Carlos Francisco Jackson

As we enter this season of gratitude, I am thankful for the exciting opportunities that our students will experience during their time at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design and after, as graduates poised to change the world through creativity and innovation.

In July, I celebrated my first full year as dean of the Stamps School and am grateful to now call Ann Arbor home. During this past year, it has been an honor to witness firsthand the important difference our alums and donors make every day in the lives of our students. The generosity demonstrated by our community is evident across the entire school and felt by the new and returning undergraduate and MFA graduate students we warmly welcomed to campus this fall.

The Stamps School has an extraordinary history of educating students who have led the vanguard of how art and design impact our world. A hallmark of my time at Stamps has been traveling the country to meet with alums who have built creative lives sustained by the art and design methods they cultivated while at Stamps. I am overwhelmed by their continuing dedication to innovation and their commitment to ensuring today’s students reach the highest levels of personal and professional success.

Your gift to the Stamps School provides powerful opportunities to continue enhancing the curriculum, pedagogy, and research within our studios and expand exhibition opportunities for our students and faculty. Together, we will create the nation’s most dynamic interdisciplinary education that spans art and design methods, where the ancient arts of ceramics and fiber sit alongside a continuum that extends to augmented/virtual reality and generative artificial intelligence. At Stamps the irreverent exists alongside the reverent; the idiosyncratic engages the universal, the spiritual, and ancestral prefigures of the future. Altogether these varied experiences and aspirations provide the tools needed to build healthier and more sustainable communities.

With your support, the Stamps School will continue to prepare artists and designers for a future without limits. Please join us in this mission by making a gift today. Thank you for your steadfast partnership to the Stamps School and for championing the importance of premier art and design education.

With gratitude,