Exhibitions

This is what you'll find in the galleries this weekend.

Main Gallery, Ezra and Cecile Zilkha

Hours: Thursday, Noon-5 p.m.; Friday, Noon-5 p.m.; Saturday, Noon - 5 p.m.; Sunday, Noon-5 p.m.

Thesis Art Exhibition

The Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery showcases the work of the Class of 2018’s thesis students in the Department of Art and Art History’s Art Studio Program. Each student is invited to select a single work from their Senior Thesis Exhibition for this year-end showcase of drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, mixed media, and architecture. Co-Sponsored by University Relations. There will be a reception with refreshments in honor of the seniors Saturday, May 26, from 2–4 p.m

Davison Art Center

Hours: Thursday, noon-4 p.m.; Friday, noon-4 p.m.; Saturday, noon-4 p.m.; Sunday, noon-4 p.m.

Reclaiming the Gaze: African American Prints and Photographs, 1930 to Now

Reclaiming the Gaze presents a dynamic survey of African American prints and photographs from the 1930s to the present. These striking works range from the expressionist style of Hale Woodruff to the photographs of the Civil Rights movement by Ernest C. Withers, and from feminist interventions by Betye Saar and Faith Ringgold to postmodern commentaries on identity by Glenn Ligon and Robert Pruitt.

The exhibition highlights forty-two prints and photographs from the Davison Art Center collection, representing a wide range of styles and subject matter, and created across nine decades. Each artist claimed his or her vision as an African American, intervening in the artistic conventions that assumed a white male gaze. Hale Woodruff used an expressionist style to convey the horror of lynching in the rural South. In photography, Roy DeCarava sought to create what he described as “the concept of a world shaped by blackness.” Ernest Withers documented the Civil Rights Movement with close-up images of Dr. Martin Luther King. Betye Saar and Fred Wilson reclaimed racist representations for new purposes. Faith Ringgold quoted quilt traditions to celebrate the stories of African American women. Robert Pruitt turns the gaze back on the viewer with an iconic female basketball player in a work titled Negra es bella, referring to the phrase “Black is beautiful,” as well as the African diaspora throughout Latin America. Artists represented in the exhibition also include Romare Bearden, Lyle Ashton Harris (Wesleyan ’88), Glenn Ligon (Wesleyan ’82 and D.F.A. 2012), Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Vincent Smith, James Van Der Zee, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems.

The exhibition was organized by the students in ARHA 368, Advanced Themes in 20th-Century Afro-American Art, taught by Peter Mark, Professor of Art History, and assisted by Clare Rogan, former DAC Curator, in the spring of 2017. Student curators were Anna Flom ’17, Miranda Gohh ’17, Nathan Johnson ’17, Page Nelson ’17, Renee Palmer ’17, Alexia Warren ’17, and Rielly Wieners ’18.

Olin Memorial Library

Hours: Open during regular library hours; Location: Special Collections & Archives exhibition cases, 1st floor, Olin Library

Wesleyan and The Great War

In 1914, The Great War—known later as World War I—broke out in Europe. Wesleyan became a war campus in the years that followed. After the U.S. Congress declared war on Germany in 1917, college life at Wesleyan “took on a belligerent aspect,” as Carl F. Price, Class of 1902, observed later. “Minor sports, dramatics, dances, were dropped. The students were in army uniform, rose early in the morning to drill, were allowed no cuts from classes. A trench seamed part of the back of campus, and armed guards challenged all comers.” By the time the Armistice was signed in 1918—100 years ago this year—some 1,200 Wesleyan faculty, staff, students, and alumni provided military or civilian service, including twenty-six students and alumni who died. View this exhibition to learn how the “War to End All Wars” impacted Wesleyan.

Rick Nicita Gallery, Center for Film Studies

Hours: Friday, 9 a.m.-5:30 p.m. & Saturday, 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m.

Be Afraid…Be Very Afraid…The Cinema of Horror

The exhibit in the Rick Nicita Gallery, “Be Afraid…Be Very Afraid…The Cinema of Horror,” showcases horror film posters from the collections of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives. The posters here include examples of the early Universal monster movies like Dracula and Frankenstein, a rare 1931 one-sheet of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the most recent winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Get Out. The posters’ designs offer tantalizing glimpses of the movies they advertise, just enough to raise your curiosity and send your imagination into the dark….