The 14-year-old program is no longer accepting applicants, the school said.
Rhea Nayyar
March 2, 2026
— 2 min read
An external view of the Flatiron Gallery at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, New York (image courtesy the School of Visual Arts)
After 14 years, the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan will terminate its master of arts degree in curatorial practice when program founder and chair Steven Henry Madoff retires in May 2027.
The two-year program, which enrolled 14 first-year students last fall, is no longer fielding applicants as indicated in a notice on the department's website.
According to Artnews, Madoff wrote in a faculty-wide email that when he mentioned his intent to retire at the end of the next academic year to SVA President David Rhodes, the latter opted to terminate the degree track altogether. He also made note of the school's current “financial challenges” — an ongoing problem that led to a layoff of 30 faculty members last August.
It remains unclear if program faculty members, especially those with first-year courses, will be affected. Nearly all of the school's educators are contracted adjunct workers who officially unionized last May, though bargaining for an initial contract is still ongoing.
“We have proposed a 'lookaround clause' that would require the School, in the event of a department or program closure, to seek to fulfill affected faculty members’ baseloads by offering them courses they are qualified to teach in other departments,” bargaining committee member Joan Hilty, a professor in the Comics department, said in an email to Hyperallergic, explaining that the proposal “directly addresses situations like the closure of this master’s program.”
The school did not immediately respond to Hyperallergic's inquiries.
Madoff created the degree program in 2013 and developed a founding faculty made up of high-profile independent curators; institutional curators representing the New Museum, the Drawing Center, and the Guggenheim Museum; arts writers; and architects for arts and culture spaces.
Among the founding faculty members was David A. Ross, former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, who recently resigned as chair of SVA's masters of fine arts program for arts practice in February after his connections to Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in the latest release of files related to the convicted sex offender.
In 2020, the school also shuttered its art writing MFA program after a 16-year run. The program was led by art critic and author David Levi Strauss.
The tightening of the belt at SVA falls in line with the ongoing nationwide program dissolutions, faculty layoffs, nosediving enrollments, profound budget deficits, and school closures of recent years. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago laid off 20 workers last November, including three key staff members from the pivotal Video Data Bank's bite-sized team. California Institute of the Arts laid off nine workers and dissolved 12 open positions in August after facing a $15 million deficit.