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1st Floor Mardigian Library

 Today's Hours: 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

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Stamelos Gallery

Metro Detroit artist set to bring mosaic art show to life, Click On Detroit
Student Writing Inspired by 2025 Gallery Exhibition – Best Kept Secret: UMD Student, Faculty, and Alumni Art Show

Seeking Light: Mixed Media Works by Michelle Sider

Wednesday, May 20, 2026 - Sunday, Aug. 09, 2026

Michigan Mosaic Artist Michelle Sider will present more than 40 original works she created between 2009 and 2026 for her largest solo exhibition to date.

This exhibition unfolds in three sections: Leaving Darkness, Celebrating Radiance, and Light Endures, each offering a unique perspective on light as a metaphor for memory, spiritual reflection, and resilience. As you move through the exhibition, colors shift, surfaces breathe, and textures animate scenes drawn from nature, history, and personal experience. This work is meant to be experienced slowly, attentively, and with openness.

Exhibition Details  
Opening Reception

Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 5:00pm - 7:00pm

Stamelos Gallery Center

Artist talk at 6:00 p.m. Reception is free to the public, free parking in UM-Dearborn lot. Complimentary wine and hors d'oeuvres provided. Due to a generous donation, the wine as well as a selection of the hor d'oeuvres will be Kosher.

Frames of Reference, Past and Present: Selected Works by Anita Bates

Thursday, Sep. 03, 2026 - Sunday, Dec. 13, 2026

This exhibition explores my aesthetic choices over the last 20 plus years. Not truly a retrospective because the scope is limited, the work is more of a survey; selected paintings which represent the various bodies of work undertaken over more than two decades.

Our experiences help us construct meaning, respond to others and define our cultural frame of reference. Similarly, the artist impacts their audience through the construction of images based on their connections, sensibilities and experiences. This is what I term as an aesthetic frame of reference, hence the title of this exhibition.

The works from 2020 through 2026 are heavily influenced by my childhood; exposure to the aesthetic choices made by a father who was an eccentric and complicated person, unable to fully be himself and thus, chose to transform our living spaces to communicate his vision of the world.

The paintings from 2003 to 2014 explore abstraction of the landscape; translating the physical attributes of land (and sky) as if I were zooming in on a particular surface or what a cross section of a surface might look like. As well, they highlight use of disparate materials and chemicals to create visually textured surfaces.

As the viewer, I ask you to take in my work with the understanding that while the genre of abstraction depends a great deal on spontaneity, this does not necessarily mean the act of creating is a thoughtless endeavor, where visual aesthetics are ruled by happenstance.

— Anita Bates PhD, MFA

Exhibition Details  
Opening Reception

Thursday, Sep. 03, 2026, 5:00pm - 7:00pm

Stamelos Gallery Center

Artist talk at 6:00 p.m. Reception is free to the public, free parking in UM-Dearborn lot. Complimentary wine and hors d'oeuvres provided.

More Upcoming Exhibitions

Denise Willing Booher exhibition

Title and Dates to be determined

Mary Ann Monforton exhibition

Title and Dates to be determined

Faculty/ student exhibition

Title and Dates to be determined

Current Digital Exhibitions

The New Freedom Fighters: Women And Nonviolent Resistance

The New Freedom Fighters: Women And Nonviolent Resistance project explores the often unrecognized role that women play in the survival and evolution of cultures and communities. The women profiled in this project live every day under military threat and use different types of nonviolent resistance to defend their human rights and mitigate the consequences of war in their communities. The lives of the women you meet here have been irrevocably shaped by war. Despite feeling the effects of the violence on their homes, families, career prospects, and communities, these women understand the need for creative nonviolence to break the cycle of war and intolerance.Exhibition Details 
Photo of Ine And Mariam
Ine And Mariam, Kristin Anahit Cass

Borderlands Under Fire

Borderlands Under Fire exposes the world of a frozen conflict and documents the effects of state-sponsored violence on daily life in the frontier villages of Armenia, a tiny country in the South Caucasus. Caught at the geopolitical crossroads of East and West, Armenian villagers find themselves used as pawns in a political power game, and ignored by international organizations like the OSCE and the UN. But they refuse to give up their agency, and they continue working to make change from within their communities. Even as the people of these border villages suffer violence and privation daily as a result of war, they hold fast to their homeland, preserving their language and culture as part of the world's heritage. The project explores the villagers' use of creative nonviolent resistance to defend their human rights and develop their communities.Exhibition Details 
Photograph of a line of girls' shoes in front of a window
Girlhood Interrupted, Kristin Anahit Cass

Art in a Time of Pandemic

The Art Collections and Exhibitions Department/ Stamelos Gallery Center hosted a campus-wide photography contest as a method for telling our stories through art during the unprecedented time of the Covid 19 Pandemic. Gallery staff invited all current University of Michigan-Dearborn students, faculty and staff to search their homes and community environments for inspiration while following safe and appropriate physical distancing guidelines.Exhibition Details 
Image of a camera

Past Exhibition

Infinite Variety: Selections from the UM-Dearborn Glass Collection

Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026 - Sunday, Apr. 26, 2026

This exhibition celebrates the infinite variety of art glass from the collection of UM-Dearborn, located an hour from where the American Studio Glass movement was born in 1962. However, the pieces included in this exhibition represent more than this movement; they reach back in time to the early 20th century and across oceans to Europe and Asia. The exhibition is organized into five themes that highlight key qualities of glass to showcase how artists play upon and confound our expectations of this medium. These themes are Ancient and Modern, Light, Nature, Prism, and Art.
Exhibition Details  
Opening Reception

Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026, 5:00pm - 7:00pm

Stamelos Gallery Center

Special Guest Speakers at 6:00 pm:

Kim Harty, Associate Professor and Section Lead of Glass,
College for Creative Studies

Sarah Kohn, Director and Curator of Collections and Exhibitions,
Flint Institute of Arts

Reception is free to the public. Complimentary beverages and hors d'oeuvres provided.

Guest Lecture by Herb Babcock:
American Studio Glass and Reflection on International Influence

Friday, Mar. 20, 2026, 2:00pm - 3:00pm

UM-Dearborn-Mardigian Library, first floor next to Stamelos Gallery

Event is free to the public and light refreshments provided.

In the early 1960’s, Harvey Littleton set out to make glass blowing a creative experience for craftspeople and artists in a small studio environment. This was the beginning of the American Studio Glass Movement that transformed glass from a factory-made product into an independent art form created in private studios. Glass is a medium of transitions.Most American participants were working in another medium before coming to work in glass as a primary material, many times, adding it to the repertory of their total art expression. As the movement grew, reaching out for international influence also assisted the artists’ endeavors... View More

The Stamelos Gallery Center is located on the first floor of the Mardigian Library at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. For more information, see below for contact information. Anyone requiring accommodations under the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act should contact (313)593-5087.

Bill and Electra Stamelos


Electra was a remarkably gifted painter and Bill was an avid photographer. The couple loved to travel, and they acquired artwork from all over the world for their collection. Bill and Electra contributed greatly to the university's art collection for decades including donating the majority of Electra's body of work and many other art pieces that they collected throughout their years together. The couple also contributed a sizeable, and very generous, gift which, along with the support of other donors, will allow for the creation of the new Stamelos Gallery.

Bill and Electra Stamelos

Al Berkowitz


The University of Michigan-Dearborn Art Collection and Exhibitions Department has been greatly impacted by beloved friend and generous donor, Alfred Berkowitz, for many decades.

Al Berkowitz

Jump To

Featured University Art Collection Piece

A dynamic construction scene, a recurring theme in his celebrated
Builders No. 3,

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), Serigraph print, 1974
Gift of Gilbert M. Frimet,
Collection of UM-Dearborn (1980.065)
Photographed by Tim Thayer

This powerful serigraph print from the permanent collection was created by Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), one of this century's most widely acclaimed artists.

Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but moved to Harlem, New York, at 13. He is among the few painters of his generation who grew up in a Black community, received instruction primarily from Black artists, and was influenced by the experiences of Black individuals.

Lawrence's artwork portrays the lives and struggles of the Black community, capturing their experiences through several series focused on figures such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman, as well as themes related to life in Harlem and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. His style is characterized by vibrant colors and abstract forms.

In the 1940s, during a time of widespread segregation, Lawrence broke racial barriers by becoming the first Black artist whose work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

He stated, "If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man's continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being."

Researched and written by:
Julianna Collins, Stamelos Gallery Center former intern, UM-Dearborn art history/museum studies graduate, Class of 2025

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  • 1st Floor, Mardigian Library, UM-Dearborn
  • 4901 Evergreen Road, Dearborn, MI 48128
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