Ways of Seeing

For some, it’s the annual Brooklyn Bridge walk or the Alumni Basketball Game, for others, a festival like Holi, the spectacle of Halloween, or a visit to the Material Lab’s library or one of the many shows put on by Pratt Exhibitions in Brooklyn and Manhattan every year. Whatever that galvanizing moment may be in life as a Pratt student (or alum), here is a visual tour through just some of the experiences, storied and new, that bring the Pratt community together.

Alumni Basketball Game

A tradition with records going back to 1974, this annual basketball match-up between alumni athletes draws Pratt graduates from all over the US to play and celebrate their Cannoneer roots. The event, organized by Pratt Athletics and Alumni Engagement, has also seen standout teammates honored and brought a festive spirit to the air before a student Cannoneers game. Athletics alumni, stay tuned! More events are being planned for the year ahead.

Athletics

Speaking of the Cannoneers: Pratt’s athletics team has a long history on the field, court, and track—with around 180 student athletes currently competing in sports that include basketball, cross country, soccer, tennis, track and field, volleyball, and equestrian. In the latest move for the athletics program, Pratt was added as the eighth full-time member of the Atlantic East Conference, a member of NCAA Division III, this year. Fans can keep up with all things athletics on goprattgo.com.

Big Damn Prints

​​In 2006, Pratt Fine Arts launched Big Damn Prints, bringing Pratt students and faculty together for a day of large-scale printmaking, transforming the heart of the Brooklyn campus into a hub for collaborative art making. Participants work together in small groups as they collectively sketch and carve intricate designs, ink the woodblock surfaces, and stretch fabric to prepare for the printmaking process. Forget a printing press: a visiting steamroller is employed instead of traditional machinery. Read more.

Brooklyn Bridge Walk

The annual sunrise walk across the Brooklyn Bridge is more than an energizing start to one of the first days of the fall semester—it’s a rite of passage, an opportunity for camaraderie among first-year and transfer students against the picturesque backdrop of the New York City skyline. A highlight of Orientation Week, this gathering of students and administrators that begins on the Brooklyn campus provides an informal initiation to Clinton Hill’s neighboring areas, while new connections and a shared admiration for the city’s panorama, not to mention an abundance of photo ops, abound.

CBoard’s Alternative Spring Break

Students who stay in New York City during Pratt’s Spring Break have a week of local activities to dive into, organized by Student Involvement’s Community Engagement Board (CBoard). This year, the week started with a visit from the pups of New York Therapy Animals (below) and toy making for the organization Pillows for Paws. Students also came together for service-oriented projects that took them outdoors with PS 216’s Edible School Garden and the Lower East Side Ecology Center.

Cultural Highlights

The campus-wide initiative Cultural Highlights honors the richness of traditions, practices, values, and customs across the global community through programming curated by the Office of Student Involvement and the Center for Equity and Inclusion. With events around holidays and festivals like Holi, pictured here, the campus community comes together for celebration and cultural appreciation throughout the year.

Drag Show

Given Brooklyn’s lively drag scene, it’s no wonder that Pratt Institute’s annual drag show takes center stage during the Institute’s Pride Week celebrations. Hosted by the LGBTQ+ student group Queer Pratt (@queerpratt) since 2013, this event dazzles the audience with a showcase of artistic flair featuring students and guest drag performers. For Queer Pratt, Pride isn’t confined to a once-a-year occasion. Aimed at encouraging self-expression and creating a stronger community at Pratt, Queer Pratt’s year-round programming includes education, outreach, activities, meetings, and campus-wide events.

Earth Action Week

The Pratt Sustainability Center heads up this twice-yearly week of academic presentations, panel discussions, workshops, and hands-on activities to highlight ongoing sustainability efforts by students, faculty, and staff. “We’re celebrating the action that’s happening at Pratt, the work that’s being generated,” said Carolyn Shafer, director of the Pratt Sustainability Center, in a Pratt news story, “and also providing opportunities for people to feel empowered as individuals to make change.”

Exhibitions

Exhibitions have long been a fixture at Pratt, for the campus community and beyond. During the 2023–2024 academic year, Pratt’s public galleries organized some of their more ambitious and critically acclaimed shows to date. They ranged from cutting-edge downtown NYC fashion to meditative reflections on environmental destruction, and the gallery spaces hosted events from an experimental “drone” music concert to a Vogue-featured runway show. Read more for a look at those shows and a glimpse of what’s on for this year.

Foundation Expanded

Each spring, Myrtle Avenue becomes a bustling pop-up shop, runway, and outdoor gallery for first-year students to share their projects during Foundation Expanded, in collaboration with Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership and Pratt’s Foundation Department. The 2024 opening event included a performance by Pratt’s Aura dance crew (@auradancecrew).

Foundations Lab

Natural wonders abound in the Foundations Lab, where students can explore an expansive collection of rocks and minerals, skeletons and specimens, plants, and other objects in a free-form environment. The lab also hosts programs that bring artists, designers, scientists, and other innovators into conversation with the campus community.

Guest Artists and Innovators

The stages at Memorial Hall, Higgins Hall, and beyond have played host to inspiring artists, designers, and luminaries over the years, through Pratt’s numerous series and events organized by schools and departments, faculty, students, Pratt Presents, and more. Last academic year, visitors included John Wilson of HBO’s How To with John Wilson and show editor LJ Frezza (above), shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, chef Marcus Samuelsson, artist Sky Hopinka, and Pratt alumni costume designers Emilio Sosa and Paul Tazewell. (Learn about upcoming programs at pratt.edu/events.)

Halloween Costume Contest

Every October, the Pratt community immerses itself in Halloween celebrations across Pratt’s Brooklyn and Manhattan (PMC) campuses. Students gather for crafting sessions, film screenings, and the much-anticipated annual costume contest. As an extra treat, the West Village Halloween Parade waltzes by PMC, connecting Pratt’s academic haven and the vivacious downtown tradition. Pratt’s Halloween festivities aren’t just about celebrating the holiday; they infuse it with a distinct artistic fervor.

Horses on Campus

Equine models get their moment in the sun on Pratt’s Brooklyn campus at this much-anticipated annual event. A collaboration between the School of Art and Pratt Equestrian—one of Pratt’s varsity athletics teams (@prattequestrian)—Horses on Campus brings everyone outdoors and together for a day of drawing and horse-lover joy.

Material Lab

From textiles and ceramics to metals and polymers—more than 25,000 material samples make up the Material Lab’s collection, all available to check out for Pratt students, faculty, and staff. It began as a resource for the Interior Design Department, cataloging numerous finishes and surfaces, and is now a hub for fields across the Institute, with its numerous circulating specimens, plus special collections and a library of books and periodicals for on-site research, programming, and an annual awards competition.

Other Islands Book Fair

After years of Graduate Communications Design majors creating innovatively designed books for their thesis capstone projects, chair Gaia Hwang had an idea: hold a book fair on campus where students could present their work alongside members of the vibrant local small press and indie publishing community. In 2023, Other Islands Book Fair was born. The two-day spring extravaganza brings printed-matter lovers from across the city, hosting roughly 45 vendors, including art, design, and literary publishers like Draw Down Books and Ugly Duckling Presse, who this year hosted a bookmaking workshop for fair attendees. Among the Pratt community participants are alumni outfits such as Dream Labor Press and Fruit & Rot, run by adjunct professor Jean Brennan.

Poetics Lab

This past spring, Poetics Lab celebrated its 10th year as a beacon of transdisciplinary exploration at Pratt. Founded in 2014 by Professor Ira Livingston and Professor Jennifer Miller (Humanities and Media Studies), Professor Duncan Hamilton (Undergraduate Communications Design), and others, Poetics Lab began as a faculty initiative to encourage collaboration across fields. Today, Poetics Lab offers a class that embraces play as a creative process and also supports faculty and student projects. Over the years, hundreds of collaborative projects have come out of the class and Poetics Lab has also published seven books. The anniversary event, pictured here, brought the campus together for a celebration of that work—music and dance performances, readings of poetry and manifestos, collaborative drawings, tarot readings, and a showcase of books and zines.

Pratt Reef

North Hall holds one of the unexpected wonders of the Brooklyn campus: Pratt’s aquariums, known as Pratt Reef. Tended by Randy Donowitz, director of the Writing and Tutorial Center, this meditative space is home to a powder blue tang, clown fish, and an exceptionally rare Cuban fish, the Gramma dejongi. It’s also the hub for Pratt’s Reef Club, a student group that comes together twice a month around “all things aquatic.” Read more.

Pratt Shows

The annual celebration of graduating students’ work runs through every spring semester, with exhibitions across the Brooklyn and Manhattan campuses and beyond. This showcase includes gallery openings on Monday evenings with an abundance of art across mediums and forms; literary readings; film and animation screenings at Brooklyn standbys like BAM Rose Cinemas and Alamo Drafthouse; Pratt Shows: Fashion, the annual runway show that extends from a Pratt tradition dating back to 1899; InfoShow, the School of Information’s culminating event; and an immersion in architecture and design students’ work in the ARC at Pratt Shows: Design.

Research Open House

This annual spring event sheds light on the wide range of research happening at Pratt. For the past two years, Research Open House has been held at the Research Yard at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which brings Pratt’s research activities together in one space.

Student Design Marketplace

Students have an opportunity to share and sell their work at the annual Student Design Marketplace, a Student Government Association–sponsored annual event. This year’s offerings included prints, stickers, jewelry, knitwear, and more.

Textile Dye Garden

From seed to plant to pigment, the connection between creativity, community, and the earth threads through every activity in Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden (@prattdyegarden). Led by School of Design professors Gina Gregorio and Isa Rodrigues and maintained by students of the Dye Garden Crew, the garden welcomes the Pratt community and the public through various programs throughout the year that have included bundle-dyeing workshops, papermaking and poetry, the history and science of natural dyeing, and even a bring-your-own-bowl soup night for students. The garden also has roots in Pratt history, linking back to the Institute’s first educational garden, where students in the teacher-training program worked with children to care for a garden.

WPIR

A tradition steeped in the rebellious echoes of the 1960s college radio scene, WPIR (@wpirprattradio), Pratt’s radio station, has provided generations of Pratt students with a platform for expressing themselves through sound. Once broadcast at AM 600 from Willoughby Hall, WPIR has had its share of ebbs and rebounds over the years, its most recent reboot during the post-pandemic return to campus. Today, with a team of more than 25 students and faculty members, the station streams online throughout the week, featuring shows covering an eclectic array of genres and thought-provoking topics, from reggae to hyperpop, conversational podcasts to deep dives into architecture. Read more.

Do you have a favorite Pratt tradition? Tell us more—email prattfolio@pratt.edu.