Arts Initiative Workshops 2026 - 2027

Join us for "Art in the Arb", a special workshop series designed to welcome U-M students, staff, and faculty to Nichols Arboretum through a shared arts experience. In this poetry workshop, artist Caroline Harper New will guide us through a series of writing meditations that ask us to reflect on our relationship to the natural world. We will think about time, memory, and seasons of transition, as well as the ways in which we become entangled with the beings around us. You will have the opportunity to read poems by others and share our own work. Everyone is encouraged to explore Nichols Arboretum before or after the workshop. No prior art or writing experience is required; all levels are welcome.  All materials are provided. Bring your curiosity and love for the outdoors!

Artist Bio

Caroline is a scholar and artist from southwest Georgia. She is the author of A History of Half-Birds (Milkweed Editions, 2024) and If I Call This Cave a Garden (YesYes Books, forthcoming 2027).

Her creative work is rooted in the precarious landscape of the Gulf Coast, where her practice spans poetry, sculpture, painting, film, choreography, and the tendons in between. As a Ph.D. student in anthropology, she studies in beyond-human entanglements, ruptures in temporality, and death and extinction in wetlands. She earned her M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Michigan.

Inspired by Cosmo Whyte's exhibition Under the Quiet, Beyond the Eye, this workshop asks how the photographs we keep, inherit, and carry with us become stories about where we come from. Participants will move through a rotating book circle, sharing photobooks and personal images in small conversations about memory, place, and belonging. Everyone will then build their own eight-page mini photobook, layering photographs with translucent sheets to create a personal archive to take home. No photography experience is needed; just bring your curiosity and, if you like, a few printed photos that matter to you.

Artist Bio

William Hohe is a photographer and installation artist from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, now based in Michigan. They are an MFA candidate in Visual Arts at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, where they also serve as Instructor of Record for Digital Photography for Non Majors. Hohe holds a BFA in Photography and a BS in Advertising from the University of Illinois (UIUC).

Hohe combines photography, performance, assemblage, and found and inherited archives to examine identity, family, and queer space. Working within a framework they call Existential Maximalism, that ask: as queer people, what does it mean to exist within spaces that are continually contested, politicized, and transformed between the expected and the imagined? Their work has been exhibited in Momentum, the Society for Photographic Education Midwest exhibition, and in DIFFA Chicago's Three for Life 2026. They are the coauthor, with designer Charlotte Watson, of the independently published photobook INTERSTATES (2025). Their photobook In An Erotic City, made in Berlin, is forthcoming in winter 2026, and their thesis project Father Figure[d] opens at the University of Michigan in March 2027. Hohe works professionally as WILLIAMSLENSES.