2026 Public Events

 


"Art Within Reach"
  • Monday, May 4, 2026 | 4:30 p.m. | Boger 112
Ezra Shales ’91, Professor, History of Art, Massachusetts College of Art and Design 

 

In his newest book, Pitchers of American Life: Art within Reach, Ezra Shales discusses vessels for drinks in ancient cultures and in modern family relationships.  Each chapter interprets a single object as a revealing time capsule.  His vision of design/craft/art intersecting provides a deliberately provocative strategy to move beyond inherited limitations and prejudices by exploring tactile pleasures and tacit knowledge, as well as the agency of artifacts.

Might a history of art extracted from the common cupboard liberate us from the usual hierarchies of civilization and the expenses of the Grand Tour—and make the idea of art more accessible and relevant?  This consideration of collective tools, relics that still resonate with our yearnings for sociability and communion, is a compassionate investigation of the immense backlog of discarded mass-produced goods piling ever higher.

The presentation will include 'show-and-touch' participation so that, for instance, a design on display at the London Crystal Palace in 1851 can be engaged firsthand and weighed in relation to one from our Plasticene era.

 

A Wesleyan alumnus, Ezra Shales double-majored in Classics and The College of Letters.  Professor Joseph Siry supervised his thesis, which benefited from a fellowship at the Center for the Humanities.

 

This lecture is sponsored by the Samuel Silipo ’85 Distinguished Visitors Fund, Department of Art and Art History and the Department of American Studies.

 

Image: mural in the Richard Alsop IV House.

 

Symposium: "Wesleyan in the 1830s—New Perspectives"

  • Friday, May 8, 2026 | 10 a.m. | Boger 112
  • Registration required, RSVP here.
The symposium “Wesleyan in the 1830s: New Perspectives” will focus on the domestic structures built in the 1830s and interrogate the relationship between high and vernacular building styles and the oppositional ideologies underlying the Triangular trade, the Colonization movement, Abolitionism, and free Black community formation with which they affiliated.

 

Building on the successful symposium “Wesleyan in the 1830s: Historic Preservation and the Stories We Choose To Tell” in April 2024, this event presents new discoveries related to the Alsop House and the Leverett Beman Historic District. Together, these sites, both created around 1830, provide a lens onto some of the most influential and controversial developments in early 19th-century America and lend insight into the University’s founding decade. We invite consideration of how these properties and histories might be better preserved, represented, and integrated into the cityscape of Middletown and the campus of Wesleyan today.

 

Click here for more information (CFA calendar) 

 

This event is sponsored by the Virgil and Juwil Topazio Fund of the Department of Art and Art History, the Center for African American Studies, the Department of American Studies, and the Theater Department.

 

Past Events

 

"The Delight of Practice"

  • Wednesday April 29, 2026
Arkadiusz Piegdon '08, Architect, Lynne Breslin Architects

"Latent Value: Spratling Silver and the Aesthetics of Mineral Development"

  • Monday April 6, 2026

Grace Kuipers '14, Postdoctoral fellow, High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University

"The Representation of Reenchantment: Local Governance, Cultural Narrative, and Contemporary Architecture in Ningbo, China"

  • Thursday February 12, 2026

Hunter Shen '18, Harvard JD/MUP; Associate, Latham & Watkins

"Building the Future: Towards a Climate Ready Architecture"

  • Monday December 8, 2025

Richard C. Yancey '85, Founding CEO, Building Energy Exchange

"Shifting Shelves — Libraries of the 19th-Century Islamic World"

  • Friday October 24, 2025

Yael Rice, Associate Professor of Art and the History of Art and of Asian Languages and Civilizations, Amherst College - "Scattered Leaves: The Fates of South Asian Albums (Muraqqa’s) and their Libraries, 18th-19th c."

Deniz Türker, Assistant Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Rutgers-New Brunswick - "Tanzimat’s Antiquarians, Their Coins, and Books"

Selin Ünlüönen, Luther Gregg Sullivan Fellow in Art History, Wesleyan University - "The Treasury, the Museum, the Library: How to Keep Books in Qajar Iran"

"Extracting the Past: How the 'AI' Industry Exploits Art History and What We Can Do to Stop It"

  • Tuesday September 16, 2025

Sonja Drimmer, Associate Professor, History of Art & Architecture, University of Massachusetts Amherst