Otis Will Honor Conrad, 3 Others With Doctorates

Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design will award four honorary doctorates at the 31st annual commencement exercises at 5 p.m. today at the band shell in MacArthur Park.

The 1987 commencement, conferring degrees on 133 candidates for bachelor of fine arts and six for master of fine arts, marks the eighth since the merger of the Otis Art Institute with Parsons School of Design.

Keynote speaker will be Times editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad. A winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, Conrad will also receive an honorary doctorate from the college.

Other recipients of honorary doctorates will be fashion designer Dorothy Jeakins, nominee for 10 Academy Awards and winner of three for her film costuming, appointed curator of the Textile and Costume Department at the L.A. County Museum of Art in 1967; Rusty Powell, who as director since 1980 of the L.A. County Museum of Art has supervised expansion including the Times Mirror Court, Robert O. Anderson Wing of Modern Art and the Japanese Pavilion scheduled to open next spring; and artist/historian Ruth G. Waddy. Her works hang in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and she is the author of “Prints by American Negro Artists” and co-editor of “Black Artists on Art.”