San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) announces the appointment of Stanya Kahn as Distinguished Artist-in-Residence and Laura Richard as Faculty Head for the 2015 Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Studio Art program.
Stanya Kahn is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in video with a practice that includes drawing, sound design, writing and performance. Humor, pathos, and the uncanny emerge as central modes in a hybrid-media practice that seeks to re-work relationships between fiction and document, the real and the hyperreal, narrative time and the synchronic time of impulse. Kahn’s video practice incorporates formal cinematic and sound strategies to place poetic and experimental content inside of loaded social contexts, in an effort to complicate and illuminate both. In a long-term investigation of how rhetoric gains and loses power, Kahn’s projects often situate language in the foreground of works that are dialectically driven by the demands of the body.
Kahn has had recent solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Pigna Project Space, Rome; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; and Cornerhouse, Manchester. Kahn is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. Solo and collaborative works have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial; the California Biennial; MoMA, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles; The Getty Center, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Center for Art and Media, Karlsrühe; and MoMA PS1, New York.
As Faculty Head of the Low-Residency MFA program, Laura Richard assumes a leadership role in shaping the summer Graduate Lecture Series, and will have oversight of the annual Summer Symposium. The 2014 symposium, “Face It: Photography, Ethics, and Identity in the Age of the Selfie,” investigated the political implications and ethical obligations that arise in a world of incessant and instantaneous images.
Richard works in modern and contemporary art with an emphasis in film. A PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, she is finishing her dissertation on the early film and room works of Maria Nordman. Her article “Anthony McCall: The Long Shadow of Ambient Light” appeared in the Oxford Art Journal in 2012, and, since 2009, she has been the co-coordinator of the Townsend Working Group in Contemporary Art at UC Berkeley, whose mission is to foster interdisciplinary and inter-institutional conversations. From 2003 to 2008, Laura was Editor-in-Chief of Artweek magazine.
The program
SFAI’s Low-Residency MFA in Studio Art program provides an interdisciplinary context for artists to develop and refine their work while engaging the historical, theoretical, sociopolitical, and creative concerns of the contemporary moment. Founded on the principle that critical inquiry and experimentation are at the forefront of art-making, the program fosters students’ use of their own questioning to generate a sustaining and vital creative practice.
The three-year program offers the rigor of a full-time MFA in a flexible format ideally suited for artists who wish to develop their work without sacrificing a professional career or commitment. Students work with faculty during intensive eight-week summer sessions in San Francisco, and independently—with guidance from artists in their home communities—during the fall and spring. Summer sessions combine critiques, art history and critical studies seminars, visiting artist lectures, and individualized tutorials to create a comprehensive studio- and research-based curriculum. The program culminates with the highly celebrated MFA Exhibition.
Priority deadline for applications is January 15, 2015. To speak with an admissions counselor, email [email protected].
About SFAI
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), founded in 1871, is one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious institutions of higher education in the practice and study of contemporary art. As a diverse community of working artists and scholars, SFAI provides students with a rigorous education in the arts and preparation for a life in the arts through an immersive studio environment, an integrated liberal arts and art history curriculum, and critical engagement with the world. Committed to educating artists who will shape the future of art, culture, and society, SFAI fosters creativity and original thinking in an open, experimental, and interdisciplinary context.
