Center for the Arts

Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts announces highlights of 2023 spring season

Middletown, Conn.—Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts announces the highlights of their 2023 spring season, including the world premiere of a collaborative dance performance conceived and directed by Assistant Professor of Dance and Embodying Antiracism Initiative Faculty Fellow Iddi Saaka; the Connecticut premiere of a genre-crashing music theater experience from Assistant Professor of Theater Katie Pearl and her company PearlDamour; and two concurrent solo exhibitions: a video installation and a sculpture by Assistant Professor of Art and Luther Gregg Sullivan Fellow in Art Ilana Harris-Babou, and works at the intersection of drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture by Carrie Yamaoka ’79. The Music Department also presents two milestone events this spring: the 20th annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend, featuring the Connecticut debut by cellist, composer, conductor, and educator Akua Dixon and her Grammy Award-winning string quartet, Quartette Indigo; and the 10th annual Wesleyan University Orchestra Children’s Concert.

“The Center for the Arts is thrilled to be hosting several projects that consider, with such care, different scales of human existence, memory, and sense of belonging,” said Joshua Lubin-Levy '06, Director of the Center for the Arts. “From the urgency of ‘Ocean Filibuster,’ which takes up humanity’s relationship to the vastness of the ocean, to the intimacy of Carrie Yamaoka’s ’79 in situ artworks that refract the physical space of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery—this spring we welcome visitors to join us in finding connections among a wide array of programs that each, in its own, instigates a new sense of what it is to share the world with each other.”

Tickets and reservations for spring events at the Center for the Arts are on sale now online at https://www.wesleyan.edu/boxoffice. Tickets are also available by phone at (860) 685-3355, or in person at the Wesleyan University Box Office, located in the Usdan University Center, 45 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown. Tickets may also be purchased at the door beginning one hour prior to each performance, subject to availability. The Center for the Arts accepts cash, checks written to “Wesleyan University,” and all major credit cards. Groups of ten or more may receive a discount to select performances – please call (860) 685-3355 for details. No refunds, cancellations, or exchanges. Programs, artists, and dates are subject to change without notice.

"Red Line:" A Collaborative Dance Performance by Iddi Saaka
Saturday, March 4, 2023 at 7pm
Cross Street Dance Studio, 160 Cross Street, Middletown
FREE!

"Red Line" is a collaborative multifaceted dance performance conceived and directed by Assistant Professor of Dance and Embodying Antiracism Initiative Faculty Fellow Iddi Saaka. The work draws on the experiences of five scholar-artist collaborators to interrogate how a place of origin can open opportunities for some but close doors to others.

The world premiere of the work includes Saaka, Alycia Bright-Holland, Kwamena Blankson, Issa Coulibaly, Venlo Odom, and Center for Prison Education Fellow Shirley Sullivan. A moderated Q&A session follows the performance.

The project is made possible through generous financial and administrative support from Wesleyan’s Embodying Antiracism Initiative, the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life, the Center for the Arts, and the Dance Department.

"Ocean Filibuster"
Friday, May 5, 2023 at 8pm
Saturday, May 6, 2023 at 2pm and 8pm
CFA Theater, 271 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
$25 general public; $15 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $8 Wesleyan students, youth under 18

"Along with an immersive experience, the script takes an intimate, as well as critical, look at the relationship between humans and the ocean."
--The Arts Fuse (Boston)

Feel the power of the ocean through an immersive image-and-sound design that envelops the audience in an awe-inspiring underwater world. Linking below-the-surface mystery with above-the-surface climate issues, "Ocean Filibuster" puts audiences in the middle of a human/ocean showdown. "The Ocean" gets the chance to tell its side of the story in this new music theater experience from Obie Award-winning company PearlDamour—an interdisciplinary team, consisting of artists Lisa D’Amour and Assistant Professor of Theater Katie Pearl, whose performance works mix theater and installation.

Using large-scale projection, songs, science, and stand-up, "Ocean Filibuster" explores the intimate, critical relationship between humans and the ocean in an epic battle of wits and wills, smarts and sass, facts and anthropocentric fiction. Set in a future Global Senate, Obie Award-winning performer and artistic director Jenn Kidwell embodies two rivals: "Mr. Majority"—who introduces a bill to end the ocean as we know it—and "The Ocean," arriving in human form to filibuster the bill.

Originally commissioned by American Repertory Theater in collaboration with Harvard University’s Center for the Environment, "Ocean Filibuster" plunges the audience into the most heated debate of our time. The Connecticut premiere at Wesleyan is presented in collaboration with the Center for the Arts, the Wesleyan Theater Department, the College of the Environment, and the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life.

In the Galleries

Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
Benjamin Chaffee, Associate Director of Visual Arts
Tuesday through Sunday, Noon–5pm
www.wesleyan.edu/cfa/zilkha

Ilana Harris-Babou: "Liquid Gold"
Monday, January 30 through Sunday, March 5, 2023
Opening Reception: Monday, January 30, 2023 at 4:30pm with remarks by the artist and curator Benjamin Chaffee, Associate Director of Visual Arts and Adjunct Instructor in Art, at 5pm.
Artist Talk: Wednesday, February 15, 2023 at 4:30pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, North Gallery
FREE!

"Liquid Gold" is the first chapter in a series of installations by artist Ilana Harris-Babou. Referring to the value assigned to human breastmilk, "Liquid Gold" looks at the history of breastfeeding as it has been narrativized, advertised, and suggested for Black mothers in America. Like other projects by Harris-Babou, this exhibition, composed of both a video installation and a sculpture, examines the consumerism and complexity of the wellness industry, while bringing attention to the racialized social structures that create the parameters for an individual’s agency in making personal health decisions.

Installed in the North Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, a single-channel video work by Harris-Babou is made with a shallow depth of field, close and textured, constructing an intimate space for viewing in the gallery. The sound for the video, calibrated to the acoustic resonance of the gallery space, remixes the lullaby “All the Pretty Little Horses.” The lyrics and the surround sound presentation of the song also suggest a closeness but amidst a deep loss, holding out the promise that when the child awakes, they will have ‘all the pretty little horses.’ The song is commonly understood to have originated as a lullaby sung by enslaved Black mothers when they would leave their children alone in order to care for their enslaver’s white children. In the passageway approaching the video installation, Harris-Babou installs a sculpture containing ceramic components and other materials derived from historical devices originally designed to aid nursing and breastfeeding, playfully and critically examining the experience and industry of motherhood. Sound and production support was provided by Reese Chahal and Anna Clock.

Ilana Harris-Babou (b. 1991, Brooklyn, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn and Middletown, Connecticut. She has a new video work that will be exhibited as part of the group show "Milk" at the Wellcome Collection, London (2023). She has presented solo exhibitions of her work at institutions including Artspace New Haven (2022); Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2021); Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland (2021); Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle (2020); and The Museum of Arts and Design, New York, New York (2017). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions including "Contact Traces," California College of the Arts Wattis Institute, San Francisco, California (2021); "Care Box," The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2021); and "After the Plaster Foundation," Queens Museum, Corona, New York (2020). She has participated in major exhibitions including the Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey (2020); and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York (2019). Harris-Babou is an Assistant Professor of Art and Luther Gregg Sullivan Fellow in Art at Wesleyan University.

Carrie Yamaoka: "seeing is forgetting and remembering and forgetting again"
Monday, January 30 through Sunday, March 5, 2023
Opening Reception: Monday, January 30, 2023 at 4:30pm with remarks by the artist and curator Benjamin Chaffee, Associate Director of Visual Arts and Adjunct Instructor in Art, at 5pm.
Artist Conversation with Associate Professor of Art History Claire Grace: Wednesday, March 1, 2023 at 4:30pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Main Gallery
FREE!

Carrie Yamaoka’s solo exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, "seeing is forgetting and remembering and forgetting again," presents a body of work at the intersection of drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture that references the effects of memory on visuality. This presentation marks the artist’s return to a gallery space in which she exhibited her senior thesis project in 1979, shortly after the gallery had opened in its present space. In a series of site visits over the summer of 2022, Yamaoka made rubbings of the gallery walls onto mylar and photographed in the gallery. Slides of these images will be presented with an analog slide projector projected onto mylar, one element of a larger installation work. The rubbings of the gallery developed into wall based-works in the artist’s studio, recording the history of invisible mark making on the gallery walls. Also included in the exhibition are reconfigurations of previous works by the artist. In recent years Yamaoka has been revisiting works, actively altering their state by separating surfaces from their substrates and recomposing the components to create new works that retain traces of their history.

The material presence of Yamaoka’s work combines different media through non-traditional processes, often alluding to, or even using aspects of, photography. Images produced through the work are often only activated through the act of display and the reflection of the exhibition space and its viewers. Rather than alluding to photography’s association with the record, Yamaoka often reduces the record of information in the image through suspension in other materials, rubbing, or chemical transformation. These erasures create, or remember, new ways of being in time. The surfaces of her works, sometimes abraded, sometimes suspended in resin, or both, slow down the re-production of an image enough to allow an opening for memory, for forgetting and remembering.

Carrie Yamaoka ’79 is a New York-based visual artist whose work traverses the disciplines of painting, photography, and sculpture. She is interested in the topography of surfaces, materiality, and process, the tactility of the barely visible, and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. Her work engages the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation. Exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), MoMA/PS1 (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Ricard (Paris), the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Artists Space (New York), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Writing about her work has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, Interview, and Bomb. Her work is included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, and Centre Pompidou. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and an Anonymous Was A Woman award. Yamaoka is represented by Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles). She is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy.

The Wayland Rudd Collection
Friday, February 3 through Tuesday, February 28, 2023
Opening Reception and Talk by Assistant Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Roman Utkin: Tuesday, February 7, 2023 at 4:30pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, South Gallery
FREE!

The Wayland Rudd Collection focuses on the representation of Africans and African Americans in Soviet graphic production and propaganda. The exhibition is part of a collaborative project conceived by the artist Yevgeniy Fiks that accesses the legacy of Wayland Rudd, the Collection’s namesake. Rudd was born in 1900 in Lincoln, Nebraska and died in 1952 in Moscow. He left the United States for the Soviet Union in 1932 to pursue his ambitions of becoming a stage actor whose career would be unhindered by racial discrimination. Containing poster art and postcards, the Collection reveals a complex entanglement of race and communism, while also serving to remind us of the conflicted legacies of Soviet propaganda and the geopolitics of racism, both domestic and international, in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.

42nd annual Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition
Saturday, March 11 through Sunday, March 19, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 11, 2023
Kindergarten through Grade 5 from 3pm to 5pm;
Grades 6 through 12 from 5pm to 7pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
FREE!

View a wide variety of visual art from children in kindergarten through twelfth grade at the 42nd annual Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition. The exhibition returns to the Wesleyan campus after being virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 and 2022. The first Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition was held in the gallery in 1982.

Gallery hours for this exhibition are as follows:

Sunday, March 12, 2023 from Noon to 5pm
Monday, March 13 through Friday, March 17, 2023 from 3pm to 6pm
Saturday, March 18 and Sunday, March 19, 2023 from Noon–5pm

Sponsored by the Middletown Board of Education, Middletown Public Schools Cultural Council, and Wesleyan University's Center for the Arts.

Senior Thesis Exhibitions
Tuesday, March 28 through Sunday, April 30, 2023
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
FREE!

Works by seniors in the Art Studio Program of Wesleyan’s Department of Art and Art History.

Week One
Tuesday, March 28 through Sunday, April 2, 2023
Reception: Wednesday, March 29, 2023 from 4pm to 6pm
Featuring works by Riya Devi-Ashby, Alec Black, Peter Fulweiler, Skye Gao, Eden Lanois, and Bell Rush.

Week Two
Tuesday, April 4 through Sunday, April 9, 2023
Reception: Tuesday, April 4, 2023 from 4pm to 6pm
Featuring works by Shasekh Augustin, Allie Godwin, Finley Jacobsen, Leevon Matthews, Mim Pomerantz, and Tess Solot-Kehl.

Week Three
Tuesday, April 11 through Sunday, April 16, 2023
Reception: Wednesday, April 12, 2023 from 4pm to 6pm
Featuring works by Sarah Albert, Catherine Capeci, Claire Femano, Nina Kagan, Tatiana Meyer, Kelly Nano-Miranda, and Annie Wendorf.

Week Four
Tuesday, April 18 through Sunday, April 23, 2023
Reception: Wednesday, April 19, 2023 from 4pm to 6pm
Featuring works by Lex Bryan, Archie Caride, Jolexis DeJesus, Florence Colette Finkelstein, Tommy Graves, Lucy Ward, and Henry Weed.

Week Five
Tuesday, April 25 through Sunday, April 30, 2023
Reception: Wednesday, April 26, 2023 from 4pm to 6pm
Featuring works by Michael Eustace, Stella Guggenheim, Harrison Haft, Julia Kaubisch, Leah Levine, Nélida Samara Zepeda Mendoza, and Savannah Russo.

MUSIC DEPARTMENT

10th annual Wesleyan University Orchestra Children’s Concert
Saturday, March 4, 2023 at 3pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut 
FREE!

The Wesleyan University Orchestra presents their tenth annual children’s concert under the direction of Visiting Instructor of Music Britney Ella Alcine. Families are invited to learn about all the instruments of the orchestra and how they work together in a fun, interactive musical exploration. The hour-long performance is a great experience for all ages. Space is limited—please arrive early.

20th annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend
Wesleyan Jazz Ensemble
Friday, April 28, 2023 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut 
FREE! Masks required.

The Wesleyan Jazz Ensemble, directed by Noah Baerman, performs as the opening concert of the 20th annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend. The ensemble presents an exciting program of small-group jazz representing a variety of modern jazz traditions and techniques.

Akua Dixon and Quartette Indigo
Saturday, April 29, 2023 at 8pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut 
$15 general public; $12 senior citizens, Wesleyan faculty/staff/alumni, non-Wesleyan students; $8 Wesleyan students, youth under 18

“Highly imaginative and beautifully textured arrangements."
--The Washington Post

Internationally renowned cellist, composer, conductor, and educator Akua Dixon has been at the forefront of improvising string players since 1973. She is the first cellist to win the DownBeat magazine Critics Poll, and is a multi-laureate of the National Endowment for the Arts in composition and performance. Dixon is considered “amongst the treasures of contemporary jazz” (The Star-Ledger, New Jersey), having performed with artists from Duke Ellington and Max Roach to Ray Charles and Lionel Hampton. And her string arrangements can be heard on the Grammy Award-winning album "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" (1998).

At Wesleyan, Dixon makes her Connecticut debut with her Grammy Award-winning string quartet, Quartette Indigo, which has been called "jazz’s leading string quartet" (The Boston Globe). The string ensemble will premiere several new works.

This concert is the conclusion of the 20th annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend.

COVID-19 Safety Guidelines
The general public is welcome to attend events at the Center for the Arts and to view exhibitions in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. All patrons must adhere to and follow the University COVID-19 safety guidelines. Wesleyan expects all visitors to be fully vaccinated including booster shots. If a visitor is unvaccinated, it is expected that they will wear a mask both inside and outside when visiting campus. Please note that some events or performances may require attendees to be masked, fully vaccinated, and boosted.