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Altos de Chavón Campus, 1981–1982, slides photographic, Parsons School of Design Slide Collection, The New School Archives Digital Collections... Underscoring our questions about Pars

Is Parsons a place for everyone?

Exploring the past, present, and future of inclusivity at Parsons through the medium of letters

For Curating Public Memory, Spring 2021

by Amanda Forment, Sophie Maize, and Lucas Vaqueiro

In 1981, Parsons School of Design forged

a partnership with the Altos de Chavón

Foundation to create a new design school

in the Dominican Republic Altos de

Chavón started as an endeavor by the

American millionaire Charles Bluhdorn

to give back to the Dominican people

by making the country a center for the

integration of art and design in the

Americas Parsons played a fundamental

role in designing the program, selecting

faculty, and participating in all

aspects of planning for this newborn

design school

Chavón had its own struggles:

maintaining faculty was hard, students did not have enough financial support

to continue their studies in the USA, and at times the school’s image was reduced to its “exotic” elements

By contrast, Parsons fulfilled its international ambitions through other endeavors in the same period Along with the main campus in New York City, the school was involved with the

longstanding Paris ateliers, as well as

a more recent partnership with Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California These connections established Parsons’s presence in the world’s major centers

of art, as was advertised in yearly catalogs promoting the built-in choice

of changing campus

Altos de Chavón Campus, 1981–1982, slides

(photographic), Parsons School of Design Slide

Collection, The New School Archives Digital

Collections.

The difference between Altos de Chavón

and Parsons’s other localities piqued

our curiosity Why do so few Parsons

students know about Altos de Chavón,

whereas Parsons’s relationship with

Paris and Los Angeles was so widely

advertised? Underscoring our questions

about Parsons’s self-promotion is a

polemic statement made by Executive Dean

David Levy in the 1985 Parsons catalog:

“Parsons is not a place for everyone.”

With this project, we set out to examine

Parsons’s relationship to Altos de

Chavón and to situate this relationship

within a larger conversation about

Parsons’s inclusivity or lack thereof

“Parsons is not a place for

everyone.”

—David Levy, 1985

We are presenting a community-based,

interactive art project using letters as

a medium of interaction and intervention

with the past, present, and future

of Parsons Our project is two-fold

First, it looks at the correspondence

and other institutional documents of

David Levy and the Boards of Overseers

and Trustees, amongst other school

administrators on the topic of Altos de

Chavón during the 1980s and ’90s These

letters, which focused on the planning,

opening, and funding of Chavón shed

light on the ways in which Levy, and

by extension Parsons, approached their

relationship to the school Struck by

the ways in which the Dominican Republic

was exoticized and viewed within the

context of Parsons’s reputation, we

wanted to interrogate these documents

further We annotated, intervened, and

created a dialogue with these newly

available primary sources as a way of

further engaging with this aspect of our

school’s history Janet Amendola (illustrator) and Cipe Pineles

Golden (designer), Parsons: New York, Los

Angeles, Paris, ca 1979, poster, Parsons School

of Design Poster Collection, The New School Archives Digital Collections.

Drawing from the work of Michel

Foucault and Jacques Derrida, we are

interested in using archival materials,

specifically letters, as a starting

point for a creative and speculative

process Foucault, in The Archaeology

of Knowledge, considers archives as

metaphors He does not consider them

merely physical spaces with sets of

documents made available to the public,

through which institutions record

and preserve discourses they wish to

remember For Foucault, archives are

“systems of discursivity” (Foucault, The

Archeology of Knowledge, 128-129) The

archive, as such, constitutes a complex

system of relations that controls,

orders, and validates knowledge In

this way, archives can create and order

knowledge and power In our project,

we want to understand the “system of

discursivity” that surrounds the New

School Archives and the letters that we

found within

Jacques Derrida also refers to ideas

of power in the archives in his seminal

Archive Fever For Derrida, a key source

of power in the archive is those who control it and work within it In his words, “there is no political power without control of the archive, if not

of memory Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.” (Derrida,

Archive Fever, 4) Derrida states that

archives are not simply repositories

of facts, but sites, where power, meaning, and identity can be disputed and established Through our project,

we hope to democratize, discuss, and challenge the discourses prevalent within these letters

Osvaldo Yi (designer), Altos de Chavón: 1er

Seminario de Artesanias Dominicanas, 1982,

poster, Parsons School of Design Poster

Collection, The New School Archives Digital

Collections.

William Vázquez (photographer) and Armando

Milani (designer), Altos de Chavón, 1994, poster,

Parsons School of Design Poster Collection, The New School Archives Digital Collections.

Secondly, our project strives to invite

members of the community to submit their

own letters following the prompt “Is

Parsons a place for everyone?” borrowed

from David Levy’s provocative statement

In our ongoing search to understand the

scope of the Parsons community, we asked

participants if they consider Parsons

to be an inclusive institution and why

or why not, allowing them to elaborate

on their answer and share a possible

solution As we received the diverse

texts, we reformatted them in a unified

and standardized way, addressing each

of them to Dr Rachel Schreiber, the

current Executive Dean of Parsons

By utilizing the form of the letter, we

place the responses from the community

within the context of the archival

letters, extending the historical

dialogue of Parsons to engage with the

present We strive to create a direct

conversation between Levy’s documents

in the New School Archives and the

contemporary letters created by members

of the Parsons community, which we

hope will illuminate aspects of the

University often rendered invisible

Letter interventions

Altos de Chavón, 1981–1984, correspondence, David C Levy Records, The New School Archives Digital Collections.

We engaged critically with letters from

the David Levy records, adding our own

thoughts, questions, and notes

Altos de Chavón, 1982–1996, correspondence, Charles S Olton Records, The New School Archives Digital Collections.

Community letters

We asked members of the Parsons

community to respond to the following prompt:

Do you consider Parsons to be a place for everyone? (Yes/no/maybe)

Why?

What is one thing Parsons can do to make

it a place for everyone?