What do Pulitzer Prize-winning-playwright Lynn Nottage, National Book Award-winner Jonathan Lethem, and hip-hop icon Slick Rick have in common? They were among the last students at the High School of Music & Art, the specialized high school that opened in 1936 at 135^th and Convent Avenue on the edge of the City College campus. A dream of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, “Music & Art” as it was called, was eventually to become the famed Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and the Arts when, in 1961, it merged with New York’s High School of Performing Arts.

Because of a series of bureaucratic issues and fiscal constraints, the merger was only on paper for many years. It wasn’t until the fall of 1984 when Music & Art students began the trek downtown as the two schools united in LaGuardia’s current building near Lincoln Center.

Nottage and Lethem graduated in 1982 and Slick Rick in 1983, making them among the last students of the Harlem campus of “LaG” as the school is popularly known.

 The City College building now houses the A. Philip Randolph Campus High School, and a small plaque on the front notes its history as the first site of the public arts high school dreamed into reality by Fiorello LaGuardia, and closed down by Nottage, Lethem and Slick Rick in true Harlem style.

Adrienne Elise Tarver’s Bus Shelter Art Project

Take a deep dive into Adrienne Elise Tarver: She who sits, now on view, and hear from the artist about her practice with Jenée-Daria Strand, Assistant Curator at Public Art Fund: