On Thursday, the School of Visual Arts announced that starting next year, it will no longer offer a masters of arts degree in curatorial practice. The update was shared with faculty via an email from Steven Henry Madoff, who founded the department in 2013 and has been chair of the two-year program for the past 14 years.
The sudden announcement follows years of financial difficulty for the New York art school. And, earlier this month, David A. Ross, chair of the MFA art practice program at SVA, abruptly resigned after ARTnews revealed that he had a friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and appears a number of times in newly-released emails.
In his letter to faculty, Madoff explains that he informed SVA president David Rhodes a year and a half ago that he plans to retire in May 2027, and that Rhodes decided to end the masters program upon Madoff’s retirement. “We call this ‘teaching out the program,’” he wrote, while also referencing the school’s “financial challenges.”
As recently as January of this year, SVA was promoting the curatorial practice program online and soliciting applications for the coming fall.
“I know this may sound abstract, but the necessity of the Curatorial as a kind of tool-making for the world is both large and particular, based on technical skills and hands-on training…,” Madoff wrote in a post on e-flux’s platform for art schools. “This [is] what we try to bring to our work together in the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.”
When the program launched in the summer of 2013, it was pitched as offering “professional training grounded in hands-on work with experts in curation, art history and theory.” At the time, Madoff had been teaching for two years in SFA’s art practice program (the department Ross had been chair of since 2008). High-profile curators like Matthew Higgs, Hou Hanru, and Claire Gilman were announced as inaugural faculty members. Current faculty include Ruth Estévez (co-director of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture), Chrissie Iles (curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art), and Charles Renfro (partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro).
In the end, SVA will not be accepting new students this fall. Instead, currently enrolled students will the last to receive their degrees, and those who teach first-year courses have just learned that this year will be their last.
SVA did not respond to a request for comment.
