On the occasion of the publication of after school, editors and curators Theodossis Issaias and Alyssa Velazquez will be joined in by Ujju Aggarwal for a conversation moderated by Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa. The program reflects on the states and stakes of public education today, and on the spatial and collective infrastructures through which the public is produced, contested, and negotiated.
Schools are contradictory places: sites of discipline and erasure, and also of play, solidarity, and collective care. after school, co-produced by Carnegie Museum of Art and in otherwards, the imprint of Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture, brings together architects, artists, educators, students, and activists to study the states and stakes of public education. Developed alongside the namesake exhibition, the publication follows classrooms, corridors, itinerant sites, and cooperative experiments to examine how public education has been shaped, organized, and contested.
Grounded in Pittsburgh, the city’s educational landscape becomes a site through which to consider the past, present, and possible futures of social infrastructure and the right to education. Essays, testimonies, lesson plans, and archival materials trace histories from the city’s first public high school and New Deal-era programs to cooperative school gardens and Black-led Street Academies of the 1970s. Drawings and photographs accompany the texts, attentive to how education takes form in buildings, streets, policies, and everyday life. after school gestures toward the possibility of a school not yet here.
