“The Career Chose Us”: Yale Arts Leaders Honored

Last month, nine individuals from the fields of art, literature, and music were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Five of the inductees have strong ties to Yale University.

Composer Martin Boykan, writer and Yale University English Department lecturer Michael Cunningham, composer and Yale School of Music professor Aaron Jay Kernis, artist Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Yale School of Architecture dean and professor Robert Stern were recognized by American Academy of Arts and Letters president and Yale Review editor J.D. McClatchy, who also teaches in the university’s English Department. National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman, who earned his doctorate from the Yale School of Drama in 1976, delivered the Blashfield Foundation Address.

A transcript of Landesman’s address, titled ​“The Play’s the Thing,” reads, in part: “… I would conjecture that not one of us in this room has embarked on a career in the arts (or letters) because of data that shows that art in schools reduces truancy by 35 percent, or that art in a city jumpstarts economic development. Most of us who have made a career in the arts did so because at one point in our lives we had an experience with a work of art that was indelible. The career chose us. This was something we had to do.”

Also inducted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters last month were artists Malcolm Morley and James Turrell and writers Louis Begley and Rita Dove. An American Honorary membership was bestowed on choreographer Bill T. Jones and Foreign Honorary memberships were given to Canadian writer Anne Carson, Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, and South African artist William Kentridge.