c/o Nicole Lee
In the afternoon of Tuesday, Jan. 30, I bolted from Downey House across High Street and past Crowell Concert Hall to catch the Center for the Arts’ (CFA) kickoff event of the year—an exhibition opening party hosted at the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery celebrating the 50th anniversary of the CFA, titled “Always Being Relation: 50 Years of the Gallery at the CFA.” This exhibition celebrates the work of University alumni and visiting artists who have presented in the space throughout the years, bringing them together for the first time in the gallery’s history.
In addition to showcasing 32 artists, the gallery also displays ephemera from the past 50 years in the Zilkha Uncommons, a reading room just to the right of the visitation desk. During the opening reception party last week, visitors eagerly gobbled down their free pizza and beer while admiring these artifacts before shuffling into the gallery space to view the diverse selection of sculptures, multimedia pieces, photographs, and sound/video installations.
An electronic DJ set by outby16 (Isabella Rykoff ’24) stationed in the gallery entrance’s service elevator felt almost like an accidental 33rd display, bringing together University students’ art past and present with the buzz of the event.
“I would say it feels like folding time in this space, because I see a lot of faces that have already graduated and also looking at the art is cool,” Xingyan Guo ’25 said. “The artists used to be here, but they’re not here anymore, but they might come back.”
c/o Nikki Klar
Guo especially appreciated one of the pieces of art on display that featured a tree trunk.
“The piece with the tree trunk on the fabric…I love that one,” Guo said. “It’s also about revisiting. The artist was revisiting the trunk again and again and was observing and documenting the erasure of the tree. I think they describe in the statement, ‘the suspension of erasure’ and how they put such a solid material, such a solid life on such a delicate, precious fabric.”
The idea of revisiting is an apt way to describe the exhibition’s theme, “Always Being Relation.” The title is taken from a quote from Gertrude Stein’s “Plays” (1935) and her discussion of the relationality of the landscape. I like to think of this phrase as emphasizing how every object, even if not directly next to another object, is always in relation to the landscape at large, just as every piece that the Zilkha Gallery has presented is inevitably in dialogue with the works that came before and those that will come after.
c/o Nicole Lee
Sculptural art pieces, like Salim Green’s “Battle Bug,” which is made of concrete, canvas, rebar, and boxing gloves, shared space with time-based media, like “Night Fishing with Ancestors,” a twenty-four-minute long video by Karrabing Film Collective, following ancestral memories of displacement and colonization. From the famous, like Cindy Sherman’s photographic self-portraits, which were among those on display in the Zilkha Uncommons, to the unusual, like Alvin Lucier’s “Music for Pure Waves, Bass Drums and Acoustic Pendulums” (1980), which featured speakers, set up within massive bass drums, which played sounds of waves, the gallery featured it all.
Throughout February, “Always Being Relation” will feature a number of other events, including a screening of the Karrabing Film Collective’s films and a conversation between Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Assistant Professor of Anthropology A. George Bajalia. This screening will take place in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery on Wednesday, Feb. 7 at 4:30 p.m. Associate Professor of Art History and American Studies Claire Grace will also be in conversation with artist Carrie Yamaoka ’79 on Tuesday, Feb. 27 at 4:30 p.m. in the Zilkha Uncommons. Yamaoka recently had her own exhibition in Zilkha, “seeing is forgetting and remembering and forgetting again” (2023).
c/o Nicole Lee
“Always Being Relation” puts the history of the University’s involvement with the arts in conversation with itself, inviting viewers to consider the last 50 years of a space that has hosted a myriad of expressions and experiences of artists and visitors alike. The exhibition asks us to consider how the impossibility of memory puts us in relation to histories we may not know or have forgotten. The exhibition is running from now until March 3, 2024 in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. I highly recommend checking out the gallery while it’s up for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the entirety of the gallery’s history on display for what may well be the first time ever!
Nicki Klar can be reached at nklar@wesleyan.edu.