Sarah Darby regularly gets in thousands of steps walking backwards around campus. “I have never felt more burn in my legs. It’s like you’re using muscle groups that you don’t use when you walk forward. I was sore,” says the sophomore political science and psychology major after she got her dream job as a Grit Guide last spring. Generally tours last a little under 90 minutes, and Darby said that her legs adjusted pretty quickly. 

Surely in the 1960s, when UMBC only had four academic buildings and no residential life yet, the tours were quicker, or at least shorter, right? Frances Allen Nickolas ’70, American studies, says: “Not really.” According to Nickolas, one of the early tour guides on campus, the tours would usually take over an hour as the interested visitors wanted to see the new school that had sprouted up in Catonsville over the last few years.

“We would talk about the majors UMBC offered and share perspectives from our own majors,” says Nickolas. “We would tell them about our experiences with the courses of study and the professors. I truly loved it because I got to meet different people all the time, and I just really enjoyed it. Because UMBC was much smaller in those days, later I’d run into some of those visitors again, but as students this time.”

This is something the modern tours have in common, says Darby, a Sondheim Scholar who enjoys giving her tours an in-depth view of her majors and favorite areas on campus (The Commons and the Library). But the thing she values most is getting to know these potential Retrievers. “I have made so many genuine connections with people when I’m out on tour—I enjoy making jokes and making them laugh,” says Darby. “Some people might think it’s ‘just a campus job,’ but I love seeing the high schoolers’ reactions to campus. It’s rewarding in a way that none of my other jobs have been. I really love it.”

Disability:IN is now accepting applications for the NextGen Leaders Initiative — a 6-month, one-on-one mentorship program (Jan–June) for current college students, grad students, and recent graduates with disabilities.

Participants are matched with corporate mentors, gain access to professional development webinars, private-sector job opportunities, and a select group will attend the 2026 Disability:IN Global Conference & Expo.

✅ No cost to apply
✅ Open to students & recent grads (Class of 2024+)
✅ Open to applicants in North & South America

Deadline: Friday, December 5, 2025 at 11:59 PM ET
Apply here: https://disabilityin.org/2026NextGenApp

See the attached flyer for full details and eligibility.

Questions? Contact: NextGen@DisabilityIN.org

Brick making is an inherently pay-it-forward process, says Marian April Glebes, M.F.A. ’09, a conceptual and mixed-media artist. In the past 10 years of her Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument project, Glebes has made thousands of bricks and then invited community members to imprint their stories into the clay. Later, the bricks are used in mobile monuments around Baltimore City and beyond. Glebes, who won the 2025 Rubys Alumni Award through the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation for this work, asks: How can we support social and spatial change in order to build a new kind of community-driven monumental public space?

I come to historic preservation by way of my M.F.A. in imaging media and digital arts (IMDA) from UMBC—with an additional masters degree in city and regional planning and historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania—my home in Baltimore City, and by making bricks as public art. As an artist, a preservation planner, a homeowner, an educator, a gardener, and a community and economic development practitioner, all of my research and methods investigate how we make a place and how a place makes us.

In 2015, I was the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Patricia and Mark Joseph Education Center. The Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson Confederate monument still stood across from the BMA’s Spring House in Wyman Park Dell in the Charles Village neighborhood of Baltimore. Aligning with and inspired by protest in support of social and civic justice movements, The Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument operated within these complex intersections.

Almost a decade later, my camera was the only familiar thing at Baltimore City’s Department of Transportation facility on a frigid dawn in November 2023. I held it tightly as if it would prove to signify my role in providing archival documentation of a monumental move. The temperature had dropped to a mere 22 degrees, but the top-secret site was teeming with activity while the project was just beginning. 

“I like to do an easy one first,” the director of field operations says. But with the removal of any Confederate monuments, these or other “monuments to hate,” there is no easy one.

In the back corner of a DOT storage yard, I watched as the historical record was made and unmade, as preservation theory and practice was suspended and turned on their side, as conservation techniques and concepts were followed to the letter and simultaneously reinvented, starting with the Roger B. Taney statue. 

Baltimore’s contentious monuments shipped out to a storage facility near St. Louis on their way to Los Angeles for an exhibition at The Brick (formerly LAXart). In Baltimore, I stayed with the problem through a project I started a decade ago—creating a countermonument out of personalized, handmade bricks. 

Memory is mutable. Social contexts shift. This is the wicked problem in living heritage and what to do when it dies. I’ve had a unique position with singular access to process and understand this ongoing debate in Baltimore City while unofficial researcher-in-residence at the Commission for Historic and Architectural Preservation (CHAP). Each community is unique in its response on what to do with their Confederate monuments, and Baltimore’s perspective is vital to the discourse. Eric Holcomb, the former director of CHAP, invited me to the conversation, positing that perhaps it could or should be for the arts and artists to influence this unfolding preservation conundrum.

At UMBC, as M.F.A. candidates, our artwork was considered research—and therefore had to be contextualized and placed within the canon. To work responsibly, we were encouraged to know our audiences and our references and understand our place in time. Inspired by the people and places of Baltimore and by conceptual art’s blurring-of-art-andlife thinking of the 1960s, The Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument maintains the ethos of rigorous research, material gravitas, and community connection engendered by my IMDA studies. Existing in the contexts of the Baltimore Uprising, the 2017 monument removals, social practice art, and civic engagement, I interrogate our circumscribed understandings of monumentality.

Monuments exist in social contexts that have often changed dramatically since the time they were created. Because of this, their meaning does not come only from the objects themselves—or only from how people view them—but from the shifting relationship between the two. The counter-monument was birthed by artists in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall and has not been widely accepted or brought into practice. In 2017, as monuments were being removed from our public spaces, artists again began erecting counter-monuments in protest of white supremacy.

The Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument is centered in process, people, and making. To date, we have engaged over 15,000 people in Baltimore, made over 2,500 unique bricks, and collected over 1,000 personal stories from Baltimore residents. The Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument is a new kind of monument, a monument not to the past, but a monument as an act of collective power that anticipates what will come to be.

The Mobile Community Brick Factory produces handmade bricks using local hand-processed clay and historic water-struck methods. This means of brickmaking is an inherently pay-it-forward endeavor—the bricks made one day are destined for someone else’s future hands. Participants personalize and inscribe their stories onto these bricks—words and messages about place, power, home, and experience. These story bricks are woodfired and become The Mobile Community Brick Monument, an ongoing series of exhibitions that create shared spaces.

While the bricks become pathways, garden beds, benches—some are embedded in sidewalks in Baltimore—I collect oral histories from brick constituents through ethnographic methods. In Baltimore, over 150,000 people have visited The Mobile Community Brick Monuments, finding connections to stories that are like their own.

At The Mobile Community Brick Factory & Monument, we believe ordinary voices matter, especially those that aren’t usually heard, that public space should be built by the people who use it, that heritage is alive, memory is mutable, and history is ongoing—made by daily lives. Our bricks represent pasts, presents, and futures that would otherwise remain untold and unwitnessed, built, shared, and spoken by urban residents. All are welcome and included in the process—a different kind of monument—a living space that honors the past and is built collectively by the people who live in and use our cities.

—Marian April Glebes, M.F.A ’09