Hello MCAD MFA Community,
I hope everyone is safe and finding what they need this summer. I wanted to post a letter to outline some of the work we’ve been undertaking since my last letter in November. During the past six months, we’ve been very busy finding solutions for our students in this time of COVID-19, as well as working on addressing systemic anti-Black racism and general racism within our program. Each of the updates below started with meeting and listening to students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community members near and far. If you’d like to talk about the program, or share thoughts on its future, please do not hesitate to reach out to me at emueller@mcad.edu.
Below you will find summaries of various projects from the past six months, including updates to curriculum, mentorship, faculty, and planning for the fall. Feel free to read the entire letter, or skip to specific sections.
- Curriculum — updates to course offerings and review processes
- Professional Practices — new courses and Launch Programs
- Mentorship — handbooks, profile pages, diversifying the pool, and advising updates
- Faculty Support — record keeping and shared tools
- Hiring — new approaches for searches and applicant pools
- Alumni Relations — social media and 25th anniversary catalog
- Orientation — discussing police and allyship
- Fall Semester — MFA faculty committee, new alumni committee, researching anti-Black racism resources
Curriculum
We have updated our curriculum to explicitly require study of selected identity issues (race, gender, sexuality), Marxism, and cultural studies/post-colonialism during Criticism & Theory I, the first liberal arts class an incoming MFA student takes. This change was based on the feedback that alumni felt our courses could better help graduates engage in current critical conversations, and that there was a strong desire to move away from the Modernism/Contemporary classification system. We researched recurrent topics in panel discussions at art and design institutions (both locally and nationally), other MFA programs’ coursework and materials, as well as taking into account the topics our students and alumni explicitly told us they wanted more foundational knowledge of.
We’ve also made all our MFA classes highly customizable so students can learn more deeply about the topics that are the most important to their practices. We’ve made this change based on feedback from Black alumni, Indigenous alumni, current students of color, and LGBTQ+ students and alumni, as well as those who might be studying an area that no one else in the program is engaged with. While we embrace and celebrate our interdisciplinarity, we also want all our students to feel supported in centering the issues most pressing to their practices. To address this need, each of our classes (Graduate Critique Seminars and Liberal Arts courses) now start with faculty conducting studio visits, polling students about their topical interests, and then crafting the bulk of the semester’s content around that feedback. We are committed to teaching the students in our classrooms and their specific practices, rather than canonical texts or topics.
We’ve also added required field trips to all courses to further connect students to the regional community. This was a great success last year, although we will be adapting to our new COVID-19 circumstances this fall, and will likely substitute video visits where possible.
We adopted the use of rubrics for our two major review processes (mid-program and thesis reviews) to avoid bias, and help students feel better supported and prepared for this process. We continuously update these documents in response to feedback collected via polling of students and reviewers after each round of these events. We also provide these rubrics to our faculty, so they can assist in preparing students for these activities during class time with the guidelines in hand. Specifically, these rubrics require students to contend with and address context, addressing the factors surrounding the creation and display of their work — they must contend with identity issues for themselves and their audience.
Additionally, we have started tracking which faculty members each student has had during their time in the program and are making an effort to reduce repetition of faculty members during their two years of study. This change was based on feedback from alumni who sometimes had multiple classes with a single faculty member, and desired a greater diversity of viewpoints. While we might not be able to fully eliminate repetition, we are able to prioritize assigning a range of faculty over the course of the program.
Professional Practices
In response to feedback that students would like more support in the areas of professional practices and teaching, we have rearranged our curriculum to add six credits of electives, and developed a professional practices class to serve as one of those electives. This course is currently scheduled to be taught in spring 2021. This course will be a welcome addition to our Professional Practices Series of evening workshops/talks, which we will continue to offer free and open to the public. These combined efforts give our students a better chance to succeed financially immediately following graduation, and not become over-burdened by loans after completing their degree.
We’ve also updated the teaching practicum/seminar to be a single, 3-credit course that will be taught during the school year at no additional cost to the students. This course replaces the summer session and the bi-weekly fall practicum meetings. Additionally, students will be able to take this course during their first year of the program, allowing them to have more opportunities to be a graduate teaching assistant and to build a stronger CV before applying for teaching jobs.
This past year we also developed a new series of Launch Programs to give our students a leg up on their CVs. These residencies, exhibitions, and fellowships are specifically aimed at our current students and recent alumni (within two years of graduation). We are prioritizing people of color as the paid judges for these awards, which has been a great way to start building further relationships in terms of studio visits, mentorships, artist talks, and institutional networking.
Mentorship
I announced the mentor and mentee handbooks last November, and we’ve since updated them for the 2020-2021 school year. We will continue to build these living documents as we receive feedback on how we can make mentorship even better. These handbooks first came into being based on feedback from our alumni that there was a lack of clarity around topics such as mentor selection, mentor changes, definition of roles, and appropriate communication. Now these documents provide step-by-step instructions for selection, what to expect from the relationship, how to switch mentors (which is now much more normalized and destigmatized for both mentees and mentors), and sample texts for communicating.
These handbooks have made recruitment of new and diverse mentors much easier, as we now have a full position description available. Additionally, these handbooks have also moved us towards greater transparency because we provide both versions to all mentors and mentees; each can see what the others’ expectations are, so all parties involved can feel more secure and prepared for the experience.
Additionally, we are working towards providing students more information about mentors using mentor pages on this website. These pages list mentors’ biographical information, teaching philosophy, and past mentees/committee service, which all help students get a clearer picture of who the mentors are, which helps them make more informed decisions. We are currently in the process of transitioning as many of these names into pages as possible (some are still linked to a variety of other webpages).
We have also been actively trying to diversify our mentors through a multi-step process of adding more Black, Indigenous, people of color, underrepresented genders, and LGBTQ+ individuals to our committees for mid-program and thesis reviews, which helps us build meaningful relationships. This past spring, after the reviews, we’ve reached out to these committee members to invite them to post a mentor page, resulting in many new mentor listings we didn’t have in the past. This is slow work based on relationship building, but we are making progress.
We’ve also updated our advising process to start at the point of deposit (late spring), so we can begin searching for good mentor matches much earlier. Now students fill out a comprehensive survey about their goals and art/design practice as soon as they deposit in the spring, and the process of seeking out mentor options, internship placements, and graduate assistantships begins. This change has already been especially helpful when an incoming student makes requests that are in areas that we need to build or strengthen, such as a medium that we have a smaller pool of mentors for, or if they’d like to work with a mentor of a particular identity, so they can discuss important lived-experiences together. The process of building these relationships takes time and sensitivity, and we are glad to have extended the timeframe of this process to better serve the needs of our community.
Faculty Support
An ongoing project is to better support our MFA faculty with more extensive record-keeping of course materials and resources to support the type of teaching we, as a program, want to achieve. This project has included building shared folders of past course materials for every MFA course, so faculty members can learn from and build upon the work and experiences of previous instructors.
We’ve also been collecting shared tools, such as an extensive folder of critique resources and articles, to support faculty in executing an array of critique approaches, which serve all our students’ practices, rather than focusing on contemporary art practices. This has meant broadening approaches to better support our designers, illustrators, and comic artists, whose work isn’t always suited to a gallery installation, and needs to incorporate different vocabulary from their respective fields.
Hiring
Since starting in this position, I have heard feedback from alumni and students that they wanted greater diversity in our MFA faculty, especially in terms of BIPOC representation (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).
To help address this pressing issue, we changed our hiring process for the 2020-21 Visiting Faculty member to be a national search following a much longer application window of time. This allowed us to advertise to a much larger and more diverse pool of applicants. We also asked all applicants to submit a diversity statement, and to describe in their application materials how diversity, equity, and inclusion issues have been and will be brought into courses, as well as addressing previous activities mentoring members of underrepresented groups. Further, we added benefits to the position, including a dedicated office/studio space and a solo exhibition in the MFA gallery.
The search was a success and we are very excited to announce our new hire to the larger community when his contract begins. On the whole, one way that we are working to support our faculty is to respect the terms of their contracts and not solicit labor outside of those terms.
Alumni Relations
You may have noticed over the past year that we’ve featured many more of our alumni on our Instagram and Facebook page. This has been possible through a great deal of research work from Niky Motekallem ’16, administrative assistant at MCAD, who searched for, and found, as many MFA alumni profiles as possible (please feel free to share yours with us if you haven’t seen us sharing your posts!). We have been working in chronological order from our first 1995 graduates to 2020. We plan on doing continuous cycles of these posts (going through everyone takes about 5 months posting 3-5 per day). If you have questions about how we are sharing profiles, or if you would like us to not share your information, please reach out to us at info-mfa@mcad.edu to let us know.
Additionally, we recently produced a publication to celebrate the first 25 years (a quarter century!) of the MCAD MFA program. We’ll be reaching out to alumni to get mailing addresses, so we can send you your copy. These books were meant to be debuted this summer at an exhibition at the main MCAD Gallery featuring our 1995 and 1996 grads, but that exhibition will be delayed due to COVID-19. When we have more specific information, we will share how we can celebrate together.
Orientation
This fall at orientation we will be updating how we talk about engaging the police and campus security. This is a work in progress. This change is of course influenced by the murder of George Floyd and ongoing systemic police violence, but also in response to alumni feedback recalling past traumatic events that we must acknowledge and work towards eliminating. We are currently researching materials, including MPD150’s list of phone numbers to call for various situations.
We’re also working on an allyship booklet similar to this one distributed by UIC Department of Art and Art History. We will discuss this material at our orientation in an effort to build an inclusive foundation for all incoming MFA students.
Looking Towards Fall Semester
We have a really strong MFA committee this fall, which consists of faculty representatives from each department on campus. This is a hardworking committee that attends to nearly all facets of the MFA Program’s needs, from curriculum to recruitment and everything in between. This fall we will be discussing all the feedback we have received since George Floyd’s murder and working to develop concrete actions we can take to combat anti-Black racism in the MFA Program. One action I am committed to is adding a paid alumni committee for BIPOC and LGTBQ+ feedback, meeting once in the fall and spring. We will open a call for 3-5 interested participants in the fall. More information will be forthcoming as we approach fall semester.
We’ll be referencing wide-ranging resources, including the recently concluded Academics for Black Survival and Wellness program organized by a group of Black counseling psychologists and their colleagues who practice Black allyship. Guided by a Black feminist frame, this program hopes to foster accountability and growth for non-Black people and enhance healing and wellness for Black people.
In closing, as I reflect back on the program from where we started two years ago, we’ve made a lot of progress towards improving the program, and we still have a long ways to go towards eliminating anti-Black racism, raising further funds to support all of our important endeavors, and continuously improving our transparency and communication. I am heartened by our strong alumni network, who cares deeply about the program’s future, as well as our current students, faculty, and staff. Please do not hesitate to reach out to provide feedback and stay in touch.
Sincerely,
Ellen Mueller
Director, MFA Program
emueller@mcad.edu
An Update July 1, 2020: Per helpful feedback from alumni, while we have specifically called out anti-Black racism in this letter given the context of the current moment following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, we have also added mention of general racism because both have been present for our domestic and international MFA alumni. We will continue to work towards fixing these systemic problems.
