SVA
MA Curatorial Practice
132 West 21st Street, 10th floor
New York, NY 10011
SVA’s Masters in Curatorial Practice (MACP) trains curators with a fully immersive, hands-on approach. The program is organized around concentrations of seminars focused on different aspects of contemporary curating taught by working professionals; practicums in research, exhibition making, and other forms of curatorial enterprise; courses in history, philosophy, and theory; and workshops in professional practices. All classes are intentionally small so that students, working directly with leading curators, are given close attention. Students accepted into the program come from around the world and many different backgrounds, not necessarily a conventional art history background. The work is intense, with a broad range of readings, writing, and discussions. Each student has the opportunity during the program to make at least three exhibitions or curatorial projects in Manhattan and Brooklyn in public spaces. Many students take advantage of being in New York by doing additional work in galleries, museums, and other cultural venues, adding to their professional credentials.
Chus Martinez, Adam Weinberg, Tania Bruguera, Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy, Tim Griffin, Maria Lind, Shirin Neshat, Hou Hanru, Daniel Kunitz, Jens Hoffmann, Joan Jonas, Mick Wilson, Pablo Helguera, Anne Barlow, Brian Kuan Wood, Saskia Bos, Joshua Decter, Dara Birnbaum, Jerry Saltz, Mark Beasley, Jessica Morgan, Jack Persekian, Kate Fowle, Charles Renfro, Alexandra Munroe, Stéphane Aquin, Nato Thompson… These are among the many international curators, museum directors, artists, writers, and theorists who are teaching and speaking as guest lecturers this year in the program.
As MACP is located in Chelsea, just a few minutes walking distance from hundreds of galleries, with museums close by, and most of the students living in Brooklyn, all students have daily access to the city’s vast cultural offerings. As well, SVA hosts more than twenty graduate programs in fine arts, photography, film and video, graphic design, industrial design, interface design, and its facilities include state-of-the-art labs, libraries, and fabrication and printing facilities. Curatorial students interact and collaborate with fellow students across programs, as we consider curating another form of making within the gamut of artistic production. The program’s space, designed by world-renowned architect and faculty member Charles Renfro of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in association with Leong Leong, hosts classes, exhibitions, panel discussions, performances, and other events.
MACP’s collaborations with the Swiss Institute, Independent Curators International, Residency Unlimited, Triangle Workshop, artinfo.com, and other institutions lead directly to exhibitions and publications that students add to their professional CVs. Past and current students have held internships at MoMA, MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Kitchen, the Walker Art Center, SALT in Istanbul, NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore, biennials in Berlin and Gwangzhou, and many other leading institutions.
Each year as part of the program, the first-year students do fieldwork at a major biennial. Last year, they went to the Venice Biennale, where they had meetings with leading curators and former directors of the Biennale and had the opportunity to publish reviews on different parts of the Biennale for artinfo.com. This year, students will be going to Manifesta in Zurich and will be involved in joint workshops there with European curatorial students and curators. This remarkable part of the program, included in the costs of the program, offers students further immersion in the professional field, along with their internships at major institutions not only in New York but around the world. In other words, this is a fully immersive program that trains curators within a city of local and international curators, while also offering the opportunity to train across the globe.
The costs of the program are highly competitive with other programs in the field, in fact lower than most.
Rolling admissions are now in effect. Students have already been accepted into the program, so now is the time to complete applications. For details, visit macp.sva.edu. Interested students are encouraged to contact MACP at T +1 212 592 2274 or [email protected].
