Sunday, October 26

All are welcome to an uplifting, student-organized ecumenical Christian worship service in Memorial Chapel. Come and meet students, staff, and faculty involved in Christian life on campus, including the Protestant Chaplain. Light refreshments will be served following the service.

All are invited for brunch at Usdan University Center. From seasonal, locally-grown fruit to made-to-order waffles piled high with delicious toppings, there will be something for everyone at this traditional Homecoming + Family Weekend festivity. Vegetarian, vegan, and Kosher-style options are available.

Tickets: $20 adults. (Wesleyan students use their meal plans and should not buy tickets.) Purchase tickets when you register before October 21. A limited number of meals may be available on-site at the Usdan Univeristy Center cashier during brunch (second floor).

Note: A select menu of a la carte food and beverages will also be available for purchase on-site at the Usdan Café.

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 Reading Room: 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.

The Charles B. Stone, Jr. A Cappella Fund was established through the generosity of Sarah Stone Maynard ’79, P’11 and Fred Maynard ’80, P’11 in honor of Sarah’s father, Chip Stone ’49, P’79, P’82, GP’11, GP’15, and in celebration of the Stone family’s long Wesleyan legacy. Once called the “singing college of New England,” Wesleyan still boasts a strong musical tradition, and the Stone A Cappella Concert provides an extraordinary showcase of the vocal talent and stage presence of Wesleyan undergraduates.

Note: This is not a ticketed event, however seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.