ELLE Field Trip and Virtual Artist's Visit

 whose medium is photography. Her exhibit (Jan-Feb 2026) at the Wesleyan Leadership lab is a collection of three bodies of her work.  I was so happy when the Wesleyan Leadership Lab director, Alexis Gregg invited my students and I to come see the show, because one room was set apart especially for people with visual impairments, which is right up our alley.

We couldn't make our schedules work to be there at the same time as the artist, but Aleixis did a great job in audio describing pieces like the banners of portraits of black women portraying large monuments in American history, such as liberty and justice, with slave crops, such as tobacco and cotton being used as props.

 

She also lead a discussion on resilience as we learned about a series of photographs for people who moved to a new place and learned a new culture where they were a minority.

But the most meaningful part of the trip was getting to explore the embossed paper images and the Brailled descriptions. There was also a soundscape of familiar noises such as a beep kickball, which is used in a modified version of baseball.

There were glass light boxes with images of faces which were cyanotypes. These also had Braille dots on the textured glass.

The following day, we had a zoom call to get to talk to the artist. She had more questions for them they they did for her, but the discussion was meaningful and the students were left feeling inspired and seen. Stephanie Elle is a talented artist who works notices the marginalized and gives them a place at the table in the art world.

 

Wesleyan Collage Workshop

 The Wesleyan College Leadership Lab has started a series Called Level Up, where community members can take part in Learning Experiences with poet Laureates and experts on AI. The first in the series was a collage workshop presented by none other than Dennis Applebee, the Art Department Chair, and my hubby. He walked participants through the history of collage and his process before turning us lose with books, art paper, X-Acto knives, and archival glue sticks.  The number one problem students make? Not putting enough glue and having the edges curl up. He uses a piece of copy paper to cover the freshly glued collage piece and rubs it pretty hard in every direction with a flat tool to make sure the glue goes into the fibers of both pieces of paper, with rubbing the image or snagging the surfaces. A lot of people left with some really nice pieces. 

Dennis had his art show hanging at the Leadership Lab throughout the month of August, so it was nice to have lots of examples of finished projects. How lucky am I to be married to such a talented guy?