community Connections
The Creative Center is proud to collaborate with community organizations and world-renowned cultural institutions alike.
“Museums can serve people living with cancer in concrete, practical ways, such as serving as a public forum to channel the experience of illness in a positive light through dialogue and creative exercises that revolve around works of art. Through my engagement with The Creative Center artists, I learned that the inner necessity to create and to articulate your responses and experiences can become most prescient when confronted with illness. It is my hope that the museum experience can inform the individuals' own creative impulse and create a unique experience.”
Margaret Krug
Former Creative Center Instructor and Senior Lecturer, The Whitney Museum of American Art. Published in "Still Life" by The Creative Center, Umbrage Editions, NYC, April 2007
The Creative Center participants and Vincent Tolentino Assistant Museum Educator for Partnership Programs on a private tour of The Frick Collection in 2019.
Work created by participant Laurie A. as part of Drawing Together with the Frick Collection interpreting details from Manet's "The Bullfight."
SU CASA
Notably the residency culminates in a public program – exhibits, readings, performances, open houses or other cultural interactions open to the surrounding community. The Creative Center has provided works in progress performances, gallery shows and receptions. For our 2020 culminating event, we were able to create a one-of-a-kind opportunity for seniors and community members to engage with the the art produced over the two month partnership program, Flowers Plus: Photographing Nature in the City, with Center on the Square. We hosted a public display of the final works from class projected outdoors across the façade of Center on the Square right across from Washington Square Park. The event included live music to score the photo presentation, and remarks from students and instructor Janis Lewin.
The Creative Center at University Settlement has been a recipient of many Su Casa grants from the programs inception as SPARC in 2012. Applying our best practices model in delivering sequential arts programs pairs exceptionally well with the program’s focus on community arts engagement as a tool to connect artists and organizations to senior centers across New York City. We have delivered programs for Su Casa residencies in a number of mediums in Brooklyn, Midtown, and The Lower East Side.
