MFA Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts

The art world is not a market. It's a conversation.

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The Program

The Art Practice program offers a fully interdisciplinary approach to an MFA degree. We approach artmaking holistically: artists in the program are not defined or separated by medium or discipline. We view process as a kind of critical thinking.

Artists in the program engage in research-based practices, and are encouraged to converse and collaborate across subject matters using a combination of traditional and non-traditional media, technologies and techniques. We aim to create a global community of artists and cultural producers who look beyond a consensus driven approach to how we define what’s important in contemporary art.

To that end, a carefully selected, small group of MFA candidates come together at SVA’s NYC campus for three successive, intensive summer residency periods where they have the opportunity to work closely with artists, designers, writers, critics and curators. Guests in 2017 included Roberta Smith, Martha Rosler, Shaun Leonardo, William Powhida, Andrea Fraser, John Cohen, Brainard Carey, Emma Sulkowicz, Kalia Brooks, Oliver Herring, Mark Dion, J. Morgan Puett, Kalup Linzy, Mike Perry, Jay Sanders, Fred Tomaselli, Alexis Clements and Antoine Catala.

Current and recent mentors for the program include Baseera Khan, FAILE, Tony Oursler, Anton Ginzburg, Kimsooja, Dawn Dedeaux, Ben Davis, Melissa McGill, Suzanne Joelson, Mel Chin, Alice Aycock, Wang Qingsong and Sara Jimenez.

Facilities include a digital sculpture center, a bio-art lab and video and sound editing facilities in addition to a wood shop, metals shop, ceramics studio and fibers lab. In the intervening fall and spring semesters, participants engage in required, rich-media online coursework from all over the world.

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MFA Art Practice is now accepting applications for summer 2018.

Program Dates

The Summer 2018 session of the MFA Art Practice program runs from June 13 to July 31.

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David A. Ross on SVA MFA Art Practice

Brainard Carey

SVA MFA Art Practice presents Brainard Carey.

Brainard Carey is a New York City and New Haven based conceptual artist and author. Praxis, his collaborative with his wife, Delia Carey, has been included in the Whitney Biennial, Slovenian Biennial and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. His educational business, Praxis Center for Aesthetics, helps artists to write grants, exhibit, and advance their careers. He also interviews artists, curators, writers and architects for his ongoing Yale University radio series, The Lives of the Artists, Architects, Curators and more.

John Cohen

SVA MFA Art Practice presents John Cohen.

John Cohen is a musician, musicologist, photographer and filmmaker. His steadfast campaign for the recognition of traditional roots/folk music has led to the production of fifteen films, hundreds of photographs, and numerous sound recordings. He has also released more than twenty albums with the New Lost City Ramblers, published eight photo books with Steidl, and is the author of countless articles, liner notes, and interviews. From the late 1950s he was involved with the emerging art world in NYC, photographing Robert Frank’s production of Pull My Daisy (1959), and documenting the emergence of Pop Art and the heyday of Cedar Bar, the central hangout of the Abstract Expressionist painters.

The Artist as Activist

SVA Art Practice present The Artist as Activist, a panel discussion with Ben Davis, William Powhida, Shaun Leonardo and Daniel Tucker.

Ben Davis is the author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class. He is currently National Art Critic for artnet News, and was formerly executive editor of Artinfo.com. His writings have appeared in Adbusters, The Brooklyn Rail, e-Flux Journal, Frieze, New York, The New York Times, Slate.com, The Village Voice, and many other venues.

William Powhida is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work critiques the contemporary art world. He is also a founding mem-ber of Placeholder, a group working towards establishing long-term, rent stabilized studios in New York. Currently he is represented in New York by Postmasters Gallery, in Seattle by Platform Gallery, in Los Angeles by Charlie James Gallery, and in Copenhagen by Gallery Poulsen. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum and the Orange County Museum of Art.

Shaun Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. He uses modes of self-portraiture as a means to convey the complexities of masculine identity and question preconceived notions of manhood. His work has been presented in galleries and institutions, nationally and internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and 8th Floor Gallery. Leonardo’s current collaborative work Mirror / Echo / Tilt is funded by Creative Capital.

Daniel Tucker works as an artist, writer and organizer developing documentaries, publications, exhibitions and events inspired by his interest in social movements and the people and places from which they emerge. His writings and lectures on the intersections of art and politics and his collaborative art projects have been published and presented widely.

Roberta Smith

Martha Rosler

Dread Scott and Ron English

Holland Cotter

Holland Cotter is an art critic for the NY Times. In 2009 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In its citation, the Pulitzer committee said it was honoring Mr. Cotter, who has been a sta critic at The Times since 1998, for “his wide ranging reviews of art, from Manhattan to China, marked by acute observation, luminous writing and dramatic storytelling.”

Tom Sachs

Jerry Saltz

Jeff Chang

Carolee Schneemann

Jeanne Silverthorne

Anthony Hawley

Carrie Mae Weems

Alexandra Hammond

Yvonne Rainer

Angela Conant + Kate Harding with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve

Chrissie Iles

Chrissie Iles (2016)

Chrissie Iles is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Her exhibitions include co-curating the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials, and curating major survey exhibitions of Marina Abramovic, Dan Graham, Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, and Yoko Ono, as well as exhibitions of Paul McCarthy, James Lee Byars, Jack Goldstein, and several group exhibitions including Signs of the Times: Film, Video and Slide Installation and Britain in the 1980s, Scream and Scream Again: Film in Art, and Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977.

Robin Winters

Cecilia Vicuña

Vito Acconci

Panel Discussion: Art and Alternative Economies

The School of Visual Arts MFA Art Practice program presents a panel discussion with artists whose work in some way deals with alternative economic systems. Panelists include:

Arlen Austin and Jason Boughton (H.E.N.S.)
Jen Abrams
Meredith Degyansky

Moderated by Ben Davis

Summer 2014

Izhar Patkin