Humanitas Student input, an art installation, and new fiction

The latest edition of Humanitas, a column focused on the arts and humanities at Yale, presents “Celestial Garden,” a new light and sound installation in Yale Schwarzman Center, news of new fiction from senior lecturer Cynthia Zarin, and student leadership opportunities with the Program for the Study of Antisemitism. Also in this edition: a call for submissions from The Yale Review, a special mentorship opportunity for a Ph.D. student in history of art, and a journalism symposium for incarcerated persons led by Yale scholars. 

For more, please visit an archive of all arts and humanities coverage at Yale News.

An installation of light and sound 

Yale Schwarzman Center kicked off its fall 2025 programming season with a 360-degree, immersive light and sound installation created by New York City-based artist and Yale alum Leo Villareal ’90.

Called “Celestial Garden,” the installation’s ever-changing imagery illuminates the rounded vault of The Dome, on the center’s third floor, using 10 projectors controlled by a computer running custom code Villareal developed with his team. The evolving patterns of colorful images — many of which evoke natural phenomena such as amoebae, nerve cells, and galaxies — are the result of Villareal’s experimentation with generative coding, inspired, he said, by English mathematician John Conway’s “Game of Life,” a cellular automaton.

“I started in the simplest way — let’s make a sphere and then another sphere, and start to connect them together, and then start to add some distortion,” Villareal said. “By combining them and iterating and repeating, it started to take on these patterns that mimic things we might see in nature, although I’m not attempting to do any kind of scientific visualization or illustrating any concept. It’s more of me finding these connections by getting lost in the code.”

An accompanying tonal soundscape subtly changes along with shifts in the projected sequences. The result is an almost-meditative experience for viewers, who may settle into a chair beneath the display or stretch out on the carpet to watch the never-repeating progressions. 

“It has this planetarium aspect,” Villareal said, “but there’s also an interior feeling, like it could be something inside the body or at the cellular scale or at the nanoscale.”

Villareal has created light artworks in museums, public spaces, universities, and office buildings around the world. Two of his more well-known creations are “The Bay Lights,” a 1.8-mile installation of 25,000 white LED lights on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, and “Illuminated River,” a shifting light scheme encompassing the nine bridges spanning the Thames River in central London. 

“Celestial Garden” is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from noon to 6 p.m. (8 p.m. on Thursdays) and runs through Oct. 10. All programming events at Schwarzman are free and open to the public. More information about upcoming events can be found here.

Engaging in critical conversations

As the new managing director of the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism (YPSA), Linda Maizels has an overarching priority: getting more undergraduates involved in its work. 

“We’re about the academic study of antisemitism, which could be anything from antiquity to the contemporary present,” she said. “We want to get more students involved in getting a greater understanding of what antisemitism is, what is its history, how long it has been around. Knowing the enemy is often a great way of conquering it.” 

Maizels — a leading scholar of antisemitism and an accomplished administrator — hopes to assemble an undergraduate student board to help shape programming, perhaps including collaboration with the new Yale Center for Civic Thought. The first step, she said, is to convene a working group of students to discuss what the student board should look like. (She welcomes queries from interested students.)

In the meantime, a series of lectures and films is planned for this fall, beginning with a Sept. 10 talk by Pavel Brunssen, the Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Research Center on Antigypsyism at Heidelberg University, on his book, “The Making of ‘Jew Clubs’: Performing Jewishness and Antisemitism in European Football and Fan Cultures.” Cosponsored with the Jewish Student Athlete Coalition, the event is free, but preregistration is required.

New fiction from Zarin

Less than two years after the publication of her critically acclaimed novel “Inverno,” the poet Cynthia Zarin has written a follow-up to be published in November. Zarin is a senior lecturer in the English department, in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

In “Estate” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Zarin revisits Caroline, the central character and narrator in “Inverno,” as she reaches middle age. Involved in a new relationship, Caroline explores questions of desire and deception, loss, absence and disappearance, and examines the stories we tell ourselves and others.

“Inverno,” Zarin’s first novel, was widely praised by critics. One reviewer, in The New York Times, highlighted its “allusive, evocative” prose, saying “there is not a banal sentence or purple patch to be found in this book, which only a poet could have written.”

Zarin, the recipient of numerous literary awards, is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays. 

Ready to pitch?

The Yale Review, a renowned cultural and literary journal, is accepting submissions of poetry, fiction, essays, and translations through Sept. 30. 

The journal, which won a 2024 National Magazine Award for general excellence in the category of Literature, Science and Politics, welcomes pitches for essays and criticism on a wide range of subjects, “from literature, art, history, and politics to film, television, music, and internet subcultures.”

“While we particularly welcome pitches with an urgent or timely peg to current cultural topics and events, we are equally excited by ideas that command us to see an old subject with fresh eyes, rescue what has been long overlooked, or convinces us that something we’ve never heard of or thought about is actually vital,” the editors write.

The editors ask that anyone interested in making a submission first review the journal’s submission guidelines — and note that the journal does not accept mailed submissions. They also encourage interested contributors to read recent issues of The Yale Review to determine whether their work is a good fit for the journal. 

Nature as art, and refuge

Colton Klein, a Yale Ph.D. student in the history of art, has been thinking about the art of Minnie Evans since he interned at the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, her hometown, 12 years ago. His recent research into her work — which focused on her sculptural painting, “Airlie Oak” — was published last year in the Smithsonian’s American Art journal. 

That article helped lead to an invitation from Ethan Lasser, the chair of Art of the Americas at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston and himself a Yale Ph.D. in art history, for Klein to curate an exhibition of Evans’ work, some on loan from the Cameron Art Museum, now on view at the MFA. 

“Ethan’s commitment to mentorship was clear from our first conversation,” Klein said. “It’s been an incredible opportunity to work with and learn from him, and the entire team at the MFA.”

Many of Evans’ richly colored drawings and paintings incorporate the natural landscapes around her, including the azaleas and magnolias of its gardens, and a forest that gave refuge to Black residents of Wilmington during a violent white supremacist coup of the city’s government in 1898, when Evans was five years old. 

“Her art can present the environment as something life-sustaining, a refuge, but it can also open up conversations about difficult, layered histories,” Klein said. 

The exhibition is just one sign of a resurgence of interest in Evans, who died in 1987. Among other events, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta is planning an Evans retrospective that next year will move to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. And this fall, a North Carolina filmmaker is releasing a documentary on Evans; Klein will host a film screening and conversation at the MFA in October. 

‘Inside Knowledge Symposium’

Criminal justice reform scholars from Yale recently hosted a journalism symposium for men incarcerated at Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, California. 

Led by Elizabeth Hinton, the Class of 1954 Professor of History and Black Studies in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, a team of faculty and graduate students affiliated with Justice for Everybody, a program of the Yale Institute on Incarceration and Public Safety, traveled west in July to run the “Inside Knowledge Symposium” in conjunction with the prison’s in-house Carceral Studies Journalism Guild (CSJG). 

The Yale Institute on Incarceration and Public Safety, which is co-directed by Hinton, is a center for research, policy innovation, and community engagement focused on transforming how safety and justice are understood and pursued in the United States. 

The symposium drew around 170 participants. Its sessions — including presentations by guild journalists and multimedia journalism and creative writing workshops — were filmed, and the footage will be uploaded to a forthcoming Inside Knowledge channel on Edovo, an online learning platform for incarcerated persons.

The event “invited us to share the podium, speak directly to our community, and collaborate as colleagues with esteemed scholars and professional journalists,” said CSJG journalist Michael Bryant Alexander. “I’ve never felt so seen in prison — this was the most transformative and humanizing environment I’ve ever been in.”

Hinton, who has authored two books and written extensively about poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence for many major publications, said the symposium “empowered residents as creators, affirmed their role as historians, recognized them as colleagues, and honored them as subject matter experts.”