Low-Residency MFA in Visual Studies

Curriculum Description

The eight-week Summer Residency includes graduate seminars, critiques, studio visits, visiting artist lectures, technical workshops, and focused studio time. Students are provided with studio space and access to PNCA’s shop facilities to make new work over the course of the summer session. Technicians can assist with tutorials and fabrication. While the majority of the students’ studio work is developed and guided by mentors in subsequent terms, the summer provides valuable peer-to-peer observation and focus guided by MFA faculty and visiting artists.

Each week during the Residency, the program hosts a Visiting Artist or Scholar, introducing MFA students to diverse artistic, scholarly, philosophical, and cultural voices. The Graduate Seminars expose students to contemporary art histories, strategies, artists, curators, critics, and systems that influence and drive the expansion of the current art world. In these courses, art and theory are approached in an interconnected fashion, with an emphasis on the flow and interchange of significant ideas between the visual and the textual—art in dialogue with theory and history. These seminars provide students with an intellectual community and critical forum in which they may test, temper, and enlarge the ideas that underlie their artistic goals.

Electives

Elective courses are chosen in consultation with the MFA Chair and allow opportunities for new exploration of ideas and skills acquisition. Global study abroad and internship opportunities incorporate as much flexibility as possible to support the student’s specific area of specialization and career interest.