The low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program is a five-semester, 60-credit terminal degree program designed to facilitate students in articulating an original vision, refining expressive skills, and experimenting in new directions.
The MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts degree criteria are the goals toward which your individualized graduate studies are aimed. Throughout your course of study, you are expected to deeply engage with the criteria, working toward a full and sustained demonstration of them by graduation.
The Degree Criteria support your holistic, integrated development of:
- Expressive, aesthetic, and process skills;
- Critical exploration and articulation of your practice within historical, theoretical, cultural and other relevant contexts; and
- Strategies for ethical engagement with audience, communities, and the world.
Degree Criteria
Personal Practice
Students will articulate, discuss, and demonstrate a personal practice that includes evidence of sustained inquiry; a critical understanding of the traditions in or against which they are working; an embodied understanding of the techniques, strategies and languages that enable their practice; and the capacity to contribute to the advancement of their fields.
Engagement with Praxis/Integration of Theory in Action
Students will reflect an understanding of the nature of praxis, the ways that ideas can be enacted and embodied through action, as well as the means by which art practice is advanced through its relationship with theory. There should be clear evidence of the integration of a personal theory of art into a student’s practice as well as an engagement with other theories of art.
Rigorous Exploration Within the Context of One’s Art Practice
The process of experimentation can deepen experience, expand knowledge and strengthen practice. By documenting processes of active exploration, assessing outcomes in relationship to intentions, and applying new learning into subsequent experiments, students will demonstrate how they have actively investigated artistic, intellectual, cultural, social and/or political contexts, questions, forms, or media that inform and/or enable their work.
Ethical Engagement & Thoughtful Action
Contemporary art practitioners are engaged with the world in many ways, situating themselves in relationship to others through a range of modalities, aesthetics and situations. Students will demonstrate their understanding of how contemporary art practices have grown beyond established sites of artistic discourse, presentation, and performance, and document how their own practice is reflectively and critically engaged with the world.
Understanding the Concept of Interdisciplinary Art
All students will be able to articulate an understanding of interdisciplinary art practice. In documenting their personal practice, students will demonstrate a full understanding of the general disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts in which their work is located as well as an understanding of the political and institutional implications of disciplinary structures.
