Arts center names new performing arts director

After 26 years as director of performing arts at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Charles Helm will retire June 30.

Lane Czaplinski, currently the artistic director at On the Boards, a contemporary performing-arts center in Seattle, will take Helm’s place on June 1.

“In Lane Czaplinski, we’ve found a bold curatorial thinker, a supremely agile producer and presenter and a highly accomplished arts leader who embraces the ever more urgent place of contemporary artistic expression, cultural diversity, and open discourse in an increasingly complex world,” Sherri Geldin, director of the Wexner Center, said in a news release.

Helm took on the director’s role two years after the Wexner Center opened in 1989 and was directly responsible for crafting the performing-arts program into a nationally respected outlet.

Czaplinski is familiar with many of the performers who have passed through the Wexner Center, having worked with the Wooster Group, Vivarium Studio’s Philippe Quesne and Laurie Anderson, among others.

The incoming director said he is eager to begin.

“I’ve always known that it would require a very special opportunity to pull me away from Seattle,” Czaplinski said in a statement. “As an interdisciplinary laboratory, the Wexner Center is perfectly positioned to redefine the field of performance by reconsidering which artists are included in the canon of contemporary art, who gets to curate and contextualize them and how the work of these artists is supported, produced, distributed and, ultimately, experienced.”