SMFA's Career Services Office develops courses with practical nuts and bolts content relating to contemporary practices and entrepreneurship. These courses are geared towards equipping you with the skills necessary to becoming a successful professional.

Fall 2013

Creative Futures: Business Essentials for Artists (open to all students)
Instructor: Nadeem Mazen
This course is a practical introduction to art and business. It will cover business planning and research; marketing (branding, pr, and advertising), networking and collaboration, fundraising, grant writing, and financing, budgeting, accounting and legal matters, writing for business and practical business habits. The aim is to prepare students to be self-reliant and resilient after school, helping them to access their innate abilities to vision and problem-solve with the goal of developing projects with real-world applications. Content is presented via in-class lectures, guest speakers, readings and assignments in a sequential manner—beginning in the fall and continuing through the spring semester. This course requires reading, research and writing assignments, development of an art business and marketing plan, and full class participation. During the spring semester a pitch event will be organized to showcase student's business models before a general audience in a competition for seed money  funds.


Spring 2013

Artist at Work
Instructor: Susan J. Belton (graduate and undergraduate)
This semester-based course focuses on the art world and one's location in it. It examines the diverse arts ecosystem and teaches students about the navigational opportunities and challenges that exist between artists and collectors, funders, curators, cultural institutions and other non-art communities. Guest speakers both illuminate and demystify these navigational pathways and give students opportunities to practice professional speaking and presentation. Hands-on class assignments and projects are pragmatic and experiential, such as student-driven "pop-up" exhibitions, drawing on skills of self-organization, promotion and presentation.

Graduate Professional Practices Seminar
Instructor: Jeannie Simms
This semester-based course, offered to graduate students only, is structured around a selection of accomplished, high profile, national and international practicing contemporary curators, administrators, artists, teachers, residency directors and organizers who deliver public lectures and interact with graduate students during class time. The class functions as a breeding ground for doing significant things in the world—locally and globally—helping students choose sites of interest and logical career choices and professional paths. Curriculum also addresses practical and philosophical questions around students' work relating to artists' ethos, audience, studio practice, community, tracing lineages and influences, art markets and art world/s. Download the schedule of visiting artists.