Graduate Studio, the foundation of the 60-credit, MFA in VS (low-res) program, students take an individualized approach to their education, synthesizing their diverse experiences into their work. Students work in private studios within a shared community environment, where cross-disciplinary exchange is highly encouraged. Studio practice is guided by faculty mentors who meet with students weekly to provide critique, dialogue, and occasional assignments geared toward the individual student's creative investigations. Graduate Studio culminates in an exhibition of work and a written thesis presented at the end of their final summer. In addition to working with faculty mentors, students meet for group critiques and on-campus activities.
Graduate Studio, the foundation of the 60-credit, MFA in VS (low-res) program, students take an individualized approach to their education, synthesizing their diverse experiences into their work. Students work in private studios within a shared community environment, where cross-disciplinary exchange is highly encouraged. Studio practice is guided by faculty mentors who meet with students weekly to provide critique, dialogue, and occasional assignments geared toward the individual student's creative investigations. Graduate Studio culminates in an exhibition of work and a written thesis presented at the end of their final summer. In addition to working with faculty mentors, students meet for group critiques and on-campus activities.
Graduate Studio, the foundation of the 60-credit, MFA in VS (low-res) program, students take an individualized approach to their education, synthesizing their diverse experiences into their work. Students work in private studios within a shared community environment, where cross-disciplinary exchange is highly encouraged. Studio practice is guided by faculty mentors who meet with students weekly to provide critique, dialogue, and occasional assignments geared toward the individual student's creative investigations. Graduate Studio culminates in an exhibition of work and a written thesis presented at the end of their final summer. In addition to working with faculty mentors, students meet for group critiques and on-campus activities.
Winter Seminar introduces thematic content to provide a case study of current strategies in contemporary art and discourse. During the LRVS Winter Session students will engage with visiting artist talks and related readings to inform discussion about the context and motivations framing each artist's work. Following the Winter Session, students develop their own case study and present it to their cohort as a means of articulating the context for their own current research and creative production.
The goal of this course is to provide candidates with an intellectual community and critical forum in which they may test, temper, and enlarge the ideas that underlie their artistic goals. The Seminar will meet regularly to critique, in rotation, the work of all candidates. The cross-disciplinary nature of the conversation is meant to foster the widest possible dialogue among artists, encourage divergent thinking and discourage the easy acceptance of received notions. MFA students will participate with regional, national and international visiting artists, designers, critics, scholars, curators and others, in student critiques and discussions. Professional practice is embedded in these seminars. Faculty leading this course may also enlist other faculty members, as well as visiting artists, critics and scholars, to join discussions and critiques. Students may also be assigned critical readings to prepare for presentation and discussion. Visiting artists may engage students through demonstrations as well as by trips off-campus to exhibitions and performances locally and beyond.
Summer Seminar supports First and Second-Year students' understanding of regional, national, and global art movements through readings, discussion, and field trips. The content is structured around the films, texts, and other influences identified by the Summer Session visiting artists as influential to their thinking. Students will seek deeper understanding of each artist's work and its place within larger cultural and political paradigms. The class will also share examples of how regional artists and art institutions operate in the professional realm, through visits to exhibitions, events, and individual artists' studios.
Structured to take place during the first year winter review session, the Library Research Seminar provides both an orientation to library resources and critical independent research skills for students who will be at distance between summer intensives. The seminar provides tools and instruction for using online digital resources and access to journals, periodicals and texts. A short research paper on a topic of interest is used to showcase best practices and initiate the assessment of a student's writing.
This is an upper division one-semester course that exposes students to contemporary art histories, strategies, artists, curators, critics, and systems that influence and drive the expansion of the current art world. Art, criticism 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. Topics will be explored through slide lectures, gallery visits, videos, web sites and reading discussion of selected books, articles and essays. Students will engage in research methodologies within the written and oral presentation components of this course, with the final oral presentation providing the opportunity to share research with the class. In order to reflect a variety of viewpoints and disciplines, guest artists and lecturers relevant to topics under discussion will be invited to speak with the class.
Graduate Studio, the foundation of the 60-credit, MFA in VS (low-res) program, students take an individualized approach to their education, synthesizing their diverse experiences into their work. Students work in private studios within a shared community environment, where cross-disciplinary exchange is highly encouraged. Studio practice is guided by faculty mentors who meet with students weekly to provide critique, dialogue, and occasional assignments geared toward the individual student's creative investigations. Graduate Studio culminates in an exhibition of work and a written thesis presented at the end of their final summer. In addition to working with faculty mentors, students meet for group critiques and on-campus activities.
Graduate Studio, the foundation of the 60-credit, MFA in VS (low-res) program, students take an individualized approach to their education, synthesizing their diverse experiences into their work. Students work in private studios within a shared community environment, where cross-disciplinary exchange is highly encouraged. Studio practice is guided by faculty mentors who meet with students weekly to provide critique, dialogue, and occasional assignments geared toward the individual student's creative investigations. Graduate Studio culminates in an exhibition of work and a written thesis presented at the end of their final summer. In addition to working with faculty mentors, students meet for group critiques and on-campus activities.
Graduate Studio, the foundation of the 60-credit, MFA in VS (low-res) program, students take an individualized approach to their education, synthesizing their diverse experiences into their work. Students work in private studios within a shared community environment, where cross-disciplinary exchange is highly encouraged. Studio practice is guided by faculty mentors who meet with students weekly to provide critique, dialogue, and occasional assignments geared toward the individual student's creative investigations. Graduate Studio culminates in an exhibition of work and a written thesis presented at the end of their final summer. In addition to working with faculty mentors, students meet for group critiques and on-campus activities.
Graduate Studio, the foundation of the 60-credit, MFA in VS (low-res) program, students take an individualized approach to their education, synthesizing their diverse experiences into their work. Students work in private studios within a shared community environment, where cross-disciplinary exchange is highly encouraged. Studio practice is guided by faculty mentors who meet with students weekly to provide critique, dialogue, and occasional assignments geared toward the individual student's creative investigations. Graduate Studio culminates in an exhibition of work and a written thesis presented at the end of their final summer. In addition to working with faculty mentors, students meet for group critiques and on-campus activities.
Winter Seminar introduces thematic content to provide a case study of current strategies in contemporary art and discourse. During the LRVS Winter Session students will engage with visiting artist talks and related readings to inform discussion about the context and motivations framing each artist's work. Following the Winter Session, students develop their own case study and present it to their cohort as a means of articulating the context for their own current research and creative production.
The goal of this course is to provide candidates with an intellectual community and critical forum in which they may test, temper, and enlarge the ideas that underlie their artistic goals. The Seminar will meet regularly to critique, in rotation, the work of all candidates. The cross-disciplinary nature of the conversation is meant to foster the widest possible dialogue among artists, encourage divergent thinking and discourage the easy acceptance of received notions. MFA students will participate with regional, national and international visiting artists, designers, critics, scholars, curators and others, in student critiques and discussions. Professional practice is embedded in these seminars. Faculty leading this course may also enlist other faculty members, as well as visiting artists, critics and scholars, to join discussions and critiques. Students may also be assigned critical readings to prepare for presentation and discussion. Visiting artists may engage students through demonstrations as well as by trips off-campus to exhibitions and performances locally and beyond.
The goal of this course is to provide candidates with an intellectual community and critical forum in which they may test, temper, and enlarge the ideas that underlie their artistic goals. The Seminar will meet regularly to critique, in rotation, the work of all candidates. The cross-disciplinary nature of the conversation is meant to foster the widest possible dialogue among artists, encourage divergent thinking and discourage the easy acceptance of received notions. MFA students will participate with regional, national and international visiting artists, designers, critics, scholars, curators and others, in student critiques and discussions. Professional practice is embedded in these seminars. Faculty leading this course may also enlist other faculty members, as well as visiting artists, critics and scholars, to join discussions and critiques. Students may also be assigned critical readings to prepare for presentation and discussion. Visiting artists may engage students through demonstrations as well as by trips off-campus to exhibitions and performances locally and beyond.
Summer Seminar supports First and Second-Year students' understanding of regional, national, and global art movements through readings, discussion, and field trips. The content is structured around the films, texts, and other influences identified by the Summer Session visiting artists as influential to their thinking. Students will seek deeper understanding of each artist's work and its place within larger cultural and political paradigms. The class will also share examples of how regional artists and art institutions operate in the professional realm, through visits to exhibitions, events, and individual artists' studios.
This course is designed to develop effective professional strategies for successfully pursuing and navigating a sustained and meaningful artistic practice upon completion of the MFA LRVS program; taking into consideration the multitude of disciplines, interests and goals the program supports. We will consider protocols for professional etiquette, identify opportunities for achieving career objectives, and examine personal and social identities that comprise an individual's professional identity. Emphasis is placed on developing strong self-presentation skills to best represent your individual practice. This may include: portfolio development, submission materials, grant and exhibition proposals, working with galleries, residencies, fellowships, teaching positions, interviewing, public lectures, job search resources, calls for entry, taxes, websites, shipping, contracts, commissions, and establishing a studio. The objective is to prepare students to identify, plan and pursue strategies for successful career development and professional accomplishments from which to offer a meaningful cultural contribution.
This seminar explores critical theory as a critique of seeing, images, art, the construction of otherness (gender, race, class, sexuality, nation), and the roles and responsibilities of artists and viewers. Though our subject is theory, questions about theory and practice will be grounded in examples of the work of artists. Our seminar begins and ends with questions. When images can be used both to save and to kill, what does it mean to be an artist? Drawing on critical theory, performance theory, rhetorical analysis, and ethics, we will attend to the responsibilities of imagemakers and image consumers; the roles of artists in an image-saturated culture; the (mis)use of images to construct difference; and questions about how human beings engage language and images to make worlds. Topics to be covered include: visuality, panopticism, performativity, ideology, experience, racism, whiteness, phenomenology, postcolonialism, sexism, resistance, agency, language, grievability, mystery, and (in)visibility.
This course is designed to instruct, guide, and support the MFA student with the completion of her/his Thesis Paper. The Thesis Paper is a statement of your critical positions as an artist. It is informed by your studio practice and supported by relevant sources. This course prepares the MFA student to develop a successfully researched Thesis Paper that relates the concept, process, and evaluation of their artwork to a reader. At the end of this course, the student should be prepared to present a thoroughly developed Thesis Paper. Each student will be led through three rough drafts before the final paper is presented for grading, binding, and storage in the PNCA library holdings. The final body of text will be between 6000 and 9000 words (approximately 20-30 pages) in length.
Willamette University