Box 842519
325 North Harrison Street
Richmond, Virginia 23284-2519
United States
T +1 804 828 2787
arts@vcu.edu
Application deadline: January 15, 2025 / International Applicants are encouraged to apply by December 15, 2024. Apply here.
The Sculpture + Extended Media MFA Program at Virginia Commonwealth University is a two-year studio intensive offering you the opportunity to deepen and expand your studio practice alongside an engaged student cohort and faculty/artist community exploring a diverse range of sculptural approaches. From spatial, object, and material-based practices; to performance, film, and lens-based media; from social and relational to web-based and evolving technologies, you are invited to experiment and grow through making in an environment of speculation and high expectations for self-motivation, intellectual capacity, and social responsibility.
Our curriculum is a dynamic and ever-renewing assemblage of activities including faculty and visiting artist studio conversations, both peer-centric critique classes and faculty committee reviews, and intensive seminars focused on a wide range of research investigations. Elective courses are available to expand your practice including classes chosen to foster your thinking with other disciplines and those providing intensive focus on building specific technical knowledge.
Graduate studios are individual spaces with 24-hour access located on the first floor with a loading entrance and outside work area, natural light, both private space and collective making areas, as well as a full array of shops. These include but are not limited to wood and metal fabrication, plaster and mold making, foundry, digital fabrication, video and audio equipment library, and computer lab. The program offers substantial financial support through paid teaching assistant positions, travel and exhibition grants, awards, and scholarships.
Led by an active and accomplished group of working artists including Jeremy Toussaint Baptiste, Lily Cox-Richard, Massa Lemu, Corin Hewitt, Michael Jones McKean, and Kendall Buster, and enhanced by a robust visiting artist program and the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU exhibitions and events, our program promotes a fluid, liberated, experimental, and progressive exploration of the transformative role of art. Our mission is to continually develop a rigorous yet supportive environment that leads to the expansive growth of individual artists. Our task is not only decoding the emergent meanings of materials, methods, and movements, but also the production of an art capable of modeling significant intensities, experiences, and sensations relevant to our time.
We seek to legitimize and foster restless becoming, where intellectual, emotional, and physical emancipation is as crucial for the individual as it is for the community. Our program is a place of ongoing transformation and reconstruction, actively formed and rebuilt by those who join us. In this state, everything becomes both beautifully unknown and potentially knowable
For more information on the VCUarts Sculpture + Extended MFA program, visit here.
