Post Masters
Excerpted from The Glass House and Post Masters.
Deborah Berke and artist Titus Kaphar were in conversation at The Glass House in New Canaan, CT talking about art, architecture, community, and urban transformation. Berke has long collaborated with artists and has designed numerous galleries, art schools, and studios. She and Kaphar are presently collaborating on the flagship building for Postmasters, a new artistic incubator that will provide studio space, mentorship, professional development, and training in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut.
The intersection of art, design, historic, industrial, local and academic is a rich alchemy that transforms communities by inclusion, collaboration, mentorship, and support.
The Post Masters' partners include:
- RISC Foundation
- Yale University Art Gallery
- Ford Foundation
- Deborah Berke Partners
- Dwight Hall
- United Way
- ConnCat
- Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
- Creative Capital
Deborah Berke is the founder of Deborah Berke Partners and the dean of the Yale School of Architecture, where she has been a professor since 1987. Berke is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a James Howell Foundation board member, and she serves on the Yaddo Board of Directors. Over the past two decades, she has also served as trustee and vice president of desigNYC, a trustee and vice president of the Urban Design Forum, founding trustee of New York City’s Design Trust for Public Space, trustee of the National Building Museum, chair of the Board of Advisors for the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, trustee of the Brearley School, and a vice president of the AIA New York Chapter. Her firm is the recipient of the National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
Titus Kaphar is the founder of Postmasters. He received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and is a distinguished recipient of the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Savannah College of Art and Design, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Seattle Art Museum. His work is included in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kaphar has also been awarded the 2015 Creative Capital Fellowship and the 2016 Artist as Activist Rauschenberg Foundation Fellowship.