Announcing The Fries Arts Building
President Michael S. Roth ’78 has announced the newly constructed Fries Arts Building, named in honor of Mike Fries ’85, a longtime supporter of Wesleyan. The building will open for student, faculty, and community use in Fall 2025.
“Through his financial support and visionary spirit, Mike Fries has once again catalyzed a transformative initiative on campus—the largest expansion of arts facilities at Wesleyan since the creation of the CFA in 1973,” said Roth.
The Fries Arts Building—the FAB for short—meets a growing need for expanded art space at the University, said Interim Associate Provost and Dean of Arts and Humanities Roger Mathew Grant. The number of Arts majors and enrollments have increased dramatically in recent years, as well as the number of student performances and dance clubs, placing stress on existing arts facilities.
The call for an integrative space has also grown since the Center for the Arts was constructed decades ago. “We've seen creative practice in the last 50 years has more interdisciplinary overlap between the art forms,” said Grant. “This is the first space at Wesleyan since the 1970s that brings the art forms together.”
Those art forms include everything from product design, ecological design, and architecture, as well as theater, dance, and drawing. The FAB will meet the “growing student interest in combining creative work with hands-on application and solving complex problems in creative ways,” Grant said.
The FAB will house new performance, teaching, practice, and studio facilities. Designed to combine formal and informal areas, the innovative space will encourage students to collaborate and the community to gather to experience the arts that are so central to life at Wesleyan.
The new building, situated at 56 Hamlin Street, features a range of flexible indoor and outdoor, public and private zones. The space includes a purpose-built black box experimental theater, movement studio with a fully sprung dance floor, drawing studios, steel mesh tension grid for teaching theatrical and film lighting, as well as a studio and wet lab dedicated to biodegradable design.
Detail of the tension-wire grid above theater space, which allows lighting and other instrumentation to be placed and tested without using a personnel lift. (Photo by Meka Wilson)
Fries, chief executive officer of Liberty Global and a Wesleyan trustee emeritus, is a longstanding advocate for Wesleyan, supporting numerous University priorities over the years, most recently the Fries Center for Global Studies. In 2013, he made a gift in support of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives Endowment Fund, which established the Charles W. Fries Curator of the archives, named after his late father.
Fries has long had an interest in the arts since the days he played violin in high school, which he regrets giving up. “It took me 30 years to rediscover music,” said Fries. “I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had just stuck with it. I have always admired young people with creative conviction and the courage to share their talent with others.”
He has also witnessed and supported the power of the arts as an adult. “As Chair of MCA [Museum of Contemporary Art] Denver for many years, I also saw first-hand how art brings communities together, provides perspective when things get polarized, drives curiosity, and tells the stories that open up our hearts and minds,” he added.
The three structures that comprise the new building have a long and intriguing history. The brick structure facing College Street was originally used for manufacturing in the 1860s; it was later occupied by the University’s Physical Plant and was reconstructed as part of the new building. The adjacent brick structure facing Hamlin Street was built in the 1930s and may have been the site of a factory for Indian motorcycles, a type of motorbike known for its classic style—and one which Fries coincidentally owned and used for racing in his youth. Before planning for the new arts structure commenced in 2021, the edifice had been dormant.
In addition to providing teaching spaces such as the double-height movement studio and performance classroom, the space will facilitate student group rehearsals and host guest artists who are incubating creative work at the CFA. It will bring all these art practitioners together in generous common spaces, designed to promote interaction among students, faculty, staff, and visiting artists.
With his gift for the new arts building, Fries affirms Wesleyan’s commitment to creating physical spaces that foster collaboration and hands-on, interdisciplinary learning. “Wesleyan is many things, but I believe at our core we are a creative community—curious, tolerant, opinionated, and unafraid to take risks. As the University’s first multi-disciplinary art space, my hope is that the FAB is where students will go to explore their artistic passions, create new and incredible work, collaborate with other artists across disciplines, and share their creativity with the entire Wesleyan community,” said Fries.
The FAB also literally brings Wesleyan “down the hill” to Middletown, said Grant, inviting the wider community into its outdoor and indoor spaces. The large glass wall of the black box theater rises, which will allow indoor performances to be viewed from the outside park landscape, and vice versa. “Performance is one of the primary ways that we invite the community in, so having a performance space down here is so meaningful precisely for that reason,” said Grant.
Wesleyan will dedicate the Fries Arts Building during Reunion & Commencement weekend in May, which will coincide with Mike Fries’s 40th reunion. “I’m beyond grateful for Mike’s steadfast support of Wesleyan, and his demonstration of confidence in our mission,” said Roth.
