Division of the Arts

Recent News

• Kelly Reichardt’s New Film The Mastermind Reviewed in the New York Times
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  Kelly Reichardt’s New Film The Mastermind Reviewed in the New York Times

  

  Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence. 
  

  The Mastermind, the latest film by S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence Kelly Reichardt, starring Gaby Hoffmann ’04, was reviewed as a New York Times Critic’s Pick. The film, set in the 1970s, follows an unemployed family man and amateur art thief J.B. Mooney, played by Josh O’Connor, as he sets out on his first heist. “Reichardt’s movies are intimate, discreet and don’t ostentatiously deviate from narrative film conventions,” writes Manohla Dargis. “She doesn’t broadcast her ideas visually or with speeches but instead lets them percolate, so they trickle into the stories.”
  
  Reichardt has taught in Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program since 2006, which integrates a wide variety of creative practices with the study of history and criticism of the medium.
   
  

  Read the New York Times Review:
  

  
  Post Date: 10-28-2025
  
• Arthur Tress ’62 Talked Cruising, Poetic Documentary, and His New Book of Photography, The Ramble, with Interview
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  Arthur Tress ’62 Talked Cruising, Poetic Documentary, and His New Book of Photography, The Ramble, with Interview

  

  Self portrait of Arthur Tress ’62, courtesy the artist’s website.
  

  For Interview magazine, writer and director Jordan Tannahill spoke with Bard alumnus Arthur Tress ’62 about his new book of photography, The Ramble. The book is a collection of photographs from the 1960s of an “overgrown stretch of Central Park that’s served as a cruising ground for gay men for nearly a century,” Tannahill writes. The photographs, Tress says, weren’t initially taken with any kind of publication in mind, given their subject and the politics of the time. “Well, at that time, there really was no audience or publications that would show gay photography,” Tress said. “They were mostly for myself, but I had a sense that they were historically important.” Some of the photographs were taken “surreptitiously,” Tress said, but others were semiposed: “My work has always been a little bit of improvised, stage-directed imagery, especially in portraits, so it’s kind of a combination. I call it a sort of ‘poetic documentary.’” The Ramble, published by Stanley/Barker, will be released November 1, 2025.
  

  Read the full piece in Interview
  

  
  Post Date: 10-21-2025
  
• Essay by Photographer Stephen Shore Featured in Aperture Magazine
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  Essay by Photographer Stephen Shore Featured in Aperture Magazine

  

  Stephen Shore, Photography Program director and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.
  

  Stephen Shore, Photography Program director and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts at Bard College, explores the complexity of photographing the color red in an essay for Aperture magazine. Shore discusses how in photography, red objects sometimes appear flat and monochromatic, and “without the tonal gradation that we read as dimensionality, they didn’t ‘sit’ in the spatial illusion of an image,” which can register to the eye as red objects disrupting the structure of the photo. He goes on to explain the complications that arise with red in the context of “gamut”—which is the range of colors that film or a digital sensor can record—and how shades of red that fall outside the gamut of a particular device are typically substituted with the closest reproducible red in a process called “clipping,” which can lead to distortions in tonal gradation and saturation. “If a painter were to see a red door and want it to turn black, they would have that option. A photographer wouldn’t. We, as photographers, are tied to the world in front of us,” Shore writes. “Knowing this, whenever possible I avoided red unless it was central to the image, unless it accorded with the image’s structure. Otherwise, it was obvious and problematic.”
  
  The Photography Program at Bard College offers instruction in the medium while providing a historical and aesthetic framework for student development within the context of a broad-based liberal arts education.
   
  

  Read the Full Essay
  

  
  Post Date: 10-07-2025
  
• Bard College Faculty Member Lothar Osterburg Named a 2025 National Academician by the National Academy of Design
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  Bard College Faculty Member Lothar Osterburg Named a 2025 National Academician by the National Academy of Design

  

  Lothar Osterburg. Courtesy of the National Academy
  

  Bard College Artist in Residence Lothar Osterburg has been elected by the National Academy of Design as a National Academicians in the Class of 2025. Recognized for their contributions to contemporary American art and architecture, this year’s class of newly elected Academicians includes 27 artists and architects from across the United States. The Hudson Valley based, German native Lothar Osterburg is an artist, master printer, and teacher of copperplate photogravure. He has been teaching in the in Studio Arts Program at Bard since 1999.
  
  “We are thrilled to welcome this extraordinary class of 27 artists and architects as members of the National Academy of Design as we celebrate our 200th anniversary,” said Gregory Wessner, executive director of the National Academy. “Their diverse and groundbreaking work reaffirms our enduring commitment to honoring innovation and excellence in contemporary art and architecture.”
  
  The annual nomination and election of National Academicians dates back to the National Academy’s founding in 1825 as the United States’ first artist- and architect-led organization. New Academicians are nominated and elected by the current members of the National Academy, a growing community of 500 artists and architects across the country. In addition to providing leadership and vision for the National Academy and its programs and exhibitions, Academicians are also invited to donate a representative work—called the Diploma Work—to the National Academy’s collection. With more than 8,000 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, architectural drawings and models and more, the National Academy’s collection has been assembled almost entirely through the donations of its artists and architect members. It is one of the most significant collections of American art and architecture in the world.
  
  As the 200th anniversary class of Academicians, these 27 individuals join the more than 2,400 artists and architects elected to the National Academy since its founding in 1825. Academicians include the most significant artists and architects in the United States over the past two centuries, ranging from Hudson River School painters like Frederic Church (1848), Thomas Cole (1826) and Asher Durand (1826), to contemporary practitioners like Marina Abramović (2013), Sanford Biggers (2023) and Julie Mehretu (2021) and architects such as Cass Gilbert (1906), Frank Lloyd Wright (1952) and Annabelle Selldorf (2012).
  
  Artist Lothar Osterburg completed his studies in printmaking and experimental film at the Art Academy Braunschweig in Germany in 1989, received his training as master printer at Crown Point Press in San Francisco in the early 1990’s, and has operated his own printshop in New York since 1994. Osterburg has been at numerous artists residencies including the MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, the Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center in Maui, and the Cill Rialaig Arts Centre in Ballinskelligs, County Kerry, Ireland. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, both in 2010, two New York Foundations for the Arts Fellowships, and a 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Award for excellence in Printmaking. He has taught at Columbia University and Cooper Union and will retire from Bard College in fall 2025 after 27 years of teaching.
  

  The National Academy
  

  
  Post Date: 09-23-2025
  
• The New Yorker on Stephen Shore’s “Precocious Adolescent Eye”
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  The New Yorker on Stephen Shore’s “Precocious Adolescent Eye”

  

  Photography Program Director and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts Stephen Shore.
  

  “To call Stephen Shore the most precocious photographer in the history of the medium is almost correct,” writes Chris Wiley for the New Yorker. Reviewing Early Work, the newly released book by Stephen Shore, director of the Photography Program and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts, Wiley remarks on the photographs in this new collection, which represent a period of Shore’s work from 1960–65. “Shore seems to have barrelled into his adolescence as a fully formed artist,” Wiley writes. While the photos in Early Work bear more resemblance to the work of photographers like Garry Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, or Robert Frank than Shore’s most famous works would come to, he was very clearly developing his own aesthetic, Wiley argues. “Shore was not simply aping the styles of his predecessors; he was hard at work cutting his own path.”
  

  Read in the New Yorker
  

  Art in America: Stephen Shore’s ‘Early Work,’ with Pictures He Shot at Age 13, Is Anything but Amateur
  

  
  Post Date: 09-17-2025
  
• Gilles Peress’s September 11 Photography Remembered in the New Yorker
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  Gilles Peress’s September 11 Photography Remembered in the New Yorker

  

  Professor Gilles Peress.
  

  For the New Yorker, Philip Gourevich remembers a photo taken by Bard Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress on September 11, 2001. Gourevich and Peress were colleagues at the time, and Peress’s photography ran in the New Yorker’s September 2001 issue. Gourevich describes the photo, which shows two firefighters standing on a destroyed street, as “the last survivors of a lost time” recorded only by Peress. “Rather than making you see, Gilles lets you see—admitting you, with each click of the shutter, to join him as he enters into an immediate and transparent intimacy with lives lived in the teeth of history.”
  

  Read in the New Yorker
  

  
  Post Date: 09-17-2025