Curriculum

Our online model includes:

  • Six semesters of highly interactive, media-rich coursework completed remotely. A typical student completes ten credits per semester for three years.

  • Ongoing small group mentorship from leading contemporary artists, curators and critics.

  • Annual invitation to the nine-day SVA Summer Seminar in New York City’s Chelsea arts district.

Year I

  • 10 Credits of online courses mixing synchronous and asynchronous learning

    Studio & Critique (3 cr)
    The course operates at the intersection of making and thinking, with students presenting works-in-progress for group discussion alongside readings addressing urgent contemporary art issues. Through structured critique sessions, students will sharpen their ability to articulate conceptual underpinnings of their work, respond to formal concerns, and situate their practice within broader cultural contexts, particularly in relation to technological acceleration, institutional critique, and emerging discourse on artistic labor and sustainability. Weekly reading assignments will include recent exhibition catalogs, artist manifestos, and critical essays that directly engage with current geopolitical and social developments.


    Foundations of Criticism I* (2 cr)
    In the 21st century critical theory has taken on a significant role, not only in reflections on works of art but also in their production considerations. Why is this the case? In this course artists develop a foundational knowledge of modern philosophy and critical theory while simultaneously considering how the modern world emerged in history, and how the form and role of art have changed in tandem. In the first half of the semester, cornerstone texts of modern thought—Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud—are considered alongside primary documents that reflect the historical struggles and contexts through which these ideas emerged. 


    Diasporic and Decolonial History, Theory, and Practice * (2 cr)
    This course explores how cultural shifts are articulated through the intersection of art, politics and pop culture. It introduces the history and power of image-making and knowledge production through a critique of the cultural evolution of the Western concept of research and its linkages to extractive economies while speaking to the specificities of the colonial experience.


    Mentor Group (3 cr)
    This graduate-level MFA course establishes an intimate, sustained mentorship model where small cohorts of 4-6 students work closely with an accomplished practicing artist throughout the semester. Mentors provide critical perspective, technical guidance, and professional insights while helping students identify and articulate the core questions driving their practice. The mentor groups create a focused environment for deep artistic development through personalized guidance, collaborative dialogue, and peer exchange. They serve as a professional model for sustainable artistic community and mutual support beyond graduate school.text goes here

  • 10 Credits of online courses mixing synchronous and asynchronous learning

    Studio & Critique (3 cr)
    The course operates at the intersection of making and thinking, with students presenting works-in-progress for group discussion alongside readings addressing urgent contemporary art issues. Through structured critique sessions, students will sharpen their ability to articulate conceptual underpinnings of their work, respond to formal concerns, and situate their practice within broader cultural contexts, particularly in relation to technological acceleration, institutional critique, and emerging discourse on artistic labor and sustainability. Weekly reading assignments will include recent exhibition catalogs, artist manifestos, and critical essays that directly engage with current geopolitical and social developments.


    Foundations of Criticism II* (2 cr)
    Building upon the coursework of Foundations of Criticism I, this course explores how these concepts are taken up, transformed and sometimes rejected by the critical theories of the 20th century as the way is paved for the 21st.


    The Aesthetics of Truth* (2 cr)
    This course examines the intersections between art and truth, starting with the rise of conceptual art and extending to contemporary practices. Drawing on the Criterion of Verifiability proposed by English philosopher A.J. Ayer, the course explores how art employs facts as aesthetic and research strategies, while also examining how artists intentionally manipulate information to uncover deeper truths, emphasizing the paradox where fabrication becomes a vehicle for authenticity. This tension between artifice and truthfulness reveals the complexities of representation, questioning whether truth in art lies in factual accuracy or in the power of constructed narratives. Themes such as capitalism, colonialism, gender, race, surveillance, and ecology will be addressed, observing how art responds to these issues by giving information an aesthetic expression. Students will engage with a wide array of art forms—including painting, sculpture, new media, installations, performatives, and institutional critique methodologies—examining how artists use these mediums to ground aesthetics in factual research. Each session will critically evaluate these practices, linking them to core theories that continually circle back—directly or speculatively—to the Criterion of Verifiability as applied to art. A guest artist will lead one session, offering insights on how truth shapes their work and influences broader trends in the contemporary art world. Active student participation is crucial, in discussions, and final assignments. Course materials will include lectures, readings, and online discussions through Canvas.


    Mentor Group (3 cr)
    This graduate-level MFA course establishes an intimate, sustained mentorship model where small cohorts of 4-6 students work closely with an accomplished practicing artist throughout the semester. Mentors provide critical perspective, technical guidance, and professional insights while helping students identify and articulate the core questions driving their practice. The mentor groups create a focused environment for deep artistic development through personalized guidance, collaborative dialogue, and peer exchange. They serve as a professional model for sustainable artistic community and mutual support beyond graduate school.n text goes here

Year II

  • 10 Credits of online courses mixing synchronous and asynchronous learning

    Studio & Critique (3 cr)
    The course operates at the intersection of making and thinking, with students presenting works-in-progress for group discussion alongside readings addressing urgent contemporary art issues. Through structured critique sessions, students will sharpen their ability to articulate conceptual underpinnings of their work, respond to formal concerns, and situate their practice within broader cultural contexts, particularly in relation to technological acceleration, institutional critique, and emerging discourse on artistic labor and sustainability. Weekly reading assignments will include recent exhibition catalogs, artist manifestos, and critical essays that directly engage with current geopolitical and social developments.


    Performative Objects* (2 cr)
    This course explores  histories, theories and practices that have rendered the object as an equal to the subject. Looking to define a space for us to work on, we will advance on a critique of consumerism, gentrification, precarity, depersonalization; economic and social processes that have placed humans at the same level of what we use, abuse, and dispose of. We are surrounded by objects, commodities, artifacts– things– that participate in the formation of our realities, shaping our lives, drawing some attachments, and yet, these things have always been seen as inferiors. In the previous years we have seen an explosion of artists working with non-human organic entities. This course explores how we might develop an art practice with our non-human, non-organic, objectual, material comrades.


    Research and Writing Skills * (2 cr)
    In this course, you’ll learn how to craft a research paper from start to finish. Each week, we’ll cover a technical skill (finding sources, saving sources, using Chicago Style, creating citations and bibliographies) and a writing or research method (description, biography, interview, context). You’ll learn how to use these techniques and methods in your own writing and, at the end of the course, produce an original research paper on an object of your choosing.


    Mentor Group (3 cr)
    This graduate-level MFA course establishes an intimate, sustained mentorship model where small cohorts of 4-6 students work closely with an accomplished practicing artist throughout the semester. Mentors provide critical perspective, technical guidance, and professional insights while helping students identify and articulate the core questions driving their practice. The mentor groups create a focused environment for deep artistic development through personalized guidance, collaborative dialogue, and peer exchange. They serve as a professional model for sustainable artistic community and mutual support beyond graduate school.text goes here

  • 10 Credits of online courses mixing synchronous and asynchronous learning

    Studio & Critique (3 cr)
    The course operates at the intersection of making and thinking, with students presenting works-in-progress for group discussion alongside readings addressing urgent contemporary art issues. Through structured critique sessions, students will sharpen their ability to articulate conceptual underpinnings of their work, respond to formal concerns, and situate their practice within broader cultural contexts, particularly in relation to technological acceleration, institutional critique, and emerging discourse on artistic labor and sustainability. Weekly reading assignments will include recent exhibition catalogs, artist manifestos, and critical essays that directly engage with current geopolitical and social developments.

    Art and Politics* (2 cr)
    In light of these serious times—where humanity seems, in the words of Noam Chomsky, to be “racing to the precipice”—the volume has turned up on the call for artists to become committed and to protest the way of things. Yet it is hard to know where to start, especially given the persistent commodification of dissent, the isolation of the educated classes from the working masses, the suffusion of mass media, and the rise of authoritarianism that are characteristic of these spectacular, unequal, and individualistic times. Drawing on art history, philosophy and political theory, this course will explore strategies for creative interventions in the political arena. Topics of discussion will include race, gender, bio-politics, identity, power structures, public space, cultural policy, censorship and social justice.


    Art and Pedagogy* (2 cr)
    This course will explore pedagogical strategies for art practice, including collaborative dialogues, action research and experiential learning. Topics of discussion will include the role of art in society, aesthetic inquiry into social systems, institutional critique, artist accountability and evaluation of social practice projects.


    Mentor Group (3 cr)
    This graduate-level MFA course establishes an intimate, sustained mentorship model where small cohorts of 4-6 students work closely with an accomplished practicing artist throughout the semester. Mentors provide critical perspective, technical guidance, and professional insights while helping students identify and articulate the core questions driving their practice. The mentor groups create a focused environment for deep artistic development through personalized guidance, collaborative dialogue, and peer exchange. They serve as a professional model for sustainable artistic community and mutual support beyond graduate school.n text goes here

Year III

  • 10 Credits of online courses mixing synchronous and asynchronous learning

    Studio & Critique (3 cr)
    The course operates at the intersection of making and thinking, with students presenting works-in-progress for group discussion alongside readings addressing urgent contemporary art issues. Through structured critique sessions, students will sharpen their ability to articulate conceptual underpinnings of their work, respond to formal concerns, and situate their practice within broader cultural contexts, particularly in relation to technological acceleration, institutional critique, and emerging discourse on artistic labor and sustainability. Weekly reading assignments will include recent exhibition catalogs, artist manifestos, and critical essays that directly engage with current geopolitical and social developments.

    Video and Sound Editing I  (2 cr)
    Through various methods that include instructor-led workshops, field experiments and group critique, students will explore practices for creating audio and video projects, possibilities for installation, multichannel works and performance. High-definition video and proper compression for projection, web and DVD will be addressed, and students will become familiar with basic editing software, including Adobe Premiere. The workshop includes screenings of film, video and sound work from modern and contemporary artists. It considers the use of media as both a document and final product.

    Video and Sound Editing II (2 cr)

    Continuing on the work from Video and Sound Editing I,  this workshop will assist students in mastering advanced video and audio editing techniques, as well as the opportunity for critical dialogue about video works.


    Mentor Group (3 cr)
    This graduate-level MFA course establishes an intimate, sustained mentorship model where small cohorts of 4-6 students work closely with an accomplished practicing artist throughout the semester. Mentors provide critical perspective, technical guidance, and professional insights while helping students identify and articulate the core questions driving their practice. The mentor groups create a focused environment for deep artistic development through personalized guidance, collaborative dialogue, and peer exchange. They serve as a professional model for sustainable artistic community and mutual support beyond graduate school.text goes here

  • 10 Credits of online courses mixing synchronous and asynchronous learning

    Studio & Critique (2 cr)
    The course operates at the intersection of making and thinking, with students presenting works-in-progress for group discussion alongside readings addressing urgent contemporary art issues. Through structured critique sessions, students will sharpen their ability to articulate conceptual underpinnings of their work, respond to formal concerns, and situate their practice within broader cultural contexts, particularly in relation to technological acceleration, institutional critique, and emerging discourse on artistic labor and sustainability. Weekly reading assignments will include recent exhibition catalogs, artist manifestos, and critical essays that directly engage with current geopolitical and social developments.

    Art and Sustainability* (2 cr)
    In our era of bio-ecological disasters and post-pandemic state, global warming, proliferation of endangered species, and devastating pollution, art history has been obsessed with a certain teleological narrative of the end-days. This course examines specific practices of artists concerning sustainability, rejects apocalyptic thinking, and instead finds inspiration to create a new set of eco-feminist interpretations. Using the paradigm of “Emergent Ecologies” (the study by Eben Kirskey 2015), this course enables insights into art history that can find flourishing sustenance in practices that create symbiotic associations of opportunistic plants, animals, and microbes that are thriving in unexpected places. As these practices show, a new discourse has been emerging, learning how to care for practices of “emergent ecological assemblages” that go beyond representation. The course formulates the need to apply parameters of sustainable art practices if we want to believe “vita brevis, ars longa”.


    Professional Practices: Building Audience and Impact* (2 cr)
    This practical course equips artists with essential skills for promoting their work and exhibitions in today's multi-platform media landscape. Students will develop comprehensive promotional campaigns for actual exhibitions, learning to effectively communicate their artistic vision across various channels. Participants will master the art of translating complex creative practices into compelling narratives that resonate with diverse audiences. The course addresses the full spectrum of contemporary art promotion, including crafting artist statements, designing digital content strategies, writing press releases, creating engaging social media content, and building effective email campaigns.

    Mentor Group (3 cr)
    This graduate-level MFA course establishes an intimate, sustained mentorship model where small cohorts of 4-6 students work closely with an accomplished practicing artist throughout the semester. Mentors provide critical perspective, technical guidance, and professional insights while helping students identify and articulate the core questions driving their practice. The mentor groups create a focused environment for deep artistic development through personalized guidance, collaborative dialogue, and peer exchange. They serve as a professional model for sustainable artistic community and mutual support beyond graduate school.n text goes here

In the sample student track above an asterix (*) indicates rotating courses in Art History and Special Projects that may not be offered each semester.

A typical student schedule will include 10 credits of coursework each Fall and Spring semester. Students may elect to take on a heavier course load.

This is not a cohort-based program. Students will not move through the program with one group, but instead will take classes with different configurations of students in all years of the program.