MassArt Designers Bring Sustainability to the Runway
Four MassArt Fashion Design Certificate students showcase their creative talents, bringing fresh perspectives on sustainable fashion to the runway.
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Studio Foundation introduces first-year students to core art and design practices through drawing, form, time, space, and experimentation, building a strong foundation for study across MassArt.
Meet our Studio Foundation faculty and department staff:
Margaret Clark, '28 BFA, Studio Foundation
Lady Stella, Sumi Ink on Paper, 2025
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Faculty Members Named 2024 Boston Artadia Awardees
- Faculty in the News
- Illustration
- Studio Foundation
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.
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MassArt Community Members Selected for Boston Public Art Triennial
Headshots of Evelyn Rydz and Andy Li (Credit: Evelyn Rydz and Evan Goldberg Photography)
- Alumni in the News
- Faculty in the News
- MassArt in the Media
- Studio Foundation
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.
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Artist and MassArt Lecturer Joanna Tam Discusses ‘Visibility Studies’ with the Boston Globe
- Faculty in the News
- MassArt in the Media
- Studio Foundation
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.
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Call to Artists: Annual Regional Art Show Happening on Bedford Day
- MassArt in the Media
- Studio Foundation
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.
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Marc Holland and the transformative power of a MassArt education
Marc Holland (BFA ’99), director of MassArt’s Studio Foundation Program, says that as a result of a professor’s guidance, he switched gears — and uses that experience to keep front of mind that the best teaching lets students know they can impact the world in unexpected ways.
Marc Holland, Faculty member and Studio Foundations department chair at the opening reception of the Selections Exhibition at MassArt.
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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
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Connecting Past and Present: Clint Baclawski MFA ’08 Brings Light to Malden
A new installation by MassArt's Clint Baclawski MFA ’08 Photography reimagines a 1908 photograph of an elevated connector trolley.
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The Brant Gallery provides a forum for interdisciplinary, cross-cultural curriculum development through its exhibition program, lecture series, and artist residencies.
The Brant gallery expands the boundaries of the Studio Foundation curriculum by introducing students to contemporary issues in art from a local and global perspective.
An integral part of the Studio Foundation program, the Brant Gallery provides exhibition opportunities by and for first-year students, recent alumni, and emerging artists. The gallery plays a key role in building community among first-year students and fosters their entry into MassArt’s art world orbit.
The gallery is a place for students, faculty, and visiting artists to discover new approaches to creativity, civic engagement, and artistic collaboration.
In your first year, you will learn to take projects through the full creative process, from idea to critique.
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.
A Drawing Studio Foundation class in with Faculty member Joshua Hart.
Margaret Clark BFA ’28, Lady Stella, Sumi Ink on Paper, 2025.
A Visual Language Studio Foundation class in the Doran Gallery with Lucie March.
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.
Foundation Year
Major Requirements
- SFDN181 Studio for Drawing 3 cr. Fall
- SFDN182 Visual Language 3 cr. Fall
- SFDN185 Drawing Projects 3 cr. Spring
- SFDN191 Time 3 cr. Spring
- SFDN183 Form Study 3 cr. Fall/Spring
- Studio Elective 3 cr. Fall/Spring
Total Credits: 18
Summary
| Studio Foundation | 18cr | ||
| Liberal Arts | 3-6cr | ||
| History of Art | 6-9 cr | ||
| Total Credits | 30cr |
After completing the Foundation Year, all students continue taking Liberal Arts Courses in Humanities and Integrative Sciences and Biological Arts, as well as and History of Art courses, which comprise one-third of the Bachelor of Fine Arts program. The undergraduate curriculum is designed to enhance and complement the creativity that occurs during the sophomore, junior, and senior years.
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The pandemic changed everything — even the paint colors we pick
- MassArt in the Media
- Studio Foundation
MassArt Studio Foundation Professor Jarrett Davis was recently interviewed by Boston.com on how the pandemic changed everything — even the paint colors we pick. Davis spoke to spoke about the psychology of colors and how they can create a certain atmosphere in a home.
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Boston Art Review Announces its Inaugural Board of Directors
- MassArt in the Media
- Studio Foundation
BOSTON, MA—Boston Art Review (BAR), an organization committed to facilitating discourse around contemporary art in Boston and beyond, is pleased to announce the appointment of Nakia Hill, Courtney Jacobovits, Beau Kenyon, Cher Krause Knight, Mallory Ruymann, Gabriel Sosa, and Gloria Sutton to the inaugural board of directors. This group of artists, scholars, community leaders, writers, and editors bring a wealth of experience connecting communities to art and guiding emerging organizations through moments of key growth.
Gabriel Sosa is a Cuban-American artist, educator, linguist, and curator. Often drawing upon his upbringing in Miami and over a decade of work as a court interpreter in Boston, he uses legal proceedings, personal archives, and contemporary visual culture to explore the mutability of language, the imperfection of memory, and the misinterpretation of both. His work has been shown at Tufts University Art Galleries; O, Miami Poetry Festival; A R E A, Boston; Lugar a dudas, Cali, Colombia; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; and Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana, Cuba. He has organized exhibitions at Haley House in Roxbury, and the Nave Gallery in Somerville. He was also part of the curatorial team of Area Code, the first art fair to showcase artists with ties to New England. Sosa teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is Deputy Director of Essex Art Center in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
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