CFA Spring 2026 Preview Examining the Ecosystems Around Us

Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts (CFA) continues to examine the ecosystems around us with a spring semester featuring an exhibition, live performances, and a talk by this year’s Artist-in-Residence mayfield brooks; an exhibition of Robert Lostutter’s paintings and Kristi Cavataro’s sculptures; and the AFTERWORDS: entanglement series of programs that explore our connections to each other.

Taken together, these works pose a fundamental question about the role of art in connecting us to our environment and to one another.

"What work can art do to attune audiences to both the painful and pleasurable ways we are all entangled with each other and the worlds that exist around, before, and after us?" asked CFA Director and Chief Curator Joshua Lubin-Levy '06.

Listening to the Ocean

brooks’ first major solo exhibition, Whale Fall with Me, is the culmination of the artist’s multi-year research on the life and death cycle of whales. It features a newly commissioned film created in September 2025 as a site-specific performance on the 1885 Tall Ship Wavertree in the care of the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, and at Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York where the artist lives.

The Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery will also present an intergenerational exhibition, which brings together an abridged survey of Robert Lostutter’s paintings and drawings from the late-1960s to the present, featuring meticulouslyrendered hybrid human forms in surreal settings, and Kristi Cavataro’s recent stained glass sculptural works.

brooks’ film, Lostutter’s paintings and drawings, and Cavataro’s sculptures will be on display from Jan. 27 through March 1. Cavataro will discuss her exhibition on Feb. 10.

dArK oXyGen, brooks’ new performance work, will be staged in the CFA Theater on Feb. 20 and 21. An immersive sonic dance installation exploring choreographies of breath, dArK oXyGen refers to the recent discovery of oxygen production in the deep ocean where no sunlight can reach (thus photosynthesis cannot take place). The performance is further inspired by ocean cosmologies from the Global South, memories from brooks’ childhood of singing Black gospel music, and dances that rely on breath to move the body and the voice.

The development of the work has been supported by the CFA, a Pillow Lab Residency at Jacob’s Pillow, and a performance residency at The Church Sag Harbor.

"A cycle of life and death in a place where it was presumed to be absent—this is the kind of contradiction that animates brooks’ work," said Lubin-Levy.

CFA interns Vansh Kapoor ’26 and Irene Tatsi ’26 will lead the first guided tour of highlights from the University’s Public Art Collection installed throughout the Frank Center for Public Affairs on February 13. And the exhibition The Blooming Mirror, curated by Maxwell Maveus ’26 as part of a tutorial in curatorial practice, draws on Japanese cultivated landscapes in the College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center from February 18 through May 23.

Exploring “entanglement”

The second season of the AFTERWORDS series of public programs continues as guest artists and curators reflect on their own practices, processes, and methods while examining this year's shared keyword: entanglement.

"How do artists and curators navigate their own entanglements?” asked Lubin-Levy, who curated the AFTERWORDS: entanglement series with Noémie Solomon, director of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance. “How have they developed practices out of entanglement’s creative possibilities, and in the process transformed traditional ideas of authorship and agency?"

Adrienne Edwards, the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and associate director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, will be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, author, and MacArthur Foundation Fellow Natalie Diaz. They will reflect on their ongoing collaboration and dialogue on modes of reframing time that centers Black and Indigenous practices of language, art, and exhibition-making on Feb. 6.

mayfield brooks will join author and choreographer Emma Bigé and Katie Brewer Ball, associate professor and chair of the Theater Department, to explore queer and trans approaches to art-making as a practice of environmental justice on Feb. 17.

And choreographer and writer Jonathan González will present a three-hour performance workshop based on his recently published book, Ways to Move: Black Insurgent Grammars, followed by a talk with Assistant Professor of Music Darius Jones to explore the relation between dance and music as ways of mapping alternatives to the present, on April 24.

Arts Department Programming

Throughout the year, Wesleyan’s extraordinary arts faculty will continue to present works for all audiences.

Satoko Takemoto, a master of the Japanese 13-string koto, will visit campus for three days that will include an open workshop with graduate music composers, a concert of works for the koto by Wesleyan composers, and a discussion about the role of the koto, often referred to as "Japan's national instrument," in Japanese history, Feb. 7 to 9.

The Dance Department’s spring faculty dance concert will be a Wesleyan celebration of movement, sound, and text in collaboration with Music Department faculty, staff, and fellows from the 2025–2026 Bailey College of the Environment Think Tank at the new Fries Arts Building on April 3.

Music Department jazz faculty will perform together in various combinations as the featured artists of the 23rd annual Wesleyan Jazz Orchestra Weekend on April 25, including Pheeroan akLaff on drums, Noah Baerman on piano, Eric Charry on guitar, Alcee Chriss on piano and organ, Giacomo Gates on vocals, Jay Hoggard on vibraphone, Darius Jones on alto saxophone, Tony Lombardozzi on guitar, and Roy Wiseman on bass.

Visiting Professor of Theater Alex Keegan will direct a production of The Crucible by Arthur Miller, selected by the team from the course THEA 180 Reading Plays for Production: Conceiving for Performance taught by Associate Professor of Theater Katie Pearl, April 30 through May 2.

The Collegium Musicum will celebrate 25 years as an ensemble on May 3 with a concert inspired by the biblical “Song of Songs” where sacred poetry becomes communal sound, and including the world premiere of a new commissioned work by Stef Conner.

And the 45th annual Middletown Public Schools Art Exhibition will feature a wide variety of visual art from children in kindergarten through twelfth grade in the Zilkha Gallery from March 7 through 15.

“The spring season at the Center for the Arts invites us to attend—to breath, to song, to ritual, and to the slow, sustaining forms of attention that art makes possible,” said Deputy Provost, Dean of the Arts and Humanities, and Professor of Music Roger Mathew Grant.

“Across the season, questions of nature, ecology, and climate emerge not as instruction, but as experience,” Grant said of brooks’ dArK oXyGen, Collegium Musicum’s Song of Songs, and The Blooming Mirror exhibition. “Together, these events reflect what the CFA does best—creating a space where nature, art, and research speak to one another, and where shared artistic rituals offer a vital counterweight to the intensity of our current moment.”

Visit wesleyan.edu/cfa to see all spring events. The box office opens for walk-up and phone sales on January 22. Tickets and reservations for spring events are available online at wesleyan.edu/boxoffice.