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Fine Arts 2D/3D

Master of Fine Arts, 2D

The foundation of our MFA 2D program is an individualized education that helps each student develop artistic vision and voice.

Our full-time, two-year (60-credit) Fine Arts 2D MFA program encourages students to experiment and explore, while refining the technical and conceptual strategies in their work.

Students are encouraged and challenged, and through rigorous study, creative exploration, and critical discourse, each artist’s body of work deepens and evolves, along with the student’s ability to place their work in the context of contemporary practice. 

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Dialogue and critique are key components of an education in the studio arts, and at MassArt critique is viewed as a creative act. The rich dialogue among students, faculty, visiting artists, and critics takes place within the framework of core classes, electives, presentations, and excursions off campus. Our approach illuminates new pathways for each artist’s work, helping students to build a sustainable practice, and to develop perspective and empathy as artist citizens of the world.

Learning Outcomes

Students who complete the MFA Fine Arts 2D program are expected to be able to demonstrate the following learning outcomes.

  • Establish one’s own creative studio practice that is grounded in knowledge and derived from focused and immersive experience of seeing, thinking and doing. This work is centered in and guided by a student’s own interest and sensibilities
  • Produce artwork that is original and goes beyond a student’s status quo
  • Produce artwork in which subject, concept, form and content interlock
  • Develop technical, perceptual, and conceptual awareness and skills
  • Understand one’s work in relation to contemporary art and art history
  • Develop the ability to critique peers’ work across disciplines
  • Develop awareness and understanding of the diverse cultural, historical, and experiential issues expressed and inherent in one’s own artwork and in that of one’s peers
  • Make coherent, thoughtful and insightful visual and verbal presentations of ones work that demonstrate knowledge of the key issues related to one’s work. These issues include and how one’s work is situated in time and place, and the context of one’s work in terms of concept, material, process, form and style
  • Exhibit one’s work in a professional manner in the thesis exhibition. Work with other students organizing, curating, installing and exhibiting work in the college’s exhibition spaces or other venues
  • Understand a range of professional pathways for careers in the arts
  • Develop knowledge of major historical and cultural characteristics of specific times /places. Infer relationships between society and art
  • Recognize various types of texts used in art historical analysis, and evaluate their content and effectiveness. Use various ideas, approaches and facts in the analysis of art. Formulate, research and argue a hypothesis. Articulate verbally and in writing, theoretical and critical perspectives on art
  • Recognize the impact of historical works of art on contemporary art
  • Draw connections between various artworks, artists and concepts
  • Collaborate with artists in other disciplines

MFA 2D Faculty

Cecilia Vázquez

Chair, Fine Arts 2D

Galvan Rene

Program Supervisor, Art Education

Catarina Coelho

Visiting Lecturer, Fine Arts 2D

Elizabeth Mooney

Assistant Professor, Low Residency MFA
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