SVA to Shutter Its MFA in Curatorial Practice After 13 Years

The School of Visual Arts announced on February 27 that it will discontinue its MFA in Curatorial Practice program, ending a 13-year experiment in graduate-level curatorial training that had graduated students who now work at major institutions across the United States and Europe. The news was communicated to faculty via an email from Steven Henry Madoff, who founded the program in 2013 and has served as its chair since its inception.

In his message, Madoff explained that he had informed SVA president David Rhodes approximately 18 months ago of his intention to retire in May 2027, and that Rhodes had decided to close the program upon Madoff's departure. No new students will be accepted this fall. Current enrollees will be the last cohort to receive degrees under the program. Faculty teaching first-year courses have been informed this academic year will be their last.

The announcement cites financial pressures at the school more broadly. SVA has faced a difficult decade economically, compounded by the effects of the pandemic on enrollment and the broader crisis in arts education funding. A separate controversy arrived earlier this year when David A. Ross, chair of SVA's MFA Art Practice program, abruptly resigned after it emerged that he had maintained a friendly correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein. That incident added reputational strain to an institution already managing structural challenges.

Founded in the summer of 2013, the MFA in Curatorial Practice was pitched as offering professional training grounded in hands-on engagement with practicing curators, art historians, and theorists. Inaugural faculty included Matthew Higgs, director of White Columns in New York; Hou Hanru, the Paris-based curator who directed the San Francisco Art Institute; and Claire Gilman, a senior curator at the Drawing Center. Current faculty include Chrissie Iles, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Ruth Estevez, co-director of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Madoff, writing on the e-flux platform earlier, described the program's stakes in broad terms. "The necessity of the Curatorial as a kind of tool-making for the world is both large and particular, based on technical skills and hands-on training." That framing, curatorial work as applied and consequential rather than merely interpretive, was central to what distinguished SVA's program from the academic curation tracks housed in art history departments at universities, which tend toward theoretical depth over institutional practice.

The closure of SVA's curatorial program arrives at a moment when curatorial training is under pressure from multiple directions: shrinking institutional budgets, the casualization of museum labor, and a sustained questioning of what a graduate degree in curation actually prepares someone to do. The profession has changed dramatically since 2013. Many of the entry-level positions that programs like SVA's once fed, registrar-adjacent roles, assistant curatorships, programming coordinators, have been restructured or eliminated at institutions responding to financial strain. Whether a two-year, tuition-bearing graduate program represents the right vehicle for curatorial entry into the field has become a live question.

SVA's program was nonetheless well regarded by practitioners who hired its graduates. Its emphasis on working relationships with practicing curators and its location in New York, with direct access to galleries, auction houses, and museum collections, gave it advantages that campus-based programs in other cities could not replicate. Several of its alumni have gone on to positions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and institutions across Europe.

As recently as January 2026, SVA was still promoting the curatorial practice program online and soliciting applications for the fall. The abruptness of the transition from active recruitment to closure within weeks will raise questions about the institution's obligations to prospective applicants who may have been preparing to apply or who turned down other offers in anticipation of acceptance. SVA has not yet issued a public statement addressing how it plans to communicate with that population.

Madoff retires in 2027. No announcement has been made about whether any of the program's curricular elements will be absorbed into other SVA departments or whether faculty will be given multi-year transitions.