Center for the Arts Season Reimagines Community, Memory, and Art

Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts 2026-27 season features a wide range of special exhibitions and performances that integrate art and artists across campus, exploring how art brings us into relation with each other.

“The presentation of any artwork is an invitation to consider what we value, an instigation to engage in a deeper consideration about who this ‘we’ refers to, who we are as a public, and what kind of world we want to bring into being,” said Director and Chief Curator Joshua Lubin-Levy '06.

Wesleyan’s annual Navaratri Festival, widely recognized as the oldest, continually running multidisciplinary festival of its kind in the nation, will celebrate its 50th anniversary from October 8–11. Founded in 1976 as part of the University’s longstanding commitment to the practice and teaching of South Indian music and dance, the festival uplifts the brilliance and diversity of global South Asian arts. Highlights of the festival include master of Carnatic vocal music T.M. Krishna’s return to Wesleyan for the first time since 2011 on October 10, and Maryland-based ensemble Kalanidhi Dance’s presentation of the flowing, graceful, and theatrical Kuchipudi dance style on October 11.

Over the course of the next academic year, the collective Make Jazz Trill Again will partner with the Center for the Arts to explore jazz as a communal language of trust-building, intergenerational connection, and collective artmaking. Their engagements will center process and practice and include performances, workshops, and town halls that invite open discussion and improvisation.

Singer and multi-instrumentalist Melanie Charles will debut her newest album, The Lunacy of Not Believing, during a performance installation on October 2 in the Fries Arts Building's Lin-Manuel Miranda Theater. Documentary filmmaker Darah Golub will screen an excerpt from the in-process film New York Love Songs/Jazz School followed by a conversation with Charles on November 6 in Ring Family Performing Arts Hall.

The group exhibition Mozart’s Chair will feature international works in a variety of media—sculpture, painting, installation, performance, and sound—that examine the relationship between contemporary art and furniture in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery from September 15, 2026 through February 28, 2027. Examining the performative nature of the gallery space with related music and theater events, Mozart's Chair considers furniture a precursor that enables action or becomes a record of actions. Curated by Associate Director and Curator of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00, the works systematically blur the lines between foreground and background, asking how furniture informs who we are, what we make, and how we understand the possibilities of our bodies.

Drawn Between The Lines, a collaborative exhibition with the Center for Prison Education, will feature works on paper created in the program’s first practice-based arts course—ARST131 “Drawing I” taught at Cheshire Correctional Institution by Associate Professor of Art Julia Randall —from September 30 through December 4 in Olin Library. Curated by Randall with Teaching Assistant Coline McEachern ’26, the exhibition includes a selection of work from the first college-level drawing course taught at the prison for men, offered for the first time in summer 2025.

The exhibition Collecting China: Missionary Assemblages of a Distant World, 1844–1911 places questions of collecting and archival practices at its center in the College of East Asian Studies Gallery at Mansfield Freeman Center from September 23 through December 4. Curated by Sida Chu ’26 and Nancy Li ’28 as part of a tutorial in curatorial practice led by Chaffee and Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Assistant Curator of Education Rosemary Lennox, the exhibition invites viewers to encounter China as a 19th-century visitor might have in the long-defunct Wesleyan Museum of Natural History (1871–1957), a space once filled with cultural and natural curiosities that alumni had gathered from around the globe. Most of the objects in the exhibition are appearing publicly for the first time in over a century, following their display in Olin Library through August 31.

In July, Razom for Ukraine, an international organization committed to supporting Ukraine’s freedom and democratic future, launched the I’mmortal Fellowship, their first Arts in Health program to develop projects that use creative practice to transform mental health, physical rehabilitation, and community reintegration in Ukraine and beyond. At Wesleyan in November, Razom's five transatlantic fellowship partnerships between artists and healers will gather for a weeklong residency of shared programming and peer exchange, culminating in a public capstone showcase on November 7 in Fayerweather Beckham Hall to present their work, and their vision for full implementation in Ukraine in 2027.

Throughout the year, Wesleyan’s extraordinary arts faculty will continue to present work for all audiences. Innovative komungo (Korean stringed instrument) virtuoso and Assistant Professor of the Practice in Music Jin Hi Kim will perform her works on October 1 with various musicians to celebrate the acquisition of her archives by Wesleyan’s Music Library and World Music Archives.

On November 18, the Music Department will present a 50th-anniversary showcase of the Wesleyan production of David’s Violin, a four-act Yiddish melodramatic opera translated by Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music Emeritus Mark Slobin in 1976. And the new Latin Jazz Ensemble, directed by Assistant Professor of Music and University Organist Alcee Chriss, will debut in a concert with the Wesleyan Jazz Ensemble, directed by Jazz Piano Instructor and Visiting Professor in Liberal Studies Noah Baerman, on December 11.

The Theater Department will present WE ARE HERE, an immersive performance that transforms participants into co-creators of a live, unfolding event in the Fries Arts Building’s Lin-Manuel Miranda Theater November 12-14. Directed by Professor of Theater Marcela Oteíza, audiences will move through space together, guided by sound and shared instructions, forming temporary assemblies, unexpected alliances, and evolving narratives.

The Dance Department presents the premiere of a new evening-length work by choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Dance Doug Elkins during the Fall Faculty Dance Concert on November 20 and 21. The company Doug Elkins and Friends will be joined by Wesleyan student artists, special guests from the worlds of contemporary dance and New Vaudeville, and hip hop luminaries.

“Reaching the 50-year milestone of the Navaratri Festival highlights Wesleyan's deep, enduring dedication to global, critical, and experimental perspectives on the arts,” said Roger Mathew Grant, deputy provost, dean of the Arts and Humanities, and professor of Music. “At the same time, Drawn Between the Lines, created in collaboration with the Center for Prison Education, reminds us that this commitment is not only about preserving traditions but also about creating new possibilities for artistic practice and exchange. Together, these programs speak to something fundamental about the arts at Wesleyan: They expand the spaces in which we can learn from one another.”

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.