Exhibition:Stamps @ Ann Arbor Art Fair
2026-07-16 10:00 - 20:00, 2026-07-17 10:00 - 20:00, 2026-07-18 10:00 - 20:00 (America/Detroit) | Off Campus Location
The Stamps @ Ann Arbor Art Fair Student Exhibition is back! From July 16–18, discover original artwork, connect with emerging artists and designers, and get a firsthand look at the creative energy from Stamps students. This year, find our booth in a new location on Ingalls Mall, across Washington St. from the Rackham Building, as part of the Ann Arbor Street Fair, the Original.

Ann Arbor Art Fair Student Exhibition
July 16–18
New location: Ingalls Mall, across Washington St. from the Rackham Building

Students Exhibiting:

Elizabeth Bierlein
Kas Brajkovic
Kati Brokaw
Bryan Castaneda
Elizabeth Galvan
Maya Hernandez
Dee Holmes
Hana Ichikawa
Laura Jhirad
Michael King, Jr.
Maya Kreiner
Paige Lemmon
Elsa Olander
Isha Oberoi
Hannah Powell
Sawyer Spink
Anya Strzalkowski
Emery Swirbalus

Exhibition:Fore-Site (Phase 2): The Stamps Gallery Pillar Project
2026-07-16 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-17 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-18 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-22 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-23 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-24 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-25 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-29 11:00 - 19:00 and 7 more dates
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

Exhibition:Fore-Site (Phase 3): The Stamps Gallery Pillar Project
2026-07-16 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-17 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-18 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-22 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-23 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-24 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-25 11:00 - 19:00, 2026-07-29 11:00 - 19:00 and 8 more dates
From September 2025 through August 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 - April 12) artists: Sally Clegg (MFA '20) and Kim Karlsrud (MFA '20)Phase 3 (May 12 - August 12) artists: Abhishek Narula (MFA '20) and Nathan Byrne (MFA '21)
Phase 3
Curated by Sometimes Space: Abhishek Narula (entry pillar)Curated by CYNK Studios: Nathan Byrne (courtyard pillar)

Exhibition:Community Exhibition: Kaleidoscope
2026-07-16 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-17 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-18 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-22 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-23 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-24 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-25 12:00 - 17:00
Curated by The Visual Arts Council of Neutral Zone

Stamps Gallery is pleased to partner with Neutral Zone’s Visual Arts Council to present Kaleidoscope, an exhibition featuring artwork of local teens from Ann Arbor. The exhibition explores the interwoven relationship of color to human emotions.

Exhibition:Marianetta Porter: Breath, Fragment, Return
2026-07-16 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-17 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-18 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-22 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-23 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-24 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-07-25 12:00 - 17:00
Curated by Juana Williams, this exhibition examines how Marianetta Porter uses everyday objects, fragments, and embodied memory to make absence an active, living presence while challenging linear histories. Rooted in African American experience, her practice treats what is discarded, overlooked, or missing not as loss, but as a source of meaning that continues to act on the present. Through her process and materials, Porter reveals how memory is carried in the body and embedded in ordinary things. Her work also resists forward-moving notions of time, instead presenting a diasporic temporality in which past, present, and lived experience circulate together through repetition, touch, and recall. In doing so, Porter proposes a vision of history as unfinished, memory as active, and absence as a force that sustains connection and shapes the present.

Marianetta Porter is a visual artist and product designer whose research and creative practice are grounded in the study of African American history, culture, and representation. Through the language of visual art, she draws connections between historic memory and contemporary African American life, giving voice to the history of the African diaspora while acknowledging its central influence on the birth and flourishing of American culture.

Her work has been exhibited nationally at institutions such as the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, the Spoleto Festival, the Harriet Tubman Museum, and the Hampton University Museum of Art.

She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Hampton University and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan. The recipient of numerous awards, Porter is Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art and Design.

Juana Williams is a curator and writer whose work explores the intersections of cross-border intellectual history, cultural memory, and identity formation as expressed through modern and contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas.

Williams has held curatorial and academic appointments at organizations including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Library Street Collective, Wayne State University, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art. Her curatorial projects have been presented at institutions across the United States and France, including the Grand Rapids Art Museum, the Muskegon Museum of Art, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art. In addition, she has presented lectures at various museums and universities and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs. Her work has been written about in publications such as Artsy, Beaux Arts Magazine, Condé Nast Traveller, Michigan Chronicle, and Observer. Williams holds a BA in Fine Art and an MA in Art History from Wayne State University.

Other:Virtual Information Session
2026-07-20 15:00 - 16:00, 2026-08-10 15:00 - 16:00, 2026-08-24 15:00 - 16:00
Join us for a virtual, hour-long info session on undergraduate programs at the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design, including a presentation and Q&A with current students and the admissions team.

Info session times are Eastern US.

Visit our Admissions Events page to learn more about additional upcoming events.

Other:In-Person Tour & Info Session
2026-07-24 10:00 - 12:00, 2026-08-07 10:00 - 12:00
Visit the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design for a tour of our facilities and creative studios! Most events will also include an info session and Q&A panel on undergraduate programs and admissions.

In-Person Tour events take place once a month; all times are Eastern US.

Visit our Admissions Events page to learn more about additional upcoming events.

Workshop / Seminar:Summer Drop-in Artmaking
2026-07-24 14:00 - 16:00
Stop by the gallery to participate in a hands-on printmaking activity with U-M’s Book Arts Studio. Create a reproduction print of one of the works in Marianetta Porter: Breath, Fragment, Return.

Summer Drop-in Artmaking events take place from 2 – 4 p.m. on the following Fridays in Summer 2026: June 12, June 26, July 10, and July 24. Free and open to the public, no experience necessary, all supplies provided.

Other:Transfer Student Info Session
2026-08-17 15:00 - 16:00
Join us for an hour long virtual info session for students interested in transferring to the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design from another school or college. The info session will include a presentation and Q&A with current students and the admissions team.

Info session times are Eastern US.

Visit our Admissions Events page to learn more about additional upcoming events.
