The Fall 2023 Theme Semester — Arts & Resistance — reflects how creativity and making can arise from oppression and destruction. Arts & Resistance has generated public performances, courses, lectures, conferences, exhibitions, and mini-grants for students campuswide.

In 1900, the Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians lost their land and rightful place as a sovereign nation. Today, with input from other Native voices, an Ojibwe artist highlights the tribe’s history and current bid for federal reaffirmation in an exhibition at the U-M Museum of Art.

She fled the tenements of Brooklyn in the 1920s to follow her boyfriend to the U-M Law School. She got married, struggled to blend in with the coeds, and sought refuge in the library when things went awry. Then, Betty Smith, the future author of ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ met playwright and professor Kenneth Thorpe Rowe. His mentorship set her on a path that produced the bestselling novel of 1944.

Live Coal Gallery in Detroit is a safe place for young artists to create and express their artistry to the world — and has had an impact on more than a thousand students since its founding. Creator Yvette Rock, MFA ’99, says she takes children under her wing (like the young artist above) because she knows they’ll be steered away from the arts as they get older.

After a 30-year career in Michigan Athletics, Greg Harden (aka ‘Michigan’s secret weapon’) delivers ‘Stay Sane in An Insane World: How to Control the Controllables and Thrive,’ a book of life lessons culled from such champions as Tom Brady, Michael Phelps, Desmond Howard, and more.

As a pair of married ghosts in the Broadway touring company of ‘Beetlejuice,’ college roommates and 2011 SMTD graduates Will Burton and Britney Coleman come to the stage with that ‘thing’ so essential to musical comedy: Chemistry.

Doctor of Musical Arts candidate Bryan Ijames followed his ear, his heart, and some scholarly detective work to resurrect a forgotten piece by composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Sophie’s Place is a bright comfortable music studio, tucked away in a corner at U-M’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. Named for young singer-songwriter Sophie Rose Barton, the studio brings its own kind of healing to patients, families, and therapists.

‘48217’ is known as Michigan’s most polluted zip code. Community activists in this community near Detroit teamed up with Stamps Professor Joe Trumpey and his students in Fall 2022 to draw attention to the poor air quality in this industrial area — to stunning effect.