Master of Fine Arts Degree

The Master of Fine Arts is an innovative, highly interdiciplinary, contextually oriented, three-year program.

The program produces artists of exceptional ability and initiative who are able to create opportunities for themselves and connect meaningfully with communities and cultures around them.

The School of Art helps cultivate artists who pursue intellectually broad-based, socially minded approaches to art-making, encouraging a new vitality and relevance of art.

Art making in the graduate program:

• is regarded as a mode of creative inquiry whose by-products may be materially intangible or intangible, static or time-based, long-lived or temporary;
• is inclusive rather than exclusive — all natural and human-created tools, technologies, materials, ideas and contexts are regarded as available to the artist for analysis, exploration, exploitation, image-development, synthesis and gesture;
• expands, and thereby redefines, the parameters of art by taking risks and risking failure;
• engages contemporary issues, ideas and technologies, anticipating the future and utilizing the past not as a safety net but as a springboard;
• is responsive to local, national and global contexts, addressing the culture inside and outside of art;
• is attuned to the nature of a university environment, both enriching and mining its resources.