MFA Textiles & Ceramics Portfolio Critique

This video provides a critique of an MFA art school portfolio, starting with an overview of the portfolio, followed by critiques for each individual artwork.

Topics discussed include aspects of the entire portfolio and artworks are working well, and recommends concrete strategies for how to make progress.

Critique led by Art Prof Clara Lieu, portfolio by Andrea Arts.

“I am a Philadelphia based interdisciplinary artist and recent graduate of The College of Wooster where I received my BA in Studio Art. My work explores themes of tactile experience, intentional process, and the intimacy of the handmade.

I hope to investigate the ways in which hand making facilitates connections between body, process, spirit, and materials and I am interested in how our relationships with objects change based on our relationships with the materials and the processes that make them. 

I explores these ideas by working with traditional craft mediums and I hope to illuminate how the nature of the connection between materials and process has immense power, trying to find mechanisms to communicate visually, verbally, and materially the ways that individual and community wellbeing are affected by our ability to make and our connections to the materials that we make with.

Most recently I completed a post-baccalaureate residency at The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. As I have a liberal arts undergraduate background, I have felt a little daunted by the task of developing a portfolio for graduate school.

I didn’t commit to my art major until the second semester of my junior year and coming from a small department, didn’t have a lot of resources for exploring the option of grad school or developing a portfolio to apply.

Additionally, I am hoping to apply to interdisciplinary programs as a huge reason I want to go to graduate school is to dig into the “why” of my work beyond just a specific medium.

I stand by the work that is in my portfolio but I don’t necessarily think that it is representative of what I will make moving forward.

I am looking for critical feedback from people in the academic art world to put the work from my liberal arts background into context and to get insight on the reality of applying to interdisciplinary programs with a craft based portfolio.”

Andrea Arts