Sarah Turner Delivers OCAC Final Commencement Address
NBSS President Sarah Turner was honored to give the commencement speech for the Oregon College of Art and Craft on May 19, 2019. This was their final commencement ceremony, having made the decision to close the College at the end of that academic year.
In February, The Oregon College of Art and Craft’s Board of Trustees approved a resolution to terminate all degree programs at the end of May 2019. After exploring a multitude of options to continue the College’s 112-year legacy, the Board determined closure was the only responsible path forward. Their staff and faculty have worked diligently to help mid-program students find new educational institutions that fit their needs. For more information on the College and its closure, see their website.
Sarah was asked to speak from a broad vantage point both as a former OCAC student, and from her experience leading institutions of art, craft, and design. Her remarks offered support and encouragement to all the members of the College as they find their next creative, educational, and professional ventures. She also offered her insights as an educator, highlighting that the definitions of education and art-making are constantly being questioned, reassessed, reframed, and redefined. Finally, Sarah’s hands-on experience as an artist craftsperson shine through her observations, and prove equally as valuable to our NBSS community as they are to the OCAC graduates.
Sarah is a graduate of the Metals program at OCAC, earning a Certificate in Metals in 1999. She also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from Smith College and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Watch Sarah’s full speech below, and read a full transcript of her remarks.
Photo above: The Platform Party, (from L to R) Sarah Turner, 2019 Commencement Speaker; Chris Potts, Dean of Student Affairs and Chief Enrollment Officer; Jiseon Lee Isbara, Interim President, Dean of Academic Affairs, and Professor; Karl Burkheimer, OCAC MFA in Craft Chair, and Sara Huston, Interim Chair of MFA Applied Craft + Design.
Introduction by Jiseon Lee Isbara, OCAC Interim President and Dean of Academic Affairs
It is our pleasure to introduce our Commencement Speaker, Sarah Turner.
Sarah is a proud alumna who has earned her Certificate of Metals in OCAC after receiving a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Smith College. She then pursued an MFA degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she eventually served as Dean.
Sarah embodies OCAC’s education. She’s a practicing artist, educator, and administrator who engages with critical theories by focusing on the meanings inherent to objects and materials for studio practice and curriculum.
Her uncompromising dedication to student success is also a value we share at OCAC. Now, as President of North Bennet Street School in Boston, Sarah’s passion in education for future generations continues.
The faculty overwhelmingly supported inviting Sarah speak to our last graduating students, as we cannot see any other person more relevant to our school and students. Please join me in welcoming Sarah.
Sarah Turner, Graduation Speaker
Good afternoon and welcome.
Welcome to the parents, families, partners, and friends of this group: the 2019 graduating class. It is wonderful to come together today to mark your accomplishments. Thank you to the College for inviting me to speak – to the Board of Trustees, and to Jiseon Lee Isbara for reaching out and trusting me to stand with all of you today.
Thank you to the staff, who have supported all efforts from the ground up: you are true community members, each of you. And a special thank you – and respect – to the faculty, present and past, who have balanced their teaching and leading with their own creative work. Thank you for being the people we wanted to study with, the people we chose as our guides – even as we resisted you.
To be asked to speak to you today is a tall order. I’ve been asked to offer some reflections on a day that is truly celebratory. After all, it’s early spring, Portland is beautiful, and 53 new craft, art, and design makers have been mentored and minted. That’s you: already at work on what’s next!
But today is also a day with a long shadow – too long for early spring: the shadow of a community closing and the responsibility that puts on all of us who have been a part of it. I’m so glad to have your strong shoulders, graduates; your capable hands and minds, as a part of the community that will take the efforts of OCAC forward. You join a mighty group of alumni, ready to do this with you, each in our own way.
I remember, early on, in critiques at OCAC and then later – whether I was a student or a faculty member – having to learn not only to make work, but to talk about work. You may be feeling talked out at this point – I can imagine you’ve come off of rounds and rounds of critiques, simultaneously wanting to squeeze everything out of each last conversation and at the same time, tired of language, the thick heaviness of critical conversation. So, I’ll try to keep this crisp – and we’ll try to let some light in.
You have seen a lot of art and design at this point. You’ve seen the really really good stuff – the pieces that simply have it – in their form, their material, their grace, be they modest or monumental. And you’ve seen a lot of the really, really bad stuff – the over-labored, the poorly made, the clichéd, the clumsy.
I hope you’ve been making both. The good, the bad, the unclear; they are all so important. And I hope you’ll continue with all kinds. If we waited for things to be right – or only allowed the things that were good, were easy to spot – how would we grow and test and expand? I have certainly made both kinds of work. And sometimes, I can’t tell the difference.
And when I’m in that not-knowing – not knowing whether something has the right quality, the right approach, the right effort, whether that’s in my studio work or in my work for Schools – I’m learning to balance a trust in moving forward, with an allowance to step back, letting others help me, lowering the stakes, looking for the bigger picture.
When I’m in that not-knowing – not knowing whether something has the right quality, the right approach, the right effort, whether that’s in my studio work or in my work for Schools – I’m learning to balance a trust in moving forward, with an allowance to step back, letting others help me, lowering the stakes, looking for the bigger picture.
This is what I love about students working on art + design these days: there seems to be less emphasis on solo authorship, on heroically going it alone. Yes, we still have those who want to be art-stars – and we’ll need some; maybe some are here today. But I see that the artistic and creative identities you create are not for yourself alone. You’ve found ways that are not fixed, and not expected to endure. I’ve seen students test out new modes: short, fruitful collaborations take hold, with all the conviction and passion of something meant to last forever. Yet there is a willingness to change tacks, move on, adapt, and re-form.
The ways that you are blending what you do seems to require this flexibility: efforts that once would have been ‘artworks’ are now a mix of object-performance-text-installation and exchange. Through the mix of craft, art, and design, your work is also action, engagement, social. It is process-bound, letting the seams show, the cracks as important as the veneer. Your work is sometimes site and place, not tangible at all. Still, it reaches out to other people, asking us to participate, to wear it, to sit in it, to use it – inviting us to be a part of what you do.
I’ll confess, I sometimes get lost in this work – when studio practice becomes a trailer in the desert, when ‘sculpture’ is a lousy fan whirring in the corner of a room – I go looking for the familiar anchor of ‘field’ or ‘discipline’; of names. But you show me that these notions and traditions are still part of what you do, and that research, practice, and form can take new-old ways. Authorship is up for re-negotiation: what is foregrounded are the partnerships, the projects, the spaces, the experiments.
This is so good – as it seems to me to be one of the best reflections of our times.
And yet, even as identities and affiliations shift and slide, we yearn for something physical and tangible, something material. This is what I have always admired about the special alchemy of OCAC. It has been a School with a powerful craft history, soundly rooted in tradition, technique, and skill.
You have been helped to make things actual, to give form to your ideas. You have been helped to understand tools, materials, pigments, images, and histories. Happily, OCAC gave us a place to both embrace and challenge these things. We were enamored by some of what was offered and skeptical of other parts.
It will be important that you’re selective about what you take from your studies. You don’t have to accept all of it. I have found that unlearning our educations, re-framing them in our own way, is as generative as the education itself. We have this idea that knowledge is passed down, as a precious ‘thing’, gifted from one person to the next. But we know this isn’t how it works: knowledge and knowing is generated, it evolves. Ideas are reformed, refitted, tuned up, or left behind.
So, whatever it is that you choose to carry with you, you have invested in your own abilities, your expertise, your own way of knowing. This is yours: with continued practice and effort, it will become more deeply you, and as it does, it will also change.
This is one of the aspects of having an education in craft that I have valued most: the abilities – practical and intellectual – that it has given me. I am able to fit and fabricate, to take things apart, repair them, build them back. This has given me confidence and a willingness to experiment, test, and even to fail.
This is one of the aspects of having an education in craft that I have valued most: the abilities – practical and intellectual – that it has given me. I am able to fit and fabricate, to take things apart, repair them, build them back. This has given me confidence and a willingness to experiment, test, and even to fail.
Craft-practice also gave me a quiet respect for time. So much of making is slow, and yet suddenly: there is the thing before you. I remember sitting in the back of Metals, on a low stool in the cluster of stumps, to raise a teapot – never believing the flat silver would change to a curving vessel. But steadily, by hammer blows, by marks, by rows – sending the ping-ping-ping of my planishing out across a dark campus – the angle shifted, the form grew. Metal to metal, over air.
Craft-study asks us trust in slowness, to not rushing the firing, to be patient with each pass over a print, to notice that our marks still show. It’s in this slow time, this over-and-over time, that new ideas take hold – our minds are both occupied and free.
With that understanding, I encourage you to teach your curiosity to couple with your ambition – leaning solidly on this slow-work of your studio effort. You know this trusty method: showing up to the studio, even when you’re tired and frustrated, picking up where you left off, envisioning where you want your work to go, and being able – with your practical skills – to get somewhere. This won’t always be in art-making; all of us go on to do many things. But it will stand you in good stead, if you remember and trust that you have it.
When I’m stuck, overwhelmed, when I’m in over-my-head (please: get yourself in over your head), I return to what I learned in the studio. For me, it’s a mix of mapping and planning, trying and seeing: a call and response of progress and results. Steady work, day by day.
This was modeled for you in the very idea of OCAC itself. While it was founded during the Arts + Crafts movement, it started as a modest endeavor – in people’s homes, it started small. Even with a firm conviction in education through craft, OCAC did not stay static, and it did not retrench to protect itself. It went forward, into a messy mix of creative work that was both sturdy, yet permeable. It invited new people to join in: new students each year, coupled with new faculty, and a steady stream of visitors and collaborators. We came to Portland, from the region, the country, and from across the World. Some of us were short-timers – dipping in to learn and share. Many others stayed a long time, helping to build the School that we’ve all been a part of. OCAC became a”known” place, even though it was never the same thing through time. It was a different school for you than it was for me.
And with its foundation in craft, it’s hard not to focus on the physical: the campus of both planned and ad-hoc buildings; the circuitous paths through landscape both tended and wild; the generous and remarkably equipped studios; each sending their sounds into the air.
But there was nothing about an old filbert orchard that predicted what OCAC would become. That was done slowly, person by person, effort by effort – by you, and by me, and by everyone here. This is something you already know: that the best, idiosyncratic, true work takes time and many influences. It takes offering your contribution to the things that others have built; and finding ways to adapt and expand them, even to the point where they cannot endure.
Today is for you, graduates. Today feels right and normal to you, because you have taken incremental steps to arrive here – your success did not fall from the sky. But no time is the right time, or the best time. Change will come, perspectives will shift, your own position will be different.
Through you, today is also for the rest of us. You are the most recent and relevant of what this community can offer. Today, you and I stand on the shoulders of the many classes, many critiques, many projects that built our educations. A work as big as a School is cumulative – no one can fully take the credit, and no one fully deserves the blame. Think for a moment of the people who helped you in this place, the people you studied with, learned from, and sat beside. I cannot name them all, but you can know them: your mentors, predecessors, colleagues; your antagonists, your champions.
New chapters are not only for new graduates – if we’re lucky, new chapters come throughout our lives.
New chapters are not only for new graduates – if we’re lucky, new chapters come throughout our lives. A new chapter is starting for the faculty, as they take their skills, networks, and initiatives to new places. They will draw on some of the same strengths and sources that you draw from and together, and we will help shift the College from being a place to persisting as an aspiration of our talents, an effort of our skills.
Today, you also join a group of alumni who are finding infinite ways to take what we learned here and apply it in our daily and creative lives. We are artists, and crafts-people, educators, and do-ers. There is, of course, no one thing that we all are or do, yet across this country and around the world, OCAC alumni find ways to make and build, fix and imagine – with a sensibility that was earned and honed up on that hill. Through our education, through our work and training, we carry forward the traditions to be preserved, supported, and advanced. That was always the work that we were bound to do. Now, it’s simply our responsibility more than ever.
Congratulations to you, this class of 2019, and welcome: we’re so glad that you’re here now, stepping forward with all of us.
Thank you and please keep in touch – with each other, with me, with everyone here. While OCAC is no longer place, it IS people – just as it always has been.
Sarah also delivered the Commencement speech for North Bennet Street School’s 2019 graduating class. Watch that speech here.