AAP Department of Art Announces Unique New Image Text M.F.A.

The Department of Art in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University has launched a unique, low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Image Text. The program brings together text and image which, according to founding faculty directors Nicholas Muellner and Catherine Taylor, creates new possibilities for creative practice and dialogue at the intersection of visual media and the literary arts.

"In the fluid landscape created by digital media platforms and the explosion of small press publishing, it seems only logical that questions of aesthetics, narrative, documentary testimony, and fictional invention be addressed within the language-and-image world we already inhabit," said Muellner (primarily a photographer) and Taylor (primarily a writer), who both join the art department as codirectors of the new program.

Muellner and Taylor's idea for the Image Text Ithaca (ITI) initiative began in 2014 at Ithaca College as a series of artist workshops that brought together artists and scholars working at the intersection of visual media and creative writing, with notable participants such as Lucas Blalock, Bruno Ceschel, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Jason Fulford, John Keene, and Claudia Rankine. The initiative grew to include an M.F.A. in Image Text and the ITI Press. When Ithaca College phased out the Image Text M.F.A. in 2021, conversations to establish a comparable program at Cornell were initiated by former Art Department Chair Michael Ashkin who, as a former visiting artist with ITI, saw the value in offering alternatives to conventional creative practice and exhibition to art students. The recent launch is made possible by a generous seed fund gift from alums Deborah Goodman Davis '85 and Gerald Davis (B.Arch. '84) who have been longtime supporters of the college and the arts at Cornell.

The new graduate program in Image Text at Cornell takes place over 25 months. It begins with the first of three intensive summer sessions in Ithaca that offer access to exceptional in-person resources and faculty drawn from ITI's community of internationally recognized artists and writers. Students then pursue independent remote study in close consultation with their faculty advisors throughout the regular academic year and participate in immersive international field courses in locations such as London, Berlin, and Mexico City.

"With this program, the art department provides more options for how to be an artist in the world," says Art Department Chair Paul Ramírez Jonas, who has led the collaborative effort to establish the new Image Text M.F.A. at Cornell following Ashkin's tenure as chair. "Given its core commitment to both making and thinking alongside highly original artists and robust facilities and technologies, AAP is a perfect setting."

Led by new art faculty Muellner and Taylor, the Image Text M.F.A. is the only program of its kind in its field(s) and is designed to build an inclusive community of working artists and writers at AAP who seek an intellectual, emotional, and political engagement with the world through alternate modes of creative production and exhibition.

"In the past two decades, there has been an explosion of books and publications by individual artists, writers, and independent publishers," added Ramírez Jonas. "These interdisciplinary and often experimental publications create a new platform for the circulation of ideas, transforming a section of the art world where participants have a great degree of agency, collaborations abound, and communities are created and supported."

"We are thrilled to join a college and university with such an outstanding reputation, and a department where collaborative scholarship and creative practice in social justice and equity align well with our own interests and commitments, as well as the core values and driving intent of the program," said Muellner and Taylor.