Updates and reflections from Wesleyan's Center for the Arts in Middletown, Connecticut
Thursday, November 7, 2019 at 8pm
Smith Reading Room, Olin Library, 252 Church Street, Middletown
Writer, director, visual artist, and vocalist Laurie Anderson addressed how to prepare for the 2020 election cycle and the tumultuous year ahead in the United States in this free talk.
Photography by Richard Marinelli.
For more photos of this event, click here.
Thursday, October 10, 2019 in the Davison Art Center
Opening reception for exhibition of miniature artworks—drawn entirely from the Davison Art Center collection—featuring objects made across several centuries, including pieces by Rembrandt van Rijn and Henri Matisse.
Photos by Richard Marinelli.
To view more photos from this event, visit: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmHGyWuY
Opening reception and performance (at 5pm) for Inaction, a new sculptural and performance-based installation by Brendan Fernandes.
Photography by Rich Marinelli
To view more photos from this event, visit: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmHxyV5B
Taylor Mac performs the Connecticut premiere of the highly immersive and outrageously entertaining two-hour abridged version of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music highlighting various musical styles and artistic voices.
Photography by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography
To view more photos from this event, visit: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmHxvcVH
A presentation and conversation with Marc Erwin Babej and William Wylie, the artists featured in the exhibition “Urban Space, Roman Couture, and A Living Past: Views of Pompeii and Pantheon,” curated by Wesleyan Professor Andrew Szegedy-Maszak.
Photography by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography
To view more photos from this event, visit: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmHxuzKX
The Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to purge sites of communism was a global operation—and East Asia was no exception. Key officials from the agency described acts of espionage and strategic coordination in the 1950s and ’60s that ranged from the mobilization of controlled media and mafia groups to the violent suppression of socialist movements. With its title alluding to mind-body dualism, The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA) contends with past machinations that are still corporeally present, albeit camouflaged in other forms of manipulation and continuing to shift control and coerce power under new terms.
The exhibition features works by artists Minouk Lim, Yoshua Okón, and Royce Ng, whose works react to anti-communist rhetoric that has suppressed and repressed intellectuals since the 1950s. To ground this narrative within the exhibition, declassified accounts of covert operations by the CIA are displayed as archival documentation.
The CIA’s clandestine activities succeeded in transforming economic policies, sovereign histories, and global perception, irrevocably altering the world’s cultural and political landscape. The exhibition considers the incarnations and reverberations of their strategies, and how they continue to infiltrate today’s political imagination.
The Imperial Ghost in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the CIA) was organized by Asakusa and curated by Koichiro Osaka—a curator, writer, producer and the founding director of Asakusa. Asakusa is a 40-square-meter exhibition venue and project space in Tokyo, committed to advancing curatorial collaboration and practices. The space intends to serve as a platform through which to engage with art-historical research and independent exhibition projects, making possible various approaches to work both with public institutions and private initiatives.
The exhibition was previously on view at e-flux, New York, from April 30 to June 15, 2019.
On display at Wesleyan through Sunday, December 8, 2019.
Photography by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography
To view more photos from this event, visit: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmHxGUnV
Zilkha Gallery showcases the work of the Class of 2019’s thesis students in the Department of Art and Art History’s Art Studio Program from 2pm to 4pm. The exhibition is curated by two students, Cara Blumstein’20 and Emma Frohardt ’20, who will comment on the exhibition at 3:30pm. The exhibition presents a work by each of the seniors from their Senior Thesis Exhibition. Works shown are in drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, mixed media, and architecture. Co-sponsored by University Relations.
Exhibition on display from Tuesday, May 7 through Saturday, May 25, 2019.
Photography by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography
To view more photos from this event, visit: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmHxtRfg
On Wednesday, April 24, 2019 inDANCE’s Roney Lewis, Xi Yi, Paul Charbonneou, and Eury German ’16 spoke about the Spring Faculty Dance Concert, SKIN, and its inherent aesthetic and socio-political representations about queer sexuality and cultural appropriation as part of the Cynthia Novack in Memoriam Lecture. The lecture was in the format of a conversation moderated by Associate Professor of Dance Hari Krishnan. The speakers also embodied this conversation with movement demonstrations.
Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.
On Thursday, April 18, 2019 artist, Rajiv Joseph, gave a lecture at Memorial Chapel. Rajiv Joseph’s play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama, and also awarded a grant for “Outstanding New American Play” by the National Endowment for the Arts. He has twice won the Obie Award for “Best New American Play,” first in 2016 with Guards at the Taj (also a 2016 Lortel Winner for “Best Play”), and then in 2018 for Describe the Night.
Other plays include Archduke, Gruesome Playground Injuries, Animals Out of Paper, The Lake Effect, The North Pool, and Mr. Wolf. He has been awarded artistic grants from the Whiting Foundation, United States Artists, and the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust. He is a board member of the Lark Play Development Center in New York City, where he develops all his plays.
He is the book-writer and co-lyricist for the musical Fly. He also wrote for the Showtime series Nurse Jackie for seasons three and four. Additionally, he was the co-screenwriter of the film Draft Day starring Kevin Costner and Jennifer Garner. He received his B.A. in Creative Writing from Miami University, and his M.F.A. in Playwriting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He served for three years in the Peace Corps in Senegal, West Africa, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.
On Thursday, April 4, 2019 an opening reception and gallery talk by Miya Tokumitsu were held at the Davison Art Center.
From eye rolls to statement jewelry—we exaggerate with our bodies as much as with our words, if not more so. Yet, more than 500 years after the Renaissance, conceptions of the “normal” body remain grounded in ideals of the human body as mathematically proportional, static, and unadorned. The exhibition For Effect: Emphatic Bodies from the Renaissance to the Industrial Age examined the obverse of these ideals, and presents bodies exaggerated by their accoutrements, pose, and anatomical proportion from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Across artistic movements and historical contexts, artists exaggerated bodies to evoke from spectators responses as widely ranging as sympathy, shock, offense, or desire.
Photos by Sandy Aldieri of Perceptions Photography. Click here to view the full album on Flickr.
