Open Educational Resources
Document Type
Other
Publication Date
Winter 2025
Abstract
The City University of New York (CUNY) hosts public art at many of its colleges. The practice of funding public art through the CUNY Construction Fund and the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York (DASNY) began after a 1966 New York State Law created a financing and construction partnership between the two entities.
As these collections of museum-quality contemporary art on CUNY campuses age and increase in value, how can care and conservation be ensured? Conceived in response to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the projected 11% growth of employment for archivists, curators, museum technicians, and conservators, this Research in the Classroom (RIC) project for York’s FA 397 Contemporary Art – a Writing Intensive seminar in Art History that serves Studio Art and Art History majors – involves undergraduate students in related research.
This project uses a case study approach, archive building, conservation practice and curatorial inquiry as methods in sharing practice-based research in art history in the classroom. The case study approach focuses on an exemplary situation: the York College DASNY collection of specially designed public art commissions created for the college’s campus architecture and grounds in South Jamaica, Queens, between 1978 and 1988. Archive-building contributes to efforts of the Principal Investigator (PI) to build an archive about York’s public art with papers from DASNY, various York and CUNY offices, and local and national archives. Conservation practice engages students in the creation of condition reports, conservation treatment proposals and preventative protocols. Curatorial research involves a display in the York College Library to share print periodicals relevant to featured artists and facsimiled archival materials from the York College Archives and Special Collections. Lastly, it engages students in brainstorming the use of York’s public art for wayfinding on campus and Open House tours, and conducting oral history interviews to archive their own experiences in the course.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
CUNY OER Funding
CUNY OER Initiative
Included in
Art and Materials Conservation Commons, Art Practice Commons, Classical Archaeology and Art History Commons, Fine Arts Commons
Comments
All content in the downloadable PDF is under CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) license. For attribution, use the following credit line:
Emily Verla Bovino, Caring for Public Art on Campus: A Case Study in Archives, Conservation and Curation for Public Art at the City University of New York at York College in South Jamaica, Queens. 2025 CUNY Research in the Classroom Grant Project, The City University of New York, New York. Open Educational Resources, 2025.