Future Schools at National Academy of Design

Future Schools is a three-part project—an exhibition, a live performance series, and an evolving curriculum of workshops and talks—that enacts alternative models for art education at the National Academy of Design. Grounded in the Academy’s origins in 1825 as a self-organized, artist-founded school, the exhibition reactivates that legacy through contemporary voices exploring new ways of learning and imagining. 

The design transforms the gallery into an active pedagogical environment that is part working classroom, part symposium space for public dialogue, and part archive of past and present educational experiments. Bringing together artists, educators, and cultural visionaries, the project reimagines how art can teach, challenge, and transform the ways we learn together.

The exhibition design reconfigures the Academy’s three galleries into an interconnected learning environment that is linked visually and structurally by a continuous wooden grid suspended from the ceiling. Upon entrance, the first gallery has been designed as the reading room, the adjacent gallery reconfigured into a classroom, and the last as the forum. From this wooden grid hang all key architectural and functional elements of the exhibition. This modular system allows each space to be activated and rearranged by participants throughout the project.

Photos By Argenis Apolinario 

Status

Completed in February 2026

Program

Art Exhibition Design

Area

3,500 sf

Location

New York, NY

Reading Room - Visitors enter the exhibition through the Reading Room. An introductory panel and small library provide context for the project and invite visitors to browse materials related to experimental forms of education. The room centers on a long reading table accompanied by a suspended display unit of archival materials.

The wall dividing the first and second galleries is activated by a chalkboard drawing by artist Chloe Bass. Visual and pedagogical, the work foregrounds the dividing wall as a central element of the exhibition.

Classroom - The second gallery functions as the exhibition’s classroom, hosting a series of workshops and classes led by artists and educators. Eleven rotating desks and an art supply cabinet occupy the space, allowing the classroom to be configured in different ways. A video work by WAI Think Tank is projected onto the chalkboard. Once again, all functional elements of the classroom—including desks, projection equipment, and an art supply cabinet—are integrated into the wood ceiling grid system.

The art supply cabinet includes a built-in high stool designed for Loud-reading Sessions. *LOUDREADERS borrows its name from an alternative practice of education in the 20th Century created as tobacco workers engaged in the boring labor of rolling cigars hired one of their own who knew how to read, to read for them during the entire work-day. As the practice of loud-reading grew, the lectores (loud-readers) would become traveling performers with an international audience, creating networks of solidarity all around the Caribbean as well as a massive, shared and open-access oral library for workers who were denied other forms of formal education.

Forum - The final gallery serves as a lecture hall and forum. A large pivoting wall displays Zines by artist Christian Nyampeta on one side, and functions as a projection screen for talks and lectures when rotated. 

In the corner of the room, a cabinet stores stackable chairs for events, as well as a photocopy machine that allows visitors to reproduce and take home copies of Nyampeta’s zines. This gesture reinforces the exhibition’s emphasis on open access and the circulation of knowledge.

Through these three interconnected spaces, Future Schools unfolds as a living educational platform that brings artists, students, and visitors together to imagine alternative ways of learning, gathering and collaborating.

Team

Koray Duman, Vernice Riego, Angel Rodriguez, Vishesh Sahni