to different people with whom she worked with, they were all very consistent, [highlighting] the seriousness of her endeavor, the generosity, the leadership, and the projects that she has done in the past.”
Verna said she first came to know González through the work of artist Franz Erhard Walther. They both curated career surveys for the artist: Verna at the Power Plant in Toronto in 2016 (the artist’s first in Canada) and González at the Museo Jumex (his first in Latin America). “I went to the opening [at the Museo Jumex], and we felt like a big family,” Verna said, noting that she was also impressed by the concurrent thematic exhibition curated by González, “Memories of Underdevelopment: Art and the Decolonial Turn in Latin America, 1960–1985.”
As head of exhibitions, González will oversee the Wexner’s exhibition calendar and manage its curatorial team, as well as look to foster further collaboration between the museum and its broader community at Ohio State.
“The Wexner is a place that has always been on my radar in terms of the shows they were doing,” González said. “I also felt that I could work well with Gaëtane because I had followed her program at the Power Plant, and there were a lot of points in common, a lot of common ground.”
Looking to the future of the Wexner, Verna and González both said they want to present groundbreaking exhibitions, running the gamut from emerging artists to late artists, local artists to international artists, with an eye toward research and a global take on how artists are addressing today’s most pressing issues.
“I want to build on the capacity and the history of the institution, but really look forward,” Verna said. “Together we bring this international perspective into the American conversation. We’re in a Tier-1 research university, there is so much capacity to push the envelope.”
González added, “For the past 15 years, I have focused on intersections between the fields, of art, film, architecture, design, anthropology, ecology, and cybernetics. … This academic setting would offer precisely a very good opportunity to do so.”
