Check Out Our Incredible 2026-2027 Season!
Our performing arts season will be headlined by Audra McDonald, the Tony Award winningest performer in Broadway history. Our visual arts season features the work of one of America's most celebrated conceptual artists, Hank Willis Thomas. And, as always, we'll introduce you to rising stars, bring you exciting innovators, and invite you to join us in remembering and celebrating great artists of the recent past.
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Visual Arts
Explore sixteen exhibitions across our three galleries this season, featuring emerging and internationally acclaimed artists whose work examines landscape, identity, memory, history, and legacy. From Athena LaTocha and Dianne Smith this fall to a major career survey by Hank Willis Thomas in the spring, there's something to discover all year long. View the full exhibition calendar and plan your visit.
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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.
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.