Stretching across the facade of what used to be Bed Bath and Beyond in the Dartmouth Towne Center, a shopping plaza, is a long blue temporary banner with the words Art & Design Studios.

It’s been nearly a year and a half since the UMass Dartmouth visual and performing arts students were given two weeks to vacate the Star Store in New Bedford, which served as the university’s College of Visual and Performing Arts studio space for 20 years, and faced the uncertainty of what would become of their education.

“It was crazy,” said Cade Hanloui, who was an undergraduate student at the time and is now a graduate student in the ceramics program, about the move. “It was just like a big panic.”

The city of New Bedford filed an action in state land court against Star Store Holdings LCC, the owner of the former Star Store property, in early October over unpaid taxes in Fiscal Year 2023, which totaled to over $525,000, according to the city.

This filing will not affect UMass Dartmouth students as the university has “no involvement” with the property anymore, according to Ryan Merrill, the university’s assistant vice chancellor of Strategic Communications and Media Relations.

While UMass has made improvements to the former Bed Bath and Beyond retail space since its opening during the Fall 2023 semester, students aren’t yet satisfied with the facilities or the university’s response to the situation.

Roughly 50 of the combined 527 undergraduate and graduate College of Visual and Performing Arts students are still adjusting to working and taking classes in the Art & Design Studios.

At the time of the move, students didn’t have access to the equipment they needed, such as kilns or glaze rooms, Hanloui said.

Fallon Navarro, who was a graduate student in the ceramics department and graduated this past May, said that the Art & Design Studios wasn’t ready for students until December and in its early days was “pretty much storage for all the boxes.”

Navarro said that she was still responsible for working on and finishing her thesis assignment despite the lack of kilns and studios.

“There was no way to do it,” she said.

The kilns Navarro needed for her thesis work weren’t available until February, which she said “gave me pretty much two and a half months to make an entire thesis show, which should have been the entire year.”

A little over one year since the move to the Art & Design Studio, students now have access to equipment and work spaces including looms for fiber and weaving, electric kilns, a sandblasting station and a clay and glaze mixing room.

Pottery wheels, kilns, looms and artists are tucked between the temporary walls, and between others, students attend classes.

But according to Hanloui, some of the equipment he needs is still not in the new space.

“We have kilns in different spots,” he said. “I would have to bring my stuff from where we’re at now in Bed Bath and Beyond over to the main campus for firings.”

Anis Beigzadeh, a graduate student in the ceramics program who moved from Chicago specifically for the Star Store and its New Bedford location, said that the Art & Design Studios only “seems like it’s working.”

“When you’re working here, the light is so bad. The sound is so bad. No windows no, you know, natural light,” she said.

Inside the Studio, the ambient lighting often associated with retail stores shines down from a ceiling of metal support beams onto white temporary walls and the scattering of art equipment.

At the Star Store, all CVPA students, regardless of major or program, were in the same building, and now that the programs are spread out, Beigzadeh said they “don’t have access to other students from other departments,” adding that she felt that “the point of being in the grad school is being with the other department students to work together.”

There are also unanswered questions left over from the move.

Last fall, students tried meeting with Chancellor Mark Fuller to talk about what was happening and why, but Navarro said that it became a “very difficult situation” where the students were refused a meeting and emails went unanswered.

Navarro added that students did manage to meet with the chancellor once for a brief meeting, but it wasn’t with all of the graduate students, which was what the students would have preferred.

“The university is doing all [it] can right now to make sure the ADS has what students need, while also planning for updated spaces on campus as well,” Merrill said.

Beigzadeh said she felt like she lost a year of her education.

“For at least six months we didn’t have any studio. We did nothing, actually,” she said.

According to Merrill, the university has been “making updates as we’ve gone along,” but students said that they are still unsure of what comes next.

“I don’t know if they have plans to move,” Hanloui said. “I’ve heard that they might put a building on campus. I don’t know how true that is. I’ve heard a lot of different things over the last couple of years.”

Beigzadeh said that the Art & Design Studios may be better in the future, but she isn’t sure what that future would look like.

At the beginning of the Fall 2024 semester, Ramprasad Balasubramanian, the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, sent out an email to CVPA faculty with updates regarding the Art & Design Studios and other facilities for the CVPA students.

In the email, Balasubramanian announced that the lease for the Art & Design Studios had been extended with the “intention of remaining there until we are able to provide permanent facilities on the Main Campus.”

For the next three academic years, all CVPA programs will remain in their current facilities, Balasubramanian wrote.

During this time, the university plans to renovate the CVPA Main Building and create additional new space on the main campus, which Balasubramanian said would make it possible to house the CVPA programs in facilities “tailored to their unique needs.”

This year, the CVPA Main Building will see exterior renewal work, window replacements and upgrades to lighting.

In the summer, new triple-glazed panes will be installed in skylights and the remaining exterior windows and the insulation in the building’s roof will be replaced.

Balasubramanian noted in his email that “it will also take the university time to identify funding sources for these projects.”

While these projects will bring CVPA students back together in new spaces and with their necessary equipment, for students like Beigzadeh and Navarro, these plans will not make up the time they lost during the move out of the Star Store and the monthslong process of getting the Art & Design Studios space set up in the Dartmouth Towne Center.

Beigzadeh said she only chose to stay at UMass after the move because of her colleagues and because she didn’t want to “lose them as well.”

“I know that I lost one year in my education, and it’s not coming back,” she said.