In after school, architects, artists, designers, and educators come together to study the state of public education. They contend with institutional spaces, pedagogies, and legacies, and ask questions about representation, creativity, and care. How can a school be liberatory? From itinerant classrooms to cooperative educational experiments, the exhibition participants put forth propositions for a school unbound.

In dialogue with contemporary projects, the exhibition presents archival fragments of histories of public education in the region. The city’s schools have been a place where rights and futures have been imagined and fought for. Common infrastructures for education, curricular reforms, and contestations over the lines that demarcate school districts reveal a continuing process of learning and praxis towards a school that is not yet here. Drawing from regional archives and the museum’s collection, after school builds on these traces of learning spaces and curricular experiments which range from the New Deal programs of the 1930s to Street Academies and the struggles for desegregation and educational justice in the 1960s and 1970s.

after school is curated by Theodossis Issaias, curator at Heinz Architectural Center, and Alyssa Velazquez, assistant curator.