Prattfolio Spring 2022 by Pratt Institute

Pratt folio

Spring 2022

ThePrattfolio Magazine of Pratt Institute Spring 2022

Power of Place

Prattfolio

Spring 2022

5 Letter from the President

36 Local Network Pratt alumni shape a connected, creative Brooklyn, and beyond

10 Pratt Institute Living Land Acknowledgment

50 The People Make the Place

12 Nurturing NYC

Pratt alumni artists based in New York City and the metro area present work at recent and ongoing group shows across the boroughs

Public works by Pratt alumni care for and celebrate New Yorkers

14 Activating an Archive of Black Life in Brooklyn Pratt faculty and students collaborate with the Weeksville community on an oral history project to shape the future

26 A Gift to New York When New York Could Use It Pratt Institute professor Signe Nielsen, landscape architect of Little Island, joins fellow experts in conversation about Hudson River Park’s inspired new addition

52 Inside Our City of Industry Manufacturing in New York City through the lens of a Pratt student, photographed for the Pratt Center’s Made in NYC initiative

58 A New Site for Creative Research at the Brooklyn Navy Yard 62 In Memoriam 64 New York Diary Life at Pratt, straight from students’ camera rolls

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Letter from the President

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Letter from the President Back in August, to celebrate the start of this academic year and a return, for many of us, to campus, I joined Pratt students on a sunrise walk to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was 4:30 AM when I arrived on the Brooklyn campus to meet what I expected would be a small group of fellow early risers. For a moment, I thought I was in the wrong place. I was greeted instead by hundreds of students who came out that morning, so excited to connect once again or for the first time in this vibrant place. We traveled just one of the many walkable routes that lace the borough together— down Myrtle Avenue, across Flatbush, to Tillary Street, and then up onto the expanse of the bridge, this iconic structure so symbolic of unity and imaginative power in Brooklyn and New York City at large. At the crest, we paused and waited for the sun to break over a foggy New York Harbor. One student commented on how disappointed they were that the haze would be too thick for us to catch dawn on the horizon. Then, suddenly, a neon orb started to emerge, abundant, radiant, and intense—because of the fog. It was a breathtaking marker of a new beginning vibrant with potential, in this extraordinary city at this transformational time, together. (continued on page 9)

Letter from the President

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Letter from the President

Photos by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead

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Pratt’s location in Brooklyn sits at the heart of creative explosion. We are situated in a hive of experimentation and innovation, making and craft, community engagement and action. Cultures, ideas, and means of expression intersect, and complex histories mesh with bold propositions for the future. Our community and our institution are a vital part of these confluences. This fall, Pratt announced its partnership with City Tech and the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation to establish a new research facility at the Navy Yard, presenting myriad opportunities for creative investigation and local workforce development at this hub of interdisciplinary innovation (read more on page 58). Meanwhile, Pratt’s joint proposal with Bank Street College of Education to develop a new secondary school focused on design and activism was selected for funding by the New York City Department of Education’s Imagine Schools NYC initiative. The School of Architecture is partnering with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden as the new Master of Landscape Architecture program launches, and faculty from the School of Information and the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences are leading digital literacy work with the Brooklyn Public Library. These examples stand alongside the dozens of community partnerships facilitated by our faculty and staff across the schools, including collaborations with organizations like the Weeksville Heritage Center (page 14). Meanwhile, Pratt community members’ contributions to the vitality of the city are present all over, from architecture professor Signe Nielsen’s work on Little Island (page 26), a stirring example of collaborative practice in action for public benefit; to streetside art and design projects by alumni that celebrate and care for city dwellers (page 12); to the work of the Pratt Center for Community Development’s Made in NYC initiative to support the city’s manufacturers and makers (page 52). Celebrated Pratt alumni artists, from Ellsworth Kelly to Robert Mapplethorpe, William T. Williams to Marilyn Nance (whose work is currently on view in Greater New York at MoMA PS1, page 50), to Derrick Adams, Salman Toor, and Mickalene Thomas, and so many more, have developed their practice here and captured the city’s movements, moods, and mythos in their work. Pratt people are part of the fabric of this place, from our community of faculty, students, and staff, to the nearly 20,000 alumni who live and work in New York City, with close to half of that number located in Brooklyn. They run studios, own businesses, serve in civic roles, shape the built environment, drive cultural institutions, collaborate with communities, educate future creative leaders, and produce literature, visuals, and experiences that deepen the story of the city.

This issue is a tribute to the ways we engage with our city in our work, create communities here, and dwell in its magic. Whether you have always called Brooklyn or New York City home, lived and worked here for a time, or are just now imagining the life of creativity and investigation that you can activate here, this issue is also a tribute to you. With the lessons we learn here, the networks we build, the partnerships we forge, we can continue to reimagine this city and our world. —Frances Bronet, President

Letter from the President

Pratt Institute is situated on Lenapehoking, the traditional and unceded homeland of the Lenape people, past, present, and future. The Lenape people have been living on this land long before the United States was established, and their wisdom is essential to our time.

We acknowledge that the genocide, theft of land and resources, forced migration, and systematic cultural oppression of Indigenous Peoples and Nations have a long-lasting impact on the living conditions, mental health, and cultural lineage of Indigenous Peoples and Nations. We acknowledge that the colonizers and their descendants have benefited economically and socially from the oppression of Indigenous Peoples and Nations, and we commit to repairing inequity and rebalancing the power distribution.

As learners and educators, we recognize Indigenous Peoples and Nations’ longtime traditions of making art and storytelling. We acknowledge the significance of their creativity and how often they are unrecognized as artists, designers, and writers, while their culture is appropriated and taken by other artists, designers, and writers. Only when we are informed of our past can we collectively envision our future. We begin by properly naming the land we reside on and recognizing ourselves as (in)voluntary immigrants to this land. We will actively work to challenge the legacy of settler colonialism, undo its extractive and exploitative land practices, and express gratitude to the stewards of the land and water who came before us, and honor their descendants who are here today.

This past November, Pratt proudly announced its Living Land Acknowledgement, and encouraged faculty, staff, and students to honor Lenape people and recognize occupied land by beginning all gatherings with it.

to present the work completed so far and bring more voices into the conversation, in preparation for the announcement of the institutional land acknowledgment on November 30.

Over the past two years, students, faculty, and staff in the Pratt community have been working in collaboration with facilitators from the Brooklyn Lenape Center to craft a formal acknowledgment of the Institute’s presence on Native American land. Under the guidance of Pratt faculty member Amanda Huynh, a series of workshops focused on creating a community-sourced land acknowledgment that can be used across the Institute and the curriculum to build a deeper relationship with the land and place that we occupy.

However, this is not the end of the process. This acknowledgment is not static. It, along with resources and research compiled by the Center for Equity and Inclusion and the Pratt Libraries, is intended to inspire us and others to recognize Indigenous homelands and territories, connecting with where we are, Lenapehoking, and integrating land acknowledgment and Indigenous knowledge into teaching and learning practices.

During National Native American Heritage Month, in November, the Center for Equity and Inclusion hosted “Community Dialogue: You’re on Indigenous Land,”

Learn more at pratt.edu/land-acknowledgment-resources.

The Indigenous Knowledge and Land Workshop Series was sponsored through Pratt Institute Strategic Funding and supported by the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. —Julianna Dow

Photo by the rakish fellow, Wikimedia Commons

—Pratt Institute Living Land Acknowledgment

Caves in Inwood Hill Park, which contains some of New York City’s last remaining natural forest and salt marsh, were utilized by Indigenous peoples before the arrival of European colonists.

Free fridges, volunteer-made dining structures, streetside murals honoring the people of New York City’s diverse neighborhoods—the ways creative people activate to support their communities have been on full display over these past two years. For their part, Pratt alumni, faculty, and students have been involved in numerous projects in Brooklyn, and beyond, that celebrate, nourish, and care for our neighbors. Throughout this issue, Prattfolio highlights a selection of that work as it harmonizes with the streetscape of the city.

Nurturing NYC

Gods That Walk Among Us by Robert Vargas, Bushwick

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Pratt Faculty and Students Collaborate with the Weeksville Community on an Oral History Project to Shape the Future By Diana McClure On a bike path in downtown Brooklyn, a half-hour walk from Pratt Institute and just off a nexus of streets that converge at the Barclays Center, a green sign with the logo of a bike says Weeksville, with an arrow pointing east. The few buildings that remain of the historic self-sustaining Black community founded in 1838— shortly after New York State’s 1827 abolition of slavery—are a twenty-minute bike ride away and the signage is new. It underscores Weeksville Heritage Center’s recent inclusion in New York City’s esteemed Cultural Institutions Group, an honor that increases access to funding as well as cultural cachet.

For a pair of Pratt faculty members teaching architecture, Jeffrey Hogrefe, professor of humanities and media studies and cofounder of the Architecture Writing Program, and Scott Ruff, adjunct associate professor of architecture, the new designation has its pros and cons. Co-creators of the project Pratt Weeksville Archive—an oral

Weeksville

history initiative developed in collaboration with the Weeksville Heritage Center, community partners, and Pratt students—Hogrefe and Ruff aim to contribute to the recentering of the area’s Black history and culture in the public imagination, and support its presentday residents in activating the story of this place for generations to come.

Founded by free persons and formerly enslaved persons, Weeksville once comprised seven civic institutions, actively participated in city government, and served as a destination on the Underground Railroad. This rich heritage makes it a vital resource for imagining the future, asserts Hogrefe. “We feel that once it’s realized the extent to which this self-sustaining 19th-century community really flourished, it can become a model for a 21st-century self-sustaining Central Brooklyn,” he says. “It has a lot to offer us in the radical imagination.”

Scholars from Pratt have played a part in clarifying Weeksville’s past since the former settlement was brought to light five decades ago. Housing stock from the former community was documented in the 1970s as a result of an aerial survey by Pratt Institute professor James Hurley and pilot Joseph Haynes in 1968 and the efforts of local activists. Weeksville has slowly regained historical footing in the area ever since.

The city’s interest in Weeksville advances attempts to determine a set

Aerial photo of Weeksville Heritage Center site by Julian Olivas; courtesy of Caples Jefferson Architects

of geographical boundaries for the area, markers of a thriving, aspirational Black utopia that was lost to forces of anti-Black violence, including redlining and urban renewal, and erased from maps by the end of the 19th century. However, as Ruff and Hogrefe note, future ownership of the name and the place is precarious. “If you look at the histories of Black settlement in the US, it’s a constant struggle with anti-Black violence. Now, gentrification is possibly the most silent and deadly of all because it doesn’t announce itself.

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It’s happening all over the US.” Ruff underscores the urgency. “Real estate people have started to co-opt the term Weeksville. Two years ago, I could go on Google and there was no Weeksville. Now, Weeksville is designated as a place and they’re using it as a way to market it. It’s kind of a foot race to see who can capture the term.” In their work, Ruff and Hogrefe consider how an active archive of oral history and critical ethnography might ward off the damaging effects of such inter-

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ests. “It is up to us to encourage the stories of those who know the place and others like us to make it clear that this is a historic space that needs to be protected from predatory development,” notes Ruff. To that end, students in Pratt’s undergraduate architecture program and graduate library and information science program have been instrumental in developing the Pratt Weeksville Archive oral history and critical ethnography project. Launched in the fall

of 2020 and supported by a Taconic Fellowship from the Pratt Center for Community Development, the project has engaged students from the undergraduate architecture research studio Connecting to the Archive, which Hogrefe and Ruff teach, and Research Assistants, an elective course for fourthand fifth-year architecture students to work with a faculty member on an approved research topic, along with a graduate student with a special focus in archives. The team’s ongoing efforts are organized around the encourage-

A celebration at Weeksville in the 1970s; courtesy of Weeksville Heritage Center

ment of a living, digital archive of Weeksville community members’ stories: an organic entity that is forward thinking while looking to the past and engaging the present. The project’s aim is to establish an ongoing, accessible, public resource that can be used by Pratt students, Weeksville community members, and others to galvanize community networks, build community strength, and subsequently stimulate political will and Black empowerment.

Weeksville

“These are aspirational goals for us that we’re setting at the onset based on studying other archives and how they work in communities,” says Hogrefe. “We’re particularly interested in critical ethnography, which is an understanding of the positionality of the ethnographer and the role of the participant in the co-creation of the archive. Scott worked in New Orleans and I’ve done work in Oakland and Berkeley before in similar settings, and we know, from looking at them historically, the benefits of storytelling, oral history, and critical ethnography.”

uff and Hogrefe’s initial collaboration with Weeksville began while they were doing research for their book In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism (Lars Müller, 2020). Their conversations with the Weeksville Heritage Center evolved into a shared interest in opening up Weeksville’s existing archive to the public and finding ways to activate it. “We saw an opportunity there to say, as architects, part of what we do is activate space as pow-

er relations. It’s part of our process. It is not just designing buildings and putting them up,” says Ruff. For the Pratt Weeksville Archive, Pratt students participated in that process from its foundational stages. Fifth-year architecture students Joseph Shiveley and Jared Rice, a member of Pratt’s chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students, prepared by reviewing historical maps

A map issued in 1869 shows Hunterfly Road, which was erased from maps by the 20th century, and building footprints along its length, as well as two historic Weeksville institutions, Public Colored School No. 2 and Berean Baptist Church, indicated as African Baptist Church. Weeksville encompassed the area around Hunterfly Road to the west of Ralph Avenue, roughly within the borders of today’s Atlantic

of the area. “One of our interests from the beginning was how Weeksville went from being one of the biggest selfsustaining Black communities in the country to one that had been very much erased from maps. When we look at the 1950s, you don’t even see Weeksville on the map,” Rice says, noting that a variety of factors contributed to its erasure over time, under the pressures of urbanization. “We used maps and [looked at] spaces to try to understand

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how that happened, how it transitioned, so that it could inform the conversations we would have later.” Sadie Hope-Gund, a graduate student in library and information science, undertook another preparatory process, which Ruff describes as anthropological detective work. Her work resulted in an in-depth annotated bibliography covering the history of the neighborhood, the history of New York City Housing

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Authority’s presence in the area— public housing that replaced several bulldozed original Weeksville blocks— and radical oral history practices.

for a digital archive. “What are the actual steps to uploading this to a website, what is it going to be hosted on, how is it going to be organized?”

Hope-Gund also led conversations to help the team think through the technical aspects of the archives setup. “The archive as a concept is very interesting, but people don’t know much about the nitty gritty,” she says, remarking that part of her work was laying out options

The framing of the project also presented an opportunity to engage with questions around the impact of community-based research work. “What does it mean for an architect to do ethnography in a way that contributes to the community, rather than just drawing

Avenue, Kingston Avenue, and Eastern Parkway. Image above and on pages 22–23 from the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library, “Sheet 3: Map encompassing Bedford Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Weeksville,” New York Public Library Digital Collections.

data from the community to design a project, which is often how architectural research is done,” says Hogrefe. Presence is a significant part of laying the groundwork for that kind of reciprocal relationship. While the pandemic may have presented its share of delays and setbacks, the Pratt team made the most of the opportunities they had, such as a street fair outside Bethel Tabernacle African Methodist Episcopal Church,

Weeksville

a community partner on the oral history project, last summer. “The one time we were all able to meet in person at a church event, it was really good for us to physically be there and show that we cared and were doing this project about the neighborhood,” Hope-Gund reflects. “That was definitely impactful, thinking about Pratt’s position as an institution in Brooklyn and what it means to really reach out to people and be a part of different communities in Brooklyn.”

t the in-person event last summer, Hope-Gund worked with Obden Mondésir, Weeksville Heritage Center’s oral history manager at the time, to collect the testimonies of Bethel Tabernacle members Faye Robinson and Kay Robbins, who have both attended for approximately 50 years alongside generations of family. In their oral history sessions, both women celebrated the people and the family-oriented, friendly, and passionate nature of the church community. These kinds of anecdotes and impressions form the collective memory that surrounds the story of Weeksville.

Ronald Johnson, the church’s historian, says that you can’t talk about Weeksville without talking about Bethel Tabernacle. The church, established in 1847, was one of the institutions that anchored the community in its early days and remains a vibrant center of activity. Johnson was introduced to Ruff and Hogrefe when he reached out to Weeksville about their archive as he was doing historical research on Bethel Tabernacle, which has an extensive physical archive of its own. This forged a connection he describes as essential. “I believe that it’s a necessity for neigh-

Pratt Weeksville Archive team members at a street fair at Bethel Tabernacle in 2020; from left to right: Susan Weller, wife of Jeffrey Hogrefe; Jeffrey Hogrefe; Ronald Johnson; Obden Mondésir; Scott Ruff; Jared Rice; and Sadie Hope-Gund. Photo courtesy of Pratt Weeksville Archive

borhood institutions such as Weeksville Heritage Center, our church, even Berean Baptist Church, which is across the street from Weeksville [Heritage Center], and Pratt to band together and collaborate, because we share commonalities in our missions that would be helpful to one another. What I hope for is a further banding together of the institutions,” says Johnson. Vanessa Smith, a Bethel Tabernacle member with deep roots in the neighborhood, says her hope is that the community will get to know the legacy

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of Weeksville. “People live there but they really don’t know how historical Weeksville is or the history of the area,” she says. For Raymond Codrington, Weeksville Heritage Center’s president and CEO, the Pratt Weeksville Archive is significant to bridging that divide. “I think Pratt’s work plays an extremely important role in amplifying the history of Weeksville in ways that draw attention to how race, resistance, and community building intersect with neighborhood change,” Codrington remarks.

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To date, the project team from Pratt has completed six oral histories, and more are planned with the participation of Bethel Tabernacle, local community garden members, and new Pratt team members Caleb Joshua (CJ) Spring and Cierra Francillon, both fifth-year architecture students. To add further longevity to the work, the Pratt team has created a framework for using cell phones to engage and empower community members to interview one another, establishing an armature to help sustain the voice

of the community over the long term. This is also a means of ensuring that authorship of the narrative of this space is in the hands of its residents.

“Settler colonialism is still alive today. The term postcolonial is a misnomer. I think the decolonizing movement is more assertive in looking at how the structures of colonialism can be taken apart. That’s been part of our project,” says Hogrefe. “We feel that we’ve started something that will ripple throughout the community. It will support communities that care about themselves and

Detail of aerial view of Weeksville Heritage Center and the surrounding neighborhoods. Photo by Julian Olivas; courtesy of Caples Jefferson Architects

are able to go to the community board and participate politically, especially as we begin to work with youth who have the energy to do that.” That youth engagement is happening in initiatives like Co-Designing Brooklyn’s Hidden Heritage, which Ruff helped develop, connecting students at Weeksville-adjacent Medgar Evers High School with undergraduate and graduate architecture students at Pratt. For young Black residents of Brooklyn, Ruff says, he wants them to understand

Weeksville

history so they can imagine a future. “This is your place that was purchased for you. That was a sanctuary for you. And you are the legacy and the future of Weeksville and this idealized place,” he says. “How do we continue that or honor that? If we can recover it and begin the process of continuing to build the place, then there will be more political strength for the people of Weeksville as they come together under an idea of place and of history, and of legacy. That’s really the empowering aspect of it.”

Weeksville today: The Weeksville Heritage Center is a hub for events, exhibitions, and public programming as well as archival projects and other initiatives that celebrate the past, present, and future of the community; photo from the 2021 Harvest Festival by Dominique Sindayiganza.

or anyone visiting the Weeksville Heritage Center—designed by Caples Jefferson Architects, where Pratt alumnus Everardo Jefferson, BID ’68, is a principal—there is a tactile quality to the building’s facade. A sense of layered texture generated through a juxtaposition of materials—wood, cool blue and gray stones, glass that reflects the sky, and elegant brass gates. Its low height does not impose a sense of grandiosity and its interior spaces are warm and reference African forms. Outside a grass lawn and interpretative landscape, designed by Elizabeth Kennedy, connect the new contemporary structure to the rediscovered 19th-century homes known as the Historic Hunterfly Road Houses, named for the Lenape trail they were built along. In quiet moments, a powerful meditative sense of sacred Black and Indigenous space is undeniable.

The land and the built environment speak to a Black continuum that runs from the utopian goals of Weeksville’s

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founder and residents in the 19th century through to the aims of the Heritage Center to bring the story of Weeksville into the consciousness of Brooklyn today and into the future. Where Pratt entered that story in the 1970s and has continued to weave through in the work of alumni and faculty engaging with the space, through the Pratt Weeksville Archive, there is now a chance to contribute to the instrumentality of Weeksville’s transhistorical presence through diverse, intergenerational collaborative practices.

For Ruff, the Heritage Center— like the archive surrounding the oral history project—embodies an ancestral presence, simultaneously futuristic, contemporary, and ancient. “It has aspects of all of those things within it,” he says, “and so it becomes a very powerful space for us to center on and for us to galvanize the community to say new things can happen here—in the name of Weeksville.”

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Weeksville

A Cluster of Enigmas by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, Fort Greene

A Gift to New York When New York Could Use It Pratt Institute Professor Signe Nielsen, Landscape Architect of Little Island, Joins Fellow Experts in Conversation About Hudson River Park’s Inspired New Addition

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Outdoor space has been central to the vitality of New York City through these past two challenging years, from car-free streets to parklets to swaths of public green space that form city dwellers’ big back yard across the five boroughs. Last summer, as the city blossomed into new life, an imaginative, inclusive new space joined those ranks—what New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman called “a charmer. With killer views,” and a gift to all New Yorkers at a critical moment.

Little Island, a free public park at Pier 55, within Hudson River Park, transports visitors with not only its inventive form but also its lush and varied plant life, the vision of Pratt Institute professor Signe Nielsen. Nielsen is Little Island’s landscape architect, founding partner of Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects, the firm that collaborated with UK-based Heatherwick Studio to design the park. She is also a faculty member of Pratt’s new Master of Landscape Architecture program, which will launch in fall 2022. This past fall, Pratt Presents produced a virtual event in which Nielsen joined a panel of fellow experts involved in bringing Little Island to life for a conversation about the design of this dynamic new public space—a park that welcomes people from across the city to escape, connect, and dream above the Hudson River. Along with Nielsen, Pratt Presents Little Island featured Mat Cash of Heatherwick Studio; Robert Hammond, cofounder and executive director of the High Line; and Trish Santini, executive director of Little Island, with Kimmelman moderating. The program was co-presented by Pratt’s School of Architecture.

These are just a few highlights from their discussion, which can be viewed in its entirety at pratt.edu/pratt -presents-little-island. (Remarks have been condensed and edited for clarity.)

Little Island

A view from Little Island’s southwest path. Photo courtesy of MNLA

Reimagining public space Michael Kimmelman: Trish, maybe you can begin by describing to us how this happened and what the circumstances were that we needed Little Island in the first place. Trish Santini: Little Island is part of Hudson River Park, and the conversation was initiated by them with Barry Diller* about the restoration of Pier 54. Because he is a visionary and a wildly ambitious human, he came back and said, “I would love to do something, but I would like to reimagine what public space could be, and create something new as opposed to simply restore what was already there.” [*Media executive Barry Diller, whose Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation took on the project, as Santini later notes.] MK: The west side had been a bustling seaport and then declined in the postwar era, in the ’60s and ’70s. What was the pier that was there and how had it functioned?

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TS: Pier 54 was there. It was a long, rectangular pier that had a bandshell at the end, so there had been concerts there in the past. But it had fallen into disrepair, and Hurricane Sandy also took it to another level in terms of what its needs were. The initial request to Mr. Diller was about being a first gift, basically launching a capital campaign, in order to support the restoration of Pier 54. What transpired over the next handful of months was that he wanted to take the project on as an initiative of the Family Foundation and fund the entire project, the creation of it as well as the maintenance and programming.

The intention from the beginning was that art would be integrated into it in such a way that there [would be] this sort of seamlessness of experience between a connection to nature and access to art. The way this project was approached was more robust than simply a structure that allowed for programming from time to time.

An exciting experience over the water Mat Cash: This project has been a kind of incredible journey for the studio [Heatherwick Studio], and its birth goes back to 2012, when we were invited to a competition to design a new pavilion for a new pier. The idea behind that was to design a bandshell, or something that would fit on top of a new pier in the location of Pier 54. We were intrigued by that, but also as a studio process, we’re always very interested in what’s underneath—like what’s the actual brief. Is it for a pavilion, or is it something else?

Now that it’s open, I feel so wrong. Because, really the test of it is, people just love it. And the visitorship is really diverse. I think it’s more diverse than the neighborhood that we’re in. MK: What was the response to “you should be doing this in another neighborhood”? RH: Hudson River Park is an asset for the whole city. I think the answer to the argument is what’s happening here, people are coming from all over the city to visit—which is part of how New York works.

Barry wanted to do something for New York, something interesting, that would reposition and explore what was possible to regenerate that area. Now, where I’m from, the UK, we have loads of piers which are thrilling to be on. Being on a pier is exciting. You don’t need to make an exciting thing on top of an exciting thing— [we thought,] why don’t we just make an exciting experience over the water, and not add another thing on top of it. New York has always been a place of incredible energy, Manhattan in particular. The High Line had recently been completed, which was thrilling, and with Central Park and the pocket parks— there’s just extraordinary green spaces in this city. [We wanted] to do another one on a lineage of what had gone before. So we did something quite different and provocative and, ultimately, we won the competition.

An asset for the whole city MK: Robbie, my impression is that, as one of the founders of the High Line, not only was the High Line in Diller’s mind . . . but that you were a voice in Diller’s ear. I’m just curious at what point you entered the picture, and what were the kinds of things that you were talking about that were important for the park, not just in terms of its design, but in terms of its social function?

Photos above and on page 27 by Michael Grimm

Robert Hammond: Well, I told him not to do it. I told him it was a bad idea. He shouldn’t do it here; it should be in a different neighborhood that probably needed it more.

There’s so much in Manhattan and it’s not just people in Manhattan that use our cultural assets, our civic assets. So the best answer is just that it’s working so well.

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A conversation between performance and landscape MK: [to Signe] How set was the program [when you came on board]? Signe Nielsen: Ostensibly I was brought on to be, and this is a quote, “the plantsman.” So I operated within that lane for a little while, but then slowly I got the trust of the studio, and we embarked on a three-, four-year journey of just incredible exploration. While the studio was the design driver, sometimes as you begin to work through a problem, you need some different ways to approach it. And so, as a team, we started to look at it as, may the best idea percolate to the surface, in terms of working out some of the details and complexities.

MC: As a studio, we had all these presentations about it being a park first, because there was a lot of conversation about it being a performance venue, as Pier 54 was a performance venue before.

I love architects, but I feel like so many times people think of these projects as architectural projects, where the High Line and Little Island are landscape projects. The landscape is what brings the magic to both of these projects. MK: You do have the architecture and the landscape, which I think work beautifully together, but they also serve very different functions in the way people experience the place. The architecture of Little Island is sort of the logo and the icon, it’s the thing that people see from the water, or from Manhattan. It’s something that obviously gives Little Island its distinction, but once you’re on Little Island, you do see the piers and there are these wonderful sort of peek-a-boo views of the tulip shapes, but you are really in Signe-land.

It’s a bit of sleight of hand programmatically, so it can shift to those two modes without feeling like one’s a compromise on the other, and that’s always been the wrestle. And then there was the thing about, well, planting. We can do the geometry, where we want hardscape and planting beds—that doesn’t mean it’s going to survive. How do we add the richness to that, so we can have that conversation between performance and landscape, and it’d be, hopefully, a balance between those two.

The landscape brings the magic MK: [to Robert] The High Line sort of set the gold standard for this kind of imaginary landscape, and I know that [maintenance has] been very costly for you and that it’s essential to the magic of the High Line. RH: Yeah, that was always one of my obsessions . . . is that Barry understood that [Little Island] was an expensive park to build and it was going to be expensive to maintain. But one of the things I was so excited about is Barry’s partnership with Signe.

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Little Island’s northwest grassland, with Crocosmia, among the numerous plantings—35 species of trees, 65 species of shrubs, and 270 varieties of grasses, vines, and perennials—that compose what Nielsen calls “the bloomscape” of the 2.25-acre park. Photo courtesy of MNLA

Little Island

Plantings of Echinacea (top) and Achillea. Photo courtesy of MNLA

Little Island viewed from the Hudson River Park Esplanade. Photo by Michael Grimm

RH: When you’re on Little Island, most of the time you don’t see that signature, but it’s playing an incredible role. The topography and the landscape are so connected.

ecosystems on this extremely small space that would create variety and make you experience the movement through this small space differently. Maybe you could speak to that too.

MC: One of the key observations when we first went to New York and walked around all the piers: quite logically, how flat they were. They’re not topographic. And we knew the pier was actually quite small. And when you read the list of the brief of what it needed to do, we were like, this is a Swiss army knife, it’s not a park.

SN: Right at the beginning, Mat talked about “park first.” We did an analysis of well-known parks, and what was the proportion of hardscape to turf to planting and presented that to the team. Because of the topography, we really needed to retain that soil with something other than turf. And so, it turned out to be a higher proportion of non-occupiable, if you will, landscape than is present in most parks, and we made sure that the whole team, including Hudson River Park Trust, bought into this.

The whole geometry of the pier was predicated on being able to hold 2,000 people like that [gestures], 600 people view that, 200 people do that. SN: And do one other thing, and that is, because of the topography and the placement, as Mat was just gesticulating, have two things going simultaneously without disturbing each other. MK: You had something of a similar task— how to create different sorts of natural

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So then . . . the big idea was a maritime palette because of the salt and wind, but then the other real driver was solar orientation. And then I got a little goofy, when Mr. Diller didn’t like my plant color palette. And then I began thinking about color combinations and seasonality, and that’s how it got to be so complicated.

Resilience you can’t buy SN: I have thought a lot about what to do in the future. Let’s just say that we’re coming on 20 years* and we’re going to transition to more capacity of, say, the Trust, I would begin to slowly weed out some of the complexity of the planting and let some of the more robust grasses take over. It’s a design that is intended to be as low maintenance as possible. It just has a lot of species. And we can let some of that species diversity go, even though it’s great for habitat. We can let it go for simplicity of maintenance, that’s no problem. I don’t think that the experience would be diminished. [*Nielsen noted earlier that Diller had agreed to endow maintenance for 20 years.] MK: Trish, I assume this was part of your thinking as well. Obviously, the hope of the Trust is that you can maintain the park at the same level and that people step up and contribute to it, but things do change in 20 years and longer, and, as Mat said, nothing’s more costly or complicated to maintain than piers and river. So what is the thinking of the Trust about that?

investment that you can’t buy, and which does tend to create the circumstances for longer life. Trish, do you have any idea on the numbers of people? TS: I think we’ve been able to strike a balance between welcoming as many people as possible and still protecting it being a positive experience. We did cross a million visitors a couple weeks ago. At the end of the day, my job is to be a good steward of the experience, this balance between how we protect the natural aspect, how we bring art into the space, and how we foster community. So, I feel like I have few complaints from this summer, which I think is extraordinary, given what this project is and how complicated and sophisticated and dynamic it is, and the nature of what’s been going on in the city for the past almost two years. We’ve seen every human emotion, because people are pent up, so to be in a space like that is a relief. That’s where the success has been. MK: It’s obviously been a gift to New York at a moment when New York could use it, and we still need it.

TS: Those conversations are in the very early stages. So much right now has just been completely immersed in what it means to operate it every day, and how all these elements coexist with one another—the balance. I expect that’s going to be a multi-year process before we can responsively, actually anticipate what real long-view planning looks like. MK: Two things in closing, related to that. One is that—[Hurricane] Ida was an interesting case—we’re finally thinking about rising seas and forgetting that water also comes from the sky, and it’s very hard to anticipate what the city will be like, what’s going to be needed in coming years, because clearly the pace of change is accelerating. The other thing we know about what works in the city is that when people feel invested in a place, when they feel ownership of it, when communities are engaged and people come to love a place, that is a form of resilience and

Little Island

Photo by Michael Grimm

Community Fridge Art by Tiffany Baker, Fort Greene

Assembly for Chinatown by A+A+A, Chinatown

LOCAL NETWORK PRATT ALUMNI

SHAPE A CONNECTED, CREATIVE BROOKLYN, AND BEYOND

By Andy P. Smith, BFA Writing ’04

I’ve lived in Brooklyn for going on 22 years now, but I’m still surprised to discover the connections this community harbors, and how often those connections lead back to Pratt. Though I suppose I shouldn’t be all that surprised. The school that brought me to this city to study writing years ago, that linked me to a network of expansive creators and thinkers, that rooted me as a writer in the borough I call home, has done the same for so many others. We’ve developed careers, traversed disciplines, and contributed to a long legacy of work, the work, supported and encouraged by our community to take unexpected paths and adapt and evolve along with this ever-changing city.

New York will transform anyone who walks these streets— challenging us, elevating and strengthening what we do and make. It’s in this vast cosmopolitan soup of individuals and ideas that we find and build our collectives. Graduates and students of Pratt Institute contribute to that abundance and bolster a swath of diverse communities in New York City, and around the world. Community, the word itself, can describe a group of people living in the same place. But it also means—perhaps most accurately, especially here in Brooklyn—a feeling of fellowship with others. That’s part of what makes Brooklyn such a unique and magical place. These alumni embody that feeling of fellowship, embracing the opportunities for connection this city has to offer. Through their contributions in Brooklyn and beyond, may we all—from incoming first-years to accomplished alumni—be further inspired to connect, support, and strengthen our own communities.

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Photo by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead. Previous spread: photos by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead and (page 36, bottom) Caroline Cramer, BFA Photography ’22

NOËL COPELAND BRINGS ART TO THE PEOPLE, STARTING AT THE BROOKLYN NAVY YARD. As an artist and educator, Noël Copeland, BFA Fine Arts ’82; MFA Fine Arts ’84, works to impact his community through both his sculptural installations and within the classroom. “Art making helps students to follow stepby-step instructions, develop focus and attention span, art vocabulary, and self-expression,” he says. “Students will learn to appreciate art, see art as a career path, and participate in art activities. I enjoy teaching art, and especially teaching kids, because as a kid I did not have the opportunity for much art instruction.” Born and raised in Morant Bay, Jamaica, Copeland studied at the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts, where his foundation drawing instructor was a graduate of Pratt Institute. So when he and his family immigrated to New York City in 1979, he transferred to Pratt, where he completed his BFA and continued on to earn his MFA in ceramics and sculpture, renting a shared studio nearby in Clinton HIll. Today, more than 40 years later, Copeland continues his work from a studio in Brooklyn, now based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Flushing Avenue. This completely renovated and revitalized facility spans over 300 acres and houses not just artist studios but over 500 businesses, including vast manufacturing and commercial spaces, business incubators, public spaces, a rooftop vineyard—and soon a new creative research facility for Pratt. “Being part of this community of creative thinkers is very inspiring and exciting,” Copeland says. “The artists support each other through programs developed by the Navy Yard.” If you visit the Brooklyn Navy Yard, you’ll see one of Copeland’s several public installations in New York City, a colorful windowpane landscape visible from the exterior and interior of Building 77, titled Blue Mountain. From there, you can take the subway to Nereid Avenue in the Bronx to see Copeland’s Leaf of Life stained glass installation, inspired by the local community gardens. Or head to Manhattan’s East Broadway stop in the Lower East Side to see Displacing Details, Copeland’s first public commission, a tile work he made by hand in 1991. Most recently, in January of this year, Copeland dedicated a 4-by-100-foot mural that incorporates children’s artwork at the Howard Houses in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood, a piece sponsored by New York City Artist Corps for the New York City Housing Authority.

And right on the Brooklyn campus, Pratt Institute presents two of Copeland’s original works within the sculpture garden: Seven Hearts (2007), a stack of hearts representing love and unity, and colored cement works titled Brooklyn Blooms (2009). “I see my public work as a way to engage an audience who would not have the opportunity, time, or means to experience art,” says Copeland. “Public art impacts a wide range of people and contributes to the community in a positive way.”

Local Network

ELISA SHANKLE CREATES A SPACE FOR HEALING IN CLINTON HILL. “My time at Pratt informed a lot of my journey, and more specifically my identity as an entrepreneur,” explains Elisa Shankle, BFA Interior Design ’09, interior designer and Clinton Hill business owner. “I often say I graduated with a life degree, not an interior design degree, because of the rigor and conceptually based practices that Pratt leads with.” Upon graduation, Shankle worked as a designer and principal of her own interior design firm, Simplexity Designs, focusing on commercial and residential interior design for more than eight years. She has a real and undeniable passion for the aesthetics of spaces, and it’s that passion, paired with a personal exploration of plant medicine and holistic lifestyles, that ultimately drove her to launch her current business. In 2018, Shankle co-founded HealHaus, with Darian Hall, as a wellness studio and café on Fulton Street, just south of Pratt Institute. Offering daily yoga sessions, meditation classes, and more, HealHaus aims to provide an inclusive space focused on holistic health and wellness. “Combining wellness and community for us is easy and automatic because we lead with integrity and honor the value and origin of this work,” says Shankle. “If you can come to HealHaus as you are, without judgment, with different access points, and can see yourself reflected here, then I know I am doing my job to ensure inclusivity is at the core of who we are.” Since opening in May of 2018, HealHaus, a Black-owned business, has welcomed a cross-section of local Brooklynites and wellness practitioners, particularly wellness first-timers. Both Shankle and Hall understand that wellness practices are not always inclusive and accessible to individuals who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color, so they are committed to shifting what those practices look like and who they are for. “Brooklyn to me is all about community, and honestly the reason why I stay here,” Shankle says. “Our growth and success has mostly been based on word of mouth, and that is all due to the strong community of members that we have that show up for their healing, and are dedicated to sharing that with someone else. Brooklyn is special because people are dedicated to supporting the locals and resonating with authentic and relatable experiences that we foster.”

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Local Network

Photo by Caroline Cramer, BFA Photography ’22

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Photo by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead

MINA STONE FEEDS ARTISTS, AND ART LOVERS, ACROSS THE CITY (AND IN KITCHENS EVERYWHERE).

“Art school supported my creativity and threw me into the culture of art and NYC,” says Mina Stone, BFA Fashion Design ’04, chef, restaurateur, and author. “It also seems like no coincidence that going to art school, whether I knew it or not, propelled me to cook largely within the art world.” Yes, Mina Stone is indeed the Mina of Mina’s, the all-day café at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. Serving home-style Mediterraneaninspired cuisine—Mina’s father is American and her mother is Greek— the restaurant feels like a natural crest in a continuing career, 20 years and counting, that has Stone perfectly situated in the center of a Venn diagram of food and art. Stone started cooking as a way to support her clothing design practice and then carried the intuition and spirit of invention that guided her design work into the kitchen. Stone’s first book, 2015’s Cooking for Artists, came about through a decade spent producing private meals and catering art-world events: post-opening dinners for the gallerist Gavin Brown, cooking for the painter Elizabeth Peyton, and preparing daily lunch for the artist Urs Fischer and his staff at his Red Hook studio. It was there where Stone was able to experiment with simple, fresh ingredients on a willing and curious group to ultimately discover and develop her own, unique approach to cooking and sharing food. “My hope is that food, the warmth and education that comes from cooking for others, affects people in a positive way,” Stone says. Most recently, in September 2021, HarperWave published Stone’s second book, Lemon, Love, & Olive Oil, a collection of 80 recipes inspired and influenced by her Yiayia (her grandmother) in Greece, where Stone grew up spending summers in Aegina, an island in the Aegean Sea.

“You can’t shy away from the many things food represents,” Stone says. “Culture, identity, politics, ritual, and so much more. It is a conduit for connection.” Today, that conduit is incarnated at Mina’s café, bright, casual, welcoming—and serving shareable plates with a personal touch. From Pratt to cooking within the art world, publishing cookbooks, and now operating her eponymous café within one of the city’s most prominent contemporary arts institutions, Stone has navigated her creative journey from her home in Brooklyn with her family, only blocks from Pratt, in a neighborhood where she’s lived for more than 20 years. “Brooklyn is my home and my community,” she says, noting that everyday experiences around Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Bed-Stuy feed and nourish her work. “I love walking up the street to my bodega, sitting with my neighbors, walking to the park or to school. All of it. I love it. It is my grounding fuel.”

Local Network

BRYNNA TUCKER INCUBATES COMMUNITY-CHANGING PROJECTS AT THE BROOKLYN PUBLIC LIBRARY.

“Brooklyn is definitely my longest standing collaborator,” says Brynna Tucker, MFA Fine Arts and MS History of Art and Design ’02. “I’ve used the sidewalk as an art gallery, my neighborhood as a resource for teaching, and now the borough of Brooklyn as an innovation hub for community change.” In 2016, Tucker joined the Brooklyn Public Library to manage its BKLYN Incubator program, where she is currently the senior manager of innovation. “I found the career of my dreams here at the library, surrounded myself with the best friends a person could have, and established a life here in Brooklyn that truly feels like home,” Tucker says.

Earning her dual master’s degrees in February 2002, just months after September 11, Tucker found herself in a new and changing world post-graduation, where career routes through the art world and nonprofits she had imagined were not readily available. But soon she found herself a full-time position at Art In General, the nonprofit exhibition space that operated from 1981 to 2020. This position within a long-standing creative community afforded Tucker many opportunities to collaborate with emerging artists and learn about the art world from the perspective of a nonprofit gallery, but ultimately she felt called to work outside the gallery world.

Tucker returned to Pratt Institute, not as a student but in a role as internship coordinator, a position that developed into associate director for entrepreneurship and experiential education. She also founded a student incubator called the Refinery, a precursor to the Ignition Lab. In her 12 years working at Pratt, Tucker says she built a network of artists, activists, entrepreneurs, and radical educators, and learned how to use her education as an artist to build what she describes as “a different type of practice that empowers change.” Now, through the BKLYN Incubator program at the Brooklyn Public Library, Tucker champions and supports community-driven initiatives borough-wide, like Shine on Me—launched by fellow Pratt alum Donald Peebles, MSLIS ’14—which provides library resources to adults experiencing homelessness. Other BKLYN Incubatorsupported programs include A Virtual Library for All, serving incarcerated patrons; the BKLYN Robotics League, offering students a “robot in a box” maker-space experience kit; and Brooklyn CookMobile, a mobile food literacy kitchen cofounded by Adeeba Rana, MSLIS ’13, initiatives that resonate with a community’s need as uniquely understood by the library staff who boldly develop them.

“Creativity and curiosity are one thing, but taking action to make something you really believe in happen is a whole other layer of bravery,” Tucker says. “If you’ve never worked with people that work at a public library, find a way. They know our communities better than most. It will change your life.” Lifting up that expertise for the benefit of all is at the heart of Tucker’s work. “Brooklyn is amazing because of its diversity, but I am a cis, straight, white, US-born, college-educated woman. Living in this city has shown me that so many systems are built for my success, and so often at the expense of others. I need to be part of building systems for everyone’s success if I want to dismantle and change that.”

Read more on pratt.edu/prattfolio.

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Local Network

Photo by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead

Restorative Ground by WIP Collaborative, Hudson Square

Photo by Caroline Cramer, BFA Photography ’22

46, 47 RESTORATIVE GROUND Abigail Coover, adjunct associate professor of undergraduate architecture; Sera Ghadaki, MArch ’18; Sonya Gimon, MS Sustainable Environmental Systems ’18; Lindsay Harkema; Elsa Ponce, MPS Design Management ’17; Bryony Roberts; and Ryan Brooke Thomas, WIP Collaborative Hudson Square, Manhattan

Photo by Caroline Cramer, BFA Photography ’22

24, 25 A CLUSTER OF ENIGMAS Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, MFA Communications Design ’15 Fort Greene, Brooklyn

Photos page 12 and this page by Caroline Cramer, BFA Photography ’22

A number of Brooklyn’s mutual-aid community fridges came to vibrant life last year with artwork by Tiffany Baker (@hiccupbk). On refrigerator installations for Playground Coffee Shop and Clinton Hill Fort Greene Mutual Aid (the Fort Greene Community Fridge, pictured on page 34), Baker’s handpainted portraits encourage neighbors to take what they need and share what they don’t. The portraits are framed in bright graphics and welcoming messages (Free food for all!). Each work serves as a reminder that art can be a bridge, as Baker’s artist statement says, “between the viewer and the subject to create a shared space of intimacy and trust.”

Photo by Deniz Gonel, BFA Film ’24

Photos courtesy of WIP Collaborative

34 COMMUNITY FRIDGE ART Tiffany Baker, BID ’08 Fort Greene, Brooklyn

Photos by Caroline Cramer, BFA Photography ’22

This is only the beginning of WIP Collaborative’s ongoing work to address inclusivity in the city’s public spaces. This past fall, they won Design Trust for Public Space’s Restorative City RFP to launch The Neurodiverse City, a multiyear project in collaboration with Verona and Carpenter Architects, with the support of Center for Independence of the Disabled-NY, Bronx Independent Living Services, and INCLUDEnyc, to analyze and develop prototypes for public spaces that welcome and support people of all spectrums of neurodiversity.

Relaxation, play, interaction—WIP Collaborative (@wip_collaborative) designed this inclusive public space as an environment of respite and joy for city dwellers of all ages and abilities. The installation was the winning proposal in Urban Design Forum’s Care for Hudson Square design competition, launched during the pandemic as a means of creating safe, outdoor healing space for community members to convene after months of isolation.

Last year, multidisciplinary design studio A+A+A partnered with the organization Think!Chinatown on Assembly for Chinatown, an initiative to construct outdoor dining structures for neighborhood restaurants affected by the pandemic. The builds, designed to comply with city regulations, were created by volunteers and personalized by various artists, including fellow Pratt alum Rose Wong, BFA Communications Design ’14. Pictured is the build for Yin Ji Chang Fen at 91 Bayard Street, with artwork by Chanel Miller.

Painting through the summer city heat and rain over three days last August, Robert Vargas (@The RobertVargas) created Gods That Walk Among Us, a mural on the corner of Troutman Street and Wyckoff Avenue. Vargas made the piece, commissioned by the street art organization The Bushwick Collective, in tribute to “the Latin people of this community . . . united under the banner of our collective Indigenous roots,” as he shared in a post on Instagram. “My dedication to this wall was my way to honor them and to further instill pride in this community.”

In the heart of Fort Greene, on Fulton Street just around the corner from Brooklyn Academy of Music and a short walk from Pratt, a swirl of stars and deep blue clouds form the backdrop of a mural honoring the city’s women, with an illuminating scientific subtext. The work pays tribute to a group of our universe’s cosmological misfits, called brown dwarfs. Neither planets nor stars, glowing in blue and red hues, these mysterious objects have long intrigued scientists, including American Museum of Natural History astronomer Dr. Jackie Faherty, whose research inspired the mural. In Phingbodhipakkiya’s words, “these curious space entities reminded me of the luminous, diverse women of New York City.” Part of the artist’s Findings mural series (@findings.art), which highlights the research of women in science, the piece depicts Brooklyn’s own Dr. Josephine English, the late women’s health trailblazer who was the first Black woman to open a private practice in New York, while celebrating all of the city’s women fighting for our shared futures.

35 ASSEMBLY FOR CHINATOWN Ashely Kuo, BFA Interior Design ’14, with Arianna Dean and Andrea Chiney, A+A+A Chinatown, Manhattan

13 GODS THAT WALK AMONG US Robert Vargas, alumnus of Fine Arts Bushwick, Brooklyn

“I’ve been able to blossom here because of how personalized I can make my major and the experiences I’ve had. Receiving this scholarship was the deciding factor in my choice to attend Pratt. Thank You.” KAYLA BADEA ABAZA BFA HISTORY OF ART AND DESIGN ’22

MAKE AN IMPACT AND SUPPORT THE NEXT GENERATION OF PRATT STUDENTS Scan the QR code to make your gift online at giving.pratt.edu.

The People Make the Place

Photo by Miki Yamato, @miki.yamato

Pratt alumni artists based in New York City and the metro area present work at recent and ongoing group shows across the boroughs.

Straight Forward, Image Driven, presented at The Painting Center in Manhattan in October 2021, highlighted the work of a multigenerational group of Pratt alumni artists. Izzy Nova, BFA Fine Arts ’16, curated the show featuring Beth Barry, MPS Art Therapy and Creativity Development ’79; Shira Toren, BFA Fashion Design ’81; Melody S. Boone, MFA Fine Arts ’09; Nancy Elsamanoudi, MFA Fine Arts ’13; and Susan Luss, BFA Fine Arts ’13. The show’s opening last fall brought an outpouring of support from fellow Pratt graduates in an evening Luss called “truly epic.”

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Installation view of work by Marilyn Nance in exhibition Greater New York 2021, on view at MoMA PS1 from October 7, 2021, to April 18, 2022. Image courtesy of MoMA PS1. Photo by Marissa Alper Film still from The Ruins of Ebay (Longues-Sur-Mer), 2018, HD Video, 2:22 min; courtesy of Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde

Pratt graduates Raque Ford, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’10; Marilyn Nance, BFA Communications Design ’76; Raha Raissnia, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’02; and the late Rotimi Fani-Kayode, MFA Fine Arts ’83, are among the 47 artists and collectives highlighted in the fifth edition of MoMA PS1’s Greater New York exhibition. This iteration of the museum’s survey of artists living and working in New York, up through April 18 in Long Island City, Queens, “foregrounds the resilience of artists and artist communities in the city, while marking ways these artists have both profoundly shaped New York, and borne witness to its many transformations.”

Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde, BArch ’06, is among the 68 artists featured in Bronx Calling: The Fifth AIM Biennial at the Bronx Museum. On view through March 20, the exhibition showcases work by artists selected for the museum’s AIM Fellowship program, which supports early-career New York City–based visual artists.

Read more group highlights and alumni news in Prattfolio Class Notes, pratt.edu/class-notes.

The People Make the Place

Inside Our City of Industry Manufacturing in New York City Through the Lens of a Pratt Student, Photographed for the Pratt Center’s Made in NYC Initiative Skilled hands finishing a finely knit panel, a spectrum of spools lining the wall of a costume studio, prototypes crafted, confections cut, and concrete poured—glimpses of the many ways manufacturing lives and thrives in New York City. Delving inside the spaces where this work happens, Jacob Grumulaitis, who will graduate with a major in photography this May, photographed 34 New York City factories during his internship with the Pratt Center for Community Development’s Made in NYC initiative last year. He visited decades-old factory floors, intimate studios of master craftspeople, coffee roasters, chocolatiers, and more, revealing the local ingenuity and expertise behind the objects we encounter and enjoy every day. As part of the Pratt Center’s work toward a more just, equitable, and sustainable New York City, Made in NYC connects with thousands of manufacturers in the city to offer support in a variety of ways, including providing marketing resources like these behind-the-scenes images. Made in NYC has also been sharing the stories of makers and companies across the five boroughs in its Factory Friday series on Instagram (@madeinnewyorkcity). Here is an inside look at just some of their spaces.

Previous spread: Claire Fleury Studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, produces inventive, inclusive garments with sustainability in mind, using 80 percent surplus fabrics and trims. This spread, clockwise from bottom left: Timberlake Studios, a costume shop in Manhattan’s Garment District founded in 1986 as the Studio, manufactures pieces for stage, screen, and fashion, ranging from personal projects to marquee productions; laying out garment pieces at Ferrara Manufacturing, which produces tailored clothing for the fashion industry in their Garment District factory,

established in 1987; Utleys in Woodside, Queens, produces prototypes and secondary packaging, with roots in model making going back to 1965; working on a machine-knit piece at Accurate Knitting, which fabricates sweaters in their Brooklyn Navy Yard mill; Oso Industries, a concretefocused design studio located at the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center, handcrafts furniture and architectural elements and fabricates art using concrete and materials like stainless steel, bronze, and colored glass.

Clockwise from top left: spools of colorful thread reflected at Claire Fleury Studio; putting finishing touches on a garment at Ferrara Manufacturing; in her Bronx studio, Jeannine Carson manufactures ceramics in small batches for her eponymous company,

Jeannine Carson Clay; extracting ingredients at Terre & Botanique, a plant-based hair-care brand in Brooklyn; Pricilla Terrero, owner of Morito Chocolates in Red Hook, Brooklyn, crafts vegan, organic, gluten-free chocolates by hand. All photos by Jacob Grumulaitis, BFA Photography ’22.

Image courtesy of Smith-Miller + Hawkinson

A New Site for Creative Research at the Brooklyn Navy Yard This fall, Pratt Institute announced the establishment of the Research Yard. A joint initiative with CUNY City Tech and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the advanced research and applied learning facility will connect faculty and students from both Pratt and City Tech with the Yard’s ecosystem of more than 500 businesses. The 27,000-square-foot space in the Navy Yard’s historic eleven-story Building 3 will be home to all of Pratt’s research centers and include fabrication labs as well as research areas for the study of robotics, information visualization, sustainability, community development, environmental sensing, design incubation in rural areas, and digital archeology, along with a number of accelerators. The space, formerly a warehouse and fulfillment center,

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will be transformed by architectural firm Smith-Miller + Hawkinson, LLP, into a 21st-century industry-education research model supporting the creative economy.

The Pratt research groups that will be based out of the new facility and will support community-based initiatives include: Pratt’s Consortium for Research and Robotics, the Pratt Center for Community Development, the Pratt Sustainability Center, and the Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative. Pratt students and faculty will gain hands-on experience collaborating with industry professionals on site. Additionally, Pratt and City Tech students, faculty, and staff will work with the Brooklyn Navy Yard STEAM Center, a career and technical training high school for 11th- and 12th-grade students who come from eight Brooklyn public high schools. “Building this advanced creative research facility just blocks from the Pratt campus and alongside the businesses and entrepreneurs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard is crucial for New York City, and especially for the borough of Brooklyn,” said President Frances Bronet. “The Research Yard of Pratt Institute, City Tech, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard will further enable our research leaders to work with the local community on today’s important challenges.” —Julianna Dow Read more at news.pratt.edu.

Brooklyn Navy Yard

School of Continuing & Professional Studies

e t a e r C

d a e L

Art, Business, Design, and Architecture

PRATT INSTITUTE CERTIFICATE PROGRAMS Advanced Perfumery Branding and Digital Marketing CAD Architectural Design Creative Careers Creative Interiors Design Business Design for Health and Wellness Digital Design Digital Product Design Exhibition Design Fashion New Media Fine Art Floral Art and Design Furniture Design Graphic Design Human Centered Design Jewelry Design and Marketing

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Motion Graphics Photography and Video Production Sustainable Design UX/UI Mobile Design Web Design Executive Education AIA-Approved Courses Interdisciplinary Technology Lab Gap Year Program Graduate Preparatory Courses PreCollege Program for High School Students Summer Credit Intensives Courses can be taken individually.

Charles Pratt created the ultimate bequest. An industrialist and educational reformer, Charles Pratt sustained a lifetime of impact through philanthropy. Founding Pratt Institute in 1887, he recognized the opportunity present to match the growing need for trained workers to the transformational impact of education on the lives of individuals.

Upon his death in 1891, Pratt left a bequest of cash and property that sustained the Institute’s ability to provide an affordable college education to all students regardless of class, race, or gender. Charles Pratt’s belief in opportunity through education and his great sense of humanity lie at the core of Pratt Institute’s mission.

Pratt is in the midst of a $500,000 Bequest Challenge to create a groundswell of support for its future.

Charles Pratt’s generous bequest to Pratt Institute provided the initial foundation of an Institute that stands tall 134 years later.

Please build upon Charles Pratt’s legacy and join the Bequest Challenge to secure the future of Pratt. In return for informing us of your future gift to Pratt, the Institute will match up to $10,000 for a current use gift now. If you do not wish to share the exact amount, Pratt will match $1,000 to support an area of your choosing.

It was this foresight and vision that created the basis for people to realize their potential through the arts, architecture, design, library sciences, and other practical courses of study.

Naming Pratt Institute in your estate plan is an extraordinary expression of generosity during this time.

For more information, please contact Rob Danzig, director of planned giving, at 718.399.4296 or rdanzig@pratt.edu or 200 Willoughby Ave, Myrtle Hall 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11205.

In Memoriam Pratt Institute remembers the community members we have lost during this difficult time.

Judy Aaron Vice President for Enrollment

Joe Bruni Certificate, Advertising Design ’50

David Easton BFA Interior Design ’63

Alban Albert attended, Evening Art School

Gerard “Jerry” Ramon Case 2020 honorary degree recipient and alumnus

Sandra (Greenberg) Eisdorfer MLS ’53

Eric William Allison MS City and Regional Planning ’92 Virginia “Ginny” R. Aussiker Certificate, Interior Design ’50 Cassandra Baker MFA Fine Arts ’09 Philippe Barrière MArch ’85 Helen Slawson Beckerhoff BFA Art Education ’42 Elisabeth Heep Beckman BID ’61 Jason Benjamin attended, Illustration John N. Berry III former faculty member of the School of Information Ivy Bottini Certificate, Advertising Design ’47 Nancy Cofield Brown Certificate, Costume Design ‘54 Bernard Bier Certificate, Communications Design (Advertising Design) ’47 Carla Jean Block MS Communications Design ’80 Brian Boland MS Art Education ’71 Richard Bove BFA Illustration ’42, emeritus faculty member of Fine Arts Mark Braunstein husband of Pratt Trustee Katharine L. McKenna, MID ’84, and friend of Pratt Institute Jean Russell Brewer attended, Costume Design Jason Brooks Public Safety Supervisor

Lauren Elizabeth Charles MS Historic Preservation ’06 Norman Cicelsky BArch ’60 Dennis Blake Clark MS Planning ’71 Margaret-Ann Clemente attended, Fashion Design Roger Coast BFA Communications Design (Advertising Design) ’55 Nina Cocchi BS Art Education ’64 Doris Darlington Cohen BFA Advertising Design ’51 Rajie Cook Certificate, Advertising Design, ’53 Jenni Crain BFA Fine Arts (Sculpture) ’13 Denis Cumberbatch BEE ’79 Arlene Dahl wife of Marc Rosen, Pratt Trustee Emeritus, Honorary Doctorate recipient, Alumni Achievement Awardee, Pratt alumnus, and professor Mae (Hillman) Daub Drawing ’43 Marion D. Degruttola Certificate, Costume Design ’40 Louis Delsarte BFA Graphic Design ’67 Bob Diamond attended, Electrical Engineering Joyce Burrows Dinkins member of The Black Alumni of Pratt Advisory Council William H. Dreyer Jr. BID ’58

Chrystyan Dain Ellerton BFA Fashion Design ’73 Ann Gunn Everitt BFA Graphic Arts and Illustration ’63 John Matthew Fimian BIE ’72 Sidney Frankel BCE ’47 Fr. John Battista Giuliani attended, Illustration Florence Goemaat MSLIS ’72 William R. Gregory attended, Advertising Design J. Roger Guilfoyle retired longtime faculty member of History of Art and Design, the Associate Degree Program, and Graduate Communications Design William “Bill” F. Haasters BArch ’65 Pete Hamill 1980 honorary degree recipient and alumnus Joseph Haran attended, Building Science Elaine Heyman attended Julie Lancaster Hickcox Certificate, Costume Design ’48 Albert Holimon Sr. BID ’59 Gail Stetson Hollenbeck MFA ’66 Gloria Jacobi attended, Evening Art School Cliff Joseph BFA Illustration ’53, founding faculty member Creative Arts Therapy

Angela Wottitz Kalischer attended, Interior Design

Barbara Michelena Certificate, Advertising Design ’51

Pamela D. Stockamore MFA Fine Arts ’84

Chris Kasik Director of Residential Life in Student Affairs

Anthony M. Missere BS Food Science and Management ’68, former head basketball coach and head baseball coach

Lawrence Sykes MS Art Teacher Education ‘57

William Katavolos BID ’49, longtime faculty member of the School of Architecture and codirector of the Center for Experimental Structures Raymond C. Keith Jr. BA Social Science ’69 Murray Keshner Certificate, Communications Design (Illustration) ’48 Kenneth Kirsten BFA Communications Design (Advertising Design) ’53 Robert “Bob” Kissane BFA Art Education ’71

Ann L. (Merschrod) Moran Certificate, Industrial Design ’46 Forrest Moses attended, Interior Design Karl Mueller BME ’55 Helen Neumunz Certificate, Interior Design ’48 Gene Norman attended, Building and Construction, former faculty member of the School of Architecture David Judd Nutting BID ’55

George Taft BArch ’65 Charles Garo Takoushian attended, Pictorial Illustration Robert Tennenbaum BArch ’59 Brian Tenorio MPS Design Management ’10 Charles “Chuck” Thatcher former faculty member and dean of the School of Engineering and Science Richard Suner Thomas BArch ’68

Gnesha Ozick Certificate, Merchandising and Fashion Management ’43

Laurel M. Thompson MPS Art Therapy and Creativity Development ’82, former chair and longtime faculty member of Creative Arts Therapy

Stephen Parisi BID ’61

Frederick K. Troiano AAS Advertising ’59

Ada Alice Pearsall Certificate, Illustration ‘50

Harry Twitchell BArch ’53

Joel H. Levitt former faculty member of Math and Science and Engineering

Jerry Pinkney former faculty member of Undergraduate Communications Design

Nancy Ai-Tseng Miao Twitchell FAIA, former faculty member of the School of Architecture

Ted Lewin BFA Illustration ’56

Anthony Alexander Pugliese BFA Advertising Design ’62

Robert Francis Manning BFA Communications Design (Illustration) ’58

Joseph Roberts former faculty member and chair of Undergraduate Communications Design

Elise Klingensmith MS Art Education ’75 Paul J. Klucznik BID ’58 Doris Mae Kretz Certificate, Textile Design ’49 Irving Levine Mechanical Engineering, attended

David Marcinkowski Associate Director of Academic Computing at Pratt Manhattan

Amy Jill Rosenbaum BFA Fashion Design ’75

Patricia Hurley Marek attended, Interior Design

Bert Schoemann attended, Engineering

Sam Martine former faculty member of Communications Design

Calvin “Cal” Schoenfeld attended, Advertising Design

Seoud M. Matta Dean Emeritus of the School of Information Joel Maxwell attended, Industrial Design Lawrence C. McAteer attended, Art Direction Lowell D. McFarland BFA Advertising Design ’60 Joseph Merz BArch ’50

Joseph Van Putten attended, Architecture Margaret Weeks MLS ’70 Lawrence E. Weider attended, Chemistry David Weisbrod former faculty member of the School of Information Katherine Grace (Rounds) Weisman BFA Fashion Design ’88

Jeffrey Shorn BArch ’66

Bernard Yenelouis former visiting assistant professor of Fine Arts

Florence Ruth Sillen attended, Fine Arts

Marc Zimetbaum attended, Art Teacher Education

Stuart Silver BFA Advertising Design ’60

Gregory J. Zoltowski BFA Advertising Design ’70

Bartholomew Allen Sowul BArch ’64

From our last Prattfolio printing in spring 2020 through fall 2021

J. Budd Steinhilber Certificate, Industrial Design ’43

news.pratt.edu/those-we-have-lost

Janet G. Stenger attended, Advertising Design

As this academic year began, we were cresting, as New York Magazine put it, “the Summer of the Photo Dump.” On Instagram, image carousels filled with camera-roll miscellany without pretense or filter—nonchalant on one hand, or, taken another way, singular, lyrical glimpses of the ephemeral beauty of everyday experience. For this issue of Prattfolio, situated in New York City, in Brooklyn, on campus, we look at moments captured by Pratt students as they moved once again through this place of serendipity, surprise, and creative connection. All images used with permission. Follow us on Instagram @prattinstitute.

All credits left to right, top to bottom. Inside front cover: Deniz Gonel, BFA Film ’24 @denizgonel (work by Baillie Vensel, MFA Open Studios); Sara Yuan, BFA Communications Design ’25 @sara._.yuan; Gonel (work by Bruce Shiyu Zhang, MFA Open Studios); Caroline Cramer, BFA Photography ’22 @carolinexcramer; Kai Dennett, BFA Fine Arts (Sculpture and Integrated Practices) ’24 @kaibarkerdennett; Cramer; Gonel; Cramer; Gonel (Zhang); Gonel; Cramer; Gonel (work by Sen-Sen Chiu,

New York Diary

MFA Open Studios). Page 64: Sebastian Sacco, BArch ’26 @sebastian.sacco; Cramer; Gonel (work by Justice–Michelle Thomas, MFA Open Studios); Cramer; Dennett; Jayden Fosburg, BFA Game Arts ’25 @owllegator; Dennett; Dennett; Leo Dohyung Kim, MPS Arts and Cultural Management ’23 @cellistar; Jessica Yan Chen, BID ’24 @ryo_fujii2333; Yuan; Yuan. Inside back cover: Yuan; Yuan; Sacco; Cramer; Sacco; Yuan; Jianhao Zheng, BFA Digital Arts (Interactive Arts) ’24 @jianhaoz526; Chen; Sacco; Cramer; Yuan; Chen.

Prattfolio

Spring 2022

Pratt Institute Communications and Marketing 200 Willoughby Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11205 Electronic Service Requested

About the cover City life unfolds in a series of intricate connections, shaping our worlds and our work. Rachel Bavaresco’s award-winning surrealist short animation 311 (three one one) reflects on these delicate, playful, unexpected moments among neighbors in an apartment building, who even in their everyday, interior motions are creators of a beautiful collective tapestry. Rachel Bavaresco, BFA Digital Arts (2-D Animation) ’21

Detail of still from 311 (three one one), 2021 Prattfolio Spring 2022

NON-PROFIT ORG US Postage Paid Brooklyn, NY 11205 Permit No 3137