Skidmore’s 98th Commencement set for May 16 at SPAC

A total of 642 members of the Class of 2009—Skidmore’s largest-ever class—will receive bachelor’s degrees at the college's 98th Commencement exercises on Saturday, May 16.  The ceremony, open to the public, will begin at 11 a.m. at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

Carter F. Bales

Thirty-seven students in Skidmore’s University Without Walls also will receive bachelor’s degrees, and 18 students will receive master’s degrees through the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program.

Skidmore will award honorary doctoral degrees to two distinguished guests: 

• Carter F. Bales, managing partner emeritus and co-founder, the Wicks Group of Companies, LLC, a private equity firm, and an environmental and conservation advocate.

• Fred Wilson, artist and Luce Distinguished Visiting Fellow for the Program in Object Exhibition and Knowledge at Skidmore’s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, serving from 2004 to 06 as a catalyst for faculty engagement with museums. 

	Fred Wilson

Each degree recipient will deliver brief remarks.

Following a Skidmore tradition, the keynote commencement address will be given by a faculty member — this year, Professor of Theater Gautam Dasgupta — chosen by the graduating class.  Skidmore President Philip A. Glotzbach will address the graduates and their guests, as will Raymond A. Sultan, president of the Class of 2009.

Background on the speakers:
Gautam Dasgupta, professor of theater, joined Skidmore’s faculty in 1990 and served as chair of the Department of Theater from 1998 to 2002.  Long interested in world theater and its cultural origins, Dasgupta in 1976 co-founded PAJ, a triannual journal of performance and literary arts, and its sister endeavor, PAJ Publications.  Both are based at Johns Hopkins University. As co-editor of PAJ Publications for a number of years, Dasgupta’s projects included many books, including the volume Conversations on Art and Performance (1999).  In 1998 Dasgupta was named to the inaugural class of Berlin Prize Fellows (with Arthur Miller, Ward Just, C.K. Williams, and Errol Morris) and spent a year at the American Academy in Berlin.

Dasgupta’s recent professional accomplishments include publishing an essay titled “Obama: Change We Can Believe In,” in the October 2008 issue of Ogonyok, a magazine published in Moscow; developing the text and narrating a performance of Oskar Schlemmer’s Das Triadische Ballett, performed last May at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York City during the Great Small Works Eighth International Toy Theater Festival; and serving as a guest panelist at discussions on theater and the arts held at conferences in London, Sardinia, Berlin, and Denmark.

He holds degrees from Jadavpur University, Calcutta; the University of Connecticut; and City University of New York.

Carter F. Bales co-founded the Wicks Group of companies in 1989 and was managing partner until assuming the emeritus title in 2006.  From 1978 to 1998 Bales was a director of McKinsey & Co., the international consulting firm, holding senior leadership positions and founding the firm’s practices in information and media, state and local government, and environmental management.  He is now an emeritus director of McKinsey & Co.

Committed to protecting the natural world, Bales has focused on the issue of climate change and cost-effective reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.  In 2007 he worked with McKinsey to prepare the report Reducing U.S. Greehous Gas Emissions: How Much at What Cost? Last year he co-wrote (with Richard Duke) an article titled “Containing Climate Change,” published in the September-October 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Bales is past vice chairman and currently governor emeritus and a trustee of the Nature Conservancy; he also is a trustee of the Climate and Grand Canyon trusts, as well as the Echoing Green Foundation.  He is a director of the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology, and Innovation.

Artist Fred Wilson is widely recognized for the site-specific installations he has created to explore issues of racial bias, gender, class, politics and aesthetics. Starting with his first solo exhibition in 1988, the New York City-based artist adopted the museum itself as his medium and muse, creating faux museum installations and finely wrought mock art to reflect on difficult or upsetting themes.

His work has been featured in more than 100 group exhibitions, including the 1993 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial Exhibition, the 1992 International Cairo Biennale, and the 2003 Venice Biennale (where he represented the U.S.), and in individual shows and retrospectives including Fred Wilson, Objects and Installations 1979–2000, which appeared at Skidmore’s Tang Museum in 2002. 

From 2003 to 2006, with support from a Henry Luce Foundation grant, Wilson worked with Skidmore faculty and Tang Museum staff to develop new avenues of museum-based teaching. Named in 2008 to the Whitney Museum board of trustees, he is the recipient of numerous honors including a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and awards from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Major collections holding his work include the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Seattle Art Museum.

Posted On: 5/7/2009

Tags: commencement 2009, carter bales, gautam dasgupta, philip glotzbach, raymond sultan, fred wilson