Transcript of the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Class Day on June 1, 2020
Lewis Center Chair Tracy K. Smith’s welcoming remarks:
Welcome to the Lewis Center for the Arts’ 2020 Class Day Celebration. I’m Tracy K. Smith, Chair of the Lewis Center, and we gather here with friends, family, faculty, and staff to honor the artists graduating with certificates in creative writing, dance, theater, music theater, and visual arts. It’s a festive occasion! I also want to acknowledge that we occupy a fraught moment in human history. Lives the world over have been claimed and upended by the coronavirus pandemic, and we continue to witness the deaths of unarmed black citizens like George Floyd and others. So, there are messages of grief and urgency with us today as well. The mixture of joy and pain and the convictions that it fosters are part of what drives the creative process and what puts artists on the frontlines of every culture.
Seeing, feeling, and dreaming the world as it is, and as it must seek to become, is the urgent work of artists all the time and in every society. Moments like this one remind us that this is not merely a pleasant past time or means of self-expression but a vital form of collective survival.
Graduates, we need your creative vision, your energy, your community building, your belief in the future. And to family members and friends gathered with us, your young artists need faith, encouragement, trust and attention.
Now, I would like to introduce our program directors who will introduce our graduating certificate students.
The Lewis Center program directors are Jhumpa Lahiri, Director of the Program in Creating Writing; Rebecca Lazier, Acting Director of the Program in Dance; Jane Cox and Stacy Wolf, Directors of the Programs in Theater and Music Theater; and Martha Friedman, Director of the Program in Visual Arts. Our first speaker is Jhumpa Lahiri.
Creative Writing Program Director Jhumpa Lahiri’s Address:
Hello, everyone. I am so happy to be able to congratulate everyone on this day, on this very difficult day, and to gather strength in numbers and to be together right now. Thank you, Tracy, for your words.
The writer Clarice Lispector observed that, “Every writer is a natural actor.” She synthesizes something I have always felt: that writing is a way of being and of understanding something other than yourself. But acting also involves improvising and heeding queues. Some of our 28 creative writing thesis students are as comfortable on stage as they are composing at their desks. But each of them, this spring, heeded unanticipated cues and improvised. Their concentration was tested just weeks before their deadlines. The familiar backdrop fell away. They produced pages, nevertheless. They are as disciplined as they are talented. I would like to offer this heroic cohort representing the genres of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, and translation a standing ovation.
And now, I will read the names of each of the certificate students in Creative Writing:
Serena Alagappan
David V. Babikian
Sarah K. Barnette
Liana T. Cohen
Robert Cody Cortes
Yousef M. Elzalabany
Arianah F. Hanke
Nathaniel Hickok
Matthew T. Igoe
E Jeremijenko‑Conley
Somi S. Jun
Eunice Lee
Scooter Liapin
Allegra E. Martschenko
Liza Milov
Abigail B. Minard
Rasheeda Saka
Destiny Salter
Peter C. Schmidt
Grace C. R. Searle
Alexandra M. Spensley
Emilie G. Szemraj
Khanh K. Vu
Heather D. Waters
Jacob D. Wheeler
Alice Xu
Cooper G. Young
Kevin J. Zou
And now to Rebecca Lazier in Dance.
Dance Program Acting Director Rebecca Lazier’s address:
Thank you, Tracy and Jhumpa. To the great Dance Class of 2020, together with all the dance faculty, staff, and designers, we offer our heartfelt congratulations to you and your families on the tremendous accomplishments that have brought you to this moment. It’s an honor to be with you today, albeit remotely, and to have learned alongside you at Princeton.
You brought passion and deep purpose of care to your courses, performances, and interactions. You trusted and took risks. You redefined limitations, honored discomfort, and uncovered what it means to be creative. On stages and studios across campus and in cyberspace, your performances were bold and vulnerable. Your compositions were full of integrity, and, through them, you have made a profound impact on your peers, your audiences, the faculty, and your families. We hope that within dance, you have found a kind of compass, a way-finding process that can support you now, especially in this time of great upheaval and change. We hope that dance has given you the tools to be fearless, the tools to create community, to be an activist, and also, the tools for self‑care, expression, reflection, and imagination. Together, these will allow you to make the world your stage.
We look forward to continuing to celebrate with you and mark your brilliance as you build new dance communities wherever you are, and we will always be here for you. Thank you. You transformed us and we are grateful for all you have given us.
Congratulations to the Class of 2020 Dance certificate students:
Sarah A. Betancourt
Sofia Bisogno
Peyton Cunningham
Abigail R. Kostolansky
Marshall Schaffer
Cooper G. Young
Aleksandra M. Kostic
Jhor van der Horst
Serena J. Lu
Jorina Kardhashi
Congratulations! And now I’d like to introduce the Director of the Program in Theater Jane Cox and Director of the Program in Music Theater Stacy Wolf.
Theater Program Director Jane Cox’s Address:
Thank you, amazing students and friends. To our black students, specifically, and all of our students of color, we specifically recognize you for your resilience, courage, and creativity in the face of the ongoing racism and racial brutality.
Graduates, in rehearsal rooms, classrooms, design studios, and theaters, you asked yourself and each other the hardest of questions, often very late at night and on very little sleep, and answered with creativity, passion, and love. Through personal illness and family illness in the last weeks and many other serious stresses, you have shown us that you are more courageous and brilliant than we even knew.
Music Theater Program Director Stacy Wolf’s Address:
More than ever, the world needs all of our graduates to bring their humanity, artistry, ingenuity, and collaborative generosity into the world.
We were thrilled to spend time this year with:
A seamstress working toward her dreams
A fierce mother who sang her way to survival
A woman whose voice reconnects her to her body
An evangelical and a liberal in a dorm room
The spirits of two sisters, a bargain, and a bag of salt
Students suffering
An artist’s early morning rituals
The people of a pop‑punk hotel
A North Korean defector, and
A murderous couple in Scotland.
We wish we’d been able to spend more time with:
Upper‑class lovers in Sweden
Horses, or maybe not horses
Chairs
A space‑bound utopian collective
A neurodiverse performing ensemble
A woman trapped with her invisible script trying to sing the poison out, and
the last English‑speakers on Earth
Jane Cox’s Address continued:
Congratulations to the following students who earned certificates in both Theater and Music Theater:
Hannah Jayne Chomiczewski
Milan Renée Eldridge
Jenny Kim
Kateryn Lina McReynolds
Richard Peng
Allison Marie Spann
Abigail Teagan Spare
Congratulations to the following students who have received a certificate in the Program in Music Theater:
Reed Sawyer Hutchinson
Jonathan Andrew Makepeace
Billie Anna Runions
Calvin James Rusley
Carl Sun
Congratulations to the following students who earned a certificate in the Program in Theater:
Tessa Rose Bernstein Albertson
Jonathan Lee Alicea
Jaclyn L. Hovsmith
E Jeremijenko‑Conley Nicholas Judt
Carol Lee
Alexandra Palocz
Hannah Marlena Semmelhack
Kent Marshall Schaffer
Katja Anita Stoke‑Adolphe
Tsjum Jhor Kai van der Horst
Chamari Marquis White‑Mink
Jianing Zhao
Now to Martha Friedman, Director of Program in Visual Arts.
Visual Arts Program Director Martha Friedman’s Address:
Thanks, Jane and Stacy. I’m humbled to be part of this program for the Visual Arts students. While recent events upended our world, the artists and young artists are called to alter the shifting landscape left behind the wake of this. You, graduating artists, can create work that allows us as a community to validate selective emotions and unpack common grief, enabling us to move forward with hope and resilience. And with this in mind, I could not think of a stronger or more committed cohort to launch into the world at this time.
To the Visual Arts Class of 2020, I say thank you for your courage and persistence, and I wish you all the best on your journeys to come. Congratulations to Class of 2020 Visual Arts certificate students:
Seb Benzecry
Julian Castellon
Christina de Soto
Nazenin Elci
Thomas Hoopes
Janette Lu
Estibaliz Matulewicz
Roland Mounier
June Ho Park
Gabriella Pollner
Irene Ross
Katie Schneer
Yunzi Shi
Elizabeth Wallace
Charity Young
Congratulations Class of 2020 Practice of Art students:
Milan Eldridge
Abby Hack
Jhor van der Horst
Ivy Xue
Congratulations to all artists, congratulations, everybody.
Lewis Center Chair Tracy K. Smith’s introduction of guest speaker Thelma Golden:
Congratulations once again to all the certificate students and all of our students here tuning in to support our wonderful young artists. You do give us hope, which is in great need at the moment.
Now I have the honor and the pleasure of introducing our Class Day speaker. Thelma Golden is Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, the world’s leading institution devoted to visual art by artists of African descent. She describes her job as that of creating space for the expression of diverse voices and in particular creating space for and dialogue around the work of black artists. And, as Golden reminds us, this is a cultural act but also a political act. Golden has said that Harlem is a place that never lives only in the present, constantly aware of the history and concerned for the future. Her work at the Studio Museum of Harlem is characterized by a deep commitment to planning for the future, and in 2015 the Studio Museum announced plans to create a new facility designed by Adjaye Associates in conjunction with Cooper Robertson on the current site in Harlem. Golden is also committed to training a generation of black curators, whose influence is now being felt across the country. I know her voice will be meaningful to you and your loved ones as you envision the role you and your art can play in a world that desperately needs love, courage, reflection, dialogue, and passionate creativity. Please join me in welcoming Thelma Golden.
Guest Speaker Thelma Golden’s Address:
Hello. Thank you so much, Tracy K. Smith and your colleagues, the faculty and staff of the Lewis Center for the Arts, for asking me to speak today.
And quite truthfully, when Tracy asked me to do this, I looked upon this assignment with great joy, and I come to you today holding that joy. So, first, I want to say congratulations to all of you receiving certificates, all of you artists who have given your time, your effort, your ingenuity toward your own self‑actualization as creative beings.
I want to thank the faculty members who helped you along this path. I want to also salute your friends and your family, communities that have made it possible for you to take this journey.
I prepared something to say to you all that now seems irrelevant for all the reasons that you know. I am the director of an institution, The Studio Museum in Harlem, devoted to work of black artists founded in 1969 at a moment, a societal moment, of reckoning, just like the one we’re in now. It is an institution created as part of an idea of a solution of systematic change in the community and for people.
I have also devoted my entire career as a curator to creating space—physical space, intellectual space, aesthetic space, even spiritual space, one might say—for black artists, and have been committed to institutional change.
So, while both of those experiences qualify me to say many things to artists because that is what has been the privilege of my work, to speak to artists to be in conversation and community with artists, but today, I have to make these remarks with a very heavy heart as I, like so many of us, deal with grief and anger, with rage, and a sense of profound and deep reckoning.
I do this as I think of, of course of George Floyd, but also Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Sean Reed, Tony McDade, and so many others who have been lost, who have been murdered, and lost their lives in this spate of racial terror which has historic implications that we’re dealing with.
I always go to art to make sense of the world and make sense of history and I’m here today trying to make sense of it with you, all artists, as you begin this path.
So, I begin where I was going to begin as I considered this a few weeks ago with the words of Toni Morrison, a visionary, a saint for so many of us that I know you all know well on the campus of Princeton, and I want to read these words to you that she said: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self‑pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
So those words of Toni Morrison are what I hope to offer you as we reconcile both their space of accomplishment and joy, but also the rage and sadness that exists in the world. I know you all are probably asking yourselves as you enter this moment, what does it mean to make art? Can art matter? Does art matter? And can it be critical to this moment? And what I say to you is, yes, it is, as it has always been. I say to you that you have been trained for this. You’ve been trained for this moment. It is your creativity, your ingenuity, and your courage that will not only allow you to make creative statements out of your vision and your voice, but also to create the kind of work that allow us, your audiences, your families, your friends, to see the world through your eyes. That is the gift that you have been given, but it is also the responsibility that you hold.
So, I hope that you will know that it is in your hands, that we will now, but also future generations, will understand who you are, what you are, what you understand, what you mean, and what you believe, and that will happen through your work, but it will also give a vision, your vision of this moment and the moments to come.
So, I want to congratulate you in that, but also say that I stand, I know, with your faculty and professors, to say that we are here, an engaged community who believe in art and believe in artists and think deeply about what it means to support the creative spirit in a world that needs love, that needs healing, that needs visions of life and visions of justice as we move on.
So, I will end with the words that I often keep with me day to day in the work that I do and even shared this morning as I spoke to the amazing staff at The Studio Museum in Harlem, all people committed to our mission, but also committed to the sense of our role and responsibility in our community. And, you know, I often say that if I had a tattoo this is what it would be in the words of Arthur Ashe. I take his mantra and mandate and mission as Arthur Ashe said, “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” So, I leave that to you today, this day, that we applaud you and congratulate you and we stand here to honor your accomplishment.
Thank you.
Lewis Center Chair Tracy K. Smith announces major prize winners:
Thank you so much, Thelma, for all that you do. Thanks for your grace and welcome into the community of artists, citizens, people with the sense of belief and hope and need which we all have.
At this moment it’s my privilege to award two central Lewis Center prizes for work by certificate students in the arts.
The Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts is awarded to one or more graduating seniors who have demonstrated excellence or the highest standard of proficiency in performance or execution or in the field of composition in the following general areas: music, theater, dance, painting, sculpture, or photography.
The 2020 Sudler Prize recipients are:
E Jeremijenko‑Conley
Tsjum Jhor Kai van der Horst
Congratulations! I’m going to read a little bit about their work. I wish we could hear the booming applause but hope you can feel it.
E Jeremijenko‑Conley, author, playwright and actor, has contributed to life at the Lewis Center from her first semester at Princeton, and her considerable talents have flourished across genres ever since. E, an anthropology major lauded for her accomplishments in writing and theater, has been an unforgettable presence in numerous stage productions, and also performed in a film for the visual arts program. And in her senior year, she wrote First and Foremost, We Are Women of Academia, a dark comedy exploring the underbelly of Princeton culture. Her creative writing thesis The Girl Who Listened to Animals, is a novel that examines sexuality, self‑hatred, friendship, and the vicissitudes of college life in engaging, ever turning ways. E’s voice, vision, and collaborative spirit embody the highest ideals of the Lewis Center for the Arts. Congratulations, E.
Jhor van der Horst, is one of the most hardworking and creative, dedicated students we’ve ever had in the visual arts and dance programs. His VIS arts work represents the highest level of conceptual rigor combined with meticulous execution. In dance and choreography, Jhor thinks deeply, reflects compassionately, and moves with both subtle sensitivity and explosive clarity. Jhor’s thesis work in vis arts and dance was profoundly original and groundbreaking. Jhor is a gifted artist across many disciplines and a generational talent who perfectly exemplifies the qualities sought in a Sudler Prize recipient.
Congratulations and thank you, both E and Jhor, thanks for your remarkable contributions to art making and citizenship at the Lewis Center for the Arts.
The Toni Morrison prize is awarded annually to one or more graduating seniors of the Lewis Center for the Arts whose individual or collaborative artistic practice has pushed the boundaries and enlarged the scope of our understanding of issues of race. This prize honors work in any form that, in the spirit of Morrison’s, is characterized by visionary force and poetic import.
The 2020 recipients of the Morrison prize are:
Jenny Kim
Destiny Salter
Again, feel the resounding applause and joy that is surrounding you.
Jenny Kim’s is a rigorous, mature, and poetic practice in several fields of theater design with strong advocacy and activist work around issues of race and identity. Jenny is a witty and lyrical lighting designer, a gifted and musical sound designer, and new, talented set designer, who has led our students in conversation around the representation of Asians in the performing arts. Jenny’s thoughtful and generous demeanor belies the force of her vision in investigating questions of racial othering in theater, whether those questions come up in auditioning, writing, casting, rehearsal, or design decisions. Jenny’s keen observation skills, her tireless energy, her endless sense of curiosity, and the rigor of her work ethic have propelled her to leadership in our community, where she is asked searching questions around the representation of Asians and Asian Americans in American theater. Her theater work culminated in her senior year independent project of producing, designing and acting dramaturg on the first English language production of a Korean play, Sister Mok-rahn, and this exciting production celebrated the Asian theater‑making community by bringing together Asian and Asian American students, visiting Korean and Korean American artists, and other members of our community in conversation around North Korean human rights, and investigated the nuances of othering and identity between South and North Koreans. Jenny is a force of nature and we’re so excited to see what she can bring to the theater both in the U.S. and in Korea. Congratulations, Jenny!
As a student and as an artist, Destiny Salter has challenged the confines of race in poetry and broadened our understanding of its complexity. The poems in A Ghost Story are fierce and alive and open. They are poised and resourceful in the wide-ranging use of formal approaches and deeply startling. They draw readers into finely tuned, psychic, visceral, moral, and imaginative spaces, and they impart an arresting clarity. Speaking personally, I’ll say that Destiny’s poems wound me in the ways good art must be willing to do, even as they also serve to console me, especially now, in a world so hamstrung by the inability to unravel the knot of racial prejudice. Destiny’s poems give me hope. I’m heartened to see that some of the hard work we as a civilization have yet to do is being done honestly and exquisitely done in poems that tackle slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day white supremacy. Of course, Destiny’s work is also equally adept at exploring friendship, romantic love, and the female black body. Her poetry is unblinking and unwavering and, as poet Monica Youn has said, Destiny’s poems are searing and precise as a blow torch. All should be so courageous, and all poems should burn so brightly.
Congratulations, Jenny and Destiny, and thank you for the remarkable work you’ve done in the Lewis Center.
I have one last word for all of our amazing LCA graduates. Remember that you have been called to do deep and necessary work through your art. We know you’ll do many other things in the world, but we also believe that your art is a huge gift to humanity. We’ve been privileged to witness it and to work with you in different ways through your time at Princeton, and we all hope that you’ll move forward bolstered by our belief in you.
And I want to thank all the friends and family that have joined us here today. Your love and support are vital resources for these young artists as they do the difficult but vital and difficult work of keeping our culture alive. I’d like to invite everyone to give our graduates a round of applause.
Thanks for joining us for this session, and the day is not over yet. Please be sure to connect with us in the various Zoom receptions.
To all of you who are here with us, thank you, take care, and be well. We know that you will be crossing our paths again.