Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: The Arts and Everyday Life in New York with Julia Foulkes, July 15-19

Julia Foulkes, Instructor

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 15th to July 19th.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote about the “sidewalk ballet” on her street in the West Village while, uptown, the largest performing arts complex in the world arose amidst the rubble of a demolished neighborhood. Lincoln Center embalmed in marble this new attention to the arts—their prestige and inherited privilege. Backlash to the complex’s grandeur and cost prompted the mayor to create a municipal office on cultural policy that now commits more city money for the arts than the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. 

This fusion between New York and the arts is now taken for granted, but how and why did this occur? What do the arts mean to New York? Who benefits and who does not? Through reading, writing, and consultation of the library’s resources, we will investigate how the arts became rooted in the city’s infrastructure, economy, daily life, sense of place—and how that changed what it means to be a New Yorker. 

Julia Foulkes is on the faculty of the New School and is the author of A Place for Us: West Side Story and New York; To the City: Urban Photographs of the New Deal; Modern Bodies: Dance and American Modernism from Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey; and Realizing The New School: Lessons From the Past, with Mark Larrimore. She has curated two major exhibitions at the New York Public Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center: The Joffrey and Ballet in the U.S. (opening September 2024) and Voice of My City: Jerome Robbins and New York (2018–19). She is finishing a book on the rise of the arts in New York in the 20th century, which she worked on at the Cullman Center in 2021-2022.

APPLY HERE

The deadline to apply is Monday, April 29th.