Our culture’s ideas about what school is, can be or should be are always changing. A new Carnegie Museum of Art exhibit explores how such change has played out, both in Pittsburgh and around the world.
The show “after school” combines new commissioned art installations with archival material from the Pittsburgh Public Schools over the past century or more, all on display in the galleries of the Heinz Architectural Center.
The Center’s Theo Issaias said he and his co-curator, the museum’s Alyssa Velasquez, wanted to tackle “the very contradictions of school. A school as a place of dreaming, but also as a place of assimilation. A school as a place of contesting and fighting for rights, but a place where many times oppression occurs.” They developed the Pittsburgh-centric part in collaboration with community members who contributed their own stories and perspectives.
‘Unruly behavior’
As befits an architectural center, some of the exhibit’s commissions suggest ways the design of physical school spaces might improve learning. The multimedia display “Cross-Border Public Spaces That Educate,” by Estudio Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, documents a University of California San Diego project to foster “reciprocal learning” across the U.S.-Mexico border in school spaces that incorporate agriculture.
Toshiko Mori’s scale model of a school and community center in Senegal.
In another gallery sits a large scale model of a combination school and community center with majestically curving thatched walls and a partially open-air roof, created by New York City-based architect Toshiko Mori in collaboration with residents of a village in Senegal.
And with “Lots of Dots,” Brooklyn-based artist Gabo Camnitzer offers a twist on the grid-like carpets school kids are often instructed to sit on. As overhead lights change color, so do the big circles on the grids, subverting the rigid order the carpet design suggests.
“A red dot can never stay a red dot if it has a purple light shining on it,” says co-curator Alyssa Velasquez. “And so it’s meant to expand movement and play, and break down more of these modernist structures of learning spaces.”
“He encourages unruly behavior, which we really like,” said Issaias.
Other installations include work by Vicky Achnani, Ana Serrano, Leah Wulfman, Lala Montoya, Danielle Dean, Pittsburgh’s Sankofa Village Community Garden and Farm, Soul Fire Farm, Crystal Clarity and Naima Penniman.
‘The dream urban high school’
About half of “after school” is devoted to a curated look at the history of public schools in Pittsburgh, mostly from the 1910s through the ’90s. It’s a story both hopeful and tumultuous.
“Schools are living organisms, in a way,” said Issaias. “They open, they are named they are expanded, they are facing disinvestment and perhaps consolidations.”
A visitor views one of the vitrines on local public schools in “after school.”
Among the schools featured here, it’s perhaps Schenley High School that best traces this arc.
When it opened in 1916, Schenley showcased progressive values and the high hopes civic officials placed in public education. The massive neo-classical landmark structure with its distinctive three-sided footprint sat along Centre Avenue, in Oakland. The school — racially integrated from the first — was designed as a community center, complete with auditorium, gymnasium, swimming pool, science labs and more, all open to the public as well as to students. It hosted adult night classes from the ’20s into the ’70s, in everything from woodworking to English as a second language.
Schenley graduates include Andy Warhol, pro wrestler Bruno Sammartino, Broadway star Vivian Reed and jazz great George Benson, and the school was beloved by generations of alums, including James Hill, a lifelong Pittsburgher and one of the many community members who helped collect materials for the exhibit or contributed oral histories to it.
Most of Hill’s family were Schenley Spartans, and his uncle coached track there for decades.
“Everybody says this about their school — it was the best one,” he said with a laugh, while touring the exhibit. “But it really was, you know. It was by far the most architecturally significant and prominent Pittsburgh public school.”
“This was the dream urban high school,” added Hill, who’s now manager of government affairs and district initiatives for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.
But Hill’s freshman year, 2007-2008, was Schenley’s last as a school building. In a move that generated outrage in the community, the Pittsburgh Public Schools board decided that the building needed renovations the district couldn’t afford and closed it. A few years later, the board voted to sell the building to a developer of luxury apartment buildings, which Schenley remains today.
Displays in glass cases and on the walls represent 9 other Pittsburgh schools with blueprints, elevation drawings, photos, vintage yearbooks and more.
It wasn’t just high schools whose architecture suggested how much Pittsburgh leaders of the ’20s and ’30s valued educational facilities. Even grade schools like Burgwin and Mifflin were lovingly designed, with features like community-accessible pools and gardens, in some cases with funding from the federal Depression-era Works Progress Administration.
A vitrine in “after school” holds artifacts from Schenley High School.
But starting in the 1950s, the exhibition documents how ambitions for schools shrank along with the tax base even as activists fought against racial segregation and for more equitable education.
“Segregation Hurts White Students Too” says a protest sign held by a Black woman in one news photo from 1967 taken by famed photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris. “We want our small children to remain close to home,” reads a sign in an image of a protest against school consolidation.
The struggle continues
The exhibit documents other fascinating bits of local educational history.
There’s the now half-forgotten “great high schools plan” of the ’60s, which would have funneled all the city’s high schoolers to five huge new campuses. Copies of the PPS publication “The News.” The Urban league’s Manchester Street Academy, a grassroots initiative for underserved Black students. Blueprints for the North Side’s Martin Luther King Elementary School, which still operates as Pittsburgh King PreK-8, though its original “open classroom” design fell by the wayside. The 1992 mock funeral — complete with casket and hearse — held by an advocacy group for Black students to protest district leadership.
The fight for equal education is far from over. One eventual outcome of that early-’90s battle was the formation of the district’s Equity Advisory Panel, which monitors, advises and reports on the district’s progress.
The Equity Advisory Panel still exists, and was among the parties “after school” curators met with in developing the show.
“We perceive it as one continuing struggle,” Issaias said.
Oral histories gathered by the exhibit’s organizers will be among the materials included in the show’s companion book, set for launch at a Nov. 13 event.