September 2 – October 11, 2025
Reception: Monday, September 15, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.
Free and open to the public
Featuring Jerrell Gibbs, Lolo Gem, Margaret Walker, Jiangshengyu Nova Pan, and Sara Dittrich.
College Park, MD. The Stamp Gallery is pleased to presentLights Off at 8 pm, a group exhibition featuring artists that approach memory as inherently fluid and ever-shifting, capable of evoking different emotions—love, grief, joy, anxiety, fear—at once and across time. Rather than seeking to preserve the past, these artists embrace the distortion, abstraction, and reinvention of memories, inviting the audience to consider alternative ways of remembering.
This exhibition and related programming is supported in part by theMaryland State Arts Council andThe Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.
PROGRAMMING
Artist Talk: Sara Dittrich - Thursday, October 9, 12 pm. Nanticoke Room in Stamp.
THE ARTISTS
Jerrell Gibbs explores the complexities of life by investigating his personal experiences of living and growing up in America. His paintings are composites of childhood memories centered around American life and culture, spotlighting stories of the familiar that go unnoticed. Gibbs uses everyday settings as the framework for his paintings to highlight the innumerable similarities humanity shares despite social differences. Gibbs is committed to creating paintings that are both authentic and truthful. His paintings highlight joy, beauty, and the extraordinary in the mundane, all components within the vastness of life. Gibbs uses the depiction of children as protagonists within his oeuvre to emphasize the lasting impact of childhood experiences on adulthood, aiming to encourage self-reflection by highlighting how our past experiences, whether positive or negative, shape our present reality. The compositions, which are often taken from his family archive, focus on placement, scale, and proportion, as much as they do on mark-making and painterly gestures. Gibbs graduated with an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2020. His work is in the permanent collection of the Brandywine Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, the CC Foundation, and the X Museum Beijing.
Lolo Gem (b. 1995, Westchester County, NY) is a Baltimore-based artist working with painting, ceramic sculpture, drawing, and imagery collaged from vintage comic books & early animation. She received a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017 and an MFA in Studio Art from Towson University in 2025. Her work has been recently exhibited at Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD; Towson University, Towson, MD; Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA; Blah Blah Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Art Enables, Washington D.C.; Current Space, Baltimore, MD; Delaplaine Arts Center, Frederick, MD; and Gallery CA, Baltimore, MD.
Margaret Walker is a photographer and textile artist whose work explores image-making as a documentary tool for memory. She holds a BFA from the University of Wisconsin and an MFA from the University of Maryland, where she studied both photography and ceramics. After relocating to the greater D.C. area to pursue her graduate studies, Walker completed her MFA in May 2025. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Photography at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. Her work has been exhibited at the University of Maryland, the Maryland Gallery, Katzen Gallery, Studio Gallery, STAMP Gallery, Wisconsin Union Directorate, VisArts, UW–Madison Photography, and UW–Madison Ceramics.
Jiangshengyu Nova Pan (b. Hangzhou, China) is a moving image and installation artist. Pan earned her MFA in the Mount Royal School of Art (Multidisciplinary MFA) at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Pan’s work focuses on human mobility. Working from the perspective of the individual, at times the artist herself, Pan’s work explores the profound transformations of space, power relations, and social networks faced by a mobile population. While her work was originally inspired by the Chinese context, where the blistering pace of social and economic change has made migration an inevitability for millions, she uses this history as an aperture, playing with scale and moving beyond place, exploring how mobility is internalized and migration felt in the body. Pan’s artistic practice is heavily influenced by cinema-as-medium, interviews, rumor, and intergenerational storytelling.
Sara Dittrich is a Baltimore-based interdisciplinary artist. Her artworks include sculpture, prints, video, and interactive installations with biometric sensors, and data-driven performance. Often informed by residencies and travel, such projects have included time-lapse imaging of landscapes, local skies, and tidal patterns, and the somatic effects of time and a place on the body. Residencies and research programs have included Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Sculpture Space, and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (Prague). She is the recipient of a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (Provincetown, MA), Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and Mary Sawyers Baker Artist Award. Dittrich’s work has been exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH), and DiverseWorks (Houston, TX). Her performances and screenings have been presented by CultureHub, Revolutions per Minute Film Festival, and Maryland Art Place.
ABOUT THE GALLERY
Located on the first floor of the Adele H. Stamp Student Union—Center for Campus Life at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Stamp Gallery is dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art, especially the work of emerging and mid-career artists. The Stamp Gallery supports contemporary art that is challenging, academically engaging, and attuned to broad community and social issues. Through meaningful exhibitions and programming, the Gallery offers outside-of-the-classroom experiential learning opportunities. It functions as a laboratory where emerging artists and curators experiment and work through their ideas. The Gallery’s programming aims to emphasize the importance of process to contemporary artistic practice and to provide a forum for dialogue.
FREE and open to the public.
Gallery hours: Mondays–Thursdays: 10 am – 8 pm, Fridays: 10 am – 5 pm, Saturdays: 11 am – 5 pm, Sundays: Closed. More information:stamp.umd.edu/gallery