It's not unusual for young artists to emerge from college feeling like outsiders as they struggle to establish their professional careers. Painter David Diao, Class of 1964, was no different, but he did have some experience adapting to unfamiliar surroundings at that point in his life.

Diao emigrated to the United States from China in 1955. He joined his father, who was already in the United States, but his mother and siblings remained in China. "A lot of my trajectory has to do with being an immigrant," he says. "How was I going to divest myself of everything that made me foreign?"

Today, Diao could well be described as an art-world insider. He was honored as one of "three bold newcomers" in a 1972 Time magazine article by Robert Hughes. Diao has been awarded several major grants-a Guggenheim in 1973 and three National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1980, 1985, and 1990. He currently explores aesthetic, social, and psychological issues in his prints, paintings, and conceptual art.

Diao credits Kenyon, and former instructors Joseph Slate in art and Virgil Aldrich and Cyrus Banning in philosophy, for giving him the time and space to grow up. Slate in particular, he says, helped him get "the start of a volition . . . that one could make art in a way that's not just an avocation."

When Diao's not putting his approach into practice, he's passing it along to students, including those participating in the Whitney Museum of American Art's independent study program. "If I hadn't been involved in teaching I would have been a more solipsistic artist," Diao says.

In one sense, though, Diao is still an outsider. He admits he has the "luxury" of being in the tiny minority of those who actually earn a living making art and have the freedom to devote their full attention to their work.