Other:Leaves Under the Lens
2025-03-16 10:00 - 16:30 (America/Detroit) | Matthaei Botanical Gardens
The leaf surface is a dynamic landscape where tiny, specialized structures help plants interact with the world around them. Let’s bring this world into view! Join us for an exhibit that highlights the complex and often beautiful anatomy of leaves from the Matthaei collection. Plants throughout the conservatory will be paired with microscope photographs and micro-CT scans that illustrate the otherwise invisible structures that protect leaves from chewing insects, absorb (or repel!) water, and even recruit “bodyguards”. You won’t look at leaves the same way again!

This project is a collaboration between MBGNA and the Weber and Vasconcelos labs in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, led by PhD student Rosemary Glos.

Exhibition:A Gathering
2025-03-16 11:00 - 20:00 | Museum of Art - Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Apse
Welcome. Make Yourself At Home.

A Gathering brings together the newest works of art to enter UMMA’s collection — many on display here for the first time.

As a free, public museum, UMMA staff takes care of art for the benefit of the community and society at large. The works on view in this exhibition, all brought into the Museum between 2019 and the present, shows how institutions like UMMA are becoming more permeable to societal challenges, and more nimble in responding to them in service to all in their communities. In this exhibition you will find works that reflect on how global migrations, race, gender, and ecological change shape the way we engage with the world and inform our visions for the future.

This collection of artistic engagements with issues give us tools to envision who we want to be as individuals, as a museum, and as a society, connected to one another across space and experience.

So gather here to take in these latest works of art brought here for you. Gather here to be engulfed in their forms and meanings, to discuss their takes, to learn, to disagree. Gather to relax, make a friend, drink a coffee, finish the daily Wordle. Gather to feel full, to be moved and inspired by all the possible imaginations of what is yet to come.

Curated by Félix Zamora Gómez Irving Stenn, Jr. Fellow in Public Humanities & Museum Pedagogy

Lead support for this exhibition is provided by Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch, the Richard and Rosann Noel Endowment, and the University of Michigan Office of the Provost.

Exhibition:enemies + entities
2025-03-16 11:00 - 16:00 | Earl V. Moore Building - Chip Davis Technology Studio
enemies + entities; one of the most ironic sentences in life. With that irony in mind, enemies + entities is an exhibition built to propose a question to the current generation regarding how media and interactive experiences are having both positive and negative impacts on each other; in other words, becoming each others’ enemies and entities. This exhibition discusses the question of whether or not enemies and entities can co-exist within a single concept or object through the lens of media, ranging from film, music, video, installations, and digital media.

Open Hours:
March 14, 4 - 9pm
March 15, 11am - 5pm
March 16, 11am - 4pm

Presented by Eva Choi (@drmnchld), BFA student in Performing Arts Technology, with support from U-M ArtsEngine.

Conference / Symposium:Scientist Spotlight featuring Forsythe Middle School Young Scientists’ Expo
2025-03-16 11:00 - 16:00 | Museum of Natural History
Only for the curious! Visit with University of Michigan scientists and participate in engaging, hands-on activities to learn about their cutting-edge research. These researchers are part of the U-M Museum of Natural History’s Science Communication Fellows, bringing scientists and the public face-to-face.

This Spotlight will also feature science projects from Forsythe Middle School students and demonstrations by the Forsythe robotics team.

Stop by the Science Forum for an interactive demonstration of CodeBloc, a new application designed by U-M School of Information students to teach coding principles through "mixed reality"!

Free and open to the public.
Suitable for upper elementary through adult visitors.
Made possible with help from the National Science Foundation.

Exhibition:Unsettling Histories: Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism
2025-03-16 11:00 - 20:00 | Museum of Art - European and American Decorative Art
Organized as a response to the Museum’s recent acquisition of Titus Kaphar’s Flay (James Madison), this upcoming reinstallation of one of our most prominent gallery spaces forces us to grapple with our collection of European and American art, 1650-1850.

In recent times, growing public awareness of the continued reverberations of the legacy of slavery and colonization has challenged museums to examine the uncomfortable histories contained in our collections, and challenged the public to probe the choices we make about those stories. Choices about which artists you see in our galleries, choices about what relevant facts we share about the works, and choices about what - out of an infinite number of options - we don’t say about them.

Pieces in this exhibition were made at a time when the world came to be shaped by the ideologies of colonial expansion and Western domination. And yet, that history and the stories of those marginalized do not readily appear in the still lives and portraits on display here. By grappling with what is visible and what remains hidden, we are forced to examine whose stories and histories are prioritized and why.

In this online exhibition, you can explore our efforts to deeply question the Museum’s collection and our own past complicity in favoring colonial voices. In the Museum gallery, which will open in early 2021, you’ll be able to experience the changes we’re making to the physical space to highlight a more honest version of European and American history.

By challenging our own practice, and continuing to add to what we know and what we write about the works we display, UMMA tells a more complex and more complete story of this nation - one that unsettles, and fails to settle for, simple narratives.

“Invisible things are not necessarily ‘not there’.... Certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them.”

— Toni Morrison

Lead support for Unsettling Histories: Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism is provided by the University of Michigan Office of the Provost, the U-M Arts Initiative, and the Susan and Richard Gutow Endowed Fund.
