2025 Commencement Address by Eva Hayward

The Yale School of Art is pleased to announce that the full text of this year’s commencement address is available to read online, below.

This address was delivered by theorist and artist Eva Hayward on Monday, May 19, 2025 at the Yale School of Art’s 2025 commencement exercises in the Yale University Art Gallery’s Sculpture Garden.

Thank you for inviting me to celebrate with you today. It is an incredible honor.

When I last was asked to give a commencement speech, it was for a Pride graduation at the University of Arizona. More performance than speech, really. I played Miss Piggy. Yes, the Muppet. As that gorgeous grunter, I invited graduating students into their want, to want their want, and without conclusion. It was and probably still is a pig-ish ask. After all, a student is supposed to have sated such wanting, with the finality of their degree.

But Ms. Piggy insisted on more, as I do again today. What do I mean by wanting want, you wanting your want, or better, and maybe without the debased tones of capitalism, desiring your desire? I mean, our capacity to want not just the objects of our want, a job, a future, or that next art show, but the very drive of want.

Why should this matter to you graduating MFA students, beloved and dear, as are all my MFA students in New Mexico. I love them, and by way you, for how you teach me about process. Conjugating questions through materials, folded slabs of refusal, dazzled horizontals of conflict. This is what you students re-teach me each year.

But why does want matter in this moment, both the momentousness of our celebration of your achievements, and in this political moment? Funding for arts education seized, diversity and inclusion programs dismantled. A student’s right to protest against war, against genocide, eliminated. International artists, especially from the global south, deported. Trans and queer artists, confronted with not being.

The history and struggle of Black and Indigenous artists, erased and banned. And a working poor artist, who will not find themselves here today. Our political moment does not surprise any of us. It is as it was intended. You hear in my sentences, dismantled, eliminated, erased. The question of desire matters to us today, because we all find ourselves, however differently, enforced by no, by not, by a refusal.

As in, want not to want. Want not to want. The psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati describes this, our moment, as the temptation of walls. To erect borders, fortresses and strongholds, pathologically hardened against any difference, making the unfamiliar dangerous, even threatening.

But Recalcati reminds us, as Sigmund Freud first taught us over a hundred years ago, that the stranger does not come from without. The fear and hatred we make of difference, is the ever disturbing presence of a difference within. It is the irrepressible vitality of our bodily drives, of unconsciousness made present through our wishes, our wants.

For art, for artists, for art students, the hatred of desire is especially fraught. After all, there is something artful about desire. The inventiveness of our dreams. The realism of our lust. Not unlike the greasy storms of Jenny Saville’s paintings, or the blooming bone worms of Ellen Gallagher’s Osedax, memory as black light radiating from within.

For this reason, and unjustly, the artist, like the student, is supposed to know something about a desirable life, a life most alive with desire. It sounds adoring, the talent of the artist, the miracle of a painting, the genius of architecture. How the sun’s blister fades through Zaha Hadid’s design into the reprieve of curved shadow.

But within this, within the praise and adulation, you artists, you students receive, a contradiction is often at work. What if the artist is more alive with life than me? Is the life of an artist more experimental, more imaginative, more open to pleasure than mine? You see what I mean? Envy. The envy you may have witnessed in your teachers. The envy you might find in your families. Envy of life. Envy as hatred of desire, of wanting want.

But the problem is, there is nothing intrinsic about desire and art. Intrinsically, an artist no more knows their want than the gardeners who keep this place we are in so verdant, so viridescent. But the artist is supposed to know desire. It is this supposed to that we want to question continually.

Within the supposed to of artists, of graduating students, is always the temptation of arrestment. To achieve a goal, to fulfill a desire, to have satisfied desire itself, to be done. Our social world will tempt you into a demonstration of what you are supposed to do, which is to forfeit your desire, to allow capitalism, enforced by racism and sexism, to provide a marketable, albeit false, alternative to the enigma of your want. All of us are vulnerable to such temptation.

So, I again say hoggishly, stay with the proposal of your desire. Not as something that you will simply achieve, like graduating today. But it’s sumptuous trouble. It is not that doing so is easy. Wanting want offers no certainty. It may not look like a professorship at Yale. It may be difficult to translate into a successful CV, into renown, into privilege and authority.

But it is precisely this illegibility, this alterity, that will lend yourself to desire, to its audacity. It may sound solipsistic, my want, my desire, but it is the staying with desire that leads us toward the difference within, toward the unknowable poetry of our lives. Making our own investments in walls into more porous structures of self, and social life.

It might sound paradoxical, wanting our want leads us out of the paranoid fortresses we make of our lives. But even the singular feel of our want always appears as part of a social world. Our lives are, from the beginning, never without one another. Indeed, our desire is the mysterious messaging of others.

So, wanting our want is another way of being with one another, full of ambiguity, uncertainty, and possibility. However much we might be lured by barriers, by boundaries, there is no escape from desire. However much this frightens us, it is what will lead us to an expanding radius of involvement to one another, to interdependence, and community. And if we are very lucky, love. Thank you.