From PITA to ACA to ACAD to AUArts, our university has been a home for creative thinkers, makers and changemakers for nearly a century. In that time, more than 5,000 graduates have walked across the stage — and countless more before autonomy from SAIT in 1985 — all adding their voices to a legacy of community through creativity.
This year, 199 new graduates joined that legacy. Family, friends, faculty and staff gathered to celebrate the Class of 2025 during Convocation and the opening of this year’s Grad Show.
We were thrilled to welcome back internationally renowned illustrator and author Jillian Tamaki (BDes ’03), who received AUArts’ Honorary MFA degree. In her convocation address, Tamaki spoke about the joy and power of making art — and the importance of protecting the spirit of creativity in a commercial world:
“Before criticism and money and relevance and all the other complicating factors entered our psyches, we made things because the act of doing so felt good. It brought pleasure. We liked to see what other people made too, sometimes it felt like a portal of understanding opened up between their brain and ours. Our humanity was affirmed. That’s the core of artmaking … It’s worth trying to guard that simple, sweet little flame somewhere inside of us, especially in a world that insists on reducing art to a commodity. The final product is not always the point of artmaking.”
Grad speakers AJ LaRiviere and Daniela Szeoke echoed those sentiments, reflecting on the community they built and the role art now plays in their lives:
“No one here got through this degree alone. Think about the classmates who reminded you about a deadline, the instructors who introduced a new technique that changed the direction of your practice, the friends who gently roasted you during critique, and somehow made your work better.
We echoed each other’s strengths, obsessions and weirdness until our creative voices came into focus. And when we finally did start to hear that voice — it wasn’t just about finding a style or building a portfolio. It became something bigger. Art became the way we made sense of things — how we understood the world, how we processed grief, how we healed, how we celebrated joy, how we dreamed.”
Congratulations, Class of 2025 — we’re proud of you, and we’re cheering you on.
