Julie Mehretu Urges RISD’s Class of 2026 to Remake the World They Have Inherited

The RISD community and out-of-town guests awoke on Commencement morning to heavy rain, cool temperatures, and a weather advisory predicting 50-mph winds, but the spirits of the Class of 2026 remained intact. Inside the Rhode Island Convention Center, 485 undergraduate and 230 graduate students prepared to receive their degrees at RISD’s 143rd Commencement ceremony.

President Crystal Williams welcomed the exuberant crowd, encouraging graduating students to select the road less traveled in life. “The path leading to the future often begins with uncertainty,” she noted, “but ambiguity can be a gift, a blank canvas.”

Graduate student speaker Shrishti Chatterjee MFA 26 GD, a multidisciplinary designer from India, followed Williams with a speech referencing her love of nature and describing the Providence River that bisects campus as the heart of RISD. “I have seen you challenge the boundaries of your disciplines,” she went on to tell her classmates. “I have learned to look again at things that at first appeared ordinary and to value the collective. I leave here utterly transformed by the thoughts and ideas of my peers.”

Undergraduate student speaker Alayka Seputra 26 ID, another member of RISD’s talented and sizable international community, recalled the 22-hour flight that brought her to RISD from Indonesia before expounding on the idea (inspired by the viral Commencement address John Waters HD 15 delivered in 2015) of the artist/designer as outsider. “But by unapologetically bringing his outsider values into the mainstream, he blurred the line and redefined who or what an outsider or insider can be,” she said. “We are the creators of everything around us, from the fork in your hand to the architecture that forms the backbone of the built world. It’s time to show the insiders what’s up.”

Seputra’s talk led to the awarding of Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees to three returning alums—cartoonist Roz Chast 77 PT, designer David Wiseman 03 FD, and artist Julie Mehretu MFA 97 PR/PT—as well as arts advocate Stephen A. Metcalf, a longtime fixture of the RISD community. Chast is best known for her brilliant New Yorker cartoons reflecting on the human condition and Wiseman for his lighting, furniture, and site-specific installations bringing his awe of nature to the built environment. Metcalf, a long-serving RISD board member and descendant of RISD’s founding family, was recognized for his philanthropy and dedication to the institution.

Mehretu, a MacArthur Award winner originally from Ethiopia, was recently commissioned to create a huge glass mural, Uprising of the Sun, for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. After ducking her head to be hooded by Board of Trustees Co-Chair Hillary Blumberg 92 FAV, she stepped up to the podium to deliver this year’s keynote address. 

Mehretu discussed the unparalleled ability of artists and designers to challenge assumptions, use their vision, and “reach into the radical imaginary to conjure something into existence that wasn’t there before. The world we’re handing you feels broken,” she said, “and the promises of the 20th century have not been delivered.” But the visionary artist has faith in this new generation to reimagine what has nearly been destroyed. 

She referenced anthropologist Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, a book that uses the matsutake mushroom’s incredible ability to thrive in forests damaged by humans as a metaphor for our own socioenvironmental predicament. “It is a story about collaborative survival, about making the forest anew,” Mehretu said, “not through restoration but through radical reimagination. Stay in the discomfort of the open question, lean on each other, work collectively, and interrogate your assumptions. Bring your fury and your tenderness into the work, and own every choice you make.”

After the bachelor’s and master’s degrees were conferred, while grads and their guests were still enjoying post-ceremony refreshments outside Market House, the ground shook as a meteorite broke through the atmosphere above Boston, some 50 miles away. But the Class of 2026—RISD’s first post-COVID cohort—is used to natural disasters, having weathered a record-breaking blizzard that shut the city down for an entire week back in February, and took the atmospheric anomaly in stride. After all, as President Williams noted in her welcome, problem solving, flexibility, and a growth mindset are the tenets of a RISD education.

Watch the Commencement ceremony on RISD’s YouTube channel. 

Simone Solondz / photos by Jo Sittenfeld MFA 08 PH
June 4, 2026