In Focus: The MFA Review: University of Houston

©Minwoo Lee, Assistant Professor

Each installment of In Focus: The MFA Review highlights a distinct MFA program for photographic artists, providing readers a concise overview of its id, curriculum, school, pupil expertise, monetary help, and post-graduation outcomes. It additionally serves as a showcase of the inventive work produced by school, college students, and alumni. Rather than functioning as rankings or endorsements, these options are meant as sensible beginning factors—instruments to assist potential college students evaluate applications, determine what issues most to them, and make extra knowledgeable choices about their graduate training. While sure particulars shared in these articles could change over time, my hope is that these program snapshots supply a transparent sense of what every represents within the current second.

Thank you to Keliy Anderson-Staley for finishing this interview and compiling all the photographs/assets!

Institution identify: University of Houston School of Art, Kathrine McGovern College of the Arts

Degree Title: MFA, Photography | Video

Location: Houston, TX

Link to Program Page: 

Link to Application Page: 

Instagram: @uh_photo_video

©Minwoo Lee, Assistant Professor

Tell us slightly about your program. How would you outline its scope and goal?

The MFA in Photography | Video on the University of Houston is a three-year, studio-intensive arts program, absolutely funded with the acceptance of a graduate assistantship place. As an interdisciplinary program targeted on pictures and moving-image, graduate college students pursue experimental and expanded lens-based practices as a part of a small cohort inside a rigorous atmosphere of critique, seminar, and analysis.

©Minwoo Lee, Assistant Professor

What would you say makes your program particular?

Our school, college students and site make us particular. Houston has a vibrant artwork scene, and our program has deep and long-standing connections with the Houston Center for Photography, Fotofest, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Menil Collection, Project Row Houses, Lawndale Art Center and Aurora Picture Show. The School of Art is throughout the broader College of Arts which incorporates UH’s famend Music and Theater and Dance applications. Our nice artwork focus permits us to connect with these assets, and college and alumni relationships with these organizations have opened profession pathways for our college students.

Our school are nationally famend with very lively nice artwork practices. Their work is in museum collections across the nation, they commonly exhibit work nationally and internationally, they usually maintain main nationwide awards and fellowships. There are extraordinary school within the studio arts and artwork historical past applications within the School of Art, and MFAs have alternatives to make connections with school throughout the college.

Our MFA college students come from throughout Texas, but additionally from throughout the nation and even internationally. They come from a variety of backgrounds and convey expertise in each mode of nice artwork pictures and video.

©Keliy Anderson-Staley, Professor

What specialised amenities can be found for pupil use (i.e. darkroom, lighting studio, print lab)?

Each MFA pupil has a personal studio within the Elgin Street Studios constructing, the place all of the SOA graduate college students have studios. In addition, we’ve got a well-equipped lighting studio, moist black-and-white darkroom with enlarger stations and different course of darkroom, the Art and Technology Center shared by all SOA college students, and an tools checkout room stocked with video tools, cameras, tripods, and many others. We are additionally including a digital scanning and printing station and proceed to increase our lab choices.

©Keliy Anderson-Staley, Professor

Is your program strictly photography-focused, or does it encourage/enable interdisciplinary work?

Students pursue a self-directed artwork observe, working with award-winning, nationally acknowledged school, whereas studying to situate their work inside up to date artwork discourse and demanding conversations in pictures and moving-image tradition. We don’t dictate medium or subject material, and actually, a few of our college students work on the far outer boundaries of what is perhaps thought of pictures. Many select to take an interdisciplinary method.

©Keliy Anderson-Staley, Professor

Do you specialise in a specific space (i.e. documentary, experimental, environmental work)? And as soon as in this system, is a pupil in a position to shift their focus if their inventive pursuits change?

We have significantly sturdy school experience in analog, black and white and historic photographic course of. New school becoming a member of us within the fall will considerably increase our shifting picture choices. Our school and college students work in conceptual, installation-based, documentary and experimental modes. Students are inspired to pursue their work within the course it leads. In latest years their pursuits have tended to take them in interdisciplinary instructions, however we even have loads of college students working within the custom of the photographic print.

©Angela Tucker, Assistant Professor

How structured is the curriculum? Are there required programs, or is it extra self-directed?

We search to develop well-rounded artists who will be capable to discover their place in a quickly altering artwork world. How we get there’s fairly versatile and all through this system college students are inspired to develop their very own work through an intensive studio observe.

All college students within the School of Art graduate program take an introductory seminar their first 12 months and of their third 12 months take a writing seminar the place they work on the written part of their thesis. The full graduate cohort from portray, sculpture, and many others. take part in these programs fostering a way of group. Our college students take studio programs within the photo-video space and are required to build up credit in associated arts and artwork historical past.

Does this system incorporate video work or rising media comparable to AI, VR/AR, or 3D/360 imaging?

Video is a crucial part of our program, and we’re planning to increase our choices in video in coming years.

©Angela Tucker, Assistant Professor

Does this system supply profession growth help, comparable to portfolio critiques, workshop/convention attendance, or networking alternatives?

Professional growth is a crucial part of instruction in this system. Students are inspired to start pondering of themselves as skilled artists, and plenty of start exhibiting their work in venues across the metropolis whereas nonetheless college students. All MFAs current their thesis work within the Blaffer Art Museum on campus, an exhibition that pulls artwork world figures from throughout town. Students additionally suggest experimental solo and group exhibitions for the 2 gallery areas within the Elgin Street Studio constructing. Our college students are lively members within the Fotofest Biennial and Meeting Place. In 2020, our program was the Houston host for the Annual Conference of Society for Photographic Education, and plenty of of our college students took an lively function in programming and convention associated occasions.

©William Bossen, MFA Candidate

What are key commencement necessities (exhibition, thesis paper, portfolio, and many others.)?

Students mount a thesis exhibition with their graduating School of Art MFA cohort within the Blaffer Art Museum on campus. The exhibition is accompanied by an exhibition catalog with an artist assertion that the scholars provide. Students additionally produce a written thesis placing their work in aesthetic, cultural, conceptual and artwork historic contexts. Students defend their written thesis and work at a proper thesis protection within the Blaffer museum.

©William Bossen, MFA Candidate

Who are your present school members? What are their areas of inventive curiosity?

Keliy Anderson-Staley, Professor and Program Coordinator, works with pictures, textual content and set up to discover narrative buildings and their relationship to pictures and the historical past of photographic applied sciences. ( ) Engaging with private archives, conventional photographic processes and the guide arts, her work seeks to place non-public histories and particular person tales inside broader historic and cultural contexts.

Anderson-Staley is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and a 2013 George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellow. Her work has been exhibited broadly, together with at Akron Art Museum, Arkansas Art Museum, Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Bronx Museum of the Arts, California Museum of Photography, Griffin Museum of Photography, Masur Museum, Morris Museum of Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Riverside Art Museum, Shelburne Museum, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Southeast Museum of Photography, and Zillman Art Museum. Her work has been written about and reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Photo District News, Photograph, Art New England, ARTnews, B&W Magazine, Oxford American, Camerawork, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. On a Wet Bough, a monograph of her tintype portraits, was revealed by Waltz Books.

Minwoo Lee, Assistant Professor, works with conventional and digital photographic and different lens-based processes to look at the digital camera’s ocularcentrism and to reimagine photographic relations past imaginative and prescient. ( ) His work has been exhibited on the Seoul Museum of Art, De Appel Amsterdam, Incheon Art Platform, the Art Gallery of Guelph, Katzman Contemporary, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and InterAccess. Lee has participated in residency applications on the Seoul Museum of Art, Paradise AIR, the Banff Centre Leighton Artist Studio, Incheon Art Platform, and the ARCUS Project in Ibaraki, Japan. He is the recipient of grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, and the Paula Riff Award from the Center for Photographic Arts.

We are thrilled that in August, Angela Tucker will probably be becoming a member of our program as assistant professor. ( ) Angela Tucker is an Emmy and Webby Award–profitable filmmaker, multidisciplinary artist, and educator whose work explores race, reminiscence, and social historical past by way of shifting picture, collage, and set up. Blending private reminiscence, historic texts, and cultural defiance, she creates work centered on the interiority of Black girls. Her movies have screened at DOC NYC Festival and BlackStar Film Festival and aired nationally on Lifetime, NBC, and Netflix. Her most up-to-date movie, The Inquisitor, premiered at Tribeca and broadcast on PBS’ Independent Lens.

Angela is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the artist-run gallery The Front. She has obtained fellowships from the Sundance Institute, Firelight Media, and Chicken & Egg Pictures, and was an Artist in Residence on the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans.

©Joseph Bui, MFA Candidate

Are school members primarily full-time or adjunct?

Our MFA college students work virtually solely with full-time school. In addition to the photo-video school, they’ll additionally take lessons within the different studio applications and should take artwork historical past programs. The school in these areas are all working on the high of their fields. Students will need to have at the very least one school member on their thesis committee from one other program (Art History, Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Design or Emerging Practices and Interdisciplinary Forms). All our MFA college students have the chance to show at the very least one course in our undergraduate program.

How concerned are school in mentoring college students past coursework?

In their second-year college students ask school to affix their thesis committees, and college work intently with the scholars by way of their time on the college. There are two scheduled first-year critiques, a second-year thesis committee critique, a thesis protection within the third 12 months and particular person studio visits all through. Our school attend pupil exhibitions and function mentors to educational assistants and first-time lecturers. Faculty oversee internships and unbiased research and actively help their college students with letters of advice and different kinds of profession help.

©Joseph Bui, MFA Candidate

How typically do visitor artists, curators, or critics go to for lectures and/or critiques?

We have a sturdy visiting artist and critic program. Each 12 months the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts sponsors a speaker sequence. Past CWM audio system have included Ramell Ross, William Camargo, Nicholas Galanin, Sama Alshaibi, Liz Deschenes, Zora J Murff, and Samantha Box. Other artists and curators who’ve visited to current their work and critique pupil work have included Anne Wilkes Tucker, Matt Eich, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Barbara Hammer, Deborah Jack, Harry Gamboa Jr., Jess Dugan, Bill Armstrong, and Natasha Egan. Additionally, we’ve got hosted bookbinding, letterpress, video-mapping {and professional} growth workshops. We even have shut relationships with the Hirsch Library and Print Room on the Museum of Fine Arts Houston the place college students can have direct entry to uncommon picture books and artworks.

©Verónica Gaona, Alum

How many college students are admitted annually, and what number of are pictures targeted?

Photography | Video admits 3 college students annually. They are a part of an incoming School of Art cohort of studio artists and artwork historians annually totaling between 17 and 22 college students. There is an August orientation every summer season, and the scholars have frequent alternatives to work together and make connections throughout disciplines. Students also can pursue a parallel MA diploma by way of the Arts Leadership program.

What is the approximate cohort measurement, and what impact does this have on critiques, collaboration, and networking?

We have 9 MFAs within the Photo | Video program. This makes for a tight-knit collegial group. With their work as IAs within the lighting studio, ATC and darkroom and their 24-hour, year-round studio entry, graduate college students are deeply concerned within the life on campus. Professional relationships shaped in this system have grow to be collaborations and mutual profession help within the artwork world post-graduation.

©Verónica Gaona, Alum

What form of work are present college students creating?

Current college students are working within the widest doable vary of photographic and video modes—together with set up and sculptural primarily based works with photographic or video parts, experimental and narrative-based video, different processes, textiles and display printing, digital pictures, efficiency (and documentation), guide arts, portraiture, narrative and conceptual tasks. Subjects embrace the city panorama, the atmosphere, cultural and social frameworks, migration, autobiography, household, id, the fabric situations of the medium, visible historical past, and extra.

©Emily Peacock, Alum

What is the whole value of this system (and length), and what funding choices can be found?

We are a three-year program. We are a fully-funded program, with the acceptance of a graduate assistantship place. The annual tuition sticker value is round $10,000 per 12 months for 9 credit every semester (within the first and third 12 months, extra within the second 12 months when college students full two 12-credit semesters). Support comes within the type of a mix of tuition waivers, graduate tuition fellowships, and educational assistantships. Students are liable for some college and parking charges.

Are there educating assistantships, and what number of tuition do they cowl?

There are educational assistant positions obtainable within the darkroom, lighting studio, Art and Technology Center and Equipment Checkout room, along with grader roles in our Art History MA program. MFA college students even have alternatives to show programs to our undergraduate college students (Fundamentals of Photography, Digital Imaging, Intro to Video, and many others.). These are paid roles, offering college students with earnings above and past tuition waivers.

©Emily Peacock, Alum

Are extra grants/assets obtainable to help pupil tasks?

All MFAs have non-public studios in our new Elgin Street Studios constructing for 3 years, together with by way of the summers, they usually have a number of alternatives to exhibit their work on campus.  Each 12 months, small awards can be found by way of a aggressive course of to help exhibitions, analysis, and journey. The School of Art has begun buying a sales space at Untitled Art Fair, Houston, during which MFA college students are inspired to exhibit and, if relevant, promote their work.

©Phillip Pyle, II, Alum

What varieties of careers do alumni pursue, and the way does this system help college students after commencement?

The School of Art is a significant feeder of artists and expertise into the Houston artwork scene. Many college students have gone on to profitable careers as artists, promoting work by way of galleries, inserting work in museum collections, taking part in residencies and profitable aggressive nationwide grants and awards. Quite just a few have grow to be full-time tenure-track professors – together with alumni Priya Kambli, Bennie Flores Ansell, Jamie Robertson, Emily Peacock and James Osamu Nakagawa, amongst others, every of whom has solid nationally and internationally vital exhibition data. Recent alum Veronica Gaóna was the recipient of the Latinx Fellowship Award and Artadia Houston and took part in residencies at Skowhegan, Bemis and ISCP Brooklyn. Philip Pyle, II lately had a solo exhibition at Houston Museum of African American Culture. Many of our alumni take positions in arts organizations within the metropolis, some have served on the boards of these organizations and some have based essential organizations within the metropolis. Alum Lauren Christlieb based Red Bird Press right here in Houston. Alum Brian Ellison is co-founder of the acclaimed Black Man Project which has had main impacts throughout the metropolis. Recent alum Maddie Casagranda was simply awarded a Trio Grant by the Wendy Wagner Foundation. Both she and up to date alum Jennifer Marion have upcoming residencies on the Ramona Residency in Houston.

There is nobody set profession path that our MFAs pursue, however our emphasis on a nice artwork observe within the context of vital discourse prepares them for a lot of alternatives within the arts.

©Phillip Pyle, II, Alum

How linked is the alumni community, and do graduates keep concerned with this system?

Many of our alumni have returned to show programs, current their work in public displays on the college or to function mentors to present undergraduate college students. Our alumni grow to be a part of an lively artwork scene and sometimes open doorways and alternatives for one another. Our alumni commonly exhibit work at HCP, Fotofest, MFAH, Art League, Lawndale Art Center and Project Row Houses. We all the time encounter present and previous college students supporting one another at these occasions. We additionally keep an Instagram feed (@uh_photo_video ) the place we promote alumni accolades. Our alumni are all the time welcome to ship updates about their work and we are going to make sure you share their successes.

©Jennifer Marion, Alum

©Maddie Casagranda, Alum

©Maddie Casagranda, Alum