The School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (Museum School, SMFA at Tufts, or SMFA; formerly the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is the

art school An art school is an educational institution with a primary focus on the visual arts, including fine art – especially illustration, painting, photography, sculpture, and graphic design. Art schools can offer elementary, secondary, post-seco ...

Tufts University Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...

, a private

research university A research university or a research-intensive university is a university that is committed to research as a central part of its mission. They are the most important sites at which knowledge production occurs, along with "intergenerational kno ...

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...

. It offers undergraduate and graduate degrees dedicated to the

visual arts The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts al ...

. It is affiliated with the Museum of Fine Arts. SMFA is also a member of the

Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design The Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) is a non-profit consortium of 36 art and design schools in the United States and Canada. All AICAD member institutions have a curriculum with full liberal arts and sciences require ...

(AICAD), a

consortium A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for ...

of several dozen leading art schools in the United States. The school is accredited by the

National Association of Schools of Art and Design The National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), founded in 1944, is an accrediting organization of colleges, schools and universities in the United States. The organization establishes standards for graduate and undergraduate degrees ...

History

The school was founded in 1876 under the name School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA). From 1876 to 1909, the school was housed in the basement of the original Museum building in

Copley Square Copley Square , named for painter John Singleton Copley, is a public square in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, bounded by Boylston Street, Clarendon Street, St. James Avenue, and Dartmouth Street. Prior to 1883 it was known as Art Square due to it ...

. When the Museum moved to Huntington Avenue in 1909, the School moved into a separate, temporary structure to the west of the main building. The permanent building, designed by Guy Lowell, was completed in 1927. The red brick building provided improved classroom, studio and library facilities. In 1945 the Museum School and

Tufts College Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...

collaborated to develop their first joint degree teacher training granting program. The creation of additional programs between the two institutions followed soon after. In 1987, a newly renovated and expanded school building, designed by architect

Graham Gund Graham de Conde Gund is an American architect and the president of the Gund Partnership, an American architecture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and founded by Gund in 1971. An heir to George Gund II, he is also a collector of contempo ...

, more than doubled the size of the existing structure and provided an auditorium, enlarged library, expanded studios and classrooms, a spacious new entrance, cafeteria, and increased gallery and exhibition spaces. Gund's expansion included the central

atrium Atrium may refer to: Anatomy * Atrium (heart), an anatomical structure of the heart * Atrium, the genital structure next to the genital aperture in the reproductive system of gastropods * Atrium of the ventricular system of the brain * Pulmona ...

, known as the Katherine Lane Weems Atrium, that connects the two buildings. In December 2015, it was announced that the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston would become a part of

and on June 30, 2016 the integration was completed.

Academics

The school does not have a foundations program, but it does require all new students to take a freshman seminar. Encouraged to build an individual program of interdisciplinary study, students are not asked to declare a major, but by choosing among in-depth courses in a dozen disciplines, students are free to concentrate in a medium of their choice. One of the unique attributes of SMFA is that students are required to participate in a "Review Board" which is a review of all of the art work that a student has done during the semester. Review Boards are led by two faculty members and two fellow students. There are many opportunities for students to exhibit their artwork at both the main building and the Mission Hill building. Opportunities to exhibit works include the annual Art Sale and the juried "Student Annual Exhibition". Various galleries and spaces that are available to students around the school buildings include Bag Gallery, Hallway Gallery, Bathroom Gallery, Underground Gallery, as well as the

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

. The school's main

campus A campus is traditionally the land on which a college or university and related institutional buildings are situated. Usually a college campus includes libraries, lecture halls, residence halls, student centers or dining halls, and park-like se ...

is adjacent to and just to the west of the Museum of Fine Arts. Most classroom space is located there, as well as the Cafe des Arts, the library, the School's store and the Grossman Gallery. The Mission Hill building, located about a quarter mile from the main building, recently has been renovated and includes studio spaces for graduate and post-baccalaureate students as well as classrooms, workshops, and the Writing Center.

Notable alumni

Academia and administration

Alon Bement Alon Bement (1876–1954) was an American artist, arts administrator, author, and teacher. He served as the Dean of Traphagen School of Fashion from 1946 until 1951. Early life and education Alon Bement was born on August 15, 1876, in Ashfield ...

(diploma 1898), painter,

arts administrator The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both ...

author An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states: "''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...

, and

educator A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching. ''Informally'' the role of teacher may be taken on by anyone (e.g. whe ...

. *

Joseph Downs Joseph Downs (July 24, 1895 – September 8, 1954) was an American museum curator and scholar of American decorative arts. After 17 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Downs became founding curator of the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Libra ...

(1921), curator at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

and

Winterthur Museum Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library is an American estate and museum in Winterthur, Delaware. Pronounced “winter-tour," Winterthur houses one of the richest collections of Americana (culture), Americana in the United States. The museum and es ...

Business

Zach Feuer Zack or Zach may refer to: People * Zach (surname), various people * Zack (surname), various people * Zack (personal name), lists of people and fictional characters named Zack, Zach, Zac, Zak or Zakk * Záh (gens) or Zách, a ''gens'' (clan) in th ...

(BFA 2000), attended 1996–2000, art dealer.

Design

Tom Jung Thomas Jung is an American Art director#In advertising, art director, graphic designer, illustrator, and storyboard artist.The Star Wars Poster Book, Stephen J. Sansweet, Chronicle Books (October 13, 2005)The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive ...

, attended in the 1930s, graphic designer and illustrator *

Sally Pierone Sarah Nettleton "Sally" Pierone (10 February 1921 – 22 June 2018) was an American art director of the Marshall Plan who in 1952 worked at the American Embassy in Paris creating posters, booklets and displays to help rebuild Europe after World War ...

, attended 1940–1942, art director and designer.

Film, video and animation

Illustrators and comic artists

Painters and printmakers

Performance artists

Photographers

Multimedia and installation artists

* Anita Glesta (MFA degree), installation artist *

Laurel Nakadate Laurel Nakadate (born 1975) is an American feminist video artist, filmmaker, and photographer. She is based in New York City. Biography Laurel Nakadate was born 1975 in Austin, Texas and raised in Ames, Iowa. Nakadate graduated with a Bachelor ...

(BFA 1998), film, video artist, and photographer. *

Ellen Levy Ellen K. Levy is an American multimedia artist and scholar known for exploring art, science and technology interrelationships since the early 1980s. Levy works to highlight their importance through exhibitions, educational programs, publications ...

(diploma 1981) is a multimedia artist and scholar who explores art, science, technology interrelationships and

complex systems A complex system is a system composed of many components which may interact with each other. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication s ...

Musicians

Sculptors

Writers

Susan Howe Susan Howe (born June 10, 1937) is an American poet, scholar, essayist, and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among other poetry movements.

(diploma 1961) poet, scholar, essayist and critic. * Lawrence Park, attended 1896–1897, art historian, architect, and genealogist *

Rebecca Richardson Joslin Rebecca Richardson Joslin (March 20, 1846 – August 30, 1934) was an American writer, lecturer, Benefactor (law), benefactor, and clubwoman. Joslin's education and affiliations were centered in Boston, Massachusetts. She published one book and ...

, author, lecturer, benefactor, clubwoman

Notable faculty

Sculptor faculty

Frederick Warren Allen Frederick Warren Allen (1888–1961) was an American sculptor of the Boston School. One of the most prominent sculptors in Boston during the early 20th century and a master teacher at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Allen had a career in t ...

, sculptor, taught for almost 50 years (1907–1954) and for 30 years he was the Head of the Sculpture Department.

Emeritus ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

. *

Frank Dengler Franz Xavier Dengler (known as Frank Dengler; 1853 Cincinnati, Ohio – 1879) was an American sculptor. Biography He went abroad while young, studied in the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, and received there in 1874 a silver medal for his grou ...

, sculptor, faculty for a short time, until 1877. *

Charles Grafly Charles Allan Grafly, Jr. (December 3, 1862May 5, 1929) was an American sculptor, and teacher. Instructor of Sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for 37 years, his students included Paul Manship, Albin Polasek, and Walker Hanc ...

, sculptor, he served as the Head of

Modeling A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a measure. Models c ...

from 1917–1929.David B. Dearinger, ''Paintings and Sculpture at the National Academy of Design, Volume 1, 1826–1925'' (Hudson Hills Publishing, 2004), pp. 230-31. *

Bela Lyon Pratt Bela Lyon Pratt (December 11, 1867 – May 18, 1917) was an American sculptor from Connecticut. Life Pratt was born in Norwich, Connecticut, to Sarah (Whittlesey) and George Pratt, a Yale-educated lawyer. His maternal grandfather, Oramel Whittle ...

, sculptor, she served as the Head of Modeling from 1893–1917.

Painting faculty

David Aronson David Aronson (October 28, 1923 – July 2, 2015) was a painter and Professor of Art at Boston University. Biography Aronson was born in Šiluva, Lithuania in 1923. He taught at Boston University from 1955 to his death in 2015, where he formed ...

, painter, sculptor; Emeritus Professor of Art,

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

. *

Ture Bengtz Ture Bengtz (1907 – November 10, 1973) was a Finnish-American artist associated with the Boston Expressionist school, an influential teacher at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and director of the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, ...

(diploma 1933),

Boston Expressionist Boston Expressionism is an arts movement marked by emotional directness, dark humor, social and spiritual themes, and a tendency toward figuration strong enough that American Figurative Expressionism#Boston Figurative Expressionism, Boston Figurativ ...

school painter, later a teacher at School of the Museum of Fine Arts. *

David Antonio Cruz David Antonio Cruz (born 1974) is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, video, and performance. Cruz is best known for his psychological paintings that combine figuration, abstraction, and collage. His work has been shown in ...

, painter and interdisciplinary artist; faculty. *

Esther Geller Esther Geller (October 26, 1921 – October 22, 2015) was an American painter mainly associated with the abstract expressionist movement in Boston in the 1940s and 1950s. She was one of the foremost authorities on encaustic painting techniques ...

, attended 1921,

abstract expressionist Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...

painter, known for

encaustic painting Encaustic painting, also known as hot wax painting, is a form of painting that involves a heated wax medium to which colored pigments have been added. The molten mix is applied to a surface—usually prepared wood, though canvas and other mat ...

, taught with

Karl Zerbe Karl Zerbe (September 16, 1903 – November 24, 1972) was a German-born American painter and educator. Biography Karl Zerbe was born on September 16, 1903 in Berlin, Germany. The family lived in Paris, France from 1904–1914, where his fat ...

from 1943–1944. *

Philip Leslie Hale Philip Leslie Hale (1865–1931) was an American Impressionism, American Impressionist artist, writer and teacher. His work was part of the Art competitions at the 1932 Summer Olympics#Painting, painting event in the Art competitions at the 1932 ...

, attended 1883, later served as faculty from 1893–1931, painter. * Arnold Borisovich Lakhovsky, painter, taught painting starting in 1935. *

William McGregor Paxton William McGregor Paxton (June 22, 1869 – 1941) was an American painter and instructor who embraced the Boston School paradigm and was a co-founder of The Guild of Boston Artists. He taught briefly while a student at Cowles Art School, wher ...

, painter and a co-founder of

The Guild of Boston Artists The Guild of Boston Artists (The Guild) was founded in 1914 by a handful of Boston artists working in the academic and realist traditions. Among the founding members were Frank Weston Benson, William McGregor Paxton and Edmund C. Tarbell, who serv ...

. He was faculty from 1906–1913. *

, German-American painter, he served as the Head of Department of Painting from 1937–1955.

Other faculty

* Chantal Zakari, faculty, book artist and graphic designer.

References

External links

* {{authority control Universities and colleges in Boston Art schools in Massachusetts Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Cultural history of Boston Educational institutions established in 1876 1876 establishments in Massachusetts Boston expressionism