The past six months since leaving my old job have been filled with a lot of down time and a lot of work - A fairly healthy balance of the two, compared to what it was in my previous occupation. When I left that job, I had one major goal in mind: prepare myself for graduate school. Sure enough, over the first few months and leading into the new year, I was woking away in my studio and in the field when I wasn’t at my new job. It ultimately led me to decide to apply to a few schools.
Grad school isn’t for everyone, and you don’t need a masters degree to succeed in the art world. Just like an undergraduate program, there’s no need to have an undergraduate degree in your media. But for some people, it makes sense. People like me who enjoy the academic setting, working one-on-one with professors and classmates in a dedicated and seasoned space for making art. The goal of going to grad school is to make yourself into a better artist using a high-intensity program with other artists always around you. And for me, that works. But it isn’t for everyone.
There are myriad artists who have made major waves in the contemporary art world with their work who only have an undergraduate degree — not even necessarily in their media — and many who don’t have a college degree at all. A great example of someone who doesn’t have an MFA and only a bachelors in art is Alec Soth, my favorite contemporary photographer. Soth’s work has been majorly influential on an entire new generation of fine art photographers for the past twenty years since Sleeping by the Mississippi was first introduced (at the time, was titled “From Here to There,” as a commentary on the early days of web surfing). Soth, as well as a few other photographers of course, has an immense influence on my work and ideas. Recently, Soth has been making youtube videos about photography books and publications, talking about his ideas and his reads of these books. In one of the first videos he did of this, he mentioned he never got to take a proper art or photo history class, and his art/photo history knowledge was built up solely through viewing and reading photo and other art books.
Soth is a model for the artist who doesn’t want a degree in their media. While of course , he never got an opportunity to pursue an MFA in photography or art because by the time he was mentally ready, his “career had already taken off at that point” and it would have been like admitting that newly famous artist to your program. But even then, he still stands as this pinnacle of MFA-less artists. One downside, however, is that if you’d ever want to teach your medium/media at a collegiate level, you must have an MFA in order to do so, so if that is on your radar as a potential future career, you know what you need to do.
I applied to four schools for an MFA in photography, all of which are quite far from home. In a previous blog post, I talked about the southwest and my attraction to that region of the country., so aptly I applied to Arizona State University. I also applied two two great plaines schools, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and University of Texas at Austin, and finally one school in New England, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
Through months of waiting and conversations, I ultimately decided that University of Massachusetts Dartmouth will be my place of study for my MFA in Photography. They’re a very small school compared to my undergraduate school, Illinois State university, but that tight-knit group of artist is exactly what I’m looking for. Roughly 30-some graduate students study at the College of Visual and Performing Arts at UMassD with many different media.
I did learn that I would be the first photography graduate student in a few years, which I see as a blessing. When I was talking to one of the graduate students there, I mentioned that photographers seem to be the most notorious for surrounding themselves with only photography and photographers, rarely consuming other media or talking to other artists in different media, that this is something I’ve struggled with and have been working to improve upon. The setting of UMassD’s art program, where every one of my peers will be working in a different media than me, that I’d be the only proper photography MFA candidate, is thrilling to me.
In recent months, I’ve been feeling a lull in my personal work, that feeling you get when a project is coming to a close, even if you don’t know you’re working on a project. Not only that, but this decision has gotten the ball rolling on leaving this state I’ve lived in for the past thirteen years — and the region of the country ’ve lived in for my entire life. I still have many photo ideas that I want to check off my list, many of which I can only make in the Midwest, and I’ve been slowly checking them off — especially since most of them would require some, well, green. It’s still pretty bare over here in central Illinois post-winter weather. But through this feeling, I’ve been starting to group together photographs I’ve made in the central Midwest that all have this same spirit to them, aesthetically and conceptually. I’ve gathered a master batch of around 300 or so photographs from the past four years to then whittle down to a smaller grouping of hopefully no more than 100 images, and perhaps make a book out of them. This more-or-less project is still very young and I don’t expect to finish it for a while yet — especially as I’m still making images for it.
But as I’m winding down my time in Illinois and gradually preparing to move to Massachusetts, there’s still a lot for me to do, both in relation to grad school prep but also my personal life. Making a major move like this out-of-state is daunting, to say the least. It’s a long, expensive and exciting process. Anyone who’s gone to grad school or is also currently preparing for it knows these feelings. It’s not easy but it’s a labor of love. Trying to decide what to bring with, what’s really important, humoring the idea of going back to your home state when all is said and done, or to move elsewhere, or even stay in the state where your MFA program is at. Thoughts on what you’ll be doing for your work, will you continue working in the style you do now, or will you experiment so much that your new work looks nothing like your old work, will you dabble in other media, or will you be strictly your one media you’re studying. All of these questions don’t need to be answered in that time before moving, but they will undoubtedly come up repeatedly in this process. The only real thing any future grad student needs to figure out is where to live and how to get there.
Despite the hilarity of this past year, and as things are thankfully starting to improve across the country as more people are getting vaccinated every day and cases are on a distinct downward trend, It gives me hope that my timing for studying for an MFA is good. While the shift will be a bit intense, I won’t be alone — I’m lucky to have friends within a couple hour drive of Dartmouth-New Bedford that I can easily visit, just like I do now with my friends in Chicago. Getting a feeling for the community and culture of the grad students at UMassD helped me make my decision, as culture and community are right behind academic setting in regard to importance for me.
in the coming months, you’ll see me continuing to post and make new work, trying diligently to make new youtube videos and interviews fro my podcast as well as making zines for Sad Bird. None of these things will go away when I begin my studies, but they will be slowed down a bit. All in mind for the future, hoping to make the most of these few months before I move away to somewhere new. Here’s to the road ahead, I’ll see you in Massachusetts.