Traditional study abroad experiences provide high-impact learning opportunities. Students leave familiar settings behind and gain knowledge through intensive cultural immersion. However studying abroad often requires significant investments of time and finances. Community colleges, an increasingly integral solution to affordable higher education, ideally allow flexibility for an individual to attend school while maintaining employment. Therefore, a typical community college student schedule leaves little to no room for a semester studying abroad. At Hostos Community College in the South Bronx, Media Design Professors Catherine Lewis and Sarah Sandman are reinventing the traditional study abroad experience to include more condensed, localized options for students and colleges facing the reality of today’s stressed economy. Starting in the summer of 2011, they launched the Hostos Design Lab, a local field study model designed to enhance their students’ urban community college experience.

Bureau For Open Culture at the Massachusetts Museum for Contemporary Art hosted the first Hostos Design Lab in conjunction with their exhibition, I Am Searching for Field Character. Student collaborators were challenged to investigate the question, "What is a cultural worker?" through video interviews with artists, choreographers, writers, organic farmers farmers, soap makers and saddlers in the Berkshire community. The final result was a multi-media exhibition at the museum and later brought back to the South Bronx’s Longwood Gallery. Characterized by new landscapes, targeted inquiry, community engagement and collaborative authorship, the Hostos Design Lab explores the Northeastern United States as a study abroad alternative.

In 2012, Hostos Design Lab traveled to rural New York to work with the art organization, The Wassaic Project. The students transformed a barn into a design studio and launched community book project exploring the question “What is a Gift Economy?”

Summer of 2013, Hostos Design Lab traveled to Averill Park, NY to work with the organization Arts, Letters & Numbers with their two professors, Jill Peterson and Sarah Sandman. Students worked side-by-side with students from Cooper Union, Rhode Island School of Design and the Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark in various creative workshops. The students' main project was a collaborative video expressing their visual interpretation of the term 'chora'. The video highlighted individual and group work, along with the student's documentation of the workshop's final performance. 

View a video draft on our blog. 

http://hostosdesignlab2013.tumblr.com/

Collaborators from Hostos Design Lab 2011, brought back their findings to the South Bronx’s Longwood Gallery.

Collaborators from Hostos Design Lab 2013, visited Thomas Hirschhorn's Gramsci Monument at the Forest Houses in the South Bronx to practice video skills. 

See more on our blog.

http://hostosdesignlab2013.tumblr.com/

Makin’ Paper was a residency project in 2011 with Kulture Klub Collaborative, a Minneappolis-based organization that engages art and artistic practice to provide enriching opportunities for youth experiencing homelessness and artists to grow individually and to transform community. Working with youth, we developed ‘plantable’ currency in response to current issues in the local community, such as the North Minneapolis tornado of 2011.