Hello MCAD MFA Community,
I hope everyone is safe and finding what they need this fall.
In exciting news, we have welcomed our new visiting faculty member Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, who has been fantastic to work with. Gonzalo is just one of our several excellent MFA faculty this fall, and you can read more about each of them here. Additionally, we’ve been busy distributing our MFA 25th Anniversary catalogs to our nearly 400 MFA alumni; if you haven’t received one, please let us know.
During the past six months, we’ve worked hard to find solutions for our MFA students in this time of COVID-19, as well as continuing our work on systemic racism and equity issues within the MFA program. It is important to note that MCAD President Sanjit Sethi has also outlined the Comprehensive Strategy for Community Support and Recovery with five major initiatives, and posted an update on each one via the MCAD website.
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: A Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Scholarship – currently fundraising
- Curriculum – new course in development, calendar updates, credit changes
- Professional Practices – move online, studio visits tracking, new Launch Programs
- International Student Support – online courses, public statement regarding ICE
- Application Process – letters of recommendation now optional
- Teacher Training and Support – new certificate, updates to graduate teaching assistant (GTA) process, resources page
- Community Building – highlighting wellness, mutual aid, connecting with undergrads
The MFA 2020 Fund: A Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Scholarship
In response to feedback from many MFA students and alumni, we have a goal of raising $26,500 to establish an endowed scholarship fund, the MFA 2020 Fund, that will support a Black, Indigenous, and People of Color MFA students. This endowed award will provide a $1,500 scholarship to one MFA student during our Merit Award period each spring.
It is our intention to continue raising funds, as we can add to the endowment at any time after the fund is established, and will be able to award multiple and/or larger awards as the fund grows. We chose to work towards an endowed fund because the need for support will be ongoing, and an endowed fund ensures that this will not be a “one off” effort.
To start off this fundraising effort, we have engaged with MFA alumni participating in the MCAD Art Sale to raise funds for this scholarship, marking works for donation. We are excited to announce we raised $2975 at the Art Sale through the generosity of these alumni! We will be in touch in the coming months with further fundraising efforts and plans.
Curriculum
To begin, we are proposing a new five-week one-credit course, “Community and Context,” which will occur at the start of the first semester in the MFA Program. Students will take field trips focused on different groups of people living in the Twin Cities who have influenced and shaped our current cultural and social circumstances. These could include Indigenous, Black, immigrant, and hyper-local/neighborhood-level perspectives. Artists, designers, curators, writers, or other cultural workers/thinkers can be invited to help illuminate relationships to creative practice. Students will be prompted to reflect on personal and situational context, privilege and difference, intentions versus results, and intended audience for their creative practices. The course will establish a framework for sustained commitment to antiracism in practice and community life by introducing related vocabulary and concepts.
We’ve also modified our program’s calendar to help provide more time to work on the thesis project. The Public Research Presentations (previously known as Thesis Presentations) now take place in December. We had our first test-run of this schedule in December 2019, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. This year we again held presentations in December, however the presentations were online. We will be posting some of the recordings on our YouTube channel.
Additionally, the first thesis committee meeting will now take place in the final weeks of the fall semester, after the Public Research Presentations. We made this change based on feedback received from mentors and students last year. Both were interested in getting committee feedback earlier in the thesis process.
We also added a brief committee meeting report sheet for the mentor to fill out after the thesis committee meetings. This short document records notes on committee feedback and expectations of the student for the next meeting. We tested this process last spring, and it was a great tool for students to remind themselves of where they are in the process without losing track of their goals.
Further, we updated the thesis paper process. Students now complete their paper entirely in class with their instructor. Mentor and committee feedback is welcome on the paper, but not required or expected. This change was implemented for the first time last year, and was based on feedback from students, alumni, committee members, and faculty who struggled to identify who was grading the paper, and which committee member’s feedback was most important to follow as students worked towards passing their thesis review. Additionally, this change helps to reduce the mentor workload, thereby making their compensation better align with their 15 weekly meetings, and not with outside reading/revising responsibilities. After our first trial run of this process last spring, the student feedback was very positive.
Additionally, we updated our mid-program review process to eliminate the surprise factor with mid-program committee members. We now inform students of everyone who will be sitting on their committee as soon as we have assigned reviewers. This change helps reduce unnecessary anxiety surrounding the review, and keeps focus on the student’s practice. We tried this approach last spring, and students voiced appreciation for the change.
Finally, we have reduced mentor credits from 9 to 8 per semester, and we reduced the thesis exhibition from 3 to 1 credit, which allowed us to add six credits of electives. This change was based on feedback from students who wanted more options, and mentors who noted our mentor credit load was high. You can read about our elective options near the bottom of our curriculum page.
Professional Practices
First, our Professional Practices series has moved entirely online, which has boosted attendance and allowed people to participate from great distances. Our visiting faculty member, Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez has done an excellent job of heading up the series this fall, and we can’t wait to see what he assembles for spring 2021.
This past summer, we hosted the Teaching Place Conference online in July, and also did a special small series on teaching applications in August. All of those sessions and accompanying materials are available for online viewing.
We have updated studio visit tracking, both within Graduate Critique Seminar as well as out-of-class studio visitors, to ensure fair distribution. Over the past two years, we have been able to provide documentation of who has received every visit and when. Now that this tracking exists, we not only use it to identify who should be offered the next studio visit with a visiting artist, but we’ve also identified where we have weaknesses, such as when it’s been a while since we’ve brought in an illustrator, furniture person, etc. It is a valuable, strategic document that holds us accountable.
This fall we’ve also been experimenting with sign-up-based, small critiques (both in-person masked/distanced, and online) involving the classes of ‘22, ‘21, and ‘20. It’s been a great way for cohorts to have the opportunity to interact with each other more, and we’re going to officially add this to our Launch Programming starting this spring by making it open to all current MFA students and alumni up to two years out of the program. This will help networking, as well as helping to smooth the transition from student to alumnus. People who sign up for in-person critiques will be able to sign up for time to install before the critique, receive feedback, and document work.
Lastly, we wanted to share the results of our Launch Programs from this past summer/fall. Shirin Ghoraishi ‘20 and Emma Beatrez ‘20 were selected to be our summer 2020 Arrowmont Fellows, however that fellowship has been pushed to summer 2021 due to the pandemic. Lee Noble ‘20 was our inaugural artist in residence at Mildred’s Lane in August, and Emma Beatrez ’20 recently completed her solo installation at Rochester Art Center.
International Student Support
Taking the pandemic into consideration, we have made all MFA courses hybrid, which means students and faculty can participate in-person when safe or remotely as needed. This has helped students affected by recent international policy shifts and visa restrictions to participate in our program.
Additionally, in July we released a statement of condemnation when ICE regulations were released. This is an ongoing and evolving situation that we will continue to monitor.
Updating the Application Process
We are excited to announce that letters of recommendation are no longer a required part of our MFA application process. We made this change based on research showing the classist and racist history of letters of recommendation. Students can submit letters if they like, but we now clearly state that they are not a required element of the application.
Teacher Training and Support
We have made exciting new updates to teacher training and support. The graduate teaching assistant (GTA) experience is now decoupled from the teaching courses, so students are now paid for their hourly work as GTAs, and they can be a GTA all four semesters, and with up to four different instructors. This change will help students build their CVs before they graduate, making them more competitive in the job market.
All MCAD faculty (both adjunct and full-time) are now able to request a GTA, which means we’ve been able to connect with a very broad range of instructors who haven’t always had a way to be involved with the MFA program. With every connection we make, we strengthen our community and the people who care about this program. We distribute GTAs based on their career interests and the faculty requests. We have been testing this new system this fall, and the feedback from both students and faculty has been very positive.
Additionally, we have revamped the teaching courses. Originally, the courses would take place as a 2-week summer intensive in combination with a part-time fall course. Because of this, students interested in learning more about teaching were required to pay extra to attend the summer course. Now it is a single full semester course called the Teaching Seminar. This seminar counts as one of two new electives, which means the cost is included, and no longer an extra charge.
Further, we are now offering a new certificate in collaboration with MCAD Continuing Education called “Teaching Art and Design Online,” which can count as an elective. This certificate is open to both MFA students and the larger public (reminder: MCAD alumni receive 75% off all Continuing Ed courses). It consists of three, five-week mini-courses focused on online course design, facilitating the creative process online, and critique approaches in the online environment. Most of our incoming MFA students who are interested in teaching are currently enrolled in this course this fall, and it has been a wonderful experience. Those students are also GTAs for faculty, and they have been able to immediately apply what they are learning to the classes they are assisting.
Community Building
Hearing feedback from our students and alumni, we have been working on ways to have greater integration with the undergraduate community. To this end, we were excited to move our Fall Show 2020 to the exterior of the main building (with masking and physical distancing). We found that the physical proximity to the undergraduate dorms helped to build connections.
We also pushed for greater awareness of the MCAD student clubs during our new student orientation, especially those with identity foci, so our marginalized students can have a better chance of connecting with support communities. Many of these clubs are majority undergraduates, which helps to further integrate the MFA students with the undergrads. At the start of fall semester, the following clubs were active: Black Artist Student Union, Latinx Unidas, Jewish Cultural Club, Quellective, Disabled Student Union, Anime Club, Music Club, Bee Club, Zelda Fanclub, Comics Club, Video Game Club, Animation Study Group, Kahoot Club (fka boardgame club), Gardening and Plant Care Club, WYC (Wheel of the Year Club), and Lo-Fi Movie Club.
Additionally, Kiley Van Note and Niky Motekallem ‘16 created and shared a map of Black-Owned Restaurants (compiled from a variety of local news sources) within a 3-mile radius of MCAD to allow for walking / biking access. Many of our current students and alumni have been interested in a variety of mutual aid efforts, and dining locally (especially take-out) is a great way to support our local Black community.
Finally, we’ve added a “wellness minute” to the start of all our monthly town hall meetings to help reinforce the idea that student wellness is important, and to share tools for stewardship of wellness on a monthly basis. Feedback from students has been positive, as many of our students are feeling very overwhelmed with the circumstances of the pandemic, caretaking responsibilities, and outside work.
In closing, we’ve completed a huge amount of work since June, 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 serve on the MFA Committee, which does a lot of work around recruitment and curriculum development: George Hoagland, Genevieve DeLeon, Jaime Anderson, and Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez.
Our work is ongoing and challenging, 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
June 2020 Letter from the Director
November 2019 Letter from the Director
