Design, Community & Public Exhibition
An ongoing initiative connecting Pratt Associate Degree students with Blick Art Materials through public exhibitions, community engagement, and professional-facing design experiences.
Developed and directed by John Battista De Santis
View Project PDF → | Creativity in the Neighborhood → | Summer in the City →
Opportunities Beyond the Classroom
The Pratt × Blick initiative was developed to create opportunities for Pratt Associate Degree students beyond the limits of an individual course or classroom. Through an ongoing relationship with Blick Art Materials on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn, student work moves into a highly visible public setting and engages audiences in the surrounding community.
Like the 14th Street Creative Corridor, the initiative uses real places and public audiences to extend design education beyond the classroom. Rather than functioning as a single exhibition, Pratt × Blick provides an evolving platform for student work, public presentation and community engagement. It creates a bridge between design education, a professional creative partner and a real public audience.
Creativity in the Neighborhood: Clinton Hill
The Beginning of the Collaboration
The initiative began with Creativity in the Neighborhood: Clinton Hill, establishing a connection between Pratt students, Blick Art Materials and the neighborhood surrounding the Pratt campus.
The project placed student work into a public context and demonstrated how an external partnership could extend design education beyond the classroom. Exhibition became part of the experience—requiring students to consider audience, presentation, scale and the relationship between their individual work and a larger public environment.
Summer in the City
Expanding the Exhibition Program
Summer in the City continued and expanded the Pratt × Blick relationship, building on the first Clinton Hill exhibition and establishing the collaboration as an ongoing initiative rather than a one-time event.
Successive exhibitions create new opportunities for student work to reach audiences outside Pratt while strengthening the relationship between the Associate Degree programs, Blick and the surrounding community. Each project becomes a foundation for what can happen next.
Extending Opportunities Across AOS
The initiative provides a structure that can extend beyond a single class. As course offerings and enrollment change from semester to semester, Pratt × Blick creates another way to build meaningful design experiences and invite broader participation across the Associate Degree programs.
Students gain opportunities to produce original work, exhibit publicly, build portfolio material, engage with a professional creative partner and experience their work in front of an audience beyond the classroom.
An Ongoing Platform
The value of Pratt × Blick is its continuity. The partnership can support new themes, different courses, collaborative projects and wider student participation without having to begin again each semester.
In this way, the initiative functions as an expandable educational platform—connecting coursework with public visibility while creating additional opportunities for students across the program.
Why Public Exhibition Matters
The exhibitions give students a chance to see their work outside the classroom and in front of a real audience. They also connect Pratt Manhattan AOS with Blick and the surrounding neighborhood.
For Blick, the exhibitions bring student work and new creative activity into the store. For the community, they offer a chance to see what Pratt students are making.
For our students, they create another place to show their work, build their portfolios and take part in something beyond a class assignment.
That is really what Pratt × Blick is about—creating more opportunities for students while building a stronger connection between Pratt, Blick and the community.
Explore Pratt × Blick
View Project PDF → | Creativity in the Neighborhood → | Summer in the City →