CFA Spring Preview: Exploring How Art Creates Knowledge

Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) continues to explore the capacity of art to reflect and transform the world this season with a spring semester featuring exhibitions and live performances of commissioned works by visiting artists, and convenings with the campus community led by this year’s artist in residence Anna Deavere Smith Hon. ’97. 

CFA Director Joshua Lubin-Levy ’06 said this academic year that the Center for the Arts has been thinking about how art creates assemblies—a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  

“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,” Lubin-Levy said.  

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

Kicking off the spring season on January 24, playwright, actor, and educator Smith— who launched her yearlong residency with the first public staged reading of her new work This Ghost of Slavery in October—will be in discussion with composer Samora Pinderhughes to 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 will return to campus to conclude her residency with a convening from April 9 to 12, exploring the power of art in building bridges to histories that help us understand and transform the present. 

Curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00, two complimentary solo exhibitions will be on display in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from January 28 through March 2. Parker Ito’s painting People tell me everyday that I’m really creative (peace on earth) (A Lil’ Taste of Cheeto in the Night Installation) (2013–2015) is part of the Public Art Collection at Wesleyan University. Ito will re-present the work and build a new installation around the painting on the tenth anniversary of its initial exhibition in Los Angeles. And for Private Figure, Chris Domenick’s designed objects recall domestic interiors, an extension of his studio practice based out of a former Subway restaurant in Canaan, Connecticut. Ito will talk about his practice on January 29, while Domenick will speak on February 20.  

Students who are part the CFA’s Director’s Council, a new initiative that gives students hands-on experience in arts leadership, will host the second in a series of novice-friendly, interdisciplinary “Make As You Are” workshops on February 14. This workshop, Breakup/Breakdown, will experiment with language and electronic music as attendees write love poems that will be remixed into a score that fills the Zilkha Gallery with fragments of love, longing, and heartbreak.  

Composer Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) will premiere two electronic and acoustic works, Electric Gamelan, commissioned by the CFA, during the Javanese Gamelan and Dance Spring Concert on May 3. The Wesleyan Javanese Gamelan Ensemble, under the direction of Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Sumarsam MA ’76 and University Professor of Music Harjito, will perform the score for the acoustic work. The concert will also feature Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Dewati Rahmayani from the Royal Palace of Yogyakarta.

Other new works premiering this spring include a collection of dance works by Rahmayani, Associate Professor of the Practice in Dance Doug Elkins, and Visiting Instructor in Dance Kellie Lynch during the Spring Faculty Dance Concert on April 4 and 5.  

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 on April 25. 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Alex Keegan directs The Moors by Jen Silverman, a dark comedy about love, desperation, and visibility, May 1 through 3.  

And this spring, 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. 

Visit wesleyan.edu/cfa to see all spring events. Tickets and reservations for spring events are available online at wesleyan.edu/boxoffice. The box office opens for walk-up and phone sales on January 23.