after school

after school begins with the first bell. It brings together architects, artists, and educators to study the state and stakes of public education. Through spatial propositions, installations, alternative playgrounds, and curricular proposals, the participants consider architectural, pedagogical, and representational structures that shape how knowledge is created, shared, taught, or withheld. From itinerant classrooms to cooperative experiments, archival material and contemporary works explore ways of learning otherwise, imagining a school unbound.

The exhibition, currently on view at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, tends to the contradictions of schools, where students are assessed, sorted, and disciplined; where prevailing norms are enforced and histories redacted. And yet, schools are also spaces of play, discovery, and collective care, where rights have been fought for and standards have been contested. Amid that tension, the exhibition considers how schools not only reflect the world around them but also shape the lives of streets, neighborhoods, and cities.

Situated within an increasingly uncertain educational landscape in the US—the culmination of decades of disinvestment and erosion of civic and democratic institutions—after school turns toward Pittsburgh. There, recent proposals for school closures and consolidations carry on existing processes of displacement, segregation, and restructuring. In dialogue with contemporary works, the exhibition presents case studies that trace the layered histories of public education in the region—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. These fragments document cycles of learning, unlearning, and collective praxis across shifting policies, built infrastructures, and forms of refusal and community care.

Participating contemporary practices
Vicky Achnani and Sankofa Village Community Garden and Farm, Gabo Camnitzer, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, Danielle Dean, Toshiko Mori, Ana Serrano, Soul Fire Farm, and Leah Wulfman.

In Conversation: Learning Spaces and after school Book Launch
We invite you to join us for an evening of interdisciplinary dialogue and celebration at Carnegie Museum of Art on Thursday, November 13, at 5 p.m.

Presented in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture, this program brings together architects, scholars, and educators—including Toshiko Mori, Ayanna Jones, Teddy Cruz, Fonna Forman, David Serlin, and James Hill—for a discussion on the architecture of learning and the spatial politics of education. Following the panel, guests are invited to a reception and book launch in Café Carnegie Co-published by Carnegie Museum of Art and Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture, the book after school inaugurates the school’s new imprint in otherwards and extends the exhibition’s inquiry into the architecture of possibility and collective care.

Free and open to the public, click here to RSVP.

Curatorial team
after school is curated by Theodossis Issaias, curator at Heinz Architectural Center, and Alyssa Velazquez, assistant curator, with McKenzie Stupica, curatorial fellow.