M.F.A. in Visual Arts Courses

Graduate students enroll in at least two out of the approximately six seminars offered each semester. Each seminar focuses on issues, topics, and practices in contemporary art in relationship to students' ongoing studio work. They introduce students to new ideas, concepts, and methodologies for creatively and experimentally working and thinking together and independently as artists who are part of a larger critical field. The seminars encourage and challenge students to experiment, expand, and deepen their ideas, to engage in productive dialogue and debate about artwork--their own and others--and to learn new approaches and concepts as they develop and deepen their own art practice. Seminars may include group and individual critique, specific projects, readings, discussions, presentations, field trips, and workshops. Most full-time visual art faculty teach one graduate seminar a year. Course topics and faculty assignments are subject to change each semester.

08:081:521,522 Visiting Artists/First-Year Review (4,4) This is a required course for both the fall and spring semesters for first-year graduate students. It features weekly presentations and lectures from noted artists, critics, and curators invited to the school. Each student will participate in a limited number of individual studio visits with invited guest presenters. At the end of the first and second semesters, the faculty conducts a review, where the students present their work for critique. The first-year review takes the form of a critique of work exhibited in the First-Year Graduate Student Exhibition, usually scheduled from mid-November to December of the first semester in the Mason Gross Galleries. A one-page artist statement is required for this review. An individual studio review is at the end of the second semester. A one-page artist statement is required for this review as well.

08:081:525,526 Research Projects I (4,4) Individual project proposed by student to faculty member of his or her choice; faculty member who approves the project then acts as its adviser.

08:081:525,526 Teaching Mentorships I (4,4) (Register as Research Projects) First-year students will work directly with an assigned instructor in an undergraduate course based on students' concentrations to assist teaching for one semester to become eligible to be offered teaching opportunities.
Register as Research Projects.

01:081:551,552 Studio Internship I (4,4) Offers direct experience in the profession. Students are responsible for locating internships with master artists, galleries, alternative art spaces, periodicals, and programs. The graduate director acts as the liaison once an internship is established.

08:081:621,622 Visiting Artists (4,4) Weekly lectures and presentations of work and ideas by invited guest artists, critics, and curators; followed by discussion. As part of this course, students participate in a limited number of individual studio visits.

08:081:625,626 Research Projects II (4,4) Individual project proposed by student to faculty member of his or her own choice; faculty member who approves the project then acts as its adviser.

08:081:651,652 Studio Internship II (4,4) Offers direct experience in the profession for second-year graduate students, who are responsible for locating internships with master artists, galleries, alternative art spaces, periodicals, and programs. The graduate director acts as the liaison once an internship is established.

08:081:675 Graduate Seminar A: Myth, Rhythm, and Place (4) This course will center around Myth, Rhythm, and Place as foundational conditions and sources of agency for creative production. We will center these conditions through the works of Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon. Audre Lorde, the self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," was and remains to be one of the most important voices in black radical feminist critique. Her poetry and critical work have been foundational and formative in shaping contemporary progressive ideas around race, sex, gender, police brutality, intimacy, and agency. Frantz Fanon was a writer, psychiatrist, and revolutionary who used both his research and his lived experience to deconstruct the internal and external relationships between race and imperialism, individual and collective agency and to (much like Lorde) interrogate the boundaries between love and violence.

08:081:676 Graduate Seminar B: Transmissions, Portals, and Making Space (4) Following ideas of transmission that are material, linguistic, and affectual, this seminar will be making/reading/thinking/talking through the present moment. What are the interfaces and material potentials for creative action during a large-scale shift? How do technology and ongoing issues of access inflect how and for who these shifts are occurring? How does one make anything under these conditions? What productive methods for thinking about space and time exist through changing ideas of materiality, site, place, and objects? Working through these questions of how and where transmissions are occurring in the world and for whom will form the critical-ethical basis of our work together in this seminar alongside your ongoing studio practice.�

08:081:677 Graduate Seminar C: Studio Problems (4) The seminar is open to all disciplines and is made up of studio visits, group critiques, and presentations of individually and collectively chosen texts. The readings serve as a shared lens through which we look at and discuss each other's work, and I imagine our sociopolitical present will be a common denominator for many of them. You are responsible for one assignment: to self-diagnose a problem in your work/studio and make a material articulation of it in a medium you otherwise don't feel ambitious about. The aim of the seminar is to bring each participant closer to a generative, autonomous definition for progress and resolution in their studio.

08:081:678 Graduate Seminar D: All Grad Seminar (4) The All Grad Seminar is designed as a structured space for all M.F.A. visual art graduate students to spend consequential time together to get to know each other and each other's artwork, ideas, perspectives, and goals. Together we will envision and experiment with ways of being together, building trust, building and being a community, exchanging ideas, learning and unlearning, offering and accepting feedback, and exploring what it means to be an artist and a graduate student in a time of continuing crisis and local and global emergencies. Readings, activities, and exchanges will be shaped by each participant's ideas, interests, needs, and desires.

08:081:679 Graduate Seminar E: Practice and Critique (4) This course will provide a setting for group critique and feedback on both first- and second-year artists' work, along with an examination of the process of group critique itself. We will develop insight into how different media, relation to time, and shifting thematic content will alter the group reception of the work.

08:081:680 Graduate Seminar F: After the Jump (4) This course will be composed of group discussion of a selection of new books including: Andre Brock Jr: Distributed Blackness and Legacy, Russell: Glitch Feminism, with the possibility of additional selections or short essays. In addition, this will be a space for individual studio visits, group critique of works in progress, and shared reading. This course is open to all graduate M.F.A. students regardless of media. It is a site for one-on-one and group discussions of philosophical and procedural problems related to your studio practice, informed by an approach I have developed through practice as a visiting critic, curator, artist, teacher, producer, and consumer of media and other cultural forms. Some structural elements of the course may be modified depending on the size of the class. The instructor's role will largely be that of a facilitator, and new formats for critique may arise from the class.

08:081:681 Graduate Seminar G: Tepper Seminar (4) We will begin by inviting artworks we love into the room. We will think about if and how we have experienced these works in person and how the brevity of these experiences relates to the longevity of the artworks' effects on us. We will think about if and how texts, language, and writing accompany our reception of these artworks and if they have influenced our ongoing relationships to them. We will look at forms such as the press release, the essay, the article, the review, the museum or wall text, the contract, proposal, the artist rider, as well as image descriptions, captions, and ekphrasis poetry, or an artwork's title as forms that work in and against the artwork itself.

08:081:703 Thesis (4) The written thesis statement is a discussion of the thesis exhibition that may include its evolution and influences, relevant theoretical and historical inquiries, or other pertinent investigations surrounding the student's work and includes three images documenting the exhibition.

08:081:704 Exhibition (4) The exhibition is a presentation of two years of creative work in the program. It takes place during the final spring semester in the Mason Gross Galleries. A student's exhibit is subject to committee review, consultation, and evaluation by the thesis committee and other members of the graduate faculty.

08:081:800 Matriculation Continued (0) In order to retain degree-seeking status in the program until all requirements are completed, students must maintain continuous registration by registering each fall and spring semester for coursework, research, or matriculation continued. Students who fail to maintain their status must apply for reinstatement.