A person performing while draped in sheets

“Unravel” Madison Mae Parker (photo courtesy of the artist)

Graduate Curriculum & Courses

Graduate Curriculum & Courses

The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is designed to offer maximum flexibility in addressing your individual needs as a student. Following admission through a department, you will design your two-year plan of study based on optimizing the offerings and opportunities available throughout SAIC. You are encouraged to seek out curricular advising as needed from a variety of available sources including the dean, graduate dean, graduate division chair, department heads, academic advising, the graduate admissions office, and your peers.

Studio—MFA 6009 Graduate Projects, Seminars and/or maximum of 12 credits of 3000-level and above studios39  
Art History12  
  • ARTHI 5002 Graduate Survey of Modern and Contemporary Art OR ARTHI 5120 Survey of Modern and Contemporary Architecture and Design(3)
  • Art History Courses, 4000-level or above (9)
 
Electives—any course in any area at 3000 level or above9  
Participation in four graduate critiques 
Participation in ONE of the following as appropriate to artistic practice:* Graduate Exhibition, AIADO or Fashion Exhibition, Graduate Performance Event, Graduate Screenings 
Total Credit Hours60

* Students who wish to use an alternative venue or presentation outside of these options must receive permission from the Dean of Graduate Studies. The AIADO Department encourages students in their MFA design programs to participate in the AIADO and Fashion Graduate Exhibition.

Degree Requirements and Specifications

  • Completion schedule: You have a maximum of four years to complete your MFA in Studio degree. This includes time off for leaves of absence. Students will have access to studios for four semesters only.
  • Transfer credits: You must complete a minimum of 45 credit hours in residence at SAIC. You can request up to 15 transfer credits at the time of application for admission, which are subject to approval at that time. No transfer credits are permitted after a student is admitted.
  • Art History requirement: MFA students are required to take ARTHII 5002 Graduate Survey of Modern and Contemporary Art OR ARTHI 5120 Survey of Modern and Contemporary Architecture and Design. Art History courses must be at the 4000-level and above.
  • Undergraduate studio courses: Graduate students are permitted no more than one undergraduate studio course (3000-level and above) per semester without permission of the Dean of Graduate Studies. Courses at the 1000 and 2000-level are allowed only with permission.
  • Full-Time Status Minimum Requirement: 12 credit hours

MFA 6009 Graduate Projects

MFA 6009 Graduate Projects advising, an ongoing individual dialogue with a wide range of full-time and part-time faculty advisors, is at the heart of the MFA program at SAIC, encouraging interdisciplinary study across the curriculum. You are required to register for one MFA 6009 Graduate Projects advisor each semester, and we highly recommend you register for two.

In the registration process, you may elect to earn 3 or 6 hours of credit with each advisor. This option is designed to allow for maximum flexibility in designing your program. You can earn as few as three and as many as six credits with each advisor each semester, thus dedicating a maximum of 12 credit hours to your studio activity. The number of credits you earn has no correlation with the length or frequency of the advising sessions or to faculty assessment of student work.

The remaining credits required for the full-time 15-credit-hour load may include graduate seminars and academic or studio electives. MFA students are urged to take graduate seminars, and an introductory seminar in their department of admission is highly recommended. In addition, the MFA student may choose from all the art history, studio, and academic offerings across the curriculum (including undergraduate offerings above 3000 level) in any given semester to customize their degree experience.

Graduate Critiques

As one of the principal means of assessment each semester, you will be required to participate in Critique Week, a week-long schedule of critiques during which classes are suspended.

Fall semester critiques are organized by department with panels representing the discipline. This provides you with an opportunity to understand the department’s expectations, have your work reviewed from a disciplinary point of view, and to reiterate the expectations for graduate study.

Spring semester critiques are interdisciplinary, with panel members and students from across SAIC disciplines. Interdisciplinary critiques allow for a broad range of responses to your work, and are intended to assess the success of your work for a more general, albeit highly informed audience. Critique panels include faculty, visiting artists, and fellow graduate students.

Graduate Exhibition or Equivalent

At the conclusion of your studies, you will present work in the SAIC Graduate Thesis Exhibition, other end-of-year events at SAIC, or the Gene Siskel Film Center—or arrange with the graduate dean or division chair for an alternative thesis of equal professional quality. Each year more than 200 graduate students exhibit work, screen videos and films, and present time-based works, writings, and performance to a collective audience of 30,000 people.

Students wishing to install work around prevalent themes, strategies or stylistic affinities can participate in a juried and curated section of the SAIC Graduate Thesis Exhibition. A faculty and staff committee conducts extensive studio visits and as a collaborative project with student participants, organizes and installs the show in designated space at the exhibition.

Undergraduate Courses

MFA students are advised to understand the expectations of their faculty when enrolled in undergraduate studio classes. Although graduate students are an asset to the group dynamic, faculty requirements for graduate students in undergraduate classes are variable. The student is responsible for understanding the faculty member's expectations about completion of assignments, attendance, and any other criteria for earning credit. To assure that graduate students are working at degree level, they are permitted no more than one undergraduate studio course (3000 level and above) per semester without permission of the dean of graduate studies. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 level are allowed only with permission.

Course Listing

Title Catalog Instructor Schedule

Description

This course introduces the student to a wide spectrum of performance forms including performance in every day life, rituals, folk forms, artists' actions, experimental dance and theatre, activist performance, and intermedia forms. Students learn the history of performance practices, explore theoretical issues , and develop individual and collaborative works. Primarily a beginner's course but open to all levels of students.

Class Number

1370

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Gender and Sexuality

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This course introduces the student to a wide spectrum of performance forms including performance in every day life, rituals, folk forms, artists' actions, experimental dance and theatre, activist performance, and intermedia forms. Students learn the history of performance practices, explore theoretical issues , and develop individual and collaborative works. Primarily a beginner's course but open to all levels of students.

Class Number

2188

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Gender and Sexuality

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

Body As Site is a laboratory for body-based research. Students will be guided to expand the range of ways they move and the kinds of presence they can bring to live art by experimenting with balance, breath, vision, speed, continuity/interruption, and more. The class also introduces research and compositional strategies for generating and developing movement for performance. Working back and forth between improvisational and choreographic modes, students will develop projects that further their individual interests and goals. Course work includes compositional games like the Viewpoints and somatic practices like contact improvisation and butoh. We will look at work by artists including Milka Djordjevich, Tatsumi Hijikata, Tere O?Connor, Okwui Okpokwasili and Jacolby Satterwhite, and documentaries like Paris Is Burning, Pina and Rize. Occasionally short readings will be assigned by writers like Eugenio Barba, Coco Fusco or Susan Rethorst. Students will build performances by responding to objects, sites, rhythms, human collaborators and local live performances. By the end of the semester, students will have presented three substantial performances for critique, and produced many in-class ?micro-performances?- nearly one per week.

Class Number

1374

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This course serves as an introduction to the puppet as performing object from traditional forms to contemporary practice. The class will focus on performance techniques with only basic instruction on fabrication. Students will create short form works centered on the puppet or informed by the language of the puppet. Additionally techniques of co-performance with the puppet and the puppeteer are introduced exploring themes of the doppleganger and the other. Students are exposed to work in the field by attending 3 productions outside of class and viewing of video documentation work such as Handspring, Giselle Vienne, Geumhyung jJeong and Bread & Puppet. Additional readings on contemporary puppet theory are included. The first half of the semester specific performances techniques are introduced such as Guignol hand puppetry, overhead projector and screen and rod shadow puppetry and three-person and one-person Bunraku style doll puppetry. Also introduced are rod puppet, scroll theater, Cantastoria and toy theater performance. Each technique then includes a theme and focus for the creation of a short original work. The second half of the semester focuses on the creation of work of the student?s choosing.

Class Number

1857

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

In this class, students will undertake a practical project specifically related to the concept of �monstrosity�. Monstrosity is a term used by Black feminist, Hortense Spillers (1987), to describe something that falls outside the bounds of normality or acceptability. As a student in this module, you will be able to immerse yourself practically in the creative approaches by Black artists who use their bodies and flesh as transformative tools that claim what Spillers terms �monstrous�. This class is designed for those who want to explore new models for performance-making in relation to decolonisation as a practice of critique that looks at other views of the world. You will also have the opportunity to develop your artistic practice, as well as an engagement with experimentation and creative risk-taking.

Class Number

1371

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

How do we observe seasonal rites, rituals, ceremonies and customs that perhaps are familiar and unfamiliar to us and in conversation with the rural? What is the rural and how can we research and look at it in the lens of living in the city of Chicago, the midwest through the body of performing and performance. How do we observe, embody and queer the rural we will be engaged with in workshop, seminar and presentation over the course of the semester. How do we encounter, engage, through the political, the economic, labour, landscape, communities, and history. We will look at a range of artists from a variety of media (performance, sculpture, fashion, video) who look at and work from the rural. These will include Marcus Coates, Fevered Sleep, Kira O?Reilly, Ralph Meatyard, Charles Freyer, British Folklore, Paul Wright, Queer Appalachia, Derek Jarman, Aine Phillips, Kathleen Stewart, Alex Hoedt, and Samantha Allen. How do you embody a field that sews in spring and harvest in fall? How do you perform time in isolation in smaller communities, away from urban centres? Where is the rural in you? Where is the ritual of home and landscape?

Class Number

1372

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This studio class draws on an eclectic blend of original 'Pocha Nostra' research-based performance exercises investigating 'living dioramas', experimental performance methodologies, Suzuki, dance, ritual practice, conflict resolution techniques and other strategic forms. The techniques evolve from sacred and intimate spaces of human presence, to baroque, highly aesthetic and politicized performances of living murals, human altars, and performance jam sessions. Students create 'hybrid personas,' short performances, spoken word texts, and/or visual media pieces based on their own complex identities and personal sense of politics, race, and gender. Readings and discussions focus on performance theory, popular culture and cultural politics.

Class Number

1856

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

EVENT/PRODUCTION is a collaborative workshop in which participants will self-produce two public performances. In this class we will hone our production skills to present and contextualize individual and group performances. Considering future-audiences, we will work through notions of genealogy, community/collectivity, and �the public'. Through collaborative research and by welcoming visiting performance practitioners, producers, and curators in the classroom, we will explore histories of DIY performance, artist-led spaces and institutionalized performance presented in the �Fine Art� context of the museum or gallery. Solo and group performance works will evolve through focused study of technical production skills including stage lighting, sound, cueing software (Qlab, OBS) and projection/live-feeds and streams. With emphasis on accessibility, we will program and present two public festivals of new performance.

Class Number

2187

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Take the Next Step

Visit the graduate admissions website or contact the graduate admissions office at 800.232.7242 or gradmiss@saic.edu.