Wesleyan’s Rani Arbo talks to Julie Shvetz about the 40th annual Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition

40th annual Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition
Artwork (clockwise from left): Maria Enrika Laredo, Gazelle Molina, Audrey Antczak.

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

The virtual opening reception for the 40th annual Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition will take place online on Saturday, March 13, 2021 from 5pm to 7pm. This event is sponsored by the Middletown Board of Education, Middletown Public Schools Cultural Council, and Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts.

Every spring for the past 40 years, the Middletown Public Schools K-12 Art Show has transformed Wesleyan’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery into a joyous, wall-to-wall riot of color. From ceramics to collage, the annual exhibition is a multimedia celebration of the creativity of Middletown students, the vision and dedication of their art teachers, and the community that supports both. It is a beloved event: last year, more than 2,000 people attended the exhibition opening on Saturday, March 7, 2020—just days before it closed early in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, the Middletown Public Schools K-12 Art Show turns 40, goes virtual, and is a testament to an unprecedented year of teaching, learning, and art-making.

“The art teachers are unsung heroes,” says Julie Shvetz, K-12 Visual Department Head for Middletown Public Schools. “They are doing amazing things in their classrooms, making it work simultaneously for kids in the room, kids who are hybrid and will be in the room tomorrow, and kids who are fully remote.” Since last spring, teachers have been packing up supply kits full of pencils, markers, watercolors, air-drying clay, and sculpting tools to ensure that kids at home can fully participate and have a supported creative outlet.

“Students need a way to express themselves and how they’re feeling, with everything going on in the world right now,” says Shvetz. During January’s Presidential inauguration week, she challenged her high school students to create an expressive collage on a topic that concerned them, from COVID-19 and the election to Black Lives Matter and their own futures. They drew a range of emotions, and then incorporated those into a collage of images, text, and 3-D elements that summed up how they felt and what they had to say (some of these will be on view in the virtual show). Says Shvetz, “This show is a perfect means for bringing the community together, from Pre-K to kids who are about to graduate. We celebrate all our students, all our schools, and all our teachers—and this virtual year, we are so glad we still have that opportunity.”

The 40th anniversary Middletown Public Schools K-12 Art Show will be hosted on a Middletown Public Schools website and will open with Zoom reception on Saturday, March 13, 2021 from 5pm to 7pm. We hope you join us for this annual Wesleyan Center for the Arts and Middletown Public Schools tradition!

Rani Arbo
Campus and Community Engagement Manager
Center for the Arts

Artwork (clockwise from left): Maria Enrika Laredo, Gazelle Molina, Audrey Antczak.

An Interview with the Curators of “Reiterate, Resound—Visualizing Time: A Student Video Exhibition”

Reiterate Resound—Visualizing Time: A Student Video Exhibition

 


In dialogue with the exhibition
A SCULPTURE, A FILM & SIX VIDEOS, currently on view in the Main Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, the videos in Reiterate, Resound capture a variety of perspectives on the nature of time. Each of the video submissions for the show responded to the prompt circulated in the spring of 2020: “in this moment, what does time mean to you?” Staged by two student curators, Maya Hayda ’21 and Nia Felton ’21, Reiterate, Resound emerged as a response to this prompt as well as a curatorial interlocutor with Six Videos. The exhibition features recent video works by six student artists and is on view in the Zilkha South Gallery until Friday, October 23, 2020. Zilkha Gallery Exhibitions Intern, Paul McLaren ’21, engaged the curators in a conversation about the exhibitions thematic content, and the process of organizing a group show featuring student work.

Paul McLaren: Can you share a little bit about the process of organizing the exhibition? How did you select, organize and curate the videos?

Maya Hayda: In August, we were approached by Ben and Rosemary and asked to curate this show from a group of about 30 videos, submissions from current Wesleyan students and recent alumni. The prompt had already been circulated in the spring, and so we were presented with all of the submissions and really an open ended task of pulling together what the exhibit would become. We were given access to view the Six Videos content, and additionally we each did some readings on video art, just to get our bearings on the medium, its history and its potential to address this larger theme of time. Nia and I then both watched the videos separately, and came together a few times to discuss our initial reactions and then to piece together a cohesive, formally interesting and thematically relevant show. For me at least, it was really important to include works that were making formal investigations into this idea of time, its cyclicality, and its effect on our lives, along with more narrative or thematic explorations of the prompt. 

After organizing the initial exhibit, we also wanted to give an opportunity for the artists to speak about their work to a wider public, since there was no opening reception due to COVID regulations. We hosted a Facebook livestream with four of the six artists, and it was a great chance to hear more about the pieces in addition to the current and future projects the artists are working on. Overall, I think it was pretty successful and I hope that everyone can check out the videos streaming on Vimeo this month! 

PM: How do the videos you selected relate to and build off one another? 

MH: I think there’s a strong connection in all of the videos which connects this idea of time to identity, and the ways in which the past may inform the present and future. There’s this consistent theme of cyclicality which occurs both symbolically and formally in repeating images and sounds. Videos like Ayat’s Dawra (which translates to cycle) show this cyclicality quite beautifully through repeated sounds, including lyrics like the song “going to the chapel and we’re going to get married” paired with repeated visuals like the hot wax brings about this idea of how our existence and self-hood is shaped by patterns and ingrained cycles in many ways. Then there’s also Alessandra’s video, On Conversations with our Fathers, which shows cyclicality in reckoning with trauma (either from events like 9/11 or the emergence of the pandemic or the trauma of dealing with racism) through symbolic and literal layering of family photos within the frame in addition to audio clips recollecting stories. I think each of the videos present a different voice in relation to time, but each remains bound up in this duality of repetition and evolution as the artists speak to their own lives and in their own practice mark themselves as active participants within this current moment. Although each of the videos shows how time passes, I think the very act of creation allows for this intervention which insists on the importance of hearing and seeing each of these voices in the present, and hopes to resonate into the future. 

NF: I don’t want to talk too much about what I think each video means because that right should be given to the artists first and foremost but I think the videos we chose all deal with time in a very intimate and interpersonal way even if the thesis of the videos vary. That intimacy I think is the greatest way the videos build off of each other. Just as an example, the conversations the artists, Alessandra Rizzo and Yichen Zhang, have with their parents is so incredibly poignant.

PM: In the description for Six Videos, curator Ben Chaffee writes, the videos “connect a deep mystical time to the present tense, visualize cycles, and reach into the future for the potential it may hold for transformation.” What’s the relationship, both thematically and materially, between Reiterate, Resound and Six Videos?

MH: One important, albeit somewhat obvious connection, between the two exhibits is their use of video to address this idea of time. Unlike photographs, sculpture, or painting, I think that video is perhaps one of the best formats to think about time and our relation to it. There’s something about how video allows for movement, which is not present in a photograph, which I think speaks to how video is able to connect the past to the present and “reach into the future.” Moments are not presented as fact, or as “document,” but as fluid and inherently connected to other moments, images or frames of reference. In terms of theme, I think that the videos in Six Videos are also in dialogue with this idea of cycles within our lives and social contexts and allow for deeper consideration of these repetitions. Videos like Prodger’s Birdgit and Kahn’s Stand in the Stream offer a look into the intimate connections between an individual lives and their presence in time, in a similar way to Alexa’s Eileen speaks to the the life of the named “Eileen” as someone who is negotiating an identity that is being constantly shaped by those around her and the landscape she inhabits. Another connection between the two exhibits is this idea of hope and faith in futurity, and its ability to learn from the past and present moment in order to evolve into something better. In Six Videos, this motif is exemplified by the “Green Ray,” which has this generational allure of mysticism and largely relies on the belief of the viewer to become actualized. Although Reiterate, Resound does not have a literal “green ray,” I think that the videos touch on similar notes of generational legacies and stories and how they inform the present. By recording instances from the past and the present and showing them in video there’s a kind of agency in both exhibits which allows for an understanding of where we are coming from and t simultaneously a place for the artists and viewers alike to move forward into the future. 

NF: During the curating process, we spent most of our time with the submitted videos and the prompt and not so much with Six Videos although we were told what Six Videos was about and what artists were featured. However, I do think authenticity is a shared theme between the art featured Reiterate, Resound, and Six Videos.  

PM: Is there a particular urgency that you feel the exhibition has given the current climate? What about video?

MH: When the prompt went around, I think there was an urgency to negotiate our relation to time, particularly for students. It’s like we’ve been on this trajectory our whole lives, through childhood, moving through college, and then all of a sudden in the middle of the semester time stops, we’re all sent home and the threat of mortality looms in our face as this strange virus takes hold of the nation. I think the urgency of the videos points to a need to respond, and take initiative to define a voice in this particular time in order to not feel hopeless or completely without agency given the context of pandemia, violence, the effects of climate change, etc. This takes forms in a few different ways in the exhibit—for example you have Yao’s video (Along the River) which is a direct response to being quarantined in a hotel room and negotiating that “captive” space by looking and filming out the window as a point of connection. Alexa’s Eileen also addresses the pandemic more directly. In addition, there’s Ben’s Video,  Imagine transcend love, which I think very powerfully affirms that despite our current situation and our organic, mortal, decaying bodies, everyone has the potential to transcend with acts of love and care. 

NF: I’m a bit unsure what you mean in this question. We did feel pressure to watch all the videos, take notes, and make decisions about the exhibition because we were called on during the late summer and the show was scheduled to go up in September. However, I think the art in the exhibition is not temporal. The horror of the pandemic may only be experienced by a few in terms of human history but the art created during this time is an important part of the preservation of human experience.    

PM: How do the videos you included resists, singular definition of time? I’m thinking about the Elizabeth Grosz quote you included in the exhibitions description: “Time has a quality of intangibility, a fleeting half-life, emitting its duration-particles only in the passing or transformation of objects and events, thus erasing itself as such while it opens itself to movement and change. It has an evanescence, a fleeting or shimmering, highly precarious ‘identity’ that resists concretization, indication or direct representation.”

MH: I think we often perceive time as moving perpetually forward. It’s something that “passes” and as people we are simply flowing in the stream. These videos challenge that idea through their emphasis on cyclicality, bringing us back to repeating moments that are fleeting and changing but very much inform the present. One video I’m thinking about in particular is Kyron’s Gentrify Express, which addresses a changing landscape of home through this formally rigorous format. We see the repetition of the subway doors opening and closing and the flow of commuters inside the frame of a compact mirror. The video starts close to the mirror and slowly zooms out, and as viewers we watch these scenes of transit and movement occurring over and over again. You can’t “capture” any of the moments in the video, which I think reflects how a process like gentrification has this kind of “evanescent” quality in public memory, as a process which happens, passes many of us by and that we don’t necessarily register until it is “past,” or “completed.” Kyron’s video brings attention to this transience and highlights through repetition that maybe we need to pay more attention and not just be passive actors in time. In another example, Alessandra’s video is also highlighting this “shimmering” or “evanescent” quality of time by using ephemeral objects (family photographs) in addition to recordings of family stories (which is in itself a time-dependent act). These objects and recordings/stories  have a “lifespan” as material objects but their placement in the video resonates with how their effects extend past this determined lifespan and continually inform our present and future. 

NF: I think that each video has distinct theses about time and that inherently makes them resistant to a singular definition of time. However, to illustrate that more clearly and using examples from artists we spoke to during our Zoom talkback: when a viewer watches Alessandra Rizzo’s video I hope that they feel the genuine and justified fear of Spring 2020 when the future was made entirely obscured in a way that it never would have been without a pandemic. In contrast, Ben Schneier’s video is a hopeful take on time, the future, and human advancement.

 

A SCULPTURE, A FILM, and SIX VIDEOS

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

This week, Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee writes about the exhibition “A SCULPTURE, A FILM, & SIX VIDEOS,” which is on display now through Sunday, November 22, 2020.

A SCULPTURE, A FILM, & SIX VIDEOS is an exhibition of a sculpture, a film, and a survey of six recent video works presented in a nontraditional, temporal framework in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. Rather than present all of the included artworks every day the exhibition is open, the sculpture is up for the run of the exhibition, the film is being projected three times, and the videos are projected one at a time for two weeks each. Instead of an eight-person exhibition there are in effect six different two-person presentations. As the videos will not be seen in the same place at the same time, they will exist in relation to each other only through memory, engaging one of the fundamental properties of the moving image in the structure of the exhibition itself.

Upon entering the front doors of the gallery you see the smallest work, the sculpture. Nestled into a custom-built atrium in a corner of the gallery, Peter Fischli & David Weiss’ Son et lumière (1990) acts as the pivot or fulcrum for the entire exhibition, the kinetic center around which everything else revolves.

Installation image of "A SCULPTURE, A FILM, & SIX VIDEOS," 2020.
Installation image of “A SCULPTURE, A FILM, & SIX VIDEOS,” 2020. Photo by Benjamin Vuchetich ’22.

Acting as a counterweight, a proto-cinematic object, and a foil, the sculpture is the smallest work included in the exhibition and is given the most time in the gallery. Like most works by Fischli & Weiss the materials list is simple: “Projection with kinetic objects including an army torch (fitted with red and green gels), turntable, corrugated plastic beaker and adhesive tape.” While the materials are self-evident, the effect they create is magical. The turntable is propped up on an angle by a few coins placed under one end and as it rotates the plastic cup rolls around the turntable surface guarded by a masking tape fence. The light from the flashlight refracts through the cup creating a projection on the wall behind making a gentle rhythmic sound as it moves.

Installation image of Peter Fischli & David Weiss, "Son et lumière" (1990).
Installation image of Peter Fischli & David Weiss, “Son et lumière” (1990). Collection of the artist. Courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.

Turning the corner into the main space of the gallery there is carpeting over the cork tile floor and a large-scale projection wall dividing the vaulted space. The videos are projected here in a darkened space. Works are included by Renée Green ’81, Karrabing Film Collective, Trisha Baga, Stanya Kahn, Arthur Jafa, and Charlotte Prodger. More information about each of the works can be found on the exhibition website. Individually these works address continuities, discontinuities, place, and displacement in time. They connect a deep mystical time to the present tense, visualize cycles, and reach into the future for the potential it may hold for transformation.

Installation image of Karrabing Film Collective, "The Mermaids or Aiden in Wonderland" (2018)
Installation image of Karrabing Film Collective, “The Mermaids or Aiden in Wonderland” (2018) in “A SCULPTURE, A FILM, & SIX VIDEOS,” Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, 2020. Photo by Benjamin Vuchetich ’22.

Tacita Dean’s 16mm film The Green Ray (2001), also included in the exhibition, refers to a naturally-occurring phenomenon, a flash of green light crossing the sky after the sun has set. In the 19th century it was a widely-held Romantic belief in Europe that observing the green ray gave the viewer a heightened perception of the world and viewing the ray was indicative of a coming transformation. In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007), the green flash is seen as a sign that a soul has returned to the living. Jules Verne encapsulated that ideal in his 1882 novel The Green Ray referring to the color as “the true green of Hope”. In her collected writings, Dean explains that “looking for the green ray became about the act of looking itself, about faith and belief in what you see.” The green ray grounds the temporal framework of the exhibition itself and the specificity of media’s relation to time, delineating difference of time in sculpture, in video, in film, in performance, in event, in exhibition. The Green Ray will be projected two more times over the exhibition run, on Wednesday, October 28 and Friday, November 13, 2020. Both screenings are at 12:10pm.

Tacita Dean, "The Green Ray," 2001, 16mm color film
Tacita Dean, “The Green Ray,” 2001, 16mm color film, mute, 2 1/2 minutes. Courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris. Copyright Tacita Dean.

On the podcast What’s Love Got To Do With It?, Alice Notley asks Precious Okoyomon, “How do you think about the future? And do you think about the future with love? Now we’re at the hazy place where we have to think about the future out of this present and how do we think about it?” These questions have been haunting me lately. How do we imagine a future out of an unsustainable present? Amidst the grief and loss of the global pandemic, systemic racialized violence, a divisive political sphere, the economic crisis, and the larger backdrop of our climate emergency? When Okoyomon returns the question, Notley shares that she doesn’t believe in future, only in an expansive present. Perhaps the way forward is not out but in. As our experiences of our present time are increasingly measured by their proximities to ending(s) this exhibition looks for continuities in time. While we reimagine a way forward to what degree can we look to the form of time itself to hold the power for transformation?

All of the exhibition programming is online at the exhibition website, designed by Everything Studio. More information is available about each of the artworks included in the exhibition and some of the videos are available for limited online screening.

Here’s a list of the upcoming online programming:

Artist Talk: Stanya Kahn
Wednesday, October 21, 2020 at 8pm
RSVP required for access to virtual event.

Performance by Tosh Basco (aka boychild): “Untitled: darkness” (2020) 
Saturday, November 7, 2020 at 2pm
RSVP required for access to virtual event.

Conversation: Collective for Radical Death Studies and devynn emory with Anthony Ryan Hatch, Associate Professor of Science in Society at Wesleyan
Monday, November 9, 2020 at 7:30pm
RSVP required for access to virtual event.

Artist Talk: Karrabing Film Collective
Wednesday, November 11, 2020 at 6pm

Talk and Reading: Victoria Pitts-Taylor
Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 6pm
RSVP required for access to virtual event.

Artist Talk: Renée Green ’81
Thursday, November 19, 2020 at 6pm
RSVP required for access to virtual event.

Kahlil Robert Irving and Richard Munaba: Safetyfirst&Fantasies_BLOCKCHAIN

 

This week we are proud to share Safetyfirst&Fantasies_BLOCKCHAIN, a new collaborative work by Kahlil Robert Irving and Richard Munaba commissioned by Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA). Right now with cultural institutions closed and physical-distancing in effect most of us can only access culture through our screens. As institutions and artists alike share documentation of works, presentations, performances, talks, and exhibitions all originally intended to be experienced in-person, we at the CFA wondered what it might look like for artists to make new (art)work of the material of the Internet at this time. Kahlil Robert Irving’s artwork Internet Data Collage (Focused eye) (2018) came to mind for its use of the aesthetics of image search engine results. This small and powerful work was included in Irving’s 2018 solo exhibition at Wesleyan in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Kahlil Robert Irving: Street Matter Decay & Forever / Golden Age. More information on the exhibition can be found here.

Roots of Irving’s practice can be found in assemblage and collage which are early Modern artistic techniques for using or referencing existing materials. Irving expands and adapts these historic methodologies by developing a syntax of contemporary visual symbols that represent the values we perpetuate and enhance through our media consumption. In Safetyfirst&Fantasies_BLOCKCHAIN Irving pairs with artist Richard Munaba who brings expertise with digital artwork and design, as well as a practice that focuses a queer lens on how technology changes and recontextualizes our relationships with each other and our surroundings. Internet Data Collage (Focused eye) (2018) and several other of Irving’s collages highlight and structure images that communicate acts of police violence and civil injustice. Sourced digitally and printed on paper these works served as reference points for Irving and Munaba as they began work on the conceptual and material constructions of Safetyfirst&Fantasies_BLOCKCHAIN. Expanding on the historic models mentioned above, this commission resonates with the dimensional possibilities of sampling—the musical technique of reorganizing or modifying previously recorded material to create something new.

Constructed from found digital materials and presented online, this interactive work is filled with details in constant motion. Even while the Coronavirus pandemic limits our physical connections with others, it opens an opportunity to reconsider how ideas are exchanged and communicated. The artists encapsulate some of the pressures of our experience in this piece by mimicking multiple browser windows—watching videos, video calling friends, scrolling through Twitter, listening to music, etc. The work plays with a heightened sense of fantasy, blending together the trauma, violence, and resistance that are already ubiquitously embedded within media and technology. ‘Safely’ viewed from a distance, Safetyfirst&Fantasies_BLOCKCHAIN brings awareness to our moments of media consumption by reminding us simultaneously of the politics of our attention and its immediate commodification.

In recent weeks we have had to confront the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and countless other Black Americans. Mourning their deaths we are angered by the systemic racial injustice. Black Lives Matter. We recognize that action takes many forms and though we may not all be able to join in body we can show solidarity in other ways. Please consider supporting the protestors and the political resistance happening now across the United States of America. Below are some resources for action, for additional educational information, and some organizations you can support with a financial contribution (if you are able).

Audre Lorde Project – https://alp.org/

Women for Political Change – https://www.womenforpoliticalchange.org/

Reclaim the Block – https://www.reclaimtheblock.org/home

Arch City Defenders – https://www.archcitydefenders.org/

Close the Workhouse – https://www.closetheworkhouse.org/

Next Door  – https://nextdoor.com/?next=/help_map/?is=helpmap&utm_campaign=caregivers

Black Protesters Relief fund – https://www.gofundme.com/f/mo-black-protester-relief-fund

The Bail Project –
https://bailproject.org/our-work/

National Bail Out – https://nationalbailout.org/black-mamas-bail-out/

Brooklyn Bail Fund – https://brooklynbailfund.org/

Black Visions MN – https://www.blackvisionsmn.org/

Reclaim the Block – https://secure.everyaction.com/zae4prEeKESHBy0MKXTIcQ2

Southern Poverty Law Center – https://www.splcenter.org/

How to Support the Struggle Against Police Brutality – https://www.thecut.com/2020/05/george-floyd-protests-how-to-help-where-to-donate.html

10 Ways Youth Can Engage in Activism – https://www.adl.org/education/resources/tools-and-strategies/10-ways-youth-can-engage-in-activism

Compiled list of bail support initiatives, protest support, petitions, and trans support – https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1A3f-20SipegLlS2D-D8JRpJd2IBGmN7eKdfRB6cJHwY/htmlview

 

Kahlil Robert Irving (b. 1992, San Diego, CA) is an artist currently living and working in the USA. Irving was selected to participate in the 2020 Great Rivers Biennial hosted by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, where he will present a solo exhibition following the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, Irving was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. In 2018, Irving’s first institutional solo exhibition took place at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts, and was accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays and an interview. Currently, he is presenting a large-scale digital collage commission at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio. Irving’s work is also featured in Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work has been exhibited at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; the ASU Art Museum, Phoenix; and the RISD Museum, Rhode Island, among others. Irving attended the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art, Washington University in St. Louis (MFA Fellow, 2017); and the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA, Art History and Ceramics/Sculpture, 2015). His work is in the collections of J.P Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Richard Munaba (b. 1992, Jakarta, Indonesia) is a New York based interdisciplinary artist and designer. Munaba currently works as editorial manager at Holler. In the past, he worked at GIPHY and has exhibited works in New York, Baltimore, Seattle, Canada, and South Korea. He received a BFA in Interactive Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016. More information about his work can be found at richardmunaba.info

 

Image above: Kahlil Robert Irving and Richard Munaba, Safetyfirst&Fantasies_BLOCKCHAIN

Environmental Studies Artist Books

Artist book by Emma Singleton ’23
New Haven-based artist Joseph Smolinski joined a Zoom session to critique student work (including an artist book, shown above, by Emma Singleton ’23) in “E&ES197: Introduction to Environmental Studies.”

Since 2014, students in Earth and Environmental Sciences 197: Introduction to Environmental Studies have had the option to create an artist book for their final project. This spring, with support from the Center for the Arts’ Creative Campus Initiative, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Helen Poulos offered those students some expert, socially-distanced mentoring from local artists. Wesleyan’s Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Ali Osborn recorded bookmaking video tutorials from his home studio; and New Haven-based artist Joseph Smolinski joined a Zoom session to critique student work (including an artist book, shown above, by Emma Singleton ’23). Each semester, the class votes on the most creative and interesting books; over the years, more than 30 of these have been selected for inclusion in the Wesleyan Library’s Special Collections & Archives and are available for viewing.

Rani Arbo
Campus and Community Engagement Manager
Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University

News from Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University

Detroit-based movement artist Jennifer Harge
Detroit-based movement artist Jennifer Harge in “Fly | Drown” (2019). For the ICPP online summer intensive, Harge will be reimagining a live-streamed version of this work in her home—the very site that inspired the original installation for the performance.

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

This week, we write from the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP), a low-residency Master’s degree in Performance Curation housed in the Center for the Arts.

ICPP students and alumni offer extraordinary examples of how their curatorial work designs ways of sustaining individual and collective practices in this time of uncertainty.


ICPP Leadership Fellowship 

Deborah Goffe (MA ’19) has been working for over a year on The Nest, a retreat for movement artists and cultural workers of color in the southern New England and New York areas to gather and share processes around performance making and commoning as survival strategies. The gathering was scheduled to take place this month. In the face of the global health crisis, Goffe redistributed the funds to the participants to offset their personal financial losses and is considering how to re-imagine the gathering at a later date. Deborah’s leadership and care for others illustrates the intentions of the ICPP Leadership Fellowship, which is awarded to graduating students to foster professional and networking opportunities while nurturing underrepresented perspectives in the field of art and performance curation.


ICPP Students Community Spotlights

MA candidate Candace Thompson-Zachery, Manager of Justice, Equity and Inclusion Initiatives at Dance/NYC, co-organized their 2020 Symposium on March 21. As New York City implemented social distancing guidelines, the all-day event was moved online and content shifted accordingly. The panels touched on indigeneity in performance, development of a disability politics toward dismantling racism, the current state of the dance field, and direct emergency response for the dance community during COVID-19. Since the symposium, Dance/NYC launched the COVID-19 Dance Relief Fund, awarding 180 grants to dance makers in the New York metropolitan area, and continues to aggregate NYC area classes and workshops on their community calendar, as well as host digital town halls. 

Graduate student Jamie Gahlon continues her exemplary work through HowlRound Theatre Commons. As co-founder and director Jamie and her team have been turning out pandemic-related content consistently and frequently over the past weeks, including livestreamed talks and panel discussions around artist resources, the state of affairs in the arts today, sustaining creative practices, and much more. The organization, already functioning as a digital commons, has taken the opportunity to host conversations around pragmatic strategies for freelance artists during the crisis, offering information on livestream technology, financial planning, and sustaining creative practices, in addition to regular content. Take a look at their ongoing online programming.


Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Performing Artist Case Studies

As part of our Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Performing Artist Case Studies, an examination into art practices, economical resources, and modes of sustainability amidst changing cultural economies, ICPP is excited to be working with Detroit-based movement artist Jennifer Harge. For the ICPP online summer intensive, Harge will be reimagining a live-streamed version of Fly | Drown (2019) in her home—the very site that inspired the original installation for the performance. 


Class of 2020

We are so proud of our four anticipated MA graduates from ICPP this month:

Beatrice Basso, independent curator and theater maker (Thesis: Curating in Translation: Oblique Gestures of Repair); Victoria Carrasco-Dominguez, Gallery Management and Adjunct Curator, Public Programs at Phi Foundation (Thesis: Public Art as Performance: Curating the Utopian Sculpture in and out of the Museum); Raechel Hofsteadter, Associate Director of Development Operations, Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University (Thesis: Mobilizing Dance Legacies: Curating Embodied Archives Through the Praxes of Jennifer Harge and Anna Martine Whitehead); and Candace Thompson-Zachery, Manager of Justice, Equity and Inclusion Initiatives at Dance/NYC (Thesis: Encounters in Caribbean Dance: Curating Beyond Display).

Thank you for your inspiring work, which opens rich and urgent avenues for performance curation across contemporary cultures.

Though making and convening performance in times of social distancing brings great challenges, we will take our cue from ICPP co-founder Sam Miller ’75 and continue to imagine infrastructures of care to accompany artists in these shifting conditions and economies. 

To receive ICPP’s newsletter, please email icpp@wesleyan.edu.

Yours,

Noémie Solomon, ICPP Acting Director; Rosemary Lennox, ICPP Program Manager; and Constanza Armes Cruz (MA ’21)

News from the Creative Campus Initiative

A screen shot of artist Carolyn Lazard and students
A screen shot of artist Carolyn Lazard (lower left) and students in Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Catherine Damman’s class “CHUM325: The Work of Art Against Work: Art, Labor, Politics.” Lazard is sharing their computer screen, and the work shown is Lazard’s “Support System (for Park, Tina, and Bob),” 2016. This durational piece addresses the performance of convalescence, disabled sociality, collaborative art practice, and the transactional nature of emotional labor. “Support System (for Park, Tina, and Bob)” is performed over the course of a day, from 9 am to 9 pm. Visitors are invited to sign up for a 30-minute slot for a one-on-one performance with the artist, who spends the day in bed. The cost of admission is one bouquet of flowers.


Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

This week we write to share news from the CFA’s Creative Campus Initiative (CCI). When Wesleyan moved to virtual learning in mid-March, we knew that professors across campus would be reimagining their syllabi—and that artists everywhere would be reimagining the purpose and possibility of their work in this unprecedented time. CCI’s mission since 2006 has been to connect Wesleyan faculty with artists—and to catalyze cross-disciplinary collaborations that elevate the arts as a way of teaching, learning, and knowing. What better time than now, we thought,  to bring those collaborations online?

Historically, CCI has focused on pairing artists with non-arts faculty primarily for cross-disciplinary work. But in this unusual time, we chose to extend an invitation for artistic collaborations to all departments. Faculty response was swift, and in just a week we had awarded modest grants to resource faculty connections with sixteen artists—choreographers, poets, actors, musicians, video, and multimedia artists—who will lecture, offer workshops, and share the labor of mentoring and inspiring students during this difficult time.

A sampling of this spring’s collaborations:

Professor of Theater and Chair of the Theater Department Ron Jenkins invited formerly incarcerated actors Dennis Woodbine and Dario Pena to critique final student work in his course, THEA115: America in Prison: Theater Behind Bars.

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Helen Poulos and choreographer Jill Sigman will work together with ENVS201: Sophomore Seminar in Environmental Studies on a movement practice that supports new assignments: a personal journal and a final project that investigates shifting ecological networks during a pandemic.

Catherine Damman, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities, welcomed writer, speaker, and artist Carolyn Lazard to speak on their community and activist work in a class on disability, rest, and care; and to mentor student work in  CHUM325: The Work of Art Against Work: Art, Labor, Politics. Read more about this virtual class here.

Assistant Professor of Theater, African American Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Katie Brewer-Ball shifted her syllabus for THEA364: Friendship and Collaboration to address how we may find new ways to be together in this moment, assigning her students to begin a letter-writing practice. She invited poet Kay Gabriel to lecture on the history of the epistolary form in poetry and to guide the class in a writing workshop.

Makaela Kingsely ’98, Director of the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship and Adjunct Instructor in Public Policy, invited five fellow Wesleyan alumni to CSPL262: Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship to discuss how they have used artistic practice as a vehicle for social change. First up were Laura Stein ’03, founder of Dancing Grounds, a multigenerational arts space that brings inclusive and accessible dance programs to New Orleans residents; and Chris Kaminstein ’04, founder of Goat in the Road Productions, a New Orleans-based performance ensemble. 

Heather Vermuelen, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Humanities (CHUM), invited artists micha cárdenas and Jen Liu, to SOC300: Queer and Trans Aesthetics, where students are considering how their own research, curatorial, and creative projects (proposed prior to the pandemic) will change in light of the shapeshifting geographic coordinates and digital realms in which they now exist. Cardenas will lecture on Thursday, April 16 at 4:30pm and Liu will lecture on Thursday, April 23 at 4:30pm. Both lectures are open to anyone with a Wesleyan email address—see both posters and learn more here.  

To these teachers, artists, and students, and to the broader Wesleyan community and all of the artists we know and have yet to meet: we are incredibly inspired by the ways you are finding to practice, teach, learn, create, and share your work as we pivot into this new world.

Gratefully,

Rani Arbo
Campus and Community Engagement Manager
Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University

 

 

 

Report from the Virtual Classroom

Catherine Damman writes, “We had an incredible virtual class visit with artist Carolyn Lazard in CHUM325: The Work of Art Against Work: Art, Labor, Politics. Students had read their 2013 essay “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity,” and Lazard began by taking us through many of their recent works. We had a complex and rewarding conversation on many of the topics that Lazard’s work addresses, including: the history of television closed captioning, the testing of psychotropic drugs on incarcerated populations, and the relationship between privacy and convalescence. Lazard spoke insightfully about how, rather than bring art to the hospital as a therapeutic tool, their work brings the hospital to the art world. Students are interested in the temporality of disability, as it is fundamentally at odds with capitalism (related to an assigned reading by Alison Kafer on “crip time,” which is also the title of one of Lazard’s video works), and we talked about the potential intersections between queer temporalities and disability temporalities. As the students are beginning their final projects for the class, Lazard shared many insights about their experience making art and scholarship that begins from illness as a site of value, rather than lack; the ways that dependency can be configured differently, as either “scarcity” or “abundance;” and making art about trauma without fetishizing its representation. The group had particularly incisive questions and reflections about how a disability studies perspective recasts such concepts as mutuality, reciprocity, and consent outside their normative definitions. Together, we have been studying theories of reproductive labor, and my brilliant students are very interested in how the work of care can be reconfigured such that it does not merely reproduce a labor force in service of capital, but rather can reimagine and enact forms of community and collectivity deserving of those names.

An Update from Interim Director Jennifer Calienes

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

May this provide an update and entry into our present work at the Center for the Arts should this be of interest or helpful to you in this time. Although there is a lot to absorb online right now, we wanted to share with you some of our current projects.

In the coming months, you will ‘see’ us online more intentionally through a series of experiments with our creative community of students, faculty, alumni, and guest artists as outlined below. We welcome your feedback and participation.

Virtual Artists in Residence and Commissions: Eiko Otake has been engaged as our first CFA Virtual Artist in Residence, and we will begin circulating video journals of her work in development for those interested. We are also engaging in a select number of virtual commissions with guest artists who know our community well and will be announcing these projects shortly.

Arts Departments: Each spring, the CFA supports an abundance of faculty and student concerts, performances, and exhibitions. We are working in partnership with Art and Art History, Dance, Music, and Theater to explore how best to showcase their endeavors through alternative formats.

Creative Campus Initiative: Since 2006, we have been providing support for guest artists working in Wesleyan classrooms in partnership with non-arts faculty. In the past week, we awarded modest grants to Wesleyan faculty members (both arts and non-arts) to resource online collaborations with thirteen artists to support and complement coursework and/or to share the labor of mentoring and inspiring students at this difficult time.

Middletown Public Schools: Closing our 39th annual Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition early was tough for all of us, and while we recognize nothing can replace moving through the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery with the works of our local public school students, we will be sharing images of their work in the hope that the circulation of our future artists might be wider than previously imagined.

#WesCreative: We will be collecting and putting a spotlight on the remarkable skills and imagination of the Wesleyan community.

You will hear more about each of the extraordinary initiatives from various Center for the Arts staff members over the course of the spring.

The CFA has always served as a platform for our creative community on campus, in Middletown, and beyond, and we intend for that to continue through this complicated and difficult time.

Please be well. You are loved and appreciated and we will get through this together.

Jennifer Calienes
Interim Director
Center for the Arts

All Spring Events Are Canceled

Dear Friends of the Center for the Arts,

With the CDC reporting cases of COVID-19 nationwide doubling since Monday, and Governor Ned Lamont declaring a public health emergency in Connecticut, it has become clear just how rapidly this virus is spreading. After Wesleyan University consulted with a variety of public health experts and other higher education institutions around the country, we wanted to let you know that all on-campus events and exhibitions have been canceled until further notice as a preventive measure. The University will continue to update the website with the latest available information.

Anyone who purchased tickets in advance will be issued a refund from the box office starting the week of Monday, March 16, 2020 and artists who were scheduled to perform this spring will be compensated. We encourage you to utilize your refund to re-invest in the arts through a donation, album, artwork, or ticket to a future performance. If you have any questions or concerns, or would like to donate your tickets to the Center for the Arts, please email boxoffice@wesleyan.edu or call 860-685-3355 Monday through Friday from 11am to 3pm.

Thank you for your continued support of the arts, and for your understanding about this decision.

Stay well and we will be in touch again soon.

Jennifer Calienes
Interim Director
Center for the Arts

Lewis Hyde

Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 4:30pm
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery
A talk by poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic Lewis Hyde, who has a particular interest in the public life of the imagination.
Photography by Richard Marinelli.

To view more photos from this event, click here.

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