Spent the afternoon at an open house for the MFA in Photography and Related Media at School of Visual Arts. There was a nice spread of fruit, sweets, coffee and Dasani bottled water, and a lot student work on the walls. A diversity of subjects, from portraits to landscape, suburban vernacular to abstracted nude studies.
It's a very nice contemporary facility, with lots of computers, digital video editing stations, on-site high-quality printing, and a few vestigial graduate darkrooms.
SVU photography is emphatically digital at the graduate level. The staff we met spoke of their students as the vanguard of a "new image-making paradigm in the 21st century."
They also mention that graduates of the program are in Chelsea galleries, the upcoming Whitney Biennial, and coveted tenure-track professorships. 20th century paradigms of status and recognition are still alive and breathing, apparently.
The idea of getting the MFA has dogged my thoughts for years. It's as if the MFA would confer a legitimacy to my undertakings as an artist that the MA I actually got, in Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, can't hold a candle to. Doing an interdisciplinary environmental studies degree that emphasized photography and landscape history didn't really put me on a well-defined career track.
When I got out of SVU, it was dark. Late fall, night time in New York. Leaves blew dramatically on a cold wind, and the lights on stoops and in store windows glowed out into the clear night. A most dramatic and beautiful time of day and year in my home town.
A few hours later, I walked by a man and his son in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The father was saying, "It's a good thing there are no clouds in the sky," and I said Oh yeah! and looked up, in time to see the onset of tonight's amazing lunar eclipse.
After ten years of indirectly pursuing the life an artist, now I am trying more and more to center on it. This comment from Akira Kurosawa's autobiography inspires me: "To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes."
Posted by Emily at November 8, 2003 10:11 PM