The Beard & Weil Galleries host a Bookmaking Workshop with historical researcher and writer Honora Spicer of Future Document. Participants will learn about bookbinding and discuss the book design and research process. Each person will leave with one book and make two additional books, in support of the AMOR Community Fund for ICE Detainees.
Visiting Artist Kelli Rae Adams gives a talk tracing the evolution of her creative practice from a traditional ceramics apprenticeship in Japan to her recent installation-based works addressing social issues, with a special focus on her multiyear project about student debt, Forever in Your Debt. She will discuss how she uses visualization, translation and participation in her work to engage with themes of value, labor and impermanence, and she will share some behind-the-scenes stories along the way.
Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor of Performance Studies & Theatre at Northwestern University and director of SLIPPAGE: Performance | Culture | Technology — he joins us to present Imagination as a Form of Study, a performance and reading that moves through questions of gardening, the feeling of liquidity in motion, and the afro-future of teaching Black dance forms.
Dance and movement sit at the center of Professor DeFrantz’s scholarship and artistry. For Professor DeFrantz, dance is never just performance; it is a way of thinking, remembering, and passing down culture, a practice where the body holds knowledge that words alone cannot carry. His visit offers the Wheaton community, a chance to engage with a scholar-artist who reminds us that moving together is also a way of studying together, and that imagination itself can be a discipline we practice with our whole bodies. He brings to Wheaton a vision rooted in our shared capacity to do better, inviting us all to engage our creative spirit toward a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer-affirming.
Free tickets can be reserved via the Watson Box Office.
they never asked
suspicious or not –
just put us away
By Sen Taro, a poet incarcerated by the U.S. Wartime Civil Control Administration in the 1940s
The exhibition they never asked examines systemic, racialized U.S. immigration enforcement and confinement, showing how creative expression and documentation can counter forced erasure. Tracing over 200 years of policy, the show features the artwork of Wheaton alumna Momo Nagano, who was incarcerated at Manzanar, an American concentration camp, during World War II, alongside Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh’s archival project the Index of the Disappeared. Local and historical resources include Mapping Deportations, a data visualization history project and book on Rhode Island detention created by Honora Spicer and Giancarlo Huapaya with the AMOR network.
The exhibition will be on display September 10–November 14, 2026.
Gallery hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 1–5 p.m., Thursday 1–8 p.m..
Kate Colby reads from her work including Paradoxx, her new collection of essays. “In Paradoxx, Colby applies her humor and exacting intelligence to teasing out tangles in relationships between memory, signification, and human perception. A one-hundred-day chronicle of a dark period in the author’s life, this tightly-wound lyric essay is also a memoir of growing up in the late 20th century and stumbling into the 21st.” (Essay Press) Colby was a founding board member of the Gloucester Writers Center in Massachusetts, where she now serves on the advisory board. She grew up in Massachusetts and currently lives in Providence, where she teaches at UPenn.
Schiff will read from her most recent book, Information Desk: An Epic (2023) which is situated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she worked at the information desk in her young adulthood. “Nearly 30 years later, Schiff transformed her experiences into an epic poem, expertly weaving its collections of visual art and connections to the world into her life’s journey, material world and imagination.” (Sara Patterson, UChicago News) Robyn’s previous books include A Woman of Property (2016), Revolver (2008) and Worth (2002). She is currently a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Director of the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.
Join Leah Smith (Wheaton class of 2014) and Michael Townsend of the Providence-based Tape Art studio to help create an original tape-based mural in the Haas Concourse & Lobby of Watson Fine Arts. Tape Art has conducted hundreds of community mural projects, highlighted most recently in Jeremy Workman’s award-winning documentary, Secret Mall Apartment (2024). Training and materials will be provided free of charge; participants may choose to work in one or both of the mural project’s two-hour shifts.
Students interested in participating should email [email protected] for more information.
This event is part of Wheaton’s Fall of Freedom programming.
Join us for a presentation by Mike Curato, author of the graphic novel Flamer which received several honors including the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Young Adult, the 2021 Massachusetts Book Award for Young Adult, and was listed as one of NPR’s Best Books of 2020. Flamer also has the distinction of being one of the top 10 banned books of 2024, and Mike has become a fierce advocate of free speech.
The highly acclaimed young adult book is a semi-autobiographical graphic novel in which Curato addresses his own adolescent struggles with being gay and bullied. Curato said he wrote the book to validate his own life and help other kids like him. Mike’s debut adult graphic novel, Gaysians, released in June of 2025 to critical acclaim. His presentation will be followed by a book signing.
This event is part of Wheaton’s Fall of Freedom programming.