after school
after school, co-edited by Theodossis Issaias and Alyssa Velazquez. Photo by Riggleman Zachary.
after school
published by in otherwards, the imprint of Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture; co-produced with Carnegie Museum of Art
"after school" attends to the material, political, and social conditions that shape public education today. Bringing together architects, artists, educators, students, and activists, the publication studies the states and stakes of schooling across classrooms, corridors, itinerant sites, and cooperative experiments. Developed alongside the exhibition of the same name at Carnegie Museum of Art, and co-produced with in otherwards, the new imprint of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture, "after school" examines how public education has been built, organized, contested, and reworked across its buildings as social infrastructures.
Situated within an increasingly uncertain educational landscape in the United States—marked by decades of disinvestment and the erosion of civic and democratic institutions—the project turns toward Pittsburgh. Here, recent proposals for school closures and consolidations continue longer histories of displacement, segregation, and restructuring. Through essays, testimonies, lesson plans, and archival fragments, the publication traces the layered histories of public education and its infrastructures 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 materials observe cycles of learning, unlearning, and collective praxis across shifting policies, built environments, and forms of refusal and community care.
Drawings, archival photographs, and newly commissioned visual contributions accompany the texts, attentive to how education takes form in classrooms, streets, policies, and everyday practices. Structured in three parts—text book, counter index, and lesson plans—the publication adapts established pedagogical formats to consider how schooling is organized, experienced, and reworked across time. "after school" gestures toward the possibility of a school not yet here. 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, and designed by Corinne Ang as the first imprint of in otherwards.
Launch Events
Thursday, November 13, 2025
From 5–6:30 p.m. in the Carnegie Museum of Art Theater, architects, scholars, and archivists Toshiko Mori, Ayanna Jones, and James Hill discuss their work in "after school" and the ways in which spaces can shape knowledge in an uncertain educational landscape. From itinerant classrooms to cooperative experiments, they come together to imagine a school unbound. Following at 6:30 p.m. will be the introduction of the "after school" book, and celebrations will then commence in the Hall of Sculpture.
Tuesday, March 3, 2026
Please join the Architectural Association, London, UK, to celebrate the launch of after school internationally. They will host co-editor Theodossis Issaias on Tuesday, March 3, 2026.
More information
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Theodossis Issaias is an architect and educator. He serves as Curator of the Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art and Special Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. His research investigates architecture’s entanglement with human rights, conflict, and shelter, articulated in his Yale PhD, Architectures of the Humanitarian Front (2021). As co-founder of FATURA Collaborative, an architecture and research collective, Issaias develops work at the intersection of ecology and the domestic, attending to the shifting politics of territory.
Alyssa Velazquez is an assistant curator at Carnegie Museum of Art. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in S/He Speaks 2: Voices of Women, Trans & Nonbinary Folx, Burnaway, and AutoStraddle. Residences include Storyknife and as a Freshworks Artist at Kelly Strayhorn Theater. Velazquez was selected as a 2026 Center for Craft Curatorial Fellow, a 2024 Lambda Literary fellow, and was invited to join PlayPenn’s 2024–25 Playwrights Cohort.
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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; and Leah Wulfman with Jin Meisenberg.
Drawings by: Sharvi Kamal Shah and Nicholas Thies. -
in otherwards is the publishing imprint of Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture, directed by Tuliza Sindi. The imprint aims toward epistemic plurality, both foregrounding prominent thought and practice, as well as negated ones such as Indigenous, diasporic, and Global South perspectives. Through books, folios, and broadsheet formats, the imprint takes interest in critical explorations on how spatial vocabularies, technologies, materialities, and cosmologies shape the built environment, and how space, culture, technology, and power co-construct each other.
In this effort, publishing at in otherwards is treated as a form of worldmaking and unmaking, and a site for relationing expansive futures.
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Title: "after school"
Authors/Curators: Theodossis Issaias and Alyssa Velazquez
Designer: Corinne Ang
Publication Date: August 2025
Format: Softcover
ISBN: 978-088039-077-4
Distributor: D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers
Exhibition: Aug. 23, 2025–Jan. 11, 2026
Price: $30
Pages / Trim Size: 256
Funding: Drue Heinz Trust; Carnegie Museum of Art Exhibition Fund; The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art; The Heinz Endowments; RAD; Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; Jill Watson Endowment. -
Support for this project is provided by the Drue Heinz Trust; the Carnegie Museum of Art Exhibition Fund; The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art; The Heinz Endowments; the Allegheny Regional Asset District (RAD); the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Carnegie Mellon University’s Jill Watson Endowment for Innovation at the Intersection of the Arts.
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Imprint Director & Editor-in-Chief
Tuliza Sindi
Curator for Public Programs and Director of Publications, CMU School of Architecture
tsindi@andrew.cmu.edu"after school" Co-Editor
Theodossis Issaias
Curator, Heinz Architectural Center; Special Faculty, CMU School of Architecture
issaiast@carnegiemuseums.org