About CUP

WHO WE ARE &
WHAT WE DO

CUP makes educational projects about places and how they change.

Our projects bring together art and design professionals - artists, graphic designers, architects, urban planners - with community-based advocates and researchers - organizers, government officials, academics, service-providers and policymakers. These partners work with CUP staff to create projects ranging from high school curricula to educational exhibitions.

Our work grows from a belief that the power of imagination is central to the practice of democracy, and that the work of governing must engage the dreams and visions of citizens. CUP believes in the legibility of the world around us. What can we learn by investigation? By learning how to investigate, we train ourselves to change what we see.

PROGRAM AREAS

Educational Services

CUP works with youth to create collaborative projects that explore the urban environment. Our educational projects build on the everyday experiences of young people in the city to ask questions about democracy, civic participation and social justice. We believe that civic engagement requires a new kind of civic education, one that explains how important decisions actually get made, what is at stake, and how residents can be involved. Our projects use art, design, and technology to draw the connections between everyday life and the decisions that give it form.

CUP creates project-based learning experiences that bring youth face-to-face with the people who make decisions that affect their lives: community advocates, government officials, and businesspeople. Students then work with CUP staff to create educational projects to solidify and spread their knowledge and understanding to the general public.

At City-as-School High School, an alternative public school in lower Manhattan, CUP recently organized a semester-long investigation into how New York City deals with its garbage. Students visited significant garbage sites and conducted interviews with garbage experts, community activists, and government officials. Finally, the class created a 30-minute documentary and a series of educational posters to communicate what they learned to the broader community.

CUP works in-school, after-school and outside of school to reach students where they're at. Our programs range from semester-long projects to independent studies and single-session workshops.

EXHIBITIONS

CUP creates educational environments in galleries, museums and site-specific settings to create spaces for dialog and insight. CUP uses the formal innovations and techniques of art and design to make complex subject matter accessible. We create multi-media environments that provide pathways and inroads to politics, architecture, planning and activism.

The Programmable City, shown at Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2001, celebrated the centenniery of New York City's first building code, the 1901 Tenement House Act. Through models, photography, and video, exhibitions documented how the political process forms our environment through laws, regulations, and activism.

CUP exhibits range from the very broad and public (an outdoor installation in Downtown Brooklyn's busiest thoroughfare) to the very specific (an indoor gallery installation about the politics of workforce investment and MoMa).

COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

CUP partners with community-based organizations to create media projects that help educate and empower their constituencies. CUP believes in the power of media to inform, and activate democratic decision making in the city. Starting in 2004, CUP began working with tenant organizers from Public Housing Residents of the Lower East Side (PHROLES) to make Public Housing Television, a series of videos about issues facing public housing tenants in New York City. The videos are broadcast on community-access television and distributed on VHS and DVD through community meetings around the city. CUP produces media in all different forms, from tenant's rights posters to advocacy videos and pamphlets.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

CUP works to create unique public programs that mix, design, research, politics and humor to make connections between agents that are usually kept far apart. We put housing activists in touch with architectural designers, earth scientists with conceptual land artists, pair policy researchers with documentary filmmakers. CUP organizes panel discussions, film screenings, student presentations, and walking tours and other events. These events often take place in conjunction with CUP educational programs and exhibitions. We also help to organize a monthly lecture series entitled "Engaging the City" and seasonal walking tours that use the built environment to explore controversial proposals, unbuilt plans, contested histories and democratic ideals.

MEDIA PROJECTS

CUP works with distributed media like websites, videos, posters, pamphlets, refrigerator magnets, and badges to spread educational projects to wide audiences. Visit Code City, an interactive map showing the history and politics of New York City's public housing.

History

In 1997, CUP launched its first project, a small booklet entitled "A How-To Guidebook for Urban Objects." At that time, CUP was an informal group of people with diverse backgrounds but a shared interest in making interpretive projects about the city. Since then, CUP has grown organically as a vehicle for collaboration. CUP received its 501(c)(3) designation in 2002 and hired its first fulltime staff members in 2005.

CUP has organized or participated in exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives, Apex Art Curatorial Program, City University of New York Graduate Center, and PS 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York; Mess Hall and the Chicago Architecture Foundation in Chicago; and Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna.

CUP has worked with nonprofits such as Sustainable South Bronx, Place In History, the Municipal Arts Society, the Fifth Avenue Committee, REPOHistory, Temporary Services, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Global Kids, the Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), the Public Housing Residents of the Lower East Side (PHROLES), the Legal Aid Society, the Community Service Society of New York, the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, the Fiscal Policy Institute, the Met Council on Housing, the New York City Public Housing Residents Alliance.

CUP has worked with over 700 students since 2001, working in city-run Tier II shelters, City-As-School, the Academy of Urban Planning, Math and Science Upward Bound, the Heritage School, Monroe High School, Parsons the New School School of Design, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Wyckoff Houses, and PS 164.

Board of Directors

Jason Anderson, Treasurer
Joshua Breitbart
Stella Bugbee
Sarah Dadush, Secretary
Damon Rich, Chairperson
Oscar Tuazon
Althea Wasow

Staff

Damon Rich, Creative Director
Rosten Woo, Director of Programs
Amy Hitchcoff, Program Associate
Lize Mogel, Grants Associate

While the core staff supports the organization from day to day, all CUP projects are designed and implemented by teams of artists, designers, educators, activists, and researchers. To see a list of everyone who makes CUP projects happen, click here.

If you're interested in joining a project team, click here.

Contact & Directions

CUP
at the Old American Can Factory
232 Third Street #E103
Brooklyn, NY 11215

(718) 596-7721

info@anothercupdevelopment.org

Take the G or F train to Carroll Street and walk down Third Street across the Gowanus Canal. You can also take the R train to Union street and walk South to 3rd Street. On the first floor, we're all the way back in the last studio on the right.