After school begins with the first bell. It brings together architects, artists, and educators to study the state and stakes of public education. Through spatial propositions, installations, alternative playgrounds, and curricular proposals, the participants consider architectural, pedagogical, and representational structures that shape how knowledge is created, shared, taught, or withheld. From itinerant classrooms to cooperative experiments, the archival material and contemporary works in the exhibition explore ways of learning otherwise, coming together to imagine a school unbound.

After school tends to the contradictions of schools, where students are assessed, sorted, and disciplined; where prevailing norms are enforced and histories redacted. And yet schools are also spaces of play, discovery, and collective care, where rights have been fought for and standards contested. Amid that tension, the exhibition considers how schools not only reflect the world around them but also shape the life of streets, neighborhoods, and cities.

Situated within an increasingly uncertain educational landscape in the US—the culmination of decades of disinvestment and erosion of civic and democratic institutions—After school turns toward Pittsburgh. Here recent proposals for school closures and consolidations carry on existing processes of displacement, segregation, and restructuring. In dialogue with contemporary works, the exhibition presents case studies that trace the layered histories of public education 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 fragments document cycles of learning, unlearning, and collective praxis across shifting policies, built infrastructures, and forms of refusal and community care.

After school grows over time—through activations, open workshops, and public convenings. With resident educators, neighbors, and visitors, the museum extends beyond the gallery and the classroom, inviting ways of studying together for a school not yet here.

(After school is curated by Theodossis Issaias, curator at Heinz Architectural Center, and Alyssa Velazquez, assistant curator, with McKenzie Stupica, curatorial fellow)