How to get accepted to an MFA in Studio Art program

A couple of years ago I wrote How to apply (and not apply) to an MFA program. If you're interested in the topic, I'd suggest taking a few minutes to read the advice in that post. What follows expands on what I wrote there.

To have a really effective application you need to understand that people have many motivations for applying to an MFA program. Some of the reasons people have for going back to school do not necessarily lead to a great educational experience. There's a good chance that whoever is looking at your application is trying to figure out what kind of student you will be.

What kind of students are professors looking for?  Generally, professors want students who are making interesting work, who are ready to experiment and break out of their artistic routines, who are open to feedback & critique, who have some self-direction & backbone, and who are ambitious for their art to be successful.

What kind of students are professors looking to avoid?  Ones who are defensive and do not want to investigate taking their art somewhere new.

So when looking at a portfolio and artistic statement, the admissions committee are not only trying to figure out if you're a promising artist, but also whether you'll benefit from graduate education.

Here are some particular things for you to consider when putting together your application:

• In my earlier posting I suggested that the portfolio should be 2-4 series of work. It is important not have only one series of works. Why?  Because if all the artworks in your portfolio are too similar, the admissions committee may take that to mean that you've settled on making art in a particular way and are not interested in exploring new avenues.
  
• If you are an artist who is already experiencing some success, be careful about how you present that. The admissions committee may worry that in light of your success you may be reluctant to try new things and may be unresponsive to their attempts to guide you. Also, graduate school is intended to be a safe place where you can explore without worrying about how the outside world reacts to what you're doing. If you're showing and selling work you may be a bit risk-adverse (or more responsive to the market place than the education).  You should try to make it clear that you truly want to be a student and that you're ready to take your art somewhere new.
  
• As mentioned in the earlier posting, avoid mentioning teaching as a motivation for going to graduate school. There's nothing wrong with that being something you'd like to do, but if it's your primary motivation then it may indicate that you're not onboard for going on the artistic journey.

Before applying to graduate school, you should ask, "Why?" If the answer isn't to take your art somewhere new and/or deeper, then you should not go to graduate school. Also ask yourself whether you're prepared to be pushed and pulled and have your art challenged. If the answer is no, then you should not go to graduate school.

Be honest with yourself.  If your art is in a place where you're happy with it, and you're not interested/comfortable with taking it somewhere new, there's not necessarily anything wrong with that artistically, but it isn't going to lead to a happy MFA experience.

The Altruist

The Altruist (above) is a short documentary about artist Laurie Munn's adventure in found portraiture. Following a project where she painted portraits of all the Presidents of the United States, Munn began painting portraits of all 220 members of the graduating class from a 1965 yearbook she found in the trash.

One of her professors (at the time of the documentary's making, Munn was pursuing her Master of Fine Arts degree) suggested she visit the school that the yearbook is from. At the school she runs into one of the 1965 graduates which sends her on a journey to track more of them down.

It's a fun documentary (though a bit ham-handed in its use of soundtrack)... and I enjoy seeing the artist's work expand from a fairly thin practice of painting portraits to a deeper, more interesting social-practice of seeking out the humanity behind the portraits.

Teaching controversial matter

Here's an interesting post from Art 21's blog. In the post, Marc Mayer discusses a high school program he ran at The New Museum:

I asked each student to create a postcard-sized artwork to be sent to another student through the mail. Students had to investigate something they feared, something they loved, or if they were really ambitious, both. They also had to consider that this work would travel through the United States Postal Service and the student who received it would respond with another piece of mail art.

...

One student sheepishly presented two postcards. One of his postcards featured a detailed graphite rendering of an erect penis and, on the other side, a vagina. The second postcard featured a red background with stick figures in different sexual positions with a white substance smeared on the other side (it was Elmer's glue.)

Go to Mayer's post

NYU's ITP Winter Showcase

The Interactive Telecommunications Program's showcase is on view today and tomorrow... Just seeing the sheer mass of techno-projects (about 200 the last year) makes the visit worthwhile.

A two-day festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP.

http://itp.nyu.edu/show <--- now dynamic listing all of the students' projects! Founded in 1979 as the first graduate education program in alternative media, ITP has grown into a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists. This two-year graduate program gives 220 students the opportunity to explore the imaginative uses of communications technologies - how they augment, improve, and bring delight and creativity into people's lives. Housed in the studios of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, ITP takes a hands-on approach. Students learn to realize their ideas through a hands-on approach of building, prototyping, and testing with people. Interactive Telecommunications Program Kanbar Institute of Film and Television Tisch School of the Arts New York University 721 Broadway, 4th Floor, South Elevators New York NY 10003 Take the left elevators to the 4th Floor This event is free and open to the public No need to RSVP For questions: 212-998-1880 email: itp.inquiries@nyu.edu http://itp.nyu.edu/show

star teachers

The December 15th issue of The New Yorker has a very interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell about difficulty of determining who will be a good teacher (or football quarterback).

An excerpt from Most Likely to Succeed:

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there's a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem.

Yale MFA student kicked out

Modern Art Notes included this in its last Friday Links post:

A Yale MFA student was kicked out of school because she "listened too much to her instructors' advice?"

That does sound ridiculous, but it makes perfect sense to me. The interactions between MFA students and their professors is an odd one and can be frustrating/mystifying to those involved who do not fully understand the format & goals.

The students' role in critiques is to distance themselves enough from their work so that they can participate with the faculty in deconstructing it and discussing its perceived merits and deficiencies. Ideally the student is simultaneously open to criticisms and ideas and firm & pushing back where appropriate.

Graduate students need to maintain their voice, integrity, & vision while genuinely considering the given feedback. This ideal is a tall order and its not uncommon for graduate students to be too obstinate or too accommodating (or waver between the two).

A student who too closely follows professors' advice isn't learning to be an artist--s/he's learning to be an artist's assistant. And the artwork will suffer because it will look like it's being pulled in six different directions.

When I was in graduate school my fellow students would occasionally complain about the feedback given by one professor during a studio visit was exactly opposite of another professor's opinion. I always enjoyed those situations because it indicated to me that there was no "right" answer and I could simply use my best judgment. In contrast, when every professor is in agreement about where an artwork is falling short, the student should really sit up and take note (& action).

For those who are interested in this topic, I'd recommend the The Critique Handbook by Kendall Buster & Paula Crawford. It really should be required reading for everyone entering an MFA program (though it is a bit pricey at $33 for 150 text-only pages).

Related post: How to Apply to a Studio Art MFA Program

Online art auction

Portland State University is having an online art auction. It's a great chance to pick up a nice work of art for a nice price.

There are 100 works including ones by Dan Graham , William Wegman, Miranda July, Harrell Fletcher, Chris Johanson, Jeanne Finley, Mads Lynnerup, Bruce Conkle (whose Endless Snowman, is pictured above), etc.

Harrell Fletcher explains the auction's method:

The auction uses an unusual system. There are 100 pieces by 100 artists ranging from Dan Graham and William Wegman to PSU students and faculty. We are selling 100 certificates which redeem an auction piece at prices from $2500 to $100 apiece. The higher priced the certificate the sooner the collector gets to pick their piece from the site, giving them a greater chance of selecting the piece they want. There are only two certificates at the highest price and there are thirty-five at the lowest price. Everyone who buys a certificate will get a piece of art and will be helping to support Portland State University's Art Dept in the form of scholarships, visiting artists programs, and helping to support PSU's MFA including the new Art and Social Practice Program.

How to apply (and not apply) to an MFA program

For those of you who aren't regular readers of my blog, let me introduce myself. In addition to being an artist, I'm an art professor at The City College of New York. We have a very affordable and good quality MFA in studio art program that I certainly encourage artists to apply to... but first, I'd suggest reading the rest of this post.

When applying to an MFA program, here are issues to consider or address:

• Is the program right for you?
  
  Most MFA programs are geared towards contemporary art. If your interest (and portfolio) is mainly in traditional styles, then make sure you're applying to a program that will support that. For more traditional styles you might consider the New York Academy of Art or an MFA in Illustration (instead of Studio Arts).
  
  If you're uncertain about this, immerse yourself in contemporary art: go to museums and galleries, read art magazines, read contemporary art blogs, read art criticism. If you're at this research stage (i.e., not certain what contemporary art is and whether you want to make it), you should hold off applying to an MFA program.
  
  
• Does your portfolio include classroom assignments?
  
  Having a BA or BFA in art doesn't necessarily mean you're ready for graduate school. Look at your portfolio... does it include classroom exercises or is it all self-initiated projects? Believe me, the people reviewing your portfolio can spot the classroom assignments. The fact that you haven't done enough of your own work to fill out 20 slides means you're not ready. Wait a year to apply and spend it developing (and showing) new work.
  
  
• Is your work mainly focused on developing technique?
  
  If you're at a point where you're mainly focused on building your technical chops, then you're probably not ready for grad school. Of course every artist is always striving to be better, but grad school is a place where the focus shifts from "how?" to "why?" Your portfolio should demonstrate that you're grappling with more than just technique.
  
  
• Does your portfolio have cohesion?
  
  Your portfolio shouldn't consist of 20 unrelated works... ideally it would show 2-4 series of works, each series exploring some particular concern.
  
  
• Did you think about the ordering of your slides?
  
  Lead with your strongest work. Your first image or two is particular critical. If you wait until the middle of your portfolio to bring out the good stuff, you may have already lost the admission committee's attention.
  
  
• Are your slides good?
  
  Make sure your slides look good. They should be well framed, well lit, and in focus. They will probably be projected, so it's a good idea to try them out on a video projector (or slide projector if they're actually slides) and see how they look at larger sizes.
  
  
• Do you provide context?
  
  The admissions committee will only have a few minutes with your work and they may need a little help understanding your work. It's a good idea to explain the issues you're exploring so that the committee isn't left wondering what's the intention. You can include it in the essay/statement or possibly include a little blurb for each entry on the slide list.
  
  
• Does your artist's statement/essay indicate that you want to make art?
  
  When writing about why you want to enter an MFA program, write about wanting to be an artist. Wanting to start an arts non-profit may be a very altruistic goal, but an MFA is not the right place to pursue it (instead, check out degrees in Arts Administration, like Goucher's MA program).
  
  You might want the MFA so that you can teach at the college level, but it's best to leave that off the essay. The admissions committee wants to admit ambitious artists, not people who see an MFA as a kind of teaching certificate.
  
  If you see an MFA as simply a hurdle towards teaching rather than an opportunity to deepen your artistic practice, then you really should rethink going to graduate school. You'll probably be frustrated by the program's expectations and challenges regarding your art... also, you should ask yourself why you want to teach if you think so little of the education.
  
  This isn't to say that the MFA program won't support students' desires to teach--just that the admissions essay isn't the place to discuss it.

Related post: Yale MFA Student Kicked Out

Question Box

Question Box is a very interesting, very cool project which allows people in an Indian village access to the Internet's wealth of information via a intercom that links up to a human researcher.

The spread of such access reminds me of how the Internet has changed the way that I think of (& access) knowledge and information--when I was a kid I would often wonder about a certain topic, but would know that the information was basically out of my reach. My town (population 7,000) didn't have a particularly comprehensive library--and even if it did, I couldn't spend hours in it to research a momentarily, idle curiosity. Now, I am constantly looking up information simply for the joy of it (e.g., "I wonder about Vanilla beans... are there vanilla trees? Oh, they come from orchids!").

Here's what Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow wrote about the project:

The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley's Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query to the operator, who runs it, reads the search results, and discusses them with the questioner (it's like those "executive assistant" telephone services, but for people who live in very rural places).
...

But the net isn't binary (well, it is, but not in the way I mean): it isn't there or not-there. It can ooze in, over the period of years and decades.

The Question Box has been deployed live in Phoolpur village in Greater Noida, close to New Delhi and it was a stonking, smashing success, and will now be expanding further.

[via Boing Boing]

MFA Bloggers

I'm teaching a graduate sculpture course this term... I've asked my students to start and keep active a blog for the term as a way of building lines of communication to the greater art world. Here are their blogs... they're definitely worth checking out!

ArtLook (Seung Ae Kim)
JangSoonNation (Jang Soon)
Rachel Jobe
Rebel Pebble (Elena Stojanova)
REcord (Shani Peters)

Blindly sculpting Lionel Ritchie

The Hello Experiment has blindfolded sculpture students modeling busts of Lionel Ritchie while listening to his 1984 hit "Hello." Surprising good results!

See the video

(via Make blog)