Part of the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, Stamps Gallery announces three exhibitions and related programming for its summer season.

This exhibition explores the expansive and experimental nature of Detroit-based artist and designer Elizabeth Youngblood’s prolific and interstitial art practice. In Syntax, viewers encounter works from the last four decades that range from large-scale drawings to intimate mixed-media works, sculptural objects, and weavings. The show includes Youngblood’s early design work where her explorations with dots, dashes, lines, and the accumulation of lines and space emerged and became a framework for a way to consider form as ever-evolving and iterative. These recurring forms became reconstituted across different mediums and disciplines, transformed over and over again to create Youngblood’s unique visual vocabulary and a Syntax of meaning and making.

The Black Art Library is a collection of books and other art history ephemera on Black visual art, intended to be an educational resource to share within the Black community and beyond. The library aims to introduce or expand the community’s knowledge of Black art from the past and the present through art books. For Stamps Gallery, Asmaa Walton has curated a special selection of books that focus on Black women artists as well as Black artists from Southeast Michigan.

Stamps Gallery commissioned Michelle Hinojosa to reimagine the pillars flanking the gallery on Division Street in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Hinojosa has created log cabin quilts to adorn the columns to reflect on ideas of home and belonging from a migrant lens. 

Public Programs

Summer Exhibitions Opening Reception
June 20, 6–8pm
Join us to celebrate the opening of our summer exhibitions.

On Space, Lines, Grids, and Ways of Knowing: The Art of Elizabeth Youngblood
July 11, 6–7:30pm
Curator Abel González Fernández and artists Senghor Reid and Elizabeth Youngblood will engage in a panel discussion moderated by Srimoyee Mitra.

I need you to be wild/loud, so I can be calm/quiet, I need to be calm/quiet, so you can be wild/loud
July 13, 3–5pm
Performance artists Jennifer Harge (Detroit), Marco Guagnelli (Chicago), and Emerson Granillo (Ypsilanti) will explore the inheritance and futuring of cultural legacies through individual performances.

DIY Bookmark Making Workshop
July 20, 2–4pm
Curator and Art Educator Asmaa Walton will lead an all-ages DIY bookmark-making workshop at the Ann Arbor Art Fair Ingalls Mall.

For more information, visit stamps.umich.edu/stamps-gallery.