Application deadline: May 1, 2012.
PhD Studies
Transart is offering the first international low-residency studio PhD course of studies: a three year minimum, full-time degree program with an average work commitment of 30 hours per week. The degree is only offered for practice-based research (creative work) accompanied by a written thesis with a word count to be agreed upon with advisors. Advisors will come from Transart Institute and Plymouth University.
The MFA Creative Practice consists of three intensive summer residencies in Europe filled with lectures, workshops, critiques, seminars, performances, and exhibitions and two shorter winter residencies in New York City. In the four semesters between residencies, students create an individual course of study realizing art and research projects with the support of faculty and studio advisors wherever they work and live.
Fast Track MFA ➞ PhD
Exceptionally focused and accomplished artists can apply for transfer from the MFA to the studio PhD program within the first year. Students who wish to enroll in the Fast Track program apply to the MFA Creative Practice. In their second semester on the MFA they develop a doctoral proposal. At the end of the semester they can apply for Fast Track assessment. Successful applicants will be registered for the MPhil/PhD course of studies at that time.
PhD Proposals
Transart is particularly keen on encouraging proposals that in the widest sense explore the archive, documentary art making, language/image, space, and inhabitation of space, software as art, network culture, the role of art making in peace, mediation and international relations, as well as performance. The proposal should demonstrate systematic study, independence, critical competence, and originality.
The Transart Program in a Nutshell
• A contemporary learning experience without grades or pre-formatted curriculum
• Summer intensives in Berlin, the art capital of Europe
• Fall and spring residencies in New York City
• Workshops, seminars, professional development, studio and performance tours
• Develop a sustainable artistic praxis rather than being trained in a certain media or genre
• Design your own course of study
• Realize your creative projects with the support of curators, faculty and self-chosen advisors
• Low-residency format allows you to keep professional and family obligations while advancing your career
• International makeup of students and faculty fosters exchange across cultural boundaries
• Alumni and faculty form an international collective with exhibition and performance opportunities
• Offsite study, critiques and advisement wherever you live and work
• Regular one-on-one reviews and interactions with a variety of curators
• Thesis exhibition and performances reviewed, critiqued and curated by established international curators
Transart Students…
…are emerging and mid-career artists and educators. Transart residencies are a meeting place for cultural exchange. Transart students and alumni will converge for the summer residency from areas as diverse as Thailand, Egypt, Italy, Pakistan, Iceland, Croatia, Ethiopia, Canada, Costa Rica, the UK and the US.
For both students and faculty, the time at Transart is a transformational experience. Performer and painter Nicole Stager wrote: “This program has changed my life in profound ways. My art practice is more informed, better articulated, more open, more thoughtful, more grounded in theory.” New York-based artist Virgil Wong found “The community I’ve become a part of through Transart is already much more immersive than what I’ve developed in ten years of living and working as an artist in New York City”. Photographer and performer Angelika Rinnhofer found that “to work independently can pose a challenge but it also offers freedom and flexibility. Since a large number of students are accomplished artists and earn a living, Transart’s concept is ideal to work toward a degree and to expand one’s artistic career in addition to having a job.” Faculty Michael Bowdidge: “Undertaking a PhD has led me to a much deeper understanding of the nature of my practice.” You can learn more about the experiences of Transart Members online.
Summer Program Highlights
Urban Poetics, a seminar with curator Radhika Subramaniam, is concerned with that ephemeral notion, “the urban experience,” and how it is brought into being, a historic process and a deeply sensual one. The elements of space, time, memory, subjectivity, and perception that have created it and continue to do so have also constructed an urban way of knowing. Exploring questions—what are the urban knowledges produced by these ways of knowing? How do urban practices frame our ways of seeing and being? How do these habituate us and influence the ways in which we inhabit cities?—close reading, experiments, performance, listening, walking, and a deep exchange and intersection with one’s artistic practice will occur.
Reciting Sites, a seminar with Andy Warhol grant recipient Myron Beasley that contemplates and interrogates the cultural politics of public art and its construction of memory and history with performance theory.
Remembering Spaces, a workshop team-taught by Deborah Aschheim and Lisa Mezzacappa, dedicated to how we experience spaces with our bodies and senses, how we remember these embodied experiences and how we can devise new ways of observing, recording, and recreating spatial experiences that get at the deeper truth of the phenomenological and narrative experience.
General information: www.transart.org
For questions or to make an appointment to speak with faculty please contact: Drew Henmi: [email protected]
Transart Institute
228 Park Ave. South
New York, NY
+1 (347) 410 9905
Skype: transartinstitute
www.transart.org
[email protected]
