Painting Faculty & Administrators within the Fine Arts 2D Department
The Painting and Fine Arts 2D programs provide students with access to well-equipped painting studios and facilities. Spacious group studio areas, for a cohort of up to 15 students, provide personal workspaces with natural and artificial lighting, easels, and a range of tools necessary for their practice.
Students also have the opportunity to experiment with different painting approaches, styles, and techniques, encouraging them to develop their own artistic voice and personal vision.
MassArt’s Painting Studios in the Kennedy building
As a Painting student, you’re invited to participate in a range of events, both here at the MassArt campus, and throughout Greater Boston. Grow your artistic knowledge and expand your network by attending talks, exhibitions, and career development opportunities alongside peers, faculty, and MassArt alumni.
Each year, the Fine Arts 2D & 3D departments host lectures featuring groundbreaking artists whose work has been recognized in their fields.
Past visiting artists include Matt Bollinger, Ambreen Butt, Walton Ford, Chie Fueki, Michelle Grabner, Josephine Halvorson, Polly Apfelbaum,, Lavaughan Jenkins, Byron Kim, Troy Michie, Sangram Majumdar, Meleko Mokgosi, Daniela Rivera, Duane Slick, and Alexandria Smith.
MassArt’s Painting department offers students a unique learning environment that combines traditional painting instruction with support to gain creative independence and self-directed work within an intensive, collaborative environment.
Unique To MassArt
Painting cohorts of 15 students work in group studio areas, and each student has their own personal workspace within that studio. Classes meet for 10 hours each week, and students regularly spend substantial time in studio work outside of class.
As their studies begin, Painting majors focus on core techniques and skills. Heavy emphasis is placed on drawing, from both observation and imagination. Students work mainly with oil and acrylic painting, in order to explore the main components of the language of painting, such as form, space and light articulation, composition, and color. Students also participate in frequent individual and group critiques to foster independent thinking, the construction of conceptual frameworks, and the ability to discuss and contextualize their practice in meaningful ways.
As students progress, they are introduced to advanced techniques and processes – exploring mixed media, digital drawing, abstraction, and expanded painting, all while being encouraged to experiment and grow as individual artists. Seniors work on self-defined degree projects in painting, and develop a command of both technical and conceptual elements of painting towards the articulation of meaning.
Painting faculty provide guidance, technical instruction, and critique to help students develop their painting skills, artistic vision, and conceptual thinking.
Meet our Faculty
The Museum of Fine Arts, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Harvard Art Museums, among other institutions in Boston, act as extensions to our classrooms. With free access, MassArt faculty frequently teach classes on site, studying directly from the most significant works of art in these institutions.
Graduates of MassArt’s Painting program pursue varied careers, as professional independent artists, curators, educators, art dealers and gallerists. They are equipped with the vision, knowledge and skills to navigate the art world and make a meaningful impact on the field of painting and beyond.
Students who complete the Painting BFA program are expected to be able to demonstrate the following learning outcomes.
