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Division of the Arts

Photo by Chris Kayden

Division of the Arts

The Division of the Arts offers programs in architecture, art history and visual culture, dance, film and electronic arts, music, photography, studio arts, and theater and performance.

Theoretical understanding and practical skills alike are developed through production and performance in all disciplines. In the course of their program studies, students in the arts also develop aesthetic criteria that can be applied to other areas of learning.

  • Why the Arts at Bard?
    Students may undertake the arts for different reasons—as a path to a vocation or an avocation, or simply as a means of cultural enrichment. Working with a faculty adviser, the student plans a curriculum with their needs and goals in mind.
Arts Menu
  • Overview
  • Arts Calendar
  • Arts Faculty
  • Arts News

Our Programs

Programs in the Division of the Arts include:
  • Architecture
  • Art History and Visual Culture
  • Dance
  • Film and Electronic Arts
  • Music
  • Photography
  • Studio Arts
  • Theater and Performance
Division Chair: Julia Rosenbaum, Professor of Art History

Coursework and Requirements

As a student progresses to the Upper College, the coursework increasingly consists of smaller studio discussion groups and seminars in which active participation is expected. Advisory conferences, tutorials, and independent work prepare the student for the Senior Project. This yearlong independent project may be a critical or theoretical monograph, a collection of essays, or, for a large proportion of students, an artistic work, such as an exhibition of original paintings, sculpture, or photography; performances in dance, theater, or music; dance choreography or musical composition; or the making of a short film with sound. In designing their Senior Project topics, students may have reason to join their arts studies together with a complementary field or discipline, including programs or concentrations in other divisions. Plans for such integrated or interdivisional projects are normally created on an individual basis with the adviser.

Discover More

Live Arts Bard
Live Arts Bard
Photo by Paula Court

Live Arts Bard

“When I was a student at Bard, I was drawn to the Fisher Center because of Live Arts Bard. LAB is pushing the frontiers of these art forms, all of which are becoming more open and fluid.” —Sam Miller ’15

Live Arts Bard (LAB) is the interdisciplinary residency and commissioning program of Bard’s Fisher Center. Since its launch in 2012, Fisher Center LAB has supported residencies, workshops, and performances for hundreds of artists, incubating new projects and engaging audiences, students, faculty, and staff in the process of creating contemporary performances.
LAB at the Fisher Center →

Arts News and Events

Featured News

a man with white hair and glasses looks at the camera

Essay by Photographer Stephen Shore Featured in Aperture Magazine

Shore explores the complexity of photographing the color red in an essay for Aperture.

Essay by Photographer Stephen Shore Featured in Aperture Magazine

a man with white hair and glasses looks at the camera
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

Recent News

  • Bard College Faculty Member Lothar Osterburg Named a 2025 National Academician by the National Academy of Design

    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”

    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

    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
  • Jeffrey Gibson’s Sculptures Exhibited at the Met and Featured in the New York Times

    Jeffrey Gibson’s Sculptures Exhibited at the Met and Featured in the New York Times

    Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson.
    Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition of animal sculptures on the facade of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art was featured as a Critic’s Pick in the New York Times. The Met’s Facade Commission invites contemporary artists to display their work outside the museum, and Gibson’s four sculptures are its newest addition. His sculptures, which are all of animals that lived inside Central Park, were made from driftwood found in the Hudson Valley, which Gibson carved, scanned, and cast in bronze before coloring.

    Gibson recently represented the US at the Venice Biennale and has taught at Bard since 2012. The Times calls his facade exhibit the latest in a “stellar group of artists” and the one that “best understands the assignment of public sculpture [to] engage as wide an audience as possible, without offending, and still register as trenchant artwork.”

    Read in ArtDaily
    Read in Hyperallergic
    Read in the New York Times
    Read in the Wall Street Journal
    Read in AirMail

    Post Date: 09-17-2025
  • Jack Ferver’s Dance Performance My Town Included in a New York Times Roundup

    Jack Ferver’s Dance Performance My Town Included in a New York Times Roundup

    Jack Ferver.
    The upcoming dance performance My Town by Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Jack Ferver was included in a roundup by the New York Times. In “10 Things We’re Excited About This Fall,” the Times showcased theater and artistic performances happening throughout the country over the next few months. This included My Town, Ferver’s dance-theater piece which will be performed at the NYU Skirball Center on November 21–22.

    My Town is a queer reimagining of Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town. The Times describes the performance as “Ferver’s surreal brand of dark humor” that presents “a raw and exacting piece of dance-theater that looks at small-town life, [exploring] a more haunting side of existence.” Ferver has taught at Bard since 2013 in the Theater and Performance Program and the graduate Vocal Arts Program.
    Read the Preview
    Event Information

    Post Date: 09-10-2025
  • Nayland Blake ’82 Art Exhibition Opens in NYC on September 12

    Nayland Blake ’82 Art Exhibition Opens in NYC on September 12

    Made with Pride by a Queen by Nayland Blake ’82.
    A survey of art works by Nayland Blake ’82, professor of Studio Arts at Bard College, will be on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City, from September 12 through October 25. For decades, Blake has made vital contributions to contemporary art and queer culture as an artist, curator, writer, and educator, and the three-part exhibition will be the largest show of their work in New York in nearly 20 years. The first part, Nayland Blake: Sex in the 90s, surveys Blake’s landmark works created in the midst of the ongoing AIDS crisis and the culture wars of the 1990s, many of which are on view for the first time in nearly 30 years. The second part, Inside: curated by Nayland Blake, includes works by 14 artists whose works Blake has “wanted to be in the presence of, to wander inside of, to refresh my eyes and mind with.” The final part of the exhibition, Session, will be an installation of Blake’s new sculptures, which build upon their works of the late 1980s. 

    The Studio Arts Program at Bard features broad offerings beyond the traditional categories of art, while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in basic techniques and principles.

    Post Date: 09-02-2025

Upcoming Events

  • 10/19
    Sunday
    2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space
    Visit https://www.barduschinamusic.org/events/chinese-ensemble-fall-25

    Bard Chinese Ensemble Fall Concert 2025

    Sunday, October 19, 2025 | 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 | Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space

    Shutong Li, conductor

    The Bard East/West Ensemble (BCE) opens its 2025–26 season with a concert rich in color and emotion, celebrating the many voices of Chinese orchestral music. From the tranquil flow of Yun Shui (Clouds and Water) and the nostalgic warmth of Late Autumn, to the vivid soundscapes of Postcards from Macao and the lyrical heroism of Lyrical Variations, each work reveals a world of its own — expressive, evocative, and profoundly moving.
    FREE and open to the public. 
     
    Contact: Kathryn Wright
    Phone: 845-758-7026
    E-mail: [email protected]
    Website: https://www.barduschinamusic.org/events/chinese-ensemble-fall-25
  • 10/28
    Tuesday
    5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
    Olin Auditorium

    Ancestral Voices Prophesying: Notes on Britten's War Requiem

    Tuesday, October 28, 2025 | 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 | Olin Auditorium

    Bard College presents renowned tenor and musical scholar Ian Bostridge delivering the Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities in honor of preeminent poet, alumnus, and former Bard faculty member Anthony Hecht ’44. In his lecture series, “Ancestral Voices Prophesying: Notes on Britten's War Requiem,” Bostridge—who has performed War Requiem nearly a hundred times since 1994—will examine the layers of meaning and context in the piece, one of the most important works of classical music written after 1945.

    The first lecture in the series, “Requiem,” takes place on Monday, October 27 at 5:00 pm, and the second, “Anthem,” will be held on Tuesday, October 28 at 5:00 pm.  A reception precedes both lectures, which will take place in Olin Auditorium on Bard’s Annandale campus. The final lecture in the series, “Akedah,” will be held on Friday, October 31 at 6:00 pm in the Irving Posner and Herman Ackman Space at Kaufman Music Center located at 129 West 67th Street, NYC.
    Contact: Mary Strieder
    Phone: 845-758-7405
    E-mail: [email protected]
  • 11/23
    Sunday
    2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
    Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space
    Visit https://www.barduschinamusic.org/events/chinese-ensemble-winter-25

    Bard Chinese Ensemble Winter Concert 2025

    Sunday, November 23, 2025 | 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5 | Bitó Conservatory Building, Performance Space

    Shutong Li, conductor

    The Bard Chinese Ensemble's annual Winter concert kicks off the holiday season with another exciting program of new music. Come enjoy the amazing sounds of this large ensemble featuring a unique blend of Chinese and Western instruments. 

    FREE and open to the public.
    Contact: Kathryn Wright
    Phone: 845-758-7026
    E-mail: [email protected]
    Website: https://www.barduschinamusic.org/events/chinese-ensemble-winter-25
  • 12/10
    Wednesday
    7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
    Chapel of the Holy Innocents

    The Georgian Choir Winter Concert 

    Wednesday, December 10, 2025 | 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 | Chapel of the Holy Innocents

    Join us for a winter concert.
    Contact: Carl Linich
    E-mail: [email protected]
Bard College
30 Campus Road, PO Box 5000
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504-5000
Phone: 845-758-6822
Admission Email: [email protected]
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