Hi everyone,

**Please join us Friday October 6th at 4:00 pm for a rally to advocate for the arts!! Located at Main Campus in the Quad in front of CVPA and Foster**

I wanted to share some updates about how this semester has gone so far for the CVPA community, as well as spread the word for an on campus rally this week.

Right before coming back to school for the semester, we were informed of the devastating loss of the Star Store which has forced hundreds of students and faculty to relocate their studios and classrooms to unfit locations at the drop of a dime. Firstly, we were told that the graduate students would be moved to an “off campus location” that ended up being an old Bed Bath & Beyond located in a strip mall in Dartmouth. This has proved completely inadequate and unsuitable to house any sort of equipment or materials that are necessary for the graduate students’ work. Now, already almost 30 days into our semester, there have still been NO plans to build studios in that location. Our graduate students still have nowhere to do their work. We are not confident that there will ever be studios built for them. 

In addition to that, we have just been informed today that the location will not able to house our Painting graduate students because there is not enough ventilation in the space for them to safely paint. Now, the Painting graduate students will be squeezed into CVPA with the undergraduate and post-BAC students who also still do not have studios. We simply do not have adequate space to house all of the painting graduate and undergraduate students, and it’s unfair to all parties. As for the undergrads, we have been trying our best to work in CVPA without studios so far this semester, and our professors have been incredible, but it has been extremely difficult to focus or get work done with sometimes dozens of students or multiple classes going on in one room, no privacy, and no space of our own. 

Not only has this impacted studio space for students, but due to this unfair decision, many classes have had to adapt extremely quickly and make changes to their curriculum because our professors don’t have the space, resources, or equipment to teach the courses that they intended. This means that many students are now taking classes that they did not sign up for, and many professors are teaching classes that they did not anticipate or prepare for. Our professors have been absolutely incredible in adapting to these changes to make sure this semester is still as positive an experience for us as it can be, but they should not have been put in that position to begin with. This decision has not only been detrimental for the students, but the impact on our professors and faculty can not be ignored.

For all of these reasons and more, we are holding an “Art Impacts All” rally on campus this Friday October 6th and invite ALL to join. This rally will be held on Main Campus in the quad in front of CVPA and Foster at 4:00pm. 
Being 4 weeks into the semester with no proper studio spaces, having lost our incredible art building with almost no notice, we feel that still having to pay full tuition and class fees is absolutely unacceptable and unfair. This is not what any of us signed up for when we applied for UMass Dartmouth. We are not being provided with the necessary accommodations to do our work, and this is not what we were promised. VALUE OUR CVPA EDUCATION!!