MFA Fine Arts Curriculum

In this two-year course sequence, all graduate students, regardless of media, discuss common issues of studio practice. The course provides an in-depth discussion and investigation of how an artist’s work is perceived as a public statement, and how one’s work exists in the world.

Graduate Studio is a 6-hour course structured around dedicated studio time and one-on- one studio visits between students and faculty members. This two-year course sequence focuses on each individual student’s practice, specifically directed toward an interrogation of the aesthetic, conceptual, and technical issues arising out of their work. It will culminate in the end-of-semester review during which the student and a review committee will discuss and evaluate the development of the student’s practice as observed over the course of the semester within the framework of the seminar.

What does it mean to work in painting and photography at this moment in time? Is it possible to incorporate our political concerns into our work? What is successful political artwork and how might it take form in painting and photography? What is our relationship to the histories attached to these two modes of production, as well as their contemporary manifestations? How might these two mediums intersect?

This is a course designed to acquaint students with exhibitions of artwork currently being produced and shown, as well as the discussions happening around them. We will visit artists and art organizations websites and read texts related to them. Through these materials we will examine the political and art dialogues of the moment, considering the ways colonialism and inequities in the art establishment are being addressed and what some alternatives might be. We will also investigate the methods that artists and arts organizations are using to make artwork available physically and virtually.

Seminar/studio hybrid. Students build knowledge and professional capacity through collaborative project- based learning in the areas of collabo- ration, collective art production, collective arts programming and curation, and collective action. Students form collectives, operate an artist run space (called Sidebar) and develop research-driven and discourse-driven projects for public exhibition and public engagement.

This two-semester course is a cross-disciplinary investigation of the various intersections of the realms of the aesthetic and the political, and engages in questions of humanity, power, and representation. We will discuss how orderings of social relations become manifest in the world and how the political becomes ‘sensible’. Through the discussion of assigned readings, we will develop an understanding of the ways in which visual cultural production provides the very frameworks for what becomes perceptible and legible. We will consider how works of art can produce encounters that slow our perceptual operations and reading capabilities in a world of easily disseminated, readymade perspectives in service of dominant values and worldviews. Assigned texts will bridge and interrogate the discourses of class, race, gender, disability, art, and the social realm. We will discuss how artists and theorists have responded to the representational politics of the present moment in order to locate individual practices within the larger cultural and socio-political environment. Our goal will be the development of individual, subjective voices within a collective, collaborative, and relational process.

This two-semester course is a cross-disciplinary investigation of the various intersections of the realms of the aesthetic and the political, and engages in questions of humanity, power, and representation. We will discuss how orderings of social relations become manifest in the world and how the political becomes ‘sensible’. Through the discussion of assigned readings, we will develop an understanding of the ways in which visual cultural production provides the very frameworks for what becomes perceptible and legible. We will consider how works of art can produce encounters that slow our perceptual operations and reading capabilities in a world of easily disseminated, readymade perspectives in service of dominant values and worldviews. Assigned texts will bridge and interrogate the discourses of class, race, gender, disability, art, and the social realm. We will discuss how artists and theorists have responded to the representational politics of the present moment in order to locate individual practices within the larger cultural and socio-political environment. Our goal will be the development of individual, subjective voices within a collective, collaborative, and relational process.

Locating context, meaning and power in your art practice. Using tools of Critical Indigenous Research Methods, social linguistics discourse analysis, community development asset mapping, and Theory of Change planning and project management methods to think deeply about building a relevant, generative and sustainable art practice. Students produce three formal project proposals that align audience, strategy, form, discourse, and context.

A deep dive into the realm of immersive installation environments, symbolic representation, and symbolic exchange. Students engage fundamentals of metaphor and narrative as agents of the ontological and epistemological negotiation of meaning making and knowledge transfer. Students then learn how to strategically position multi-model, multi-sensory content as metaphor and narrative within defined spaces, environments, and landscapes to produce transformational audience experiences.

In this hybrid seminar/studio class, students learn the histories, contexts, theories, methods, and strategies by which artists have employed sound within the social contexts of public, private, contested and intersubjectively determined spaces and environments. Students learn a fundamental set of skills and critical literacies pertaining to analog and digital modes of sonifying human experience, intentions, environments, and systems. Students learn how to use analog and digital modes of sound as tools for listening, facilitation, consensus building and community self-determi- nation, as well as interrogation, manipulation, coercion, and discipline. Sonifying Community provides a safe, supportive, mentoring framework for students to learn how to research, design, produce and publicly exhibit a significant sound work within a diversity of socially engaged contexts.