Acclaimed Visual Artist Julie Mehretu to Deliver Keynote Address at Rhode Island School of Design 2026 Commencement

Alum Mehretu will accept an honorary degree along with cartoonist Roz Chast, arts advocate Stephen Metcalf, and designer David Wiseman

PROVIDENCE, RI – April 7, 2026 – On Saturday, May 30, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) will award degrees to 485 undergraduate and 230 graduate students at its 143rd Commencement ceremony. Commencement 2026 will take place at 9 am ET at the Rhode Island Convention Center in downtown Providence followed by a community reception in Market Square to toast the Class of 2026. For more information about RISD’s 2026 Commencement and to view the ceremony streaming live on May 30, visit risd.edu/commencement.  

Julie Mehretu MFA 97 PR/PT, whose work articulates the contemporary social experience and explores palimpsests of history, will deliver the keynote address and accept an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree. Cartoonist Roz Chast 77 PT, arts advocate Stephen Metcalf, and designer David Wiseman 03 FD will also receive honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees. 

Reunion Weekend will be held May 28–31 in conjunction with Commencement Weekend. Reunion activities celebrate all things RISD while bringing the alumni community together and welcoming its newest members, the Class of 2026. This year’s events include RISD’s inaugural Asian Alumni Reunion. Public events include the RISD Craft art sale and WaterFire lighting on May 31. Details are available at alumni.risd.edu/reunions. 

Julie Mehretu | keynote speaker and honorary degree recipient
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970, Julie Mehretu MFA 97 PR/PT creates paintings, drawings, and prints that articulate the contemporary social experience and explore palimpsests of history, from geological time to modern-day phenomenology. After earning her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from RISD, she moved to New York City, where she continues to live and work.

Mehretu has received many prestigious awards, including the MacArthur Award (2005) and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture (2025). Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in 2020, and she recently created Uprising of the Sun, an 85x25’ glass mural for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, IL.

Her work has been exhibited extensively in museums and biennials, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2019); the High Museum, Atlanta (2020); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2021); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2021); the Palazzo Grassi Pinault Collection, Venice (2024); the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2024); K21 in Dusseldorf, Germany (2025); and MSN Warsaw (2026).

Roz Chast | honorary degree recipient
Roz Chast 77 PT is known for turning everyday anxieties into sharply funny, unmistakably personal cartoons. She has earned many honors, including the Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society in 2015 and a National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2024.

Born in Brooklyn, the only child of public school teachers, Chast discovered Charles Addams’ work at the age of nine, sparking a fascination with cartooning that never left her. After earning a BFA in Painting from RISD in 1977, Chast returned to New York and to her initial love of cartooning. Her work began appearing in The Village Voice and National Lampoon, and in 1978 she sold her first cartoon to The New Yorker, where her work has been featured ever since.

Her 2014 memoir about caring for her aging parents, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, became a critical and commercial success, winning multiple awards, including the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Her latest book is The Two Saddest Kitchens, which will be published by Bloomsbury later this year.

Stephen Metcalf | honorary degree recipient
Stephen A. Metcalf, long-serving RISD board member and descendant of RISD’s founding family, was named chair of the Emeriti Trustees in 2018. After graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute, from which he received his BFA in 1972, Metcalf sailed a schooner around southeast Asia before returning to the US. He has explored the concept of “tensegrity” in his kinetic sculptures, which adorn the fields around his farm in Exeter, RI. Over the years, Metcalf has worked in management for both television and marine construction but currently spends his time investigating the connections between the physical world and his geometrical forms. Metcalf is active in the Attleboro Arts Museum, the Newport Art Museum, and Art League of Rhode Island, and earned the RISD President’s Medal of Honor in 2021. He is currently on the RISD Museum’s Board of Governors and the Fine Arts Committee, and he and his wife A. Ewa Metcalf established the Frank Robinson Curatorship of Painting and Sculpture at the RISD Museum in 2025, an endowed position that ensures permanent support for the curatorial leadership of one of the museum’s most significant collections.

David Wiseman | honorary degree recipient
David Wiseman 03 FD produces sculpture, furniture, lighting, and site-specific installations that bring his awe of nature to the built environment. He also draws inspiration from global decorative arts traditions and timeless craft techniques, while maintaining a distinctly contemporary sensibility for pattern and form. The result is delightful, handcrafted interventions: from porcelain cherry blossom ceilings to terrazzo-inlaid furniture and illuminated branch and bud chandeliers.

With his brother, Ari, he has built a unique studio environment in Los Angeles that includes viewing rooms, gardens, and extensive purpose-built production spaces. Wiseman has also created site-specific installations for public institutions, international brands, and private collections, including RISD’s President’s House.

A 2003 graduate of RISD’s Furniture Design department, Wiseman has made work included in the permanent collections of the Corning Museum of Glass, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Barack Obama Presidential Center, and the RISD Museum and has been featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The World of Interiors, and Architectural Digest. His recent monograph, The Four Seasons of Flower Fruit Mountain, was published by August Editions in 2024.

A series of exhibitions leading up to Commencement will highlight new work produced by graduating students. Showcasing the work of grad students across 19 disciplines, Grad Show 2026 will be on view at the Rhode Island Convention Center from May 21–30. 

The work of seniors receiving undergraduate degrees will be featured by department throughout the spring semester in weekly shows at Woods-Gerry Gallery. Installation and work images are viewable online. 

About Rhode Island School of Design
RISD (pronounced “RIZ-dee”) is a creative community founded in 1877 in Providence, Rhode Island. Today, we enroll 2,577 students hailing from 60 countries. Led by a committed faculty, they are engaged in more than 40 full-time bachelor’s and master’s degree programs and supported by a worldwide network of over 33,000 alumni who demonstrate the vital role artists and designers play in today’s society.

Beyond facts and figures, what is the spirit of this community? Through a cross-disciplinary curriculum of studio-based learning and rigorous study in the liberal arts, RISD students are encouraged to develop their own personal creative processes, but they are united by one guiding principle: in order to create, one must question. In cultivating expansive and elastic thinking, RISD seeks to activate a critical exchange that empowers artists, designers and scholars to generate and challenge the ideas that shape our world. RISD’s mission, at both the college and museum, is not only to educate students and the public in the creation and appreciation of works of art and design, but to transmit that knowledge and make global contributions. Visit risd.edu to learn more.

RISD contact:
Jaime Marland
Senior Director, Public Relations / RISD
jmarland@risd.edu
401 427-6954