COVID Thesis Submission Guidelines

The entire Columbia Visual Arts MFA class of 2020 will be invited to participate in the Class of 2020 Exhibition which we plan to hold in the spring of 2021. If you choose to graduate in February 2021 prior to the mounting of the exhibition please follow these guidelines in preparation for your Preliminary Thesis Committee Meeting. You will have the opportunity to reconvene your committee for a second meeting after the exhibition is installed. If an external committee member is not available at that time you may invite a different committee member. If you are not planning to graduate in February 2021 you must register for Thesis Completion before the end of the day, Friday 15 January.

MFA students are required to develop both a visual and a written thesis during their second year of study. We recognize that the pandemic radically changed the trajectory of your fourth semester, and the thesis guidelines have been changed to address this. A suggestion—do not take this as an assignment or burden, but as a chance to quietly look back and conditionally think about your last two years, who you were as an artist, how your work functioned, and where you find yourself today, knowing that in a week, a month or a year, it may look, feel or be quite different. See this as an opportunity to communicate as clearly and directly as possible to the three people who will be spending an hour focused on your work, and who can use this document and documentation to make this hour a deeper one. Think of it also as an opportunity to produce a document that you will look back on, to see the ‘you’ who wrote this in a particular week of a particular month of a particular year.

Your thesis submission should include the following:

• A narrative of your artistic trajectory and development over the past two years, in terms of theoretical and medium-based explorations/ experimentation. This should include questions your work engaged in, the terrain you’ve investigated and could include other offshoots that you didn’t directly continue with in your thesis work but that you hope to continue in the future. This can be seen as an archive of possibilities or possible promises you make to your future self.
• An in-depth presentation of your thesis work. If it’s largely completed, this should take the form of a presentation, including changes you envision in finalizing and installing the work. If it’s a work-in-progress, do include changes you envision in the completed work and why. If the project is early in its development, this should take the form of a detailed proposal. This writing should theoretically and historically ground your set of inquiries related to your thesis project. You don’t need to think about this (or your thesis work, for that matter) as providing an answer or solution, but instead articulating your questions and the questions your work raises.
• Documentation of the thesis project or proposal, including photos, links to videos, annotated plans, descriptions, or any mix of these. You might consider also including documentation of works prior to the thesis work that map your artistic trajectory and development in the program. This will show your thesis committee, in a material way, what has led to your thesis project.
• As your fourth semester at Columbia was marked by exceptional global happenings, feel free, if you like, to write about how this has impacted the direction of your thesis and future work and/ or your thinking as an artist in general.

If you intend to graduate on 10 February 2021 your thesis submission will be due by 25 January 2021 and you will need to schedule your thesis committee to convene with you remotely sometime between 25 January and 5 February. Please do this individually with your committee members and then email Carrie, Laura, and Claire to let them know who the three members of your committee are and when you will meet. If you have chosen Thesis Completion and will graduate later please contact Laura Mosquera or Claire Valdez to learn what the deadlines are.

Clair Valdez will create a Google Drive thesis folder for you and share the link with you. All of your materials should be uploaded to this folder and then shared with your committee members. Please include a document that lists the contents of your folder. Please also be sure to label all work samples and images with titles, dimensions, materials, etc.

Prior to your committee meeting your committee will look in depth at the materials in your Google Drive folder. Because this meeting will take place on Zoom it’s important that you create an organized a way to reference and show these materials during your thesis review. Please troubleshoot the technical details to make the best use of everyone’s time. We would suggest that you aggregate all of your work samples into a presentable format such as a series of numbered images that can easily be sorted in Preview, a PDF document with labeled images at the appropriate resolution, or a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation. Please have all material, including video files, ready to show in full-screen mode when you share your screen in Zoom.

If you have any questions please reach out to Matthew, Leeza, Carrie, Laura, or Claire and also be in touch with your Thesis Chair.