Alexander Falck Class of 1899 Professor of Art, Emeritus
1988–2024
Your students are grateful not just that you taught them to draw, paint or appreciate art, but even more that you taught them to see.
To look closely. Pay attention to detail. Understand space, scale and perspective. And to communicate it all with feeling.
When creating your own acclaimed oeuvre, you see light in the equatorial forest, hear birdsong in the Public Garden, feel breezes out of Antarctica and smell daffodils in spring. Your worksites range from Baffin Island to the heart of New York City, and from Ecuador to New Zealand to Botswana.
Your work in these diverse settings reflects a belief that to make art is “to be alive to what is around you.” Elsewhere you have described “a desire to help make the changes in philosophy that are required if humanity is to create a sustainable future.”
Your desire to effect that “change in philosophy” is at the core of your teaching, as well. You know where each student is, what each needs and how each can fail in order to learn to succeed. Alumni remember you as gentle yet demanding, as nurturing and challenging, as empathetic and inspiring. Through your teaching and your art you have made them, and us, more alive to the world.
I hereby declare you the Alexander Falck Class of 1899 Professor of Art, Emeritus, entitled to all the rights, honors and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 2, 2024