Excavations, Gary Red Oak O’Neil’s solo exhibition in the South Gallery Reading Room of the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, features the artist’s ceramic practice, which draws on his deep connection to the land and the materiality of the soil itself. The works include a range of styles reflecting O’Neil’s enduring career spanning nearly 60 years, along with newer pieces 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 tribe’s interactions with early 17th-century English settlers. To excavate is to ascertain, to determine, to discover that which has been hidden or lost. O’Neil’s pots and trays are vessels that carry the weight of fragmented history like the beveled edges of broken shards. As such, the exhibit speaks to layers of newfound evidence that have been submerged and recovered.

Curated by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui in partnership with Associate Director of Visual Art Benjamin Chaffee ’00 and Exhibitions Manager Rosemary Lennox.

Exhibition co-sponsored by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities.

This exhibition will be closed from Saturday, October 18 through Tuesday, October 21, 2025.

Held in conjunction with the exhibition, a Wangunk History Symposium, “Emerging from Erasure: Indigenous and Settler Colonial Histories of the Wangunk People,” will take place on Friday, October 24 and Saturday, October 25, 2025. Please contact Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities for more information.

“Dark Forest Theory” (DFT) states that civilizations hide in an effort to preserve themselves. If they were to come out of hiding, they’d risk falling into conflict and being destroyed by another civilization. The theory is an offshoot of the Fermi paradox, which points to the distance between our lack of evidence of alien life and the (high) likelihood of its existence. Rather than applying the theory to the extraterrestrial, DFT is used here as speculative social theory, as a vehicle to explore contemporary human interaction.

The group exhibition DFT 2025 incorporates artworks by artists in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, video, installation, performance, and sound. The artworks on view and the exhibition’s curatorial strategies toy with core themes of DFT: concealment, elusiveness, and both accessibility and its opposite. The exhibition includes an expansive list of artists and artworks that map a web of relations that extend offsite. Thus the exhibition itself functions as the temporary nucleus of a network, the nodes of which emit multi-frequency transmissions on a spectrum between legibility, hiding in plain sight, and complete concealment.

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 and insistence on privacy, and opting out, facilitate freedom? The artworks and artists included in the exhibition engage with these questions, at once both accessible and clandestine.

Artists Showing in Zilkha Gallery:
Emilio Cruz, Rhea Dillon, Nikita Gale, Jasper Marsalis, Rodney McMillian, Daid Puppypaws, BLACKNASA, and the Otis Space Technology Research Collective, Pope.L, Coumba Samba, Michael E. Smith, SoiL Thornton, Kaari Upson

Additional Contributions By:
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, K.O. Asante, Jamil G Baldwin, Luisa Bryan, Ben Chaffee ’00, East Main Fish & Chips, Kyle Dancewicz, Darby English, Erica Enriquez, Aili Francis ’19, Boz Garden, Emelia Gertner ’20, Salim Green ’20, Teo Halm, Kevin Holliday ’19, Brandon LaBelle, Chris Lloyd, Jared Quinton, Steven Shaviro, Shani Strand, Charlotte Strange ’19, Paul Thek, Samantha Topol

Co-curated by Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee '00 and Sullivan Fellow in Art Salim Green '20.

This exhibition will be closed from Saturday, October 18 through Tuesday, October 21, 2025; and from Tuesday, November 25 through Monday, December 1, 2025.