Devotion to excellence in teaching is a way of life at RISD. I know perhaps the greatest joy as a teacher is when you experience your students grow to surpass your own capabilities. It’s a humbling experience when it happens and puts your entire creative life into perspective.

When my former student Peter Cho sent me an update on his recent piece it made me smile in that way you feel when you’ve been bested by your child in a running race, and at the same time being proud that they have won the race on completely fair terms.

The joy of life is the opportunity to learn. If not from your students, from the people around you, and also the people that came before you. Books. Lifelong university printed on pulp and available in large quantities everywhere. Everything is connected. Peter’s work reminded me of one of my “professors on the bookshelf” — Calvino.

Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium changed my life. I know for many students at RISD, if it is not Calvino it is some other book they have read … that shapes how they see, touch, smell, taste, and consummate the creative acts in which they engage. Literature has the quality of making that which is abstract stay abstract and thus open for more interpretation than most.

I wonder if Peter had read Calvino and if it influenced the way he thinks. I read Calvino, and touched Peter’s mind when he was younger and perhaps Calvino went in that way. Forever I could imagine what Calvino thought, but could not see it as reality and am so glad that Peter was able to take a step in that direction. He made it real. For it is the artist and designer that can take raw imagination and make it into something real to admire, or criticize, or simply ignore. I thank them for their courage.