losemygrip

Hunter generally considered the best, but I've never been impressed by any of the MFA work from any of the campuses (even though a dear friend of mine received a Hunter MFA a few years back--so not since her at any rate).

Your writing seems a little non-grammatical, so make sure not to do that in your applications.

You can have more than one interest area. You'll just have to decide which one is secondary. The B+ in German is fine. Continue with German--take upper-division courses in literature, or cultural readings in German. Add a second language--if you think you might want to do Renaissance primarily, try Italian or Latin. I recommend applying to TERMINAL M.A. programs. Many of your schools offer M.A.s along with Ph.D.s So that would be UC Riverside, UW Milwaukee, UMass Amherst, etc. Places like that. If you're not confident about your competitiveness, well, that's less competitive. Plus, there will be better financial aid for you. Overall, the philosophy should be to apply to a wide range of schools, some where you're fairly sure you can get in, up to some that are probably dream schools out of reach. If you find a place that really suits your interests very well, don't worry whether you're applying to Ph.D. or M.A. Go ahead and go for broke. Now, if you wanted to combine the German with the Renaissance, U.T. would be a good place.

The competition for art history jobs is NOTHING compared to studio art positions. Nothing. Captain, you need to capitalize on your existing training. You already have an MFA, so you're qualified to teach studio art, right? It's also a terminal degree equivalent. With an M.A. in art history, you could also teach art history. You'd be in a good position to do something like run a community college gallery and teach there. I'd recommend working in modern/contemporary, since that's where the curatorial opportunities are, and that's where your current background lies. Since you've already got a terminal degree, you could even go to one of those arts administration or curatorial studies programs, if you really want to focus on that.

I find that odd that the BA takes less time. In schools that I attended and worked, they required the same number of credits. Just different kinds of credits. (The BFA requiring MUCH more are and fewer electives). You must be going to an art school? It's true, however, that for grad school the portfolio is what counts. It might be great now, or it might be that the extra year would give you that much more time to develop your work and prepare a great portfolio.

Go wherever you get the best deal. Calculate total cost, and go wherever is cheaper. The difference in reputation isn't enough to matter here.

Ditto. Your career goals don't require a PhD in art history, so why bother? You need a burning desire to study and research Latin American art. SMU used to have a combined MBA/MA program that might work. I think you could also get into what you're interested in via art or museum education. You probably don't have enough art history to meet the minimum requirements of some programs. A lot of them don't require a major, but do require 18-24 credits minimum in art history. You should probably plan to go back to school somewhere as a special student and take some more advanced art history courses to make sure this is right for you.

How many schools did you apply to?

I wouldn't recommend graduate school if you just want "a year to develop and collaborate." Maybe there's a post-baccalaureate program? I don't know about the UK, but here is it sometimes possible to be a "transient" student, enrolled in classes but not seeking a degree. The MFA is a terminal degree, equivalent to a PhD. The MA is less demanding (and shorter) and less intensive. It's not impossible to get headhunted for grad school, but rare. It more often happens that one of your instructors recommends you to a close colleague somewhere else. You would not be "out of circulation" for three years if you were in grad school. You'd need to keep up your production just as much if not more than before. The only weird thing about a successful artist getting an MFA is answering the question, "Why?" It could be seen as a silly decision unless you have very specific goals (e.g., want a teaching position). Re: those examples--I'm tempted to refer you to some Raphael Rubenstein articles in _Art in America_ recently about "Provisional Painting," as he calls it. However, I think there's a difference between Provisional Painting and just bad painting. Just because it's up on the walls of a gallery doesn't mean it's any good.

But it's true that a lot of schools don't respect the MA. They do sort of feel that if you were any good, you'd have been in a PhD program to begin with. Case in point: my acquaintance who had a perfectly good MA from a top state institution was only given one semester's credit when starting on a PhD at Harvard.

CMU for sure. More selective=more prestigious. Plus you get some money.

Not in painting. The Davis name still has a little bit of the cachet from the old days, but they were always much better known for 3-D. You did right by going for the money.

Only if it is something really outstanding. Then you can list it with "(Declined)" after it. If you need to. But after a few years, drop it.

Try an entry in Thieme-Becker, or in a German exhibition catalog.

Take the best grunt job you can get in a museum or gallery or auction house. The last might make the best use of your training.

Take it. Do you hear me? TAKE THE JOB!!

Oh my gosh! I think for painting it will be fine. I've never regretted going for the money in grad school.

This, in spades.

I agree with the others. Re-apply next year, try some different schools as well as this one, and try to get a decent package. Don't go into debt to get an MFA.

Have you decided yet? I have a question: is the 2-year MFA at Washington 60 credit hours? Make sure it is. If it isn't, it can't really be considered a terminal degree and could potentially cause problems if you get an academic appointment. I don't think that the reputational ranking difference between the two schools is enough to make up for the difference in funding. I agree with others that it's important for you to be in a program where you'll have plenty of peers, and the size of LSU would likely ensure you'd find some interesting minds to interact with. So I'd recommend LSU unless you visit and hate it.

If it's between just those two, Brooklyn College.

If you actually think that Gonzalez-Torres's Perfect Lovers is so canonical that art historians from all fields should know it--well, you have a lot to learn. You really think a specialist in Greek vase painting would know it? Of Japanese hanging scrolls? Do you know all the major works of Sesshu or the Painter of the Wooly Satyrs? Forget it. What's "canonical" in contemporary art changes every two years. Just look at a series of recent editions of survey texts. I'm going to come to Pepe's defense just a little bit and say that statistically, the observation that a large majority of art historians are women is quite true. Thus it stands to reason that a large majority of students are as well (and in fact have always been in the schools where I've attended and worked). In fact, in most universities a significant majority of the whole student population is female. So no reason to get outraged about that observation. Similarly, the observation that a lot of undergrad art history majors are vacuous has been verified in my 20 years of teaching. The same can be said of a lot of other majors as well. At "elite" schools this is likely different, but not at mid-range schools. (Although I taught briefly at a very highly ranked liberal arts college where the majors, while bright, seemed not to know why they were in art history. More females than males in the group, but one of the males was a very nice young man who was really more interested in lacrosse. So not gender specific.) I'm not sure Pepe was saying that their gender was actually related to the students' casual attitudes; I think it was probably just careless writing that gave this impression, and I think that's where the flame war erupted from. Certainly vacuousness applies to none of you here in these forums; the same passion for the discipline that leads you into grad school perhaps also makes it hard to understand how others might not be so serious. Finally, I have some sympathy with the critical comments about Theory. The "Theory mavens" are a much rarer breed these days than formerly, but I have found that frequently they know very little about art, or even about history. Scholarship consisted of invoking the names of various theorists and regurgitating and applying these theories to various visual (or not) texts. They couldn't tell a Rembrandt from a Renoir. Sounds like Pepe had an unfortunate encounter with one of these. May they rest in peace. I'm pleased to see the generalists coming out of the closet. I really think that overspecialization has been bad for the discipline. It kind of makes me sad to see that you guys are all needing to apply to grad school to study with a very particular topic and individual in mind. I've always felt there's plenty of time for that AFTER you get to grad school. I learned so much more during my MA, and even during my PhD coursework. Learning about widely divergent things can be quite revelatory when addressing your special interests. (Surprise! most schools will have distribution requirements in your graduate coursework for that reason). Back to the topic at hand: my motivation was that I wanted to teach in college, and I was interested in studio art, history, and languages. I had an artist sister who suggested art history when I was in high school. Being a natural dilettante, it's the only thing that could hold my interest.

Well, I can see I'm outnumbered here. But let me ask this: are any of you who are arguing that it's just fine to re-apply to all the same schools, that you probably just barely missed being accepted, that it's just a matter of "fit" or a better essay--are any of you actually people who have successfully re-applied with only some tweaking of your essay? If so, that would be good information to provide. If not, do you personally know people who did this? On what basis are you making this argument? Not to pull rank, but after all, I kind of AM the grizzled old veteran in these parts. The idea of addressing weaknesses in your application I agree with. The idea that this can be something as simple as a re-written statement, I do not. Or that magically, in re-applying the second year, you're going to be JUST what they were looking for, whereas in the first year, you were not (i.e., the argument about "fit"). This, I don't disagree with, EXCEPT this likely won't happen in one year. If you re-apply in two or three years and there have been such changes, then maybe. By all means, do. My argument is that the more you change up your application and your qualifications, the more viable you are in re-applying. It needs to be something significant. And it sounds as if you have gotten some very specific feedback on your application from the very school to which you want to re-apply, so that's somewhat of a different situation as well. Did they suggest that you re-apply? However, there's another sort of problem in this immediate re-application thinking. While your application may improve, you'll be going up against a different group of applicants. They may be less interesting than last year's--but they might be MORE attractive to the committee. You might have fared better with your new app against your original crowd, but will you against this new crowd? The committee WILL know you're re-applying, unless you were someone who initially got knocked out of consideration very early on. You're already becoming "old hat." You risk being seen as silly or desperate unless there are significant changes. But I would like to hear from anybody with firsthand experience in successfully reapplying the next year by only changing their essay and/or writing sample (Because let's face it--that's about the only changeable part of your application that doesn't entail the kind of significant factors that I'm talking about.)

GC, if those are the only schools where you applied, that seems strange. They're not well known for ceramics at all. Frankly, if Tyler doesn't come through I'd go again next year and apply to a range of schools, including some highly competitive ones such as Indiana, Washington, Arizona State, and then some less competitive such as CSU Long Beach, San Diego State, maybe Syracuse.

Good luck Hicks. I hope you can find an affordable place to live out there!