Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Theory (MA)

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Application Deadline

Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Theory

Overview

Stream 1: Coursework only (24 course credits; 8 months)

or

Stream 2: Coursework (15 course credits; 12 months) + M.R.P. (major research paper of approx. 50 pages)

Coursework + research paper (12 months)
Full-time enrolment
In-person courses
Internship experience

Grasp the interconnection of media, visual art, and current affairs

This one-year master’s program (offered in two streams and in French and English) connects contemporary visual arts to urgent issues, such as decolonization, environmental crises, gender and representation, as well as capitalist disparity viewed through critical theory, feminism, materialism, and formalism. The program emphasizes the role of art institutions in the dissemination of art and culture, and provides links to the contemporary art world. Graduates of the program move on to work as curators, researchers, academics, community liaison officers, archivists, writers, or design specialists.

Learn to speak the industry’s language: internship and classes with MFA students

The Department will assist you in setting up a 12-week, part-time internship with a renowned art institution in the nation’s capital, such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Ottawa Art Gallery, or the City of Ottawa Public Art Program, during which you will acquire behind-the-scenes experience in the heritage and culture industry. Through shared classes with MFA students, you will gain experience working with practicing artists and exploring their perspectives.

Immerse yourself in an environment that hosts major cultural institutions

The Ottawa-Gatineau region boasts seven major national museums, several smaller museums, and dozens of galleries. The relationships between the Department and these art institutions will foster your interactions with curators and collections, and help you build your network.

Research Fields

Environmental and Curatorial

Celina Jeffery’s SSHRC funded interdisciplinary work on art and environmental humanities has an international reach (India, UK, USA, Australia, Mexico and Mauritius) and her approach of the subject through curatorial research and exhibition making is in tune with the global trend towards an expansive development of museum exhibitions as experience. She is also the co-founder and lead editor of an online journal of art criticism and theory and frequently uses digital humanities as a platform for her curatorial projects.

Digital and Information

Jakub Zdebik’s philosophical research into the concept of the diagram provides a basis for the current development of digital humanities in academia. From the perspective of the aesthetic of the diagram, he explores digital, network and internet art. His current research in the relation between art and information has yielded a curated exhibitions in the United States and Canada, a colloquium of international breadth on the topic of art and information as well as several books and articles.

Global and International

Though all four art history professors have an international breadth to their research, Andrea Fitzpatrick’s research in Middle-Eastern art, methodologies, global perspectives, visual studies, and human rights, demonstrates an urgent current topicality. Her expertise in theories of gender and her affiliation with the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa demonstrate the inter-disciplinarity of the Destination 2020 Plan. She also curated an important exhibition at artist-run centres in Ottawa and Toronto which brought together prestigious Iranian artists.

Meet the Faculty

Jakub Zdebik, Associate Professor, Art History

Jakub Zdebik received his PhD from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at The University of Western Ontario specializing in Contemporary French Aesthetic Theory. After he obtained his PhD, he became Visiting Research Fellow at The Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art at Concordia University. His monograph, entitled Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization, was published by Continuum Press and is based on his doctoral dissertation. This book explores the notion of organizational aesthetics and its representation through the concept of the diagram as it can be observed in modern and contemporary art. He has translated French texts by Guattari and Jean-Clet Martin. He curated an exhibition for the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio entitled Art as Information. He is also working on a monograph on the concept of the map-image.

He has taught at several Canadian universities such as Concordia University, University of Guelph, Carleton University, Trent University as well as teaching at the University of Ottawa for the past several years.

Celina Jeffery, Associate Professor, Art History

Celina Jeffery is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses on artistic responses to climate change and environmental degradation, as well as curatorial practice. Recent publications include Ephemeral Coast: Visualizing Coastal Climate Change (2022), Ephemeral Coast (2015), The Artist as Curator (2015), the ‘Junk Ocean’ issue of Drain: A Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture (January 2016) and the ‘Towards a Blue Humanity’ issue of Symploke (2019) co-edited with Ian Buchanan. She is the founder of Ephemeral Coast, a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) funded, curatorial research project (2015–2019), and has held several SSHRC grants.

Andrea D. Fitzpatrick, Associate Professor, Art History

Andrea D. Fitzpatrick (they/them; she/her) earned a Ph.D. in art history and critical theory from McGill University in 2005 and has been an Associate Professor of Art History since 2012. Their research focuses on contemporary visual art in all media (especially photography, video, performance, multi-media, and installation), identity, gender, critical race theory, anti-colonial theories, the politics and ethics of representation, as well as images of and resistance to human rights violations during particular wars and conflicts. Currently, they’re exploring contemporary art by diasporic Iranian women in Canada; the life’s work of Iranian-Canadian artist Sadegh Tirafkan; contemporary South African art and exhibitions; Palestinian photographic art and resistance; curatorial support for Global South artists in Documenta exhibitions (#11 - 15) in Kassel, and at the Venice Biennale (#56, 2015); and Holocaust memorials in Berlin. Fitzpatrick has also: presented their research internationally; had their research translated into German, Farsi, and French; and curated exhibitions of Iranian lens-based art at two artist-run centers in Canada (SAW Gallery in Ottawa, and Gallery 44 in Toronto). They are currently working on a book about contemporary art, methodologies, exhibitions, and memorials, and the usefulness of various theoretical and philosophical paradigms to address those areas.

Chinatsu Kobayashi, Part-Time Professor

Chinatsu Kobayashi was born in Tokyo, Japan. She studied philosophy at the University of Ottawa, with a thesis partly on Collingwood’s aesthetics. After obtaining supplementary credits in Art History at McGill, she began doctoral studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal, during which she spent time as visiting student at the University of Oxford. She wrote her second doctoral thesis on John Ruskin’s aesthetic theory and its influence on British Arts and Crafts and the beginning of Art Nouveau in Europe. She has published a number of papers on Collingwood’s aesthetics, including an edition of some of his letters, and she is now working on publishing parts of her thesis on Ruskin as independent papers. She is also working on Op Art, the conceptions of ‘art as experience’ and the role of interaction in visual arts. She has taught numerous art history classes at the University of Ottawa, in English and in French, covering such topics as contemporary art, globalization in art, and theories of new media art.

Cristina S. Martinez, Adjunct Professor, Art History

Cristina S. Martinez is an interdisciplinary art historian who holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century British art, William Hogarth, the history of copyright law, Canadian art and artistic practices of appropriation. Professor Martinez is the official biographer for the entry on Jane Hogarth in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and is co-editor of the volume Female Printmakers, Printsellers, and Print Publishers in the Eighteenth Century: The Imprint of Women, c. 1700-1830, published with Cambridge University Press (2024).

Cara Tierney, Adjunct Professor, Sculpture and Performance Art and Art History

Cara Tierney (they/them) is an artist and researcher and earned their PhD in Cultural Mediations from Carleton University. Drawing from Queer Studies, Trans Studies, Pedagogical Studies, visual art in all media (especially performance, photography, video, sculpture and installation) their ongoing research takes a transdisciplinary approach to investigating the way art can be used in the service of social transformation. Through creative practice, scholarly research, and interdisciplinary collaborations their current work seeks to strengthen visual and gender literacy in the service of disarticulating social barriers which inhibit participation in public life for Two-Spirit, trans and gender nonconforming people. From an intersectional perspective this means always orienting the labour and efforts to be in the service of those most marginalized. Using the emancipatory, consciousness-raising possibilities of radical pedagogies, and the open-ended interpretative strategies fostered in visual cultural production, their work seeks to expand the ways we encounter and produce knowledge, and the way research and academic practices can find meaningful footholds, based in action, which lead to social change.

Alumni

“During my Master’s of Arts in Contemporary Art Theory, I was particularly interested in personal and political identity-based representations, narratives, and counter-narratives in contemporary art....”

Marianne Brown

How to Apply

1) OUAC Application

Submit an admission application to the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre (OUAC) and pay the application fees to OUAC.

Important: the supporting documents cannot be uploaded via that platform.

2) Upload of Documents in uoZone

Once the University of Ottawa receives your admission application from OUAC, you will be given access to uoZone, a portal into which you will be able to upload your CV, letter of intent (see the information below) and transcripts (post-secondary education).

Minimum Requirements

Honours BA in Art History, or an equivalent, with a minimum A- (80%). Applicants who do not have an honours degree in Art History may in suitable cases be recommended by the Visual Arts Department for admission to a qualifying program. Such applicants are usually honours graduates in another subject field.

Your complete admission package must include

2 Recommendation letter(s): It is highly recommended that you contact your referee prior to submitting your application to confirm their email address and their availability to complete your letter of recommendation.
Transcript
Proof of proficiency in your program's language of instruction, in the case of applicants whose first language is neither English nor French
Resume (must include chronological academic history)
Letter of Intent

The Department of Visual Arts

The Department of Visual Arts offers four undergraduate and two graduate programs that respond to your various interests and needs: a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), a Major in Visual Arts, a Major and a Minor in History and Theory of Art, a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) as well as a Master of Contemporary Art Theory.

Learn more about the department.