California College of the Arts will confer honorary doctorate degrees on artists Julia Florence Parker and Richard Tuttle at the 99th Commencement Exercises May 13 at 2 p.m. at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco.
   Tuttle will deliver the commencement address. In addition to attending the commencement ceremonies, Parker and Tuttle will be honored at a reception at the Oliver Art Center on the Oakland campus the night before and will participate in the post-commencement reception at the San Francisco campus.    
    Julia Florence Parker is one of the country’s preeminent Native American basket makers, a prolific artist, a teacher and a storyteller. Throughout more than 40 years of study, she has emerged as an expert in California Native basketry, including the traditions of her own Coast Miwok and Kashaya Pomo people and her husband’s people, the Sierra Miwok and Mono Lake Paiute.
    Parker is known for her “intertribal” style of weaving in which she synthesizes design elements and techniques of diverse groups in original and complex structures. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Yosemite Museum, the Norwegian Ski Association headquarters in Oslo, Norway, the private collection of Queen Elizabeth II of England and numerous other private collections.
    In 2004 Parker’s work was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition, “The Past in Present Tense: Four Decades of Julia Parker Baskets,” at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek. Parker has worked as an Indian cultural specialist at the Yosemite Museum since 1960, demonstrating basketry, telling Native stories and acting as a cultural interpreter. She also travels nationally, consulting, teaching and lecturing.    One of the foremost artists of the time, Richard Tuttle is often described as a maverick. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Tuttle’s work formed an essential part of the groundbreaking developments that reconceived Minimalism. Purposefully blurring the boundaries among painting, sculpture and drawing, he creates small, eccentrically playful objects out of materials such as paper, string, cloth, wire, twigs, cardboard, bubble wrap, nails, Styrofoam and plywood. Although most of Tuttle’s prolific artistic output has taken the form of three-dimensional objects, he commonly refers to his work as drawing rather than sculpture, emphasizing the small scale and idea-based nature of his practice.
    A major retrospective of his work, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was on view there in 2005 and is currently on a national tour. Tuttle’s works are in renowned private collections and museums, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture.
    Founded in 1907, California College of the Arts (CCA) is the largest regionally accredited, independent school of art and design in the western U.S. Noted for the interdisciplinary nature and breadth of its programs, CCA offers studies in 19 undergraduate and 6 graduate majors in the areas of fine arts, architecture, design and writing. CCA currently enrolls 1,600 full-time students.