I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree. The feeling of well earned and shared accomplishment was palpable walking amongst the families of the graduates, and I was reminded yet again of the hard work and sacrifice that these moments are invested with.

I was introduced by Robert Storr, artist, curator and Dean of Yale University School of Art. I had met Rob many years ago at a bon voyage party at his home given for a mutual friend. He had just begun his stint as curator at the Museum of Modern Art at that time and we were Brooklyn neighbors. I would leave New York to start grad school at Yale one year later, in 1991. Rob became School of Art dean in 2006. He's a former University of Chicago Lab School kid and School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA grad. In his brief remarks to the graduates preceding my remarks Rob reminded the students that there is "a lot of bad energy out there in the art world," and that they would do well to avoid these negative seductions as they began their own careers. Our remarks, taken together, hopefully inspired sober but inspired reflection for the assembled graduating class. My brief remarks follow:

"Thank you for that kind introduction Rob. A very warm thank you to those of you who invited me here today to address this graduating class. It's a real pleasure to be back. I’d like to congratulate the graduating class and all of the family and friends who are gathered here today to celebrate with you. Before I continue, I’d like to dedicate my remarks this afternoon to Richard Benson, former dean of the School of Art, one of my professors during my time here in the Graduate Photography program and one of the most brilliant and decent human beings I have had the pleasure to know. I want to ask all of you in the graduating class to stand and give a warm shout out to Chip, who couldn’t be here with us today.

Of course I remember well the feeling that those of you graduating from this institution and the School of Art are feeling today. I was certainly proud of what I had accomplished in moving my work forward, glad to have been surrounded by some of the best minds one could study and work with for two years, pleased to have formed a community of support and, quite frankly, scared half out of my mind! The nervousness mixed with anticipation that you are feeling is understandable, since you are indeed at the end of one journey and at the beginning—or the continuation—of another. What I would like to share with you today is my own sense of how you might go about both alleviating that nervousness and thinking about your place in society as artists at this particular moment in the 21st century.

Once you leave here you will be faced with a number of decisions and choices that you will have to make. Certainly you will be faced with the need to continue your work, even as you are confronted with the realities of having to somehow sustain that practice at a moment of real economic uncertainty. Making art has never been—as far as I know—the safest or easiest career choice. It’s one thing to do this when you are very young without any real responsibilities to shoulder and another make a serious commitment to this as a vocation rather than an avocation. So it should go without saying that making art is a real act of faith. And your faith is about to be seriously tested once you leave here. Now I have not come here today to make you any more nervous about your possible futures than you might already be. Rather I want to encourage you to believe that your work not only should continue, but that it is imperative and that it needs to exist in the world. You each need to continue to believe that your work matters and that through your work you have the ability to change and reshape the world one person or one viewer at a time and to continue to expand your own sense of who you are in the process.

Now you might think that this is an overly ambitious agenda I am proposing here, but it is the only agenda to have if you are going to continue along your chosen path. Indeed it is your responsibility to reshape the way the world is experienced through each encounter with your work. The viewer leaving your work has the potential to go back out into the world with new information, new perceptions, new ideas, and by extension a transformed worldview. And hopefully you too will find out something about the world through your own work and feed that back into the world through your own subjectivities. If we are to ensure that our work actually thrives in the world, then we need to be prepared to have a much broader conversation, a conversation that embraces the larger world that we live in, not just the marketplace of the art world.

In the past we in the art community have sometimes paid a heavy price for ignoring that larger world and living inside of an insulated aesthetic bubble that excluded the larger social community. The so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s was a moment in which the art world and the larger social world found themselves on opposite ends of a great divide, viewing each other with mutual hostility and animosity. Opportunistic politicians exploited these tensions. It didn’t have to be that way, and we can’t afford to let it be that way now. Some of you will be leaving here to return to the communities you left two years ago. Others will be continuing on to become part of new and different communities. Wherever you are going I encourage you to return to those communities not only as artists, but as citizens. I am not asking you to be a social worker, but to consider what it means to be an artist in the fullest sense and how your presence in those communities can be part of a meaningful and necessary dialogue that can both enliven the civic conversation and provide opportunities for your work to embed itself in the social fabric.

Hopefully while you’ve been here these past two years you have also formed a community of support with each other. Contrary to what some might think, no one gets there—wherever there is--on their own; there is no lone genius who makes a solitary breakthrough without a supportive and sometimes challenging community of peers with whom to engage in an ongoing critical conversation. Each of you have that opportunity to encourage and to sustain each other. Embrace it. There is room for more than one person at a time at the table of opportunity.

Speaking of opportunities, it is clear that the current economic climate demands that some of the opportunities you are seeking are going to have to be ones that you yourselves create—not only for yourself, but indeed for each other. Recently in Philadelphia I spent some time with Sarah Stolfa, who came out of the graduate photography program here just two years ago. Along with another recent MFA graduate from Syracuse University she started the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, an exhibition space that also provides rental digital facilities for area photographers as well as classes and workshops for others. These two artists have not only created positions for themselves, but have created a much- needed resource for other photo-based artists in that city. I did a benefit book signing for them while I was there and look forward to returning at some point to continue supporting their efforts. Think about what you can do to build and sustain community with each other where you are. It is going to be an increasing necessity, one that you should welcome. So much of my career has been possible only through relationships that span many years, relationships in which I have applauded and sustained the work of others even as they have supported me. And it can be this way for you as well.

I would encourage you to maintain your relationship with this institution as well and make it a part of your community of support. It may have felt at times like they were giving you a serious beat down up in here, but in reality you have been challenged these past two years as a way of preparing you to continue to challenge yourself over the life of your careers as artists. When people ask me what I most remember about my time here I tell them that this School exemplifies a strong work ethic. I believe that as artists we think by making things. The more things one makes the more you are able to work through the challenges of giving coherent and interesting form to your ideas. That rigor and that work ethic will serve you well as you continue on your path as artists. I know it has served me well. I couldn’t stop making work even if I wanted to. I’m afraid Tod Papageorge would belatedly decide to retroactively kick me out of the program. And so I keep working.

Yes, you will each have your School of Art war stories to tell; stories about how you were ripped to shreds during a particularly brutal crit. But it will make sense when you hit a rough spot, as we all do, or when you are in your studio thinking of tossing in the towel perhaps, and you hear and feel that nagging internal voice pushing you to keep going and to figure it out one more time. You will hopefully realize then why you were pushed so hard. There is no quick or clever hustle that will sustain you, no one you can meet whose connections will allow you to not have to put in the long hours producing something of substance.

So, being an artist is a profound act of faith. I hope that each of you will keep that faith as you go forward, finding your own way to reshape the world around you and to continue to affirm that the work we do as artists can and does matter. It’s up to you to make it so, and I know that you will.

Thank you."

(Yale School of Art graphic © Paul Rand)

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Birmingham on My Mind

September 15, 1963 - Fifty Years Later

One night, many years ago, a book appeared in my suburban Jamaica, NY home. My parents had attended a lecture that James Baldwin had given at our church, Calvary Baptist Church, and had returned with the book in hand. While the church never struck me as a particularly activist one, our minister, Rev. Walter S. Pinn, had let it be known on more than one occasion that he had marched besides Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There was a small black and white photograph hanging in the church vestibule that proudly and permanently testified to that fact. Most likely my folks purchased the book after Baldwin's talk as part of SNCC's fundraising efforts.
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On The Passing of Two Giants

This has been a difficult month, what with the loss of poet and activist Louis Reyes Rivera, and even more recently the esteemed artist Elizabeth Catlett. Both Rivera and Catlett were artists who were unabashedly forthright in their adherence to the cause of social justice, and equally as forthright in their adherence to practicing at the highest level of of their respective art forms.
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Reshaping The Art/Museum/Public Experience

The past few months have been interesting ones for those interested in the ways in which art practice, public institutional practice and their various audiences interact. As the economy has taken a downturn lately public institutions have begun to think about the ways in which they do or do not engage that larger audience that their very survival depends upon.
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The recent passing of Dr. Billy Taylor was marked by notices of his contribution to jazz music as both musician and advocate. Taylor, in addition to being a seminal jazz pianist, had sustained for over four decades a position as one of the music's most visible and preeminent spokespersons, having taken on the role of educator and institution builder among his numerous other accomplishments in the field.
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Recent Censorship Recalls Spirit of an Earlier Era

In 1936 Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, instructed Adolf Ziegler, president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, to put together an “exhibition of shame”, depicting the “deterioration of art since 1910”. Ziegler gathered a group of what were called “art inspectors” to trawl through the public museums and galleries. The committee compiled everything from some 100 art collections they considered useful for defaming the Modernist movement.
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John Boehner Fires the Opening Salvo

I had the rather auspicious fortune to be in Washington, DC for several days this past week when the opening salvo of a new round in the Culture Wars was fired by Congressman John Boehner.
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A Different Kind of MoMA?

On a recent trip to New York I had one of those rare epiphany like moments where I found myself standing in front of a group of works that spoke clearly to how the work we do as artists might actually matter in the world. Such was the impact of this show on me that almost every other exhibition I saw both before and after in those three days came to feel almost meaningless, like so much empty, aestheticized and useless decoration.

National Endowment for the Arts chair Rocco Landesman was in Chicago recently, holding a series of meetings, gatherings, and conversations with various institutions and the arts community.

I was the speaker at the Yale University School of Art Commencement this past Monday. The School of Art ceremony followed the school wide ceremony on the Old Campus where, among others, Aretha Franklin fittingly received an honorary Doctor of Music degree. The feeling of well earned and shared accomplishment was palpable walking amongst the families of the graduates, and I was reminded yet again of the hard work and sacrifice that these moments are invested with.
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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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