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For Rebeca Huntt ’12, the release of Beba, her debut, autobiographical documentary, came with some worry about how the film would be received. Members of her family are interviewed extensively throughout, with her own life serving as the subject of the film. After seeing audiences respond to the work, however, these fears have receded. “This film is bigger than my fear and what I think people are gonna think of me,” Huntt said in an interview with TIME. At the festival circuit, viewers would approach her after screenings to share their own familial histories, which were often “intense and intimate.” “Having people come and talk to me about these things that otherwise would be shameful is like, that’s why I did this,” Huntt said. “What is my fear in the face of that?” The film, which was released on June 24, 2022, has received widespread critical acclaim, with Huntt being named one of 10 rising Black women film directors by Indiewire. At the close of the interview, Huntt was asked what she hoped people would take away from Beba. “That it’s okay to be authentic,” she answered.

The detective, as a figure, looms large in the “American mythology,” says Theo Wenner ’09, speaking to Interview about his new book of photography, Homicide. “It’s like a Western, or baseball,” Wenner says. “I wanted to see what it looks like now. Does it actually exist like you think it does? The way they dress, the way they talk?” In creating Homicide, which visually documents a year spent alongside the NYPD’s North Brooklyn Homicide squad, Wenner says his studies with Stephen Shore at Bard informed his approach to this work of photojournalism. “It’s not one single thing that Shore imparts on you. You start to realize the importance of objects,” Wenner says. Objects, Wenner says, can be more true than a portrait, which captures a projection of how someone wishes to be seen. Objects, by contrast, are “unbiased,” especially when it comes to the grim subject matter of Homicide. “You’re staring at the person’s face and it’s like they got caught mid-sentence, the eyes open and looking off into wherever, there’s like a yellow M&Ms wrapper next to the victim,” Wenner says. “Those little details take on so much significance.”

Best known for Opus 40, “a massive hand-built sculpture, with ramps, walls, and pedestals, covering 6.5 acres in Saugerties” and “one of the first American ‘earthworks,’” the life and work of Harvey Fite ’30 will be presented in a retrospective running June 3–July 10, 2022, at the at Emerge Gallery and Lamb Center. Ahead of the exhibition, Chronogram covered the span of Fite’s life, including the influence dyslexia had on his life and his “fierce passion” and “geniality.” “Every life is a journey, but some people voyage farther than others,” writes Sparrow, noting Fite’s ultimate goal of “[reducing] the human body to its essential form, almost the way driftwood is smoothed by the action of water.” Let the Stone Tell the Story: An Inside Look at Sculptor Harvey Fite’s Studio Work runs June 3–July 10, 2022, at Emerge Gallery and the Lamb Center in Saugerties, New York.

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Lucas Blalock ’02 as assistant professor of photography. His tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year. 

Lucas Blalock ’02 is a photographer and writer whose work explores the potentials of mannerism in photography. He has been included in exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Malmo Kunsthall. He has also staged solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum Kurhaus in Kleve, Germany as well as in galleries in the US and in Europe, including Ramiken Crucible, White Cube, Eva Presenhuber, and Rodolphe Janssen.
 
Blalock’s books include, Towards a Warm Math (Hassla, 2011), Windows Mirrors Tabletops (Morel, 2013), Making Memeries (SPBH, 2016), A Grocer’s Orgy (Primary Information, 2018), Figures (Zolo Press, 2022), and Why Must the Mounted Messenger Be Mounted? (Objectiv, 2022). Oar Or Ore, an expansive survey of the artist’s work since 2013 as seen through the lens of recent exhibitions will be published by Museum Kurhaus later this year.
 
Blalock, originally from Asheville, North Carolina, holds a BA from Bard College (Class of ’02), attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received his MFA from UCLA. He is represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich and New York and by Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels.

Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence, received the Carrosse d’Or (or the Golden Coach), presented annually by France’s Society of Film Directors at the Cannes Film Festival. The honor pays tribute to “directors of innovative works with an uncompromising and daring spirit in directing and production.” Reichardt’s eighth feature, the “exquisite” art-scene comedy-drama Showing Up, is screening in competition at Cannes—one of only three of the 18 competition selections that are directed by women. The film finds Reichardt collaborating again with the actor Michelle Williams, with whom she began working more than a decade ago.

The platinum-selling rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with Bardian Nick Zinner ’98 on guitar, has released their first new music in nine years. Writing for the Guardian, Hermione Hoby observes a “sense of revelation thrums through their triumphant fifth album, Cool It Down,” due out in September. In an interview with the three musicians, Zinner says simply, “Performing with this band is the greatest thing in the world.”

Zinner majored in photography at Bard College and is also an accomplished photographer.
 

In an intimate, six-part webcomic for McSweeney’s, Nguyên Khôi Nguyễn ’04 depicted the fertility journey his wife and he took during the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout “In Our Own Time: One Couple’s Fertility Journey,” written and illustrated by Nguyễn, the couple is depicted at all stages of their journey to pregnancy via IVF and IUI. The series, which concluded on May 31, documents the experience and emotions of Nguyễn’s wife, the couple’s initial inability to go together to a doctor during the pandemic, and the hopeful, happy conclusion of their journey together.

Distinguished Writer in Residence Dawn Lundy Martin has been selected as one of 63 artists to receive a 2022 United States Artists (USA) Fellowship. Each year, individual artists and collaboratives are anonymously nominated to apply by a geographically diverse and rotating group of artists, scholars, critics, producers, curators, and other arts professionals. USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career. 
 
Martin is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. They are the author of several books and chapbooks, including A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007); Discipline (Nightboat Books, 2011), a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize; and Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life (Nightboat, 2015), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Their latest collection, Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press), won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2019.
 
Bard MFA candidate Marty Two Bulls Jr. is also a 2022 USA Fellow.

“Something this common needs to be normalized and talked about,” says Hannah Bronfman ’11 in an interview with Ebony. Bronfman chronicled her three-year fertility journey, including a painful miscarriage, on YouTube and Instagram, an experience she says helped her feel less alone. “So many of us suffer in silence and this kind of just felt like the appropriate thing to be discussing and emphasizing that there’s no shame in this journey,” she says. With the help of a doula and an OB she trusted, Bronfman had a safe vaginal birth at a private facility, an experience, she emphasized, she did not take for granted. “Obviously, that’s not what most Black women experience, and I want to do everything I can to speak out, bring awareness to the lack of access, and share resources to people who need them.”

Bard College Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse constructs painstaking sets for her photographs, using found materials from the natural world to create “a kind of living and dying diorama.” With large custom frames set under a canopy in her backyard, she arranges dense and detailed settings for her photographs with plants, skulls, decomposing fruit, and animals to create fantastical images. “[G]iving the viewer an immersive sense of wonder is paramount,” says Marcuse. 
 
In 2005, she embarked on a three-part, 14 year project, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven, moving from iconic, serial photographs of trees in Fruitless to lush, immersive, allegorical works in Fallen and Woven. The photographs in Woven are as large as 5 x 13 feet.

Tanya Marcuse is an alumna of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, AA ’81. She teaches in the Photography Program at Bard College and has been a member of the faculty since 2012.

Four Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. The recipients of this cycle’s Gilman scholarships are American undergraduate students attending 536 U.S. colleges and represent 49 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, who will study or intern in 91 countries around the globe through April 2023. 

Computer science and Asian studies joint major Asyl Almaz ’24, from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, has been awarded $4,000 towards her studies via Bard’s Tuition Exchange at Waseda University in Tokyo for fall 2022. “Coming from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, it has not been an easy journey immersing myself into a different culture when I moved to America for college—let alone another one. I am so incredibly grateful to receive the Gilman scholarship to be able to spend a semester in Waseda. This will ensure that I will be able to not only step foot in another country and learn so many new things about Asian history and culture, but also to be able to afford the expenses that I will have to pay there,” said Almaz.

Music and Asian studies joint major Nandi Woodfork-Bey ’22, from Sacramento, California, has been awarded $3,500 to study at the American College of Greece for fall 2022. “I’m immensely grateful to have received the Gilman Scholarship. I look forward to spending a semester abroad in Greece as I expand and diversify my studies in music and culture. Studying abroad will help me build the global and professional skills needed to succeed in my future endeavors, and I’m thankful that the Gilman program has further helped me achieve this opportunity” said Woodfork-Bey.

Theater major Grant Venable ’24, from Sherman Oaks, California, received a Gilman-DAAD scholarship and has been awarded $5,000 to study at Bard College Berlin for fall 2022. “I am honored to be able to attend Bard College in Berlin with the help of the Gilman scholarship. This scholarship will allow me to pursue my passion for theater and challenge my work as a performance artist through my studies in Berlin,” said Venable.

Philosophy major Azriel Almodovar ’24, from Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, has been awarded $3,500 to study in Taormina, Italy on Bard’s Italian Language Intensive program in summer 2022. “Thanks to the Gilman Scholarship, I am able to study abroad with no financial issues and really take advantage of all that the Italian Intensive Program has to offer. I am very grateful for being a recipient and look forward to my time abroad,” said Almodovar.

Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 34,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. 

As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”

The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but 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.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org

Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History Susan Aberth, Critic in Residence Ed Halter, and Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Alex Kitnick were published in the May 2022 edition of Artforum, alongside alumnus Tim Griffin MFA ’99. Aberth reviewed Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art, an exhibition on view now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which includes work Aberth says “inspires us as we depart to contemplate how limited our human perceptions of this world and everything that surrounds it really are.” Halter reviewed the work of the Otolith Group, seeing in their body of work “intimations of a sixth sense that may be cinema’s truly primary role, an inner sense of space and time, of forward motion—that is to say, our deepest sense of orientation in the world, the basis for all image schemas and conceptual mapping.” Kitnick reviewed Lifes, on view now at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, an eclectic exhibition that includes, among other things, “nine marble lions occasionally mounted by dancers” and “a neo-Constructivist monument to interspecies intermingling.” Finally, Griffin reviewed the work of Virginia Overton, noting that her various sculptures “never quite let go of their histories.” 

Read “Don’t Give up the Ghost” by Aberth
 
Read “Today, in a Hundred Years” by Halter
 
Read “Group Think” by Kitnick

Read “Make History” by Griffin

Bard College’s Division of the Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Angelica Sanchez as assistant professor of music. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year. 
 
Pianist, composer, and educator Angelica Sanchez moved to New York from Arizona in 1995. Since moving to the East Coast Sanchez has collaborated with such notable artists as Wadada Leo Smith, Paul Motian, Richard Davis, William Parker, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Nicole Mitchell, Rob Mazurek, Tom Rainey, Tim Berne, Mario Pavone, amongst others. 
 
Her music has been recognized in national and international publications including Jazz Times, the New York Times, Down Beat, Jazziz and Chicago Tribune amongst others. She was also the 2008 recipient of a French/American Chamber Music America grant, the 2011 Rockefeller Brothers Pocantico artist residency, the 2021 Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice Score Compilation Grant, and the 2021 Civitella Fellowship, Italy. 
 
Sanchez’ debut solo CD “A Little House” was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and her recording with Marilyn Crispell “How to Turn the Moon” was chosen as one of the best recordings of 2020 in the New York City Jazz Record and was voted as one of the top 50 best recordings in 2020, NPR critics poll. Sanchez leads numerous groups including her nonet that will release a new recording in 2022 on the Pyroclastic label. A new trio recording with Michael Formanek and Billy Hart will be released on Sunnyside Records in 2022. Sanchez holds a master’s degree from William Paterson University in Jazz Arranging. www.angelicasanchez.com

Bard professor and alumnus Tim Davis ’91 has created a “composite portrait of American housing, civic space, and civil service, photographed one mailbox at a time.” So writes Frances Richard in an essay in Places exploring Davis’s images, most of which were taken in upstate New York. “They say a lot about housing,” Davis observes. “Most Americans don’t own their own homes and these mailboxes, often overlain with multiple residents’ names, show the amazing diversity in our country. … They tell you who lives there in a way that is fairly shockingly revealing, in a time when anonymity is so prized; they represent a sense of porousness between the invisible interior of a home and the public.” Tim Davis is an associate professor of photography at Bard College. He has been a member of the faculty since 2003.
 

The International Center of Photography (ICP) has honored Sky Hopinka, assistant professor of film and electronic arts, with a 2022 Infinity Award in Art. “ICP’s annual Infinity Awards celebrate visionary photographers and the power of the image,” said David E. Little, Executive Director of ICP. “This year, we honor artists whose bodies of work focus on environmental justice, climate change, conservation, and related environmental issues—among the most critical concerns of our time. We are proud to acknowledge the winners not only for their work, but for their contributions to conversations furthering images and imagemaking as forms of empowerment and catalysts for social change.”
 
The 2022 Infinity Award Categories and Recipients are: Sebastião Salgado (Lifetime Achievement), Gabriela Hearst (Trustees), Sky Hopinka (Art), Esther Horvath (Emerging Photographer) and  Acacia Johnson (Documentary Practice and Photojournalism). Recipients were honored at the 38th Annual Infinity Awards at Ziegfeld Ballroom in New York City. ICP is the world’s leading museum and school dedicated to photography and visual culture. Its annual Infinity Awards are among the leading honors for excellence in the field.

As part of its 2022 “Culture” issue, T, the New York Times Style Magazine, interviewed Tschabalala Self ’12, Bard alumna and visiting artist in residence, on the creative life and the connection between her practice of sewing and familial identity. Her mother collected fabric, Self says, something that comes to mind as she incorporates sewing into her artistic repertoire. Her mother could make a dress from scratch—something Self says is beyond her. “For me, sewing’s a kind of collaging,” Self said. “And it does have this association with my mom, who’s one of the most important people to me. Working this way feels like honoring her.” A part of “24 Hours in the Creative Life,” Self’s interview is part of an issue that Hanya Yanagihara, editor in chief of T, says “is dedicated to living a creative life, which is something that all of us, whether self-proclaimed artists or not, have available to us.” The issue also features advice for early- and mid-career artists from Bard faculty member Nayland Blake ’82.
 
Read More in T

Five Bard College students have won Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects, graduate study, and English teaching assistantships. 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.

Mercer Greenwald ’22, a German Studies major from Williamstown, MA, has won a Fulbright Research and Teaching Assistantship Award in Austria for the 2022–23 academic year. As a Combined Research and Teaching Fulbright Scholar, Greenwald will spend the year immersed in the cultural life of the city of Vienna, where she will teach English and write an independent research project on the topic of “concomitant being” in the work of Austrian writer and thinker Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920–1977). Greenwald will begin doctoral study in Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University in the fall of 2023.

Maya Frieden ’22 (they/them), an art history and visual culture major, has won a Fulbright Study/Research Award to support graduate study in the Netherlands for the 2022–23 academic year. Frieden will spend the year in the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures. “I have often questioned the sustainability of the current pace at which the design industry is progressing. Embedded within every designed element--from object design to urban design--are intentions that can be sensed, even subtly, by those encountering them, and they frequently symbolize and materialize exclusionary or prohibitive ideologies,” says Frieden. “The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Master’s program, Art & Culture: Design Cultures, understands the significance of historical, sociological and environmental research within the field of design, training students with the skills to interpret, discuss and interact with the discipline, so that we will be equipped to contribute in quickening the pace. By studying in this Master’s program, I will develop additional strategies for noticing the presence or absence of sensitivity within design, while also improving my capabilities for communicating such analyses, and working with those in positions that influence how our world is designed.”

Paola Luchsinger ’20, a Spanish major from Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, has won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Greece for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend the year in Athens teaching English elementary through secondary students at Athens College–Hellenic American Educational Foundation. “As an English Teaching Assistant in Greece, I hope to gain an idea of Greek perceptions of American culture while also representing a positive image of the United States. I have chosen Greece as my destination because a year in Greece will give me the opportunity to become fluent in Greek through immersion and improve my knowledge of modern Greek society,” says Luchsinger.

Lance Sum ’21 (BHSEC Manhattan ’19), an anthropology major from Brooklyn, NY, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Taiwan for the 2022–23 academic year. He intended to teach English and participate in intensive outdoor adventures, explore large influential cultural institutions in the major cities of Taiwan, host peer review writing and poetry sessions, and educate his Taiwanese community members about his experience in growing up in New York City. “I think Taiwan could offer me a more magnified perspective of a community who has preserved their own culture through much political and colonial pressure, an experience that would help me develop my cultural understanding for others,” says Sum.

Jordan Donohue ’22, a historical studies major, won a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Award in Brazil for the 2022–23 academic year. She will spend in the year teaching English and deepening her knowledge around music and farming. Continuing her past work with Indigenous groups internationally, she plans to engage with and learn from the Indigenous populations of Brazil. Additionally, Jordan has studied Portuguese for seven years and will utilize her time as a Fulbright scholar to advance her fluency and prepare for further academic research on the language and culture of Brazil.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. Fulbright creates connections in a complex and changing world. In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad. us.fulbrightonline.org.

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Thena Jean-hee Tak as Assistant Professor of Architectural Studies. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year. Professor Tak joins the team of designers and scholars who are building Architecture, among the newest and most dynamic academic programs at Bard College.

Thena Jean-hee Tak is a researcher, designer, and the founder and principal of LILO: Little Office, a design practice that privileges alternative ways of seeing and thinking.  The practice considers stories of entanglement, slowness, reciprocity, and the quotidian through the weaving of architecture, land, and art.  Her current research engages the notion of surrogates as both a point of inquiry and a working methodology with a particular focus on its relationship to the more-than-human world.   She has also worked professionally at a number of renowned offices including, Vincent James Architects Associates in Minneapolis, Howeler and Yoon Architecture in Boston, and Barkow Leibinger Architects in Berlin.  As an educator, she has taught at the University of British Columbia School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, the University of Minneapolis College of Design, and Cornell University’s Architecture, Art, and Planning.  She holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design with Distinction and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University Architecture, Art and Planning.

Bard College seniors Ashley Eugley ’22 and Andy Garcia ’22 have been awarded prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowships, which provide for a year of travel and exploration outside the United States. Continuing its tradition of expanding the vision and developing the potential of remarkable young leaders, the Watson Foundation selected Eugley and Garcia as two of 42 students to receive this award for 2022-23. The Watson fellowship offers college graduates of unusual promise a year of independent, purposeful exploration and travel—in international settings new to them—to enhance their capacity for resourcefulness, imagination, openness, and leadership and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community. Each Watson Fellow receives a grant of $36,000 for 12 months of travel and independent study. Over the past several years, 24 Bard seniors have received Watson fellowships. 

Ashley Eugley ’22, from South Bristol, Maine, will challenge the hegemony of conventional, top-down scientific approaches by exploring community science initiatives in across four continents. She will work directly with communities and nonprofit organizations, seeking to learn how participatory science efforts diverge from the paradigmatic model and how they are leveraged to monitor change, combat environmental injustice, enhance resilience, and bolster agency. An Environmental and Urban Studies major with a focus on economics, policy, and global development, Eugley says: “Environment is everything: it is a determinant of health, happiness, and agency. Unfortunately, communities across the world lack access to clean air, potable water, and uncontaminated soil, factors that are essential to environmental security and justice. Rather than passively enabling environmental inequality to persist, communities can use participatory science to monitor hazards and leverage their findings to advocate for justice. This approach diverges from the mainstream paradigm of institutionalized science by empowering non-experts to use accessible scientific approaches to enhance their knowledge, resilience, and agency.” She will spend her Watson year in South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and Ireland

Andy Garcia ’22, from New York City, will visually theorize, through a photographic lens, what the present and future of the African diaspora would be if colonization and slavery had not occurred. Using using their 23andMe results as an itinerary, Garcia will confront the sinister colonial history that has caused fractures and gaps in the understanding of identity in African diasporic descendants. A photography major, Garcia says: “African diasporic people have ended up in these places as a result of immigration, expatriation, and slavery. In creating a visual Afro-futurist media grounded in my lens as a person whose identity has been fractured by colonialism and slavery, I will materialize theories on the future of the African diaspora. This engagement with my ancestral history will enable me to rethink notions of identity beyond just connections to land in a global history marked by forced and coerced immigration.” They will spend their Watson year in Spain, France, Nigeria, Senegal, Egypt and, hopefully Pakistan.

A Watson Year provides fellows with an opportunity to test their aspirations and abilities through a personal project cultivated on an international scale. Watson Fellows have gone on to become leaders in their fields including CEOs of major corporations, college presidents, Emmy, Grammy and Oscar Award winners, Pulitzer Prize awardees, artists, diplomats, doctors, entrepreneurs, faculty, journalists, lawyers, politicians, researchers and inspiring influencers around the world. Following the year, they join a community of peers who provide a lifetime of support and inspiration. More than 3000 Watson Fellows have been named since the inaugural class in 1969. For more information about the Watson Fellowship, visit: https://watson.foundation.

Architecture at Bard, a new undergraduate program codirected by Assistant Professors of Architectural Studies Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams, is now in its fourth semester. The program, featured on Bloomberg CityLab, approaches the discipline and practice of architecture as a matter of public concern—an aesthetic spatial practice whose propositions aim to reconfigure our collective present toward more just futures. “Essentially, says Adams, the program seeks to untangle the social and economic forces that produce buildings and cities: ‘How does that all operate within the background [of architecture] and why are we not talking about it more?’ ”

In an interview with Coda Story, Maria Sonevytsky, associate professor of anthropology and music, spoke to the history and future of Ukrainian music—a category which is itself under political dispute. In Sonevytsky’s work studying Ukrainian music and its relation to national identity, she has written widely about hybrid works that imagine futures, “even if just a wish for the survival of a past.” In addition to her scholarship on groups such as the Dakh Daughters and Vopli Vidopliassova, Sonevytsky is equally interested in street musicians, who even now play in the streets of Kyiv. “I’m thinking about very ordinary musicians, noncelebrities, who are playing music on the streets of Odesa or on the streets of Kyiv in defiance of this unjust war,” Sonevytsky says. “I think these ordinary acts of defiance, these people playing music on the streets as they’re surrounded by barricades and sandbags, have been incredibly moving to watch.”
 
Read More in Coda Story

Patrick Vaill ’07 returns as Jud Fry for the London run of Daniel Fish’s Tony Award–winning, re-imagined, and re-orchestrated revival of Oklahoma! Vaill originated and humanized the role of Jud Fry, the play’s villain, while still a theater and performance student at Bard in Fish’s 2007 staging (commissioned by the then Director of Bard’s Theater Program JoAnne Akalaitis). When Fish then adapted the production for Bard’s 2015 SummerScape season, Vaill was cast again as Jud Fry and stayed with the production until 2020 as it went from off-Broadway to Broadway. Now, he will reprise the role in the U.K. premiere of Fish’s production at the West End's Young Vic Theatre in London. Previews start April 26, and opening night is set for May 5 with the run scheduled to continue through June 25.

It might seem natural that visual artists look to the visual for inspiration, but what about the written word? Mieke Marple, writing for LitHub, spoke with 14 contemporary artists about how reading influences their work, including Jibade-Khalil Huffman ’03 and Azikiwe Mohammed ’05. Huffman, whose work incorporates “subtitles, titles, and more abstract juxtapositions of text,” and who has published several books of poetry, says he’s currently reading Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib. In his work, “there is typically lots of veering back and forth between a clear sort of description/essay and the more indeterminate shifts of thought that poetry allows.” Mohammed, meanwhile, cites Todd McFarlane’s Spawn as an inspiration. “It is drawn out in a way that feels luxurious, for me, as a Black man, rarely able to have time exist as such,” he says. “The character Spawn is a Black man who has died, and in death found the time that I lack here while among the living.”
 
Read More on LitHub
 

Bard College student Elisabeth Sundberg ’22 has won a Davis Projects for Peace prize for her proposal, “Tracing The Turnrow Web: Appalachian Rising.” Human rights and studio arts major Sundberg will receive $10,000 to facilitate a series of collaborative art projects across the Turnrow network in West Virginia. Turnrow Appalachian Farm collective is a food hub connecting 100+ farms across West Virginia and providing fresh vegetables to their local communities. Working with farmers, artists, activists, and students, her work will “strengthen connections between the organizations within Turnrow and those between food producers and customers and celebrate the work that the different parts of the Turnrow food hub are doing, including education, food access, and strengthening local food landscapes.”

Sundberg’s project proposes to engage West Virginian residents with each other and their food systems through a series of community art events. Over the summer, she will facilitate a two week-long art project that includes the creation of a participatory mural painting, patchwork table cloth, and celebratory communal meal in each of four larger regions that Turnrow serves. This project is a continuation of a grant-funded community project Sundberg facilitated last summer. Like a traditional quilting bee, the community will gather to create these artworks together. The murals serve as a lasting visual representation of community work and the table cloths as an artifact which will be used by the network for potlucks, yearly business meetings, fundraising, and other events that Turnrow organizes. “Peace is not possible without food security and food justice. Many small towns in West Virginia don’t have a grocery store and rely on the Dollar General chain for their groceries. It is important to acknowledge that poor eating habits are not due to ignorance about healthy food choices, but due to lack of access. Peace is promoted when everyone has the right to local, sustainable, and nutritious produce, which is why organizations connecting farming and food access are so important,” says Sundberg.

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. To learn more, visit: middlebury.edu/office/projects-for-peace.

Sydney Oshuna-Williams ’24, who is majoring in film and electronic arts and philosophy, has been recognized for her commitment to solving public problems. Campus Compact, a national coalition of colleges and universities working to advance the public purposes of higher education, has named Oshuna-Williams one of 173 student civic leaders who will make up the organization’s 2022–2023 cohort of Newman Civic Fellows. The Newman Civic Fellowship recognizes students who stand out for their commitment to creating positive change in communities locally and around the world. 
 
As the founder of the Me In Foundation, Oshuna-Williams seeks to increase artistic education opportunities for underrepresented youth through social and cultural awareness year-round programming. In her first semester at Bard College, Oshuna-Williams created the Me In Foundation as a Trustee Leader Scholar project. The Foundation allows youth scholars to share their stories through a variety of different art forms and currently works with over one-hundred and fifty K-12 students in Upstate New York and Atlanta. Oshuna-Williams is also a Mogul in Training at Usher Raymond’s non-profit organization, Usher’s New Look, where she facilitates conversations centered around college and career readiness as well as financial literacy. Oshuna-Williams continues to use her passion for storytelling to bring untold truths to the surface because, as she says, “Every story deserves to be heard by the characters who live it."
 
Through the fellowship, Campus Compact will provide these students with a year of learning and networking opportunities that emphasize personal, professional, and civic growth. Each year, fellows participate in numerous virtual training and networking opportunities to help provide them with the skills and connections they need to create large-scale positive change. The cornerstone of the fellowship is the Annual Convening of Fellows, which offers intensive skill-building and networking over the course of two days. The fellowship also provides fellows with pathways to apply for exclusive scholarship and post-graduate opportunities.
 
The fellowship is named for the late Frank Newman, one of Campus Compact’s founders, who was a tireless advocate for civic engagement in higher education. In the spirit of Dr. Newman’s leadership, fellows are nominated by Campus Compact member presidents and chancellors, who are invited to select one outstanding student from their campus each year.
 
“Sydney Oshuna-Williams, a second year Posse scholar at Bard College, is a very active student addressing mental health healing in our student body (as a peer health educator specializing in the healing of BIPOC students) and securing pathways to creative careers for kids in our neighboring communities. Sydney is currently serving as a peer counselor (Bard's version of residential advisor) to support students in their living environments and a Sister2Sister mentor (a student-led mentorship program providing guidance and opportunity to young women of color). Sydney also partners Bard's neighboring school districts with schools in her home state of Georgia to bridge opportunity across geographical limitations,” said Bard President Botstein.

After leaving his job at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Gabriel Kilongo ’15 wanted not only to open a gallery, but to start a scene. His new gallery, Jupiter, which opened on March 5 in the North Beach community of Miami Beach, Florida, is meant to challenge not only where art galleries are supposed to open, but what they are designed to do. “I wanted to find a space that was not in a place that is already too trendy, already overdeveloped,” Kilongo said to the New York Times. The gallery, currently showing works by Marcus Leslie Singleton, will emphasize “emerging artists who are adding new perspectives to canonized art historical conversation,” Kilongo says.
 
Read More in the New York Times

Song of Songs Is Commissioned by the Fisher Center at Bard, Where Tanowitz Is Choreographer-in-Residence, and Which Also Commissioned and Premiered Her Renowned Four Quartets

The Fisher Center at Bard, which has become one of the world’s preeminent sources of major multidisciplinary performance works, presents a project that exemplifies its place on the cultural landscape: a new dance setting of the biblical Song of Songs created by the Fisher Center’s internationally celebrated choreographer-in-residence, Pam Tanowitz, with new music from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, making its world premiere July 1-3 as part of the 2022 edition of the Bard SummerScape festival.

Spiritual and erotic, playful and mysterious, Song of Songs (also known as The Song of Solomon) is perhaps the greatest of all love poems—a hymn of yearning, steeped in images from the natural world. It has inspired artists and lovers for millennia; some scholars argue that the entire tradition of Western love poetry springs from its glorious verses. Based on this radiantly beautiful text, Tanowitz’s collaboration with Lang, in which she explores her Jewish identity, is a collage of movement, sound, and song that reimagines ancient rituals of love and courtship and holds the sacred and profane threads of the Song in perfect balance.

In addition to choreography by Tanowitz and music by Lang, Song of Songs features production design by Tanowitz and her longtime collaborators Reid Bartelme, Harriet Jung, and Clifton Taylor; sound design by Garth MacAleavey; music supervision by Caleb Burhans; and dramaturgy by Mary Gossy. Betsy Ayer is the production stage manager. 

The performers include Pam Tanowitz Dance company members Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, Lindsey Jones, Brian Lawson, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura, and Melissa Toogood (rehearsal director); and musicians Emily Brausa (cello), Caleb Burhans (viola), Martha Cluver (soprano), Katie Geissinger (alto), Rebecca Hargrove(soprano), and Yuri Yamashita (percussion). 

Song of Songs follows the resounding success of Tanowitz’s two previous Fisher Center commissions: I was waiting for the echo of a better day, chosen as one of The New York Times’s “Best of 2021,” and Four Quartets, which recently played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was, after its Fisher Center premiere, named “Best Dance Production of 2018” by the Times. The paper pronounced it “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”

Pam Tanowitz, who is entering her fourth year as the Fisher Center’s choreographer-in-residence, says of the work, “I feel a deep personal connection with this work—an intimate, small-scale love story. In 2018, after my dad died, I started thinking about lineage, and Jewish identity, and wanted to make a piece that honors my father and my heritage, something I’ve never done. For me, the use of this text provides a framework to push myself artistically. I want to find a way to mirror the structure without being literal. I plan to deconstruct the duet form as I investigate how to give shape or feeling to a figure.”

David Lang explains, “It was Pam’s idea to make a big project that would be based on the biblical text Song of Songs.I responded to her suggestion by mapping out four different paths through the text, resulting in a new text for the music that I would write myself. Each of these paths applies a different literary filter to the original text, and each path tries to concentrate on the paradox that, for Judeo- Christian believers, the text is both a sensual description of the experiences of two lovers and, at the same time, a deeply spiritual exploration of a relationship with god. My hope is that, by examining this deep and powerful text from such different angles, these movements, taken together, may begin to reveal more of the original text’s emotional and spiritual powers.”

Bard SummerScape, described by The New York Times as “a hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure” and as a producer of dance works that provide “reliable transcendence,” returns this year June 23 - August 14 and comprises eight weeks of live music, opera, dance, and theater. Additional highlights include the 32nd Bard Music Festival, Rachmaninoff and His World; a new production of Strauss’s The Silent Woman, directed by Christian Räth; and a new adaptation of Molière’s Dom Juan, directed by Ashley Tata; and more. More information about the 2022 festival is here. 
                                                            
Performance Schedule and Ticketing
Performances of Song of Songs take place July 1 at 8pm, July 2 at 5pm, and July 3 at 2pm in the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center (Manor Ave, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504). Tickets, starting at $25 ($5 for Bard students), can be purchased at fishercenter.bard.edu or 845-758-7900.

About Pam Tanowitz
Pam Tanowitz is a celebrated New York-based choreographer and collaborator known for her unflinchingly post-modern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance to explore dance- making with a consistent community of dancers. Tanowitz is currently the Fisher Center’s Choreographer in Residence.

Her 2017 dance New Work for Goldberg Variations, created in collaboration with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, was called a “rare achievement” (The New York Times). Four Quartets (2018), inspired by T.S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece and set to music by Kaija Saariaho, was called "the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” (The New York Times).

In 2016, Tanowitz was presented with the Juried Bessie Award for “using form and structure as a vehicle for challenging audiences to think, to feel, to experience movement; for pursuing her uniquely poetic and theatrical vision with astounding rigor and focus.” She has been commissioned by New York City Ballet, The Royal Ballet, The Joyce Theater, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Bard SummerScape, Vail International Dance Festival, New York Live Arts, The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, Danspace Project, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Chicago Dancing Festival, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Duke Performances, Peak Performances, FSU's Opening Nights Series, and the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston. 

About David Lang
David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention as a passionate, prolific, and complicated composer. Lang is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms. 

Lang is one of America's most performed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalog is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike.

Lang's “Simple Song #3,” written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino's acclaimed film Youth, received many award nominations in 2016, including the Academy Award and Golden Globe. Recent works include his opera Prisoner of the State, co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam's de Doelen Concert Hall, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, and Bruges Concertgebouw; his opera The Loser, which opened the 2016 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the Public Domain for 1000 singers at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival; and his chamber opera Anatomy Theater at Los Angeles Opera and at the PROTOTYPE Festival in New York. His 2008 composition The Little Match Girl Passion won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Lang's works are performed around the globe by prominent orchestras, ensembles, festivals, and venues. His music is used regularly for ballet and modern dance including works with such choreographers and companies as Twyla Tharp, the Paris Opera Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and Benjamin Millepied. Lang is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe nomination, Musical America's Composer of the Year, the Rome Prize, a Bessie Award, Obie Award, and a Grammy Award. Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York's legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His work has been recorded on the Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Teldec, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, and Cantaloupe labels, among others. 

Funding Credits
The 2022 SummerScape season is made possible in part by the generous support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, and Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members. The 2022 Bard Music Festival has received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Commissioning funds for Song of Songs are provided by Jay Franke and David Herro, with additional support received from the O’Donnell Green Music and Dance Foundation. The Fisher Center on behalf of Pam Tanowitz Dance received a 2020 NDP Finalist Grant Award for Song of Songs, made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to address sustainability needs during COVID-19.

Steven Sapp ’89 and Mildred Ruiz-Sapp ’92 met at Bard, fell in love, and went on to create Universes, a groundbreaking national theater company of color founded in 1995, whose members include William Ruiz ’03 (a.k.a. Ninja) and Gamal Chasten. They are currently working on a piece, titled Maria, commissioned by Long Wharf Theatre, that explores the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, as seen through the eyes of a woman who has experienced a trauma similar to that of West Side Story’s heroine Maria. “With Maria, Universes intends to reclaim the way stories about specific communities are made without their consent, not to mention stories that white culture specifically tells them they have no right to have an opinion on,” writes Jose Solís for American Theatre.

Bard alumna and visiting artist in residence Tschabalala Self ’12, known for her figurative collage paintings of Black female bodies, has just launched a new brand collaboration. Her Ugg x Tschabalala Self capsule collection is made up of colorful twists on Ugg’s boots, slippers, outerwear, and accessories, which combine form, function, and Self’s exuberant creative vision. “It was kind of a natural fit,” she says. “Ugg is a brand that deals a lot with materiality and texture, and I deal with that stuff in my painting as well.” With this project, she notes, “I’m using a lot of the same aesthetic tropes and types of patterning and design and geometry that I would generally use in my practice, but the figure is not present.”

Ahead of their first solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Carolyn Lazard ’10 spoke with Frieze about their work and how they incorporate Blackness, queerness, disability, and collectivity into their aesthetic. A cofounder of the art collective Canaries, “a network of women and gender non-conforming people living and working with autoimmune conditions and other chronic illnesses,” Lazard sometimes feels uncomfortable with the idea of individuation, of focusing on one artist over another. “The truth is that my work comes out of a long lineage of Black, disabled, and queer people making art,” they say. “My practice doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it is made in relation to the work of other artists who have come before me, and those whose work I learn about day to day.” 
 
Lazard’s work, which spans different mediums, progressed from a love of avant-garde cinema, which they first came into contact with at Bard. Recently, Lazard has experimented with providing multiple ways of presenting a single artwork, both visual and non-visual. “Access has this capacity to break through the boundaries of medium, because of the way it makes art necessarily iterative,” they say. “Through access, a single artwork might exist as a description, as a notation, as sign language, as a transcript or as a tactile object—depending on what people need.” Still, though these categories inform their work, they are resistant to the market trends which seek to define artists, especially Black artists, by a singular trait or identity. “Most museums seem committed to receiving Black art, Black aesthetics, and Black politics—provided it’s on the museum’s terms,” they say. “It’s a complex time to be a Black artist, but when has it not been?”
 
Read More in Frieze
 
Learn More about Carolyn Lazard: Long Take

Translating Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices” for the stage, Justin Peck collaborated with Shaw and Eva LeWitt ’07 to create Partita, a new ballet for the New York City Ballet. While developing Partita, Peck discovered Sol LeWitt, Eva’s father, was an inspiration for the original score, which led him to her work, which he described as having “a dimensionality and theatricality” integral to this new adaptation. For LeWitt, the ballet spoke to her sense of her own work, especially her use of gravity. “That’s so linked to dance, to humans moving through space, and to the voice too,” LeWitt says. “Those gravitational universes are important to all our art forms.” Partita, performed by eight dancers in sneakers, featured set design by LeWitt, whose “vibrantly colored hanging fabric sets” served as the backdrop for the ballet when it premiered January 27, 2022.
 
Full Story in the New York Times

“Photographer Tim Davis’s latest book, I’m Looking Through You, (Aperture, 2021) is a welcome respite from all the chaos and clamor unleashed in the world right now. It’s a book about the unbridled joys of ‘seeing’ with a camera. It’s also a love poem to the crazy, freewheeling streets of Los Angeles,” writes Kenneth Dickerman for the Washington Post. Tim Davis ’91 is associate professor of photography at Bard College. He has been a member of the Bard faculty since 2003.

 

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Joshua Glick as Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts for a three-year period from 2022 to 2025. Professor Glick’s research and teaching focus is the comparative histories of film, television, and radio; nonfiction media; race and representation; and the civic uses of emerging technology. He will also be teaching in Experimental Humanities.

Joshua Glick is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History (University of California Press, 2018). Josh’s current book explores the rising interest in nonfiction on both the left and right of the political spectrum. It examines, in particular, the way documentary’s proliferation across new platforms has transformed the relationship between Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C. Josh is also actively involved in public humanities projects, collaborating with archives, museums, and community organizations. As a Fellow at the Open Documentary Lab at MIT, he recently designed the interactive online curriculum: Media Literacy in the Age of Deepfakes. He also co-curated the exhibition currently up at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York: Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen. The show investigates the history of media manipulation, the rise of “deepfake” videos, and how synthetic media can be used for the public good. Josh holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Prior to coming to Bard, he was the Isabelle Peregrin Assistant Professor of English, Film & Media Studies at Hendrix College.

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Masha Shpolberg as Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts for a tenure-track position beginning in the 2022-2023 academic year. Professor Shpolberg’s research and teaching explore world cinema, with special attention to Russia and Eastern Europe, ecocinema, women’s cinema, and global documentary.

Masha Shpolberg’s first book project focuses on the aesthetics of labor in Polish cinema of the late socialist period, examining how filmmakers sought out new ways of representing the laboring body at a time of massive workers' strikes—and how they co-opted, confronted, or otherwise challenged the representational legacy of socialist realism. She is also currently working on two edited volumes: Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe, forthcoming from Berghahn Books, and Contemporary Russian Documentary, under contract at Edinburgh University Press. Masha has contributed film criticism to Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Tablet, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a Ph.D. in Film & Media Studies and Comparative Literature from Yale University. Prior to coming to Bard, Masha taught at Wellesley College and the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Multiple Bard faculty members, both former and present, as well as several alumni/ae will be featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Works by Rindon Johnson MFA ’18, Duane Linklater MFA ’13, and Jon Wang MFA ’19 will be featured alongside those by current and former faculty Nayland Blake ’82, Raven Chacon, Dave McKenzie, Adam Pendleton, and Lucy Raven MFA ’08. David Breslin, co-organizer of this edition of the Biennial, spoke with the New York Times about the curation of work that spoke to the social and political conflict that has taken place since the last Biennial in 2019. “Our hope is that this show permits a taking stock, a way of seeing what we’re maybe not at the end of, but in the middle of,” Breslin says, “and how art can help make sense of our times.” Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept will open on April 6, 2022 and will run through September 5, 2022. This year marks the 80th edition of the exhibition, the longest-running of its kind.

Full Story in the New York Times
Read More on whitney.org

Lucy Sante—writer, critic, and Bard faculty member—pens an intimate personal essay for Vanity Fair tracing her journey as a trans woman, from the carefully repressed feelings of her adolescence to finally coming out last year. “Now I am aware that I live, as we all do, in a cloud of unknowing, where certainties break down and categories become liquid,” she writes. “None of us really knows anything except provisionally. Now, as Lou Reed put it, ‘I’m set free/ to find a new illusion.’” Lucy Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1999.
 

The Posse Arts Program celebrated its inaugural class of scholars, including a cohort from Puerto Rico that will attend Bard College this coming fall, at a virtual awards ceremony on January 24. Yadier Perez, one of 10 Posse Arts Scholars who will attend Bard, reflected on the significance of the award for his family. “I am thankful to Bard. You have given me the opportunity to show my brothers, my siblings, that pushing and fighting for your dreams can make them a reality. … We've all gone through hardships, but we're here to succeed. We've earned this. So thank you, Bard, for giving me the opportunity to make my mom proud.”

The program included remarks from songwriter, actor, and director Lin-Manuel Miranda, his father and political strategist Luis A. Miranda Jr., and U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona. President of the College Leon Botstein greeted the incoming Bardians with a message underscoring the importance of community. “To succeed, you can’t do it alone—you’re only as good as the people who help you and collaborate and share and support you,” President Botstein said. “It’s terribly important, the Posse idea.”

Addressing the new Posse Arts cohorts at the recent awards ceremony, Lin-Manuel Miranda said, “This really is an extraordinary moment. We are believers in the Posse process. Your time in school is a time for you to find your voice, find what you are passionate about. You’re going in with a squad and with a group of like-minded artists and you’re going to be able to lean on each other for support. You’re going to have an instant set of potential collaborators. Take advantage of your time and sink your teeth into the school. Get to know your Posse cohorts. And we are excited to be a step in your journey and to be able to say, ‘We knew you when.’”

Representing Bard, the first institution to partner with Posse to recruit students from Puerto Rico, President Botstein spoke about the outsized role the arts play in society. “We believe that the arts are not a separate way of life,” he said. “The arts are not decoration; they're not ornament. They're essential to any notion of freedom or autonomy or community, especially in a democracy. They are on the same level as physics, or mathematics, or economics or history and literature. And it's a wonderful addition to our student body, to have students from Puerto Rico.”

Twenty-seven high school seniors will attend college on full-tuition art scholarships totaling $5.2 million as participants in the new Posse Arts Program, an initiative of the Posse Foundation—a leading college success and youth leadership development organization. Selected from public high schools in Puerto Rico, New York, and cities across the country, the program’s inaugural class will matriculate this fall at Bard College, California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), and University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), respectively.

The Posse Arts initiative was conceived in collaboration with Lin-Manuel and the Miranda Family Fund. The program seeks to create a diverse pipeline of leaders in the creative arts by connecting promising art students from diverse backgrounds to top colleges and universities, where they attend as members of a cohort. Last spring, former First Lady Michelle Obama joined Lin-Manuel and Posse in announcing the launch of the program.

BARD COLLEGE POSSE ARTS SCHOLARSHIPS AWARDEES

Ariana Sofia Diaz
Naobie Angeline Garcia
Jadiel Omar Gómez Marín
Dashely Valeria Juliá Ramírez
Dyann Malpica Santiago
Gabriel Antonio Medina Maldonado
Kiara Arlene Peña González 
Yadier M. Pérez Pagán
Diego Andrés Santos
Pedro Emiliano Vázquez Colón

 
Read More

Opus 40, the 57-acre sculpture park created by the late Harvey Fite ’30, former Bard professor and alumnus, will begin 2022 with a combined $650,000 in grant awards. With these new grants, Caroline Crumpacker, executive director of Opus 40, has prioritized preserving the park and ensuring its success. The upkeep of Opus 40 would not be possible without this grant money, says Jonathan Becker, Opus 40 board president and Bard executive vice president, vice president for academic affairs, and director of the Center for Civic Engagement. "The (Mellon) Foundation’s grant, combined with the National Parks Service/Save America’s Treasures grant announced in September, will allow for a truly historic conservation effort and will secure the preservation of Fite’s sculpture for generations to come,” Becker said in a statement.

Full Story in the Times Herald-Record

Selected by actress Tilda Swinton, artist Cao Fei, and architect David Adjaye, Marie Schleef ’14 was named one of 10 recipients of the first Chanel Next Prize. The biennial prize awards Schleef with €100,000, devoted to a project of her choosing. Schleef’s work as a theater director and multimedia artist centers the female experience and challenges notions of the male gaze. Yana Peel, Chanel’s global head of arts and culture, said in a statement: “We extend Chanel’s deep history of cultural commitment—empowering big ideas and creating opportunities for an emerging generation of artists to imagine the next.” Also included with the prize is access to a network of mentors over the course of the next 20 months.
 
Full Story on ARTnews

“Dance has always been a radical act, even if it was covered in gauze and tulle.”
—Maria Simpson, Professor of Dance and Dance Program Director 

Dance Magazine features Bard College in its January 2022 issue, highlighting the work of Sam Pratt ’14 in its “25 to Watch” cover story, and interviewing Bard senior Leslie Morales and Professor Maria Simpson in “Dance with a Purpose,” an article about blending art and activism in your practice, even before graduation.

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence in the Studio Arts Program, spoke widely about his work in a talk hosted by Art Basel. Tracking his personal and artistic history, Gibson spoke at length about a period of his career during which he took a deliberate step back from the “traditional” studio space and worked in concert with Indigenous artisans and creators, some of whom didn’t explicitly define themselves as artists. Though his work is often seen through the lens of identity, Gibson spoke of an intertribal aesthetic he brings to his work, which often calls for Indigenous and queer liberation.



Full Video on Art Basel
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Two Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Art history and Italian studies major Francesca Houran ’23 has been awarded $5,000 towards her studies at the University of Trento in Italy, where she will be the first to participate in a newly established tuition exchange program with Bard. “Through studying abroad, I hope to further my knowledge of the hermaphrodite within the context of the Italian Renaissance and how it influences the gender binary in contemporary Italy. I am also excited to explore the ascending, vertically-oriented architecture of museums, churches, and monuments that prompts climbing and physical ascension as a symbol of conquest and hierarchy,” says Houran. “My overarching goal is to build a foundation for a career in ethical museum curation and nuanced communication of histories surrounding gender, race, and colonialism—a goal that traveling through the Gilman Scholarship will make possible for me as a low-income college student.”

Biology major and premed student Emma Tilley ’23 has been awarded $4,500 to study via Bard’s tuition exchange at the University College Roosevelt in the Netherlands. “I am grateful for the Gilman scholarship and excited for the opportunity to travel abroad and learn more about international healthcare systems and the ways that Covid has impacted nations differently. My additional focus is to continue working on promoting inclusion in STEM on a global scale,” says Tilley.

Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 34,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. 

As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”

The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but 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.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org.

In a thorough exploration of recent photography books for the New York Times, Lucy Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, reviews works by Annie Leibovitz, Harry Gruyaert, Catherine Opie, and more, as well as a new book by Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. Sante calls the physical mass of Gilles’ new work “intimidating,” going on to say that the book is nothing less than “capacious.”

Documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, these “two enormous volumes of plates, the size of 19th-century ledgers, and an accompanying almanac” provide the reader with something unique, Sante writes, “not a timeline but a series of existential crises that recur like rituals, that also play out in headlines, TV news footage and, above all, graffiti, rises in waves and recedes into choppiness, as capacious as a 19th-century novel but as indeterminate as an ocean.” Gilles’ photos are “never at rest,” she writes, with violence “always imminent if not present.”
Sante goes on to review a bevy of books by other “masters of the form,” including new work by Annie Leibowitz and Catherine Opie. Calling Opie “a portraitist of unusual poise,” whose subjects are often “trans people, butch lesbians, [and] fetishists of diverse sorts,” Sante writes that Opie’s “stately presentations have done much to infuse dignity into their public perception.” Later, reviewing work by Mitch Epstein, who “works like a nonfiction writer,” Sante notes his skill as a sort of aesthetic documentarian. “His photographs are always lucid and eloquent,” she writes, “and often very beautiful despite their grim subjects.”

Full Story in the New York Times

A new 14-minute work by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, was reviewed in the New York Times. “Imaginative writing for percussion and bustling rhythmic activity — long traits of Tower’s music — course through this restless, episodic score,” writes Anthony Tommasini. Tower, “as inventive as ever,” debuted the piece with the New York Philharmonic as part of Project 19, which commissioned 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment. “1920/2019” represented the resumption of the series and a return of Tower’s “multilayered, meter-fracturing” style.

Read the Review in the New York Times

 

“Understood or not, McLuhan’s work was influential in its time, and with Distant Early Warning, Alex Kitnick shows how it spoke to numerous artists of the avant-garde,” writes Kelvin Browne in Literary Review Canada. “These artists may already have been aware, even if not consciously, that twentieth-century media consumption was leading to a significant cultural shift, but McLuhan’s analysis helped give shape to their intuitions. That’s why, Kitnick argues, McLuhan should be considered more relevant today than he is: not because of his role in nascent media studies but because he was a bona fide player in the art world.”

Kitnick describes his new book as an introduction to McLuhan’s theory of art. Each chapter positions McLuhan, who is most famous for the idea that “the medium is the message,” into context with individual contemporary artists through “concrete points of contact.” In doing so, Kitnick wants to “to reimagine the relationship between theory and practice, criticism and art.” Alex Kitnick is assistant professor of art history and visual culture and faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

“Author Lucy Sante is at an interesting point in her life, looking backward and forward simultaneously,” writes Bob Krasner for the Villager. “With the release of her latest book, a collection of essays entitled Maybe the People Would Be the Times, she has gathered together pieces that form a kind of memoir—even in the fiction that weaves in and out of the examinations of music, art, tabloids, photography and her life in the East Village many years ago. Between the creation of this book and its actual publication, Sante has entered a new phase of her life [...] In her mid-60’s, Sante has recently come out as transgender, changed her name and is happily living her life with a new set of pronouns.” Lucy Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1999.

The French newspaper Le Monde reviews S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence Kelly Reichardt’s film First Cow as a “chef-d’œuvre” or “masterpiece” and calls her one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema. In French.

Bard Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Yebel Gallegos joins Joanna Kotze in conversation for Long Distance Dance Dialogues Exchange #8. In the exchange, Gallegos talks about his journey as a musician in high school, to dancing, and now to being an educator. They also discuss borders, culture, and balancing all of one's passions, interests, and selves. The second part of the exchange is video of movement that has been relayed from Milka Djordjevich in Los Angeles to Yebel Gallegos in Annandale-on-Hudson. Djordjevich does her original movement and then both Djordjevich and Gallegos do Djordjevich's movement, which Gallegos learned. Gallegos will add onto this and that movement will be passed on to Sarah Beth Oppenheim in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Long Distance Dance Dialogues is a series of exchanges between Joanna Kotze and 12 dancers/choreographers around the world and throughout the United States between January–December 2021. Each exchange begins with a video interview that will be archived online and shared with the public once a month beginning in March 2021. The discussion is followed by sharing one minute or less of movement, as a relay, from one dancer to the next, linking us together through the making, learning, and documenting of dance. Each relay of movement will also be archived and shared online in its intentionally raw, unpolished form, once a month. At the end of the year, a film bringing together all parts of the relay will be shared as a record of the project. 

Aperture has announced the shortlists for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, which include Bard alumna Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10 and Photography Program faculty members Farah Al Qasimi and Gilles Peress. Phyars-Burgess is listed in the First Book category for Untitled (Capricious Publishing, 2021). On the Photobook of the Year list, Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography Farah Al Qasimi was selected for Hello Future (Capricious Publishing, 2021) and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress was chosen for Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Steidl, 2021). Initiated in 2012, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. The jury reviewed more than 800 submissions this year and selected only 35 books. A final jury will select winners next month.

An Immersive Experience of Harmony, Poetry and Gesture, Featuring 50 Singers

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY—The Fisher Center LAB (Fisher Center at Bard’s residency and commissioning program) and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities have teamed up to develop and present a new iteration of The Gauntlet, an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol. Performed on and around the lawn of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, including on the Olafur Eliasson installation “the parliament of reality,” performances will take place on Friday, October 15 at 5:30 pm; Saturday, October 16 at 1 pm and 3 pm; and Sunday, October 17 at 5:30pm. Tickets are $25. Bard students may access tickets for $5 made possible by the Passloff Pass. To purchase or reserve tickets visit fishercenter.bard.edu, call 845-758-7900 (Mon–Fri 10am – 5pm), or email [email protected].

An intimate, personal experience utilizing the exterior landscapes of the Fisher Center, audiences will be led through musical corridors of sonic architecture formed by the human voice. The Gauntlet is site-specific and bespoke. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.” 

“Freedom in the sense of the power to act and speak in public spaces is at the heart of Hannah Arendt’s political thinking,” said Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center. “For Arendt, freedom happens in a public space. The Gauntlet is so exciting because it brings people together to experience thinking about freedom in a collective space. And the setting in Olafur Eliasson’s ‘parliament of reality’ provides a context of democratic spaces in which to experience thinking about freedom to act in the practice of self-government. I can’t think of a better way to conclude the Arendt Center’s conference on ‘Revitalizing Democracy and Spaces of Freedom.’” 

The libretto, written by Shirey and Karol, is comprised of text generated from 20 “movement interviews” with local activists, organizers, artists, scholars, elected officials, and citizens, conducted by Karol as a way to explore individual and collective experiences on the theme of freedom. The Gauntlet will bathe audiences in waves of harmony, poetry and gesture, sung by a choir of 50 singers, assembled from all corners of the Bard College and Hudson Valley community. Audiences are led through the performance by four dancers (Karol, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Effy Grey, and Remi Harris). 

Shirey composes the score utilizing melodies and harmonies that are passed from singer to singer in a chain of exchange, creating a “gauntlet” of sound and story, exchanged through the immersive performance as audience members flow through the pathways of sound. Says Shirey about the process, “I am constantly imagining how the audience will hear these stories as a rush of words flowing by, in exchange from singer to singer. The hope is to write grounded phrases and fractile melodies that bloom the minds of the listener.”