Master of Visual Arts

With our fully redesigned Master of Visual Arts program at Sint Lucas Antwerp, we challenge you to come up with relevant answers to the following questions: What do you hope to accomplish with the artistic knowledge, skills, and attitudes you’ve already acquired in your discipline? In which context do you want your artistic practice to be active?

Consider our one-year MFA study program (60 credits) as your first year as a professional artist or designer, and use the full potential of all our master coaches to contextualize your work within a contemporary theoretical and professional framework. Through research, experimentation, and network building, you will become self-aware of the potential of your own choices and aspirations.

The program provides five contexts to choose from. Next to the contexts of Applied and Autonomous, we wish to highlight the following three distinctive contexts:

Socio-political context
We offer a pathway to learning to relate to the socio-political context you find yourself in as an artist or designer. You will explore how your practice can contribute to themes such as (but not limited to) ecological crisis and climate change, decolonization, anti-discrimination and intersectional solidarity, social justice, grassroots activism, and collective practices. How can your work bring insight and transformation to these social urgencies?

You will develop a master project tailored to your personal experiences and interests. Intensive introductions to relevant and diverse professional contexts, practices, and methodologies will support you in this (think of socially engaged art, social design, participatory practices, artivism, speculative design, and so on). You collaborate with your fellow students to create a caring, participatory learning environment. You invest in a practice that develops methodology, process, and output as equally valuable artistic models and forms.

Technological context
By combining technology, design, and art, we provide an incubator for innovative ideas and groundbreaking projects. We consider technology not only as a creative tool but as a completely different medium with its own guidelines for design and storytelling. It is a platform where you are given the space to realize a project in which your competencies, skills, artistic vision, and technical abilities are demonstrated. 

Through coaching, you will develop an intuition about what it means to create work using technology and digital media. In doing so, we strive to balance the technical, artistic, and creative aspects of digital media. We guide work that ranges from imminently practical to whimsical, artistic, and creative. We encourage you to develop your own form of expression through digital media.

Jewelry context
In your artistic practice, you will explore the specificity of jewelry. You do this through a process-oriented way of working, where research and experimentation are sources of inspiration. Analysis and reflection, the further development of practical skills, and the theoretical discourse on critical references within the field: all of these elements contribute to the development of your own research methodology. As a result, an articulate, multidisciplinary execution is encouraged. In addition, you determine in which socio-cultural environment your jewelry work can be situated, as well as how to take note of the references specific to the discipline. 

Furthermore, an international internship is a mandatory central training component that has a great impact on your professional development. It will enable you to build an international network that is necessary to further professionalize your own artistic practice in the future.

Application guidelines
We recommend that you start your application early, due to potentially time-consuming immigration procedures and scholarship application deadlines. Therefore, the application deadline for non-EU applicants is March 1, 2022; for EU applicants, May 30, 2022; and for BE applicants, June 16, 2022.

Please join us for an online information session: February 10, 6:30–7:30pm (CET). Register here.