Grammy winner esperanza spalding receives honorary doctorate at PSU College of the Arts commencement

esperanza spalding at College of the Arts Commencement 2024. Photo by Chad Lanning.

Portland State University's College of the Arts recognized jazz artist, community builder and alumna esperanza spalding with an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters at its 2024 commencement ceremony Friday, June 14, in acknowledgment of her contributions to the arts.

In her address to the graduates, spalding began with a song, calling upon students to embrace the agency that each person has in shaping their own life and the future of their environment and community. She reminded the graduates of their place in the flow of history, calling to mind the ancestors who came before, who lived here and created the social and physical structures that make up our cities and institutions.

"You see, everything we are living inside of, locally, globally, relationally, is the great downstream of one-hundred-year-old actions," she said.

"I think about water a lot," she said. "About streams, I think about rivers, I think about the interconnectedness of all rivers, all water cycles connected to each other throughout the entire globe. We know that our bodies are made up of and connected to all these waters. Global waters. Was the water in me once flowing in the Willamette? In the blood of a child in Gaza? A teenager in a Congolese mine?"

"I think about how all of us living beings, second to second, are moving through time like that water through our lives."

Although the courses of rivers may seem permanent and inevitable, she said, "the systems the water circulates through are being constantly changed, eroded, accumulated, pressurized, redirected, deepened, expanded, hollowed, flooded."

"But while the water in a river is beholden to the course of that river, each of us . . . have agency minute by minute, day by day, decade by decade over our movement, our course. And these courses of movement change the course of all waters and the environment around us."

Spalding closed with a gift to the graduates: a tool to help them clarify their intentions and connect with the people who will follow them in the centuries to come.

"Remembering that in one hundred years, we'll be the ancestors our graduating great-great-grandchildren will remember . . . we're going to sing now, to prepare the world for your most beautiful intentions. So I ask you . . . How do you want your great-great-grandchildren to feel when they think about you? Let's sing that now, into the next hundred years."

The graduates and their families responded with a musical roar, filled with emotion, before giving her a standing ovation.

In her work, the five-time Grammy winner interweaves instrumental music, improvisation, singing, composition, poetry, dance, therapeutic research, storytelling, teaching, regenerative agriculture, urban land and artist-sanctuary custodianship in her hometown community of Portland. She co-founded and serves as lead curator for Prismid Inc., a non-profit that creates and stewards artist residency, performance, and workshop space in Portland, Oregon.

A former PSU student, spalding attended classes at Portland State starting at age 16, studying with renowned jazz musician and professor Darrell Grant.

"I have marveled at the way that, from the beginning, esperanza embraced the power of her artistic platform to eloquently elevate issues of importance, and continue to lean into the task of singing, playing and speaking truth in the face of injustice, conflict and oppression with clarity, fierceness and compassion," Grant said.

In addition to the honorary degree she received from PSU, spalding has previously earned an honorary doctorate from her alma mater Berklee College of Music and another from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).