Commencement Remarks 2010

Extending the Creative Commons

Thomas Manley

Pacific Northwest College of Art

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for the 2010 Commencement of Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA).

Welcome everyone and congratulations to the Class of 2010 and congratulations to your parents, families, friends, and mentors who have supported you on your journey to this magnificent day.

Welcome also, of course, to our honoree and speaker, Sally Lawrence, PNCA President emeriti, and to Carlene Jackson and the other members and friends of honoree Thelma Johnson Streat, alumna 1935.

And welcome finally to the members of the talented PNCA community—Board of Governors, faculty, staff, alumni and students. Thank you for what you do and especially for the role that you have played in making this day possible. You, like the women we will honor later, have used your influence as teachers, mentors, collaborators and learners to activate the creative community that gives this school its distinctive personality and overarching coherence. Later in my remarks I want to come to this word influence for I believe it not only helps us understand the relationship between generations of artistic endeavor and the importance of College’s like PNCA in the arts and culture ecology, but ultimately that it presents a critical tool for each of you to employ in your professional and personal lives. But I will say more on that in a minute.

Today we celebrate first and foremost those who are receiving the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts and those receiving the Master of Fine Arts degree. We do this with no small amount of pride in your individual and well-earned accomplishments. And although you are not the first graduates that PNCA has honored in its 101 years as a school of art and design, you are, quite literally in a class of your own because of the unique configuration of collective knowledge, training talent and other resources you take away from PNCA.

Much of this knowledge and training has been aimed at preparing you for what comes after today, for a life of creative practice, where the habits of mind, eye and hand that you have worked so hard to develop here will continue to deepen. Those habits are multifold, and, as you have already discovered, their mastery is elusive. They include among others the practice of visual observation, the ability to envision, the desire to persist, a willingness to reflect deeply, a dedication to craft, the capacity to explain yourself effectively visually, in writing and orally, to place your work in historical and social contexts, and to extend your attention and thoughtfulness to the work of others in a manner that is respectful, intellectually ethical, spirited, and open minded.

As you apply these and other important elements of your practice, do remember that you operate from a special vantage point—a place of shared ideas, experience, and civic inspiration we might think of as a Creative Commons. Your work, and the work of those who have come before you, draws from and bears on this Commons in vital and enduring ways. Lewis Hyde, author of the modern classic The Gift and one of the visiting scholars to PNCA this year, spoke about this public reservoir of intellectual and artistic wealth. Little that we regard today as “domain” changing knowledge or technology whether in the fields of science, medicine, economics or art would have been possible in a world where the Creative Commons did not exist or was greatly restricted.

By definition, of course, the Creative Commons is not the exclusive province of any individual or institution. Nevertheless, the role that artists and designers and institutions of creative education like ours play in sustaining and extending the Creative Commons is indispensable and critical. And here I return to the idea of Influence.

Some of you know that over this past year, the College has been engaged in a discussion about its future vision. To frame that discussion, which has centered on a descriptive statement of what PNCA be like by the year 2016, we proposed that our College would be considered a growing “School of Influence” and then asked groups of faculty, staff, board members and students what that ought to mean. As examples, we mentioned the Weimar art, design and architecture academy known as Bauhaus and the American experiment Black Mountain College, in North Carolina. Both of these schools were magnets for cutting edge intellectuals and creative practitioners, who they invited to collaborate with faculty and students and from which projects, ideas, and innovations that would shape contemporary art and design for decades that followed were born.

We pose the question of becoming a School of Influence not out of some overinflated sense of our importance or a driving ambition to be bigger or better than anyone else, but rather from a sense of obligation and opportunity to become the best school we can imagine together and that our collective efforts might achieve. We are obliged to do these things, first, because they are necessary to providing a rich educational environment that will support and challenge our students, and secondly, because in order for the “gifts of creativity,” brought by artists to flow unimpeded to the Commons, art schools and other organizations must choose to exercise and grow their influence, using it to protect and extend the Commons and to make ever clearer arguments for the transcendental value of making art, music, literature, theatre, dance, and all forms of thought, inquiry, expression and activism that serve to uplift us and bring coherence and personal meaning to the idea of creative community.

As our conversation has evolved, I have come to think that the term influence is a good choice for the purposes of art schools and artists. Its relationship to the idea of “flow”—a critical concept in current theory psychology about the process of creative work—and fluency suggests a way of working that is subtle and thoughtful. There is also the notion of joining into (through confluence) and making a larger stream grow until perhaps it becomes a river, there is the idea of re-shaping the course of things. Being mindful of the watershed that your influence enters and changes, whether as an individual or institution, is essential forethought. A School of Influence and influential artists/innovators need be concerned about the health of the larger ecosystem upon which they depend.

But influence also carries a strong sense of elective agency. You may choose to use your influence or not as you may choose to use other tools within your repertoire. But to have effect your influence must have authority, a power and command that exceeds at least the concerns—whether they are aesthetic or social—that you wish to address. Developing your authority as artists and designers is as you have learned at PNCA a life’s process. It requires persistence, focus, and ongoing cultivation of the habits that I mentioned earlier. I hope you have found these habits and the values to employ them plentiful and accessible during your time during PNCA. We did not give these to you; rather you earned them in full measure and that is what the degree we will soon confer upon you signifies.

Class of 2010, you have already contributed to making PNCA a growing school of influence, and we are grateful to you for that and excited by the prospects of the work you will do to further widen the reach of that circle. In the process you will also be strengthening, with your gifts, the vitality of the Creative Commons. For what you have and will accomplish you have our admiration, our confidence and our hope.

Thank you.

(Portland, Oregon, May 24, 2009)