Thank you for having me here today.

Before I start, I would like to make a confession. In preparation for writing this speech, I took the opportunity to go back and read some of my teachers’ comments from when I was a student at Milton that my mother had kept for all these years. I came across this rather sobering evaluation, which I would like to share with you today:

Date: June 5, 1987
Subject: Public Speaking
Teacher: Deborah E. Simon
Grade: B-

“Sarah, at the beginning of this year I saw in you the potential to be a very fine speaker. Before each speech I was hopeful that this would be your most powerful effort. In all of your presentations there were fine elements—voice, your opinion of a particular source, your use of the outline. But unfortunately I never thought you totally pulled it together in one, polished effort...I’m not sure what got in the way of your presentations in this class—absences, attitude, lack of preparation. But Sarah, you have the makings of a very fine speaker. I wish I could have seen your strengths more often.”

So I am back again for one last try.

Reading through these piles of detailed comments, I was reminded of how, as a student, ones performance is being watched and evaluated at all times. In light of this, I would like to start by giving you something that Milton might not have given you while you were here. I’d like to give you all the permission to fail.

It’s an ugly word that means different things to each of us. But in certain crucial situations, the permission to fail means the freedom to take meaningful risks. And in certain crucial choices, such as choosing to do what you love, the practice of being too cautious could be the greatest failure of all.

I am an artist. It is a career that, perhaps uniquely among professions, is vigorously encouraged in children and then vigorously discouraged in adults. After being vigorously supported and encouraged by a remarkable art faculty here at Milton, I arrived at Yale in the fall of 1987. I was studying art along with four other subjects. A live model would come to my painting class every week, pose for an hour, and we would paint a likeness on canvas—a method of teaching painting that probably dates back to the very beginning of painting itself. I had the ability to paint quickly and to capture likeness, and this ability served me well. Studying art is a very public, group endeavor, and at the end of each class, when the easels were all turned and the canvases lined up, there was no doubt that mine stood out. Studying art became like a competitive sport.

But when I look back at those paintings, what strikes me is only their technical virtuosity. The skill was evident and self-assured. But I was only fulfilling exercises, jumping through hoops.

And then, in a bizarre turn of events, my dorm room burned down. A fire had caught in one of the old college chimneys and spread through the floorboards. I climbed the stone stairs of my entryway only to find the black, soaking shell of our common room. I scanned the room with a dull sense of disbelief. But it was not until I saw the remains of my painting—a painting that I had done at Milton Academy and brought with me to college—that I was surprised by a profound sense of loss. It was a painting of about three by four feet, and on the wall where it had hung, oddly, there still remained a skeleton of blackened stretcher bars, the canvas of the painting perfectly singed off. I lost all my belongings in that fire, but when I thought about what I might have saved from that room, the only object I could think of was that painting.

The loss of the painting was a good thing, not only because it was a dramatic indication of what I cared about, but also, because it was one of many paintings that I had produced at the time that were primarily paintings in which I was concerned with showing off my skill as a painter. It was a skill for which I had always gotten approval. The seduction of that approval would have to be destroyed in order for me to move beyond making artwork as simply an academic exercise.

The painter Philip Guston once said, “The basis for creativity is one’s willingness to risk embarrassment.” By the time I left college I was bored, and most lethally I was bored by my own paintings. I had finally figured out what the artist Nam Jun Paik meant when he said that he would “rather make a new mistake than an old success.” It was time for me to make some new mistakes.

It was just a few days into graduate school at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. I went to class expecting the usual encouragement and support. The teacher for critiques that morning was the artist Jackie Winsor. “Who cares if you’re talented?” she said. “You wouldn’t have gotten this far if you weren’t, and nobody cares. The great majority of you will give up making art within a year after graduating—if you even make it through. The few who survive will be the ones who are able to work through the bad work. The creative process is not a steady climb upward. It’s ups and downs. Whether or not you’ll be resilient, that will be the real test.”

That didn’t sound like Anne Neely. I knew my paintings on the wall were not going to cut it. I packed away the tentative paintings I had eked out and decided to clear the room until it was reduced to a white, bare box. I tried to forget what a piece of art should look like. I went out to the corner store and bought a selection of materials—materials that I could experiment with, that were not precious and laden with history of painting; I bought materials that were cheap, dispensable and everyday, but that were somehow staples: rice, spaghetti, toilet paper, cheese, erasers.

When I arrived back at the studio building, the elevator was broken. My studio was on the ninth floor. Climbing the stairs with the plastic grocery bags cutting into the creases of my fingers—primarily from the weight of the four bags of rice—I imagined putting a grain of rice on each stair and watching the piles accumulate as I ascended. I couldn’t get this vivid image out of my mind, and after the second floor, against my better judgment, I decided to try it. I returned to the ground floor and started at the first step, placing one grain on the first stair, then two on the second, three on the third, until I had reached the 288th stair with a pile of 288 grains that marked the ninth floor on which my studio was located.

Looking down the vertical drop of the stairwell, the descending, shrinking piles in the distance had a life of their own. They were provocative and would be discovered unexpectedly by the viewer. They surprised me. The work sat in between painting and architecture, decidedly outside the traditional form of sculpture.

In the history of art, sculpture is typically an object. Its value is traditionally signaled by the worth of its constituent materials—gold, bronze, ivory, ebony, marble, in the most traditional forms. But what if value lies in an event, or in an intention, even if it is a failed intention? What if it lies in something that can be destroyed and easily can be remade—in fragility, in evanescence? The rice piles were like the leftovers of an event. The act was barely there—so slight that it was nearly invisible—but the process absurdly rigorous.

In the years that followed, I made sculptures out of everyday materials, trying to imbue value into ordinary objects: ladders, plants, lights, Q-tips, paper, cloth and flowers. I made them in non-traditional locations—outside the white boxes set up in galleries and museums, in places they would be discovered unexpectedly by the viewer, not presented to them. I buried pieces underground and hoisted others into trees. Some pieces, such as the one made in the studio of Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, are on the verge of destroying themselves. Others, such as the one in the atrium above the student center at Milton, is intended to climb and descend simultaneously, with two blue ladders spinning off in its wake.

I try to make all these sculptures to appear to still be in development, structurally fragile, so that it’s unclear whether they will grow or fall. I try to make sculptures that are somehow risking failure in their very existence.

Twenty years ago, almost to this very day, I sat where you are now sitting. At the time it did not cross my mind that I would be asked back in this capacity. I ask you to take a moment now, all of you, to imagine yourself invited back to speak. Apparently Milton has adopted a policy to invite back former graduates, so your chances are already not bad. And on top of that, you have just heard that it’s possible to become a graduation speaker by putting piles of rice on stairs. So imagine yourself standing up here in the year 2027, and I’d like to ask you to consider three questions:

What would you save if your room burned down?

What if the thing you had saved needed then to somehow be destroyed in order to be reinvented again?

And perhaps most importantly, with the first two questions in mind, what would you like to be honored for in twenty years time?

I’d like to end by leaving you with these questions and with thoughts expressed in a letter by the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham in a letter to Agnes De Mille. Graham wrote: “You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. It is not your business to determine how good your work is or how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. There is in you a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.”

Congratulations to you all, and thank you very much.

[Back to Graduation 2007]