Studio Foundation Faculty & Department Administrators
Faculty members Evelyn Rydz and Gabriel Sosa were named recipients of the 2024 Boston Artadia Awards. Artadia is a non-profit grantmaking organization and nationwide community of visual artists, curators, and patrons.
Read more in Boston Art Review.
Congratulations to MassArt alumnus Andy Li (BFA ’12) and Program Area Chair and Professor Evelyn Rydz on being selected for the Boston Public Art Triennial’s accelerator program. Li and Rydz will have the task of producing a public-art project with a budget of $50,000 that will debut May 22, 2025 in Charlestown Navy Yard. The MassArt Art Museum will also be one of the sites for the triennial.
Rydz said she sees the accelerator “as an opportunity to keep learning and to keep growing as an artist with amazing support both to be a student through the workshops that they offer, and also through the financial support to realize a project in public space.”
…”Rydz’s work focuses on human relationships to water. [Sanchez said] Rydz’s work shows the promise to engage the Charlestown immigrant community and “to touch upon some of the site-specific history in relationship to water.” Li was selected because his textile art “brings positivity to the world,” said Sanchez. “It’s accessible, it’s light, it’s vibrant.”
Read more in the Boston Globe.
In a feature piece about her latest project, ‘Visibility Studies’, Artist and MassArt Visiting Lecturer Joanna Tam talks about the complex connection between hypervisibility and invisibility in relation to safety and vulnerability for folx at the margins. She employs video, photography, and objects made with safety vests and green screens to explore the danger zones marginalized people navigate between invisibility and hypervisibility.
Tams was recently named the 2024 Prilla Smith Brackett Award winner by Davis Museum at Wellesley College.
Read more in the Boston Globe.
Incoming first-year student Ada Cooprider is the recipient of this year’s Bedford Arts and Crafts Society scholarship. Her work will be on view at the Bedford Day Regional Art Show Saturday, September 21.
Marc Holland, Faculty member and Studio Foundations department chair at the opening reception of the Selections Exhibition at MassArt.
When Marc Holland, sculptor and director of MassArt’s Studio Foundation Program, enrolled at MassArt in 1995, he thought he was embarking on a journey that would lead to teaching university-level photography. But he didn’t understand just how transformational his MassArt journey would be.
“I knew when I got to MassArt that it was my place—everything felt right about it,” he said. “At 30 years old, I was married, I knew my direction in life. I knew I wanted to teach no matter what, and I thought photography was the thing.”
But that plan shifted when Marc took a woodworking class in honor of his late father. Three weeks into the course, his professor, Rick Brown said something that set his education on a new trajectory.
“He asked me ‘You’ve been thinking with your hands before your head your whole life, haven’t you?’” Marc recalls. “He said ‘If you can put something in your hands first, instead of trying to think through it first, it makes a whole lot more sense, doesn’t it?’ And he was right. I declared a double major that afternoon. And I fell in love with all things 3D.”
After finishing his MassArt education with dual degrees in sculpture and photography, Marc went on to complete graduate programs in sculpture and visual art. When he returned to MassArt to teach his first class as an adjunct in 2003, Rick Brown, the woodworking professor who changed the course of his education, offered Marc some teaching advice that’s stayed with him.
“He told me the hardest thing is that we’re always teaching for 10 years from now—the things you really want students to know, in their heads and in their hearts, take 10 years to sink in,” Marc says. “There are things like cutting, sure, that stick in the moment—but the things you’re teaching them about themselves, you have to have faith that they will understand, in time.” Marc says that hearing from past students about those moments when everything clicks into place is one of the most rewarding aspects of his job.
Another thing he loves about teaching is helping students understand how the skills they gain at MassArt lead to limitless possibilities in terms of the impact they can have on the world—sometimes in the most unexpected ways.
From finding his path in life to helping his students flourish as they find their own, Marc credits MassArt as the institution and community that makes incredible things possible. “I’m very, very proud to teach at MassArt, very proud of our students and who we are as a school. I’m proud that we’re a public institution. MassArt is the best deal in the United States, by far. There’s no place like it.”
When you graduate from MassArt as a sculptor, you’re not just a sculptor. You’re a welder, a woodworker, you can do mold-making and casting. Our graduates work as cabinet makers, as framers. They build houses and start companies. You have all these amazing skills, and you can do anything you want to make a living.Marc Holland Department Chair, Studio Foundation & ’00 BFA
MassArt Illustration students and faculty member and alumnus John Rego’s design selected for the Official FIFA World Cup 26™ Boston Poster.
View story
Caroline Hu received her PhD in biology from Stanford University and conducted her post-doctoral work at Harvard. Now the visual artist, biologist, and educator has landed her dream job — teaching biology in MassArt’s program of Integrative Sciences and Biological Arts (ISBA). We asked her how she educates art and design students about biology and about the opportunities for comics creators and biologists to work together.
View story
The Brant gallery expands the boundaries of the Studio Foundation curriculum by introducing students to contemporary issues in art from a global perspective.
An integral part of the Studio Foundation program, the Brant Gallery provides exhibition opportunities by and for first-year students, and is a key part of building community among first-year students.
The gallery expands the boundaries of the curriculum by introducing students to contemporary issues in art, including cross-disciplinary approaches and global perspectives, as it also promotes the political function of art. The gallery is a place for students, faculty, and visiting artists to express transformative approaches and ideas about creativity.
The Studio Foundation curriculum is required of all first-year students before they select a major for their sophomore year. Students arrive at MassArt with varying levels of experience, as well as differing interests and backgrounds. Studio Foundation introduces every first-year student to a wide variety of techniques and media that cut across traditions and technologies; something is new for everyone.
As a first-year student, you will learn to develop projects through all stages of the creative process, from inception, to design, then construction, presentation, revision, and completion. You will learn how to effectively and wisely critique your own work and the work of others, while learning to situate your studio practice in the historical, social and cultural contexts of artmaking.
Here’s what your Foundation Year, 30-credit curriculum will look like:
After completing the Foundation Year, all students continue taking Liberal Arts and History of Art courses, which comprise one-third of the Bachelor of Fine Arts program. Both curricula are designed to enhance and complement the creativity that occurs during the sophomore, junior, and senior years.
