If you’re anything like me, I assume you’ve pictured your college experience to be centered around a coffee shop full of deep conversations about art, music, and philosophy. Then, somewhere along the way of your real college experience—consisting of basketball games and boozy fraternity parties,—you realized that your idea of classical music is acoustic covers of Taylor Swift songs and the cute canvases you buy on etsy are “high art.” There’s no need to worry though, because there are simple things you can do to get cultured in College Park without missing too many tailgates.
The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (or The Clarice, if you want to sound sophisticated) houses a ton of exhibitions and performances. Many of these performances are even free for students. In addition to the theater and dance performances that are open to the public, students can also get free tickets to any performances on a first-come, first-served basis on the Monday of any given week.
Pictured: The façade of The Clarice
In addition to performances at the Clarice, there are endless student performing groups that dance, sing, and act at locations all over campus. You can find a group that fits almost anything you’re interested in, from video games with the Gamer Symphony Orchestra to Shakespeare with the Maryland Shakespeare Players. It’s a great opportunity to support friends as well as the campus community while expanding your horizons beyond EDM and pop music.
There are also many opportunities to experience the visual arts in College Park. There is a University of Maryland Art Gallery housed in the Art-Sociology building. Currently, there is an exhibit entitled Questioning the Bomb: History and Non-Proliferation, and there is a calendar of fun art events you can attend on campus at artgallery.umd.
Pictured: The National Portrait Gallery
A final fantastic thing about the University of Maryland is our proximity to Washington, D.C. We all remember how this fact was celebrated at orientation and used to sell the school as a way to get internships, but D.C. is a great location for the arts as well. There are numerous free museums to go see art; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the National Portrait Gallery all house amazing collections. Even if you aren’t super into art and don’t know a thing about art history, browsing galleries is always fun on a date or with some friends.
At the end of the day, you don’t have to be incredibly passionate about art, theater, or classical music. Nobody expects you to become a pretentious art critic over night. But college is about expanding your horizons and learning new things, and even if you just go to a gallery to look at some pretty things, you will be doing just that. So as we get further into this semester and the leaves turn red, let’s take the time to do just that, from the comfort of our own campus while we’re drinking our PSLs. Happy art-ing!