WATCH THE LIVE STREAM HERE: sva.edu/commencement or facebook.com/SchoolOfVisualArts.

Award-winning writer, director, artist and cult icon John Waters will give the keynote speech at the School of Visual Arts’ 45th annual commencement exercises, scheduled to air online tomorrow, May 27. The ceremony will be streamed starting at 1:00pm EST on sva.edu/commencement and on Facebook Live via the College's page, facebook.com/SchoolOfVisualArts. During the exercises, SVA President David Rhodes will recognize some 1,280 degree candidates from the College’s 31 undergraduate and graduate programs.

John Waters has been a singular voice, tastemaker and boundary-pusher in pop culture since the 1970s. A prolific filmmaker, writer, photographer and actor, he has written and directed 16 feature-length films, authored nine books and exhibited his work in galleries all over the world. Waters has become synonymous with his hometown of Baltimore, hailing it as the “hairdo capital of the world.” He has paid tribute to this characterization with films like Cry-Baby, Hairspray, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Polyester, and with his tight-knit community of local performers, including Divine and Mink Stole. Waters has won honors from Provincetown International Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center, the British Film Institute and the Writers Guild of America. On top of appearing in countless television shows and movies, including Ryan Murphy’s Feud and Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, his one-man shows have played to crowds at Bonnaroo, Coachella and the Sydney Opera House.

As a writer, Waters has earned spots on the best-seller lists in the The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle for his 2010 book Role Models and his 2014 book Carsick, which, along with his 2019 best-selling book Mr. Know-It-All, The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, earned a Grammy nomination for its audio-book recording. His 2017 book Make Trouble was also released as an audio album by Jack White’s Third Man Records.

Waters’ photography has been shown in galleries and institutions all over the world for nearly 30 years, including at The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, Fotomuseum Winterthur and de Pury & Luxembourg Gallery in Switzerland, Sprueth Magers Gallery in London and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Multiple catalogues of his work have been published, and most recently he exhibited a traveling retrospective show, “Indecent Exposure,” in 2018 and 2019.

As the keynote speaker for SVA’s commencement exercises, Waters joins a distinguished group of leaders in the arts, humanities and public service, including musician and poet Patti Smith, activist and author Gloria Steinem, U.S. Congressman and civil-rights hero John Lewis, cultural critic Greil Marcus, artists Laurie Anderson and Carrie Mae Weems, playwrights Edward Albee and Tony Kushner, and historian Robert A. Caro. Read on for selected quotes from SVA commencement exercises of years past, and join the College tomorrow at 1:00pm EST to hear from Mr. Waters and celebrate the SVA class of 2020!

"Art can be a reflection of our time, or it can pose a new way of looking at our world."

—Artist, designer and environmentalist Maya Lin, SVA 2018 Commencement

"We are woke! There’s so much to be learned if you go beyond your boundaries and now is the time we need to blast those boundaries.”

—Writer, activist and feminist icon Gloria Steinem, SVA 2017 Commencement

“Let it be said that when you look back over the course of your measured life, you had absolutely no regrets.”

—Artist, MacArthur Fellow and SVA faculty member Carrie Mae Weems, SVA 2016 Commencement

“What is required [now] are serious portraitists—people who know how to look into someone’s eyes and see a life. Not only see a person’s past but see their future. In a time of massive dehumanization of nine tenths of the planet, this is a time for humanities to step forward.”

—Opera and stage director Peter Sellars, SVA 2015 Commencement

“Use the pen, use the pencil, use the camera, use your learning to go out and find a way to get in good trouble, necessary trouble, to make our world a better world. . . . You have a moral obligation, you have a mission, you have a mandate to get out and disturb the order of things.”

—Civil-rights legend, National Book Award-winning author and U.S. Congressman John Lewis, SVA 2014 Commencement

“What art does—maybe what it does most completely—is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.”

—Journalist and cultural critic Greil Marcus, SVA 2013 Commencement

"The reason I'm an artist is that it's one of the few things that you can do in this world in which you are totally free ... absolutely no one tells you what you can do and what you can't do."

—Multimedia artist Laurie Anderson, SVA 2012 Commencement

Congratulations to the class of 2020!

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