I.B.9 –THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY CENTER - HONORARY DEGREES TO BE AWARDED AT THE SCHOOL’S ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT CEREMONY ON MAY 24, 2012

RESOLVED, that the Graduate School and University Center award and Philip Levine the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, at the School’s Commencement Ceremony on May 24, 2012.

EXPLANATION: Marian Goodman founded the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City in 1977 and a exhibition space in 1995. As a gallerist, she has informed, educated, and delighted art audiences internationally; she is regarded as one of the hundred most influential figures in the contemporary art world. In the past, she has represented such noted figures as American pop artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Today, she represents artists from all over the world who work in a variety of media. Some of the artists she exhibits are William Kentridge, a South African multimedia artist; English visual artist Tactia Dean; and Canadian photographer Jeff Wall. Through her vision, Ms. Goodman has contributed immensely to the tremendous vitality of the current art scene, both in New York City and around the world.

Philip Levine is currently the Poet Laureate of the United States and is both a writer and an educator. He is the author of 20 collections of poems, including the collection titled The Simple Truth, for which he won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Levine has twice won the National Book Award, in 1980 and 1991, for his collections Ashes: Poems New and Old and What Work Is, respectively. He has received two fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and three from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has shared his expertise with students as a faculty member at such prestigious institutions as the University of California at Berkeley, Vassar College, Vanderbilt University, and Princeton University.

Marian Goodman

Marian Goodman is regarded as one of the 100 most influential figures in the contemporary art world. She founded the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City in 1977 and opened her Paris exhibition space in 1995.

Among those whose works she has presented to the art public are leading foreign artists, including the painter Gerhard Richter, the photographer Thomas Struth , the sculptor Thomas Schutte, and the mixed-media documenter Lothar Baumgarten, of Germany; the sculptors Tony Craig and Richard Deacon and the video artists Steve McQueen and Tacita Dean, of England; the installation-makers Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager, the filmmaker Chantal Ackerman, the site-specific painter Niele Toroni, and the digital animator Pierre Huyghe, of ; the Mexican aesthetic gamesman ; the sculptor ; the Canadian creator of staged light-box photographs Jeff Wall; the Irish maker of gnomic slide shows James Coleman; the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra; and the South African film animator and puppeteer William Kentridge. Goodman represents Americans, too, including the sculptor and the conceptualists Lawrence Weiner and John Baldessari, the master of photographic montage. Others whose works Goodman has presented include Richard Artschwager, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, and Andy Warhol.

In 2004, art critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in an article in The New Yorker that “Goodman may be the most respected contemporary dealer in New York, for her taste, standards, and loyalty to her artists.” Former Dia Art Foundation director, Michael Govan, considers Goodman as one of the most powerful and influential dealers of the 20th century. Marian Goodman was ranked 27th in the November 2011 ArtReview’s Power 100, a guide to the hundred most powerful figures in contemporary art.

We wish to honor Ms. Goodman for her capacity for nurturing artists and educating audiences. Her contributions add to the vitality of the contemporary art scene in New York and globally. Through her lifetime commitment to the arts, she used her role as a gallerist to inform, educate and delight.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, is a writer and educator. The author of some twenty collections of poems and a Pulitzer Prize winner, he is also the recipient of two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships.

Levine’s skill and scholarship have been recognized with the awarding of other prizes, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Frank O’Hara Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Poetry Prize, and the National Book Award (Ashes: Poems New and Old, 1980 and What Work Is, 1991), among others. From 1984-85, he chaired the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Levine published his debut collection of poems, On the Edge (The Stone Wall Press), in 1963, followed by Not This Pig (Wesleyan University Press) in 1968.

Since then, Levine has published numerous books of poetry, most recently News of the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Breath (2004); The Mercy (1999); The Simple Truth (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize; New Selected Poems (1991); 7 Years From Somewhere (1979), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Names of the Lost (1975), which won the 1977 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and They Feed They Lion (1973).

Levine has also published nonfiction essays and interviews, collected in The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (University of Michigan Press, 1994); Don't Ask (1981); and So Ask: Essays, Conversations, and Interviews (2002).

As editor, Levine published The Essential Keats (Ecco Press, 1987). He has also co-edited and translated two books: Off the Map: Selected Poems of Gloria Fuertes (with Ada Long, Wesleyan University Press, 1984) and Tarumba: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines (with Ernesto Trejo, Sarabande Books, 2007).

After receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Levine taught technical writing in Iowa City. He subsequently taught literature and creative writing at California State University, Fresno from 1958 to 1992. In 1970, Levine was chosen Outstanding Professor at the University, and the following year he was chosen Outstanding Professor for the California State University System. He has also taught or served as a writer-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley; Vassar College; Vanderbilt University; Princeton University; Tufts University; Columbia University; the University of Houston; New York University; and elsewhere.

Philip Levine was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000.

We wish to honor Mr. Levine for his lifetime accomplishments and distinguished career in literature and education which reflect the goals and aspirations of the students at The Graduate Center.