George Washington University

The master of arts in exhibition design (MA–EX) program explores the intersection of design and public communications, in the nation’s capital, at a critical moment in the history of cultural discourse and spatial practice.

Exhibition design, in the MA–EX program at GW’s Corcoran School, is more than the design of spaces that convey information, share stories, or promote products. It does more than relate artworks, objects, and audiences in experiential compositions. It has the potential to tell us about how we are living and how we could be living.

MA–EX students take up the charge to rethink connections in the world. They find shapes for ideas and identities and orient them for diverse publics. They choreograph forms, facts, and fictions that put people in touch with each other and with the (built) environment. They design exhibitions as sites of material expression and activism.

The interdisciplinarity of the MA–EX program prepares students to innovate through exhibitions. Students work with curators, artists, and institutions. You will design in dialogue—drawing on multiple art, design, and social practices. And, you will develop dexterity, through training in analog craft and digital fabrication, studies in history and theory and exercises in real-world application.

The MA–EX program coordinates with Washington, DC’s extensive network of national museums. It also engages the city at-large, identifying opportunities for exhibition in its places of memory and monument, performance and protest, and commerce and leisure.