ART@COVID.EDU: Studio Art MFAs and the Cost of Remote Learning
Featuring concerned students from Columbia, Hunter, UCLA, UPenn, and Yale
Tuesday, July 7, 6pm (Eastern Time)
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Special Guests: A.K. Burns, Dana DeGiulio, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem, Sharon Hayes, and Tausif Noor
As the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates the racial, economic, and cultural inequities of our institutions, we witness the rumblings and eruptions of social movements that are changing the way we think and live. This sense of unrest has been growing in universities across the country where the move online has placed a disproportionate burden on the most vulnerable and under-resourced populations. The cost of remote learning has hit studio art programs particularly hard as students depend upon facilities on campus and physical resources to fulfill their most basic educational needs. With universities unwilling to negotiate a reduction of exorbitant tuition rates in spite of these glaring losses, students have been organizing to reassess the value of their education and examine the priorities of the institutions entrusted to provide it.
Reimagining how higher art education is transacted in the post-COVID era takes on urgency with the Fall semester looming on the horizon. As universities announce plans for online or hybrid learning models and proceed with up to 5% tuition hikes, many MFA students are considering taking a leave of absence or, if denied that, dropping out altogether. Even the most prestigious programs may see dramatic drops in enrollment. Is it necessary to divest from institutions that have made it clear that delivering a quality education is not their top priority? Does this moment have the potential to transform how we think about higher art education?
In this forum, MFA students in the field will address the causes of this impasse, the gains made through student organizing, and the pressing issues they are facing as the Fall semester approaches. Following these short presentations audience members are invited to join breakout groups for focused conversations and Q&As featuring guest panelists.
This event will be live captioned. If you have specific access questions or needs, please contact info@cueartfoundation.org and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Link to event resources: https://bit.ly/artcovidedu
ART@COVID.EDU: Studio Art MFAs and the Cost of Remote Learning
ART@COVID.EDU: Who Cares with Dana DeGiulio and D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem (Breakout Session)
ART@COVID.EDU: Teaching in an MFA Program Post-COVID (Breakout Session)
AGENDA:
Introduction
Tausif Noor
Field Reports
The Nature of the Case: Contracts, Tuition, and Educational Expectations
Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers, Narendra Haynes
Unwritten contracts govern the expectations of art students entering expensive MFA programs. How do COVID-19 contingency plans, such as online learning, fulfill – or break – such contracts, and what are the consequences for the upcoming academic year?
The Institutional Promise: “Don’t worry, you’ll get your degree”
Emma Safir, Diana Sofia Lozano
How do powerful educational institutions limit their responsibilities of care for its constituents and peripheral communities during a world health crisis? When it comes to the MFA programs that reside within these larger institutions, how has the current COVID-19 crisis revealed various forms of institutional neglect?
Intimacy Working Group
alea adigweme, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Kimi Hanauer, Hea-Mi Kim, Amelia Lockwood
Intimacy Working Group aims to investigate forms and definitions of intimacy as they play out within and outside of contemporary socio-cultural structures. Examining relationships on a variety of scales ranging from the interpersonal to the organizational, IWG hopes to inquire into issues of access, commodification, power, and belonging in institutions, the art world and its immediate economies.
Rethinking, Reimagining, and Recalibrating Pedagogies: How to be Together Now
Christina Barrera
In order to build or imagine a different institution we must consider its basic guiding principles; we must ask questions that examine and reevaluate what constitutes our education and its methods. Where do we begin and how do we create new possibilities within a pre-existing institution?
Breakout Sessions
Teaching in an MFA Program Post-COVID
A.K. Burns, Sharon Hayes
Art educators and fine arts faculty play an integral role in shaping arts discourse both in and out of the classroom. How can visual art instruction respond to and integrate the cultural shifts brought about by the pandemic and mass protest?
Who Cares
Dana DeGiulio, D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem
Dana DeGiulio and D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem will discuss student expectations of care on having entered what many interpret as a custodial relationship with the institution, from whom that care is expected and how it's delivered, putting voice and face to who cares in this relationship which is in fact a contract, an affect economy underwritten by tuition, not pretending as love but being most essentially work, which we do at our own and variable degrees of risk, and the demands placed acutely on Black womxn in the academy these days and all days ever.
Intimacy Working Group
alea adigweme, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Kimi Hanauer, Hea-Mi Kim, Amelia Lockwood
IWG’s foundational questions include: How is desire reshaped and reinterpreted throughout the various institutional and interpersonal terrains it moves through? How can individuals and collectives create genuine forms of intimacy in spaces and structures that are seemingly antithetical to the creation of said intimacy? How can the same collectives or individuals generate new spaces that center intimacy and an ethics of care as a central tenet of their organizations? That said, how does COVID-19 make more visible pre-existing inequities in our art institutions? What are some of these inequities? If we assume that the institution was not built to facilitate or encourage care, how can we become intimate with each other in spite of that?
alea adigweme is a multidisciplinary Igbo-Vincentian-American artist-scholar working in the fields of creative writing, book arts, performance, installation, and visual media. She is currently an MFA student in interdisciplinary studio art at UCLA.
Christina Barrera is an artist and educator based in New York City. She is a fourth-semester MFA candidate at Hunter College.
A.K. Burns is an artist and educator based in New York and a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Greater Economy). A.K. Burns is a Distinguished Lecturer and New Genres Area Head at Hunter College, Department of Art & Art History.
Dana DeGiulio has been an itinerant adjunct professor of visual art for the last 12 years and is Dr. Zoom.
D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem is a space sculptor whose award-winning teaching, art, and writing have been commissioned worldwide, bridging disciplines of ritual, design, ecology, and Afrofuturity. She is Associate Professor, Adjunct, at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Founder of Denenge Design and In The Luscious Garden, focused on holistic and conceptual approaches to human-centered design. Her first monograph AFRIFUTURI 02022020 and The Camo Coat Collection launched on February 2, 2020 at Blanc Gallery in historic Bronzeville, Chicago.
Kearra Amaya Gopee is a multidisciplinary artist from Carapichaima, Trinidad and Tobago, based in Los Angeles, CA. Currently, they are a MFA candidate at University of California, Los Angeles, concentrating in Interdisciplinary Studio. They are generally concerned with//by many things.
Kimi Hanauer is an artist, cultural organizer, and founder of Press Press, a publishing studio that aims to shift and deepen the understanding of voices, identities, and narratives that have been suppressed or misrepresented by the mainstream. She is currently an MFA student at University of California, Los Angeles.
Sharon Hayes (b. 1970) is a multimedia artist based in Philadelphia. She currently teaches in the Department of Fine Arts, Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.
Narendra Haynes is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in painting. He is currently a student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Cindy Hwang is a designer and artist based in New Haven, Connecticut. She recently received an MFA in graphic design from the Yale School of Art.
Hea-Mi Kim is an artist from Detroit, MI but based in Los Angeles, CA. She is currently an MFA student at University of California, Los Angeles with a concentration in New Genres.
Amelia Lockwood is an artist from Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, currently based in Los Angeles, CA. She received her MFA in ceramics from University of California, Los Angeles in 2020.
Diana Sofia Lozano is an artist from Cali, Colombia, currently based in New Haven CT. She is an MFA candidate in the Sculpture Department at the Yale School of Art.
Emilio Martínez Poppe is an artist and organizer currently based in Philadelphia. They are an MFA / MCP dual degree candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of BFAMFAPhD.
Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City and Jersey City. She is a Visual Art MFA candidate at Columbia University, concentrating in printmaking.
Tausif Noor is a writer and curator currently based in Philadelphia and soon to begin a PhD in History of Art at UC Berkeley.
Emma Safir is an artist currently based in New Haven, CT. She is an MFA candidate in the Painting & Printmaking Department at the Yale School of Art.
Graphics by Cindy Hwang