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

Youth Education

CUP partners with schools and afterschool programs to produce experiential, project-based curricula that get students out of the classroom to interact with the City and the people who make it work. Our education programs vary in length from one week to one semester and reach over 500 students each year – from the Bronx to South Brooklyn and everywhere in between.

CUP's Urban Investigations programs ask basic questions about how the City works and answer them over the course of a semester. Where does our garbage go? Where does our water come from? Who built public housing? Students make site visits and conduct interviews while working with CUP staff to produce award-winning videos, exhibitions, magazines, and other media that communicate what they've learned to a wide audience. These products are screened in theaters, exhibited at museums, and used by advocacy organizations to educate others.

COMMUNITY EDUCATION

CUP works with advocacy organizations, policy experts, and designers to produce publications, workshops, and other teaching tools that explain important policy issues for people who need to know. CUP publications and teaching tools are made for specific groups in specific places, but they reach a national audience of people interested in civics education and graphic and information design.

CUP's Envisioning Development Toolkit produces workshops built around interactive tools that teach people about basic land-use terms and concepts, enabling them to participate meaningfully in neighborhood change. One tool, for example, teaches participants about income demographics and the technical definitions of affordable housing to help them analyze proposed developments in concrete terms of units, rents, and incomes.

CUP's Making Policy Public series facilitates close collaborations between policy experts and design professionals to produce foldout posters that make complex policy issues accessible and appealing. One issue, for example, helped 10,000 longshoremen understand their place in the global shipping network, but was also a bestseller at art and design bookstores in New York. For the Making Policy Public website, click here.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

CUP produces public events, workshops, and exhibitions that bring together people from different disciplines – whether on stage or in the crowd – to engage and learn from each other. CUP public programs have drawn thousands of people to events all over the City, across the country, and abroad – from our offices in Gowanus, Brooklyn, to the International Architectural Biennale in Venice, Italy.

CUP looks to public programs as a great way to expand the CUP community, have fun, and learn something. One program, for example, brought together a real-estate developer and an urban sociologist to talk about the interplay of cultural programming and development economics in DUMBO.

PARTNERING WITH CUP

Are you an individual or member of an institution that wants to partner with CUP or commission a CUP project? For more information on how to work with CUP, click here.

History

In 1997, CUP published its first project, a 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 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

Damon Rich, Founder & Chair
Althea Wasow, Co-founder & Vice-chair
Christian Matthaeus, Treasurer
Kate Rubin, Secretary
Sarah Dadush, Co-founder
Katie Dixon
Joseph Heathcott
Suzanne Menghraj
David Smiley
Pam Sporn
Dan Wiley

Staff

Rosten Woo, Executive Director
Valeria Mogilevich, Program Manager
Lize Mogel, Grants Associate
John Mangin, Yale Law School Fellow

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.