By Angelina Nunez
The University of Maryland’s 17 for Peace and Justice club hosted an environmental collaging event on Sept. 15. There, participants created collages representing their ideal futures centered around environmental justice.
The club hosted the event in the CEDAR Gallery in Taliaferro Hall as part of the NextNOW Fest 2026. The room, full of artwork, cozy couches, craft materials, snacks and music, invited attendees to relax, talk and create art together.
Co-President Khushi Desai, a junior environmental science and policy major, joined the organization as a freshman in 2024. Since then, they have participated in and hosted many collaging events, offering a fun, stress-free way to engage new members and increase interest in the club.
“We really wanted to highlight the CEDAR Gallery; this is a space that is really important to us,” Desai said. “CEDAR stands for centering ecologies, diasporas and ancestral roots.”
The new space, established in May, is a place where environmental science and history majors can go to work or chill. The room is filled with various upcycled materials the club and its supervisor collected, according to Desai.
“We really wanted to elevate this space and make sure people knew it was here,” Desai said. “There’s not a lot of places on south campus for students to just chill and exist outside the library,” Desai said. “So we really wanted to make sure people knew there was a space here and that it’s specifically meant for environmental students or history students.”
The club’s supervisor, Jayson Maurice Porter, an assistant professor in the University of Maryland history department, runs the space and contributed to the majority of the thrifted furniture, collaging materials and artwork that decorate the room. The art covering the walls of the space is filled with cultural and historical significance. One piece is a beautifully moving painting, created using debris collected after Hurricane Katrina as the canvas.
Graduate student Angelina Mussini, pursuing a master’s in public policy, attended the event as a fun way to interact with like-minded people and create artwork that was meaningful to them. Through the collaging process, Mussini had a clear idea of what she wanted to create.
“I specifically want to be working with … the concept of eco-futurism, so ideas of utopia and how technology can be integrated into a more sustainable future,” Mussini said.
After attending a Stamp Gallery event in 2022 called “alternate universe: visualizing queer futurisms,” she said it highlighted what the artists envisioned the future to look like as technological advancements move forward, and it inspired Mussini’s collage to point toward the idea of queer futurism as well.
Sophomore anthropology and history major Kate Cooper took a different approach to the collaging event. Cooper wanted to let the offered materials and the meeting’s general purpose guide the finished piece.
“I don’t have a clear aim. I’m just trying to be inspired by the purpose of this space as a place to process climate anxiety but also eco-grief,” Cooper said.
In their final remarks on their newly created environmental collage, Cooper described the piece as a way to connect the negativity of environmental anxieties to the serenity of creating a hopeful future through art.
“If I am to connect it all the way, it feels very calm to me, and that’s a thing that is scarce in regards to environmental justice nowadays,” Cooper said.
Featured Image: Angelina Mussini tears a piece of paper during the Environmental Collaging event at Taliaferro Hall’s CEDAR Gallery on Sept. 15, 2026. The event was part of the University of Maryland’s NextNOW Fest. Photo by Paige Trendell.