New Dimensions in LEARNING AT MECA

Beginning this fall, incoming Maine College of Art BFA first-year students will experience an exciting new curriculum rooted in MECA’s strength in delivering fundamental composition and design concepts. The first year acts as a universal learning experience to establish the skills needed by all MECA BFA students and prepares them to enter a major in their second year of the BFA. When designing the new first-year experience, faculty identified key concepts that all contemporary artists and designers need to learn to be successful and build a learning experience that prepares students for creative, scholarly, and multi-disciplinary practice. The new courses highlight foundation concepts (design, composition, research, and making) through a blended approach to learning in 2D, 3D, and 4D work. These innovative courses blur the boundaries between digital and traditional approaches to studio practice. For example, in the first semester, students begin their journey in learning through hands-on study in Materiality, a course that takes students through two separate 3D areas to observe materials such as

ceramics, wood, metal or textiles, as a means to develop dexterity, material intelligence, and creative 3D problemsolving. Meanwhile, in Observation & Translation, students move back and forth between digital and traditional methods of drawing the world around them, and in Field Dynamics, they dynamically study composition in both 2D and 3D. In the spring, as a capstone to their blended learning, students develop engaged, thoughtful creative practices in Research & Inquiry, a new course that pairs academic and studio faculty around thematic content. Working from the context of thematic content allows students to develop their aptitude as scholars and citizens while growing as artists and designers. Overall, the new first-year experience enables students to gain critical experience working with the tools necessary for contemporary artists and designers, from 3D-printing to welding to cutting paper to editing video to analyzing historical references. MECA delivers these skills through problem-solving areas that are expanded by imagination, creativity, and thoughtful study.

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3 FIELD DYNAMICS Field Dynamics cultivates an understanding of design and composition in two-dimensional space through an in-depth study of compositional balance, figure/ground relationships, the choreography of visual experience, and other topics, using both conventional and digital approaches. Though rooted in 2D work, Field Dynamics will also include projects that move between 2D and 3D.

MATERIALITY Materiality investigates three-dimensional design and composition through a selection of paired seven-week mini-courses that teaches an applied understanding while acquiring knowledge of specific materials and fabrication techniques. Areas include Metals, Ceramics, Woodworking, Sculpture, and Textiles.

OBSERVATION & TRANSLATION Observation & Translation teaches students to see and translate visual phenomena through conventional and digital drawing, using techniques of perception, measurement, contour, massing, volume, and value structure.

CHROMAPHILIA Chromaphilia investigates color as a shaper of culture and a primary tool for artists and designers, including fundamental color vocabulary, color composition, and color in both perceptual and cultural contexts. Work will include 2D and 3D approaches to color.

SPACE & TEMPORALITY Space & Temporality investigates modes of practice beyond the creation of objects, with a focus on process as opposed to product. Topics include the body as a dynamic object in time and space; lens-based seeing; light; audio; sequential and process-based drawing; and the moving image.

RESEARCH & INQUIRY Research & Inquiry is a collaborative course between Academic Studies and Foundation designed to immerse students in a sustained studio/research project through which they research, write, read, make, revise, remake, and present their work in an interdisciplinary context.