art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

cap students cindy barrios (attended
2002) and han yue (attended 2002)
drawing from pre-columbian
sculpture at the national museum
of the american indian.
cap co-instructor mary valverde
with students on a sketchbook
journey in lower manhattan.
collaborative portraits on display
at the cap summer in nyc exhibition
2002, the cooper union foundation
building.
case study: cooper union for the advancement of science and art 65
In 1985 the Saturday Program was authorized to organize a summer
session focused on minority recruitment to the college. Absorbed
into Cooper’s School of Art in 1987, this summer session became the
foundation for the current Outreach Program. In 1991, Outreach was
expanded into a year-round program with the intention of displacing
the student-taught Saturday Program. In 1995, after years of maneuvering,
including public protests, both programs survived and were consolidated
into the Saturday Outreach Program (sop), overseen by the dean of the
School of Art and reprieved from drastic budget cuts by the personal
efforts of John Hejduk, then Cooper’s dean of architecture. The Saturday
Program, with its emphasis on student teaching, survived intact, as did
the Outreach Program with its year-round, intensive, faculty-taught courses.
Today the combined Saturday Outreach Program employs
multifaceted strategies, reflecting its history. It works out of studios,
shops, and classrooms in Cooper Union buildings, with a staff of
seven part-time administrator/artist/educators, twentyto twenty five
undergraduate instructors, rotating adjunct faculty, and five professional
poets. Co-directed by Marina Gutierrez and Stephanie Hightower,
it serves more than 400 local high school students year round with tuitionfree
courses in studio arts, architecture, portfolio preparation, cross
disciplinary writing, contemporary art issues, and field trips to artist studios,
museums, and other urban cultural sites.
Roughly 80 percent of the program’s seniors go on to colleges locally,
regionally, nationally, and internationally, and the program’s students
comprise between 15 and 25 percent of each Cooper freshman class.
In the Saturday Program, classes are collaboratively taught by teams
of undergraduates, supported by a professional curriculum coordinator.
Through ongoing challenge and support, collaborative mentoring emerges,
enabling inexperienced student teachers to define goals, structure, and
plans and achieve a unique curricular vision with excellent outcomes,
while they serve as peer role models. Marina Gutierrez, who has directed
the Saturday Program since 1981, was born and raised in New York City,
went to city schools and to Cooper Union. As a child, she attended
community art classes, becoming a teen volunteer, working in diverse
settings—from a Brooklyn housing project to a Cherokee community
in the Smoky Mountains to a theater project in Puerto Rico.
In Outreach Program classes, intensive, discipline-based curricula
are taught by working artists with the support of an undergraduate
teacher’s assistant. This bi-generational team nurtures a supportive
educational atmosphere which introduces high school students to the
world they will encounter in college-level studio and theoretical course
work. In support of local high school teachers, the program also offers
an artist-teacher summer residency. The Outreach Program’s director,