On Maryland Day, look for a row of doors in front of the Stamp Student Union, and consider the question: What feels like home to you?
From 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 25, students in University Honors course HNUH278Q: “What’s Art Got to Do With It? How Community Art Projects Change the World” are inviting the campus and local community to participate in an art project they’ve been working on all semester. Led by instructors Katie Coogan and Dr. Margaret Walker, these students have spent months exploring how community-based art can bring people together to imagine solutions.
The course asks students to consider how public visual arts, including murals, street art, collage, and textiles, can promote dialogue about issues like climate change, poverty, natural disasters, and racism. Students have collaborated with local artists, visited galleries and collections on campus, and studied recent community-based art projects to see how creativity can drive social transformation.
“When artists work with communities, they have the power to heal, unite, and transform,” explained instructors Katie Coogan and Margaret Walker, both based in the UMD College of Education.
This year, students in the course have chosen to focus the project on the idea of “HOME.” Throughout the semester, the class has been asking what home means across cultures, life experiences, and identities. To make these meanings visible, they have brainstormed everything from textiles and mosaics to sound and movement, drawing on the diverse talents in the class, which includes students from a range of majors, including engineering, microbiology, and music performance.
“I have really enjoyed this project because none of us is an education major, so it was cool that we all brought different skills to create something we wouldn’t get to do in other classes,” said sophomore chemical engineering major Kyra Brockett ’27. “It was fun to collaborate and explore something different.”
On Maryland Day, visitors will be asked to respond to prompts such as: What makes a home? Who and what represents home to you? What symbols reflect home? What memories remind you of home? Is home a physical place or a feeling? You can bring a favorite photo or take a selfie on the spot to add to a collage that will come together on a series of doors positioned outside Stamp. Around these doors, students will invite you to draw, write, and layer your images with words, symbols, and sketches that capture your sense of home. Visitors will also be asked to contribute to a playlist of songs that remind them of home. As more people contribute, the work will grow into a living portrait of what “home” means to the Maryland community.
For these students, this project is both practice and purpose: they are learning how to lead community-based art that builds skills, sparks reflection, and connects people. For you, it is a chance to slow down, reflect, make something with your hands, and connect with other people.
Be sure to drop by Stamp this Saturday to find the doors, bring a photo or a memory, and add your voice to this evolving artwork!
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HNUH278Q: What’s Art Got to Do With It?: How Community Art Projects Change the World is part of the “Change the Narrative” Thematic Cluster.
The Honors College’s University Honors program aligns passion with purpose by fostering relationships intentionally, navigating complexity with humility, and engaging unfamiliar ideas and interrogating familiar ones. To learn more about the University Honors program, visit universityhonors.umd.edu.
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Photo collage captions:
- Top left: Dr. Margaret Walker and a student work together to sew assorted fabrics that will become part of the art structure.
- Top left: Students use markers to enhance elements in photo prints that depict their own ideas of home.
- Bottom left: Students in HNUH278Q paint the doors that make up the main structure of the community art project.
- Bottom right: Students paste photos onto one of the doors to create a collage of “home.”
