Dear Parents and Families,
Happy New Year! As we approach the beginning of the spring semester, I’m excited to be writing to you from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts on Tufts’ newest campus. Located in the historic Fenway and Mission Hill neighborhoods of Boston, the SMFA became part of the Tufts School of Arts and Sciences this past July 1st. Closely affiliated with the venerable Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, since their co-founding in the late 19th century, the SMFA since 1945 has staffed all the studio art courses for Tufts undergraduates on the Medford/Somerville campus, while the School of Arts and Sciences has hosted countless SMFA students in its liberal arts and sciences courses. Now that the SMFA is actually a school within Tufts, though, our relationship is much richer and more deliberate—and exciting faculty and student collaborations are popping up all over the place.
It’s great, for example, to see the scholars, filmmakers, and media experts in our Film and Media Studies program, launched in 2015, collaborate on projects with the SMFA artists working in the media arts. A Film and Media Studies major can now take top-notch courses in animation, digital media, and multimedia arts from SMFA artists. And SMFA students have the whole Medford/Somerville campus as their playground for their film shoots. The Tufts University Art Gallery and the exhibitions team at the SMFA are collaborating on a multi-campus art exhibition, The Ocean After Nature.
Entrepreneurial Leadership minors and SMFA students are working with a professor of the practice who is a highly successful entrepreneur to learn how to set up sustainable businesses for selling Tufts student art. My own department, Philosophy, is offering a two-week intensive course in Rome next summer on the nature and cognition of aesthetic and moral values, the scope and limits of scientific claims about them, and their role in the conception and production of works of art. Staff in the division of Student Life are also working to bring Medford/Somerville student organizations to SMFA students, and to bring SMFA traditions like our 4,000-plus-piece annual Art Sale to the Medford/Somerville campus.
If you or your student hasn’t yet visited the SMFA, I strongly recommend making the short trip to Boston from Somerville/Medford. It’s an amazing place – unique in the true sense of the word. Unlike most contemporary arts schools, which push design-related career paths (graphic design, fashion design, video-game design), the SMFA is about thinking through and expressing ideas, not just through words, but through visual, audio, and tactile expression. This makes it a perfect fit with a liberal arts institution, and particularly with Tufts, which still believes strongly that learning how to think, rather than how to navigate a professional field, prepares students for a multitude of life paths, many of which haven’t yet been forged.
In a world of standardized testing, the SMFA provides us with a model of pedagogy that is an antidote to grade-oriented evaluation. Faculty work closely with each BFA and MFA student at the school to help them develop unique forms of self-expression in their work. Failure—in one’s artistic forays—is an inevitable part of the process. Students learn to accept failure, to backtrack (or start over), and to try again. They learn to tell histories of the paths they take to artistic success. At the end of the term, instead of being assigned a grade, each student sits before a review board consisting of two faculty members and two other students. Students bring to the boards all the work they have done for the term —including, perhaps, papers they wrote for liberal arts classes on the Medford campus, doodles they made on the shuttle bus, soundscapes they made in their residence halls —and they tell their interlocutors a story about what happened during the term: the good, the bad, the (literal and figurative) ugly.
The point of the boards is to get students to develop an ongoing narrative about where they are headed as artists — that is, as people who think via the creation of art — and about where they need to change course. This kind of self-evaluation and self-reflection has always been at the core of the liberal arts education students receive at Tufts. But the SMFA is bringing it back into the foreground in ways that ask all of our students to think about the less quantifiable (and often more fundamental) aspects of their intellectual and personal growth.
SMFA faculty artists are thrilled about the prospect of teaching more Tufts students and welcoming them into their classrooms. And exciting changes are afoot that will involve more studio art programming on the Medford/Somerville campus. To that end, we are constantly improving transportation between the schools. All departments and programs also have faculty ambassadors who are welcoming interested students and helping them select courses on both the Medford/Somerville and Fenway/Mission Hill campuses.
I invite you to visit the SMFA the next time you come to Tufts. See our upcoming exhibition The Ocean After Nature (part of which is also on the Medford/Somerville campus). Meet our faculty. Find your inner artist by taking one of our evening or weekend classes. Come talk to me! I’d be happy to answer your questions or arrange a tour for you and your student—not to mention entice you to explore your own capacity for artistic self-expression.
Sincerely,
Nancy Bauer
Dean of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts
Dean of Academic Affairs for Arts and Sciences
Professor of Philosophy