By his own admission, Marvin Mattelson is not the first person you would suspect to know how to use an Elgato Stream Deck. Pre-pandemic, the longtime artist and illustrator—who celebrates his 50th year as a School of Visual Arts faculty member next year—“knew less than nothing” about video production and online broadcasting, he says. Today, the art studio at his Long Island home is rigged with three PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) cameras, a professional-grade video control panel and the aforementioned stream deck, a device whose 32 LCD keys can be pre-programmed for any number of live-streaming tasks, like adding a split-screen to the video feed. “It was designed for gamers,” Mattelson says. He uses it to teach portraiture.

What does a fully remote art and design education look like? Before the pandemic, this was not a question for SVA to answer. Though its Continuing Education Division had long offered online courses, and its MFA Art Practice, MPS Digital Photography and MFA Visual Narrative programs are all low-residency, the great majority of the College’s activity took place, as it always had, in the workshops, studios and classrooms of its Manhattan campus.

And yet, by the time you read this—and despite a limited reopening of its residence halls, library and select studio spaces last fall—it will have been more than one year since SVA moved its classes online. The College is now on the verge of holding its second virtual commencement exercises and in the midst of its second round of virtual thesis shows and year-end presentations—milestones that would have seemed unimaginable in early 2020.

To be sure, the experiences of remote learning and teaching have been varied—dependent as they are on the individual circumstances of each student or faculty member. But this period has also been one of surprising discoveries and advancements, the best of which will likely influence or even directly carry over into post-pandemic life at SVA.

SVA faculty and students take on the challenge of tech-based remote education with creativity and an open mind