Hello MCAD MFA Community,
I hope everyone is happy and healthy this summer.
Currently, we’re celebrating the final week of the “Then & Now” exhibition at the MCAD Gallery, which showcases the alumni classes of 1995 and 1996, along with their mentors. If you’re in the area, please stop by the closing reception this Sunday, July 11, 3-5pm. Then we’re headed right into a week of exciting events for the Furniture and Social Practice conference!
We also recently bid farewell to our visiting faculty member Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, who has landed a tenure-track position at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. Gonzalo was an absolute pleasure to work with, and we are all so excited for his very bright future. This coming winter/spring we will be doing a national search for a new full-time visiting faculty member.
Each of the MFA Program updates below started with a piece of feedback from 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.
- The MFA 2020 Fund – currently fundraising
- Curriculum – new orientation module, Community & Context course
- Professional Practices – new Launch Programs, workshop recordings, informational interviews
- Events – two thesis exhibitions, mid-program reviews, new thesis essay
- Program Support – infographic, monthly meetings
The MFA 2020 Fund: A Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Scholarship
We have raised $28,313, and the fund is now officially endowed — thank you all so much for your support! We have set a new goal of raising $40,000, which will allow us to increase the size of the yearly grant to match the other MFA merit awards. Continue spreading the word, and contributing; you can also keep track of our progress on the MFA website. And, along with so many generous alumni and past mentors, we also want to thank the Calmenson Foundation, which recently became a significant donor to the MFA 2020 Fund.
Curriculum
This summer we are testing a new asynchronous (self-paced) orientation module for all our incoming students. The module is focused on introducing students to each other, community guidelines, and critique approaches. Once orientation is complete, we’ll collect feedback and work on building this part of the program, so incoming students can feel as supported as possible.
We’re also ready to start our first iteration of our new 5-week Community & Context course this fall. We have booked a field trip with the MN Humanities Center to do the “Learning from Place: Bdote” tour in collaboration with the undergraduate Art & Social Change class, and we’re planning to visit the Hennepin History Museum (just across the park from us!). Again, we’ll be collecting student feedback after the course is complete, so we can keep improving.
We held our first iteration of our new Professional Practices and Teaching in Higher Ed courses, and the feedback was excellent. We’ll continue to offer these electives to our MFA students.
This coming fall we’ll be offering our second iteration of our Teaching Art and Design Online (TADO) certificate. Alanna Stapleton ‘18 will be teaching an additional section this fall — don’t forget that alumni get 75% off all MCAD Continuing Education courses, including the TADO certificate!
We’re also adding greater transparency to the mid-program/thesis process by leaving reviewers’ names on the rubrics moving forward. Additionally, we updated the mid-program process book to be a research summary, which alleviates a lot of student anxiety over the planning and creation of an actual book.
Professional Practices
During the past six months, we’ve continued sending students and recent alumni to several new and recurring funded Launch Programs. You can find a full list of all the recipients on our Launch Programs page. Congratulations to all!
Also, this past spring and summer we held numerous online Professional Practices events — many of them were recorded, so check them out when you have a chance! Our attendance at these events grew with our move online, and we’ll plan to keep them free, public, and online in the future to help support our larger community.
We also sponsored a workshop, “Exploring Solidarity Through Sign Painting” with Kelsi Sharp through Curiosity Studio. It was great to help make this workshop accessible and free to the larger community, while demonstrating our values as a program. We saw some alumni participate too, which was awesome.
We also created a new resource on informational interviews, so that our resources can be more inclusive for commercial and client-based practices, not just focusing on studio visits.
Events
This past December and January, we held the 2020 Thesis Exhibition in the MFA Gallery with an appointment system to accommodate for pandemic restrictions. We also held our first-ever online panel discussions with the graduating class, and they were a big hit! We did this again with the 2021 Thesis Exhibition in April and May.
For the class of 2021, we experimented with having an official thesis essay, and we’re going to keep it! For this essay, we hired a curator, Keisha Williams, to do studio visits with each of our graduating students, and then write about their work. The class of 2021 was also included in the larger MCAD printed catalog.
We also opened up the Mid-program review installation to the public for the first time, which was very rewarding for the first year students.
Program Support
We developed an infographic with clear steps and contact information to help students address concerns within the MFA program and at MCAD. This is distributed during orientation and included in the MFA Program Handbook.
This past year we implemented new optional monthly meetings for mentors and faculty. These new meetings give faculty and mentors a chance to discuss challenging situations as they arise, and share resources for anti-racism, critique, and other issues. We have been able to work better as a group and support student concerns more effectively.
We’ve also transitioned many of our key documents to be Google Documents, which can be readily available and updated more regularly. This includes mentor/mentee handbooks, our new conflict resolution guide, our studio visit and informational interviews guides. This has allowed more equatable access to these resources as they are now able to be easily viewed by students, faculty, mentors, staff, and committee members both on- and off-campus.
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In closing, we’ve been very busy the last six months, and it’s important that I call out all the people who make this work possible. Big thanks go to Kiley Van Note, our Senior Administrative Assistant, and Niky Motekallem ‘16, Administrative Assistant in Academic Affairs, who both make what we do in the MFA Program possible. Additionally, we have four faculty members who served on the 2020-2021 MFA Committee, which did a lot of work around recruitment and curriculum development: George Hoagland, Genevieve DeLeon, Jaime Anderson, and Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez.
Our work continues, but as always, I am heartened by our strong alumni network, who care 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
Winter 2020 Letter from the Director
