Exhibition:Fore-Site (Phase 2): The Stamps Gallery Pillar Project
2026-03-14 11:00 - 19:00 (America/Detroit) | Off Campus Location
From September 2025 through November 2026, Stamps Gallery is partnering in a curatorial collaboration with two Ypsilanti-based, artist-run project spaces led by Stamps alumni: C.Y.N.K. Studios, directed by Sally Clegg (Lecturer III and Student Exhibition Coordinator, MFA ’20) and Abhishek Narula (MFA ’20); and Sometimes Space, directed by Nathan Byrne (Lecturer I, MFA ’21). Each space hosts dozens of artists annually for exhibitions, performances, and events, fostering experimental work and building community. For this project, Byrne, Clegg, and Narula have been commissioned to reimagine the pillars on Division Street that flank the gallery. In response, they’ve curated six artists to create new work for the pillars over three cycles:

Phase 1 (September 12 - December 12) artists: Amelia Burns (Cranbrook MFA ’23) and Erin McKenna (MFA ’20)
Phase 2 (January 12 - August 12) artists: Sally Clegg (MFA ’20) and Kim Karlsrud (MFA ’20)
Phase 3 (September 12 - November 12) artists: Abhishek Narula (MFA ’20) and Nathan Byrne (MFA ’21)
Phase 2 Curatorial Statement

Curated by Sometimes Space: Sally Clegg (entry pillar)
Curated by CYNK Studios: Kim Karlsrud (courtyard pillar)

Artists Sally Clegg and Kim Karlsrud wrap the Division Street pillars in highly site-specific ornament unearthed from the overlooked margins of Ann Arbor. On the Courtyard pillar, Karlsrud scales up photographs of objects found in liminal spaces surrounding campus buildings on Green Road, which the artist has encrusted in road salt. On the entryway pillar, Clegg zooms in on tiny fragments of found material from UMich’s famous “rock” to celebrate nearly seven decades of student art and activism. Both artists uplift aggregate of local human activity to reveal tiny worlds of found form.

Sally Clegg: Sentimentary Rock
Sentimentary Rock is a composition of paint slag collected from the UMich rock monument at the corner of Washtenaw Avenue and Hill Street. This colorful composite material has been accumulating at the base of the iconic limestone boulder since the mid 1950’s, when students began a tradition of painting it in acts of protest, creativity, and ritual, sometimes multiple times per week. Akin to byproducts of industry such as “Fordite” (collectable chunks of automotive overspray sometimes called ‘Detroit agate’), Sentimentary Rock includes thousands of layers, each dripped from a palimpsestic public proclamation. When processed, sculpted, sealed, assembled, and macro-photographed, the result is this enlarged array of tiny gems, intended to celebrate the indissoluble student voice.

Kim Karlsrud: What Amasses
What Amasses is an assemblage of everyday found objects collected within the Miller Creek watershed, an urbanized drainage system that encompasses much of the city of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan campus. Selected objects were immersed in a road salt solution, allowing delicate crystalline formations to emerge. Road salt is a common material input into these hydrological networks during the winter months and exists in multiple states of refinement, expression, coherence, and fragmentation. Each object was then arranged, photographed, and enlarged to recontextualize these materials in ways that invite deeper reflections on how infrastructure and human agency blur notions of the natural and the artificial.
Artist Statements/Bios

Sally Clegg
Sally Clegg is an artist and educator from Pelham, Massachusetts. Her studio practice is rooted in sculpture and expanded printmaking, stemming from a fascination with human efforts to make meaning from our relationships to objects. Clegg integrates history, popular culture, literature and philosophy as material for artmaking, leveraging personal anecdote and humor to reveal the complexity, absurdity, and theoretical richness at play in our connections to things and to ourselves.

Clegg holds an MFA in Art from The University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design, and a BA in Art & English from Goucher College. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work can be found in permanent collections at Yale University, The New York Public Library, and elsewhere. Her artwork and writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, BOMB Magazine, Sculpture Magazine, and Hyperallergic. She is a lecturer in Art & Design at the University of Michigan. Website / Instagram

Kim Karlsrud
Kim Karlsrud is the co-founder of Commonstudio, a collaborative creative practice that develops socio-ecological and spatial interventions, installations, and initiatives working with and within urban landscapes. Her work explores the space between art and design, and is grounded in the concept of the “commons,” that which is shared, as well as that which is ordinary, banal, and commonplace.

Karlsrud completed her undergraduate degree in Product Design from Otis College of Art and Design and an MFA in Art from the University of Michigan. She is currently an Assistant Visiting Professor in the College of Design at the University of Oregon, teaching across Art and Landscape Architecture departments. She jointly received the 2014-15 Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture, was a 2017 resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and is the 2025-26 Fuller Fieldscape Fellow. Website / Instagram
