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 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 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 single-session workshops to semester-long projects.

EXHIBITIONS

CUP creates educational environments in galleries, museums, and other settings to create spaces for dialogue and insight. CUP uses the formal innovations and techniques of art and design to make complex subject matter accessible.

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 political processes form our environment through laws, regulations, and activism.

Recent CUP exhibits range from an outdoor site-specific signage project on Fulton Mall, downtown Brooklyn's busiest thoroughfare, to a window installation at White Box on the political interaction between the Museum of Modern Art, real estate, and workforce investment.

COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS

CUP partners with community-based organizations to produce 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. Since 2004, CUP has worked 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 through community meetings around the city.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

CUP curates unique public programs that mix design, research, politics, and entertainment to connect people that are usually kept far apart. We put housing activists in touch with architectural designers, earth scientists with land artists, policy researchers with documentary filmmakers. CUP organizes panel discussions, film screenings, and student presentations. We also help to organize seasonal walking tours that use the built environment to explore controversial proposals, unbuilt plans, contested histories, and democratic ideals.

MEDIA PROJECTS

CUP produces media in many forms: posters, magazines, refrigerator magnets, postcard books, websites, and more. Visit Code City, an interactive map showing the history and politics of New York City's public housing.

History

In 1997, CUP published 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

Sarah Dadush, Secretary
Christian Matthaeus
Suzanne Menghraj
Damon Rich, Chairperson
Kate Rubin
Pam Sporn
Althea Wasow
Dan Wiley

Staff

Rosten Woo, Executive Director
Valeria Mogilevich, Program Manager
Lize Mogel, Grants Associate
Damon Rich, Founder and Chair

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 #B402B
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 on Fourth Avenue to Third Street. We're in Building B, on the fourth floor. Here is a map.