Center for Community Engagement Arts & Culture

Mead Art Museum

The Mead houses the art collection of Amherst College, spanning 5,000 years and encompassing the creative achievements of many world cultures.  Learn more about the Mead Art Museum and their current exhibitions.

Music at Amherst Series

This program brings world-class performances to Amherst College, and is free with Amherst College ID. Curated by the Music Department for Amherst and the wider community, these musical performances include, but are not limited to, chamber music such as string quartets and wind ensembles, solo artists, jazz, world, and a wide range of genre-bending new music. Visiting artists also give masterclasses, and do other community outreach including talkbacks and class visits. View this year’s performance schedule to learn more. Please write to concerts@amherst.edu if you'd like to find out more!

WAMH Radio Station

The college radio station operates out of Keefe Campus Center. WAMH is committed to playing new music and helping new DJs find their voices; in addition to broadcasting seven days a week, WAMH hosts concerts, writes music blogs, and partners with community organizations in the Pioneer Valley. To find out more or get involved, visit WAMH on the Hub or wamh.com.

Ancestral Bridges

Ancestral Bridges supports and builds programs that celebrate BIPOC arts, history, and culture in western Massachusetts. They also partner with local communities to create educational and economic opportunities so that BIPOC and disadvantaged youth can thrive. Find out more about events, tours, and the mission of Ancestral Bridges.

The Drake

Located in the center of Amherst, the Drake is one of the region’s premier gathering places for the cross-cultural exchange of the arts.  From dance to comedy, spoken word to stage, open mic nights to local story-telling, it is a place where the cultural and artistic richness of our communities can be lifted up, expanded, and embraced. Check out their events calendar. 

Eric Carle Museum

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is an international champion for picture books. They collect, preserve, and exhibit original illustrations, encourage guests of all ages to read and create art, and foster an ever-growing audience passionate about children’s literature.  The museum is just down the road - a quick PVTA ride away. Find out more about the Carle Museum in Amherst.

Indigenous Books and Art

Kiara Vigil

The Fall 2023 iteration of this course enabled students to learn about Native American literature and art production through the Mead Art Museum's "Boundless" exhibit and through readings and research related to Native American artistic traditions and literary practices. Students worked with texts from the Amherst Native Literature collection and chose a Native artist from the Mead’s exhibit to study in more depth. The course centered around Indigenous approaches to learning and enabled students to deepen their understanding of the relationships between research, museums, archives, and Indigenous cultural representations that contend with the legacies of colonization.

Public Art and Collaborative Practices

Lucia Monge

Public Art and Collaborative Practices is a studio art course, based on the premise that art is a form of care. It focuses on art in public space, collaborative art making practices, and activist art that addresses social and political issues. Students learn about artist collectives, socially engaged art, and practice working together in group projects. They also analyze temporary and permanent public artworks and then make art with specific sites and communities in mind. Ultimately, the semester is dedicated to thinking about art's potential for big and small change and participating in the transformation of our environment through making.

Soundscapes of the Connecticut River Valley

Jeffers Engelhardt

This course is about exploring, participating in, and documenting the musical communities and acoustic terrain of the Connecticut River Valley. The first part of the class focuses on local histories and music scenes, ethnographic methods and technologies, and different techniques of documentary representation. The second part involves intensive, sustained engagement with musicians and sounds in the Amherst vicinity (and beyond). The course culminates in contributions to a web-based documentary archive of soundscapes projects. Students also benefit from visits and interaction with local musicians.