MFA in Art, Art History, and Design

If you want to come to MSU, think about what your end goal is when you leave here. So do you want to teach? Do you want to be a working studio artist? Because this program can really help you. It's a three-year MFA and each year is thematic. The first year is exploration. This campus and this university, every day something fascinating is happening. There's a lot of potential to be able to work outside of your kind of background. There's a set of credits that you're given that are flexible. So if there's a class on campus that you would like to take outside of your discipline, there's a really good chance you'd be able to find a spot in that class. It is really important to think about things outside of art for our art practice. And so just talking to these different experts with the latest research in the areas that I'm interested in, that's just priceless. All of our students coming in are fully funded. They do not pay tuition. They teach and they receive a modest salary. Beyond being fully funded, there are great opportunities for scholarships and fellowships for materials or for travel. It really opens up the doors for what you can do. I love interacting with students in the classroom and that the conversations that I have, even in teaching a foundations level course, really impact the way that I view my own studio work. I wanted to walk out of here becoming a professor. The only way to become a professor was to learn how to teach. And I wanted that experience right away. Learning how the basic aspects of teaching and in art work from the teaching perspective of how to manage critique, how to manage a presentation of contemporary art resources for students, how to plan a lesson that integrates with a larger curriculum. The second year of our MFA, the theme is integration. You take all of your exploration from the first year and you integrate all of that work into your studio practice. Our faculty members are internationally known and the opportunity to work with some of these people is invaluable. The references that my faculty members have given me have been really important because they understand my language and what my work needs. Through our Critical Race Artist-in-Residence series that we have, I actually was in a course called Bodies of Sound. So in this course we learned about performance artwork, sound artwork, but then how research can also inform this way of working. So these were really new concepts and new sort of approaches to studio work that I was not experienced with. Taking not just art practice but like making practice and putting them together, how that grew into needing it to being more environmental and then it came to be installation. So now it's painting, sculpture, installation. It's like trying everything to like see what is the best avenue for this work, not only for myself but also for the viewer. The third year is their final thesis exhibition in the Broad Art Museum. It's in this absolutely gorgeous Zaha Hadid designed building that brings in really cutting-edge contemporary art on campus. This is the space in which our MFA students present their thesis show. The connection with the Broad Art Museum is really exciting and really unique to our program. Our graduate students have an open door to the curators and to the staff and to the museum itself. I am able to hone my skills through the Broad and just expose everything to those jobs to become a professor and teach others. Both teaching and continuing to develop my artistic practice, those are two things that I envision doing after I leave here and those are two things that this program prepares me to do.