Written by Camille Levy A’25
Photos by Clyde Nicols A’24
Cooper Radio Collective, also known as CRC merges and fosters the various interests, practices, and perspectives of all students at The Cooper Union within its development and live broadcast through radio.cooper.edu.
Founded in 2022 by SOA student Camille Levy (A’25), CRC features 25-30 student and faculty hosts per semester, broadcasting Monday through Friday during the academic year. Members of the collective include students from all three schools, including faculty members as well as graduate students. You can tune into the website, radio.cooper.edu at any time to see the weekly schedule. Tune in between 6pm-12am to hear class-integrated projects, interviews with alum, reports and discussions about the air-quality index, Cooper lore, live performances and more. With support from faculty Lucy Raven and Zach Poff, and partnership with Julia Kim (A’25), who created the CRC website, Levy began a campaign for funding and a space for its operations. Levy and Kim both agreed that it was urgent Cooper start building an alternative platform for building and facilitating community on campus. After establishing CRC as an official student organization, Levy, Kim, alongside other student collaborators began conceptualizing the mechanics of the collective and its place within the school community. The Collective began broadcasting in the Spring of 2023.
In the last two years, CRC has flourished exponentially within the Cooper community through curricula, lecture series, exhibitions, live events, in media and archives, and within its staff. For the last two years, Professor Lucy Raven has invited her freshman 4DD class to complete their final projects over the radio, entitled Lucy Raven’s 4DD takeover. In March of 2023, CRC hosted CRC Circus which was a free event hosted at Sixth Street Community Center that offered a space for performances by students within the Cooper community. The event was funded by donors via GoFundMe, and there were about 80 attendees throughout the night, 80 percent being students, staff, and faculty from Cooper.
More recently CRC collaborated with the CU Library in co-curating a show alongside librarian Mackenzie Williams, held in the library atrium that discussed the history of sound at Cooper. The exhibition included documents and ephemera that displayed the development of Cooper Union’s Audio and Visual department (AVRAC) alongside CRC’s ever-evolving archive. Selected recordings displayed learning and sharing through CRC’s radio sentiment via live stream, as well as represented the evolution of AVRAC and the lasting qualities sound can have on a community when properly preserved. Currently, CRC is also live streaming and archiving the lecture series, New Public Forum every other Thursday, which was recently developed by SOA students Zaid Arshad and Dylan Clark with support from the CU Grant program, School of Art, and the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
In addition, shows broadcasting every week are recorded, archived, and stored in the Cooper Union Archive Library, along with pins, posters, and memorabilia. Last semester, Levy worked with CU Library director, Lisa Norburg and Archive Librarian Mary Mann to develop a work study position geared towards archiving CRC content as well content and memorabilia from other student organizations. In the Fall of 2024, CRC also welcomed four new staff members; students from all three schools. Levy and Kim couldn’t be more excited to hand the collective over to a new team as they prepare to graduate in the Spring of 2025.
CRC is housed at 30 Cooper Square, where hosts return weekly to live broadcast in our radio room using provided and/or personal equipment to bring in guests, consecrate a mixtape, or whatever else may be of utility to drone into the night.
Here is our website where we broadcast during the week:
To find more about the CRC Library Exhibition, use this link
To find more about the New Public Forum, use this link, New Public Forum
Clyde Nicols (A’24) wrote an article that discusses the event and CRC a bit more. You can read this article Here