In 1835, just four years after the University’s founding, the Missionary Lyceum student group at Wesleyan resolved that “at some favorable point in China” a Methodist mission be established there. That “favorable point” came soon enough in the 1840s, when opium and gunboats forced China’s doors wide open. Under protections freshly codified by unequal treaties, Wesleyan graduates began arriving along Chinese shores, convinced of a calling to bring forth social and spiritual transformation. As Methodist missionaries, they founded schools, opened medical clinics, and preached the gospel of Christ across cities and provinces. And to generate public interest in and sustain funds for their work, they also sent home thousands of objects that gave shape to how Americans imagined China from afar.

The exhibition Collecting China: Missionary Assemblages of a Distant World, 1844–1911 invites viewers to encounter China as a 19th-century visitor might have in the long-defunct Wesleyan Museum of Natural History (1871–1957), a space once filled with cultural and natural curiosities that University graduates gathered from around the globe. After the museum’s closure, its materials were dispersed across various locations on- and off-campus and remain in storage cabinets to this day. Collecting China presents only a fraction of what missionary alumni had shipped back from the East. From chopsticks and ladies’ shoes to herbal specimens and a brick off the Great Wall, most of the objects displayed are appearing publicly for the first time in over a century. With their return to view, Collecting China revisits Wesleyan’s long but little-known history of engagement with East Asia and places questions of collecting and archival practices at its center. Through material assemblages, missionary alumni of the 19th century helped produce a knowable “China” that became the basis upon which evangelical Christianity and Western modernity worked to reform, relay, and remake a world across the Pacific.

The exhibition was curated by Sida Chu ’26 and Nancy Li ’28 as part of a tutorial in curatorial practice led by Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Assistant Curator of Education Rosemary Lennox and Associate Director and Curator of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00. Exhibition support provided by the College of East Asian Studies.

The symbolism of many plants and flowers has long been codified across Japanese art, from seasonal floral motifs on kimonos to poetic tropes in classical literature. In an era of refined court culture that prized allusive expression, plants and their manipulated forms, such as classical flower arrangements [rikka], embodied moral and emotional subtexts that transgressed cultural anxieties and taboos. Featuring homoerotic encounters, courtly love stories, and meditations on transience, the exhibition The Blooming Mirror explores the myriad aesthetic and affective functions of cultivated Japanese nature, presenting objects from Wesleyan’s College of East Asian Studies Art and Archival Collection and facsimiles of Japanese literati paintings and narrative handscrolls that employ plants as semiotic vessels.

The exhibition was curated by Maxwell Maveus ’26 as part of a tutorial in curatorial practice led by Exhibitions Manager Rosemary Lennox and Associate Director of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee ’00. Exhibition support provided by the College of East Asian Studies. Maxwell will offer an exhibition tour at 11 a.m. on Friday.

Looking Inward: The Interior as Subject  
Visualizing the interior, both material and subjective, has long been a source of fascination for artists. The desire to see, and especially to show, what is typically unseen and private aligns with the aims of visual communication to display and to reveal. Viewing interiors also satisfies the spectator’s desire to look beyond, or beneath, the surface. Both actual interiors and depictions of them are frequently taken as externalizations of a person’s psychic state, or at least their personal taste. These themes and potentialities of interiors emerge in the works in the exhibition Looking Inward: The Interior as Subject, all of which are invitations to look inside and within. This exhibition of prints and photographs features artwork by Édouard Manet, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Carrie Mae Weems, Joel Meyerowitz, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and many others. 
 
Curated by Miya Tokumitsu, Donald T. Fallati and Ruth E. Pachman Curator of the Davison Art Collection. 
 

Not/ Finished: Working Proofs and Cancellation 
This exhibition features prints that cannot be characterized as conventionally finished. Some are experimental working proofs, or prints struck from partially completed matrices so that artists could gauge the progress of their work. Others are so-called cancellation prints, or impressions taken from cancelled matrices, deliberately defaced by their artists. A relatively modern practice, matrix cancellation limits the size of a print’s edition (the number of impressions printed from a matrix); it also prevents unsanctioned printings from a matrix. Working proofs and cancellation prints have come to be valued by both collectors and museums as records of an artist’s entire process, and frequently as aesthetically pleasing objects in their own right. On view are prints by Jean-François Millet (1814–1875), James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), Glenn Ligon ’82, Hon. ’12 (b. 1960), and others. All works from the Davison Art Collection, Wesleyan University. 
 
Curated by Miya Tokumitsu, Donald T. Fallati and Ruth E. Pachman Curator of the Davison Art Collection.