2025 News 2025: Exhibition: Windows on UMass

The CVPA Campus Gallery and UMassBRUT will present Windows on UMass, a collaborative exhibition featuring art and architectural works by students from UMass Amherst and UMass Dartmouth from March 6 through March 23, 2025. The opening reception is planned for Wednesday, March 19, 4-6pm in the CVPA Campus Gallery at 285 Old Westport Road in Dartmouth, MA, where light refreshments will be served. Please use parking lots 5, 14, or 18 and walk to the CVPA building from there. The gallery is on the first floor.

Windows on UMass is a project that inspired students to interpret the brutalist buildings of the UMass Amherst and UMass Dartmouth campus through their windows. The exhibition showcases original work of students from both universities through photography, digital renderings, drawings, and writings. Windows on UMass renews the public perception of the UMass Brutalist heritage buildings by highlighting their historic and cultural significance, today's use of these treasures, and the people that use them.

This exhibition shows how students see the windows of the historic brutalist buildings of the UMass campuses from multiple viewpoints, with art history students providing a written reflection about windows forming connections, and interior architecture + design (IAD) students considering the quality of natural lighting in the interior space through the windows, and reimagining the CVPA building with consideration of existing and newly proposed windows.

The exhibition premiered at UMass Amherst in the fall of 2024 as a project initiated by UMassBRUT founding members from UMass Amherst Timothy M. Rohan and Ludmilla Pavlova-Gillham, curated by Erica DeWitt and Lincoln Nemetez-Carlson. UMass Dartmouth students in Prof. Anna Dempsey and Prof. Laura Franz's ARH 102: Intro the History of Art, as well Prof. Stephanie McGoldrick's IAD 202: Lighting Design Studio, and Prof. Rose Botti-Salitsky’s IAD 302: Institutional Design Studio were included, with work aimed at reshaping perceptions of the brutalist architecture of the University of Massachusetts system.

The Breuer Window sculpture presented in the Claire T. Carney Library was designed and built by Colleen Tully, UMass Amherst graduate student in architecture and design (‘24), to investigate and invite public perceptions of brutalism. It comprises a modular plywood sculpture that is a 3/4 scale model inspired by the precast concrete facade panels of Marcel Breuer’s Lincoln Campus Center at UMass Amherst. The sculpture has been exhibited at UMass Amherst's Fine Arts Center “Joy of Art” event in October 2023, the Lincoln Campus Center for the Association of Preservation Technology Northeast conference in February 2024, the Association of University Architects conference in June 2024, and at the Olver Design Building Gallery Windows on UMass exhibition in October 2024.

About UMassBRUT 

After years of individual endeavors on each campus to promote its modernist architecture, UMass Dartmouth and UMass Amherst joined forces in 2019 to create UMassBRUT as a collaborative advocacy group of faculty members, staff, students, alumni, and interested parties dedicated to celebrating, preserving, and re-imagining our mid-century brutalist public architecture. UMass Boston and UMass Lowell joined the effort in 2023.

UMassBRUT's mission is to raise awareness of the relevance and international significance of the brutalist architectural heritage across the campuses of the UMass System. To achieve this goal, UMassBRUT sponsors public and scholarly activities and events that promote the importance of these architectural icons and highlight the critical need to preserve them now and for future generations.