Overview of Interdisciplinary Sculpture

Maryland Institute College of Art

Sculpture is contemporary art’s meta-medium, spanning the tangible and the conceptual. The interdisciplinary sculpture department embraces the spectrum of sculptural practice, incorporating the environmental, performative, electronic, and virtual activities, as well as object-making. Students explore a broad and deep array of form, content, techniques, and concepts.

Classes offered within the department combine theory and practice, and encourage students to develop interdisciplinary and multimedia approaches in their work, building bridges among disciplines, and inventing collaborations with new audiences and communities.

Through this innovative curriculum, you will be exposed to a broad range of creative possibilities within the material, spatial, and non-static arts. You will be encouraged to cross boundaries, invent hybrid processes, and explore innovative content in the areas of object-making, installation, performance, site-work, time-based art, and digital forms. You will develop a range of conceptual skills and strategies that will allow you to realize content in inventive ways. And you will explore both experimental and established approaches to art-making. Courses within the department will allow you to build a solid base of technique and constructive skills by working in such areas as wood and metal fabrication, mold-making, casting, assembling, laser-cutting, 3D printing, rapid prototyping, welding, carving, and construction. You will be challenged to use these skills to make work that is relevant in our complex, diverse, and ever-changing global culture.

Our accomplished and diverse faculty provide the theoretical and historical framework to assist you in developing a sophisticated critical/ self-analytical awareness of your work and its place in the larger culture. Interdisciplinary sculpture students are encouraged to develop technical mastery, conceptual sophistication, and an understanding of new and emerging genres; to explore contemporary issues, ideas, and technologies; and to create a practice which is cognizant of the past while envisioning the future.

The expansive studio facilities for sculpture at MICA are housed in the newly renovated Mount Royal Station, a converted B&O railroad passenger station which also houses the College’s graduate sculpture program, the Rinehart School of Sculpture. New classrooms, a renovated metal shop with upgraded ventilation, and a new glass kiln add to the already well-equipped facilities, which include up-to-date computers and software, and dedicated areas for work in plaster, wood, and a metal foundry.

A Dynamic Discourse on the Nature of Sculpture at MICA

Students in interdisciplinary sculpture have access to an array of faculty perspectives— from Tildon Streett, who has taught traditional figurative sculpture at MICA for decades—to chair Eve Laramee, whose work includes installations, performances, and sculptures. Visiting artists offer a similarly diverse window on the nature of this dynamic approach to art-making. Some recent visiting artists whose work is encompassed within the context of contemporary sculpture internationally have included:

Recent Graduates