Saturday, October 25

The art of critical listening, looking, and comparing has never been more essential. Rooted in the philosophy of pragmatic liberal arts education, Wesleyan Alumni & Family Academy will explore how critical listening, looking, and comparing can be transferred beyond the classroom to strengthen thoughtful engagement in everyday life. This course aims to cultivate strong, independent minds and develop communication strategies across disciplines. 

The Wesleyan Alumni and Family Academy is in its second of a three-year pilot program aiming to provide Wesleyan alumni and families with the opportunity to engage with Wesleyan faculty in a classroom type setting, while highlighting Wesleyan’s commitment to access, launch, and activate possibilities in a way that resonates on campus, across distance, and through generations. 

Agency and Improvisation: Exploring Modes of Individual and Collective Power to Make Change

As climate change renders everything more unpredictable, organisms of all kinds seem to be turning to improvisation. Can a dialogue across disciplines reveal where our current ideas about agency come from and help transform our understanding of who and what can act to meet the challenges of a changing climate? Join the 2024-2025 Bailey College of the Environment Think Tank fellows in an exploration of the theme of agency: sociopolitical, cultural, artistic, and biological.

9:00-10:15 am 

Exley Science Center Room 150 
Sociopolitical, Cultural and Biological Agency & Power 

Student fellows Maryam Badr '25 (Neuroscience & Behavior), Nic Galleno '25 (English), and Hannah Podol '25 (Anthropology) will discuss their work in progress on sociopolitical, cultural, and biological influence and power, joined by Wesleyan faculty Garry Bertholf (African American Studies), Justine Quijada (Religion/Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies/Environmental Studies), and Sonia Sultan (Biology/Environmental Studies). 

10:30-11:30 am 

Exley Science Center Room 150 
Distinguished Visiting Scholar Roxy Coss: Artistic Agency & Musical Improvisation 

Join Grammy–award winning musician, composer, educator, and activist Roxy Coss for a lecture-recital featuring a discussion of her background in artistic agency with live jazz improvisation. A renowned jazz saxophonist, Coss is the 2024-2025 Menakka and Essel Bailey ‘66 Distinguished Visiting Scholar, a Bailey College of the Environmental Think Tank fellow, and the founder and president of the Women In Jazz Organization. 

Now entering its 33rd year, the Dwight L. Greene Symposium honors Dwight L. Greene '70 as a memorial and tribute to his life and work as a professor of law, mentor and friend. Each year, presenters are selected from among Wesleyan's alumni, faculty, and friends who have distinguished themselves in their professions, to share on topics of importance for Black alumni, alumni of color, and the Wesleyan community at large.

This symposium provides an opportunity to hear from a diverse set of voices while facilitating networking and reconnecting with members of the Wesleyan community. with each other and ensures that diversity remains an important part of the Wesleyan experience.

Historically sponsored by the Black Alumni Council and Alumni of Color Council, the symposium serves as a long-standing campus tradition and a time to reflect on where we were, where we are, and most importantly…where we are headed. This event will be livestreamed and recorded. Access the livestream below with the passcode: 185265

VIEW THE LIVESTREAM

Zilkha Main Gallery: Dark Forest Theory

“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.

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

Zilkha South Gallery: Gary Red Oak O’Neil: Excavations

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.

A peerless storyteller with great satirical flourish, William Hogarth (1697–1764) brings spectators into the raucous streets and parlors of Georgian London, at once the center of a mighty empire and, in the artist’s view, a den of grifters, social climbers, cynics, and fools. Though his images teem with references to actual personalities and places of 18th-century London, Hogarth’s concerns were more universal than specific. With a balance of humor and sincerity, his art contends with the quandaries of how to hew to a moral path within a competitive, market-driven society; how to build social institutions that serve their communities faithfully; and fundamentally, what kind of society the people of a given time and place ought to build—all questions that demand our attention in the present. This exhibition draws from the Davison Art Collection’s deep holdings of Hogarth’s prints. It features several complete series by Hogarth, including The Harlot’s Progress, The Rake’s Progress, Marriage à la Mode, and The Four Stages of Cruelty, along with many of his other works.

Curated by Miya Tokumitsu, Donald T. Fallati and Ruth E. Pachman Curator of the Davison Art Collection.

Dominated by colorful, bronze percussion instruments, the Gamelan ensemble features gongs, bronze and wooden xylophones, two-headed drums, a female soloist and a male chorus. Some of the instruments date back to the 12th century in Java, an Indonesian island located between Sumatra and Bali. Get some real experience playing the Gamelan in this lively, hands-on workshop. 

Presenters: Professor Sumarsam 

Please note: Space is limited and will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. This session often reaches capacity.