The MFA thesis should serve as clarification of your work to date as an artist and as closure to your work at RPI. It should elucidate your projects, your theoretical explorations, your questions, and your aspirations. The thesis, or elements of the thesis, could be published as articles or as an artist book. The thesis can also serve as source material for other professional situations such as teaching, giving talks, and grantwriting.

The MFA thesis is the theoretical component of the MFA project. Different from a humanities thesis, which presents new research or an original argument, the MFA thesis is a paper that frames your studio work and final thesis project in relation to your development, research, and goals and the related discourses of art, culture, history, and theory. (For clarification, discourses are bodies of knowledge and practice that have generally accepted histories, questions, boundaries, for example, contemporary art that deals with issues of racial identity.)