Service By Design

Maximillian Re-Sugiura’s favorite part of the day at the High School of Art and Design is when he visits the illustrations classrooms on the 11th floor. When he steps in, the students are focused on the subject at the center of the room. He gets little to no acknowledgement from them, but he likes that he’s the type of principal whose presence doesn’t feel alien in a classroom. “The environment is one where they’re anchored in their expression, and it’s not about anything [but] the pure act of creation...It really is just a place of learning. And these arts classrooms, specifically, are places of calm.”

Max, as his students refer to him, was wearing a muted pink plaid blazer, a pink patterned shirt of a slightly different shade, and an enamel pin of animator Hayao Miyazaki’s face. Though he got his undergraduate degree at the Fashion Institute of Technology, “I don’t think I had that much sartorial anything,” he said. “But I’ve always had an affinity for bright colors.” The outfits also help him with his job of empowering students to be themselves. “I think it’s important visually to represent the full extent of who you are,” he said.

In his early 20s, Re-Sugiura was an operations manager at American Apparel, but “fell out of love with that side of work,” he said. In 2008, he entered NYC Teaching Fellows, the city’s alternative certification program, and became a special education teacher at the High School for Environmental Studies.

Both of Re-Sugiura’s parents are artists, and his family has always had “a scholastic tint.” Re-Sugiura grew up learning with his father, who is an immigrant that has been, as he described, “working really hard for these last 50 years to get English just right.” On Saturday mornings, the duo would read the New York Times together, looking up words they didn’t understand. On Sundays, Re-Sugiura went to Japanese school. “I was spending six days a week learning no matter what,” he said.

While teaching, Re-Sugiura went to Brooklyn College for his second master’s in education, this time for administration. He was an assistant principal and worked in supervision until he landed at Art and Design in 2019. Midway through his first year as principal, the pandemic hit. “I was sort of shepherding a community into a digital age, more so than they had been before,” he said.

Four years in, Re-Sugiura is steadfast about the principles that guide his administrative process: that art and education are vital tools for justice.

“Students at my school are predominantly students of color, predominately female-identifying, with a large percentage of LGBTQ and non-binary students,” he explained. “This is a safe haven for them, and their artwork is often their identity, and it is therefore immediately political whether they choose for it to be or not. It’s important for them to technically develop themselves so that they can have that purest expression of what it is that they want to say about themselves, so that if they do want to take a stronger political...angle that bends towards justice, they can do so with confidence.”

Re-Sugiura is eager to equip students with the tools to not just be creatives, but also professionals. His motto, “service by design,” is embedded in his email signature. “Our desire [is] to focus on art as service, not art for its own sake,” he explained.

At Art and Design, where students are referred to as young professionals, there’s an in-house ad agency, with a client list that includes the M.T.A. They learn about pricing original work, design, and IP law. Re-Sugiura is talking with Etsy about a partnership through which young professionals can sell their original concepts and train for e-commerce optimization. “Now you have a young person going to their parents and saying, ‘I want to be an artist and here’s my four point plan,’ right?” he said. “We’re really, really proud of developing that.”