Pros and Cons for Low Residency Art Students

Below are a few points for art students to consider with regard to low residency art programs.

Pros

Your World - Low residency means you’re away from the day-to-day BS that happens on college campuses.

Follow Your Art - You get to design and carry out your own vision.

Pride - Whatever you accomplish happened because of your own sweat and tears.

Get Ahead - You can build a professional practice (or maintain an existing one) while simultaneously earning your degree.

Travel - If you are not bound to any one place then you can learn in remote locations.

Partnerships/Internships - You can turn a job or artistic residency opportunity into college credit.

Work - If you have a job, you can keep it.

Cons

Flying Solo - Low res programs can be lonely at times.

Uncertainty - It can be hard to tell if you’re “doing it right” because there are no other students close by to measure yourself against.

Do You Need It? - You could’ve made art without having to deal with the degree program work on top of the rest of your responsibilities.

Debt - If you don’t have the money and you opt to borrow, that’s gonna weigh on your art practice.

Closeness - In a university setting it’s easier to dismiss interpersonal problems because you’re not bound to any one person. With low res programs you tend to have one or two people who have a lot of influence over your academic fate.

Why Your Major Matters

What is the Value of Your Art?

What is the value of art? More specifically, what is the value of your art? For this exercise we’re loosely defining value as “something that people hold precious.”

What is precious about your work? Do you know? Can you identify why people—folks who do not know you—would find your work valuable? Would they pay for your work? If so, why? What specifically and generally is interesting, useful, and innovative about that thing you do?

Consider not only the value your art gives to others but also the value it brings to you.

For example:

• I am innovating new ways of engaging the public through dance
• By expressing myself I feel connected to my community
• Dancing keeps me healthy
• Nobody can move like me
• My work inspires young and old people to move

Brainstorm and identify the value of your art. Doing so will help you in making, marketing, and explaining your work. If you’re unclear about your value then how will you convince the rest of the world that they should pay attention to your efforts?

6 Pros and Cons of Alternative, Low Residency Art Education

If You Attend a New Low Res Program

- If you attend a low residency program at a college that previously did not offer low residency education, chances are the administration is flying by the seat of their pants. When schools start new programs, the first few students through the door are guinea pigs who help shape the future curriculum. That can be very frustrating.

+ If your program is very new, there are lots of opportunities for you to create interesting possibilities within the program. For instance, if nobody has done an internship at your low res school then you can shape one to suit your needs. You can also initiate online clubs, programs, traditions, and systems that will benefit you, your classmates, and future students. That can be fun.

- A student from a new, low res major at a California art school told me that the her program stands in the shadow of a very traditional and long established studio art MFA program. As a result, administration didn’t know what to do with her and her classmates. Low residency programs are the ‘punk rock’ of academia and not everyone will take them seriously.

If You Attend an Established Low Res Program

- Some schools that have an old educational model tend to also have an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” kind of mentality. I assume that’s because they have accreditation and they want to keep it. For example, some schools still use a paper system where a digital system would be more efficient. Old programs often have students jumping through academic hoops that were valuable twenty years ago but are not as important today.

+ Once you graduate, your education becomes a memory for you and a set of statistics for the rest of the world. If you go to an ivy league school then it almost doesn’t matter what happened during your two years there.

- If you attend a program that issues narrative transcripts it could negatively impact your hiring and college acceptance processes (unless you apply at places that understand narrative transcripts).

You Write a Lot in the Goddard College MFA-IA Program

Do You Like to Write?

If you enroll in the MFA-IA program in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College, you better be prepared to do a lot of writing. Some of my classmates entered the program not realizing just how much writing is involved. You really do have to crank it out.

There are packets of writing due every few weeks each semester (in addition to your visual or time-based art work) and the final semester is nothing but writing—you have to create a written “portfolio” that usually ranges from 80 to 280 pages. It takes a lot of time.

If you’re looking for a program where you can make work and talk about it instead of writing about it, Goddard might not be for you.

The Good Things About Writing

Writing about your work, and writing in general, will help you in your artistic endeavors. Unless you have a PR firm working on your behalf, you’ll have to write descriptions, proposals, bios, grant applications, residency applications, press releases, and all kinds of unexpected stuff. The more practice you have in explaining your work and discussing your process in academic, pedagogical, and artistic terms, the better off you’ll be. If you’re already a writer, no worries!

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