News

“As equipment for life and art, An-My Lê’s exemplary work suggested to me that one way forward might be back—into the tangles of memory and history, onto the contested terrain of the past,” writes Hai-Dang Phan for the Baffler. An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/speak-reenactment-phan

Buzzfeed features the work of students in HR 321, Advocacy Video, in which Bard undergraduates worked together with students in the clemency clinic at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to create short video self-presentations by applicants for clemency. Buzzfeed reporter Melissa Segura highlights the video narrative of Rodney Chandler, incarcerated at Cayuga Correctional Facility, and also interviews David Sell, with whom the class worked last year on two videos from Wende Correctional Facility. Advocacy Video is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences class cotaught by Thomas Keenan, professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Program, and Brent Green, visiting artist in residence. This is a Human Rights course crosslisted with Film and Electronic Arts. The four videos produced by students in fall 2020 are available on the Human Rights Program website.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/melissasegura/prisons-covid-clemency

Time-lapse photographs of airplane arrivals and departures by Bard alumnus Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ‘00 are on view through March 1 as part of A Trip Back in Time at the Quad City International Airport in Moline, Illinois. The exhibit comprises Mauney’s photographs, Drew Morton’s digital drawings of airport runways around the world, and a selection of mid-century modern artifacts. For this series, Mauney camped out in select locations for hours at a time with his camera aperture open to capture the light emitted from airplanes and stars as they moved through the night sky. Pete Mauney lives and works in Tivoli, New York. He received his BA and MFA in photography from Bard College. 
https://www.wvik.org/post/airport-art-exhibit-airport#stream/0

Programs Feature a World Premiere by Sarah Hennies and Popcorn Superhet Receiver by Radiohead Band Member Jonny Greenwood

The Orchestra Now (TŌN) will begin its 2021 season with two concerts to be livestreamed from the Fisher Center at Bard on February 7 and 21, led by Leon Botstein and James Bagwell respectively. Both programs for string orchestra will offer pieces by underrepresented composers, including a new work by composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies written for the Orchestra and the Bard Music Program, where she is on faculty. Her work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, love, intimacy, and psychoacoustics. She was recently profiled in The New York Times about her eclectic musical style, “rife with psychological effects and emotional undercurrents.” Additional rarely-heard music will showcase Popcorn Superhet Receiver, a work by English composer Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist and keyboard player of the alternative rock band Radiohead; and Serenade for Strings by the Venezuelan composer, pianist, and singer Teresa Carreño, who played for Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1863.

Upcoming highlights in the 2021 season are a concert led by assistant conductor Andrés Rivas (March 7), a performance with resident conductor Zachary Schwartzman (March 20), and two concerts led by music director Leon Botstein (April 10 and May 1).

Schoenberg & Bach
Sunday February 7 at 2 pm
Leon Botstein, conductor
Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
Lutosławski: Funeral Music
Teresa Carreño: Serenade for Strings 
Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night)

Access: RSVP at theorchestranow.org starting on January 27 to receive a direct link to the livestream on the day of the concert. This concert will be available for delayed streaming on TŌN’s digital portal STAY TŌNED, starting on February 11.

New & Classic Works for Strings
Sunday February 21 at 2 pm
James Bagwell, conductor
Sarah Hennies: New Work (World Premiere)
Jonny Greenwood: Popcorn Superhet Receiver
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Grieg: Holberg Suite

Access: RSVP at theorchestranow.org starting on January 27 to receive a direct link to the livestream on the day of the concert. This concert will be available for delayed streaming on STAY TŌNED starting on February 25.

STAY TŌNED
Since March 2020, TŌN has presented more than 100 audio and video streams on STAY TŌNED, its new portal regrouping of all digital initiatives. Audio content is offered every Tuesday and videos every Thursday. The events feature weekly new and archived audio and video recordings that comprise recitals, chamber music, and symphonic programs, including collaborations with the Bard Music Festival that are also available on the Fisher Center at Bard’s virtual stage, UPSTREAMING. Much of the content is also available on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Bard College Covid-19 Measures and Safety
To adapt to current circumstances, Bard College created detailed protocols for testing and screening, daily monitoring of symptoms, contact tracing, quarantine practices, and physical distancing in the classroom and across the Bard campus. This includes specific protocols for musicians campus-wide in both its undergraduate and graduate programs.

The Orchestra Now
The Orchestra Now (TŌN) is a group of 72 vibrant young musicians from 14 different countries across the globe: Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Hungary, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Peru, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, the U.K., and the U.S. All share a mission to make orchestral music relevant to 21st-century audiences by sharing their unique personal insights in a welcoming environment. Hand-picked from the world’s leading conservatories—including The Juilliard School, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Royal Conservatory of Brussels, and the Curtis Institute of Music—the members of TŌN are enlightening curious minds by giving on-stage introductions and demonstrations, writing concert notes from the musicians’ perspective, and having one-on-one discussions with patrons during intermissions.

Conductor, educator, and music historian Leon Botstein, whom The New York Times said “draws rich, expressive playing from the orchestra,” founded TŌN in 2015 as a graduate program at Bard College, where he is also president. TŌN offers both a three-year master’s degree in Curatorial, Critical, and Performance Studies and a two-year advanced certificate in Orchestra Studies. The Orchestra’s home base is the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center at Bard, where it performs multiple concerts each season and takes part in the annual Bard Music Festival. It also performs regularly at the finest venues in New York, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others across NYC and beyond. HuffPost, who has called TŌN’s performances “dramatic and intense,” praises these concerts as “an opportunity to see talented musicians early in their careers.” 

The Orchestra has performed with many distinguished guest conductors and soloists, including Hans Graf, Neeme Järvi, Vadim Repin, Fabio Luisi, Peter Serkin, Gerard Schwarz, Tan Dun, Zuill Bailey, and JoAnn Falletta. Recordings featuring The Orchestra Now include two albums of piano concertos with Piers Lane on Hyperion Records, and a Sorel Classics concert recording of pianist Anna Shelest performing works by Anton Rubinstein with TŌN and conductor Neeme Järvi. Buried Alive with baritone Michael Nagy, released on Bridge Records in August 2020, includes the first recording in almost 60 years—and only the second recording ever—of Othmar Schoeck’s song-cycle Lebendig begraben. Upcoming releases include an album of piano concertos with Orion Weiss on Bridge Records. Recordings of TŌN’s live concerts from the Fisher Center can be heard on Classical WMHT-FM and WWFM The Classical Network, and are featured regularly on Performance Today, broadcast nationwide.

For upcoming activities and more detailed information about the musicians, visit theorchestranow.org.

Leon Botstein
Leon Botstein brings a renowned career as both a conductor and educator to his role as music director of The Orchestra Now. He has been music director of the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992, artistic co-director of Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival since their creation, and president of Bard College since 1975. He was the music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra from 2003–11 and is now conductor laureate. In 2018, he assumed artistic directorship of Campus Grafenegg and Grafenegg Academy in Austria. Mr. Botstein is also a frequent guest conductor with orchestras around the globe, has made numerous recordings, and is a prolific author and music historian. He is editor of the prestigious The Musical Quarterly and has received many honors for his contributions to music. More info online at LeonBotstein.com.
https://www.theorchestranow.org/

“If the postmodernism of the 1980s considered the museum to be in crisis and contemplated its ‘ruins,’ today many see these same institutions as frustratingly intact, as bulwarks against change, citadels to be stormed,” writes Professor Alex Kitnick in Artforum. “Where an earlier generation of artists associated with institutional critique pointed to the museum’s genetic incoherence, as well as to the incursion of corporate interests, today the museum itself stands as a purveyor of systemic and symbolic violence.” Alex Kitnick is assistant professor of art history and visual culture and Brant Foundation Fellow in Contemporary Arts at Bard College.
https://www.artforum.com/print/202101/alex-kitnick-on-the-discontent-with-museums-84657

The Beastie Boys’ 1986 debut LP Licensed to Ill—the first rap disc to top the Billboard 200 album chart—is among the 2021 inductees into the Grammy Hall of Fame. “We are proud to announce this year’s diverse roster of Grammy Hall of Fame inductees and to recognize recordings that have shaped our industry and inspired music makers of tomorrow,” Harvey Mason Jr., chair and interim president/CEO of the Recording Academy, said in a statement.
 
https://deadline.com/2020/12/grammy-hall-of-fame-springsteen-beastie-boys-pearl-jam-ymca-the-gambler-1234660315/

“[New York City gallery] Broadway inaugurated its storefront space with a hypnotic show by the restlessly intelligent indigenous filmmaker Sky Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians,” writes Andrea K. Scott. “The show’s centerpiece, Lore, was a short film with the fragmentary internal logic of dreams and the intimate mood of late-night conversations, circling a band of friends in a practice-room reverie, with Hopinka on bass. Lore itself is a rehearsal of sorts: its audio consists of early drafts and excerpts of Hopinka’s searing prose poem ‘Perfidia,’ published as an elegant book by Wendy’s Subway.” Sky Hopinka is assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2020-in-review/the-best-art-of-2020

The Brooklyn Museum commissioned Bard College artist in residence Jeffrey Gibson to revive a neglected collection. Collaborating with associate professor of history Christian Ayne Crouch, the curators “took aim at the museum’s archive, cracking open the ideological biases—the ignorant and often racist beliefs and values—on which its collecting was premised,” writes Lynne Cooke of Artforum. Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks at the Brooklyn Museum is curated by Jeffrey Gibson and Christian Ayne Crouch with Eugenie Tsai and Erika Umali, and is on view through January 10, 2021.
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/jeffrey_gibson

Sky Hopinka, Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts, made Holland Cotter’s New York Times “Best in Show” list for 2020 with his exhibition at CCS Bard, Sky Hopinka: Centers of Somewhere. Also, don’t miss Professor Hopinka’s interview with the Sundance Institute. He talks about centering Indigenous perspectives in experimental storytelling, how Native audiences respond to his work, and how his poetry has slowly worked its way into his filmography.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/arts/important-art-moments-2020.html

Acclaimed filmmaker and S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence Kelly Reichardt’s film First Cow was named the best movie of 2020 by Time magazine. The film is set in the wilds of an early 19th-century Columbia River settlement, in what is now Oregon, and focuses on the business partnership and friendship of an Anglo cook and an entrepreneurial Chinese immigrant. “Both tranquil and dazzling,” writes Stephanie Zacharek, “First Cow is a song of this weird, rough-edged stretch of stolen land we call America, a place where tenderness is still the most precious commodity.”
https://time.com/5914535/best-movies-2020/

Blanca Lista ’01 has won the EMMY for Outstanding Children's Program as co-executive producer on Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance for Netflix. “Graduation from Bard College in Film Studies was a privilege,” Lista says, “and it shaped me to be the producer I am today.”
https://www.emmys.com/bios/blanca-lista

Bard College has named Miriam Felton-Dansky director of its undergraduate Theater and Performance Program. A longtime faculty member in the program as well as in Bard’s Experimental Humanities concentration, Felton-Dansky will take her position as director in spring 2021. Gideon Lester, who has served as director of the Theater and Performance Program since 2012, will become senior curator of the newly formed Center for Human Rights and the Arts, part of the Open Society University Network, alongside his work as artistic director of the Fisher Center at Bard. 

“Miriam Felton-Dansky steps into this key leadership role at a moment when the College's Theater and Performance Program is poised to enact important curricular changes,” said Dean of the College Deirdre d’Albertis. “The theater and performance faculty are engaged in collaborative work with students past and present to develop and strengthen opportunities for undergraduate theatermaking based in the program's affirmed commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.” She added, “Gideon Lester will join with Tania El Khoury in building the new Center for Human Rights and the Arts and its allied MA program, bringing his artistic vision and experience to this important new leadership position in Bard's graduate programs.”

Miriam Felton-Dansky is associate professor of theater and performance at Bard. She has also been a core faculty member of the Experimental Humanities concentration since 2012 and served as its interim director in 2015–16. A scholar and critic of contemporary performance, her first book, Viral Performance: Contagious Theaters from Modernism to the Digital Age, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. Her criticism has appeared in Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, TDR, Theater, PAJ, ASAP/J, Artforum.com, and the Walker Art Center’s magazine; from 2009 to 2018 she was a theater critic for the Village Voice. She is a cohost of the theater studies podcast On TAP and a contributing editor to Theater, where she served as guest coeditor for the Digital Dramaturgies trilogy (2012-–18). Her current research focuses on the history and politics of spectatorship in experimental performance. She holds a BA summa cum laude in theater and history from Barnard College and a doctorate of fine arts from the Yale School of Drama.

Gideon Lester, artistic director of the Fisher Center at Bard, has been named senior curator, OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts. Through its public, research, and academic programs, the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts seeks to confront the current practical and conceptual challenges of human rights discourse by stimulating new ways of thinking, developing new strategies of activism and engagement, and working meaningfully on a global scale. The Center is finalizing an MA program in human rights and the arts, which will unite artists, scholars, and activists in an international, comparative, and interdisciplinary curriculum. The MA program will be based at Bard College, a founding member of the Open Society University Network (OSUN), and is expected to welcome its first class in fall 2021.

A festival director, creative producer, and dramaturg, Lester has collaborated with and commissioned leading American and international artists across disciplines, including Romeo Castellucci, Justin Vivian Bond, Krystian Lupa, Brice Marden, Sarah Michelson, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Claudia Rankine, Kaija Saariaho, Peter Sellars, and Anna Deavere Smith. Recent projects include Where No Wall Remains, an international festival on borders (cocurated with Tania El Khoury); Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! (Tony Award); Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets; and Ronald K. Brown and Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grace and Mercy. He founded and directs Live Arts Bard, the Fisher Center’s residency and commissioning program, and directed Bard’s undergraduate Theater and Performance Program from 2012 to 2020. He was previously cocurator of the Crossing the Line Festival and acting artistic director at the American Repertory Theatre. He has taught at Harvard and Columbia, has a BA in English literature from Oxford University, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training.
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About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 160-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.11/19/20
 
https://theater.bard.edu/

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and the Human Rights Project announced today that Ama Josephine B. Johnstone has been selected as the seventh recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Her appointment is made possible by the Keith Haring Foundation as part of the second series of a five year-grant supporting the Fellowship—an annual award for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at Bard College. Johnstone’s appointment marks the shared commitment of the College and the Foundation both to exploring the interaction between political engagement and artistic practices and to bringing leading practitioners from around the world into Bard's classrooms.

“The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism is an ongoing dialogue with leading artists, writers and scholars, bringing new modes of thinking, pedagogical models and ways of working into the Bard community.  International in scope, the Fellowship continues to evolve, raising issues that are current and introducing innovative responses to the challenges of the present,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is a speculative writer, artist, curator and pleasure activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyze human rights, environmental evolutions and queer identities. Johnstone is a PhD candidate in psychosocial studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She describes her research as taking “a queer, decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism in Sub-Saharan Africa with a particular focus on inherently environmentalist pleasure practices in Ghana and across the Black universe.”

“Ama says that her work 'thrives in the fecund liminal spaces between the museum and the academy, the gallery and the protest,' and in this sense, among many others, she exemplifies the spirit and practice of Keith Haring. Her fearless creativity, coupled with her relentless critical curiosity, especially about human rights discourse itself, are going to be essential guides in any journey through our perilous times,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Project.

Johnstone will be in residence at Bard during the spring 2021 semester to teach and develop local collaborations in the Hudson Valley, succeeding Pelin Tan as the 2019–20 Fellow. Details on the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism and previous fellows can be found at ccsbard.edu.

About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and the Human Rights Project at Bard College
Bard College seeks to realize the best features of American liberal arts education, enabling individuals to think critically and act creatively based on a knowledge and understanding of human history, society, and the arts. Two pioneering programs developed under this mission are the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and the Human Rights Project.

CCS Bard was founded in 1990 as an exhibition and research center for the study of late 20th-century and contemporary art and culture and to explore experimental approaches to the presentation of these topics and their impact on our world. Since 1994, the Center for Curatorial Studies and its graduate program have provided one of the world’s most forward thinking teaching and learning environments for the research and practice of contemporary art and curatorship. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty, and researchers to question the critical and political dimension of art, its mediation, and its social significance.

The Human Rights Project, founded at Bard in 1999, developed the first interdisciplinary undergraduate degree program in Human Rights in the United States. The Project maintains a special interest in freedom of expression and the public sphere, and through teaching, research, and public programs is committed to exploring the too-often neglected cultural, aesthetic, and representational dimensions of human rights discourse.

Since 2009, CCS Bard and the Human Rights Project have collaborated on a series of seminars, workshops, research projects, and symposia aimed at exploring the intersections between human rights and the arts, and doing so in a manner that takes neither term for granted but in fact uses their conjunction to raise critical, foundational questions about each. While academic in nature, this research and teaching nevertheless draws heavily on the realm of practice, involving human rights advocates, artists, and curators.

About the Keith Haring Foundation
Keith Haring (1958-1990) generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and disadvantaged communities. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.

The Keith Haring Foundation makes grants to not-for-profit entities that engage in charitable and educational activities. In accordance with Keith’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: The support of organizations which enrich the lives of young people and the support of organizations which engage in education, prevention and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection.

Keith Haring additionally charged the Foundation with maintaining and protecting his artistic legacy after his death. The Foundation maintains a collection of art along with archives that facilitate historical research about the artist and the times and places in which he lived and worked. The Foundation supports arts and educational institutions by funding exhibitions, programming, and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate the artist’s work and philosophy. haring.com

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MEDIA CONTACTS:
For further information, images, or to arrange interviews, please contact:

BARD COLLEGE CONTACT:
Mark Primoff
Director of Communications
Tel: +1 845.758.7412
Email: primoff@bard.edu

CCS BARD CONTACT:
Ramona Rosenberg
Director of External Affairs
Tel: +1 (845) 758-7574
Email: rrosenberg@bard.edu
 
https://ccs.bard.edu/

Bard College announces the appointment of internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist and educator Nayland Blake ’82 as the incoming chair of the Bard Studio Arts Program, beginning with the academic year 2021–2022. Blake is the chair of the ICP-Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies, a joint masters program run by Bard College and the International Center of Photography in New York City. They succeed Ellen Driscoll, who returns to the studio arts faculty. For more information about Bard’s Studio Arts Program, please visit studioarts.bard.edu.

“Nayland Blake has a long history with Bard and a significant appreciation for what makes the institution unique. At the same time, they bring an important new perspective to imagining the future of Bard's Studio Arts program,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre D’Albertis. “What all members of the program have commented on and appreciate already about Nayland is their commitment to students, faculty, and staff in the program all being heard and considered in building toward that future.”

Nayland Blake is an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Des Moines Art Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the University Art Museum, Berkeley. Their writing has been published in Artforum, Shift, Interview, Out, Outlook, and numerous exhibition catalogues. Blake has been on the faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts (Bard MFA) and has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, the California Institute of the Arts, the University of California, Berkeley, Parsons School for Design, New York University, the School of Visual Arts, and Harvard University Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. They are represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. Blake has a BA in sculpture from Bard and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 160-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
 

The Orchestra Now (TŌN) has announced the addition of two more symphonic concerts to be livestreamed for free as part of its fall season. On November 1, Music Director and Founder Leon Botstein will conduct a program pairing 20^th century works by Schoenberg, Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, and R. Strauss with Handel’s Water Music; and on November 14, he will lead the Orchestra in the rarely heard Scherzi musicali by Black American composer Ulysses Kay. The concert will also feature Haydn’s Symphony No. 48 and works by Varèse and Hindemith. The livestreamed concerts are free and will be available for streaming after the performances.

The November concerts follow the Orchestra’s earlier fall livestreamed series Out of the Silence: A Celebration of Music, a four-concert virtual celebration of music showcasing Black composers presented with the Bard Music Festival in September; and the October 17 performance of string concertos by Polish, Czech, and Brazilian composers conducted by Zachary Schwartzman. All concerts will be made available on TŌN’s website. The additional November performances will be the final concerts livestreamed from the Fisher Center at Bard in TŌN’s fall season. The graduate students will finish with their academic courses for the remainder of the semester and then return in February 2021 to continue their academic and musical activities.

STAY TŌNED
TŌN has presented more than 60 audio and video streams since April 2020. They are offered on STAY TŌNED, its new portal regrouping all digital initiatives. The events feature weekly new and archived audio and video recordings showcasing recitals, chamber music, and symphonic programs, including collaborations with the Bard Music Festival that are also available on the Fisher Center at Bard’s virtual stage, UPSTREAMING. Some of the performances, such as the Sunset Serenade series, were performed outdoors for physically distanced audiences. Much of the content is also available on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Handel & Strauss
Sunday, November 1, 2020 at 2 PM
This concert pairs three works from the early 20^th century—including R. Strauss’ elegiac Metamorphosen, written in the final months of WWII, and one of Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’ earliest orchestral compositions, Cuauhnáhuac—with Handel’s Baroque Water Music Suite, composed for one of King George I’s royal water parties on the River Thames in 1717.
Leon Botstein, conductor
Handel: Water Music Suite No. 1
Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 1
Silvestre Revueltas: Cuauhnáhuac
R. Strauss: Metamorphosen

ACCESS: RSVP here to receive a direct link to the livestream on the day of the concert. This concert will be available for delayed streaming on STAY TŌNED starting on November 5.

Haydn’s Maria Theresa
Saturday, November 14, 2020 at 5:30 PM
Leon Botstein conducts three 20th-century works that all premiered in the U.S.—including the rarely heard Scherzi musicali by Black American composer Ulysses Kay, who taught at Lehman College in the Bronx for twenty years—along with Haydn‘s regal Maria Theresa Symphony, performed for the Holy Roman Empress in 1773.
Leon Botstein, conductor
Blair McMillen, piano
Varèse: Hyperprism
Hindemith: Concert Music for Piano, Brass, and Harps
Ulysses Kay: Scherzi musicali
Haydn: Symphony No. 48, Maria Theresa

ACCESS: RSVP here to receive a direct link to the livestream on the day of the concert. This concert will be available for delayed streaming on STAY TŌNED starting on November 19.

Bard College Academic Year and Safety
To adapt to current circumstances, Bard College created detailed protocols for testing and screening, daily monitoring of symptoms, contact tracing, quarantine practices, and physical distancing in the classroom and across the Bard campus. This includes specific protocols for musicians campus-wide in both its undergraduate and graduate programs.  TŌN has successfully pivoted its activities to comply and in addition to physically distanced rehearsals, the musicians have resumed their academic coursework. Since August, procedures required a separation of brass and wind instruments from the larger ensemble. Currently, restrictions on winds and brass have been eased, and limited numbers may be added to the Orchestra. This can be credited to Bard’s diligent testing and protocols.

The Orchestra Now
The Orchestra Now (TŌN) is a group of 72 vibrant young musicians from 14 different countries across the globe: Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Hungary, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Peru, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, the U.K., and the U.S. All share a mission to make orchestral music relevant to 21st-century audiences by sharing their unique personal insights in a welcoming environment. Hand-picked from the world’s leading conservatories—including The Juilliard School, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Royal Conservatory of Brussels, and the Curtis Institute of Music—the members of TŌN are enlightening curious minds by giving on-stage introductions and demonstrations, writing concert notes from the musicians’ perspective, and having one-on-one discussions with patrons during intermissions.

Conductor, educator, and music historian Leon Botstein, whom The New York Times said “draws rich, expressive playing from the orchestra,” founded TŌN in 2015 as a graduate program at Bard College, where he is also president. TŌN offers both a three-year master’s degree in Curatorial, Critical, and Performance Studies and a two-year advanced certificate in Orchestra Studies. The orchestra’s home base is the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center at Bard, where they perform multiple concerts each season and take part in the annual Bard Music Festival. They also perform regularly at the finest venues in New York, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others across NYC and beyond. HuffPost, who has called TŌN’s performances “dramatic and intense,” praises these concerts as “an opportunity to see talented musicians early in their careers.” 

The Orchestra has performed with many distinguished guest conductors and soloists, including Hans Graf, Neeme Järvi, Vadim Repin, Fabio Luisi, Peter Serkin, Gerard Schwarz, Tan Dun, Zuill Bailey, and JoAnn Falletta. Recordings featuring The Orchestra Now include two albums of piano concertos with Piers Lane on Hyperion Records, and a Sorel Classics concert recording of pianist Anna Shelest performing works by Anton Rubinstein with TŌN and conductor Neeme Järvi. Buried Alive with baritone Michael Nagy, released on Bridge Records in August 2020, includes the first recording in almost 60 years—and only the second recording ever—of Othmar Schoeck’s song-cycle Lebendig begraben. Upcoming releases include an album of piano concertos with Orion Weiss on Bridge Records. Recordings of TŌN’s live concerts from the Fisher Center can be heard on Classical WMHT-FM and WWFM The Classical Network, and are featured regularly on Performance Today, broadcast nationwide. In 2019, the orchestra’s performance with Vadim Repin was live-streamed on The Violin Channel.

For upcoming activities and more detailed information about the musicians, visit theorchestranow.org.

Leon Botstein
Leon Botstein brings a renowned career as both a conductor and educator to his role as music director of The Orchestra Now. He has been music director of the American Symphony Orchestra since 1992, artistic co-director of Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival since their creation, and president of Bard College since 1975. He was the music director of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra from 2003–11 and is now conductor laureate. In 2018, he assumed artistic directorship of Campus Grafenegg and Grafenegg Academy in Austria. Mr. Botstein is also a frequent guest conductor with orchestras around the globe, has made numerous recordings, and is a prolific author and music historian. He is editor of the prestigious The Musical Quarterly and has received many honors for his contributions to music. More info online at LeonBotstein.com.


Press Contacts
Pascal Nadon
Pascal Nadon Communications
Phone: 646.234.7088
Email: pascal@pascalnadon.com

Mark Primoff
Associate Vice President of Communications
Bard College
Phone: 845.758.7412
Email: primoff@bard.edu


 
https://www.theorchestranow.org/

The Fisher Center at Bard, long known for its memorable productions of rarely performed operatic works programmed and conducted by Maestro Leon Botstein, commemorates World Opera Day on October 25 with two special releases, adding to an already robust selection of archival HD opera recordings and contextual materials available free of charge on UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage.

World Opera Day is an international campaign to raise awareness of the positive impact and value of opera for society. As part of World Opera Day, the Fisher Center will present a lively and wide-ranging virtual conversation about opera today between Maestro Botstein and the acclaimed mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, who recently assumed the directorship of the Vocal Arts Program at Bard College. Their conversation will be available for streaming here, beginning October 25. Bard Music Festival members will receive early access to the conversation on October 20.

“Opera is immune to technological reproduction and is a unique amalgam of the visual language and sound,” says Botstein. “It is perhaps the most resilient, alluring, and enduring genre of the human imagination.”

Offering one of the most unique opera programs in the country, Bard presents a new, fully staged production of a rarely performed opera each year as part of the renowned SummerScape Festival. The operas are programmed in conjunction with Bard Music Festival, a summer series led by Botstein, which focuses on one composer each summer for an intensive series of concerts, lectures, and panel discussions. “Some of the most important summer opera experiences in the U.S. are … at Bard SummerScape.” —Financial Times

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fisher Center has been streaming selections from its rich archive of HD video recordings over UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage. On October 19, Bard SummerScape’s 2016 production of Pietro Mascagni’s Iris joins a robust selection of Bard SummerScape productions of rarely-performed operatic treasures available for viewing. Operas produced in recent years at Bard SummerScape (all currently streaming on UPSTREAMING) include the U.S. premieres of such neglected treasures as Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane (2019); Richard Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae (2012); Carl Maria von Weber’s Euryanthe (2014) and Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers (2015). These perfromances have been made available at no charge to ensure wider access to these rarely seen works. All of these programs can be viewed here.

About UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage. Archival Discoveries and New Commissions for the Digital Sphere.
UPSTREAMING broadens the Fisher Center’s commitment to reaching audiences far beyond the physical walls of our building, and offers new ways for us to engage with artists. Launched in April 2020, UPSTREAMING has released new content, including digital commissions, virtual events, and beloved performances and rich contextual materials from the archives of the SummerScape Opera and Bard Music Festival’s 30-year history. UPSTREAMING highlights different aspects of the breadth of programming the Fisher Center offers. New releases are announced via the Fisher Center’s weekly newsletter. To receive those updates and stay connected to UPSTREAMING, join the mailing list here.
#UPSTREAMINGFC

ABOUT THE FISHER CENTER
The Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present, as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 159-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.(10.19.20)
 
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/upstreaming/

Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning pianist and composer Marcus Roberts as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music for the 2020–21 academic year. A highly acclaimed modern jazz pianist, composer, and educator, Roberts is known throughout the world for his development of an entirely new approach to jazz trio performance as well as for his remarkable ability to blend the jazz and classical idioms. Hailed as “the genius of modern piano,” Roberts’s life and career were featured by the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes in a 2014 episode, “The Virtuoso,” in which he was interviewed by Wynton Marsalis. In addition to his renown as a performer and composer, Roberts is the founder of The Modern Jazz Generation, a multigenerational ensemble that is the realization of his long-standing dedication to training and mentoring younger jazz musicians. Roberts will teach a series of master classes to Bard music students this fall and spring.

Pianist/composer Marcus Roberts has been hailed “the genius of the modern piano”. His life and career have been featured on an episode of the CBS News television show, 60 Minutes, called “The Virtuoso.” The show traced his life from his early roots in Jacksonville and at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind to his remarkable career as a modern jazz pianist, composer, and educator. Roberts grew up in Jacksonville, FL where his mother's gospel singing and the music of the local church left a lasting impact on his own musical style. While he began playing piano at age five after losing his sight, he did not have his first formal lesson until age 12. Despite that late start, he progressed quickly and at age 18, went on to study classical piano at Florida State University with the great Leonidas Lipovetsky. Roberts has won numerous awards and competitions over the years, but the one that is most personally meaningful to him is the Helen Keller Award for Personal Achievement.

Roberts is known throughout the world for his development of an entirely new approach to jazz trio performance as well as for his remarkable ability to blend the jazz and classical idioms to create something wholly new. His critically acclaimed legacy of recorded music reflects this tremendous artistic versatility with recordings ranging from solo piano, duets, and trio to large ensembles and symphony orchestra. His popular DVD recording with the Berlin Philharmonic showcases his groundbreaking arrangement of Gershwin's “Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra”. One of Roberts’ more recent musical projects is the founding of a new band called The Modern Jazz Generation. This multigenerational ensemble is the realization of Roberts’ long-standing dedication to training and mentoring younger jazz musicians. Roberts is also an associate professor of music at the School of Music at Florida State University and he holds an honorary Doctor of Music degree from The Juilliard School.

In addition to his renown as a performer, Roberts is also an accomplished composer who has received numerous commissioning awards from such places as Chamber Music America, Jazz at Lincoln Center, ASCAP, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Savannah Music Festival, Seiji Ozawa and the Saito Kinen Orchestra (who commissioned him to write his second piano concerto, “Rhapsody in D for Piano and Orchestra”), and most recently, the American Symphony Orchestra.(10.13.20)
 

Concerts will Feature the World Premiere of Artist in Residence Erica Lindsay’s Adagio for String Orchestra (2020) and Works by Casals, Vivaldi, Mozart, Mahler, and Elgar

October 24 Event Will Honor Cellist and Faculty Member Luis Garcia-Renart (1936–2020)

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents a student and faculty showcase weekend, October 24–25, two free, live-streamed concerts featuring the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra, Leon Botstein, conductor, showcasing performances by celebrated violinists and new Conservatory faculty Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony, as well as students and other faculty from the Bard Music Program, Conservatory, and The Orchestra Now. The October 24 concert, at 7:30 p.m., is in honor of cellist and faculty member Luis Garcia-Renart (1936–2020), and features the world premiere of Artist in Residence Erica Lindsay’s Adagio for String Orchestra (2020), as well as works by Casals and Vivaldi. Garcia-Renart, who taught at Bard from 1962 until his death earlier this year, was a former student of Casals. The October 25 concert, at 3 p.m., includes performances of works by Mozart, Mahler, and Elgar. Both concerts are free and will be live streamed from the Fisher Center at Bard’s Sosnoff Theater. Reservations are required. Proceeds support the Conservatory Scholarship Fund. For more information, visit fishercenter.bard.edu.

October 24 at 7:30 p.m.
Bard College Conservatory Orchestra Leon Botstein, Music Director
Concert in honor of cellist and faculty member Luis Garcia-Renart (1936–2020)

Pablo Casals
“The Song of the Birds” (El cant dels Ocells)

La Sardana, Cello choir with faculty members Peter Wiley and Raman Ramakrishnan and cellists from the Conservatory, The Orchestra Now, and the Music Program

Erica Lindsay
Adagio World Premiere
Conservatory Orchestra with Erica Kiesewetter, conductor

Antonio Vivaldi
The Four Seasons
Conservatory Orchestra
with faculty soloists Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony, violinsOctober 25 at 3 p.m.
Bard College Conservatory Orchestra Leon Botstein, Music Director

W. A. Mozart
Serenade No. 6 in D Major, KV 239 “Serenata notturna”

Gustav Mahler
Adagietto from Symphony No. 5

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)
Introduction and Allegro, for string quartet and string orchestra in G Major, Op.47


BARD COLLEGE CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC

Tan Dun, Dean

Frank Corliss, Director

Marka Gustavsson, Associate Director

The Bard College Conservatory of Music expands Bard’s spirit of innovation in arts and education. The Conservatory, which opened in 2005, offers a five-year, double-degree program at the undergraduate level and, at the graduate level, programs in vocal arts and conducting. At the graduate level the Conservatory also offers an Advanced Performance Studies program and a two-year Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship. The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, established in 2017, offers a unique degree program in Chinese instruments.

For more information, see bard.edu/conservatory.
 
(10.08.20)

 
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) presents Sky Hopinka: Centers of Somewhere opening October 17, 2020, a focused look at key ideas, preoccupations, and methods in the work of artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka (born 1984 in Ferndale, Washington). In order to limit capacity in the museum guests must register in advance - see below for details on how to visit.

A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka has become recognized for video work that centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and that explores language as a container of culture. Within the trajectory of experimental cinema, Hopinka contributes to the development of Indigenous aesthetics, insisting on a profoundly subjective position that destabilizes entrenched colonial perspectives and related descriptions of land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood. Significant to his work is the study and teaching of the near extinct Indigenous language chinuk wawa. His films are sometimes subtitled in English and chinuk wawa or the language Hočąk, and move between concepts in each linguistic system to subvert and question them.

Centers of Somewhere will present a newly commissioned, multi-channel work Here you are before the trees (2020), alongside a selection of recent videos and photography. The newly commissioned work will explore Indigenous histories of the Hudson Valley as they are connected to other regions in the U.S. Each channel of the new installation will focus on a different aspect of these landscapes, including the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohican Indians who were relocated from the Hudson Valley region to Wisconsin near Hopinka’s tribal homeland. The installation also incorporates research on Henry Roe Cloud, a Ho-Chunk tribal member from Wisconsin who was a contributor to the Merriam Report of 1928 as well as the prolific and influential writer Vine Deloria Jr. and his father, Vine Deloria Sr. who was a graduate of St. Stephen’s College, Bard’s first incarnation. Centers of Somewhere will also present a new series of sixteen photographs entitled Breathings (2020) that were shot throughout the U.S. in 2020. While the photographs within the Breathings series range in locations and subject matter, a text binds them, with its handwritten lines encircling the borders of each image. For instance, a line around a cold Chicago intersection devoid of people reads:  “I think of my home tonight. I don't have any resolutions, but I've felt so much through these streets, these neighborhoods. This land and this Land hold so much, and this pain and this Pain call for salves we already have, still needing to be wrapped and poulticed.”

Centers of Somewhere also includes several short video works by Hopinka including Dislocation Blues (2017), an experimental documentary of the Standing Rock protests, offering what the artist calls an “incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections” around the historic event and its potential; Jáaji Approx (2015), which layers recordings of Hopinka’s father over landscapes that the two (father and son) have separately traveled; and, I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become (2016), an elegy to poet Diane Burns (Chemehuevi/ Anishinabe) that meditates on mortality, afterlife and reincarnation.

Sky Hopinka: Centers of Somewhere is curated by Lauren Cornell, Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator, CCS Bard. A series of on-line public programs for Centers of Somewhere will be organized by Cornell and Dr. Christian Ayne Crouch, Associate Professor of History, Bard College. The first virtual event was on October 19th at 5 p.m. In this special presentation, Heather Bruegl, Director of Cultural Affairs for the Stockbridge Munsee Community, gave an overview of local history with an aim to restore Indigenous presence at Bard College. This activation, issued from the community's current home in Wisconsin, acknowledges the continuing Mohican and Munsee relationship to their homelands. Registration for this virtual event and others (to be announced) will be available on the CCS Bard website (https://ccs.bard.edu/).

Alongside Centers of Somewhere, CCS Bard has co-published Perfidia a book of Hopinka’s writings with Wendy’s Subway, a non-profit reading room, writing space, and independent publisher located in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The book features an essay by Julie Niemi, independent curator and CCS Bard Alum 2017.

Exhibitions at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies, the CCS Bard Arts Council, and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.

Major support for Centers of Somewhere is provided by Lonti Ebers.

###
How To Visit
The CCS Bard Galleries are open Thursday through Sunday from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is by advance reservation only - reserve and confirm your timed tickets here. We have instituted new attendance protocols to ensure the health and safety of our patrons, community, and staff. To read more about all the safety precautions we have in place and to prepare for your museum visit, please read more here.  Reserved tickets are free to the public. We cannot admit walk-up visitors, so please confirm your reservation before visiting.

Access Policy for Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Bard Galleries
CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum are located in a single-level facility. Parking is available outside of the building in an ADA-compliant parking lot which has four accessible parking spaces at the end of the paved entrance way. If you have specific questions or requests about access, please write to ccs@bard.edu at least two weeks before your visit or the event you plan to attend and we will make every effort to accommodate you. During your visit, you may seek the assistance of Security and Visitor Service staff members who are present at the CCS Bard reception desk and throughout the exhibitions. Please don’t hesitate to contact ccs@bard.edu with feedback about your visit. To read our full access policy, please see our website here.

MEDIA CONTACTS:    
For further information, for images, or to arrange interviews, please contact:

BARD COLLEGE CONTACT:
Mark Primoff
Director of Communications
Tel: +1 845.758.7412      
Email: primoff@bard.edu        

PRESS ADVISOR:
Gabriel (Gabe) Einsohn
M: 202.415.8095
Email: Gabriel.Einsohn@gmail.com

CCS BARD CONTACT:                                    
Ramona Rosenberg                                        
Director of External Affairs                                          
Tel: +1 (845) 758-7574                                               
Email: rrosenberg@bard.edu
 
https://ccs.bard.edu/

Bard at Brooklyn Public Library microcollege student and artist Russell Craig ’22 has installed a mural honoring the Black Lives Matter movement at the entrance of the Philadelphia Municipal Services building. The mural, called Crown, is just steps from where the statue of controversial former Mayor Frank Rizzo once stood, and the site of large protests in late spring demanding the city remove the statue, which it did in June.
 
https://whyy.org/articles/black-lives-matter-mural-now-greets-visitors-at-phillys-municipal-services-building/

Bard College announced today the appointment of Tania El Khoury as Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater and Performance and Ziad Abu-Rish as Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights. Together they will lead a pioneering Master of Arts program in Human Rights and the Arts, planned to commence in Fall 2021. Designed by Bard’s Human Rights Program, the Fisher Center at Bard, and the Central European University, and launched through the Open Society University Network (OSUN), the interdisciplinary program will bring together scholars, artists, and activists from around the world to explore the highly-charged relation between artistic practices and struggles for truth and justice.

The appointments deepen Bard’s relationship with El Khoury and Abu-Rish, both of whom were visiting faculty at the college in 2019. Abu-Rish taught in the Human Rights Program, while El Khoury co-curated the 2019 edition of the Live Arts Bard Biennial at the Fisher Center at Bard.  Where No Wall Remains: an international festival about borders included nine newly commissioned projects by artists from the Middle East and the Americas. In addition to their work with the new graduate program, they will also teach in the undergraduate college: El Khoury is joining the faculty of the Theatre & Performance Program; Abu-Rish is affiliated with the Human Rights Program.

The proposed M.A. program in Human Rights and The Arts links the study of advocacy, law, and politics to critical theoretical-historical reflection, and focuses on the power of aesthetic, performative, and curatorial forms in the fight for rights. Anchored in the intersection of art, research, activism and social change, it will offer students the opportunity to explore interdisciplinary training, creative knowledge production, and practice-based research. At its heart is a perspective that looks beyond the U.S.-based art and NGO industries to identify, assess, and engage with the ethical, intellectual, and political potential of this emerging hybrid form. Students in the program will pursue a core of interdisciplinary courses in human rights theory and practice, supplemented with electives across the arts and humanities, including, in particular, the study and practice of live arts and performance, and curatorial practices.

“The international and cross-disciplinary dimensions of this new program make it groundbreaking and timely,” said Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of the Fisher Center and Director of Bard’s Theater & Performance Program. “Students will work with artists, faculty, and curators across OSUN's international network and beyond. Artists and human rights experts will inform each other’s practices, offering a fully integrated pedagogy. At a time when the ideals of open society and liberal education are threatened, this program will offer unique and fertile opportunities to study and share best practices across the world.”

El Khoury is internationally recognized for her installations, performances, and video projects. A Soros Arts Fellow for 2019, El Khoury's work explores political histories and contemporary issues through richly-researched and aesthetically-precise events focused on audience interactivity and concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. In as Far As My Fingertips Take Me, a one-on-one performance, a refugee artist painstakingly inscribes a drawing on the arm of a guest while narrating the story of his sisters' escape from Damascus.  In Gardens Speak, an interactive sound installation, the audience is asked to dig in the dirt to exhume stories of the Syrian uprising. El Khoury holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is affiliated with Forest Fringe in the United Kingdom and is the co-founder of the urban research and performance collective Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.

Abu-Rish was previously Assistant Professor of History and Founding Director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Certificate Program at Ohio University. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal. He has a highly successfully track-record of institution building, public scholarship initiatives, and graduate student training. He co-edited Jadaliyya, organized summer institutes for graduate students, and contributed to various research centers and academic associations. Abu-Rish has published widely on politics, economics, and popular mobilizations in Lebanon and Jordan, and is a co-editor, with Bassam Haddad and Rosie Bsheer, of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Old Order? (2012). He is currently completing a book entitled The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and the Institution Building in the Wake of Independence.

“Almost 20 years ago Bard was the first U.S. institution to offer a full, free-standing, interdisciplinary B.A. in Human Rights,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Program. “Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish will expand this to the graduate level and explore the forces that emerge at the intersection between human rights and the arts. The program will underscore the importance of the arts and humanities in confronting pressing social issues, and serve as an incubator of new ideas and strategies within the human rights movement at a time when it is widely understood to be under assault.”

The program is supported by the newly-founded Open Society University Network, a global project of Bard College, the Central European University, and the Open Society Foundations, with university and research partners stretching from Germany and Kyrgyzstan to Ghana and Colombia.7/8/20
 

Young Asians and Latinx in the United States are taking the conversation about racism in America home by tackling difficult conversations with their families. Bard alumnus Charlie Mai and his brother, Henry, caused a family row when they told their father, a retired FBI agent, that they were attending a Black Lives Matter protest in D.C. Since then, conversations about race in their house have progressed, with Glenn Mai admitting, “I’ve been wrong.” Charlie is a Class of 2018 graduate in the Theater and Performance Program, who now works as an artist in New York City.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/young-asians-and-latinos-push-their-parents-to-acknowledge-racism-amid-protests/2020/06/21/97daa5f2-b193-11ea-856d-5054296735e5_story.html

Bard College announces the appointment of Hannah Barrett as director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Prior to this appointment, Barrett, an award-winning artist and educator who has taught, lectured, and exhibited widely, was the international program coordinator at Bard College Berlin. Barrett succeeds Arthur Gibbons, who served as director of the Bard MFA program since 1990. Gibbons will continue teaching at Bard as professor of sculpture in the College’s Division of the Arts.

“I am delighted that Hannah Barrett has accepted the appointment as the new Director of the MFA program, one of Bard’s most distinguished graduate programs and one of the finest MFA programs in the country,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “She has been a terrific colleague and is uniquely suited to take this vital task on. She follows the remarkable, long, and distinguished tenure of Arthur Gibbons, who led the MFA to achieve its international renown. I thank Hannah and the faculty in the MFA program for their cooperation in finding a path to continue the excellent and innovative work of the MFA in this challenging time.”

Hannah Barrett is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based artist. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven her painting for over a decade, which has led to the current exploration of dandy monsters in domestic space. Recent exhibitions include a 2020 retrospective at Childs Gallery, Boston, a two-person invitational in 2019 at La MaMa Galleria, and a solo at Yours Mine and Ours Gallery in 2018. Selected group shows include Spring Break 2020, Platform Project Space, Dumbo NY, Kate Werble and Calicoon galleries in NYC, Mother Gallery, Beacon NY, and September Gallery in Hudson NY. Museum Shows include the Decordova Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Time Out New York, and Modern Painters. Barrett is on the curatorial staff of Soloway Gallery in Williamsburg. Barrett is also the illustrator of a vegan and lesbian themed children’s book “Nuts in Nutland”. Prior to coming to Bard, Barrett taught painting and drawing for 18 years and was on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Pratt Institute Brooklyn. Barrett holds a BA in studio art and German literature from Wellesley College and an MFA in painting from Boston University.

Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student—serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist students engage with accomplished faculty members, while developing their individual studio practices. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography, and music/sound.

The Bard College Theater and Performance Program has been invited by Theatre for a New Audience, in Brooklyn, to give three more live online performances of Mad Forest, as a coproduction with the Fisher Center. Bard students will be performing (virtually) off-Broadway. Performances on May 22, 24, and 27.

Mad Forest premiered on April 10 as the Theater and Performance Program's first-ever virtual production. Originally slated for the Fisher Center stage, the creative team transformed the work for live webcast. Ashley Tata directs this reimagining of Caryl Churchill's sly, funny, and surreal account of the Romanian Revolution, performed live by actors in isolation from 14 remote locations using a specially modified version of Zoom.

The live webcast of Mad Forest was a project of UPSTREAMING: the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage. Learn more about the production and watch UPSTREAMING performances on the Fisher Center's website.
https://www.tfana.org/current-season/digital-programming/madforest

Join Bard Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman for a remote, livestreamed conversation with Hugo Award–winning author N. K. Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy), whose new work The City We Became was released in March to great acclaim. Presented in association with Oblong Books & Music, the conversation is part of an ongoing Fisher Center series in which Gaiman discusses the creative process with another artist. The live webcast of this event is a project of UPSTREAMING: the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage.
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/gaiman-jemisin/#eventoverview

The Bard College Dance Program and GIBNEY, a New York City–based dance and social justice organization led by Founder, Artistic Director, and CEO Gina Gibney, are creating a new partnership to begin in fall 2020. This will be the fourth professional partnership launched by the Dance Program, which began in 2009 with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.

The Bard Dance Program/Gibney Partnership will provide unique opportunities for Bard students to work closely with Gibney’s resident dance troupe, Gibney Company, a commission-based, repertory company that works with renowned and rising international choreographers representing a broad range of aesthetics and techniques.

Gibney Company artists and directors Amy Miller and Nigel Campbell, and Bard faculty member and Partnership Coordinator Tara Lorenzen* and Director of Dance Maria Simpson will spearhead the partnership.

Each semester, artists selected by Gibney’s leadership will teach courses embedded in Bard’s dance curriculum, including studio courses for all levels of dancers, as well as seminar courses that address discipline-specific topics, such as Dance Writing as Activism. A special feature of this partnership will be the opportunity to perform Bard Dance Senior Projects at Gibney Center in Manhattan in the spring. Gibney will also offer yearlong artistic advising of student choreographers. Extracurricular workshops and master classes will further enhance the educational field of study. Gibney Company’s residency at the College will include open rehearsals and a public showing. This partnership represents a wide-ranging vision of what dance can be in a liberal arts curriculum at a time when artist engagement in both local and global communities is essential.

*Tara Lorenzen has danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Stephen Petronio, Beth Gill, and Maria Hassabi, has worked for the American Dance Festival and Kaatsbaan|cultural park for dance on their education initiatives, and has been teaching in the Dance Program at Bard College since 2016.
https://gibneydance.org/

“Life in the era of COVID-19, as in all times of crisis, amplifies our basic instincts. Do we become anxious or confident, selfish or generous, rigid or adaptable? The same applies to institutions. And right now, at this moment of national and global crisis, Bard College is demonstrating who we are: student-focused, innovative, entrepreneurial, and civically engaged.” —Jonathan Becker, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College

A broad network of Bard faculty and staff—including Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams in the Bard Architecture and Design Program; Maggie Hazen and Melinda Solis in Studio Arts; IT’s Doug O’Connor, Hayden Sartoris, and Christopher Ahmed; and the Philosophy Program’s Katie Tabb—has come together to produce face shields for frontline health-care workers who are grappling with a nationwide shortage of protective gear.

With two 3D printers loaned by Bard physicist Paul Cadden-Zimansky, Exo Adams and Santoyo-Orozco set up a makeshift lab in Tivoli to fabricate reusable face shields for health-care workers. When the lab is fully operational, they expect to produce up to 50 shields per week. Hazen and Solis have begun a production line as well, using 3D printers purchased with proceeds from a GoFundMe campaign established by MFA alumna Luba Drozd ’15 that has raised more than $20,000. A small batch of shields has already been distributed to Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson, New York, and the group is now looking for more distribution options in the Hudson Valley. Deliveries of face shields are also scheduled for Albany Medical Center and, in Dover, New Jersey, Saint Clare’s Hospital, where a Bard student’s relative works and on whose behalf the student made a request. Anyone interested in distribution or in assisting with the project should contact Doug O’Connor (oconnor@bard.edu), who is centralizing the distribution efforts with the help of CCS Bard students.

And in Annandale, members of the Fisher Center’s Costume Shop—together with Audrey Smith from Buildings and Grounds, Rosalia Reifler from Environmental Services, and Saidee Brown from the President’s Office—have sewn nearly 200 face masks for the essential College employees who remain on campus.
 
To learn more about virtual engagement opportunities at Bard, visit Bard Connects.

The Bard College Theater and Performance Program presents a live-stream of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest on April 10 at 7 pm.

Romania. December 25, 1989. A dictator is executed. A totalitarian regime topples. What happens next? Caryl Churchill’s 1990 play depicts life during and after a repressive dictatorship. Reimagined as a digital presentation by a professional creative team and student performers, this 30-year old work approached from a 2020 point of view powerfully resonates with our current global state. ⠀
⠀
YouTube Livestream ➡️ bit.ly/MadForestYT
Facebook Live ➡️ bit.ly/MadForestFB

#UPSTREAMINGFC #MADFORESTFC

 
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/spring-mainstage-2020/

Bard College student and photography major Peace Okoko ’21 won a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant. This grant offered her the opportunity to spend the summer in Kenya, where she would work to increase homeless women’s access to proper sanitary supplies and facilities. In its 14th year, the Davis Projects for Peace program invited undergraduates to design grassroots peace-building projects to be implemented during the summer of 2020 and selected the most promising and feasible projects to be funded. Although all 2020 Projects for Peace have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the foundation’s hope that circumstances will permit them to roll these grants forward to 2021.

Okoko’s project proposed providing reusable sanitary products (either cloth pads or menstrual cups) to homeless women in Nairobi’s slums. She plans to work with an organization ‘Bank on Me’ that distributes pads to girls and help extend their demographic reach. Her project would educate women on how to create their own clothing pads in hopes to foster future sustainability. Through Bank on Me’s network of local tailors, they would provide a one-day training on how to create the clothing pads. “Lack of access to menstrual hygiene products or sanitation facilities is dehumanizing, strips a person of their dignity and robs them the opportunity to have a peaceful existence with themselves and the community around them,” writes Okoko. “In 2020, access to sanitary products should not be a privilege but rather commonplace.”

Projects for Peace was created in 2007 through the generosity of Kathryn W. Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who believed that today’s youth—tomorrow’s leaders—ought to be challenged to formulate and test their own ideas.
https://davisprojectsforpeace.org

Two Bard College students have won prestigious Fulbright Awards for individually designed study/research projects and one student has been selected as an alternate. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.

Madison Emond ’18, a photography major from Barrington, Rhode Island, has won a Fulbright Scholarship to New Zealand, where she will pursue a photography project, initially developed as her Bard College Senior Project, Nature as Artist: Visualizing the Personhood of the New Zealand Landscape. “My photographic practice sets out to question traditional landscape imagery and how it affects the viewer’s relationship to the environment. Still images of nature can estrange us from knowing the Earth as a living, shifting, unruly being, locked in a process of steady, often violent, transformation. No matter how moving or dramatic a photograph of nature is, it often speaks only to the vantage point of its maker standing outside of it. Rather than making images of the landscape I make images with the landscape. What I mean is this: all my works are made through the interaction of photosensitive materials, the natural world, and moonlight – and nothing else,” says Emond. Emond has chosen New Zealand because it was one of the first nations in the world to grant legal personhood to landforms. In 2014, Te Urewera, a national park, was granted legal personhood. Three years later, the Whanganui River was granted this same status. Emond’s project has a cross-cultural component. “The United States has a passion for the natural beauty of its land and I believe its people have the capability to recognize a similar alternative relationship between its human and “natural” citizens. With that belief in mind, I plan to explore how legal personhood could benefit landforms in the United States.”

Michelle Jackson-Beckett, a Ph.D. student in the Bard Graduate Center, won a Fulbright Scholarship to Austria to conduct research on “Vienna’s Other Modernism: Design and Dwelling 1918-1968.” Jackson-Beckett has accepted a faculty position at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in lieu of the Fulbright scholarship.

Medora Jones ’18, who graduated from Simons Rock in 2016, has been named an alternate for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Morocco.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the largest U.S. exchange program offering opportunities for students and young professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and primary and secondary school teaching worldwide. The program currently awards approximately 2,000 grants annually in all fields of study, and operates in more than 140 countries worldwide. Fulbright U.S. Student alumni populate a range of professions and include ambassadors, members of Congress, judges, heads of corporations, university presidents, journalists, artists, professors, and teachers. Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose, actor John Lithgow, composer Philip Glass, opera singer Renee Fleming and economist Joseph Stiglitz are among notable former grantees.

 
https://us.fulbrightonline.org

On Monday, March 2, 2020, Berlin Prize–winning author Carole Maso will read from her work at Bard College. Known for her experimental, poetic, and fragmentary narratives, “Maso is a writer of such power and originality that the reader is carried away with her, far beyond the usual limits of the novel,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. Maso will be introduced by Bard literature professor and novelist Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented by Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. 
 
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=16614

On Tuesday, February 4, esteemed filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Bradford Young will take part in a discussion at Bard College exploring their career trajectories, works, creative processes, and commitments to the humanities. The event is part of a series, “Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today,” which seeks to diversify perspectives on the arts disciplines and to offer models for collective and inclusive community dialogues. The discussion is made possible through a 2019 FilmCraft Grant from the Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is cosponsored by Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program, Center for Civic Engagement, Art History Program, American Studies Program, and Africana Studies Program. The conversation will be moderated by Tabetha Ewing ’89, Social Studies Division chair and associate professor of Historical Studies, and Dariel Vasquez ’17, director of program design and management at Brothers@Bard (BAB). It takes place from 6–8 p.m. in Olin Auditorium (Olin Hall) and is free and open to the public. Registration is required. For more information or to register, click click here.
 
“Through this public dialogue, we hope to highlight the rich forms of black filmmaking that unfold on university campuses and celebrate the extraordinary work of these marvelous and generous practitioners who have not only changed which actors and stories appear on screen but also the ways audiences interpret and use films in their daily lives,” said Director of Africana Studies at Bard and Assistant Professor of Africana and Historical Studies Drew Thompson, organizer of the discussion series. “Ultimately, these conversations between artists aim to inspire underrepresented groups to pursue careers in the visual and performing art and to highlight the productive and impactful ways in which visual and performing artists engage communities.”
 

Patrick Vaill ’07 took his final Broadway bow as Jud Fry, after performing in Daniel Fish’s production of the musical Oklahoma! since he was a student at Bard. The Tony Award–winning Broadway production closed last weekend after an immensely successful run. Daniel Fish’s reimagining of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic began as a 2007 staging with Bard students in the Theater Program. Fish then adapted the production for Bard SummerScape 2015, took it to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, and then to Broadway. Patrick Vaill played Jud Fry in every iteration of the production. In this interview with the New York Times, Vaill reflects on embodying the iconic role and pays tribute to his alma mater.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/theater/patrick-vaill-oklahoma-broadway.html

“One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy.” —Salon.com

The Fisher Center at Bard, in association with Oblong Books & Music, presents a public conversation between two leading writers of fantasy and science fiction: Neil Gaiman, Bard professor in the arts, and Hugo Award–winning author N. K. Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy), whose new work The City We Became will be published in March. 

The program takes place on Saturday, May 2, at 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Tickets are $25 and can be ordered online at fishercenter.bard.edu or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900. $5 student tickets available to Bard undergraduate students through the Passloff Pass.

The conversation is part of an ongoing series in which author Gaiman discusses the creative process with another artist. Following the program, N. K. Jemisin will sign books in the lobby, which will be available for purchase, courtesy of Oblong Books. Signed titles by Neil Gaiman will also be available for purchase.

N. K. Jemisin is the first author in history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has also won the Nebula, Locus, and Goodreads Choice Awards. Her most recent work is the acclaimed short fiction collection How Long ’Til Black Future Month?, and her next novel will be The City we Became in March 2020. Jemisin has been a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops. In her spare time she is a gamer and gardener, and she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his phenomenally destructive sidekick Magpie.

Neil Gaiman is a New York Times bestselling author of novels, poetry, short stories, graphic novels, comics, journalism, and screenplays, who is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top 10 living postmodern writers. Works include The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neverwhere, Stardust, Anansi Boys, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), the award-winning Sandman series of graphic novels, and the short story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. Novels for younger readers include Fortunately, the Milk; Coraline, also an Academy Award–nominated film; and The Graveyard Book, winner of the Newbery (U.S.) and Carnegie (U.K.) Medals. He has written and directed for film and television, including a 2011 episode of Doctor Who that won the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Make Good Art, the text of a commencement speech he delivered at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, was published in a volume designed by graphic artist Chip Kidd. At Bard since 2014.
About the Fisher Center
The Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present, as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 159-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.

Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard College, has been given a $50,000 Film Independent Spirit Awards Filmmaker Grant designed to recognize a midcareer female director. Reichardt won the third annual Bonnie Award, named for Bonnie Tiburzi Caputo, who became the first woman to pilot a major U.S. airline when she joined the award’s sponsor, American Airlines, in 1973.

Kelly Reichardt is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose most recent work, First Cow, was screened at the 2019 New York Film Festival. Other films include Certain Women, starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone; Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy ( 2006), and River of Grass (1994). Honors received include a United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at major international film festivals, with retrospectives at several leading institutions devoted to the cinematic arts.

Reichardt has been teaching in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College since 2006.
https://www.thewrap.com/kelly-reichardt-spirit-awards-filmmaker-grant/

Cecilia Alemani MA ’05, director and chief curator of New York’s High Line, has been named curator of the 59th Venice Biennale. She will be only the fifth woman to curate the biennale in its century-long history, and the first Italian woman to do so.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/arts/design/venice-biennale-cecilia-alemani.html

Two Bard College students were awarded a highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship by the U.S. Department of State. Art history major Tatiana Alfaro ’21 has been awarded $5,000 towards her studies at Bard College Berlin. “I’m so happy to have received the Gilman award. It’s definitely an honor and was unexpected. My experience with Gilman will enhance my experience abroad. Studying in Berlin will help me have a more global view on the art world, and specifically, what I want my role within it to be. I believe it will be a good opportunity for me to see my personal and academic interests overlap, not only as an art historian but as a global learner.”

Biology major Mary Reid ’21 has been awarded $3,000 for her term at the Lorenzo di Medici Institute in Florence, Italy. “Studying abroad is an aspiration for many students but financial concerns are often an impossible barrier. I am incredibly privileged to reach for my own aspirations as a result of this scholarship, my supportive friends, and my wonderful family. While abroad, I hope to gain a greater knowledge of new cultures and ideas, as well as an increased sense of autonomy and introspection. I am eager to make my study abroad experience live up to my childhood ambitions. Thank you to everyone who has made this possible.”

Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000 to apply towards their study abroad or internship program costs with additional funding available for the study of a critical language overseas. The Gilman scholarship supports American undergraduate students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad and, since 2001, has enabled more than 31,000 outstanding Americans of diverse backgrounds to engage in a meaningful educational experience abroad. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. The late Congressman Gilman, who served in the House of Representatives for 30 years, chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee, and was honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, commented, “Study abroad is a special experience for every student who participates. Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views, but also adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
https://www.gilmanscholarship.org

“État remains a wonderfully twisted house of mirrors, where electronic gear and traditional instruments are treated as equals and often rendered indistinguishable from each other.”
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/11/778227044/10-classical-albums-to-usher-in-the-next-decade

Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse and Writer in Residence Francine Prose were in conversation at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library on the evening of Monday, December 16. The event celebrated Marcuse’s new book Fruitless, Fallen, and Woven, published by Radius Books. This stunning three-volume set traces the arc of 14 years of Marcuse’s work, from the iconic trees of Fruitless to the lush, immersive photographs of Fallen and Woven. Her work features elaborate tableaux of flora and fauna suggestive of the abstract, large-scale paintings of Jackson Pollock and the symbolism of medieval tapestries. She discussed the creative process with Francine Prose, award-winning writer and best-selling author of more than 20 works of fiction.
http://tanyamarcuse.com/

Hollywood Reporter names BoJack Horseman, cocreated and produced by Raphael Bob-Waksberg '06, the #6 best TV show of the decade.
Full Story

TIME magazine calle the animated series Undone, created by Bob-Waksberg, one of the 10 best TV shows of the year.
Read the Story in TIME

Raphael Bob-Waksberg '06 will be competing against himself at the Gotham Awards this year: his shows Tuca & Bertie and Undone have both been nominated for Breakthrough Short-Form Series.
Read the Story in Variety

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is pleased to announce that Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, has been selected as the recipient of the 2020 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of CCS Bard. For the past 21 years, the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence has celebrated and awarded the individual achievements of a distinguished curator whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive of exhibition-making today. The award reflects CCS Bard’s commitment to recognizing individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice. This year the award will be presented to Butler by artist Andrea Fraser at a gala celebration and dinner co-chaired by CCS Bard Board of Governors member Lonti Ebers and Chairman of the CCS Bard Board Martin Eisenberg, and will take place on April 7, 2020, at One Manhattan West, 395 9th Avenue, in New York City. Event location provided by Brookfield Properties with additional generous support from Lonti Ebers.

“Connie Butler represents the best of curating; independently minded, always curious, dedicated to artists and consistently bold in the scope of her exhibitions and choices of subject.  Her exhibitions are touchstones of curating in the United States—helping to redefine subjects and the institutions where she works.” —Tom Eccles, Executive Director, CCS Bard

The awardee is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. Past recipients include Harald Szeemann (1998), Marcia Tucker (1999), Kasper König (2000), Paul Schimmel (2001), Susanne Ghez (2002), Kynaston McShine (2003), Walter Hopps (2004), Kathy Halbreich and Mari Carmen Ramírez (2005), Lynne Cooke and Vasif Kortun (2006), Alanna Heiss (2007), Catherine David (2008), Okwui Enwezor (2009), Lucy Lippard (2010), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2011), Ann Goldstein (2012), Elisabeth Sussman (2013), Charles Esche (2014), Christine Tohme and Martha Wilson (2015), Thelma Golden (2016), Nicholas Serota (2017), Lia Gangitano (2018), and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2019).

“I am thrilled to receive the Audrey Irmas prize for curatorial excellence. The history of this award is truly a distinguished one and it is an honor to be among such incredible colleagues at this critical time in our field. Now more than ever our work matters and I continue to follow and support the work of artists and believe in the future of museums.” —Connie Butler

The 2020 award will once again be given under the name of patron Audrey Irmas, who has bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize of $25,000. Irmas is an emeritus board member of CCS Bard and an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award has been designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, and is based on his 2006 commission Bard Enter, conceived for the entrance to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.

Connie Butler is the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, where she has organized numerous exhibitions including the biennial of Los Angeles artists Made in L.A. (2014), Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth (2015) and Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space (2017). She also co-curated Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions which opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in April of 2018 and at the Hammer in October 2018; Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line, 2019 and Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence a retrospective exhibition which opened at the Hammer September 2019. From 2006 to 2013 she was The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she co-curated the first major Lygia Clark retrospective in the United States, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (2014); and co-curated On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010) and mounted Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, the first US retrospective of the artist’s career. Butler also organized the groundbreaking survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles where she was curator from 1996 to 2006.
http://ccs.bard.edu

The winners of the 2019 Concerto Competition were announced on Saturday, November 2, after the final round of performances at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Twenty-one students in the Bard College Conservatory of Music competed for the honor over a three-day period. This year’s winners are two undergraduates—Gitta Markó ’20, violin, who performed Concerto funebre by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and Yixin Wang ’23, guzheng, who performed Fragrance of Jasmine Blossoms by Zhanhao He—and a second-year student in the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy, who performed Shéhérazade by Maurice Ravel. The three winners will perform as soloists with the Conservatory Orchestra, The Orchestra Now, or the American Symphony Orchestra during the 2020–21 season.

You never know what you'll find in the Montgomery Place collection. The Curiosity Cabinet class, taught by Associate Professor of Art History Susan Merriam, meets regularly in the basement of the mansion at the Montgomery Place Campus to study some of the fascinating objects in the collection. Items include a mechanical cat, dueling pistols, and a chicken foot letter opener. The collection boasts well over 8,000 objects.

Students have been researching objects that illuminate the historical phenomenon of the curiosity cabinet. These collections of oddities, as small as a box or as large as a room, are precursors to the modern museum. In class on Tuesday, November 5, students gave presentations on their research, discussing such themes as shifting colonial structures in the era of the objects, the romanticism of nature and early American identity, and Victorian death culture.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, fabulous shells, valuable oil paintings, and exquisitely carved ivory pieces shared display space with oddly shaped vegetables, primitively taxidermied animals, and an array of other oddities in curiosity cabinets. Until relatively recently, scholars believed that the cabinets were merely eccentric exercises in the appreciation of peculiar or marvelous things. Recent research, however, has shown that the collections constitute a premodern system of classifying objects and an important step in the emergence of our modern taxonomic systems.

This course analyzes the emergence of the cabinets, the collecting practices that sustained them, the relationship between colonization and the cabinets, the curiosity aesthetic, and the role the cabinets played in the history of science. The main project for the course is to conceptualize and research a curiosity cabinet exhibition featuring objects from Montgomery Place. At least half of the classes during the semester meet at Montgomery Place, where students become familiar with the collections, learn about collections management, and do original research.

The exhibition of Montgomery Place objects and student research will take place at Stevenson Library over the winter, with an opening reception on December 10 from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
 

In “Evolution and Persistence: Bacewicz and Her Legacy,” Bard Music West “ensured that Bacewicz’s legacy continues to burn brightly.” Founded by Bard alumnae Allegra Chapman and Laura Gaynon, the organization presents an annual festival that endeavors to make 20th-century music relatable, in part by providing adequate context about the life and work of a single composer. This year’s festival presented three programs that illuminated the work of Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz.
https://www.sfcv.org/reviews/bard-music-west/bard-music-west-champions-the-grazyna-bacewicz-legacy

The soprano and Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna Julia Bullock is on the verge of an unconventional career.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/arts/music/julia-bullock-zauberland-lincoln-center.html

The Television Academy has honored Boris FX, the leading developer of visual effects plugins and applications, with three Engineering Emmy Awards. The Boris FX products Sapphire, Mocha Pro, and Silhouette have each been recognized for their technical achievements and contribution to the world of television. Bardian Ross Shain is the chief product officer for Mocha, and he accepted the award at the 71st Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening, October 23, 2019, at the JW Marriott Hotel Los Angeles. 
https://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/the-wire/boris-fx-wins-big-at-engineering-emmy-awards

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and the Human Rights Project announced today that Turkish sociologist, activist, and architectural theorist Pelin Tan has been selected as the sixth recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Her appointment coincides with the generous renewal by the Keith Haring Foundation of the five year-grant supporting the Fellowship, an annual award for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at CCS Bard and the Human Rights Project at Bard College. Tan’s appointment marks the beginning of the Fellowship’s second phase, and reaffirms the shared commitment of the College and the Foundation both to exploring the interaction between political engagement and artistic practices and to bringing leading practitioners from around the world into Bard's classrooms.

“The Keith Haring Fellowship brings some of today's most incisive and engaged voices to Bard.  This innovative, cross-disciplinary, fellowship provides for research, teaching and production of new ideas among the undergraduate and graduate programs,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Pelin Tan's current research concerns political movements that focus on climate justice, landscape, agriculture, and indigeneity, and particularly activist projects that put interactions with the non-human world at the forefront of their practice. She asks about how our concepts of justice and rights can be extended to landscape and territory, and about the role that critical artistic and architectural interventions can play in making these claims. She also continues to explore, and experiment with, alternative modes of pedagogy, new modes of teaching that work from the bottom up to challenge and transform the institutions of art and design education.   

Her practice combines scholarship, curating, and artistic and architectural creation. She was Associate Professor and Vice-Dean of the Architecture Faculty at Mardin Artuklu University in Turkey from 2013-2017, and has held visiting fellowship and research positions around the  world, from Hong Kong to Cyprus. Most recently she curated the Gardentopia: Cosmos of Ecologies project, in Matera, Italy, a program of European Cultural Capital 2019.

"Throughout her career, the work that Pelin Tan calls 'action research' has demonstrated that the borders between scholarship, activism, and creation can and must be transgressed if we want to pursue justice in this world. In this way, Pelin is an artist very much in the spirit of Keith Haring," said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Project.

Tan will take up her one-year appointment in September 2019, and spend the spring semester of 2020 teaching at the College. She succeeds the artist and curator Tiona Nekkia McClodden, curator Galit Eilat, architects Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, the artist and curator Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and the first recipient, artist Jeanne van Heeswijk.
 

Avallone’s 2019 Bettie Page Halloween Special is “a tribute to Bard,” he writes. The plot unfolds at “Annandale College” in upstate New York, where settings and characters are modeled on Avallone’s memories of Bard.
https://www.bleedingcool.com/2019/10/22/david-avallones-writers-commentary-on-bettie-pages-halloween-special-2019/

Sillman’s The Shape of Shape at the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art in New York City is “among the most valuable of the inaugural shows.” Sillman “ranges throughout the collection, across media, generations and styles, seeking out overlooked or excluded artists and unfamiliar works. Her effort parallels the approaches at work in the permanent collection galleries, but reflects a relatively robust visual appetite — the artist’s unfettered eye — that the museum needs more of.  The show’s dense installation encourages surprising connections …”
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/arts/design/moma-reopening.html

Bard professor and acclaimed photographer Stephen Shore was honored with The 2019 Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art at the annual Gala Awards ceremony on Tuesday, October 22 at Carnegie Hall in New York. The awards are part of the Lucie Foundation’s mission to honor master photographers, discover and cultivate emerging talent, and promote the appreciation of photography worldwide. Since 2003, the foundation has paid tribute to more than 135 of the most important figures in contemporary photography through the Lucie Awards.

Professor Shore’s work has been widely published and exhibited for the past 45 years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, 40 years earlier. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. More than 25 books have been published of Professor Shore’s photographs. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.
http://www.lucies.org/honorees/stephen-shore/