HONOREES HELP CELEBRATE RISD’S NEWEST GRADS
Thousands of family members and friends from around the country and the world will celebrate the accomplishments of more than 672 students—464 undergraduate and 208 graduate—who are accepting their hard-earned degrees this year. On Saturday, June 2, artificial intelligence expert David Hanson 96 FAV, photographer Annie Leibovitz (above right)
and multidisciplinary artist Cai Guo-Qiang (above) will join the festivities as honored guests. Hanson, who is committed to creating compassionate “genius machines” (see page 58), will accept the Alumni Award for Artistic Achievement and deliver the keynote address. An icon in her field, Leibovitz creates portrait photography that reveals the strength, vulnerability and humanity of her subjects. Since becoming Rolling Stone’s chief photographer in 1973, she has brought an unmistakable aesthetic to the art of celebrity portraiture, discovering in some of the world’s most prominent people something new and previously unseen. For the past 35 years, the New Yorkbased artist has continued to shoot groundbreaking photographs for Vanity Fair and Vogue, among others. Her work has been
After two decades of experimentation, Cai Guo-Qiang produced the breathtaking 2015 performance piece Sky Ladder, which rose above the harbor in his hometown of Quanzhou, China.
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exhibited widely, published in several books and earned her Living Legend status with the Library of Congress, along with many other accolades. Working across several disciplines, Cai is best known for his signature “explosion events” and paintings made by detonating gunpowder that attempt “to achieve a sense of the eternal from the ephemeral.” The New York-based artist’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, which hosted the 2008 retrospective I Want to Believe. In 2012—the same year his daughter Wen-You Cai 12 SC graduated from RISD—Cai received the Japan Art Association’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale and was among five artists to earn the first US Department of State Medal of Arts award. In 2016 Academy Award winner Kevin Macdonald further illuminated the artist’s life and work in the Netflix documentary Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang. Prior to the main event on Saturday, master’s degree recipients will celebrate their accomplishments at a graduate hooding ceremony on Friday. Risë Wilson, chief program officer for The High Line in Manhattan, will offer new grads a fresh perspective on professional practice.