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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 Altos de Chavón Campus, 1981–1982, slides (photographic), Parsons School of Design Slide Collection, The New School Archives Digital Collections 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 The difference between Altos de Chavón and Parsons’s other localities piqued our curiosity Why 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 William Vázquez (photographer) and Armando Milani (designer), Altos de Chavón, 1994, poster, Parsons School of Design Poster Collection, The New School Archives Digital Collections 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 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 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 We engaged critically with letters from the David Levy records, adding our own thoughts, questions, and notes Altos de Chavón, 1981–1984, correspondence, David C Levy Records, The New School Archives Digital Collections 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 to make it a place for everyone?