Center for the Arts 2025-26 Season Imagines New Ways of Being
Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) 2025-26 season features a wide range of special exhibitions and performances that give expression to the possibility of other worlds and ways of being, and explore how art can help the campus community pay closer attention to the ecosystems around us.
"At a time like this, art centers like ours play an even more important role as incubators and platforms for creative voices—voices that deepen our understanding of cultural difference and exchange, help us realize new ways of coming together and building community, and champion the right to, and power in, freedom of expression," said CFA Director Joshua Lubin-Levy '06.
Over the course of the next academic year, the 2025–2026 CFA Artist in Residence mayfield brooks will work closely with the CFA as they complete the third and final part of their Whale Fall series. Their residency will include the creation of a new dance-film, an artist book, a series of community gatherings, and the development of a new performance, dArK oXyGen, which will premiere in the CFA Theater in February 2026. In partnership with Jacob’s Pillow, they will be provided with a 10-day rehearsal residency in spring 2026 to begin developing dArK oXyGen. Brooks will also teach a class on practice-based research in the Dance Department.
Gary Red Oak O’Neil’s solo exhibition Excavations will feature a range of ceramic works from his nearly 60-year career in the South Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from Sept. 9 through Nov. 16. His newer pieces are inspired by the current archaeological dig taking place at the Lt. John Hollister (1650-1715) site in Glastonbury, Connecticut, which has uncovered Native American pottery and other belongings that offer a glimpse of the Wangunk (the Indigenous people of central Connecticut) tribe’s interactions with early 17th-century English settlers. O’Neil will discuss the exhibition with co-curator J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and reflect on his practice in relation to the history of the Wangunk and the power of art in cultivating belonging on October 24 in Ring Family Performing Arts Hall.
Co-curated by Sullivan Fellow in Art Salim Green '20, the group exhibition DFT 2025 will feature works in a variety of media, including sculpture, painting, video, installation, performance, and sound in the Main Gallery of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from Sept. 24 through Dec. 7. DFT (“Dark Forest Theory”) states that civilizations hide in an effort to preserve themselves. If they were to come out of hiding, they would risk falling into conflict and being destroyed by another civilization. The exhibition explores how individuals, particularly Black people, may gain agency through concealment. How might a practice of hiding, abstraction (as a tool and strategy), evasion, a refusal of visibility, insistence on privacy, and opting out, facilitate freedom?
Formed in Kyiv in 1918, the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus of North America will perform in Crowell Concert Hall on Oct. 17, the group’s first concert in Connecticut since 2007. The bandura, often called Ukraine’s national instrument, is a 60-stringed folk instrument that carries centuries of tradition, resistance, and identity, and is a powerful symbol of cultural survival.
“These are projects that remind us how deeply our present is entangled with systems of power and histories of domination that keep us from imagining alternative ways of being together,” Lubin-Levy said.
Wesleyan’s 49th anniversary Navaratri Festival celebrates the diversity of Indian music and dance Sept. 25 to 27, including the Connecticut debut of husband and wife dance duo Srikanth Natarajan and Aswathy Srikanth, performing the New England premiere of their gender-bending reimagining of the classical Indian epic the Mahābhārata. One of the best bamboo flute artists in Indian classical music, Shashank Subramanyam will return to Wesleyan for the first time since 2013.
Wesleyan will celebrate the opening of the new Fries Arts Building located at 56 Hamlin Street with an open house on Oct. 4 that will invite campus and community members to explore the new space, participate in student-led arts activities from the CFA’s Director’s Council, and enjoy a series of concerts and programs featuring arts faculty. The celebration will conclude with the semester’s first WesGrooves event, a social dance party open to the public that provides a novice-friendly introduction to music and movement from throughout the world. This WesGrooves will feature a West African dance lesson with Associate Professor of Dance Iddi Saaka followed by a dance party featuring African pop grooves.
Throughout the year, Wesleyan’s extraordinary arts faculty will continue to present work for all audiences. On Oct. 29, the Music Department will present the New England premiere of the work “Samesoul Maker” by Assistant Professor of Music Darius Jones, which explores Jones’ mythological world of an alien family meditation, composed for two female-identifying voices and two male-identifying voices, bells, and vibraphone.
The Theater Department will present a production of the new performance work Marta Becket, Save Us All, Nov. 13 to 15. The work was conceived and directed by Associate Professor of Theater Katie Pearl and inspired by the life of Broadway dancer Marta Becket, an eccentric figure who left New York at the height of her career and moved into an empty opera house in an abandoned desert town where she performed for the next 40 years, whether anyone was there to watch or not.
The Dance Department presents the 20th anniversary celebration of the Movement of the People Dance Company led by Assistant Professor of the Practice in Dance and African American Studies Joya Powell on Nov. 21 and 22. The company is dedicated to addressing historic and present sociocultural injustices by combining contemporary and traditional dance forms.
“This season, at the Center for the Arts, we once again come together for the timeless ritual of finding joy and power in community,” said Roger Mathew Grant, Deputy Provost, Dean of the Arts and Humanities, and Professor of Music. “In Marta Becket, Save Us All, we learn the stunning story of a performer who took seriously the sacred space of the theater and moved into an abandoned opera house. How fitting, then, that it’s with this season we open the new Fries Arts Building on Hamlin Street and bring our rituals to this new place. We cannot wait to see you in all of our halls, vintage and new, this season.”
Visit wesleyan.edu/cfa to see all fall events. Tickets and reservations for fall events are available now online. The box office opens for walk-up and phone sales on September 8.
