With the help of friends from the Florentine Opera Company, MIAD professor James Barany takes a unique approach to the graduation speech.

• View the entire Commencement 2017 on YouTube

This is the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, but we call it MIAD.

This is what MIAD looks like inside. Neat it is not. There is dust. There is grit. Paint has been spilled. That’s because people are at work here. All the time. We create, tear down, start over, fail, succeed, fail again and finally get it right. Or at least right enough that something new comes next.

MIAD is a place to come where you’re so into something that you want to do it for keeps. Make a career of it. You know, get paid for doing what you’d probably be willing to do for free.

We work together at MIAD. Ideas get passed around which makes them stronger. Industrial Design works with Communication Design, and both work with Illustration and Fine Arts and Interior Architecture to solve huge problems with simple ideas, and simple problems with huge ideas. MIAD is a place where creativity always has a problem-solving purpose.

MIAD connects to the larger world, to the urban environment we’re a part of, and works with people beyond the walls of the school to make the city MIAD’s in a little bit better of a city to be in.

MIAD teachers teach, but more than that they present the opportunity to learn. That means experimenting and exploring and discovering. From day one “what you do” will always have a “why you do it” attached. If you bring your passion to MIAD, it will find purpose. And after four years, when the world explodes open, MIAD people are ready to take a place in the creative economy.

MIAD’s approach to art and design never gets boring. It’s an approach that gets you ready to do work that matters. It’s an approach that gives making meaning. It’s an approach only found at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.

But we call it MIAD.

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• Explore MIAD's Majors
  • Communication Design
  • Illustration
  • Industrial Design
  • Interior Architecture + Design
  • New Studio Pracice: Fine Art
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