mayfield brooks: Whale Fall with Me / Robert Lostutter and Kristi Cavataro

Currently on view until March 1, 2026, the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts presents two concurrent exhibitions: mayfield brooks’ Whale Fall with Me and Robert Lostutter and Kristi Cavataro.

mayfield brooks: Whale Fall with Me
Whale Fall with Me is a solo exhibition by mayfield brooks, the 2025–2026 CFA Artist in Residence, culminating their multi-year research on the life and death cycle of whales—a project that extends across writing, ’zine making, moving image, and brooks’ embodied practice of vocal and dance improvisation. At the center of the installation is a newly commissioned film focusing on the third chapter of brooks’ Whale Fall trilogy. Created as a site specific performance on the 1885 Tall Ship Wavertree in the care of the South Street Seaport Museum in New York, and at Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York where the artist lives—this film brings together multiple strands of the artist’s exploration of the “whale fall” (an ecosystem process that occurs when a whale carcass sinks to the bottom of the ocean, its body feeding an entire world of creatures from the largest apex predators to the smallest microorganisms). Considering this phenomenon as more than an ecological event, brooks has used whale song and even the history of whaling (one of the first integrated industries relying heavily on Black and Indigenous labor) to imagine death as one of the most powerful life-giving forces in the universe. At its core, the whale fall asks: what becomes possible, inevitable, and necessary when systems break down? Whale Fall with Me gestures towards decomposition as a world-making force, a practice of liberation, a process of unbecoming that feeds a different existence.

Profile
mayfield brooks improvises while Black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film Whale Fall, and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022–23 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program, and currently are a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow.

Robert Lostutter and Kristi Cavataro
This intergenerational exhibition brings together an abridged survey of Robert Lostutter’s paintings and drawings (from the late-1960s to the present) with Kristi Cavataro’s recent stained glass sculptural works.

Robert Lostutter is known for creating meticulously-rendered hybrid human forms in surreal settings. Seemingly beatific, even when contorted with exposed innards, these adorned creatures demonstrate both a technical mastery and wild imagination that is at once bound up with and reaches beyond the human figure. Occupying the gallery’s floor, Kristi Cavataro’s sculptures, constructed out of opaque or translucent stained glass, create abstract shapes that evoke biomorphic resonances. Taking advantage of the abundant natural light of the gallery’s large windows, these closed volumes reveal an interior space defined by their color. More than a superficial skin, the color in the glass goes all the way through the medium.

Profiles
Robert Lostutter (b. 1939, Kansas) lives and works in Chicago. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and has been included in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Terra Museum of American Art, and the Corcoran Gallery. Lostutter’s work is included in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Museum, Madison Art Center, The Smithsonian Institute, and the Smart Museum, University of Chicago. He is represented by Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago.

Kristi Cavataro (b. 1992, Connecticut) lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from the Cooper Union in 2015. Her work was part of the group exhibition Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York in 2021. She is represented by Ramiken, New York and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

Curated by Associate Director and Curator of Visual Arts Benjamin Chaffee with Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Assistant Curator of Education Rosemary Lennox. mayfield brooks' presentation in the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery's Reading Room was co-curated by Assistant Director for Programming and Assistant Curator for Performing Arts Kiara Benn and Rosemary Lennox. Installation by Art Preparator Paul Theriault.

Support for these exhibitions and related programming was provided by Wesleyan University's Center for the Arts, Digital Design Commons Production Club, and Bailey College of the Environment; South Street Seaport Museum; Creative Time; the National Endowment for the Arts; and The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts.

The Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery is free and open to the public Tuesday through Sunday. Located on the campus of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, it is situated two hours north of New York.