Yale School of Art 2018 Commencement

Commencement address by poet, critic, and scholar Fred Moten

2018 candidates for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

Graphic Design
Nilas Kaalund Andersen, Guillaume Pierre Louis Edouard Boucher, Ingrid Chuen-Neng Chen, Hicham Samir Faraj, Muxi Gao, Pianpian He, Byungjo Kim, Nathan Jeffrey Barros da Costa Pyper, Yo-E Ryou, Hrefna Sigurðardóttir, Youngeun Sohn, Katelyn Merry Spinelli, Dustin Tong, Bryce Sutton Wilner, Matthew Taylor Wolff, Christine Fae Zavesky, Ziwei Zhang

Painting/Printmaking
Camille Alice Altay III, Felipe De Jesús Baeza, Natalie Marie Ball, Ernest Arthur Bryant III, Lauren Kyung-Mee Chun, Kenturah Davis, Daniel Joseph Ginsburg, Adam Robert Higgins, Clare Kambhu, Kathryn Brett Kerr, Wyatt Lasky, Leslie Martinez, Alexandria Lyn Mento, Kent Isaac O’Connor, Johnathan Robert Payne, Estefania Puerta Grisales, Antonia Lu-Yi Robins Kuo, Julia Ann Frances Rooney, Ilana Savdie, Vaughn Spann, Maya Grace Strauss, Emma Beatrice Gambier Webster, Chase Alexander Wilson

Photography
Dannielle Nicole Bowman, Jennifer Helene Calivas, Penn Chan, Jillian Germaine Freyer, Kathryn Elizabeth Harrison, Lacey Lennon, Lucas Libera Moore, Evelyn Louise Pustka, Daniel James Swindel

Sculpture
Sula Bermudez-Silverman, Shikeith Cathey, Brian Dario, Nicholas Erik Gaby, Justine Melford-Colegate, Ian Page, Raúl José Romero, William Scott Stewart, John Drue Scott Worrell, Valentina Maria Zamfirescu

About commencement speaker Fred Moten
Fred Moten is a poet, critic, and scholar. His focused area of research in Black Studies is “a dehiscence at the heart of the institution on its edge; its broken, coded documents sanction walking in another world while passing through this one, graphically disordering the administered scarcity from which black studies flows as wealth.” This, as written by Moten within his recent trilogy of critical writings—Black and Blur, Stolen Life, and Universal Machine—three volumes of writing that are concerned with the social force and social origins of black expressive cultural practices. 
 
Moten is the critically acclaimed author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2009); B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010); The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016) and consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018). He is also engaged in long-term collaborations with theorist Stefano Harney and artist Wu Tsang. With Harney he is co-author of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013) and A Poetics of the Undercommons (Sputnik and Fizzle, 2016) and, with Wu Tsang, of Who touched me? (If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016). Tsang and Moten are also co-workers in the project Gravitational Feel, iterations of which have been shown or performed at several venues including the Tate Modern in London and The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.



Fred Moten is a Professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Stephen E. Henderson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the African American Literature and Culture Society. In 2018, Moten was awarded the inaugural Roy Lichtenstein Award of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and named a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow.