art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

68 art / vision / voice
In 1999, jcal had a professionally designed art gallery and dance
studios, a fully renovated 900-seat theater, and offered a number of
visual arts classes conducted in classrooms furnished with child-size
chairs and tables. It also had an after-school program enrolling a few
young teens and adolescents whose parents could afford the fees. It now
aspired to provide a larger, more effective after-school teen arts program,
with an ambitious sequential curriculum. Given Cooper Union’s
expertise in pre-college curricular innovation and tradition of tuitionfree
education the stage was set for a partnership.
A successful pilot cap after-school drawing class was implemented,
and that expanded to four twice-weekly after-school classes. Administrative
staff were hired to avoid overtaxing already overextended Cooper
and jcal staffs. An unused basement room in jcal was found, cleared,
and painted by jcal staff. Cooper undergraduates assembled sawhorses,
and procured hollow-core doors for use as work tables and new stools.
With this professional workspace, christened the cap Studio, the
partnership got underway. From 1999 to 2003, cap offered after-school
classes in drawing, sculpture, design, and architecture for the
communities surrounding the jcal.
The directors of Cooper’s Saturday Outreach Program had
anticipated programmatic change in the form of a gradual evolution
and articulation of a distinct site identity. They had not imagined that
a cadre of young people nurtured and trained by the sop network would
come together through cap and re-create the program in their own
image. The collaboration of three young Queens artists—Mary Valverde,
Antoine Touze, and Leslie Hewitt—resulted in an innovative summer
course that would become one of the cap/jcal’s strongest components.
Mary Valverde was raised in a traditional Catholic family by
Ecuadorian immigrant parents who believed in keeping girls close
to home. Before college she never went by herself to Jamaica, 20 minutes
away, or traveled the 30 minutes to Manhattan without being driven by
her father. Although she had applied and been accepted to the city’s two
art-oriented high schools, her father insisted she attend a Catholic high
school, where she was not able to pursue her interest in art. Having
graduated from high school without a portfolio, Mary scraped together
five drawings and was accepted at the Fashion Institute of Technology
in Manhattan; after transferring to the School of Visual Arts (sva) on
Manhattan’s East Side in 1996, she studied with Whitfield Lovell, a
graduate of Cooper’s sop and a Cooper alumnus, who had begun sva’s
Junior High Saturday Program. On his recommendation, Mary was
hired as an administrative coordinator for cap.
Antoine Touze grew up immersed in the vibrant energy of the
popular culture that suffuses Haiti, a country also saturated with
cap students gathered for a
critique of drawings from
observation at a brooklyn
museum of art african art
exhibition.
cap student carson coley (attended
2000, 2001, 2002) working on a drawing
project exploring the possibilities of
abstraction in the cap studio at the
jamaica center for arts & learning.