2003

 

 

grad students walkingThe class of 2003
greets the world

Brilliant sun and beaming families surrounded Reed’s 294 new graduates this May at commencement (the first one without rain in several years). Daniel Greenberg ’62, chairman of the board of trustees, and Patrick Pruyne ’83, president of the alumni association, welcomed the most recent Reed alumni (two as MALS grads), and college president Colin Diver spoke thoughtfully about his freshman year at Reed. Commencement speaker Lawrence Rinder ’83, chief curator of contemporary art at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, spoke about what he has learned from teaching art, the curious distinction between art and craft, and the importance of how we define art. “What grad studentwe see mirrored in the ways that the arts are defined in our society,” he said, “is a reflection of lingering sexism, racism, and class-ism. For these are the insidious ideas that lie just beneath the surface of terms like craft, untrained art, and low art.” Rinder surprised the audience by unrolling and displaying a large tapa cloth painting made by the Maisin people of Papua New Guinea to demonstrate a different conception of art from that in the Western world; he said about the Maisin that “Although their practice, strictly speaking, fell outside the boundaries of art as I was taught to define it, I found greater formal skill, greater imaginative refinement, and far greater social relevance in their work than in virtually any other visual material I have dealt with in the well over one hundred exhibitions I have organized.” For the complete text of Rinder’s speech, and for more photos of commencement, visit http://www.reed.edu/commencement/2003/index.html. End of Article

grad studentsdiver photopruyne photo

 

 

next page next page  

2003
next page next page