after school Exhibition Publication

Heinz Architectural Center Aug. 23, 2025–Jan. 11, 2026

Schools are contradictory places. They are where students are assessed, sorted, and disciplined, and where histories are censored. Yet they are also sites of play and discovery, of solidarity and collective care, where rights have been fought for and standards challenged. after school brings together architects, artists, educators, students, and activists to study the states and stakes of public education. Developed alongside the exhibition of the same name at Carnegie Museum of Art, the publication follows classrooms, corridors, itinerant sites, and cooperative experiments to consider how public education has been shaped, organized, and contested across its buildings as social infrastructures.

Situated within an increasingly uncertain educational landscape in the United States—the culmination of decades of disinvestment and erosion of civic and democratic institutions—after school turns toward Pittsburgh. Here, recent proposals for school closures and consolidations continue longer histories of displacement, segregation, and restructuring. In dialogue with contemporary works, the contributions trace the layered histories of public education in the region—from the city’s first public high school and New Deal–era programs to cooperative school gardens and Black-led Street Academies of the 1970s. These fragments observe cycles of learning, unlearning, and collective praxis across shifting policies, built infrastructures, and forms of refusal and community care.

Drawings, archival photographs, and newly commissioned visual contributions accompany essays, conversations, and case studies attentive to how education takes form in classrooms, streets, policies, and everyday practices. after school attends to the material, political, and social conditions that shape public education today—and gestures toward the possibility of a school not yet here. The publication is structured in three parts—text book, counter index, and lesson plans—which adapt established pedagogical formats to consider how schooling is organized, experienced, and reworked across time.

after school is published on the occasion of the exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Art.
The exhibition and book are curated and edited by Theodossis Issaias, curator, Heinz Architectural Center, and Alyssa Velazquez, assistant curator, with McKenzie Stupica, curatorial fellow. Designed by Corinne Ang, the publication is co-produced by Carnegie Museum of Art and in otherwards, the imprint of Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture.

Contributors
Essays by: Ujju Aggarwal, Sarosh Anklesaria, Rachel Delphia, Theodossis Issaias, Laura Nelson, Leigh Patel, David Serlin, and Alyssa Velazquez.
Conversations with: Miguel Braceli with Stefan Gruber; Sister IAsia Thomas with Wanda Henderson, Regina Holley, Tamanika Howze, Anthony Mitchell, James Stewart, and William Thompkins (Equity Advisory Panel); and Sala Udin with Dana Bishop-Root.
Testimonies from: Martin Chetlin, Paula & Jolene Elder, Jillian Forstadt, Noah Fritsch, James Hill, Ayanna Jones, Lynn Kawaratani, Justin Laing, Lajja Mistry, and Pete Vitti.
Lesson plans by: Vicky Achnani; Ayanna Jones & Sankofa Village Community Garden and Farms; Gabo Camnitzer; Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman; Danielle Dean; Toshiko Mori; Ana Serrano; Soul Fire Farm (Lala Montoya, Naima Penniman, and Crystal Clarity); and Leah Wulfman with Jin Meisenberg.
Drawings by: Sharvi Kamal Shah and Nicholas Thies.