CAMPUS AND FACILITIES
APPLICATION AND FINANCIAL AID
Bard MFA is housed in the summer on the 540-acre rural campus of Bard College. Located in Annandaleon-Hudson, New York, Bard lies on the east bank of the Hudson River, about 90 miles north of New York City. Bard’s proximity to New York City is significant for the MFA program; many faculty members reside there and visiting artists regularly travel from the city for presentations and performances at Bard. Students can easily travel by train or car to the city on summer weekends to attend exhibitions, performances, readings, lectures, and films.
Artists who seek the stimulation and challenges of an interdisciplinary environment in their pursuit of the MFA degree are invited to apply for admission to the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Successful candidates demonstrate a desire to rigorously reevaluate their artistic practice. Applicants should also possess a strong grasp of the technical craft, historical background, and current practice of their discipline, with an interest in the equivalent vocabularies and practices of other disciplines. An undergraduate degree in the arts is not required for admission; an applicant’s life experience may take the place of an undergraduate degree.
Bard offers facilities on campus appropriate for each artistic field, including workshops for welding, woodworking, and printmaking; photography darkrooms and digital printing labs; film and video shooting and editing suites; electronic music and recording studios; and performance venues. The Bard College Exhibition Center (UBS Gallery) in the neighboring Village of Red Hook is a converted warehouse with more than 16,000 square feet of exhibition and studio space, in which MFA students present their Master’s Projects to the public. The Bard campus is also home to CCS Bard, an exhibition and research center dedicated to the study of art and exhibition practices from the 1960s to the present day. The Center for Curatorial Studies presents rotating temporary exhibitions of contemporary art in the 9,500 square foot CCS Galleries. The Hessel Museum of Art offers an additional 17,000 square feet for exhibitions curated from the Marieluise Hessel Collection of more than 1,700 works. Bard MFA students may utilize the CCS Bard research library and curatorial archive, and attend free public lectures and educational programs addressing key topics in the study of contemporary art.
Applications for admission are accepted once per year in January. Admission requirements and links to the online application can be found on our website, bard.edu/mfa. Financial aid, in the form of fellowships, scholarships, and loans, is awarded to help offset the cost of tuition and fees. Bard MFA does not offer teaching assistantships, work-study opportunities, or tuition waivers. All students are eligible to apply for fellowships and scholarships; only U.S. citizens and permanent residents may apply for federal loans. A student with extremely high financial need may receive up to about 50 percent of the annual tuition in fellowship and scholarship awards; the remainder would need to be covered through loans, outside grants, or personal funds. Students with lower financial need would receive a smaller award. For financial aid purposes, students are considered to be enrolled half time during their first two years of the program and full time for their final summer. For additional details on the program, including tuition and fees and faculty information, please refer to bard.edu/mfa. You can also learn about student, faculty, and alumni/ae events on facebook.com/bardmfa.
Artwork featured in this catalogue by: Colleen Brown, MFA ’11; Marley Freeman, MFA ’11; Richard Garet, MFA ’11; Abraham Gomez-Degado, MFA ’11; Leila Hekmat, MFA ’11; Dani Leventhal, MFA ’10; Erik Nelson, MFA ’09; Lee Puckett, MFA ’11. Photography by Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00.
Arthur Gibbons Director | Susan Tveekrem Managing Director | 845.758.7481 | mfa@bard.edu | facebook.com/bardmfa | bard.edu/mfa
ARTISTIC DISCIPLINES
Founded in 1981 as the first of its kind, the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts (Bard MFA) is a nontraditional school for interdisciplinary study in the visual and creative arts. Bard MFA combines a flexible approach to art education with a strong foundation of interdisciplinary dialogue to meet the ever-changing needs of our students and faculty. Innovation and risk taking are necessary for the growth of our students and are integral to our educational mission. Bard MFA is summer based: approximately 80 students are in residence on campus for eight weeks during three consecutive summers. Two winter independent study periods are completed off campus. We do not offer an MFA program that runs during the traditional academic year.
“The program fosters mutual interest and support that are underwritten by a sense that making art and making a life in art are challenges that can be met in diverse ways.”
During the summer each student has his or her own studio in which to create work and meet individually with faculty members. When not in the studio, students participate in critiques with students and faculty from all disciplines, meet weekly within their discipline, and attend student, faculty, and visiting artist presentations. Each student presents his or her work to the entire community at least once during the summer session.
Ann Lauterbach*
*From her essay “The Thing Seen: Reimagining
During the remaining 10 months of the year, students live off campus, anywhere they choose, and are free to pursue part- or full-time employment and other activities. Though students do not have face-to-face contact with faculty during this period, they are enrolled half time, creating independent study projects and participating in online seminars. The following summer they return to campus and present their winter independent study work to the community. Students complete the program at the end of the third summer, when they present the Master’s Project. Because the Bard MFA curriculum is dynamic and taught by practicing artists who have commitments to their own projects, the faculty in residence changes somewhat from summer to summer. Approximately 60 faculty members are in residence each summer session; of these, 25 to 30 are on campus at a given time. A core group of the faculty returns to teach regularly. In addition to the faculty, each discipline invites guest artists to give readings, performances, and lectures during the summer sessions. These visiting artists may also confer with students in their discipline and attend critiques or other activities during their residency.
845.758.7481 | mfa@bard.edu | facebook.com/bardmfa | bard.edu/mfa
Arts Education for Now,” page 93 of Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century), edited by Steven Henry Madoff, The MIT Press, 2009
At the time of application, each student selects one of the following artistic fields as their primary discipline: Film/Video, Music/Sound, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, or Writing. Entering students are expected to have experience with the working practice and technical knowledge of their field. Each student is housed in one discipline and will approach his or her work from the methodology and philosophy within it, but every student may work in any medium and will have access to the facilities and equipment of all departments during the summer session. Film/Video emphasizes aesthetics and innovation, the art of cinema. It seeks filmmakers who want to work on personal, experimental, poetic, or documentary films, and leaves the blockbuster special-effects films and television docudramas to other schools. Facilities for film and video editing and video installation, as well as cameras and lighting equipment, are available to students both within and outside of the film/video discipline for the summer session. Music/Sound is directed toward artists working with acoustic and/or electronic sound as music and audio art, including composers, improvisers, sound installation artists, sound sculptors, and musicians using acoustic, electronic, or computer-based resources. The aesthetics of the music/sound discipline grow out of the exploration and discovery of experimental music. Practice rooms with and without pianos, a recording studio, and electronic music facilities are available to all students. The Painting discipline encourages students to engage with the shifting and expanding parameters of “painting culture,” a deeply structured, historically informed aesthetic practice that embraces and extends beyond the contexts of the Western painting tradition. It encompasses other predominantly two-dimensional
forms such as drawing and printmaking, and encourages students who work in installation and multimedia forms. Facilities for printmaking and silk-screening are offered. The Photography discipline reflects the diversity of the medium, ranging from traditional to digital, from still to moving image, and from formally conventional approaches to more conceptual concerns. The discipline emphasizes a critical approach to imagebased mediums, intended to help each student find and extend a personal approach and vision, to develop as fully as possible the ideas and directions within it, and to evaluate his/her position relative to contemporary critical ideas. Darkrooms for both black-and-white and color processing, a digital lab with large format printers, and cameras and lighting equipment are provided for the use of all students. The Sculpture discipline is shaped and reshaped by a set of ideas: form, space, surface, material, location, gesture, narrative. Some students come into this program from art schools; others have no formal art training. What they have in common is a serious commitment to their practice and a readiness to challenge the assumptions that inform it. Students engage in object making, installation, video, and performance. The interdisciplinary context of Bard MFA is ideal for writers, as it allows them to explore issues common to the other arts while they address those specific to writing. The Writing program puts an emphasis on developing awareness of a variety of verbal, aural, and textual structures. Students are encouraged to find and develop an individual process of composition, as well as a critical understanding of their field. The structure and nature of the program make it most suitable for writers working with innovative forms of poetry, short fiction, sound, and mixed-media writing.