Special Regalia for the Master of Fine Arts Degree

In the United States, the Master of Fine Arts is an unusual degree. It is a “terminal” master’s degree – a master’s degree that represents the highest academic achievement within the visual and performing arts (except music, which has a different academic history). The Doctor of Fine Arts degree is almost always conferred honoris causa; researchers doing work in the history of art typically receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Other academic disciplines used to confer terminal master’s degrees, but all of these have been renamed as doctor’s degrees. The fine arts have resisted this “doctoral envy”, probably because the Master of Fine Arts degree has its origin in the medieval arts and crafts guilds like the Guild of St. Luke, where an Apprentice or Journeyman would submit a “masterpiece” (Meisterstück) to the guild in hopes of becoming a Master artist, artisan, or craftsman in the guild. This pedagogical model has persisted long after the end of the guild system, and is how modern fine arts training is accomplished today. Thus the title of the highest academic degree in the visual and performing arts is the “Master of Fine Arts”.

Stringent requirements for the terminal Master of Fine Arts degree have been set by the College Art Association and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design which require about three years of work in a given artistic medium as well as study in a cognate subject. Unfortunately some literature departments have started shorter and less demanding “Master of Fine Arts” programs in creative writing or poetry that do not meet the standards of the CAA or NASAD and should not be considered “terminal” Master of Fine Arts degrees. (To avoid confusion, these literature programs should begin conferring Master of Literary Arts degrees instead of Master of Fine Arts degrees.)

The Practitioners of the Visual Arts (c.1578) Cornelis Cort, after Jan van der Straet. This engraving illustrates (from right to left) two Masters of Drawing, a Master of Painting, two Masters of Sculpting, and a Master of Anatomy surrounded by apprentices. All wear doublets or jackets with sleeves protruding from the open sleeves of their gowns, either at the shoulder or elbow. This arrangement frees their arms for work. The Masters of Painting and Anatomy wear gowns with inverted T-shaped sleeve openings at the elbow, closed with decorative buttons and frogs. The Painting Master has tucked the hanging sleeves of his gown into his belt, whereas the Anatomy Master is not wearing a belt and has thrown his gown sleeves over his shoulders. The Painting Master has a gown trimmed with fur. The Masters of Drawing and Sculpting are less smartly attired, two of them wearing only a jerkin over their doublet. The other two are wearing gowns with sleeves opened at the shoulder that are left to loosely hang out of the way behind the Master’s back or possibly tucked into the belt if the gown has one. Also notice the different types of caps worn by the Masters, including what appear to be a type of pileus quadratus on the Drawing Master at right and a type of pileus rotundus on the Anatomy Master at left.

Because the MFA degree is a terminal master’s degree, neither a (non-terminal) master’s degree nor a (terminal) doctor’s degree, it falls between the regulations for the master’s and doctor’s garments in the Intercollegiate Code of Academic Costume and the Academic Costume Code. These Codes require graduates with a Master of Fine Arts to wear the regalia of a non-terminal master’s degree, diminishing their status by assigning lower-ranked garments to their degree. As a result, graduates with an MFA have been left without a way to communicate the distinctiveness of their degree with their academic costume. To rectify this problem, Yale University permits Master of Fine Arts graduates to wear a standard doctoral gown with a standard master’s hood, but this type of sartorial “mixed bathing” is semiotically confusing because it is inconsistent with the taxonomy of both Codes. A far better solution would be to authorize special academic costume for the MFA degree that is derived from historical examples of guild livery not very different from today’s academic costume.

This can be done by allowing graduates with a Master of Fine Arts degree to wear a traditional (pre-1960) master’s gown with sleeves that resemble those on medieval artists’ gowns more closely than the sleeves of the current American master’s gown. Artists would not have had their arms encumbered by long curved sleeves hanging from their wrists, which is why the traditional master’s gown, with arm openings at the elbow, is commonly seen in illustrations of medieval and Renaissance artists who were Masters in the guild system of the time. This type of gown is also similar to the master’s gowns used when Yale founded the first university School of Fine Arts in 1869, when the University of London founded a School of Fine Arts two years later, and when the University of Washington conferred the first Master of Fine Arts degree in 1924. This black silk gown [a variation of Groves Classification m1] would differ from current master’s gowns in that the sleeves would have arm openings at the elbow and a crescent-shaped cutout at the rear of the lower part of the sleeve. Three braided cords (or “frogs”), fastened with three fabric-covered buttons on each end and in the center, could be sewn above the arm opening, as in the engraving above by Cornelis Cort. These cords would be approximately six inches in length and placed above each other, about one inch apart.

This gown could be paired with a variation of the American doctoral hood [Groves classification f14], edged with bistre-colored velvet four inches in width and a liripipe with a rear-facing crescent-shaped cutout to resemble the cutout on the sleeves of the the master’s gown.

A velvet mortarboard, tam, or other soft cap could be worn with a gold tassel.

This ensemble would provide graduates with a Master of Fine Arts degree with academic costume that is historically evocative and distinctive. Today, faculty with an MFA may purchase similarly-styled British master’s gowns, or purchase vintage (pre-1960) American master’s gowns from sellers on eBay, in antique stores, or in resale shops. A tailor could then modify the garment to these specifications. Likewise, an appropriate hood for the MFA may be created by purchasing an American doctor’s hood from similar sources and then having it modified by a tailor.