Tacita Dean: Blind Folly
Columbus Museum of Art
Located in Lower Level Walter Wing
On view October 8, 2025–March 8, 2026
Admission Information
Tacita Dean: Blind Folly is included with the cost of general admission.
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Exhibition Description
Tacita Dean: Blind Folly is the first major museum survey in the United States of work by British European visual artist Tacita Dean (b. 1965). The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with Dean, spotlights her career-defining approach to creating art through unmediated and chance-based drawing processes across a variety of mediums, from film to printmaking. Blind Folly, the show’s title, reflects Dean’s desire to let the behavior of her mediums dictate the results of her work. For the artist, the playful and old-fashioned phrase connoting foolishness, “blind folly,” represents the role chance and fate play in the creative act.
Blind Folly brings together several of Dean’s monumental blackboard drawings along with rarely shown drawings from her studio on paper, found postcards, albumen photographs, and 16mm films. This selection includes several newly created works, some of which were inspired by Dean’s residency at the Menil Collection’s Cy Twombly Gallery, a Renzo Piano-designed building devoted to the work of late American artist Cy Twombly (1928-2011).
Tacita Dean: Blind Folly is curated by Michelle White, Senior Curator, The Menil Collection, Houston, and presented at the Columbus Museum of Art in collaboration with Daniel Marcus, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, and Rae Root, Roy Lichtenstein Curatorial Fellow. The exhibition is accompanied by the book Blind Folly or How Tacita Dean Draws, written by Michelle White (co-published by the Menil and MACK). The text, illustrated with more than forty images, is based on seven years of conversation between the author and the artist.
Tacita Dean, Beauty , 2006. Gouache on black and white fibre-based photograph mounted on paper, 141 × 147 in. (358.1 × 373.4 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Purchase through a gift of Raoul Kennedy in memory of Patricia A. Kennedy. © Tacita Dean. Photo: Tenari Tuatagaloa
