Working under the supervision of the Program Director and a faculty mentor, students will design and implement a community-based project informed by their individual art practice, their core and elective coursework, and the cultural or organizational context in which they will be working. In collaboration with NYC-based cultural and educational organizations, students will be encouraged to use different methodologies that combine intuition, social, conceptual, and cultural ways of knowing and being in order to develop and implement an art project that allows for social transformation.
See examples of student projects:
The Global Hindutva, is a comprehensive power map that is embedded in the practice of radical cartography ,which visually presents the global infrastructure of right-wing Hindutva groups. The project presents the complex web of the global interaction of the Hindutva ideology; through a power map. The map is intended to be used as an educational tool to expose the Hindutva fascist ideology, and the socio-economic basis of right-wing institutions, towards the assertion of secularism and democracy.
“We’re in this (Chicken) Shit Together”, 2022
The project “We’re in this (Chicken) Shit Together” is composed of a zine as well as using the guerrilla tactic of stickering the meat sections where chicken is sold in supermarkets in NYC.
The zine aims to provide an anthropocentric argument against factory farming in order to nudge readers further along their journey toward sustainable (in every sense of the word) behavior change. The stickers provide information to consumers regarding what kind of chicken to buy that is humanely raised and sustainable, rather than asking them to stop eating chicken, which is the ultimate goal, it is not always effective in changing people’s minds.
Hidden Histories: Black Stories in the Lower East Side, NYC, 2021
“Hidden Histories: Black Stories in the Lower East Side, NYC” is a collaboration with “Beyond Symbol: Culture + Reparations”, a Fourth Arts Block (FABnyc) project, which brings visibility to the hidden history of African-Americans in the LES, generates dialogue on the role of arts and culture in the reparations movement, and builds resources and collective action for reparations in New York City. The project Hidden Histories: Black Stories of the Lower East Side, NYC is composed of a website that presents 9 African American sites as well as a public art intervention called Chalk Wall that posed questions for the public to answer. The Chalk Wall was placed in two public spaces: one, on the fence of University Settlement House on Rivington and Staton and the second, in First Green Park on First Street and First Avenue.
See: https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/black-hidden-histories-les/home
The COVID-19 Community Care Mixtape: Decolonial Sound Healing, 2020
The COVID-19 Community Care Mixtape is a collectively made compilation and pedagogical listening experience that explores music’s age-old capacity for healing and resistance. Art + Education graduate students Naisha Solomon and Amanda Charnley curated a mixtape of sounds and songs as part of a pedagogical album experience —complete with a listening companion guide with artwork and liner notes— designed to promote care and further decolonial inquiry and action during this pandemic.
Heirlooms/Evidence: An Archive of Whiteness and Privilege, 2020
What does responsible ownership and exploration of whiteness look like? The project Heirlooms/Evidence: An Archive of Whiteness and Privilege, created and facilitated by Art + Ed students Alexis Lambrou, Chloe Rowan, Sarah Winter, and collaborator Jessica Bal, is a workshop and interactive archive investigating whiteness and privilege. The idea of this workshop is to collect items—evidence of sorts—of privilege, and reflect on objects that signify personal lineages of whiteness. Participants are asked to interrogate whiteness at the personal and familial level. Inspired by Kerry James Marshall’s Heirlooms and Accessories project, this project uses the personal and tangible to discuss whiteness through personal history and lineage, and invites participants to consider what they have inherited from the ownership of these objects, and what values they hope to pass on.
Kathai, 2019
Kathai is an activist project by Prinita Thevarajah and Tong Wu that consists of several online interventions that draw awareness and contribute to the mobilization of diasporic Thamil communities around the many injustices of the Sri Lankan government. The project began as an online space to share and discuss Thamil women’s intergenerational trauma that exists within the diaspora and for those still living in Sri Lanka as a direct result of the genocidal tactics used by the majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist Sri Lankan government during the civil war from 1958 to 2009. The bombings on Easter Sunday May 2, 2019 shifted the focus of Kathai to educate people regarding the continuing human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government.
Coffee Shop Conversation on Masculinity, 2019
The socially engaged project Coffee Shop Conversations is about masculinity and aims to create a space that encourages men to confront, situate, deconstruct, and propose opportunities to counteract toxic masculinity, both in their daily lives and at a systemic level through orchestrated conversations in coffee shops. These conversations were recorded and a digital archive was created to house the coffee shop conversations. A curated set of topical guiding questions are provided to be used in these conversations, as well as a document outlining strategies for fostering respectful, empathetic dialogue.
Passport to the Past, 2018
The project Passport to the Past is a guided walking tour that highlights twenty sites of resistance and resilience of historically marginalized groups and immigrants around NYU’s main campus. This walking tour and brochure was designed for Freshman and Graduate student orientation at NYU as an art intervention, as there are 500 events for Freshman but none that speak to the rich historical context in which students will spend four years of their lives.
My Body is Not in Question, 2017
My Body is Not in Question is a project that invites individuals to respectfully explore the relationship they have with their bodies in order to promote sexual health and reproductive justice.
The project features a series of visuals that participants can interact with, working both to create a space for reflecting as well as a tool to gather information regarding how girls and women understand their bodies and their health.
Flatbush Learns, 2017
To find out what “education” means to the Flatbush community, student Diane Bezucha asked residents two questions: Where do you learn? and What do you learn there?
Residents identified places in the Flatbush (and surrounding) community where they had learned something and then added their learning experiences to a map of the neighborhood.
Community Health and Well-being in the Lower East Side, 2017
This collaborative final project between Brenda Hung and Vincente Cueto in the Art, Education, & Community Practice program at NYU, focuses on the health and well-being of the communities of elders in the Lower East Side. It was developed in partnership with Anthony Feliciano, the Director of the Commission on the Public’s Health System (a community focused organization that advocates for people’s right to access health care) and the Director of the University Settlement’s Older Adults Program, Michele Rodriguez.
Rice Not Bullets, 2016
Rice Not Bullets, takes its name from one of the protest cries of the indigenous people of the Philippines following the Kidapawan Massacre in Kidapawan City in the Philippines in April, 2016, to respond to the massacre and the longer lineage of attacks on Indigenous people in the Philippines.
#PrioritizeChildCare, 2016
#PrioritizeChildCare, conceived by Emily Caruso and Erika Houle, is the beginning of a grassroots initiative to bring child care and early learning to the forefront of legislation. Working from a social media foundation, and building upon the imagery of the crayon in their logo, #PrioritizeChildCare uses the theme of play to build a series of interactive games to engage adults and children alike, in public conversations about child care. Website: #PrioritizeChildCare
The Labor of Flowers, 2016
Through a series of strategically timed artistic interventions as well as conversations with Fairtrade America and a global floral company, artist activist Federico Hewson, with some of his classmates, engaged the public to draw attention to the labor of flowers, in the hope that this increased awareness points to ways to improve conditions for flower workers everywhere.
The Fourth Demand, 2016
Universities are sites for pedagogies that both reproduce hierarchies of power while challenging the predominant hegemony. In 1969, Black and Puerto Rican students took over the New York City College Campus to demand open admissions. With their “fourth demand”, these students sought to include the voices of marginalized peoples into the classroom.
This exhibition demands the opening up of the private space of New York University to the public, pushing the students, faculty and administration to engage in political and economic action which shifts NYU’s relationship with the public.
Timeline of Police Brutality in the US, 2015
This project was undertaken in the Spring 2015 semester, with a group of high school students at the Harvey MLK High School (NYC), in the aftermath of Ferguson, during the beginning of the BlackLivesMatter movement; at a time when the topic of police brutality was foremost in the minds of these youth. “Why do police kill black people and never get caught?”, asked one of the students in this class. This question became the catalyst for the timeline of police brutality and movements of resistants in the United States, as a way to educate the community on this history of institutionalized violence in the country.
El Trifinio, 2015
When María León, an immigrant Chilean tattoo artist, met Sebastián Milla, a Peruvian-American performance artist, they decided to collaborate on a tattoo design, to be placed on Sebastián’s left arm as what is commonly referred to as a “sleeve tattoo”.
Given Peru and Chile’s long and complex histories as joined South American countries, León and Milla used the opportunity of artistic collaboration to unpack parts of their identities that otherwise might have gone unexplained and untouched. While planning the tattoo, they talked about Spanish colonization, the Incan Empire, pre-Incan civilizations, American involvement in Peru and Chile. As a way to brainstorm the aesthetics of the tattoo, they ended up constructing a shared timeline to map all of the events that they held in common, the events where their histories separated.
The “ah-ha” moment arrived when they traced their histories to the present-day, realizing that the same immigration policies that María was facing as a grad student mirrored the experiences Sebastián’s parents had faced in the 1980’s. In sharing similarities and differences, the artists found it interesting that the words “immigrant”, “illegal”, and “Latino” are often used to describe such a wide variety of people, like them, with such diverse stories and journeys to the US.
No Home Gallery, 2015
No Home Gallery was founded by Victoria Manganiello and Anastasia Voron in 2014 for the purpose of providing New York City residents educational and cultural, artistic experiences that foster collaborations between artists, local art enthusiasts and passionate patrons in familiar yet unexpected spaces. The projects feature original artwork responding to relevant and contemporary social topics. This handbook, created as a final project in the Art, Education and Community Practice Program, is a collection of the Gallery’s intentions and motivations, intended to provide an opportunity to start a dialogue or propose a project with the gallery.