Building on a rich base of faculty expertise, institutional resources, and a 100+ year tradition as a professional art school, we are pleased to announce the launch in August 2008 of Herron’s graduate program leading to the degree Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art. Areas of emphasis in this new graduate program include Sculpture, Printmaking, and Furniture Design. Herron also offers graduate programs leading to the degrees Master of Fine Arts in Visual Communication and Master of Art in Art Education.

Individual artistic vision: As a graduate student at Herron, you are challenged to define and develop your own individual artistic vision. You do this by immersing yourself in an intense combination of processes that can be summarized as making and thinking.
Active participation in the real world: In addition to working on your individual artistic vision, Herron’s graduate students in the visual arts will develop projects that embody their artistic visions in concert with cultural, business and industry partners.

Graduates gain the ability to thrive within the context of commercial galleries, planning for public art commissions, serving as a university teacher, organizing art projects of their own design, working in collaboration with other artists and specialists in diverse intellectual arenas. This fluid, multi-faceted approach to developing a way of working and a body of work will provide the skills, experiences, and results that will prepare graduate students for energized, self-directed, flexible professional careers as visual artists and creative, disciplined thinkers.

At Herron, MFA graduate students explore the variety of roles that are available to them as 21st century professional visual artists. The surrounding metropolitan community (Indianapolis is the 14th largest city in the country) provides a context that provokes in the grad student real world tactics for effectiveness. Furthermore, MFA students will be challenged to seek out and sample conditions that are linked into a wider network of other potential sites, collaborators, and audiences (e.g. the Internet, or groups of artists and arts institutions in other cities and countries).

Interdisciplinary aspects of the program prepare you to develop your artistic content across diverse academic disciplines and to explore your strategies for creating work in concert with others who possess their own expertise.