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Whether you want to exhibit and lecture about your work, teach, write a book, or create an artist-run collective, MECA’s Master of Fine Arts Program encourages each student to think across traditional academic boundaries and challenge their art practice and intellectual curiosity. Studio-based, with renowned faculty, visiting artists and carefully selected graduate advisors, the curriculum emphasizes the intersection of studio production, individual research, critical analysis, and travel to important and inspiring locations. This structure promotes the development of a professional lifelong practice. From the first moment of your first eight-week summer intensive, you will experience a truly individualized education and focus on becoming an inventive, skilled, self-disciplined, engaged maker in the world and in your own community.
Choose from our Low or Full Residency options and base your studio wherever you decide— whether it’s on campus in Portland, Maine; or in our Low Residency Program anywhere in the world. Applications are currently being accepted for the 2017–2018 academic year. Full Tuition Scholarship deadline is January 27, 2017. Priority application deadline is February 20, 2017. Rolling Admissions is until May 1, space permitting.
Students who choose the Full Residency option move to Portland, may have a studio, have consistent 24/7 access to MECA facilities and the activities that occur that happen in the College and around Portland during the school year. They are also able to take advantage of Graduate electives and Teaching Assistantships. Our low residency MFA combines intense periods of on-campus instruction in Maine with the freedom and independence of working from any home location. Our low-residency structure is designed for experienced artists who want the ability and independence to maintain their ongoing careers while earning an MFA. Both of MECA’s MFA tracks offer an interdisciplinary approach that encourages students to think across traditional academic boundaries and challenge their art practice and intellectual curiosity.
While most low residency programs offer 1-2 week on campus intensives, MECA is unique in offering an 8 week summer intensive trimester and a full fall and spring trimesters. The Summer Intensive trimester allows students a full semester of on campus experience each summer, while the Fall and Spring trimesters offer a full academic year of studio and coursework from a student’s home studio. Short Winter and May residencies (for graduating students) complement the fall and spring trimesters. The low residency structure features year round contact with core faculty and a local studio advisor who meets with each student in their home studio during the fall and spring trimesters. Studio time is complemented by a rigorous program of online coursework. The MECA MFA low residency track is a full-time 60 credit program of study.
The academic year kicks off annually with an eight-week Summer Intensive in Portland, Maine. The Intensive generally begins in mid-June and runs through early August. See the Academic Calendar for more information.
You may request a catalog (here). You may open the downloadable PDF (here).
Documentation of your work should be of professional quality. Choose images that best represent you as an individual. You may submit up to twenty images but we recommend that you thoughtfully edit the selection to support the ideas communicated in your letter of intent.
Describe your intended field of exploration to show us what materials, ideas, and approaches you are ready to embrace as part of your graduate study. Alongside an analysis of your recent work, describe how you anticipate your work moving in new directions in the future. Tell us how you are ready to challenge yourself and why you think MECA’s MFA will help you do this.
For Summer 2014 we were joined by Abigail DeVille, Sharon Hayes, Rick Lowe, Michael Oatman, Richard Renaldi, Jay Sanders, Lisa Sigal, and Trevor Smith. The roster of visiting Artists and Curators for summer 2015 is forthcoming.
To be eligible for aid at MECA accepted applicants must have completed a FAFSA form online. Please visit the Financial Aid section for more information. All students may apply for remote research fellowships. Please feel free to contact Rachel Katz, Administrative Director of the MFA in Studio Art, at 207.699.5030 or at rkatz@meca.edu
Please see our Academic Calendar.
Please do not hesitate to contact our Program Chair, Gail Spaien. Our other Graduate faculty are available to answers question's as well. Feel free to email mfa@meca.edu.
My experience at MECA reinvigorated my art practice and took me in directions I never anticipated. The artists, writers, and thinkers I was introduced to there empowered me to investigate my work in ways that reached out as well as back. I emerged from the program a much more complete artist and thinker with a peer group that continues to enrich my work.
Jonathan Wayne MFA '08 // Cleveland, OhioBeing at MECA gave me chance to experiment and grow with my work, to create a network of peers and friends, and to interact with and learn from a fantastic group of artists. Since graduating, I have coordinated the MFA Alumni Residency Program, which allows alums to return to campus in the summer and work alongside the current MFA students and faculty.
Alexandra Silverthorne MFA '10 // Washington, DCI only applied to one grad school, because I knew it was the perfect balance of theory and practice for me. Little did I know that MECA would wreak havoc on my art practice and all my preconceived notions about art-making. MECA opened up a landscape of contemporary theory, practice, and possibility.
Catherine D'Ignazio MFA '05 // Waltham, MassachussettsMECA gave me the critical thinking skills I need as an artist working in a solitary, isolated atmosphere. The inner dialogue I developed at MECA continues to guide me as I move forward in my work.
Maysey Craddock MFA '03 // Memphis, TennesseeMECA’s MFA Program affirms how the unforeseen emerges in the repeated chances we take with the structures and gestures that inspire us. Therefore, art is never done.
Elaine Angelopoulos MFA '09 // Brooklyn, New YorkThe MFA Program completely reinvigorated my art practice. I was more ready; every moment was like being inside a diamond—it was synergistic. Now I am not afraid to take on any kind of project, large or small, community-oriented, or very personal. I make whatever the moment calls for: interactive immersive video and sound installation or apple pie.
Assistant Professor in MFA Julie Poitras Santos‘ site-specific visual practice takes many forms, including installations, video, performances and public projects. Much of her recent work uses walking as a means to create community, investigate richly sited ways of knowing, and narrate new territories. This fall, Julie will be teaching ‘Walking Art History’ as an Academic Studies class.
green is the forest we wander (a locus, an echo, an amble)
One of twelve artists recently selected to create work for the 2017 IPark Site Responsive Biennial in East Haddam, CT, Poitras Santos was in residency for three weeks this spring making “green is the forest we wander (a locus, an echo, an amble)“, a 15-minute site-specific audio walk that invites participants into the forest imaginary populated by things magical and unseen. Using cues in the landscape as guides to research, on-site investigation, and poetic inscription, the audio essay wanders through Mie’s Trail, a reclaimed gravel pit and natural preserve on the IPark grounds. Poitras Santos discusses this work along with an upcoming project in Sweden in a recent interview for Konst i Blekinge (Art in Blekinge). You can listen to the podcast here. (the interview is Swedish, with Julie talking in English).
Map & Universe
In August, Poitras Santos will be joining the Milena principle and presenting her work along with other artists and experts in diverse fields for “Made of Walking, La Romieu,” an international forum focusing on dialogues between performance, art, literature and new media related to walking practices. The forum follows the theme of “listening to the ground,” honoring the work of Pauline Oliveros. Additionally, an upcoming essay this fall in Living Maps Review details “Map & Universe,” a walking based artwork she created in southern Sweden in May 2016.
Closer to home, a 50-page catalogue detailing last summer’s PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS 2016 (funded by SPACE Gallery through the Kindling Fund) was released in April with an accompanying public walk through the Portland peninsula. The catalogue contains photos, essays by Poitras Santos and Barbara Louder, and walk descriptions from the fifteen artists who were invited to participate in the initial project.
green is the forest we wander (a locus, an echo, an amble)
I encourage my students to be curious, thoughtful explorers of life and visual culture. Participating in this process of discovery and potential is extremely rewarding.
Visitors to Joshua Reiman’s website are greeted by the enigmatic film still of a man in a suit and bow tie climbing up from the Seine river in Paris with a snorkel mask perched on the top of his head. The character is from Reiman’s film Panning for the Immaterial (2015). He is looking for the gold from Yves Klein’s 1959 seminal conceptual artwork Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, where Klein dumped gold into the Seine as a gesture of selling a space that does not exist. The muted elegance of the image aptly reflects Joshua’s multifaceted and exploratory artistic career, which currently includes teaching at MECA as an Assistant Professor of the MFA in Studio Art + Sculpture.
Joshua Reiman, Panoramique de l’immatériel, 2015 (poster) 23 minutes
Joshua works in sculpture, film, video and photography and 2016 has already been busy, starting with the exhibit MAXIMUM MINIMUM IN UNUM, which he co-curated with Susanne Slavick at Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery, and which explored the dichotomy between“over-the-top” (Reiman) and “less is more” (Slavick). Writer Colin McFadden wrote in the online publication Dear Pittsburgh, “the works displayed are meant to eschew discrete classification. Loosely translated, it refers to the maximum and the minimum in fact of one, two sides of the same coin, exploring themes that sometimes run parallel, sometimes converge. Even the stylistic choice of articulating the exhibition in all capital letters reinforces the curatorial concept.”
Joshua Reiman, G. Washington, 2001 (I Can Not Tell a Lie), c-print 30″x30″, from a series of 14 images
My Castle is your Home, curated by Helga Schmidhuber, opens March 12 and runs through May 1, 2016, at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (NKV) in Wiesbaden, Germany. The focus of the group exhibit lies in inviting people into her Helga’s “stronghold” to view artwork by colleagues and friends, whom she met during her studies at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, or through art residencies. The exhibit includes work from four of Joshua’s films (2009-2015), and a photograph from his G. Washington (2001) series, described in an essay by Stefan Osdene as “imploring viewers to consider how notions of heroism, celebrity, and rebellion have shaped the popular culture of two distinct epochs in American history: the period of the Revolutionary War and the Hip-Hop era. Viewers are confronted by provocative images of George Washington and his compatriots wearing powdered wigs, grills (gold teeth), diamond-encrusted pendants, and customized basketball uniforms – individuals who strut around with a sense of swagger and confidence more befitting gangster rappers of the late 1990s than revolutionary leaders.”
Joshua Reiman, Vanished into Plein Air, 2015 (film stills), Super 8 and digital Super 16, 9:06
Meanwhile, The Mountain and the Bumble Bee, curated by Chris McGinnis, opens March 25 and runs through April 22, 2016 at the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design. This exhibit was inspired by a travel log by geologist and land surveyor John C. Fremont, who noted in his 1842 travel log an unlikely high-altitude encounter with a bumblebee, during which he imagines each of them to be the first of their species to brave the geological extreme of the Rocky Mountain territory. The group exhibit features Joshua’s four-channel film A Brief Inquiry (2010) and other works by contemporary artists and poets that explore notions of landscape, highlighting America’s “contradictory role as both steward and exploiter.”
Joshua’s work often uses iconic figures from art and politics to “anchor new narratives at the junction of where reality and fiction meet” and his work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States, in Germany and in Estonia. Prior to joining MECA, Joshua was a visiting professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University where he taught sculpture, installation, and site work. Josh has an MFA in sculpture from Syracuse University and a BFA in sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute.
'To do' lists highlight the ever-evolving line between wants and needs.
What differentiates MECA from your own college and grad school experience?
MECA’s intimate scale facilitates symbiotic flow between faculty and students. Of course, significant connections evolve at all schools. However, I doubt I had nearly the influence on my instructors in college or grad school that my extraordinary students have on me. They continually enrich my life and expand my views of how art functions for us individually and culturally, ever-increasing the consciousness I bring to teaching, making, and being.
Was there a professor who stands out in your mind as having influenced you?
One salient influence was Stanley Lewis. After studying drawing with him, I avidly took his painting classes, which included a good dose of art history. Like me, Lewis thinks and speaks in non-linear fashion, so he issued me a series of permission slips. He went beyond teacher to mentor for me while some peers chafed against his teaching style. No teacher can be all things to all students, or perhaps not even one thing to all students. However, when a teacher’s emitters hit a given student’s receptors, that artist can take what is received and run with it, likely being further ignited by something another instructor, peer, or influential experience offers down the line, and in turn inspiring others. The whole deal is a marvelous Rube Goldbergian delight.
Why do you work in the medium you do?
I make mountains out of molehills and traffic in human aspirations, tastes, and accomplishments, choosing media best suited to a given concept. “To do” lists highlight the ever-evolving line between wants and needs, with wilder fluctuations across cultural borders. What may be a pressing need in one part of the world, such as potable water or access to health care, may not even be on the radar for someone where such things are taken for granted until an emergency. By examining the lists others make, my viewers often identify with some of the wants or needs of other people. Small details hand-written on the list of a stranger might remind us of the struggles others have that we don’t, or perhaps challenges we have surmounted, generating compassion for others and ourselves.
What do you do when you hit a creative wall?
Sorry, that question does not compute. I hit lots of walls—few of them creative. Yes, they are constructed, but most (if not all) of them are illusions.
How do global events and issues, whether contemporary or past, inform your practice?
I research what humans do with their time, energy, and attention today. Global events and issues take a lot of those three resources to absorb, yet they can also infuse us with energy as well as clarify priorities. That in turn certainly trickles down to our “to do” lists. I mine the extraordinary by immersing myself in the [purportedly] ordinary.
Have you ever worked / presented outside of the U.S.?
For a 2008 exhibition organized by Professor Ling-Wen Tsai called The Crossing of Time and Environment, in Toshei Village, Taiwan, I issued a call for photos of plastic bags snagged in trees and implicated myself as part of the problem by laminating images I gathered, and hanging them in trees on the “chosen barren land” where installation occurred. Recently I was invited to design a two-sided banner installed on lampposts in tiny towns in Denmark. The website ET4U.DK documents this exciting public art project bringing diverse work— much of it politically charged—to quiet streets traveled by tractors, school buses, bicyclists, and families turning into their driveways. I only understood the magnitude and potential of this project by walking the streets of these towns this summer. Seeing work virtually is simply not a full-bodied substitute for experiencing it in the flesh, and I encourage students to experience art directly.
What country, that you have never visited, would you like to visit?
The red and black palette of my inlaid burnishing clay panels derives from ancient Greek ceramics. I would love to find some lists hand-written today in Greek, a language we associate with ancient times and remote priorities, and yet spoken and written today in a country experiencing economic upheaval and thus constantly shifting priorities. I also welcome any lists readers wish to mail me care of MECA!
Glass Houses is a thought-provoking and meditative show that draws in the viewer.
Assistant Professor of the MFA in Studio Art and Sculpture, Joshua Reiman, has a review of his show Glass Houses in HyperAllergic.
“Glass Houses is a thought-provoking and meditative show that draws in the viewer, but only up to a point — purposefully. The vitrines create a sense of disconnect and distance between the viewer and the realities depicted — often of pain, death, destruction, and time — and they remind the viewer that even though the best art connects us to experiences we do not have and worlds we have not visited, there is always a lingering gap between what exists in the world and how closely the viewer can truly grasp it. The job of art is to attempt to bridge that gap, and Glass Houses is a strong argument in favor of straddling that line.” —From Henry Clay Frick to Gilded Matzah, Observing the World in Glass Cases, Deborah Krieger
I am a painter that is currently using traditional methods of oil on panel to explore themes of contemporary life, memory, and the formal properties of paint.
The Portland Mural Initiative aims to bring contemporary art into the public spaces of Portland and its surrounding areas. They work with emerging and established artists that have a strong connection to Maine, to create innovative murals and architectural interventions. They also aim to facilitate a dialogue between the artists and the communities in which the murals are located, through public meals and artist talks.
Tessa Greene O’Brien is one of the co-founders of Portland Mural Initiative. Tessa was born in midcoast Maine, and grew up surrounded by woods, fields, ocean, and artists. The landscape and the people continue to inspire her work. She graduated from Skidmore College with a degree in studio art, and went on to spend the next 10 years traveling the country doing art production for music festivals. During this time she worked closely with teams of artists to design and implement many large scale murals, installations, and collaborative projects. She gained extensive experience managing volunteers, operating lifts, and overseeing project timelines and budgets. Today she lives and works in Portland, Maine, where she has a small specialty painting business, and is pursuing an MFA at Maine College of Art.
MECA is a small school and you can really find a place for yourself. One of the best aspects is the opportunity to meet fellow classmates and form a wide network of other artists – my classmates in the MFA program lived in Brazil, Canada, South Dakota, New York, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kansas.
Canandaigua is the Seneca word for “the chosen spot.” Pilar Nadal left Canandaigua, her hometown in Upstate New York, for her chosen spot: MECA. During her first visit, she was immediately drawn to both the program and the community. “I was really impressed with the facilities and the idea that everything was in one building for the undergraduates and that it was such a small and supportive community. I also chose MECA because I knew I wanted to do printmaking and wanted the flexibility to deviate from that, to experiment and to let the idea take me into the media, rather than using the media as a starting point.”
Pilar has been pleased with her choice as she has not had to wait until after graduation to measure the value of her degree, “At MECA, I didn’t feel like I was living in some kind of grad school bubble, and that the real world would start up again in May, when I graduated. I was already almost there as a working artist; that’s what I am and will be.”
Pilar has built a strong professional network and is currently an Adjunct Instructor of Foundation at MECA. “MECA is a small school and you can really find a place for yourself. One of the best aspects is the opportunity to meet fellow classmates and form a wide network of other artists – my current classmates live in Brazil, Canada, South Dakota, New York, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kansas. Our group is really tight, so we stay in touch pretty often.”
The many projects Pilar explored as an MFA student at MECA include the Tired Press, a bicycle retrofitted with the components of a mobile print shop, which she takes out into the city during the monthly First Friday Art Walk. The idea came from an Artists at Work elective taught by Daniel Fuller, the Director of MECA’s Institute of Contemporary Art. “I like bicycles, postcards, printmaking and talking to people,” Pilar noted. “I spent two semesters building the bike and researching similar contemporary printmakers’ projects, such as Drive by Press print collective, and the Moveable Type truck. This idea of creative entrepreneurship was appealing to me.”
The freedom to explore and question are two facets of the program that Pilar finds particulary valuable. “One thing grad school has taught me is how to ask questions about my own work as well as other people’s.” Pilar plans on staying in Portland to teach, to create, and to continue to develop her freelance print and design studio. She recently took over the Pickwick Press in the Artist’s Studio Building adjacent to MECA. “I love it here,” she says. “I’m excited to see what the world beyond MECA brings.”
H. Maxwell Fisher was a visionary toy shopkeeper and pioneer amateur space aeronaut whose estate sale featured amazing collectible artifacts, including his personal hand‐built spacecraft, the “Fisher FireFly.” The trick is that H. Maxwell Fisher (as well as his son H. Maxwell Fisher II) is a fictional doppelgänger channeled by Randy Regier, an artist who revels in creating original toys and artifacts that look excruciatingly similar to mass‐produced collectables. Except these are definitely one‐of‐a‐kind. The concept is further enlarged with exhibits such as H. Maxwell Fisher’s Underground Toy Emporium & Spaceship Parking at Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York. And sometimes the exhibition space itself is staged as an unexpected surprise. Repurposed from neglected spaces, the exhibit often just appears with little explanation. Pop‐up versions of the NuPenny Toy Store have been installed in a variety of empty storefronts, including an entrance vestibule to an old brick Central Maine Power building in Waterville, Maine, and the Spencer Museum of Art at Kansas University.
For 29 years, Randy did autobody work, which paid very well, but felt creatively and personally exhausting. He realized he needed to make a change and once he enrolled in a 3‐D art class at Kansas State University, his life was transformed. Later he moved with his wife and two children to Maine to attend MECA’s MFA program. In an interview in Maine Magazine in 2010 he commented, “I had made a lot of stuff in my life. I just had never realized it was art. The undergraduate degree was great, but I still had a lot to learn about what it meant to be an artist, not just how to make art.” In 2014 emissaries from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art visited his studio as part of a nine‐month road trip across America in pursuit of undiscovered artists; as a result his work was featured on CBS Sunday Morning.
In an interview with Gina Kaufmann on KCUR, Randy describes his art as “an acknowledgment that we’re mortal and that the the most beautiful moments in our lives, we don’t get to keep. … How do you steward what was beautiful or lovely about your past, how do you capture it, hang onto it and bring it forward with you?”
How does the term ‘public engagement’ differ from artist to curator? Public engagement is a form that an idea can take in the same way that a painting or a photograph or a table is a form. Artists who make work in this way seek to highlight the interactive qualities that exist between the idea or the maker and the viewer. There are as many ways to make a work of public engagement as there are ways of engaging in public, ie parties, talks, craft workshops. When curators seek public engagement they generally are looking for bodies in their exhibitions. Public engagement has been a concern of museum and gallery staff longer than it has been a form for artists to employ. The artist, you see, co-opted the term.
What role, if any, has public engagement played in the valuation and monetization of art? In both senses of the word public engagement has broadened the audience for contemporary art. It has therefore led to a democratization of the art world. This is a good and bad thing depending on who you ask. To my eyes, it is bringing more perspective to the field without necessarily altering its configuration that much. How does that bear on the bottom line? The more people we have in our audience, the more value (cultural and monetary) we can find in our work. The trick is to make sure that all those involved in these public engagement projects are adequately compensated.
What evolution/change, if any, do you see in students from their first to last year in their awareness of the world outside MECA and their capacity to engage with it constructively? Graduating students should always feel like they can change the world. For too long art schools reinforced the idea that artistically, all ideas have precedence in history and therefore have been done before. Couple that with a society that does not value the labor of artists and the picture can be dim. But as initiatives for public engagement spread from the classroom to the studio, so too does the ability for young artists to see and make change within their communities. They, as artists, can find publics, activate them creatively and hopefully find some avenue to get paid in the process. This is part of the development of our students.
