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 a.m. to 12 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 Katie Coogan ’05, M.Ed. ’13, senior faculty specialist, and Margaret Walker ’91, associate clinical professor, both based in the University of Maryland College of Education, 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 Coogan and Walker.
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? Visitors 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 visitors to draw, write and layer their images with words, symbols and sketches that capture their 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 Maryland Day visitors, it is a chance to slow down, reflect, make something with their hands and connect with other people.
This article is adapted from a story that first appeared on the UMD Honors College website.
HNUH278Q: What’s Art Got to Do With It?: How Community Art Projects Change the World is part of the University Honors “Change the Narrative” Thematic Cluster.
