Celebrating Our 2025-2026 Season
Fifty years since the Fine Arts Center's founding, the arts still bring us together. Thank you for being part of our milestone fiftieth anniversary season.
A tradition of compassion and healing
April 6–10, the Fine Arts Center welcomed monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery to campus for a rare presentation of the centuries-old Tibetan Buddhist tradition of sand mandala creation at the UMass Old Chapel. Throughout the week, visitors gathered to observe as the monks carefully placed millions of grains of colored sand by hand, creating a work of art rooted in compassion and meditation, only to be ceremonially dismantled at the close of the week.
The monks’ visit invited the campus and broader community to slow down and engage with an ancient artistic practice believed by the monks to generate healing. Visitors of all ages, including local educators and their students, returned throughout the week to witness the mandala evolve, contribute to a community-created mandala, and experience a powerful lesson in impermanence.
Art for the Common Good: A statewide convening on arts, health, and wellness
The evidence is clear: The arts don’t merely inspire; they heal. A growing body of research proves that participating in the arts lowers depression and pain, strengthens social connection, and even decreases early mortality risk.
On April 10, the Fine Arts Center hosted more than 300 policymakers, health practitioners, artists, and researchers from across Massachusetts for Art for the Common Good, a statewide convening on arts, health, and wellbeing. The convening marked the beginning of the Fine Arts Center’s expanded focus on arts and wellbeing, and a deeper commitment to integrating the arts into public health conversations.
Fifty years of the Fine Arts Center
For half a century, the UMass Fine Arts Center has been a cultural engine, activating conversations, uplifting diverse voices, and challenging the boundaries of what art can do. In a time marked by division and a deepening need for connection, we remain committed to what we’ve always believed: that the arts are not just entertainment, but an essential means of truth-telling, resistance, and healing.
UMass art students turn the museum into a classroom for K-12 learners
On April 10, the University Museum of Contemporary Art bustled with nearly sixty fifth graders from Amherst’s Wildwood Elementary School. In one gallery, students searched Tammy Nguyen’s paintings in The Political Uses of Madness for symbols and imagery. In another, they sketched responses to a contemporary work in Deja Vu: The Cycles That Haunt Us. Down the hall, a group connected themes from Camille Turner’s exhibition, Land of the Free, to their own lives.
The students were following a lesson plan developed by UMass students in Art History 327, a service-learning course in which undergraduate students teach local K-12 students by bringing them directly into the museum for hands-on engagement with contemporary art.
Soweto Gospel Choir: A joyful exchange with UMass students
For nearly every performance, the Fine Arts Center and visiting artists host engagement activities, including class visits and workshops with UMass students and the Five College community.
In November, the three-time Grammy Award-winning ensemble Soweto Gospel Choir brought their joy-filled music and dance to a special workshop with UMass choir students.
“At a personal level, it’s really about getting to interact with people and sharing what they won’t find in any book — or even on the internet,” said choir member Bongani Ncube. “The best way to exchange culture is to be in the midst of the people you’re sharing it with.”
Explore more than 100,000 objects in the Five Colleges' new museum collections database!
The Five College Consortium has unveiled a new collections database, making it easier than ever for anyone, anywhere to explore more than 100,000 works of art and objects from the collections of Historic Deerfield and five campus art museums, including the University Museum of Contemporary Art.
Students can use Collections Online to support class projects or get up close to objects they’ve discussed in the classroom. Researchers may find detailed records opening new avenues for academic projects. And curious art lovers can browse by museum, artist, era, theme, or keyword and happily lose themselves in the process, stumbling onto unexpected discoveries along the way.
Camille Turner confronts New England's ties to slavery
"I see my role almost as a public historian," says Turner, the University Museum of Contemporary Art's artist in residence. "My job is to make this history palpable, to make it alive, to make it relatable, and to invite people to sit with it, to process it, to reckon with it, and to imagine different futures."
Turner's new exhibition, Land of the Free, builds off her expansive body of research-driven work honoring the lives of enslaved Africans transported aboard slave ships. Through four cinematic works and an archival lab, Turner imagines new futures where legacies of oppression are confronted and dismantled.
Land of the Free will be on view at the museum February 6 through May 8. A reception will be held February 5.
Fine Arts Center residency program sparks creative exchange
Four artists in residence spent a week on campus laying the foundation for spring exhibitions and performances that will reflect months of research and collaboration across campus.