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Creativity and Collaboration in the City of Art

Commencement Remarks 2009

Thomas Manley
Pacific Northwest College of Art

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for the 2009 Commencement of Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA).

Welcome to you all and congratulations to the Class of 2009 and congratulations to your parents, families, friends, and mentors who have supported you on your journey to this outstanding day.

Welcome also, of course, to our honoree and speaker, Michael Curry, PNCA class of 1981, and to the members of the talented PNCA community—Governors, faculty, staff, alumni and students.

Today we celebrate first and foremost the members of the Class of 2009, both those who are receiving the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts and those recipients, the first in the College’s history, who are receiving a PNCA Master of Fine Arts degree. This is a milestone for our school and it is fitting that it comes at this time and in this year.

For ten decades PNCA has served as the flagship art school for Oregon and the wider region and in the course of those years its faculty, students, alumni, and staff have contributed indelibly to the spirit and substance of this institution, its city and region, and to the creative community that connects us to a wider world of possibilities, concerns and obligations. Imagine a life without the high places of wonder, joy and insight to which the arts lift us. Then imagine what the impact that the tens of thousands of creative citizens who have been associated with the school over its first 100 years have had on the quality of our personal and public lives today.

Class of 2009, I want to speak more about the idea of creative practice and citizenship in a moment, but if I may ask you and all present to join me in moment of quiet reflection and appreciation for those who have brought us to this point.

Our centennial is of course a chance to acknowledge an historical legacy, but this afternoon is about the future, especially your future Class of 2009, and how you choose to apply your considerable talents and knowledge. That future, we believe is a bright one, if only given the increasing value of the educational currency you have earned. But there are other reasons for being optimistic despite the state of the economy.

We believe that a PNCA education prepares you for a life of creative practice. We make this claim based on our confidence in the blending of a studio-based education and liberal arts learning the College offers. And we make this claim based on what you have accomplished with the PNCA faculty in your time with us.

To last year’s class I spoke about the markers of those accomplishments in terms of the specific habits of studio thinking students develop and strengthen while at PNCA. Habits like careful observation, envisioning, resourcefulness, persistence, reflection, commitment to craft, effective communication visually, orally and in writing, the ability to understand and present your work in an historical context, and not least the capacity to work with others respectfully, to be active in seeing and responding to their work in a manner that is rigorous and that encourages ongoing investigation and dialog.

These habits are more than a collection of skills. Taken as a whole they encompass an experientially grounded approach to engaging and interpreting the world in original and sometimes transformational ways. That approach has always been vital to the making of culture that inspires and moves us as individuals and citizens to care about the quality of our lives together. Through the steadfast practice of creativity, the capacity for civic imagination is enlarged.

Creativity is a potential all possess. But it is in its sustained and dedicated practice that it is more fully developed by artists and designers. In chronicling the creative practice of a dozen artists, Barbara Seidel has written that through practice, creativity brings “many blessings. It requires time, but it can open us to the timeless moment. It requires effort, but it becomes effortless. Hard work, she notes, often leads to great delight. Perhaps most importantly, “the process itself takes us to ever-higher levels of creative functioning.”(Barbara Seidel, The Intimate Agenda: 121)

A life of creative practice engages us in ongoing problem posing and problem solving. It requires discipline and seeks to appreciate the shifting relationships among practice, process and what is ultimately produced. Here is where we explore, test, fail, stretch, adapt, discover and find personal meaning. Here is where creativity lives and is unleashed. This is also where innovation and originality are often born and it is the level of creative endeavor at which we can most effectively employ the transformative process of collaboration.

Unlike the work and practice of the solitary studio, which is its necessary partner/prerequisite, collaboration, to be true and rich, asks us to submit to an overarching discipline of shared exploration and dialog in order to let new things unfold. It depends on openness and rejects, what Maria Callas warned in regards to operatic performance, the slavish rendering of musical notation in favor of the total economy of the aria. Through the crucible of collaboration we are able at times to fuse the ideas of many into something that rises far above what we alone could imagine. This is undoubtedly why the great visionary poet, William Blake, spoke of the City of Art as the highest expression of human creativity, a place characterized by collaboration through which artists channeled their experience, craft and imagination to achieve together what they could not achieve by themselves.

The world we find around us is imperiled on so many fronts. On its own I do not believe that art and culture has the power to change the harsh realities of that world. But it does have the power to point to what Yeats calls the counter truths and to inspire us with transcendent moments of beauty, astonishment, joy, longing, insight, sorrow, and environmental connectedness? This is why Petrarch tells us that logic and philosophy may help us to better define virtue, but only poetry and metaphor, both technologies of the artists imagination, can move us to be virtuous.

Therefore, the forging of community through collaboration is more than a technique for expanding the richness of our shared culture; it is an act of shared responsibility, ethical intelligence and a countermeasure to the forces and conditions that feed on intolerance, closed mindedness, violence and corruption in order to flourish. Through the accomplishments and coalescing of creative individuals, who have gathered around common purpose and who apply their talents and experience with integrity and diligence, optimism is made to blow strongly against the clouds of cynicism and despair, and in every place we build this kind of community, a City of Art materializes.

Class of 2009, you have our deep admiration, our confidence, our heartfelt support and our hope. We look forward to the steady stream of your accomplishments, in which we will take great pride and perhaps on occasion, just a little bit of credit.

Thank you.

(Portland, Oregon, May 24, 2009)