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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
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The class of 2003 
we
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 
