(upbeat music)
- If you wanna 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,
everyday something
fascinating is happening.
- There's a lot of potential to be able
to work outside of your 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 is 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's 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 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,
actually was in a course
called Bodies of Sound.
So, in this course we learned about
performance artwork, sound artwork,
and how research can also
inform this way of working.
So, these were really new
concepts and new approaches
to studio work that I
was not experienced with.
- Taking not just art practice,
but making practice and
putting them together.
How that grew into needing it
to being more environmental
and then it came to be an installation.
So, now it's painting,
sculpture installation.
It's like trying everything to see
what is the best avenue for this work.
Not only for myself,
but also for the viewer.
- [Ben] 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.
(soothing music)
