About CUP

CUP takes two approaches to increasing meaningful civic engagement: youth education programs in which students work with Teaching Artists to investigate some aspect of how the city works and create final products that educate others about what they learned; and community education programs in which CUP collaborates with designers and advocates to produce tools, workshops, and publications that explain complex policies or processes for specific audiences.

All of CUP’s projects use design and art to improve civic engagement. Here are some other things you’ll find in all of our work:

Unique and unexpected collaborations. CUP is committed to bringing individuals from different fields together in creative dialogue. All CUP projects include CUP staff, artists or designers, community-based or advocacy organizations, and the people directly affected by the issues we address. CUP projects increase the capacity of our partners to advocate for social change, both through the products we create together and through our participatory design practices.

Visual communication. Every CUP project results in a piece of visual communication. CUP works with artists and designers to create everything from documentaries to posters to comic books to contraptions, all with a strong visual presence and a focus on making information accessible, enjoyable, and meaningful. CUP projects have been featured in art museums, design magazines, film festivals, and other venues, including the Venice Biennale and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum’s Design Triennial; publications like Print, Good, and The New York Times; and venues from Exit Art to the New Museum for Contemporary Art.

Products that are useful in the real world. CUP projects produce visual tools designed to be used by constituencies that can most benefit from the information. These audiences include community organizations, who use the products in their own organizing efforts; educators, who use the products in their classrooms; and other constituencies addressed in particular projects, such as New York City street vendors or residents of public housing. 

A focus on social justice. While CUP aims to foster greater and better civic participation across the board, our projects emphasize engagement of historically underrepresented communities. Our youth education programs are all based within the New York City public school system, and our community education programs help communities access the information they need to effectively advocate for themselves and participate in decision-making that impacts their lives.

Fun and funny. CUP is serious about civic engagement, but we think it works better when it’s fun. We find these topics inherently interesting but we know they can often be intimidating. We think it’s easier for people to engage with projects that capture their imaginations, make them laugh, or give them a chance to play.

CUP projects work through a hub and spoke model that places our staff at the center of a large network of collaborators from numerous disciplines. Our staff run the organization from day to day and initiate and manage our projects. The spokes are individual project teams, made up of artists, designers, educators, activists, and researchers, who collaborate on the individual projects.

CUP was founded in 1997 by Damon Rich with co-founders Jason Anderson, AJ Blandford, Josh Breitbart, Stella Bugbee, Sarah Dadush, Althea Wasow, and Rosten Woo, who drew on their backgrounds in art, architecture, history, public policy and political theory, and graphic design to collaborate on projects investigating how the city works. They made publications, videos, and exhibits on topics like urban renewal, housing subsidies, and the history of public housing. Over time, they brought more and more collaborators, from more varied backgrounds, into their projects.

In 2001, CUP organized Building Codes, an exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture on the 100th anniversary of New York City’s Tenement House Act that used multiple methods to investigate and represent the politics of urban development. The next year, CUP conducted its first Urban Investigation project, Garbage Problems, where CUP collaborated with students to look into waste management and then create posters, models, and a video about what we learned.

In 2002, CUP received its 501(c)(3) status, and Damon Rich and Rosten Woo became its first full-time staff in 2004.

That same year, CUP began to develop some of the partnerships that have become core to our practices. That year, CUP began to hire project-based teaching artists, expanding our circle of collaborators and spreading our impact. That year, CUP also partnered with a community-based organization for the first time, Public Housing Residents of the Lower East Side (PHROLES), to create Public Housing Television, a visual tool for popular education and organizing for residents of public housing in New York City. This was one of CUP’s first Technical Assistance projects.

CUP began to create more structured collaborative frameworks for advocacy organizations, designers, and CUP staff in 2007 with the introduction of Making Policy Public.

Over the years, CUP has worked to take the core methods developed in projects like the Building Codes exhibit—stakeholder interviews; collaborations with students, organizers, advocates, educators, and visual artists; and the use of visuals to break down and communicate complex policy and planning issues — and developed a series of programs that meet specific community needs. Though we don’t make exhibits any more, we continue to use print, video, and other media to create visually-based projects that help communities all over New York City (and beyond) to understand and be a part of the decision-making that shapes their communities.