Our Stories: An Archive of Now

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Our Stories: An Archive of Now

We are living through extraordinary times, filled with hopes, challenges, and the potential for insight. Each of us have experienced the unexpected during the pandemic. We all have stories, from attending class from your parent’s kitchen to producing face shields on the fabrication lab’s 3D printers. The Cooper Union community has an incredible history, filled with stories of social transformation; we also have a long and remarkable legacy of producing things—from recyclable refugee shelters to graffiti—that express a wide range of lived experiences. We want future generations to know how the Cooper community responded to this moment and to learn from our insights and experiences.

This is an open invitation to share anything you’ve made that expresses your experience during this time. These could take any form—a drawing, a photograph, a film, a poem, a story, a song, a constructed artifact—any work that expresses some aspect of your lived experience in the last two years.

We will collect these artifacts into an archive of this time, to be housed in The Cooper Union Archive, as a resource for future generations to explore the material of our stories and gain insights into our experience, as a community, in these changing times.

These items can be conveyed to The Cooper Union Archive using your preferred method:

Email: archives@cooper.edu

Mail: Cooper Union Library, c/o Mary Mann, Archives Librarian, 7 East 7th Street, New York, NY 10003

In person: Come on into the library, on the first floor of the Foundation Building — we'd be delighted to see you!

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.