Not Accepting Applications
To best meet the needs of our students, we have decided to suspend enrollment in the Master of Arts in Art, Education, and Community Practice.
The 30-credit master’s program in Art, Education, and Community Practice will equip you with interdisciplinary training in radical educational theory, social activism, and socially engaged art practice. Through hands-on projects and collaborative community initiatives, you’ll leave the program adept at using the arts as a method and medium of social change and ready to work effectively as an artist, community organizer, activist, and educator.
Core Course Sequence
The foundational courses of the Art, Education, and Community Practice MA cover the history and practice of socially-engaged art, critical pedagogy, and social activism, striking a balance between theoretical exploration and practical application. You will also choose elective courses from across the university that complement your personal interests and professional goals. Throughout your coursework, you will learn from artists who create socially-engaged work and collaborate with local organizations and community partners to understand how art can address historical, political, cultural, and social needs.
Culminating Experience
For your capstone project, you will draw on your knowledge of creative activism strategies to design, develop, and document your own art activist initiative.
Curricular Requirements
Sample Plan of Study
This module addresses the expanding field of socially engaged art in the US and internationally: its history, current practices, and conceptual understandings of art, politics, public sphere, activism, and democracy. Students learn first-hand from socially engaged artists locally and globally.
Foundational Course
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ARTCR-GE 2459 Art & Ideas: What is Social Practice Art? 3 Credits
This course explores the burgeoning field of social practice art. Today artists working in the field of social practice focus on aesthetics, ethics, collaboration, media strategies, & social activism as central issues that inform their artworks & projects that are designed for public & social spaces. In the United States, visual art that engaged the public directly began in the late 1950s & coincided with the local “decentralization” efforts that, in the arts, resulted in community-based art practices that envisioned the public as diverse, socially-engaged, & contributed to an expansive aesthetic consciousness. Understanding this history contextualizes social practice art & allows us to interrogate the ways artists blur the lines between object making, performance, activism, grass roots organizing & pedagogy.
- Department: Art and Art Professions
Providing a firm grounding in popular education and social justice education that is inspired by Paulo Freire, students explore the educational function of socially engaged art: learning about critical pedagogy in public, community-based, informal, and virtual/media-based contexts, both locally and globally.
Foundational Course
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ARTED-GE 2070 Critical Pedagogy, Artists, and the Public Sphere 3 Credits
This course will explore the intersections between critical pedagogy, contemporary art, and public pedagogy. Based on readings in education and cultural theory, as well as case studies and presentations by artist and educators, students will explore education as a creative act and means of social transformation in formal and informal learning settings. Students will analyze their own teaching and learning and connect theory with practice through opportunities to work with local cultural organizations.
- Department: Art and Art Professions
Overlaying the artistic and educational modules is a focus on social activism and community engagement that explores the history, politics, and ethics of working in local, global, and virtual contexts. Within this module students learn about methods, tactics, and strategies of engagement from social movements and community organizing to create artistic interventions in public and community spaces.
Foundational Course
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ARTCR-GE 2461 Art & Ideas: Art as a Practice of Freedom 3 Credits
This class will seek to interrogate the categories of art & activism by looking closely at the following efforts: Occupy Wall Street movement, Gulf Labor Coalition & Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), the direct action wing of Gulf Labor Coalition, & the Direct Action Front for Palestine-NYC & Black Lives Matter. These case studies will sketch the possibility of a practice in which artist’s work does not simply add an artistic flair to this or that campaign, but rather theory and research, action & aesthetics, debriefing & analysis. Close readings of texts and visual materials form the core of the class supplemented with field trips, & special guests.
- Department: Art and Art Professions