On Saturday, Oct. 4, the Fries Arts Building (FAB) hosted its opening celebration, commemorating the new building on Hamlin Street with art activities, music, and dance. The FAB, which officially opened in Fall 2025, serves as an interdisciplinary hub for all forms of art curricula and performance.
The celebration was organized by the Center for the Arts (CFA) Director’s Council, a student-led committee that works closely with Wesleyan’s director of the CFA. This committee was comprised of Malen Cheung ’28, Sida Chu ’26, Chloe Duncan-Wald ’26, Ezra Holzman ’28, Jess Huang ’27, Emerson Jenisch ’25, Vansh Kapoor ’26, Lucia Kenney ’28, Luna Kwon ’27, Kyra Nielsen ’27, Jake Rekrut ’26, Samia Segal ’25, and Matty Shields ’25.
“The FAB building offers a unique space for multiple disciplines across the arts to all intersect with each other in one space,” Holzman said. “With the CFA on campus, a lot of the artistic disciplines are in separate facilities right now, but this really offers a collective space where we can all gather in our separate disciplines and make art together.”
Organizers said that the FAB’s unique design, with a combination of indoor and outdoor spaces, including the large retracting glass door of the black box, not only encourages the creativity of Wesleyan students but also opens up programming to the broader Middletown community. The building has three levels. There is a lobby, faculty offices, and a design lab on the lower level. The ground level houses the art forum, movement studio, design studio, dressing room, green room, and theater. The drawing studio and performance mezzanine are on the upper level.
“I love how open and airy this building feels,” Huang said. “There’s a lot of beautiful light, and it is just very inspiring. It makes you want to create things and engage with the building.”
The highlight of the event was the interactive journey through the arts building using “art passports”: The visitors could collect student-designed stamps at each exhibit by using a passport booklet that they received along with a CFA notebook.
The celebration featured art-related activities, exhibitions, and concerts throughout the day, followed by a cupcake toast in the evening. The event culminated with a WesGrooves Dance Party. This was the fourth event of the WesGrooves series, which aims to create community connection through creative movement. It was led by Associate Professor of Dance Iddrisu Saaka, who gave a West African dance lesson which was followed by a dance party featuring the University’s African Pop Music Band, directed by Assistant Professor of Music John Dankwa Ph.D. ’18.
One of the events was FABricate, hosted in one of the drawing studios. It featured a fabric square decorating activity, with the squares being compiled into a community FAB tapestry.
“This FABricate activity is a way of trying to get everyone in here to really get creative, and [it is] just [a way] to make it accessible and individual, so it doesn’t feel like there’s any expectations,” Kenney said. “I think that’s another thing that’s important: You can get a lot of people to make art, but it’s kind of hard to show your art. So making it a communal thing is also one of the ideas.”
The center also hosted Cardinals of the Future, an art activity to design a new Wesleyan mascot for the year 3025. Other events included the concert series, Sound, Imparted, which featured student performances honoring the music mentors of the University community in an expression of gratitude. The student-crafted exhibitions and concerts displayed the many types of art that come to life in the building. Antithesis, curated by Chloe Duncan-Wald ’26, conveyed the purpose of the FAB’s Movement Studio as a place for performance and fluidity through her portrayal of artists across mediums.
“The thing that the CFA buildings don’t have that this building has is communal space where students can just hang out and work together,” Director of the Center for the Arts Joshua Lubin-Levy ’06 said. “Last night, when we were setting up, we saw Drawing Club just take over in the upper cafe area. That space for students to just make work, we don’t have that kind of informal space in the CFA, so the fact that they could add that here is amazing.”
While the FAB is mostly intended for curricular use, some public performances will also be held at the building. The next scheduled event is the Theater Department’s semester production, “Marta Becket, Save Us All,” in early November.
Raiza Goel can be reached at rgoel@wesleyan.edu.
Alessandra Woo can be reached at aawoo@wesleyan.edu.
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