Commencement Address

Each year to celebrate the graduation of our MFA and Certificate Students, The New York Studio School invites distinguished professionals to deliver the address at our Commencement to honor the accomplishments of each graduate.

2012 Commencement will take place on Wednesday May 16 at 1pm at the New York Studio School.

This year's speaker is: Jed Perl. Mr. Perl is the art critic for The New Republic. Among his many books are Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World, Eyewitness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis, and New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century, which was a 2005 New York Times Notable Book and a 2005 Atlantic Monthly Best Book of the Year. A new essay collection, Magicians and Charlatans, will appear in Fall 2012. Mr. Perl is currently working on the first full-length biography of Alexander Calder, to be published by Knopf.

Mr. Perl is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Rome, the Leon Levy Biography Center at the City University of New York, and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation. He has been a Contributing Editor at Vogue, and has written for The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Criterion, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, and many other publications. He has appeared on Charlie Rose, the McNeil Lehrer News Hour, CNN, as well as National Public Radio; and has been a Slade Lecturer at Oxford University, and spoken at the Phillips Collection, National Gallery of Art, Kennedy School at Harvard University, Kansas City Art Institute, Stanford University, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Kimbell Art Museum, and many other places. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Liberal Studies at The New School in New York.

Past speakers as follows:

Selected PDF's of past addresses:

To download a PDF of Carter Ratcliff's 2010 Commencement Address click here.