“Art and design and the institutions that surround them have to take a stand, share responsibility and continue to propose alternative visions and bold imaginations, question what is proposed to us, step outside frameworks and keep pushing the future forward.”

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- Jan Boelen, Ils Huygens, Heini Lehtinen, Studio Time: Future Thinking in Art and Design

As you navigate this dynamic virtual space of Moore College of Art & Design’s Class of 2020, you will witness a bounty of creative, conceptual, intellectual, and affective evidence of a Moore education. Whether undergraduate or graduate—artist, designer, curator, or educator—Moore graduates are required to do a final body of work; a thesis process that begins with speculative research that is given form and velocity through what is created and released. The process actively is dialectical, balancing deep concentration with a wild expansiveness that emanates new insights and bold possibilities.

In other times and circumstances, many of us would have gathered, with boisterous humanity, in The Galleries at Moore to witness the culminating work of graduating students. Yet in this defining year, the annual exhibition vibrantly and virtually exists in a new dynamic time and space.  Yet, like all thesis exhibitions—now and then, here and there—this moment for our students is both a conclusion (yet never conclusive) and a beginning (not yet known.) These inherent spatial and temporal paradoxes are nutrients of creative lives and minds.

At this time of epochal uncertainty and joyous celebration of their achievements, I commend and congratulate Moore’s graduating students for putting their work boldly, bravely, generously, lovingly, passionately—and perhaps precariously—in the world. As you complete your degrees and engage a world in radical transition, we need your passionate and persistent creativity now more than ever.

As you prepare to leave Moore, what are questions you will continue to ask through your work?