MFA in Sculpture

The MFA in Sculpture is a two-year, studio-intensive program that focuses on amplifying students’ creative work within the context of an ongoing and immersive critical discourse. Sculpture shares material, process, language, technology, and history with aspects of our social and physical infrastructure and can offer direct access to the complex questions and problems embedded within both. Using this sense of immediate connection to the world as a point of departure, graduate sculpture at BU offers a challenging yet supportive environment for artists who actively envision new potentials for the future of art itself.

The hallmarks of our program are intimacy and intensity. With a primary emphasis on studio practice, students work across the broadest possible range of fabrication techniques and material production, as well as exploring cross-disciplinary and genre-defying creative possibilities. In addition to regular studio visits with SVA’s core graduate faculty, students have extensive one-on-one contact with numerous internationally renowned visiting artists, curators, writers, and critics. Weekly group critiques, thematic seminar courses, professional symposia, technical workshops, and field trips add to the wide-ranging and immersive conversation that forms the basis of the department’s studio culture.

The MFA program in Sculpture remains committed to providing a platform for the incorporation of highly distinctive voices from social, economic, cultural, and geographic positions consistently underrepresented within the field of contemporary art. Our curriculum is designed to balance intensive critical conversation informed by art historical and cultural theory with a grassroots studio-driven discourse framed by the plurality of our students’ individual perspectives. Students are encouraged to deepen their relationship to their specific areas of interest and to broaden their creative horizons by engaging with the extensive academic, technical, and human resources available within the University community at large.

Learning Outcomes

All students graduating with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from the Boston University School of Visual Arts are expected to exhibit:

1. Sustained individual creative practice: Students demonstrate a sustained, self-directed, professional level of studio-based practice and/or creative exploration.
2. Development of artistic community: Students participate in defining the shared terms of an ever-evolving artistic community. Students gain experience with maintaining a supportive and respectful atmosphere, engaging openly with peers, providing substantive feedback within group critiques, offering dissent and difference of opinion with curiosity and civility, conscientiously sharing resources, and collectively solving problems.
3. Development and application of critical language skills: Students develop the ability to clearly articulate the complexity of their own work and that of other artists, both verbally and through writing within the context of critiques, studio visits, and final reviews.
4. Comprehensive awareness of the field and its historical legacies: Through shared discourse and independent research, students build awareness of historical and contemporary practices within the field of sculpture and gain ability to situate their own work in relation to the varied histories of art practice and craft tradition.
5. Demonstrated understanding of professional practice: Students gain significant experience with exhibition design, installation, and documentation within weekly critiques, end-of-term reviews, independently curated projects, and as a function of required exhibitions.

Program of Study

The MFA in Sculpture is a 60-unit program that requires an average of four terms to complete. Students may only enter in September.

The College of Fine Arts Policies for Graduate Students apply to this program. Students must earn a minimum of 60 course units in graduate-level coursework (500 level or above).

Fundamental to the curriculum of graduate studies in sculpture is a well-rounded studio practice with extensive exposure to a plurality of contemporary perspectives. The program balances individual creative production with a wide range of curricular activities such as: reading and research; topical seminar courses; critical analysis and interpretation of student work; collaborative projects; and travel to galleries, museums, and cultural events within the Boston area and beyond. At the end of each term, student work is reviewed by the core faculty and a guest critic from the field. At the end of the fourth term, graduating students mount a public thesis exhibition in a professional gallery, where the work is reviewed by a thesis panel. The exhibition is accompanied by the MFA exhibition catalogue, which includes a written thesis statement by each MFA student.

Graduate Sculpture CFA AR 821, 822, 823, 824 (9 units each)	36 units
Graduate Seminar/Discussion CFA AR 843, 844, 845, 846 (3 units each)	12 units
Liberal Arts elective (CAS, COM, GRS, MET, CFA FA 500 level or above)	4 units
Art or General electives, 500 level or above	8 units
Total units	60 units