The Massachusetts School of Art and Design is in its fourth year of partnership with the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown for a low-residency Master of Fine Arts program, which includes a series of onsite residencies in Provincetown as well as coursework pursued in the artists’ home studios under the direction of an artist-mentor. The residencies build relationships between the student-artists and the town
of Provincetown with its long tradition as an art colony.
“Several students from last year’s graduating class were picked up by the Schoolhouse Gallery and Alden Gallery,” noted program director Barbara Baker. But the artwork being produced in the program pushes in directions well beyond the traditional schools of painting for which Provincetown has been known. “There is a real diversity of artists coming in,” Baker said. “We’re getting people from a much broader geographic spectrum and each class is more non-conventional in their work.”
This September, a Provincetown-based exhibition of the program’s second graduating class reflected that trend of diversity in style and media. The 12 graduating students explored works in oil and watercolor, printmaking, digital media, video, conceptual art and installation, textile sculpture and sewing, collage, organic sculpture and more. Many artists found themselves encouraged by the program to explore beyond the traditions of two-dimensional oil on canvas work.
Western Massachusetts-based Nancy Winship Milliken entered the program painting in oil. “Then I moved into three-dimensional photography,” she said. “The program is open to complete experimentation.” Milliken also began work on a series of intriguing and beautiful small sculptures for her thesis. She employs viscera, abdominal organs of animals from local farms, along with other natural materials like wax, honey and wool. Some of the viscera are inflated and dried, forming opaque, meandering tubular structures. Others are photographed filled with a fluid like honey that make them take on the