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Apply for PSU’s Art and Social Practice MFA program
Recognized by Artsy as one of the “Top 15 Art Programs in the United States,” Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA is a three-year graduate program that combines individual artistic practice with collaboration, community partnerships, and experiential learning supported by diverse faculty. Students engage with a wide range of approaches—including curatorial practice, writing, performance, conceptual art, design, video, socially responsive research, and visual/studio methods—within a socially engaged framework.
The program emphasizes critical and professional practice, alternative pedagogy, collaborative social engagement, and transdisciplinary exploration, creating an immersive and dynamic educational environment. Coursework encourages students to rethink how art can operate in public life, civic systems, and everyday contexts, while developing long-term strategies for sustaining a professional practice.
Based primarily in Portland, Oregon, the program offers built-in flexibility for students undertaking residencies, fellowships, or site-specific projects in other locations. Faculty work closely with students to support individualized project needs, interdisciplinary interests, and community-based inquiry across geographic contexts.
As an extension of the program’s collaborative ethos, graduate students have opportunities to work directly on several ongoing initiatives, including Dr Martin Luther King Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA), Art and Social Practice Archive, Social Forms of Art Journal, and Assembly—the program’s annual conference and socially engaged art festival. These experiences help students build real-world skills in organizing, publishing, education, community research, institution building, and public engagement.
Applications for fall 2026 are due January 24, 2026 at 11:59pm PST. Get more information and begin your application online. Prospective students are encouraged to apply for scholarships by April 1, 2026.
Learn more about how art can meaningfully connect with people, place, and social systems—and join a community of artists working to reimagine what art can do.
KSMoCA’s artists-in-residence and upcoming events
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA) is a functioning contemporary art museum inside a public elementary school in Northeast Portland, Oregon. During the 2025–26 school year, the museum is hosting three artists-in-residence. These residencies continue our ongoing, immersive arts programming with pre-kindergarten through fifth-grade students. Artists-in-residence develop and create artworks in collaboration with a cohort of elementary school students which are exhibited side-by-side in the museum at the school. These works and images of their process will be featured in printed exhibit catalogs and each artist gives public talks on a rotating schedule throughout the year. Visit our website for dates and times of artist talks and exhibit openings.
KSMoCA 2025–26 artists-in-residence: Yoonhee Choi, Harriet Tubman Center for Expanded Curatorial Practice at Dr. MLK Jr. Elementary School, and Deep Time Collective.
About KSMoCA
Founded in 2014 by artists Lisa Jarrett and Harrell Fletcher, KSMoCA connects public school students with internationally renowned artists through collaborative workshops, exhibitions, artists lectures and site-specific commissions. KSMoCA’s programs are developed in partnership with the Dr. MLK Jr. School community, PSU’s Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design faculty and graduate and undergraduate students, and contemporary artists.
Students learn through experience about museum practices by participating in KSMoCA as curators, preparators, artists, gallerists, writers, and docents. The project reimagines how museums, public schools, and universities can work together to shift culture and perspectives by creating radical intersections for sharing resources across organizations.
The majority of students at Dr. MLK Jr. School identify as Black and non-Black students of color, and the school is located in a gentrifying historically Black neighborhood. KSMoCA’s programs and participating artists directly reflect this context. The museum works to empower the school community whose voices and experiences remain underrepresented locally and in society at large.
Images: (1) MFA candidates Lou Blumberg and Simeen Anjum present "Songs against Dark Times Like These: PDX Edition. Song circle." as part of Assembly 2025: Public Domain. (2) Gwendolyn Hoeffgen and Domenic Toliver, If We Could Talk, The Black Gallery in Portland, Oregon. Community storytelling and participatory photography project. (3) Public Agency of Travel Planning for the Overwhelmed is an interactive art installation created by MFA student Simeen Anjum, a social practice artist and international student in the U.S. The project plays with the complexities of visa navigation, borders, and immigration systems through her own interpretation of global travel. This interactive installation and performance was at the Portland Building in Portland, Oregon. (4) A student at Dr. MLK Jr. Elementary School talks with artist Yoonhee Choi about her life and work. They are looking at the zine PSU students wrote, designed, and published about Choi who was KSMoCA’s fall visiting artist. Photo courtesy of KSMoCA. (5) Peery Sloan, an MFA student, works with a fourth grader during a KSMoCA workshop with visiting artist Yoonhee Choi. Photo courtesy of KSMoCA.
