Staff Explorer Pass - Michigan Arts Festival 2026

Join this very special U-M Staff-only guided tour!

Stamps Gallery kicks off the fall 2026 semester with an ambitious mid-career survey of interdisciplinary artist Cosmo Whyte. Born and raised in Jamaica, Whyte completed a BFA from Bennington College and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan. He is currently a faculty member at the School of the Arts and Architecture, UCLA.

This exhibition brings together two central concerns that animate Whyte’s artistic practice: the archive, both personal and public, as a site of disturbance; and migration as a lived experience of refuge, refusal, and reinvention. In Whyte’s work, the archive is never static or neutral. Rather, it is a contested space where official histories encounter memory, inheritance, and the fragments of stories carried across generations. His practice moves within this charged interstitial terrain, between what has been recorded and what has been remembered, between institutional knowledge and embodied experience. Whyte invites the viewer to consider the fluidity of geographic borders and layered cultural identities that have persisted despite societal unrest caused by racial and socio-economic hierarchies across generations. In an era of intensified border politics and renewed debates over national identity, Whyte’s work offers a timely meditation on memory, movement, and belonging.

This program is part of the Michigan Arts Festival Staff Explorer Pass. In partnership with Voices of the Staff, the U-M Arts Initiative is offering limited complimentary tickets for select campus events and extra special experiences for U-M staff members all throughout October! For a list of all Staff Explorer Pass events, visit https://sessions.studentlife.umich.edu/track/event/23512