I was selected to give the keynote address for SVA’s 50th commencement celebration. After 68 rewrites, the following is the most important speech I’ve ever delivered. Thank you to all who supported and urged me to do this.
Photos: Todd Carroll
It is a great privilege to speak at this 50th commencement ceremony. Thank you, President David Rhodes, Provost Chris Cyphers, the Commencement Committee, SVA board members and the Greek chorus of my colleagues, collaborators and compatriots sitting behind me.
I am pleased to doff my hat to the SVA class of 2025. Congratulations to you honored graduates, proud families, significant-pluses, and loyal service pets. Soak up all the joy on this, your special day.
I’ve been asking myself why am I here at Radio City Music Hall instead of Bad Bunny or Ariana Grande.
Maybe because I’ve been associated with SVA for 50 years: As an expelled student; adjunct faculty member; summer workshop co-coordinator; conference organizer; exhibition curator; cofounder of five graduate programs … and for 27 happy years, co-chair of MFA Design with Lita Talarico, who is here today.
For many of those years, I did these and other art and design jobs, while working almost every day as a senior art director at The New York Times.
I’ve been a recovering workaholic for as long as I can remember.
I’ve attended two dozen commencement events, hugged and/or shaken the hands of 300 MFA Design grads, and appeared in multiple terabytes-worth of selfies and photo-bombs.
It’s been a gift to listen to the words—wise and true—of our extraordinary commencement speakers. And here are a just a few of the many notables:
Representative John Lewis, who, as a young man living in the Jim Crow South, was leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; an organizer of the historic 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, AL; an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King; and ultimately the ranking U.S. Congressman from Georgia.
A hero of the Civil Rights Movement, his soulful oratory and eyewitness accounts of the struggle for racial equality—currently derided as “critical race theory”—were poignant and inspiring.
Lewis was arrested 40 times for civil disobedience—or what he called “good trouble”—and he slyly joked that he might be arrested a few more times before his life’s mission was complete.
He told our grads to use “your training to get into good trouble, so we can all be a little more human.”
He died in 2020, a few months before Jan. 6, 2021, MAGA insurrection; on that day, a rioter stole a framed photograph of Lewis from Nancy Pelosi’s desk. It was never returned. The thief was pardoned along with 1,600 others by Donald Trump.
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I was excited by the candid speech of women’s rights and social justice icon Gloria Steinem, who before becoming an activist, had worked at MAD magazine with the comics guru, SVA faculty member, and briefly my teacher, Harvey Kurtzman.
A few years later as a writer/reporter for SHOW magazine she famously went undercover as a Playboy Bunny to investigate working practices in Hugh Hefner’s exploitative night clubs. It was a seminal example of the New Journalism.
And in 1971 she was the co-founder and editor of Ms. Magazine, where SVA faculty member and former board chair, Milton Glaser, consulted on its graphic design.
Gloria’s optimism about the curative powers of art was palpable. “The visual arts,” she said, “has the most potential of bringing diverse persons together.”
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I was also energized listening to Jules Feiffer, creator of introspective and sardonic political comic strips, dramatic and comic plays and screenplays as diverse as Carnal Knowledge and Popeye.
In his late 70s he took a leap and began writing and illustrating his own unconventional children’s books.
The recipient of the 2005 SVA Masters Series Award, Jules spoke to us about busting social taboos with satire, lampooning political hypocrisy and employing the power of wit to outwit the powerful.
Jules was my role model. I wanted to do exactly what he did, and although I never became a successful cartoonist, I did the next best thing—I was editor of his book Jules Feiffer’s America.
Although he lost most of his eyesight to macualar degeneration, a few weeks before he died this past January at 95 years old, he finished his autobiographic graphic novel.
Making his art is what kept him alive. Let THAT be a lesson.
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Speaking of comics, Art Spiegelman has not given an SVA commencement speech YET, but he taught the first-ever Aesthetics of Comics class at SVA.
Graphic novels, currently a cash cow of the publishing industry, did not exist; Art launched a new genre with his intensely confessional two-volume comic book, the holocaust memoir MAUS.
I must confess that when he told me of his plans to find a mainstream publisher for the book, I was skeptical.
But my much wiser wife, Louise Fili, a former SVA faculty member and the art director of Pantheon Books, hooked him up with her publisher. MAUS received rave reviews, was translated into multiple languages, won the only Pulitzer Prize ever awarded for graphic novels, and is currently, and ironically, banned by various school boards for its vivid depictions of the Holocaust.
Still, generations of SVA students have benefited from Art’s commitment to comics as an art form and language.
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SVA has invited many speakers who are champions of art in the service of justice and social change. During COVID, filmmaker John Waters offered grads a hilarious to-do list of taboo-busting transgressive principles. And author/critic Roxane Gay issued a passionate plea to fight for women’s reproductive rights before the Supreme Court’s dreadful overturning of Roe v. Wade.
I could spend all my time riffing on the memorable speeches. Instead, I suggest that you invest your time and watch them on YouTube.
To prepare for this talk, I spent a lot of time searching.
I discovered an address given at Stanford by Apple founder Steve Jobs, where he admitted that after officially dropping out of college, he surreptitiously audited classes that interested him (for free). Of most consequence was a course on calligraphy and the history of letterforms; Jobs said it was the reason that years later, well-designed type fonts were factory-loaded into the early Macintosh computers—thus setting the typographic bar for all PC companies to license proprietary typefaces.
I also listened multiple times to Bob Dylan’s speech accepting the 2016 Nobel Prize for literature, delivered the year after he declined to attend the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm.
Dylan’s talk is not a commencement speech … but it is a remarkable prose poem of self-discovery that began: “I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature; I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful.”
My words are also roundabout. But I hope they will be “worthwhile and purposeful.”
First, a disclosure: I do not have any bona fide academic degrees. I attended my high school graduation but there is no trace of my diploma. So maybe it was all a dream …
I do have a certificate left over from the 1960s verifying that (for a $20 fee) I’m an ordained minister in the Universal Light Church, which I had hoped would allow me to get a religious draft deferment from serving in the Vietnam War. It didn’t work. But I can officiate at weddings.
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The goal of a commencement speech is to share bits of wisdom that might be useful once you, as certified artists, are released into the wild.
As New York Times culture critic A.O. Scott wrote:
“Like a wedding toast, a commencement address is not supposed to surpass its occasion. The speaker is generally someone who has said or done memorable things; the speech should not be one of them.”
As I was working on this talk, coincidentally I was also writing a wedding toast for my son and daughter-in-law’s recent reception at Katz’s deli. I tried to copy a few lines from it for this talk—but they just didn’t have the same zing without the scent of freshly sliced pastrami in the air.
At the very least, I hope something that I say strikes a chord.
So here it goes:
Experience does not equal wisdom.
You can have years of practical experience and only be as wise as a potato chip.
Wisdom is a calculus of learning, analysis and reflection, from which you formulate transcendent thoughts and concepts.
I have accrued decades of experience since I started working at 14 years old in the ad department at Bergdorf Goodman, and for the next 60 years, as layout person, letterer, illustrator, cartoonist, designer, art director, editor, author, lecturer and educator. Yet without a formal education I have a classic case of imposter syndrome.
I’ve been motivated by fear of failure.
So, the one bit of wisdom that sticks to me like Gorilla Glue is a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, the most auspicious First Lady of the 20th century, who said: “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”
And emphatically added: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
I have done things I was never trained to do, and subsequently learned to do them better from other people’s helpful, sometimes stinging, critiques.
Gaining “strength and courage” is dependent on receiving reinforcement—it is the single-most important validation one can receive and, of course, give to others in return.
A gallery owner once told me that whenever he reviewed an artist, he judged them based on the best work in their portfolio. As an art director and teacher, I’ve followed that principle. Even if I never gave the artist a job or the student a high grade, I always pointed to their best as a model for the rest, which shows respect and gives hope.
We all need hope.
SVA has taught me that being an artist is about reaching a certain height and aspiring to go even higher, which I know sounds like one of our ad slogans. But a good slogan contains morsels of truth.
I once toyed with the idea that the college be renamed the School of Visible Aspirations.
In 1947, Silas Rhodes and Burne Hogarth founded the Illustrators and Cartoonists School, later shortened to C&I Art School, for artists to learn drawing and storyboard skills. It was generously funded by the government’s GI Bill for veterans … a program that DOGE would probably slash today.
Rhodes aspired to expand the school. So, in 1956, the name was changed to School of Visual Arts, and he added courses on advertising, fashion, audio visual, fine arts, photography, industrial design and more.
From this aspirational goal years later was coined the slogan affixed to many of SVA’s trademark subway posters: “ART IS …”
And today that “is” includes various arts and humanities represented here and now by the chairpersons sitting on this stage.
This is the SVA legacy that you became a part of when you entered the college.
For me, SVA’s mission is first and foremost to support and realize aspirations.
During the ’60s, SVA helped alter the trajectory of arts when New York City became a wellspring of painting, graphic design, comics, advertising, photography and film in Postwar America.
I often imagine when I read lists of the famous alumni and faculty who contributed to the cultural renaissance of this city and the world: What would New York be like if SVA did not exist?
I conjure an abyss—a black hole. The loss would be incalculable on many levels.
I am not an artist. I consider myself art adjacent. I work around the edges of art. I write about and document design and designers, typography and typographers, illustrators and illustration, art activism and activist artists; I study the histories of democratic and authoritarian propaganda, and these days, our country’s slide into darkness. All these pursuits have been bolstered by access to SVA’s continuing ed programs, its library and archival resources.
“ART IS … Whatever,” reads the headline on one of Milton Glaser’s famous subway posters, and if SVA did not exist to promote this concept, there’d be way fewer art-rebels making waves.
At the risk of sounding like what A.O Scott calls “rhetorical emptiness,” I consider that all of you, in that impressive sea of red out there, are the next wave.
Your job is to create alternative spaces and objects with old and new technologies—or at least reinvent something in the existing space in which you can take personal and collective pride. As SVA grads you must fend off the barbarians that are all too real and crowding in, of late, like a herd of zombies too close for comfort.
At this point I would be remiss to ignore the toxic orange cloud hanging over us. Politics inevitably impacts the purpose and meaning of art, and we are entering a new world disorder where ideologues and idiocrats are poised to thwart your most progressive efforts or co-opt them for their own self-serving goals.
The culture wars are regrettably in full swing. The movement to erase so-called wokeness has reduced our capacity to think clearly—and teach honestly. Artists are in high anxiety mode. Far right and far left contribute to the rising danger. Sometimes stressful times fuel great work, but just as often they snuff it out.
A climate of cultural risk aversion will create a creative wasteland.
So, don’t be averse to risk.
Artists must protest the flood of Executive Orders, like the one targeting the Smithsonian Institution that instructs the compliant JD Vance to “eliminate improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from its two dozen museums of American history, including those focusing on marginalized peoples.
Last week the Librarian of Congress was fired for “promoting radical content” authored by Trump opponents. This erasure is just one of many chilling decrees issued regularly from the MAGA White House.
Demigods use art and architecture to underscore their power and leave a telltale legacy. They dismantle language too: Words and phrases like equity, diversity, inclusion, racism, nonbinary, BIPOC, gender identity and dozens more are now taboo in halls of the increasingly dismembered government. In only 130 days, Trump’s “agenda” normalization has been culturally devastating, to say the least.
To quote Bob Dylan again: “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters.”
Be nonconformists. Take confident strides—make your own opportunities, either solo or in collaborations.
The graphic designer Paul Rand once wisely said, “Originality will happen or it won’t, being good is hard enough.”
Your job is to be good at whatever you do.
Speaking of originality, my favorite quote comes from early 20th-century typeface designer Frederic Goudy, who said: “Some of those old guys stole our best ideas.”
SVA is loaded with plenty of aspirants to lead the way out of darkness. Just scan the accomplishments listed each morning in SVA Today. Everyday some project, exhibition, talk by students and alumni offers alternatives to and critiques of the status quo. It’s impressive!
As graduates it is your mission to continue the continuum.
To quote my favorite Al Pacino line in the film The Scent of a Woman: “Protect it. Embrace it. It’s gonna make you proud one day, I promise you.”
So, I will end by telling you about an experience I had recently at a doctor’s appointment.
When I arrived, the first thing I saw in the waiting room was a surprisingly familiar face. It was the singer/songwriter Graham Nash of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, one of my favorite rock supergroups.
I instantly felt calm wash over me, and was comforted by his silent presence sitting across from me minding his own business, while I googled him on my phone. When I was finished with my exam, he was still sitting there alone in the waiting room.
So I worked up the nerve to enter his personal space and said, “I love your music.”
He lifted his head, smiled, focused his eyes on mine and softly replied in his familiar British accent, “I do my best.”
Not, “I try to do my best,” but, “I DO my best.”
Just that brief encounter made my day, my week, my month …
Here’s my bit of takeaway wisdom: To the Class of 2025, whatever your circumstances, whichever media and technology you’re using, if you are the least bit anxious about what comes next in your life and work, you’ll do fine if you believe: “I do my best.”
Congratulations again: Take a day or two to celebrate your accomplishments. Then start to make good trouble.
The post The Daily Heller: Walking in the Footsteps of the Greats appeared first on PRINT Magazine.