Low-Residency Visual Studies

Curriculum Description

The eight-week summer intensive includes graduate seminars, critiques, studio visits, visiting artist lectures and demonstrations, and focused periods of studio practice. Each MFA student is provided with a private studio to make new work over the course of the summer session. Work made each summer is used for display, critique, dialogue, and iteration. While the majority of the students’ studio work is developed and guided by mentors in subsequent terms, the summer provides valuable peer-to-peer observation and focus guided by the MFA Chair and visiting artists and faculty.

Each week during the intensive, the program hosts a Visiting Artist or Scholar, introducing MFA students to the breadth of contemporary artistic, scholarly, philosophical, and cultural voices.

Graduate Seminars expose students to contemporary art histories, strategies, artists, curators, critics, and systems that influence and drive the expansion of the current art world. In these courses art and theory are approached in an interconnected fashion, with an emphasis on the flow and interchange of significant ideas between the visual and the textual—art in dialogue with theory and history. These seminars provide students with an intellectual community and critical forum in which they may test, temper, and enlarge the ideas that underlie their artistic goals.

Credits per term 

First Year  Summer/Fall  15 credits Winter/Spring 6 credits

Second Year  Summer/Fall  18 credits Winter/Spring 7.5 credits

Third Year  Summer 13.5 credits

60 credits total

Electives

Elective courses are chosen in consultation with the MFA Chair and allow opportunities for new exploration of ideas and skills acquisition. Global study abroad and internship opportunities incorporate as much flexibility as possible to support the student’s specific area of specialization and career interest.