Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts announces highlights of 2025 spring season

Middletown, Conn.—Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) announces the highlights of their 2025 spring season, including convenings with the campus community led by the CFA’s 2024–2025 artist in residence Anna Deavere Smith Hon. ’97; two complimentary concurrent solo exhibitions featuring a painting and installation by Parker Ito, and framed wall-based works and designed objects that recall domestic interiors by Chris Domenick; and the premiere of two commissioned works by composer Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton).

“Over the 2024–2025 academic year, we have been thinking about how art creates assemblies, wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts,” said Joshua Lubin-Levy '06, Director of the Center for the Arts. “We continue that work this spring with a wide range of special programs: exhibitions that reimagine the gallery as a space of gathering bodies and objects; student-led events that create novice-friendly creative communities; a speaker series that explores architectures and infrastructures for communing from Brooklyn to the West Bank; and we continue to build on our work with Anna Deavere Smith, exploring performance as a way of knowing ourselves and each other across our differences.”

AFTERWORDS: assembly, the CFA series of public programs that asks what happens after the encounter with the work of art, will feature events with Peter Zuspan, Emily Jacir and Camila Palomina, and mayfield brooks, the CFA’s 2025–2026 artist in residence.

Drummer, percussionist, composer, and arranger Bobby Sanabria’s Latin jazz ensemble Ascensión will make their Connecticut debut as the conclusion of the 22nd annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend.

Wesleyan’s Dance Department presents dance works choreographed by Dewati Rahmayani, Doug Elkins, and Kellie Lynch. The Music Department presents world premiere works by Neely Bruce, Yvonne Troxler, Paula Matthusen, Cesar Camarero, Negar Soleymanifar, and Seán Doherty. And the Theater Department presents a production of the play The Moors directed by Alex Keegan.

Wesleyan’s College of Design and Engineering Studies (CoDES) will celebrate the new CoDES Textiles Hub on the fifth floor of the Exley Science Center with two days of panel discussions and talks, “Fabricating Fabrics: Design and Computation.”

“This semester, the CFA continues to explore how creative practice can create new knowledge,” said Roger Mathew Grant, Dean of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Music. “In partnership with artists like Anna Deavere Smith and Jlin, we see new connections emerging between art making, experimentation, and critical inquiry.”

Tickets and reservations for spring events at the Center for the Arts are on sale now online at 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.

EXHIBITIONS AND PERFORMANCES

On Mentorship: Public Discussion with Anna Deavere Smith and Samora Pinderhughes
Friday, January 24, 2025 at 7pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

Anna Deavere Smith Hon. ’97, the 2024–2025 CFA Artist in Residence, will engage in a discussion about art, civic engagement, art’s role in healing the wounds of history, and the importance of intergenerational mentorship with musician and composer Samora Pinderhughes.

One of the most important relationships artists can have is to each other. In this conversation, Smith and Pinderhughes will explore the history and meaning of their relationship as mentor/mentee, and how they nurture similar reciprocal relations in the worlds they create through their individual arts practices.

Smith is continuing to develop her most recent play, This Ghost of Slavery (originally published in The Atlantic, December 2023). Samora Pinderhughes recently released his latest album, Venus Smiles Not In The House of Tears, while continuing to serve as creator and executive and artistic director of The Healing Project, a massive multidisciplinary project which was recently awarded a $1 million dollar grant from The Mellon Foundation that explores through art the question: what if we built our world around healing?

Parker Ito: A Lil’ Taste of A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night
Tuesday, January 28 through Sunday, March 2, 2025
Tuesday through Sunday, Noon to 5pm
Opening Reception: Tuesday, January 28, 2025 at 4:30pm
Artist Talk with Parker Ito: Wednesday, January 29, 2025 at 4:30pm, Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
Lunch and Learn with Curator Benjamin Chaffee ’00, Associate Director of Visual Arts: Monday, February 3, 2025 at Noon
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, North Gallery, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

2025 marks the 10th anniversary of Parker Ito’s exhibition A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night at Château Shatto, Los Angeles. This maximal and constantly-changing months-long exhibition included a series of eight double-sided paintings, each paired with a set of custom powder-coated chainlink. One of those paintings, People tell me everyday that I’m really creative (peace on earth) (A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night Installation) (2013-2015), is now in the Public Art Collection at Wesleyan University. For this anniversary re-presentation, the artist will build a fresh installation around the painting, resituating it among some of the original installation elements and new ones, all in new configurations. Included within the 2015 exhibition were a series of bronze sculptures that riffed off the mascot of the local Los Angeles company Western Exterminator.

The artist likes to play with the conventions of exhibition-making including alternative installation strategies but also the extensions of the exhibition, including the artist’s bio or the press release. Ito opened a text published in Artforum in 2015, “I want to make exhibitions where there is always a potential for the work to be shifting.” He goes on to explain that the question was how to make something that felt like the artist’s website, where he’s always making new work and always editing. The artist’s website became like his masterwork containing everything the artist has ever done and everything is located within a bigger structure.

Ito’s work is associated with the term “Post-Internet.” Often used to narrowly categorize a specific aesthetic derived from the internet or an overload of information, Ito prefers to define it much more broadly, “Post-Internet as a state or period that we are living in that is applied to everything, not just art, but to the world. If we think about it in those terms, then every single artist ever in the history of art is a Post-Internet artist. The Post-Internet era changed the way that we perceived and understood art. Now you can look at cave paintings magnified by a thousand times their original size online. That is more about a historical condition which we are living through and looking at art through.”

Chris Domenick: Private Figure
Tuesday, January 28 through Sunday, March 2, 2025
Tuesday through Sunday, Noon to 5pm
Opening Reception: Tuesday, January 28, 2025 at 4:30pm
Lunch and Learn with Curator Benjamin Chaffee ’00, Associate Director of Visual Arts: Monday, February 3, 2025 at Noon
“Make As You Are” Event: Breakup/Breakdown - Friday, February 14, 2025 at 4:30pm
Artist Talk with Chris Domenick: Thursday, February 20, 2025 at 4:30pm, Reading Room, South Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Main Gallery, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

Chris Domenick’s Private Figure, his solo exhibition in the Main Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, is the extension of his studio practice based out of a former Subway restaurant. Private Figure is composed of framed wall-based works and lamps. Within Domenick’s practice the frame acts as a “suspender” and not a “finisher.” The contents of the frames–drawings, print works, fragments of paper, or found imagery–are often placed inside rather than affixed. Through these combinations of image and object, Domenick sees the works “fulfilling their identity as framed drawings” but also through “some kind of slippage” existing as sculptures. This collapsing of categories extends to other aspects of the presence of Domenick’s work. In graduate school the artist was obsessed with the found object and endeavored to bring that energy into his studio practice. In the artist's words, “Found objects embody the systems they navigated without an author.” These new works fluctuate in their authorship between a kitschy craftsperson and an artist. Some of the objects are found and others seem to embody systems but were handmade in the artist’s studio in Canaan, Connecticut.

Domenick’s work flirts with design—lamps, kitchen islands, and frames are all designed objects of domestic interiors. However it’s almost as if he arrived at a design language through a reverse rhetoric, admitting that art opposes design even if the resultant object might be the same. A key tenet of design, as defined by the artist, is its ability to be instrumentalized towards another purpose. This question of utility is active and squirrely within Domenick’s installation. His lamps, filled with our expectations of use, do light the space around them, casting light on the framed artworks on the wall. As Domenick himself explains, “While this ontological companionship could be framed as the ‘lamp lights the artwork,’ it may be more apt to say that the artwork enables a clearer viewing of the lamp.”

Convening with Anna Deavere Smith
Wednesday, April 9 through Saturday, April 12, 2025
Center for the Arts, 283 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut

As the final engagement of her year-long artist residency with the Center for the Arts, Anna Deavere Smith Hon. ’97 assembles a multi-day convening of guests and hosts, thinkers and doers, from the Wesleyan University campus and beyond.

Participants will explore the power of art in building bridges to histories that help us understand (and transform) the present. Closed conversations among participating artists and scholars allows for deep investigation across disciplines, while public sharing of their work “before it’s ready” allows for a raw relationship between audiences and the issues presented in the participants’ work.

The program draws its impetus from the following quote from Civil Rights leader John Lewis on the importance of sensing the long arc of history: “We used to say that ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part. And if we believe in the change we seek, then it is easy to commit to doing all we can, because the responsibility is ours alone to build a better society and a more peaceful world.”

Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend: Bobby Sanabria and Ascensión
Saturday, April 26, 2025 at 7pm
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.

Led by multiple Grammy Award-nominated drummer, percussionist, composer, arranger, and educator Bobby Sanabria, his ensemble Ascensión has been critically-acclaimed for its Pan-Latino approach to Latin jazz. Encompassing Afro-Cuban, Brazilian and traditions from Venezuela, Colombia, Sanabria's ancestral homeland of Puerto Rico and beyond, as well as straight-ahead jazz and the avant-garde, Ascensión is a musical laboratory that is constantly exploring the rich cultural and spiritual roots and connections between the jazz and Latin jazz continuums.

Sanabria has worked with every major historical figure in the field. The diverse range of legendary artists he has toured and recorded with includes Dizzy Gillespie, Mongo Santamaria, Tito Puente, Paquito D'Rivera, Henry Threadgill, Ray Barretto, Randy Brecker, Chico O'Farrill, Larry Harlow, Max Roach's M’Boom, Celia Cruz, and the "father of Afro-Cuban jazz," maestro Mario Bauzá. Sanabria's experiences make him uniquely qualified to lead Ascensión, a group that has been hailed by K. Leander Williams of Time Out Magazine as “…the most exciting Latin jazz band since Cuba’s Irakere.”

This concert is the Connecticut debut of Ascensión, and the conclusion of the 22nd annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend.

The concert opens with a 45-minute set performed by members of the Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra, directed by Professor of Music and African American Studies Jay Hoggard ’76, MA ’91.

Javanese Gamelan and Dance Spring Concert
Saturday, May 3, 2025 at 7:30pm
World Music Hall, 40 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

The Wesleyan Javanese Gamelan Ensemble, under the direction of Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Sumarsam MA ’76 and University Professor of Music Harjito, presents a spring concert of the classical music and dance of Central Java, featuring Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Dewati Rahmayani from the Royal Palace of Yogyakarta, and the world premiere of two commissioned works by composer Jlin, one of which will be performed live by the Javanese Gamelan Ensemble.

Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) has quickly become one of the most distinctive composers in America and one of the most influential women in electronic music. She has collaborated with Philip Glass, Björk, and the Kronos Quartet; and worked across disciplines with choreographer Kyle Abraham, fashion designer Rick Owens, and visual artists Nick Cave and Kevin Beasley. During the summer of 2024, Jlin, Sumarsam, and Harjito collaborated to record the individual sounds of each instrument of the gamelan—both for use in Jlin’s work, and to create the first open-access digital library of Wesleyan’s gamelan sounds. Over the 2024–2025 academic year, Jlin was commissioned to create two new compositions using these digital recordings: a score to be played live by Wesleyan Javanese Gamelan Ensemble musicians, and an electronic composition.

ARTS DEPARTMENTS

This Is It! 2.0: The Complete Chamber Music of Neely Bruce - Part V
Sunday, February 9, 2025 at 3pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

This festive concert, featuring works of chamber music by Neely Bruce, John Spencer Camp Professor of Music, continues a year-long celebration of the composer’s 50 years of teaching at Wesleyan.

The West End String Quartet–Sarah Washburn and Marianne Vogel on violin, Wesleyan Chamber Music Ensemble Director John Biatowas on viola, and Anne Berry on cello–will perform A Partita for Aymeric Dupré la Tour, and the world premiere of Random Study for Oboe and String Quartet with special guest Oboe Instructor Libby Van Cleve.

Fabricating Fabrics: Design and Computation
Monday, February 10 and Tuesday, February 11, 2025 at 4:30pm
Woodhead Lounge, Exley Science Center, 265 Church Street, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

The College of Design and Engineering Studies (CoDES) celebrates the new CoDES Textiles Hub on the fifth floor of the Exley Science Center. On Monday, February 10, fiber artist and designer Victoria Manganiello and 3D machine knitting researcher Megan Hofmann join Assistant Professor of Art and Design and Engineering Studies Yu Nong Khew and Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Design and Engineering Studies Sonia Roberts in a panel discussion on knitting as a modern computational manufacturing and design method. On Tuesday, February 11, computer scientist and 3D machine knitting researcher Megan Hofmann gives a talk on her current research.

Yvonne Troxler presents New Music with the Glass Farm Ensemble
Friday, February 21, 2025 at 6:45pm
Crowell Concert Hall, 50 Wyllys Avenue, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

The Glass Farm Ensemble presents an evening of world premieres by Piano Instructor Yvonne Troxler, Professor of Music and Director of Graduate Studies Paula Matthusen, and Spanish composer Cesar Camarero, plus works by Frederic Rzeswki, Louis Andriessen, and Willy Burkhard. The ensemble features Troxler on piano, violinist Leah Asher, Jos Lammerse on bassoon, and percussionist Caitlin Cawley.

Spring Faculty Dance Concert
Friday, April 4 and Saturday, April 5, 2025 at 7pm
Patricelli ’92 Theater, 213 High Street, Middletown, Connecticut
$8.

A collection of new works by Associate Professor of the Practice in Dance Doug Elkins, Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Dewati Rahmayani, and Visiting Instructor in Dance Kellie Lynch. Lynch will perform a duet with collaborator Lindsey Bauer.

The Moors
Thursday, May 1 and Friday, May 2, 2025 at 8pm
Saturday, May 3, 2025 at 2pm and 8pm
CFA Theater, 271 Washington Terrace, Middletown, Connecticut
$8.

The Moors (2017) by Jen Silverman is a dark comedy about love, desperation, and visibility. Two step-sisters and a dog live out their lives in the bleak English countryside, dreaming of love and power. The arrival of a hapless governess and a moor-hen (water bird) set all three on a strange and dangerous path. Directed by Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Alex Keegan.

Collegium Musicum Spring Concert: Leyli’s Sky—Musical Constellations Across Time
Thursday, May 1, 2025 at 9pm
Memorial Chapel, 221 High Street, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.

Wesleyan’s Collegium Musicum will premiere new pieces that draw on cosmic themes by graduate music student Negar Soleymanifar and Irish composer Seán Doherty during a spring concert under the direction of Jane Alden, Professor of Music, and Chair and Professor of Medieval Studies.