Division of the Arts

Recent News

• Exhibit Curated by Professor Susan Aberth Opens at Andrew Edlin Gallery
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  Exhibit Curated by Professor Susan Aberth Opens at Andrew Edlin Gallery

  

  Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History Susan Aberth.
  

  Conduits of the Unseen: Women Artists Imagine Other Worlds, a new exhibit curated by Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History Susan Aberth, has opened at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York City. Centering the work of Paulina Peavy, a visionary artist known for her paintings, drawings, and ornamented masks, the exhibit also includes artists Leonora Carrington and Agnes Pelton, among others, alongside mediums like Madge Gill and Emma Kunz. In a press release, the gallery said the exhibition presents artists who “gave visual form to alternate realities, spirits, cosmic forces, and other planes of consciousness . . . united by a shared desire to give form to their inner visions, expressed across landscapes, portraits, narratives, and pure abstraction.” The exhibit opened on September 9 and runs through October 31, 2026.
  
  Aberth teaches in the Art History and Visual Culture Program, which introduces students to visual material across a broad range of periods and societies.
  

  Read More About the Exhibit
  

  
  Post Date: 09-09-2026
  
• Visiting Artist Tschabalala Self’s ’12 Lady In Blue Unveiled in London’s Trafalgar Square and Featured in the Guardian
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  Visiting Artist Tschabalala Self’s ’12 Lady In Blue Unveiled in London’s Trafalgar Square and Featured in the Guardian

  

  Tschabalala Self’s sculpture Lady In Blue.
  

  A sculpture by Visiting Artist Tschabalala Self ’12 was unveiled in London’s Trafalgar Square on September 10. Lady in Blue stands prominently on the Square’s fourth plinth, one of the world’s best-known commission spaces for public art. The fourth plinth has been host to a rotating series of contemporary artists including Mark Wallinger, Katharina Fritsch, and David Shrigley.
  
  The Guardian also featured Self in advance of Lady in Blue’s unveiling. Speaking about the sculpture, which the artist describes as an image of an everywoman striding forward into the future, and “a beacon that could shed light into a possible future,” she says, “it’s about there being space for all in places that were formerly weighted down by antiquated gestures, belief systems and impossibilities." The Guardian describes her work as “a lurid, vivid, super-colourful, mega-joyful celebration of everyday bodies” embodying “simplicity, joy, and above all freedom.” Lady in Blue will remain on the plinth for two years.
  
  Self is a visiting artist in Bard’s Studio Arts Program, which provides a breadth of expanded offerings while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in basic techniques and principles, in an era when much contemporary art cannot be contained within the traditional categories and technology is transforming the production of visual images.
  

  Read More in the Guardian
  

  
  Post Date: 09-09-2026
  
• Spencer Vazquez ’22 Awarded a Residency from Visual Studies Workshop
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  Spencer Vazquez ’22 Awarded a Residency from Visual Studies Workshop

  

  Spencer Vazquez ’22. Photo by Zayira Ray
  

  Photographer and filmmaker Spencer Vazquez ’22 has been awarded a 2027 artist’s residency from the Visual Studies Workshop, an artist-run organization that has offered more than 500 artists residencies since 1969. The residency, which will take place between February and March 2027, provides resources and space for artists at any stage of their career who are pushing disciplinary and conceptual boundaries in film, photography, or new media. Vazquez’s debut solo show, Glue Traps, was on view earlier this year at the Camera Club of New York. His work has been featured in publications including ARTnews, Hypebeast, Interlocutor, and Musee Magazine. “Vazquez's work explores the intersection of memory, digital media, and the everyday image,” writes Broadway World.
  
  Vazquez graduated from Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program, which encourages interest in a wide range of expressive modes in film and electronic arts including animation, narrative and non-narrative filmmaking, documentary, performance, and installation practices. The program emphasizes imaginative engagement and the cultivation of an individual voice that has command over the entire creative process.
  
  Post Date: 09-08-2026
  
• Alexa West MFA ’14 Included in ArtNews’ “New Talent 2026”
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  Alexa West MFA ’14 Included in ArtNews’ “New Talent 2026”

  

  Scene from Alexa West's Occasion, occasion, occasion, 2023. Photo by Kayhl Cooper
  

  Choreographer Alexa West MFA ’14 was featured in ArtNews as part of their “New Talent 2026” series, following the staging of her immersive dance performance Jawbreaker. After premiering at the TONO Festival in Mexico in March, Jawbreaker was staged in August at the New York Museum of Modern Art as part of the museum’s Kravis Studio artist residency program. “West’s uncanny, Rube Goldberg-esque dances have made her one of the stars of the city’s experimental dance scene,” writes Madeleine Seidel for ArtNews. “[Jawbreaker] is a near-perfect distillation of what makes West one of America’s most exciting choreographers: kinetic movement, a hypnotic soundtrack, and props that serve as objects for the dancers to work against.” West, who studied sculpture at Bard’s Milton Avery School of the Arts, says her time in Bard’s sculpture program influenced her dance practice. “I’ve learned how to make dances from a sculptural approach in terms of material, scale, and time,” she told ArtNews.
  
  Bard’s MFA Program is a two-year multidisciplinary program focused on individual process and work in progress, as each student confronts the conceptual and practical questions at the core of all artistic production. Each MFA candidate chooses a primary field: Moving Image, Music/Sound, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, or Writing.
   
  

  Read in ArtNews
  

  
  Post Date: 09-03-2026
  
• Bard Alum Captured Never-Before-Seen Footage of Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 Woodstock Performance
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  Bard Alum Captured Never-Before-Seen Footage of Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 Woodstock Performance

  

  Jimi Hendrix performing in 1967. Photo used under Creative Commons BY 2.0.
  

  Bard Drama alumnus Albert Goodman ’71 secretly captured footage of one of rock and roll’s most famous performances, now released for the first time in nearly 60 years. At the Woodstock festival, which took place in Bethel, New York in 1969, the 22-year-old Goodman sneaked backstage behind a musician friend, camera in hand. He then joined a group of professional photographers just 15 feet away from Jimmy Hendrix as he delivered the festival’s legendary closing set. The footage, which includes Hendrix’s infamous rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, as well as several songs never before seen on film, was reportedly screened for the guitarist at the rented house where he was staying. 
  

  Read in Rolling Stone
  

  
  Post Date: 08-26-2026
  
• Bard Scholar Julianne Swartz MFA ’03 Awarded Grant from Bobby Anspach Foundation
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  Bard Scholar Julianne Swartz MFA ’03 Awarded Grant from Bobby Anspach Foundation

  

  Julianne Swartz MFA ’03, associate professor and codirector of the studio arts program.
  

  Julianne Swartz MFA ’03, associate professor and codirector of the studio arts program at Bard College, has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the Bobby Anspach Foundation, an organization created to support artists, scientists, and researchers whose work advances dialogue on meditation, psychology, creativity, and collective engagement as pathways to global harmony and health. Swartz, whose work focuses on multisensory installations, was one of two artists chosen from over 3,300 applicants for the inaugural flagship grant.
  
  The grant will support Swartz’s project, Heart Flow Instrument, a large-scale contemplative environment in the form of a deconstructed fountain that functions as a body in itself, where water, sound, light, and human presence circulate through interconnected vessels. Each visitor becomes a component of that body, contributing vital rhythms to a shared sensory field. As visitors engage with sensors, their cardiac and neural rhythms radiate through the installation, affecting the sonic and haptic environment others inhabit.
  
  “This generous funding will allow me to experiment with biomedical sensors to explore new thresholds of interactivity using human biorhythms to shape sound and light,” said Swartz.
  
  The Bobby Anspach Foundation was established to carry forward the vision of artist Bobby Anspach, through the belief that art holds the power to fundamentally transform how we understand ourselves and each other. This year's flagship grants support artists whose work uses immersive technology and sensory experience to open new pathways into consciousness, empathy, and collective transformation. Throughout 2026, the foundation will spotlight the work of all grant recipients across its platforms and through foundation programming such as events, conversations, and gatherings designed to share this research across disciplines and introduce the grant recipients to new audiences.
  
  Post Date: 07-17-2026