Posts from Aguilar Library

Yoko, a former student from Japan, stopped by the Tompkins Square Library's Center for Reading and Writing to say hello.  I took the opportunity to ask her a few questions.    

Last week, students from the Seward Park Library's Center for Reading and Writing, the Library's free adult literacy program, took a field trip to the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building to see the exhibit, Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

As the group trundled up the library steps, one student, a lifelong New Yorker, remarked, "It's funny, I pass by here all the time. But this is the first time I'm going inside."

Better than vanilla ice cream! That’s what one student said in her reading at the Aguilar Center for Reading and Writing Learning Celebration on Thursday, December 8th. The student read her story about things she was thankful for—and the Aguilar CRW was right up there, better than vanilla ice cream. Other students shared their emotions about being a single parent and the responsibilities of bringing up a child without any help; about a dream finding $1 million dollars in a Swiss bank account; and even a story about fly fishing!

On October 26, 2010, adult literacy students and their volunteer tutors from the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island gathered at the Bronx Library Center for the second annual Storylines Project celebration. The Storylines Project brings together adult literacy students from the New York Public Library's Centers for Reading and Writing, a free program for adults to learn to read and write, with a published author, for a night that recognizes and celebrates the writing of both, and the unifying power of story. 

The NYPL's Centers for Reading and Writing have served thousands of New Yorkers over the years - making some adults genuinely literate for the first time in their lives and improving literacy skills for many others.

In every case, a volunteer did the "heavy lifting."

Harlem and Aguilar CRW students gathered at the Zora Neale Hurston Room of the Harlem Library on Friday May 28 for their debut as budding photographers of the CRWs of the NYPL. Students browsed the exhibit before guests arrived and were thrilled to see their photos mounted on the exhibit wall of the immense community room.

Students in the CRW Photography Workshop brought in objects which held personal significance for them. We spent some time writing about these objects and then went into the garden to take some portraits of each other posed with our special objects.

Students in the CRW Photography workshop browsed the Groana Melendez Family Work Series of portraits photographed in the Dominican Republic and in New York.  The exhibit is on the Mezannine of the Aguilar Library and can be seen there until September 7, 2010.  It is presented by En Foco's Touring Gallery which features presentations by emerging photographers in community spaces throughout New York City. En Foco's mission is to support the creation of work by photographers of diverse cultures, primarily US residents of Latino, African and Asian heritage, and makes their work visible to the art world and accessible to under-serviced communities.

This past Friday, the group shared their dreams in front of the class. They shared dreams that they had during sleep, as well as those that they hope to achieve.

What a portrait can tell us?
by Judith Aisen

Billy said that portraits “portray” things about people and Keith said they give you a little history.  We shared written “portraits” of friends and relatives but some of our liveliest conversations were inspired by a film about the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who spoke about working quietly, like a cat, to capture people in their own habitat.  We talked about HC-B trying to, “put the camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.”