[email protected]
Info session for prospective students:
Wednesday, November 12, 6 p.m.
CCA San Francisco campus,
1111 Eighth Street (at 16th and Wisconsin)
The Graduate Program in Fine Arts at California College of the Arts offers an immersive, interdisciplinary environment. MFA students explore both the specifics of particular disciplines and the points of interaction and overlap among those disciplines.
Critical Practice
Students in the program gain a deep understanding of their own artistic ideas and vision. The core curriculum combines rigorous studio critiques with intensive theory seminars and ongoing exposure to a wide range of contemporary arts practitioners through lectures and studio visits. Students learn about the various ways in which artistic practices relate to and affect larger social and cultural landscapes while developing the individual skills they will need to pursue careers in the visual arts.
In their second year, each student produces an integrated thesis project, which consists of a final exhibition and a substantive written thesis supporting their body of work.
Project-Based Seminars
Project-based seminars are led by international visiting artists and curators in conjunction with resident faculty. These courses focus on group production of exhibitions, temporary projects, and public programs, often in collaboration with local museums and arts organizations. They give students crucial experience in creating fully realized projects that are embedded in the art world, and they help them cultivate a network of fellow practitioners and supporting institutions that can be built upon after graduation.
Recent project-based seminars have been led by Kai Althoff, Christian Jankowski, Raimundas Malasauskas, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. Collaborating institutions have included the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the For-Site Foundation, and the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, Germany.
Interdisciplinary Curriculum
MFA students are encouraged to enroll in electives offered by CCA’s other graduate programs in Writing, Curatorial Practice, Visual and Critical Studies, Architecture, and Design. Taking an interdisciplinary approach enables them to understand and contextualize their work across a variety of discourses.
Studio Facilities
Each student has 24-hour access to an individual studio for four consecutive semesters, including the summer between their first and second years.
CCA has state-of-the-art facilities for digital media; editing facilities for film, video, and sound; darkrooms and photography facilities; a spray booth; a model shop (including a laser cutter and a 3D prototyping machine); a materials library; an alternative-materials shop; and facilities for printmaking, glass, ceramics, metals, woodworking, and textiles.
Application Deadline
The deadline to apply for the fall 2009 semester is January 15, 2009 (applications will be available starting November 1, 2008). Read more at www.cca.edu/admissions/grad/finearts.
Scholarships and Financial Aid
CCA awards a range of competitive merit and diversity scholarships as well as substantial need-based financial aid. For more information about financial aid at CCA, visit www.cca.edu/financialaid.
Image above:
Travis Meinolf, Blanket Offer (Want or Need), 2007
For more information go to: http://www.cca.edu/finearts