U-M Student Life Sustainability Announces Artist-in-Residence Dawn Weleski in Partnership with U-M Arts Initiative
The University of Michigan’s Student Life Sustainability Office is proud to announce, in partnership with the U-M Arts Initiative, artist-in-residence Dawn Weleski as part of the "Noon at Night” project. Noon at Night is a collaborative project offering radical hospitality through participatory performances, student campus tours, and a community café. This initiative is organized by the U-M Student Life Sustainability Cultural Organizers and will culminate in a two-day event taking place on April 12-13, 2024.
Dawn Weleski is an internationally renowned artist based in Upstate New York. Weleski activates and broadcasts the stories of individuals and groups in experimental public performances, where conversation is her process and people her medium. Weleski’s public artwork has earned her international attention, most notably for Conflict Kitchen with Jon Rubin (2010–2017), a Pittsburgh restaurant that only served cuisines from countries with which the United States is in conflict and her multi-city operatic productions on public transit, Bus Stop Opera (2008–2010).
Waleski regularly exhibits and produces public projects around the world, and most recently exhibited at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (2022-2023). Weleski holds a BFA in Visual Art with a concentration in Contextual Practice from Carnegie Mellon University and a MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University.
With funding from the U-M Arts Initiative Projects in Partnership fund and Student Life Sustainability, Weleski and the Noon at Night team will reactivate the defunct Palmer Commons and Kitchen for this two-day gathering (April 12–13, 2024). The café will serve as a living archive of student-led movement work locally and abroad, mocking up a potential future educational lab and community space.
“We are excited to bring Dawn in to work with our Cultural Organizing team, whose work focuses on the strategic use of art and culture to envision and build a better world,” said Alex Bryan, Director of Student Life Sustainability, “Noon at Night builds off of U-M’s robust set of opportunities for students to use our campus-as-lab in and outside of the classroom, pushing us to imagine campus not only as a lab, but also as a studio and living archive of student-led advocacy towards a more sustainable and just institution.”
The inaugural core collaborative project team for Noon at Night includes U-M undergraduate students and doctoral candidates across fifteen disciplines, united by the question, "What has your stomach in a knot?" Through workshops and events, they have fostered spaces for wellness, critically assessed diversity and inclusion initiatives, and developed creative strategies for adaptation amidst climate emergencies.
“Noon at Night highlights the vibrant history of student protest and faculty action on campus to remind us of both the university’s proud tradition of creating engaged community advocates and its core educational mission to develop the ‘leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future’,” notes Mark Clague, Interim Executive Director of the Arts Initiative. “Not only are the arts a vehicle through which unheard voices can rise and shout, but I’m simply excited to eat some great food and meet some great people, all brought together by radical hospitality!”