Engaged creative practice is a phrase that the Stamps School uses to describe the powerful collaborations that happen when artists and designers work in honest, meaningful ways with community partners. Together, they generate creative work, discover fresh policy approaches, and innovatively address real-world challenges.
Socially engaged projects allow artists and designers to:
Respond to a need or set of needs in a particular community or communities
Facilitate connections among diverse groups and disciplines
Broaden participants’ experiences and understanding of the social constructs of modern society
Broaden participants’ view of the role of art and design in local and global contexts
Put theory and practice together through hands-on, collaborative projects or public interventions
These practices are central to the work of many contemporary artists and designers — and at Stamps, they’re part of our unique interdisciplinary curriculum. All undergraduate students are required to take at least one engagement course during their time at Stamps. Students can pursue a range of opportunities, from working with K‑12 classes in local schools to engaging with community leaders on civic projects, to fulfill this community engagement requirement.
The Courses
Through specially designed courses led by experienced faculty, Stamps students learn how to integrate meaningful and engaged creative practice into their lives during college and beyond. Below are some of the compelling course options that fulfill the engagement requirement.
Before practice comes theory, and this course explores the ways in which artists, designers, and citizens work within the public sphere. Students gain an understanding of socially engaged art and design practice while learning the approaches and skills essential to engagement work.
Students in Teaching Professor Jessica Frelinghuysen’s Fall 2023 Social Spaces class participate in a zine exchange.
In this course, students develop, design, and teach art projects in a wide variety of media to grade school students from a partner school or community art center. Students work in close collaborative teams to develop and produce vibrant art projects involving exploration, discovery, play, and problem-solving that foster imaginative and cognitive development through creativity.
In this video, Stamps students in Teaching Professor Melanie Manos’s Art Connections class discuss the impact of their collaborative work with 5th graders at Ypsilanti International Elementary School (YIES).
The Detroit Neighborhood Entrepreneurs Project is an interdisciplinary program for students interested in applying their skills to help Detroit-based small business owners (re)grow their businesses. For Stamps students, the opportunity allows for expanding their professional portfolios and building a network. Students learn how to collaborate with a variety of teammates, polish their communication with real-life clients, and become immersed in positive social impact.
Students and community partners work together to create social impact through design and entrepreneurship. With an emphasis on problem identification, participants prototype ideas, build objects, develop innovations and processes, and refine these through fieldwork, validation, and testing.
Recent Change by Design community partners include Nurturing our Seeds and Detroit Community Schools.
Students in this course learn strategies for reversing the trend of a society driven by value extraction. Through hands-on projects, students explore techniques such as designing with ecologically sustainable materials, enhancing labor value for an artisanal economy, and merging cultural arts with computing.
This video features a collaboration between students in Ron Eglash’s Design for Generative Justice class and the Dabls MBad African Bead Museum, in which students harvested electronic waste and turned it into jewelry. The museum was demolished in July 2024.
In partnership with community leaders in Detroit, students develop murals that address environmental issues based on dialogue with local residents. The goals of the projects include community increased education, awareness, engagement and beautification.
U‑M Professor Joe Trumpey and his students teamed up with community activist Theresa Landrum to help raise awareness of pollution issues facing one Detroit neighborhood through a series of murals.
Socially Engaged Visual Art In Prison: Humanizing the Numbers is a collaborative photography project inside Michigan Department of Corrections facilities, bringing together men incarcerated within the MDOC and students from the University of Michigan to create images about the personal experiences of those directly impacted by mass incarceration.
Taught through the Residential College in the College of Literature, Science & Arts by Residential College faculty Isaac Wingfield, this course is one of several Prison Creative Arts Project-engaged learning options that focus on the creative arts through the lens of mass incarceration.
In Humanizing the Numbers, U‑M students and Michigan inmates collaborate to create images about the personal experiences of those directly impacted by mass incarceration. View portfolios from this collaboration at humanizethenumbers.com.
Courses offered that meet the Engagement Studio requirements vary by semester; view current Engagement Studio courses here. Current students can view more information about the community engagement requirement on the Stamps Intranet.
The Partnerships & Collaborations
The Stamps School has a rich history of community partners and collaborations. These connections are vital, allowing the Stamps School to offer opportunities for students to work on projects with off-campus organizations. These mutually beneficial alliances are typically project-focused and may or may not lead to long-term, ongoing partnerships. Recent collaborators include Neighbors Building Brightmoor, Dabls Mbad African Museum, and Signal-Return, where Stamps faculty member Lee Marchalonis helped connect artists to Detroit non-profits.
You can read more about past collaborations at DetroitConnections.org, a compendium of the community engagement through art and design partnerships that the Stamps School has participated in over the last decade. ArtConnectsKids collects at-home art projects for kids and families created by students in Detroit Connections: In the Classroom during the Winter and Fall semesters of 2020.