Hello MCAD MFA Community,
I hope everyone is safe and finding what they need this fall.
In exciting news, we are launching our new Fall 2022 visiting faculty search and we are actively seeking diverse candidates to work with. Please help spread the word of this open position far and wide. Speaking of our wonderful faculty, you can read more about fall 2021 faculty on our website.
During the past six months, we’ve been continuing to adapt to life and learning during a pandemic. MCAD tracks Covid-19 information on their website and maintains vaccination/masking policies for review. We’ve also been furthering our work on systemic racism and equity issues within the MFA program. Check out our ongoing equity work below (MFA 2020 Fund, Community and Context course, and communications work).
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
We have raised $30,208, and $745 was from the 2021 Art Sale donations. 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. Please continue spreading the word, and contributing; you can also keep track of our progress on the MFA website.
Curriculum
This summer we successfully launched a new asynchronous (self-paced) orientation that focused on welcoming students into the community, fostering connections and sharing critique approaches. Feedback was very positive from students and faculty alike. We’ve already started adding new ideas for this online orientation next summer: preparatory reading skills, documentation practice, more getting-to-know-each-other activities, and a few other items to reduce the length of our synchronous and in-person orientation sessions.
With Covid-19 precautions in place, we also held a private welcome-back orientation picnic for the classes of 2022 and 2023 on the MFA building’s front lawn, so people could get to know each other. It was fun to see many people in person for the very first time!
We have also completed our first iteration of the new 5-week Community & Context course this fall. Check out photos from our field trips to the MN African American Heritage Museum and Gallery, MN Humanities Center to do the “Learning from Place: Bdote” tour (read more in this feature article), and the Hennepin History Museum (just across the park from us!). We collected a bunch of student feedback after the course and already have great ideas for updating and building this course further.
Additionally, we are nearing the end of our first semester of hyflex teaching. This new teaching and learning modality, which accommodates simultaneous in-person and remote participation, increases the MFA Program’s accessibility, and we have accommodated our first fully-remote student. This modality also has been helpful to others needing to be in quarantine due to covid contact, or who have had caregiving conflicts. Our faculty and students have been tremendously patient and flexible as MCAD and the MFA program have ironed out wrinkles in the process, technology, and training. In fact, we have just started training our spring 2022 faculty, and the updates implemented based on the fall 2021 faculty and students have been very helpful in developing new best practices.
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! Some of the highlights include a new “Collaborative Practices Award,” which resulted in funding two brand new collectives including both current students and alumni. Additionally, we have recently partnered with Homewood Studios in Northeast Minneapolis for a new gallery assistant program, and this past summer we sent four students/alumni on residencies at Art in Motion, located on the Lake Wobegon trail.
Also, this past fall we held four online Professional Practices events — some of them were recorded, so check them out when you have a chance! These are all free, public, and online, so feel free to spread the word. We hope you will join us for our spring series – now available for registration!
Events
This past summer, the Furniture & Social Practice Conference (follow the link for recordings) was a great success as we heard from speakers both local and national. Our hope is that the connections forged through this event will result in more furniture and social practice students applying to the program, further bolstering our interdisciplinary focus.
This fall, we continued our new tradition of holding Fall Show outdoors on the main campus, and this time we hustled to get the work under the MCAD tent due to weather! It was a lot of fun and a lovely gathering of the community as we welcomed a new class of MFA candidates to campus.
We also hosted the traveling exhibition, Glitch is the Soul in the Machine, which brought a number of exciting works to our campus and highlighted experimental video and multimedia work.
Finally, we just concluded our Public Research Presentations, and the class of 2022 should be very proud of their hard work! We will be posting recordings to the MFA YouTube channel in the coming weeks.
Recruitment
We are thrilled to announce Alanna Stapleton ‘18 has joined the MCAD Admissions team as the official graduate programs counselor, and it has been tremendously helpful to have her support in place. We have been able to share duties and ideas, and I am very excited to see where we can grow and improve.
Also, this year we have been very successful in expanding our online presentation program, in which we present to classes of undergraduates who are interested in topics such as “How to Research Grad Schools,” “10 Tips for Taking Successful Gap Years,” “Preparing Your Grad School Application,” or “Studio Visits After Undergrad.” We’ve presented from California to Maine and everywhere in between. If you know of a professor who might like us to present to their class or department, please reach out!
Communication and Support
Kiley Van Note, our wonderful MFA Assistant Coordinator and I continue to closely monitor communications and opportunities to enhance support. We made the decision to keep our MFA town hall meetings online this fall, and we’ve been very pleased with attendance and participation. Additionally, we have continued with monthly online faculty and mentor meetings, and have received word that these meetings are useful and appreciated.
We’ve also launched a new resources hub on Canvas featuring a number of links and helpful pages to support MFA students and faculty. It features new tools like our infographic of conflict resolution, the building and gallery map, procedures for securing funding, and much more.
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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 Assistant Coordinator, Niky Motekallem ‘16, Administrative Assistant in Academic Affairs, and Alonzo Pantoja ‘20 our Professional Practices and Studio Visits assistant, who all make what we do in the MFA Program possible. Additionally, we have four faculty members who are serving on the 2021-2022 MFA Committee, which is busy with a lot of work around recruitment and curriculum development: Robert Algeo, Regan Golden-McNerney, George Hoagland, and Rik Sferra. And last but not least our wonderful fall 2021 faculty.
Our work continues, and 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
Summer 2021 Letter from the Director
Winter 2020 Letter from the Director
Summer 2020 Letter from the Director
Winter 2019 Letter from the Director
