art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

70 art / vision / voice
The idea was to make the length and breadth of New York City’s
cultural landscape the class’s workshop. The students were exposed to
various mediums: drawing, painting, and 3D installation. The use of
sketchbooks and written journals was a central focus. In these, students
documented their travels across the city, as well as their personal,
interior journeys in learning. Visits to museums and cultural sites
illustrated the application of classroom concepts by providing larger
cultural/historical frameworks. Visits to the studios of professional
artists/role models revealed individual strategies and life styles within
the creative realm of art making.
Despite the program’s success, after four years, the relationship
between Cooper Union and jcal would founder in organizational conflict
between the non-hierarchical, street-level goals of the community-focused
cap leaders and the turf-oriented bureaucratic layers of the institutional
partners. Despite the successes of the cap and its Summer Sessions,
bureaucratic tension made it increasingly difficult to get approvals and
negotiate between two different institutional structures. cap staff felt
they were not fully respected by college administrators, and vice versa.
In the last year of cap, the summer program was eliminated altogether.
And Cooper has, for the time being, retreated from off-site projects.
In addition to bureaucratic lessons learned, there were personal lessons
as well. The sum of these lessons, both positive and negative, offers
a concrete legacy.
cap students, led by co-instructor
antoine touze (left), on a sketchbook
journey to the brooklyn bridge.