Master of Fine Arts Painting

While earning a Master of Fine Arts in Painting, you'll expand your notions of painting as a medium and heighten your understanding of your own artistic practice in a self-directed learning environment supported by rigorous critique from your faculty and peers. In the studio, you'll be empowered to take creative risks as you experiment with new techniques and ideas, carefully scrutinizing the results in order to refine your process and practice.

The program also emphasizes strengthening the conceptual underpinnings of your work through focused immersion in scholarly research and critical theory. You'll learn how to situate your work within the contemporary art horizon by frequently researching, discussing, and presenting on contemporary scholarship and theory, while a graduate seminar in art history will expose you to the ways in which art both informs and is informed by the society in which it is created,

Additional opportunities to dive deeper into the nexus of art, media, and culture are available through taking courses in KCAD's Certificate in Visual and Critical Studies program or even earning an 18 credit-hour certificate. These courses offer a diverse perspective on topics such as cultural criticism, research ethics, and new media literacy.

As you work toward technical, material, and conceptual mastery, you’ll also develop enhanced communication skills through focused critique sessions with faculty and fellow students. KCAD’s MFA Painting program promotes open, honest, and vulnerable dialogue that will help you heighten your ability to speak intelligently and confidently about your work, competently defend your artistic decisions, and respond to others’ ideas in a well-considered, constructive manner.

You’ll also gain pertinent professional skills in curation, artwork preparation, and promotion by collaborating with other MFA students, including those in other disciplines, to organize exhibitions of student artwork in several on-campus gallery spaces. These spaces act as a laboratory in which you and your peers can experiment with various methods of engaging audiences with your creativity, facilitating experiences that will help prepare you to both secure exhibition opportunities and maximize their potential.

If you’re considering a career in higher education, you can also take advantage of the MFA teaching seminar, which covers current methodologies, preparatory and studio practices, and other practical teaching skills.

The KCAD MFA Painting degree program promotes an artist/scholar model that will shape you intellectually as well as creatively, ultimately enabling you to do more with your degree. You’ll also benefit from the program’s close-knit community atmosphere, wherein different people, ideas, and processes are always converging in interesting and inspiring ways. You and your peers will receive personalized instruction and support from faculty who have extensive national exhibition records and reflect a broad diversity of professional practice—from figurative, landscape, watercolor, and encaustic painting techniques to expertise in theory and international experience in shaping the landscape of research ethics—that will provide you with an invaluable breadth of perspective.

There’s also the matter of Grand Rapids, a mid-size city that values art and design. Your experiences in the MFA Painting program will be complimented by exposure to nationally and internationally recognized artists exhibiting at the nearby Grand Rapids Art Museum. You will also be able to connect to the thriving local creative community, including galleries, cooperatives, and other arts organizations—including many powered by KCAD alumni—that will help you expand you network and fuel your professional development.

The MFA Painting degree program aims to instill in its graduates a strong sense of artistic, intellectual, and personal confidence that will open doors to a broad array of professional possibilities. You’ll emerge from the program empowered to succeed as a professional artist, and you’ll also be equipped to teach at the college/university level and pursue career opportunities such as a gallery owner, art director, curator, archivist, museum specialist, art consultant/buyer, or many other positions in which your creative and communication skills will enable you to thrive.