By Sophia Yodice
Across the University of Maryland campus, creativity shows up in unexpected places. From quiet studios to bustling student spaces, the visual arts community navigates the tension between students’ drive to create and exhibit work, limited funding and space and the ongoing challenge of making art visible outside the classroom.
At the center of that landscape is the Stamp Gallery, an art gallery students often enter by accident, wedged between dining options and event services in the Adele H. Stamp Student Union.
It is here that gallery manager Tara Youngborg sees the contrast between the university’s creative potential and the realities that define its arts culture. Youngborg oversees both the Stamp Gallery and Studio A, an interactive activity space for artistic workshops and events. Youngborg describes these spaces as vital but stretched.
The gallery’s location means it reaches people who aren’t expecting to encounter art, offering both an advantage and a reminder of how easily the arts can be overlooked on a large, fast-moving campus, according to Youngborn.
“We’re really a space for beyond-the-classroom learning,” Youngborg said, though she acknowledged limits. “We can’t be everything for everyone.”
Even with growing visibility in recent years, both programs face the challenges of limited resources, shifting priorities and a student body that often turns to the arts only when seeking a break from academic pressure. Together, the two spaces offer accessible entry points into the arts, even as they navigate a 10% budget cut this year.
The Stamp Gallery presents two exhibitions each semester, highlighting early-stage artists and embracing its mission to serve as a lab for creative ideas that invites people to think, engage and connect with the wider community. It promotes the university’s Contemporary Art Purchasing Program as a hands-on way for students to study contemporary work and contribute to the campus collection, one of many efforts to pull students deeper into creative practice.
Studio A, operating under the motto “No grades, no pressure,” draws students seeking a respite from demanding majors.
Youngborg said the student union has remained supportive, allowing programming to continue and making room for initiatives like their Juried Winter Show, an exhibit held during the academic winter session.
This year, both spaces have centered on mental health, incorporating reflective areas. Youngborg sees these approaches as part of a larger effort to weave creativity more fully into campus life.
“We’re a flagship university, and I think we can really be doing some incredible things for our students by making [art] a part of their everyday lives,” Youngborg said.
As UMD expands its arts initiatives and reconsiders the role of creativity in campus culture, those working in the visual arts say this moment could define the direction of the university’s artistic ecosystem for years to come.
But the work taking place inside the student union’s glass-walled gallery is only one part of a much wider network.
Across campus, major arts spaces, from the David C. Driskell Center to the Art-Sociology building galleries and performance venues at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, operate with their own histories, missions and audiences. Together, they form an ecosystem shaped not only by student creativity but by the university’s evolving efforts to support and connect them.
Arts for All, now in its fifth year, sits at the center of that effort. Craig Kier, director of the program and School of Music professor, leads the presidential initiative focusing on expanding visibility and strengthening resources for the university’s arts programs.
Kier describes Arts for All as a connector. Faculty members bring ideas, and the initiative links them with galleries, performance spaces, donors, data, or collaborative partners who can help move those ideas forward, he said.
“The arts are more than just entertainment, and the arts are more than just making you feel good or escaping something. The arts are an entry point to considering things more deeply,” Kier said.
He added that much of the work comes down to ensuring that the arts are understood as an essential part of Maryland’s academic environment, not an extracurricular flourish. That means supporting everything from visual arts to music, poetry, creative writing and emerging technologies such as AI and quantum art.
“Every college across our campus has had some sort of meaningful relationship to Arts For All,” Kier said.
Justin Strom, chair of the Department of Art, echoed the campus-wide perspective.
“Wherever you go, you’re going to collide with art somewhere,” Strom said.
Strom described his role as feeling “like an air traffic controller,” managing the department, committees, teaching, strategic planning and collaborations with foundations and donors. He emphasized the growing significance of the Immersive Media Design program and his constant communication with Arts for All.
“We are so lucky and happy that it continues to be this snowball of opportunity,” Strom said.
The department stretches across campus, from the kinetic sculpture at the Idea Factory to laser engraving and 3D printing in the Sandbox at the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science, and outdoor installations surrounding the Art-Sociology Building, including a balcony courtyard projection space.
Still, visibility remains the arts department’s biggest challenge, according to Strom. He noted it can be difficult to get students to explore spaces outside their home academic buildings.
With numerous venues and concurrent events, students and visitors can only attend so many.
Looking ahead, Strom hopes to see the department continue to grow in prominence and envisions an outward-facing arts venue on Route One that draws in broader public engagement.
For many faculty members, art at UMD is inseparable from research and public life, according to Brandon Donahue-Shipp, an assistant professor in the Department of Art and studio art lead of the creative placemaking minor. Donahue-Shipp frames public art as a way to build community through murals, crosswalks and installations that bring creativity into shared spaces.
His work also asks students to navigate funding limits, infrastructure constraints and the bureaucratic realities that shape public art.
“Public art deals with science, it deals with economics, it deals with every single universe that the university offers,” Donahue-Shipp said.
Katherine Guinness, an assistant professor in critical studies, echoed that interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes art as a form of research grounded in history and context.
“The gallery is the laboratory, the studio is a workshop,” Guinness said.
At a campus with no shortage of creative programs, Guinness noted that visibility and awareness are as essential as opportunity itself.
That challenge is often clearest to some students navigating the arts community on campus. Rachel Schmid-James, a senior art history and classical languages and literature major, said she saw firsthand how difficult it can be for student artists to find space, support and visibility.
Schmid-James experienced the campus arts ecosystem as both a student artist and a docent at the Stamp Gallery. She contributed to several semesterly exhibitions and led Studio A programs, which are designed to offer a creative space outside academic pressure. Through peer-led classes and student exhibitions, Schmid-James and other student organizers work to lower barriers to participation in the visual arts.
“Art is the most central part of human existence in so many ways,” she said. “I think we forget that because we live in a world that doesn’t really value art.”
Through galleries, classrooms and public spaces, UMD’s visual arts community continues to negotiate how creativity fits into a research-driven campus. What emerges is not a single center, but a network that depends on visibility, connection and continued investment to remain part of everyday university life.
Featured Image: A person viewing a Jerrell Gibbs painting titled “All we’re left with are peace lilies, teddy bears and a balloon,” at the “Lights Off at 8 pm” exhibition at Stamp Gallery, which ran from Sept. 2 to Oct. 11, 2025. Photo by Miller Rogers-Tetrick.