Division of the Arts

Recent News

• Professor Anne Hunnell Chen Recognized by Wikimedia
  ×

  Professor Anne Hunnell Chen Recognized by Wikimedia

  

  Professor Anne Hunnell Chen.
  

  Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen was recognized with the 2025 Award for “Outstanding Professional Advancing Open Access to Cultural Heritage” from the Wikimedia Foundation. This international award was given for Chen’s work on the International Digital Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), which she founded. IDEA is an initiative using digital tools and a Linked Open Data set (LOD) to facilitate archaeological knowledge about the Dura-Europos site in Syria, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
  
  The awarding committee said, “Anne Chen’s work is worthy of the highest recognition, by the advanced use of LOD methods, the sheer scope of collaboration between the digital humanities and across Wikimedia projects, and the focus on an immensely important and underrepresented cultural geography like Syria.” They also recognized the importance of her work at the present moment, “when the organizations that helped fund this work are currently being severely defunded.”
  
  The Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard introduces students to visual material across a broad range of periods and societies.
  

  More About the IDEA Project
  

  
  Post Date: 11-18-2025
  
• M. Gessen Writes About the Responsibilities of Citizenship for the New York Times
  ×

  M. Gessen Writes About the Responsibilities of Citizenship for the New York Times

  

  M. Gessen. Photo by Lena Di
  

  In an op-ed for the New York Times, Distinguished Visiting Writer M. Gessen wrote about how Americans can learn from citizens of other countries that grapple with human rights issues. Speaking to Jewish citizens of Israel, Gessen discusses what it means to benefit from government actions one disagrees with. Gessen spoke with Michael Sfard, a human rights lawyer who represents Palestinians in Israeli courts, and Ella Keidar Greenberg, who refused to enlist in the Israeli army. “Being an idle bystander is doing something,” Greenberg says of her decision. “I’m either maintaining the system or dismantling it.”
  
  “To be a good citizen of a bad state, one has to do scary things,” Gessen concludes. “It may be using your body to shield someone more vulnerable, [or] withdrawing your economic cooperation, weighing… flying under the radar against taking a risk.”
  

  Read the Article
  

  
  Post Date: 11-05-2025
  
• Artist Jeffrey Gibson Profiled in the Financial Times
  ×

  Artist Jeffrey Gibson Profiled in the Financial Times

  

  Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson. Photo by Brian Barlow
  

  Bard College Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson was featured in the Financial Times ahead of his recent exhibition coinciding with Art Basel Paris. Gibson reflects on the trajectory of his artistic career, following his ups and downs before becoming the first Indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Gibson shares that he nearly abandoned art in his 40s before moving to the Hudson Valley, finding his current studio, and beginning to experiment with his current “psycho-prismatic” art.
  
  Gibson’s art includes sensory objects like flashes, jingle dress dance, and op-art patterns to produce a feeling of “luminous, multisensory release.” His upcoming show This Is Dedicated To The One I Love is focused on bright paintings inspired by prisms and nebulas. These pieces reflect his childhood, which he spent surrounded by many different cultures, and impart  the sense that humanity is “encased by this planet… on the same, massive, phenomenal organism.”
  

  Read the Article
  

  
  Post Date: 11-05-2025
  
• Bard Student Production of Brecht’s Puntila and Matti Reviewed in the Millbrook Independent
  ×

  Bard Student Production of Brecht’s Puntila and Matti Reviewed in the Millbrook Independent

  

  A mainstage production of Puntila and Matti, His Hired Man (1948) by Bertolt Brecht, conducted by the Theater and Performance Program at Bard, was reviewed in the Millbrook Independent. Directed by Rebecca Wright and performed at the Fisher Center’s LUMA Theater, Brecht’s play was based on stories by playwright Hella Wuolijoki and translated by Ralph Mannheim. “This excellent and robust student production, set in Finland, evokes striking, trenchant parallels to our contemporary situation in the United States, where power has been translated from a dysfunctional democracy to totalitarian improvisation,” writes Kevin T. McEneaney. 
  
  Bard’s Theater and Performance Program offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts-based approach to the making and study of theater and performance, and embraces a wide range of performance practices, from live art and interactive installation to classical theater from around the globe.
   
  

  Read the full review in the Millbrook Independent:
  

  
  Post Date: 10-28-2025
  
• Kelly Reichardt’s New Film The Mastermind Reviewed in the New York Times
  ×

  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
  ×

  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