Fries Arts Building Opening Celebration
Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 2:00pm
Fries Arts Building, 56 Hamlin Street, Middletown, Connecticut
Free and open to the public.
Join us for an open house and dance party to celebrate the new Fries Arts Building (FAB), an expanded home for the arts at Wesleyan University. While the FAB’s most important function is to offer teaching space, for this one day, the Director’s Council (a student-led committee that works closely with the Director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts) will turn the FAB on its head. Today, the theater becomes a concert stage, the dance studio becomes an art gallery, and the drawing and design studios host beginner-friendly arts activities for all ages!
All events are free, family-friendly, and open to the public. Don’t miss the cupcake toast at 5 pm, and stay to cap off the event with a WesGrooves dance party.
Light refreshments will be provided. The first 100 guests are eligible for a coupon for free gourmet grilled cheese from Whey Station.
2pm–5pm:
Arts Activities
Exhibitions
Concerts
5pm:
Cupcake Toast
5pm–6:15pm:
WesGrooves Dance Party
ARTS ACTIVITIES
Arts Passport
Check in at our welcome table and pick up a free notebook, crayons, and a program that includes your “Art Passport” for the day. Along your self-guided tour of the Fries Art Building, find student guides with custom stamps (designed by Jake Rekrut ’26). Collect all six stamps to complete your passport!
FABricate
Become part of the fabric of this incredible new space by lending your creativity to the FAB tapestry! Join us in the FAB drawing studio where you’ll be invited to make a a drawing on fabric squares. Use a pre-fab square or cut your own from salvaged textiles. The resulting squares will be sewn together into a community mosaic. Thanks to the Wesleyan University Costume Shop and WesThrift for support in sourcing fabric.
Cardinals of the Future
The year is 3025. Climate change’s wrath has gotten to the cardinals, and sadly, they are now extinct. Unfortunately, this means Wesleyan must now find a new mascot. Creatives of all kinds are joining together in the FAB design studio to consider a new mascot. Can you help? Draw a cardinal fit for the future… Is it a cardinal? A genetically modified skunk that sprays Febreze? The future is in your hands…Tunes for drawing provided by the archives of WESU, Middletown (WESU-FM) a noncommercial, community/college radio station.
EXHIBITIONS
Antithesis
Curated by Chloe Duncan-Wald
Antithesis is a temporary commons across disciplines, collapsing the silos between faculty, student, studio, and classroom. It rejects the hierarchies in higher education that often divide students from faculty, on- and off- campus, by creating a space of greater fluidity. Assuming the guise of the academic group show, Antithesis stages this core drama: the Fries Art Building’s Movement Studio was intended as a site of rehearsal and embodiment rather than exhibition. The exhibition convenes practitioners across mediums: musicologists with choreographers, architects with painters, sculptors with performance scholars, and ethnographers with video artists. Participating artists include: Jane Alden, Patricia Beaman, Aaron Bittel, Katie Brewer Ball, Joseph Isaac Cohen, Ilana Harris-Babou, Elijah Huge, Ron Jenkins, Yu Nong Khew, Hari Krishnan, Kevin Markowski, Tammy Nguyen, Marcela Oteíza, Katie Pearl, Joya Powell, Sasha Rudensky, Eddie Sanchez, Mark Slobin, Tula Telfair, Kate Ten Eyck, Paul Theriault, Noah Shacknai, Pelumi Sokunbi, Erica Wessman, and Truly Zanda.
Self-Portrait as a Diptych
Self-Portrait as a Diptych is a collection of work from students who participated in an introductory drawing course taught at Cheshire Correctional Institution in Summer 2025, taught by Julia Randall, Associate Professor of Art, with Teaching Assistant Coline McEachern ’26. For their final assignment, students created self-portrait diptychs, expanding on traditional ideas of self-portraiture as a singular image in order to develop a more layered and conceptual representation of the self. They challenged themselves through the time-honored approach (rendering, through observation, their faces, looking out at the viewer) and then moved beyond literal likeness to explore deeper dimensions of their identities: probing conceptual dualities including exterior/interior, objective/subjective, singular/multiple, observation/imagination. This project invited student-artists to think creatively about how to represent the complexity of who they are—not just how they appear.For many years, the final assignment for students enrolled in Drawing 1 at Wesleyan University has been the creation of a 1:1 self-portrait, a true-scale full body image that requires the use of a full-length mirror. At the prison, the only mirrors available to students were the two-by-four-inch flexible safety mirrors sold on commissary, presenting a layer of challenge to the initial objective observation. The self-image reflected back to these portraitists was slightly dulled and partial. Specular clarity and sharpness was to a degree imagined; perception of the whole self was an act of reconstruction. Participating artists include Anthony Azukas, Carlton Bryan, William Burrell, Raymond, Clark III, Veronica-May Clark, Ian Cooke, Jose Cordero, Alex Cruz, Kyndrel Dawson, John Moye, Mateus Nascimento-DaCosta, Marco Nogueras, Marquis Pettway, Roderick Rogers, Trelaine Shaw, Kunta Soyini, Michael Torres, Stanton Trent, Jar'Viyan Williams, and John Yates
CONCERTS
Sound, Imparted, curated by Emerson Jenisch
Sound, Imparted is a concert series dedicated to those who have nurtured our love of music, who have taught us, and who have encouraged us to think deeper about how we relate to each other and know ourselves better through music. With gratitude to our professors, and theirs, and so many others, we invite the Wesleyan community to gather together to celebrate some of the many influences that have shaped the musical lives of Wesleyan students, professors, and community members. Sound, Imparted features performances conceptualized by professors Ron Kuivila, Marichal Monts, Noah Baerman, and John Dankwa.
2pm–2:30 pm: Tribute to Richard Lerman, Presented by Professor of Music Ron Kuivila
For this tribute to composer Richard Lerman, best known for his use of contact microphones to transduce elements of the natural world, Lerman’s Travelon Gamelon will be performed by students enrolled in MUSC 109: Introduction to Experimental Music, followed by a screening of the artists’ Arctic Transitions 3, and a performance of the composition Changing States by Ron Kuivila.
2:45pm–3:15pm: Ebony Singers @ 40, Presented by Marichal Monts, Conductor, Ebony Singers
For almost forty years, Ebony Singers has provided Welseyan students with an opportunity to study African American religious music through the media of performance. A live performance from the current ensemble, as well as video from ensembles past, will be followed by a short Q&A with Pastor Monts.
3:30pm–4pm: Jazz Up Close, Presented by Noah Baerman, Director, Jazz Ensemble
For over a decade, Noah Baerman has led the interactive series “Jazz Up Close,” providing opportunities for exchange with remarkable jazz artists and introducing new audiences to the genre. Join us as Baerman, alongside Henry Lugo and Jocelyn Pleasant, introduces jazz to some of our FAB audiences.
4:15pm–5pm: West African Vocal Music, Assistant Professor of Music John Dankwa
From its earliest days, Wesleyan University was known as “The Singing College” for its renowned Glee Club and the many music pastimes of its students, which often include formal and informal opportunities to raise collective voice. The legacy of vocal music continues with this presentation of West African choral music organized by John Dankwa and featuring members of the Connecticut-based African Choral Ensemble alongside Wesleyan students.
5pm–6:15pm: WesGrooves—Afro Pop, with Iddi Saaka and John Dankwa
WesGrooves is a series of social dance events with a vision to create community connection through rigorous play and creative movement. The opening celebration for the Fries Art Building concludes with this collective dance party, beginning with a short lesson in West African dance from Associate Professor of Dance Iddi Saaka followed by an open dance party featuring Wesleyan’s African Pop Music Band.
Named in honor of Mike Fries ’85, a longtime supporter of Wesleyan, the FAB houses new performance, teaching, practice, and studio facilities, and is designed to combine formal and informal areas that will encourage students to collaborate across the arts.
Organized by the CFA Director Council: Malen Cheung ’28, Sida Chu ’26, Chloe Duncan-Wald ’26, Ezra Holzman ’28, Jess Huang ’27, Emerson Jenisch ’25, Vansh Kapoor ’26, Lucia Kenney ’28, Luna Kwon ’27, Kyra Nielsen ’27, Jake Rekrut ’26, Samia Segal ’25, and Matty Shield ’25.
Read more about the Fries Arts Building in The Wesleyan Connection.
The Director’s Council is a student collective, advised by the Director of the CFA, that participates in setting the vision for the CFA of the future. Working to reach new audiences and integrate arts across the campus, council members serve as ambassadors and agents of arts engagement that draw together different disciplines and various forms of study at Wesleyan University through creative making. The Council is governed and operated by the students who, each year, set the collective’s agenda. Students interested in joining the council will apply through Handshake and may direct questions to Joshua Lubin-Levy at jlubinlevy@wesleyan.edu.