Application deadline: February 1, 2016
SVA
MA Curatorial Practice
132 West 21st Street, 10th floor
New York, NY 10011
T +1 212 592 2274
[email protected]
Chus Martinez, Adam Weinberg, Tania Bruguera, Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy, Maria Lind, Shirin Neshat, Hou Hanru, Daniel Kunitz, Jens Hoffmann, Joan Jonas, Mick Wilson, Pablo Helguera, Anne Barlow, Brian Kuan Wood, Saskia Bos, Joshua Decter, Dara Birnbaum, Jerry Saltz, Mark Beasley, Jessica Morgan, Jack Persekian, Kate Fowle, Charles Renfro, Raimundas Malasauskas, Alexandra Munroe, Stéphane Aquin, Nato Thompson… These are among the many international curators, museum directors, artists, writers, and theorists who are teaching, speaking as guest lecturers, and running workshops this academic year in SVA’s Masters in Curatorial Practice (MACP), located in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.
MACP’s collaborations with the Swiss Institute, Independent Curators International, Residency Unlimited, Triangle Workshop, artinfo.com, and other institutions lead directly to exhibitions and publications that students add to their professional CVs. Past and current students have held internships at MoMA, New York; MoMA PS1, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Kitchen, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; SALT, Istanbul; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; and many other leading museums, art centers, and commercial galleries.
Our program trains curators with a hands-on approach. Organized around concentrations of seminars focused on different aspects of contemporary curating taught by working professionals; practicums in research, exhibition making, and other forms of curatorial enterprise; courses in history, philosophy, and theory; and workshops in professional practices. All classes are intentionally small so that students, working directly with leading curators, are given close attention. Students accepted into the program come from around the world and many different backgrounds, not necessarily a conventional art history background. The work is intense, with a broad range of readings, writing, and discussions. The students form tight-knit communities, visiting exhibitions and studios together, sharing ideas and concepts, helping one another in the creation of projects, and producing projects in teams. Each student has the opportunity during the program to make at least three exhibitions or curatorial projects in Manhattan and in Brooklyn in public spaces. Many students take advantage of being in New York by doing additional work in galleries, museums, and other cultural spaces, all adding to their professional credentials.
As the program is located just a few minutes walking distance from Chelsea and most of the students live in Brooklyn, all students have daily access to the galleries, to the city’s museums, and to artists’ studios. SVA hosts more than twenty graduate programs in fine arts, photography, film and video, graphic design, industrial design, interface design, and its facilities include state-of-the-art labs, libraries, and fabrication and printing facilities. Curatorial students interact and collaborate with many of their fellow students across programs, as we consider curating another form of making within the gamut of artistic production. The program’s space, designed by world-renowned architect and faculty member Charles Renfro of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in association with Leong Leong, hosts classes, panel discussions, exhibitions, performances, and other events.
Each year as part of the program, the first year students go on a field trip to a major biennial. Last year, they went to the Venice Biennale, where they had meetings with leading curators and former directors of the Biennale and had the opportunity to also publish reviews on different parts of the Biennale for artinfo.com. This year, students will be going to Manifesta in Zurich and will be involved in joint workshops there with European curatorial students. This remarkable part of the program, included in the costs of the program, give the students an exceptional experience contributing to their knowledge.
The Masters in Curatorial Practice at SVA is a fully immersive program that trains curators within a city of curators and culture that is a crossroads for art professionals from across the globe.
Initial application deadline is February 1, with rolling admissions after that. For all details about the program, visit macp.sva.edu. Interested students are encouraged to contact MACP at T +1 212 592 2274 or [email protected].
