News

New Faculty Chairs and Distinguished Professorships include Susan Aberth in Art History, Valeria Luiselli in Written Arts, Kelly Reichardt in Film and Electronic Arts, and An-My Lê in Photography

Bard College has appointed four new chairs and distinguished professorships across disciplines this fall. In the Division of the Arts’ Art History and Visual Culture Program, Susan Aberth has been named Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History. This chair was formerly held by Jean French. In the Division of Languages and Literature’s Written Arts Program, Valeria Luiselli has been named Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. In the Division of the Arts’ Film and Electronic Arts Program, Kelly Reichardt has been named S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence. In the Division of the Arts’ Photography Program, An-My Lê has been named Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts. This chair was formerly held by Peter Hutton.

Susan Aberth is an art historian whose area of specialization is surrealism in Latin America. Aberth’s teaching interests focus on Latin American art, African art, Islamic art, and other religious art and practices. Additional interests include African religious practices in the Americas, and the art and iconography of Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and the occult. In addition to her 2004 book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries), she has contributed to Seeking the Marvelous: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (Fulgur Press, 2020), Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos mágicos (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Black Mirror, and the Journal of Surrealism of the Americas. She received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles; MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Aberth has been at Bard since 2000.

Valeria Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. A 2019 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is the author of the novels Lost Children Archive (2019); The Story of My Teeth (2015), named Best Book in Fiction by the Los Angeles Times and one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and Faces in the Crowd (2014), for which she received a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” prize, among other honors. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Question, a nonfiction work published in 2017, won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle and Kirkus Prize finalist. Other nonfiction publications include “Maps of Harlem,” in Where You Are; and Sidewalks, a collection of essays that was named one of the 10 best books of 2014 by New York. Recent journal, newspaper, and radio work has appeared in the New York Times (“The Littlest Don Quixotes versus the World”), Guardian (“Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry”), Outlook Interview Series, BBC World Services (“Undocumented Central American Minors”), Harper’s Trump special (“Terrorist and Alien”), and NPR’s This American Life (“The Questionnaire”), among others. Honors also include an Art for Justice Fellowship (2018–19) and residencies at Under the Volcano, USA-Mexico; Poets House, New York City; and Castello di Fosdinovo, Italy. She previously taught at Hofstra University, City College, the New York University MFA Writing Program in Paris, and Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. Luiselli founded the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association at Hofstra in 2015, a program that offers continuous support to immigrant and refugee teens through one-on-one English classes, soccer games, and civil rights education. She is a member of PEN America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She received her BA from UNAM in Mexico, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. She has been at Bard since 2019.

Kelly Reichardt is a filmmaker whose latest film, Certain Women—starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone—premiered in 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival and won the top award at the London Film Festival. Her other films include: Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy (2006), and River of Grass (1994). Her film First Cow is currently in postproduction. Reichardt has received the United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at the Whitney Biennial (2012), Film Forum, Cannes Film Festival in “un certain regard,” Venice International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and BFI London Film Festival. She has had retrospectives at the Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the Moving Image, Walker Art Center, and American Cinematheque Los Angeles. Reichardt received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University. She has taught at Bard College since 2006.

An-My Lê is a photographer who was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960, but left that country during the final year of the war in 1975 and subsequently found a home as a political refugee in the United States. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1993. Her film and photography examine the effects and representation of war and have included the documentation of (and participation in) Vietnam War reenactments in South Carolina. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, and has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and MoMA PS1. An-My has been teaching at Bard since 1999.

The 2019 LightField Arts exhibit, Photo + Synthesis, features Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis and Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse among seven artists selected to make or exhibit work focusing on the Hudson River Valley and climate change. The exhibition will be on view at Hudson Hall in Hudson, New York, October 12 to December 21, 2019.

The show draws a geographic line around the Hudson River Valley. In part this is to prompt a fresh look at the mythology of the Valley’s art, ecology, and history, but through the lens of our Anthropocene era. Works on exhibit include contemporary landscape photography, mid-19th century landscape painting, and data visualization art about tree ring science.

Participating artists contribute newly commissioned and existing work. The roster includes: Sarah Bird, Tim Davis, Christopher Griffith, Genevieve Hoffman, Tanya Marcuse, Daniel McCabe, Laura Plageman, and paintings by Hudson River School artists. Alongside these works, LightField exhibits the art produced in its annual Young Photographers Workshop.
 
https://www.lightfield.vu/2019-artists

Two Bard College faculty members have been named 2019 MacArthur Fellows. Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence in the Studio Arts Program and Valeria Luiselli, writer in residence in the Written Arts Program, are both recipients of this prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. Fellows may use their award to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the Fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential. Indeed, the purpose of the Fellowship is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society. MacArthur Fellows receive $625,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Eleven Bard faculty members have previously been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.



Jeffrey Gibson grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, Korea, and England. He is a Choctaw-Cherokee artist who incorporates his heritage into his multi-disciplinary work, which includes abstract sculptures, paintings, and prints. Gibson earned his Master of Arts in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1998 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. Gibson has work in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Canada, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and more. Recent solo exhibitions include Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer at the Seattle Art Museum in Washington and Madison Museum of Art in Wisconsin and Jeffrey Gibson: This is the Day at Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Gibson is a past TED Foundation Fellow, and a Joan Mitchell Grant recipient. He lives and works in New York.



Valeria Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. She is the author of the novels Lost Children Archive (2019); The Story of My Teeth (2015), named Best Book in Fiction by the Los Angeles Times, one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, and a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and Faces in the Crowd (2014), for which she received a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” prize, among other honors. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, a nonfiction work published in 2017, won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle and Kirkus Prize finalist. Other nonfiction publications include “Maps of Harlem,” in Where You Are, and Sidewalks, a collection of essays that was named one of the 10 best books of 2014 by New York. Recent journal, newspaper, and radio work has appeared in the New York Times (“The Littlest Don Quixotes versus the World”), Guardian (“Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry”), Outlook Interview Series, BBC World Services (“Undocumented Central American Minors”), Harper’s Trump special (“Terrorist and Alien”), and NPR’s This American Life (“The Questionnaire”), among others. Honors also include an Art for Justice Fellowship (2018–19) and residencies at Under the Volcano, USA-Mexico; Poets House, New York City; and Castello di Fosdinovo, Italy. She previously taught at Hofstra University, City College, the New York University MFA Writing Program in Paris, and Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. She founded the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association at Hofstra in 2015, a program that offers continuous support to immigrant and refugee teens through one-on-one English classes, soccer games, and civil rights education. She is a member of PEN America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She was born in Mexico City and currently lives in New York City.
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/1036/

For over 30 years, Bard MFA chair and Bard College alum Nayland Blake '82 has been a critical figure in American art, working between sculpture, drawing, performance, and video. No Wrong Holes marks the most comprehensive survey of Blake’s work to date and their first solo institutional presentation in Los Angeles.
https://www.theicala.org/en/exhibitions/67-no-wrong-holes-br-thirty-years-of-nayland-blake

Conservatory Advanced Performance Studies alumnus Tomoki Park and second-year Vocal Arts Program student Margaret Tigue recently performed at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, as part of the Tanglewood Music Center's Festival of Contemporary Music. In a concert dedicated to former Tanglewood Music Center director of contemporary music Oliver Knussen, Tomoki Park's "sensitive" performance of Knussen's distinctive "Prayer Bell Sketch" was one of the highlights of the program. Margaret Tigue offered a very fine performance as a soprano soloist in Knussen's "Whitman Settings."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/arts/music/tanglewood-boston-symphony.html

Globally recognized modern dancer and Bard alumnus Ainesh Madan ’15 observes that art comes to the rescue of the mundane. In this interview, he talks about the importance of a daily artistic practice, his most recent work focusing on his return to India after eight years in New York, and pieces he choreographed at Bard now coming to fruition. “Once I went to Bard College,” he tells the Hindu. “I started discovering my artistic side. I dedicated the majority of my day in the studio, even when I was not in class. I made (choreographed/composed) a lot of work. Once the studios were closed, I would come back to my room and work on music.”
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/dance/dance-with-him/article28772631.ece

President Botstein talks about the U.S. premiere of Erich Korngold’s The Miracle of Heliane, and why Bard is the perfect place to revive overlooked works.
 

"Bard is a great place because we are not interested in commercial performance. We want to make a contribution to knowledge and scholarship. We are interested in the future of music both in new music but also in the past.

If the past is only about 20 operas, then the future of the art form is going to be condemned. The way you tell the story of the past influences the way you tell the future. Our mission is not to compete with anyone but to show different repertoire." —Leon Botstein

http://operawire.com/q-a-leon-botstein-on-the-american-premiere-of-das-wunder-der-heliane-the-future-of-opera/

The Bard Music Festival turns its focus on Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the preeminent film composer of the 1930s and ’40s whose art music long went overlooked. August 9–11 and 16–18 at the Fisher Center.

By Barrymore Laurence Scherer

Now that film music enjoys an unequivocal presence on contemporary orchestral programs, it’s no surprise that the Bard Music Festival, that bastion of imaginative programming, is marking its 30th anniversary season by turning to a figure somewhat unfamiliar as a “serious” composer: Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957). Korngold was arguably the pre-eminent film composer during Hollywood’s “Golden Age.” Yet, by the time he died, his work there during the 1930s and ’40s had effectively obliterated the exceptional stature he had achieved in Europe’s concert halls and opera houses.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/serious-works-from-a-hollywood-composer-11564518246

Set in an unnamed totalitarian state, The Miracle of Heliane (Das Wunder der Heliane) features an intricate, erotic triangle between a ruthless despot, The Ruler; his beautiful and neglected wife, Heliane; and a young, messianic Stranger. An allegorical tale about the destruction of a dictatorship by a woman, Heliane premiered to great acclaim in Hamburg in 1927, and remains extraordinarily relevant today. This new production is directed by Christian Räth, with sets and costumes by Esther Bialas, both making their SummerScape debuts. The consistently excellent cast includes the stunning Lithuanian soprano Ausrine Stundyte in an all-too-rare U.S. appearance alongside rising star tenor Daniel Brenna, and the heralded bass-baritone Alfred Walker. Opening Friday, July 26, at the Fisher Center.
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/heliane/

On Sunday, July 28, at 6 pm, the Spiegeltent at Bard’s Fisher Center will host a showcase of Bard alumni/ae making their mark on the music scene. Bardians near and far come together for a celebration led by Bard alumni/ae musicians, with performances by: Odetta Hartman ’11; Bree and the Reeds, featuring Brianna Reed ’12; Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez '16; and a new musical project by Dan Vernam ’13, Wyatt Bertz ’13, and Joe Tisdall ’13; with Alex Friedman ’12, Jesse Featherstone ’14, Luke McCrosson ’16, Zach Berns, and more.
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/still-thinking/

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is pleased to announce that distinguished scholar, curator, and educator Nana Adusei-Poku will join CCS Bard as senior academic adviser and Luma Foundation Fellow. In this role, Adusei-Poku will collaborate with the staff and faculty to develop and advise on the curriculum, which centers around the study of contemporary art, the institutions and practices of exhibition-making, and the theory and criticism of the visual arts. She will also work with Executive Director Tom Eccles, Chief Curator and Graduate Program Director Lauren Cornell, and faculty to develop the curatorial and publishing program at CCS Bard, including symposia, conferences, performance, and exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies and in collaboration with partners, including departments across Bard College and contemporary art institutions.

“Nana Adusei-Poku is an exceptional scholar, curator, and teacher. Her intellectual rigor and commitment to original research will be invaluable to our program and to future classes of CCS Bard graduate students,” said Cornell. Previously, Adusei-Poku served as visiting professor at The Cooper Union, and as a guest lecturer in the Department of Art and Media at the University of the Arts, Zurich. She was research professor for visual cultures (2015–17) and for cultural diversity (2013–14) at the Hogeschool Rotterdam with affiliation to the Piet Zwart Institute and Willem de Kooning Academy. She received her PhD from Humboldt University Berlin following degrees in African and gender studies, and in media and communications at Goldsmiths College London. She has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Ghana, Legon, London School of Economics, and Columbia University, New York.

She is the curator of the program Longing on a Large Scale in conjunction with Todd Gray's exhibition Eucledian Gris Gris at Pomona College Museum of Art, which starts in September 2019 and will run until May 2020. In 2018, Adusei-Poku curated the immersive event performance of No-thingness at the Academy of Arts Berlin and, in 2015, she co-curated the exhibition NO HUMANS INVOLVED at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam. She has published in artist monographs about Leslie Hewitt, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, and Todd Gray, among others, and in publications such as e-flux, multitudes, Le Journal des Laboratoires, Kunstforum International, as well as peer-reviewed journals such as Nka Journal for Contemporary African Art, Feministische Studien, and Dark Matter.

Adusei-Poku replaces Jeannine Tang, who joins Eugene Lang College at The New School as assistant professor in modern and contemporary art history, after nearly a decade at CCS Bard. In 2018, Tang co-curated The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts. Co, (1983–2004) at the Hessel Museum of Art, a project that exemplified her commitment to building groundbreaking scholarship in contemporary art and curatorial history.
 

General information on the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College can be found at:
https://ccs.bard.edu/

The Bard Graduate Center (BGC) and U’mista Cultural Centre have launched an exhibition website that explores the hidden histories and multiple legacies of Franz Boas’s The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. It is part of an international project to create a new critical edition of the volume. BGC also hosted an exhibition of The Story Box at its New York City gallery this year.
 
http://exhibitions.bgc.bard.edu/storybox/

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents Say Ever Moves, the class of 2020 thesis presentation, which brings together works by MFA candidates in the disciplines film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. The exhibition will be on view from July 21 through July 28 at the Bard College Exhibition Center / UBS Gallery, 29 O’Callaghan Lane, Red Hook, New York.

An opening reception takes place on Saturday, July 20, 1–4 p.m. Evening presentations of time-based works, including performances, readings, and screenings, will be held at several locations on the Bard College campus during the week of July 22. All presentations are free and open to the public.

The Bard MFA thesis presentations feature works by Luis Arnias, Georgian Badal, Jobi Bicos, Lauren Burrow, Gwenan Davies, Omari Douglin, Carolina Fandiño Salcedo, Carolyn Ferrucci, Marco Gomez, Colleen Hargaden, Evie K. Horton, Christiane Huber, Rachel James, Jamie Krasner, Nawahineokala'i Lanzilotti, Dani Leder, Isabel Mallet, Carla Jean Mayer, Lee Nachum, Brandon Ndife, Diane Severin Nguyen, Miko Revereza, Alicia Salvadeo, Robert Sandler, Jaxyn Randall, Estelle Srivijittakar, Jordan Strafer, Daniel Sullivan, Christopher van Ginhoven Rey, Jessica Wilson, and Alex Zandi. The exhibition is coordinated by Marisa Espe ’20, a graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard).

The Bard College Exhibition Center will be open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m., and Saturday/Sunday, 1–5 p.m. For the opening reception, a return shuttle service will be offered from Rhinecliff Amtrak station. Schedules, accessibility information, and more are available below. Parking is available in the Saint Christopher’s Church lot at 7411 South Broadway or on Garden Road.
https://www.bard.edu/mfa/thesis/

Oklahoma!, directed by Daniel Fish and starring Patrick Vaill ’07 as Jud, earned eight Tony nominations, and won best musical revival and best featured actress. Its Broadway run has been extended through January 19, 2020 and national tour will begin in Fall 2020.

by Jennifer Wai-Lan-Huang and James Rodewald ’82 in the Bardian, Summer 2019

Twelve years ago, JoAnne Akalaitis, director of the Theater Program, invited Daniel Fish to direct a student production. Patrick Vaill ’07 recalls Akalaitis telling Fish he could choose any play he wanted. “Over time it was revealed that the show would be Oklahoma!” says Vaill. “There was a lot of excitement. People were surprised.”

The surprising choice, in Fish’s hands, meshed perfectly with the ethos of the Theater Program under Akalaitis. “She fostered an incredibly vibrant, hardworking, interested group of students who just loved doing this work together,” says Vaill. “It was thrilling to be a part of.” Fish reimagined the patriotic, upbeat 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein original as a morality tale for our time. Three-quarters of a century ago, America was at war, and it responded to the musical’s celebration of pastoralism, the charm of country folk, and the idea that “Everythin’s goin’ my way.” Since then, our tribes have become less homogeneous, the tension between the haves and the have nots continues to increase, and guns are less icons of the frontier than instruments of violence and terror. The realism, the immersion, and the sensitivity of the acting in Fish’s Oklahoma! give modern audiences—who hear the very same words and tunes—a very different experience than theatergoers of the ’40s had.

Auditions for the student production were held just before winter intersession. Vaill had hoped for the part of the handsome cowboy, Curly, who gets his sweetheart, Laurey. He was cast instead as Jud Fry, the brooding farmhand, whose own desires for Laurey are violently thwarted. “The idea was that we were all—the audience, the actors—in a room together to hear and to tell this story,” says Vaill. “When we performed it in Theater Two [now LUMA Theater] at the Fisher Center in 2007, with an all-student cast, it was clear to me and to those who saw it that we were involved in something very special.”

Vaill was raised in Manhattan, and his parents often took him and his sister to the theater. “I fell in love with it as a child and harbored a secret desire to pursue acting,” he says. “It was a magic trick that was completely amazing to me, breathing the same oxygen as the people doing that.” He had a similar instant connection with Bard. On his first visit to the campus, Vaill felt a deep kinship with the College. He applied Early Action, was accepted, and never considered another option. “I felt this was the place I had to be. I am very pleased to say I was correct. I flourished.”

Vaill’s decision to major in theater was a less straightforward process. “Moderation loomed over me. I couldn’t be cavalier about my major. I tried on many different possibilities—religion, Victorian studies, literature, art history—until I finally realized that theater was the only major I was passionate about. It was during Parent’s Weekend, after Vaill took his parents to Akalaitis’s production of the Euripides drama Orestes at the Fisher Center, that he told them about his decision. “There’s something very personal about telling someone that you want to be an artist, so I was very nervous about it. They said they absolutely understood my decision after seeing the play we’d just seen.”

After graduation, Vaill went on to act in several off-Broadway shows in New York City and with the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., working on stage professionally for three years before pursuing his MFA in acting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. The first role Vaill landed after graduate school was on the Lincoln Center stage in Shakespeare’s Macbeth directed by Jack O’Brien and starring Ethan Hawke as the Scottish king. “It was an incredible experience. I played Graymalkin, one of the witches’ familiars. I leaned very heavily into the supernatural and played those scenes as a demonic being.” Vaill then played Ernst Ludwig in the Roundabout Theatre’s national tour of the Broadway revival of Cabaret directed by Academy Award winner Sam Mendes. Then, eight years after performing it as an undergraduate, Vaill learned that Gideon Lester, Fisher Center artistic director for theater and dance and director of Bard’s Theater and Performance Program, had commissioned a professional production of Fish’s Oklahoma! for the Fisher Center’s 2015 Bard SummerScape season.

“I sent Daniel an email about how exciting it was and that I would love to audition to play Jud again if they were holding auditions,” says Vaill. “He wrote back that day saying he had already given my name to the casting director as someone whom he wanted to see.” Vaill auditioned and was cast as Jud. “As a senior at Bard, I was largely going on impulse. There was something about the character that I absolutely understood instinctively. Over the years, with more training and experience, I have found the tools to express it.” The production, Vaill believes, developed in a similar way. “I think it had distilled in Daniel’s mind. His understanding of the material and what he wanted to do with it is more purposeful, more fully realized. The student production was the kernel of what came later.”

In his review of the 2015 SummerScape production, New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley described Vaill’s Fry as “a paranoid but oddly understandable stalker.” Most earlier portrayals presented the character as muscular, brutish, and simple; a caricature of the marginalized working stiff. Vaill played him, in Brantley’s words, as a “pale, weedy man with the kind of grudge that lands sociopaths on the front page and in prison.” The complexity Vaill brings to the role, and the empathy he evokes, are crucial to the success of the reimagined musical.

The immersive, groundbreaking production garnered rave reviews, and Fisher Center executive director Bob Bursey and his staff began working to bring it to New York City. In fall 2018, the Fisher Center production transferred to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, where it had a sold-out six-week run, and it opened on Broadway at Circle in the Square Theatre in April. “We knew that something special was happening again,” says Vaill.

A hallmark of Fish’s production is the absence of any preconceived notions about Oklahoma!—seeing the play for what it is, and revealing the script’s deeper meanings. “Jud is often played as a very scary, mean brute of a man,” says Vaill. “What Daniel and I have tried to do is look at the words on the page with fresh eyes to see who this person really is. Not to judge him before he speaks. If you look at Jud’s song ‘Lonely Room,’ it is about dreams. He has dreams, wishes for things. Beautiful words and images come out of him. It’s not what you’d expect to come out of the mouth of a ‘dirty farmhand.’ He expresses this desire to be seen, this desire to be loved, and this desire to be held that is incredibly human. When you strip him bare, what you’re left with is someone who just wants love so badly. And who hasn’t experienced that?”
https://www.bard.edu/news/details/?id=312&type=feature

Evidence, A Dance Company and its founder, choreographer Ronald K. Brown, make their Bard SummerScape debut with the world premiere of Grace and Mercy. Commissioned for SummerScape 2019, the two-part program opens with Grace, created in 1999 for Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and performed here for the first time to live music, and concludes with the premiere of Mercy, a companion piece set to a score written and performed live by Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello.
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3152

For its summer 2019 season, CCS Bard will present the first U.S. solo museum exhibitions of work by Leidy Churchman and Nil Yalter, along with Acting Out, a group show featuring artists in the Marieluise Hessel Collection, including Larry Clark, Lyle Ashton Harris, Nan Goldin, Boris Mikhailov, Lorraine O'Grady, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence. The shows will open to the public on June 22, 2019 and will run through the fall. 
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3129

Sunday night was a big one for Bard at the Tonys. Oklahoma!, which started its revival at Bard SummerScape in 2015 and has roots in a 2007 student staging, won best musical revival. This marks the first competitive Tony win for the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. Ali Stroker won best featured actress in a musical, and became the first wheelchair user to win a Tony. “This award is for every kid who is watching tonight who has a disability, who has a limitation or a challenge, who has been waiting to see themselves represented in this arena,” Ms. Stroker said. “You are.”

Read more in the New York Times.
 

Bard MFA alumnus Fitz Patton won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Play for Choir Boy.
https://www.broadwayworld.com/article/CHOIR-BOYs-Fitz-Patton-Wins-2019-Tony-Award-for-Best-Sound-Design-of-a-Play-20190609

BARD x HGG
Curated by Stephen Shore
June 20 – August 29, 2019

Photographs by Recent Bard College Graduates Paired With Work by Dave Heath, Frederick Sommer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lisette Model, Joseph Sudek, Minor White

New York—Last winter the legendary photographer Stephen Shore received an unusual request from Howard Greenberg Gallery: Would he be interested in curating an exhibition that included his students from the renowned photography program at Bard College? The answer was, “yes,” and the resulting collaboration, Bard x HGG, pairs work by seven of Shore’s recent graduates with photographs by historic 20^th century artists from the Gallery’s vast archives. The exhibition will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from June 20 through August 29, 2019. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, June 20, from 6:00-8:00 p.m.

“Stephen Shore is a bridge connecting contemporary photography with the history of photography,” said Howard Greenberg. “As a contemporary figure and an important part of photo history, he is in a unique position to be able to connect a new generation of photographers and viewers.”

“I think of myself as both a photographer and a teacher and am delighted to have this opportunity to show my student’s work,” said Stephen Shore, Program Director & Susan Weber Professor in the Arts at Bard College. “Each of the recent graduates (from 2017 and 2018) is represented by a series of pictures so you can get a sense of their thought process and artistic practice.”

Works by the Bard graduates—Jasmine Clarke, Madison Emond, Briauna Falk, Vanessa Kotovich, Jackson Siegal, Naomi Zahler, and Ying Jing Zheng—are paired with photographs by Dave Heath, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lisette Model, Frederick Sommer, Stephen Shore, Joseph Sudek, and Minor White from Howard Greenberg Gallery’s extensive holdings.

Shore noted that the pairings vary from artist to artist, often highlighting an aspect of the recent graduate’s work. For the work by artists from the Gallery, Shore selected images by many photographers with whom he has personal connections: “David Heath was a friend to me when I was 14 and taught me about printing, and I was in a 10-day workshop run by Minor White when I was at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.”

Providing a gateway to the exhibition, work by Don Donaghy will be presented within the context of Bard x HGG. “While going through the Gallery’s archive, I came across Donaghy’s work and thought it would be wonderful to show,” said Shore. “His work was considered cutting edge in the 1960s. Yet, his photographs disappeared from public view despite the important role they played in the development of contemporary photography.”

About Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore's work has been widely published and exhibited for the past 45 years. He was the first living photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, 40 years earlier. He has also had solo shows at George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective spanning Stephen Shore's entire career. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970s sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary work. More than 25 books of Shore’s photographs have been published. His work is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers, London, Berlin, and Los Angeles, where his work will be on view from June 19–August 30, 2019. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

About the Photography Program at Bard College
Bard College’s Photography Program, led by Program Director Stephen Shore, is widely recognized as having one of the strongest faculties in the country. It is noted for its traditional grounding in photographic techniques, and the range of aesthetic approaches of its students. Bard College, a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences, is located 90 miles north of New York City on 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; nine early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 159-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. The undergraduate program at the main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement.

About Howard Greenberg Gallery
Since its inception over 35 years ago, Howard Greenberg Gallery has built a vast and ever-changing collection of some of the most important photographs in the medium. The Gallery's collection acts as a living history of photography, offering genres and styles from Pictorialism to Modernism, in addition to contemporary photography and images conceived for industry, advertising, and fashion. Howard Greenberg Gallery is located at 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406, New York. The gallery exhibits at The ADAA Art Show, The Armory Show, The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, Photo London, Art Basel, Paris Photo, and Art Basel Miami Beach. For more information, contact 212-334-0010, info@howardgreenberg.com or visit www.howardgreenberg.com.

Acquanetta, which originally premiered at the 2018 PROTOTYPE Festival, comes to Bard in the same unmissable production by Daniel Fish, whose previous SummerScape staging (a revelatory take on Oklahoma!) is currently “the coolest new show on Broadway” (New York Times).
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3156

The Bard Graduate Center will receive a grant of $30,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the upcoming exhibition and catalogue Eileen Gray: Designer-Architect, opening in spring 2020.
https://www.bard.edu/news/notes/details/?id=4091

Bard Fisher Center presents comedian, actor, and former host of The Late Late Show Craig Ferguson, with his new, irreverent memoir Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations. Ferguson will appear in conversation with WAMC bureau chief and host of 51% Allison Dunne.
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3135

The Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has awarded 2019 FilmCraft and FilmWatch grants to Bard College’s Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public program, which will include a master class hosted by leading black American filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Bradford Young.
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3150

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, will perform Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in the Sosnoff Theater on May 10 and 12. The performances feature mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti, the Bard College Chamber Singers, Bard Festival Chorale, and Bard Preparatory Division Chorus.
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3146

The actor and Bard alum on his critically acclaimed performance, violence in America, and the politics of the hottest revival on Broadway.
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a27274165/patrick-vaill-oklahoma-broadway/

Visiting Artist El Khoury teaches in the Theater and Performance Program this semester, and is guest curator the Fisher Center’s festival on borders and migration in fall 2019.
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/press-releases/open-society-foundations-announce-2019-soros-arts-fellows

The Orchestra Now will perform the U.S. premieres of Joachim Raff’s Psalm 130: De Profundis and Lera Auerbach’s De Profundis (Violin Concerto No. 3) at Bard’s Fisher Center on Saturday, May 27, and Sunday, May 28, featuring internationally acclaimed violinist Vadim Repin, and EMI recording artist, soprano Elizabeth de Trejo.
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3142

This summer, the Bard Music Festival celebrates its 30th anniversary season with a two-week, in-depth exploration of “Korngold and His World.” In twelve themed concert programs, complemented by pre-concert lectures, a film screening, panel discussions, and expert commentary, Bard examines the life and career of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), the under-sung yet hugely influential composer whose lush Romanticism would come to define the quintessential Hollywood sound. The festival will take place over two weekends, August 9–11 and 16–18, as the centerpiece of Bard SummerScape 2019.
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3138

The Orchestra Now (TŌN) continues its season at Bard Fisher Center on April 6 and 7 with Verdi’s celebrated Requiem, led by TŌN’s music director, Leon Botstein. The immense work is set for double choir and orchestra, and will feature soprano Margaret Tigue, mezzo-soprano Chloë Schaaf, and bass Wei Wu.
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3132

Led by The Boston Globe’s “bona fide b-girl,” Ephrat Asherie makes her Fisher Center debut with Odeon, a high-energy, hybrid hip-hop dance work set to and inspired by the music of early 20th-century Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth, played live. Odeon will be performed in the Fisher Center’s LUMA Theater on Saturday, April 13 at 7:30  p.m., and Sunday, April 14 at 2 p.m. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased at fishercenter.bard.edu or by calling 845-758-7900.

Odeon delves into what happens when you bring together the extended family of street and club dances—including breaking, hip hop, house and vogue—remix them, pick them apart, and push them in new choreographic directions. An original dance work for seven dancers and four musicians, Odeon is the second collaboration between sister and brother team Ephrat and Ehud Asherie, choreographer and musical director, respectively.

Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie, a 2016 Bessie Award winner for Innovative Achievement in Dance, creates work for the dynamic group of multifaceted dancers in her company Ephrat Asherie Dance. The company embodies many different street and club dance styles including breaking, hip hop, house and vogue and is dedicated to revealing the inherently complex and dynamic qualities of these forms, “paving the way for something new” (The New York Times). 

While in residence at the Fisher Center, Asherie will also be developing a new work, which will be presented to the public in an open rehearsal on Friday, April 12 at 7 p.m. also in the LUMA Theater. This work-in-progress showing will be free and open to the public.

Odeon is presented through the Bard College Dance Program’s partnership with the American Dance Festival. Presentation support is provided by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

EPHRAT “BOUNCE” ASHERIE, a 2016 Bessie Award Winner for Innovative Achievement in Dance, is a New York City–based B-girl, dancer, and choreographer. As artistic director of Ephrat Asherie Dance (EAD) she has presented work at the Apollo Theater, FiraTarrega, Jacob’s Pillow, New York Live Arts, Summerstage, and the Yard, among others. Ephrat has received numerous awards to support her work, including a Mondo Cane! commission from Dixon Place, a Creative Development Residency from Jacob’s Pillow, Workspace and Extended Life Residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a Travel and Study Grant from the Jerome Foundation, and two residencies through the CUNY Dance Initiative. Her first evening-length work, A Single Ride, received two Bessie nominations in 2012 for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer and for Outstanding Sound Design by Marty Beller. Most recently, Ephrat received a National Dance Project award to support the development and touring of her newest work, Odeon. Set to premiere in the summer of 2018, Odeon was also made possible by Jacob's Pillow Dance, Mass MoCA, Works & Process at the Guggenheim, and the Jacob's Pillow Fellowship at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts at LIU Post. Ephrat is a regular guest artist with Dorrance Dance and has worked and collaborated with Doug Elkins, Rennie Harris, Bill Irwin, David Parsons, Gus Solomons Jr., and Buddha Stretch, among others.

Ephrat has been on faculty at Wesleyan University and set pieces for students at Smith College, SUNY Brockport, Alvin Ailey Dance Center, University of Texas Rio Grande and Texas Tech University.  Ephrat teaches at Broadway Dance Center and is a founding member of the all-female house dance collective, MAWU. She earned her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University in Italian and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she researched the vernacular jazz dance roots of contemporary street and club dances.

Ehud Asherie, “a master of swing and stride" (The New Yorker), is a jazz pianist who integrates the venerable New York piano tradition into his inventive style. He has toured clubs and festivals around the world, including South America, Europe and Asia. Asherie’s playing can be heard on countless recordings, including the 2010 Grammy Award winning soundtrack of HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire.’ He recently released his twelfth album entitled ‘Shuffle Along’ (Blue Heron Records), a solo piano performance of Eubie Blake songs from the musical ‘Shuffle Along.’

The two-day conference, “Tradition and Discovery: Teaching Chinese Music in the West,” includes guest speakers and concerts featuring performances by celebrated pipa virtuoso Wu Man and the Chinese instrument majors of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3124

Bard College: The Montgomery Place Campus announces three spring series of events celebrating the history and arts of one of the Hudson Valley’s esteemed historic estates. Toward an Ethical Imagination: Gilsonfest, Spring Salon Series on Music of the Gilded Age, and The Gilded Garden: Historic Ornament in the Landscape at Montgomery Place are presented at Montgomery Place and locations in Red Hook, New York, beginning on Sunday, March 10 and culminating on Memorial Day weekend, May 24–27. Most of the events are free and open to the public. For reservations and more information go to bard.edu/montgomeryplace.

Toward an Ethical Imagination: Gilsonfest

Toward an Ethical Imagination: Gilsonfest is a collaboration between Bard College, Historic Red Hook, Dutchess County Historical Society, and Red Hook Quilters focusing on the life of Montgomery Place gardener Alexander Gilson, an African American slave, who after being freed stayed on as head gardener and eventually opened his own nursery business.

The program kicks off on Sunday, March 10 at 3 p.m. with a lecture, “A People’s History: Oral Histories and Inclusion,” by Susan Merriam, Associate Professor of Art History at Bard College, at the Elmendorph Inn, Red Hook, New York.

On Friday, May 24 at 11:30 am the program continues with the opening of an exhibition, Alexander Gilson: From Property to Property Owner, at the Historic Red Hook Annex, Cherry Street, Red Hook. It includes an exhibition by students in a Bard College class about Alexander Gilson, a quilting presentation by the Red Hook Quilters, and a presentation on historic garden artifacts and plants.

There will be a public signage dedication in honor of the life of Alexander Gilson on Friday, May 24 at 1 pm at the Montgomery Place Visitor Center. Following the dedication, there will be a gathering at the Montgomery Place Greenhouse tool room to celebrate an adjunct exhibition on Alexander Gilson.

The program concludes on Sunday, May 26, at 2 pm with the lecture “History of Memorial Day” by Myra Young Armstead, Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College. This will be presented at the Montgomery Place Coach House, followed by refreshments on the Mansion House north porch.

Events are free and open to the public and no registration is required. For more information, go to bard.edu/montgomeryplace.

Funding for Toward an Ethical Imagination: Gilsonfest is provided by The Lumina Foundation.

Spring Salon Series on Music of the Gilded Age

Hosted in partnership with Hudson River Heritage and coproduced and curated by Christopher Brellochs.

Saturday, May 11, 3 pm
Concert: “The Musical Life of Cora Livingston Barton and Her Husband Thomas Barton at Montgomery Place,” a recital with Christopher Brellochs, saxophone and Rita Costanzi, harp

Montgomery Place Mansion House Parlor. Admission: $25, limited to 40 seats. For more information and to purchase tickets for this event, please go to hudsonriverheritage.org.

Cora Livingston Barton and her husband Thomas Barton expanded the Montgomery Place estate to better capture the Romantic sensibilities of the time; music filled the house and the farming operations become more separated from the “pleasure gardens.” It was 1860 and the beginning of the Gilded Age; relatives such as Major General Richard Delafield, who was stationed at West Point, inspired the dedication of musical compositions such as “Florida March” and “Manassas March.” This performance will be a unique opportunity to hear these forgotten gems and experience music at Montgomery Place like Cora and Thomas did more than 150 years ago.

PROGRAM
Florida March
Manassas March
Berceuse, Op. 16 (1879)         Gabriel FAURÉ (1845–1924)
The Carnival of the Animals: The Swan (1886)        Camille SAINT-SAËNS (1835–1921)
Hommage a Bellini     Antonio PASCULLI (1842–1924)
Meditation, Op.18 (1898)       Gabriel VERDALLE (1845–1915)
Introduction, Theme, and Variations (1879)  Caryl FLORIO (1843–1920)

Saturday, May 18, 3 pm
Lecture: “Music of the Gilded Age in the Hudson Valley”
Montgomery Place Mansion House Parlor; tickets are $25. The concert is limited to 40 seats. For more information and to purchase tickets for this event, please go to hudsonriverheritage.org.

Dutchess Community College Associate Professor Christopher Brellochs, who has been presenting this beautiful music in authentic historical settings, will discuss the role and importance of music during the Hudson Valley Gilded Age.

Sunday, May 26 at 4 pm
“The Gardener of Montgomery Place and the Composer of Newburgh, New York,” an outdoor saxophone quartet performance
Montgomery Place North Porch; free and open to the public. Attendees are requested to bring their own lawn chairs and/or blankets. In the event of rain, the concert will take place in the historic Montgomery Place Coach House, and be limited to the first 50 attendees.

During the early 19th century, the gardener at Montgomery Place was an African American slave named Alexander Gilson, who, after being freed, stayed on to continue as head gardener. He eventually opened his own nursery business. Downriver in Newburgh, New York, composer Ulysses J. Alsdorf, whose grandfather was freed by the Manumission Act of New York State on July 4, 1827, had a similar life journey. The Alsdorfs were entrepreneurs, involved in everything from catering to dance schools, and became prominent citizens of the thriving Hudson Valley City of Newburgh. Ulysses J. Alsdorf’s music was used to celebrate the Newburgh portion of the 1909 Henry Hudson–Robert Fulton Celebration, when a steamboat traveled from Manhattan to Albany, stopping in Newburgh. His music will do the same for this event, 110 years later.

Christopher Brellochs, soprano saxophone
Eric Aweh, alto saxophone
Joe North, tenor saxophone
Wayne Tice, baritone saxophone

PROGRAM
Selections by Ulysses J. Alsdorf (1872-1952) will include:
Ramsdell Park March (1897)
In College Colors (1900)
Dear Hudson-Fulton Days (1908)
Boom, Boom, Boom It Up! (1908)

Additional selections by:
Quatuor pour saxophones (1861)       Jean-Baptiste MOHR (1823–1891)
Quatuor pour saxophones (1863)       Léon KREUTZER (1817–1868)
Premier Quatuor (published 1888)     Louis MAYEUR (1837–1894)
Quartette (Allegro de Concert) (1879)           Caryl FLORIO (1843–1920)

Funding for the Montgomery Place 2019 Spring Salon Series on Music of the Gilded Age is provided by Charles and Valerie Jacob.

The Gilded Garden: Historic Ornament in the Landscape at Montgomery Place

A Garden Party Exhibition Opening

Produced in partnership with and curated by Barbara Israel and her staff from Barbara Israel Garden Antiques.

Friday, May 24, 4 pm
Opening will take place in the Ellipse Garden, located in front of the Greenhouse
The gardens at Montgomery Place once featured decorative garden ornaments and furniture alongside the living plants. During the mid-1800s, renowned architect Alexander Jackson Davis was hired to redesign the mansion as well as consult on the surrounding grounds. He introduced the property owners, Louise Livingston and her daughter Cora and son-in-law Thomas Barton, to landscape designer and writer Andrew Jackson Downing, who designed the gardens surrounding the jewel box–like conservatory directly across from the mansion. It was the style of the time to adorn the grounds with a lavish display of garden ornaments, including cast iron, terra-cotta, and marble objects. Displaying a wide-ranging mix of styles, these pieces were acquired from European and American manufacturers. Elaborate arbors and columnar supports of wirework held up climbing vines. Urns as large as 15 feet wide served as centerpieces for flower beds edged by elaborate rococo revival border tiles of terra-cotta. Many of the garden ornaments pictured in early photographs of the conservatory survive in the museum’s collection. The garden was considered a domestic space, allowing the confines of the home to extend into the landscape. The interior decoration of conservatories followed suit. Designed to be beautiful inside as well as outside, these glasshouses typically featured statuary, furniture, urns, potted plants, and hanging baskets. Program is free and open to the public.

Funding provided by the A. C. Israel Foundation and Plymouth Hill Foundation.

In conjunction with the above programs and Commencement activities, the Montgomery Place Mansion House will be open for viewing on Saturday, May 25 from 10:30 am to 1 pm and on Sunday, May 26 from 1:30 to 4 pm. For more information go to: bard.edu/montgomeryplace.
 

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Bard College: The Montgomery Place Campus, a 380-acre estate adjacent to the main Bard College campus and overlooking the Hudson River, is a designated National Historic Landmark set amid rolling lawns, woodlands, and gardens, against the spectacular backdrop of the Catskill Mountains. Renowned architects, landscape designers, and horticulturists worked to create an elegant and inspiring country estate consisting of a mansion, farm, orchards, farmhouse, and other smaller buildings. The Montgomery Place estate was owned by members of the Livingston family from 1802 until the 1980s. In 1986, Livingston heir John Dennis Delafield transferred the estate to Historic Hudson Valley, in whose hands it remained until 2016, when Bard College acquired the property.
 
https://www.bard.edu/news/details/?id=256&type=feature

The Bard College Conservatory Orchestra performs at The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts’s Sosnoff Theater on Saturday, March 9. The performance features  Mark Russell Smith, guest conductor, and five-time Grammy Award–winner soprano Dawn Upshaw in a program that includes Samuel Barber’s Symphony in One Movement, Op. 9; Oliver Knussen’s Requiem—Songs for Sue; and Mussorgsky/Ravel’s Pictures at an Exhibition. The Conservatory Orchestra performs Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 at the Fisher Center on May 10 and May 12, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director, with Eve Gigliotti, mezzo-soprano, the Bard College Chamber Singers, and the Bard Festival Chorale.
https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3125

https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3126

Includes Bard Music Festival’s 30th anniversary season, “Korngold and His World,” American premiere of Korngold’s grand opera The Miracle of Heliane, Daniel Fish’s lauded staging of Michael Gordon’s Acquanetta, and the world premiere of Grace and Mercy by choreographer Ronald K. Brown, with live music from Meshell Ndegeocello and others

This summer’s 16th annual Bard SummerScape festival comprises more than seven weeks of music, opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, centered around the 30th anniversary season of the Bard Music Festival, “Korngold and His World.” This intensive examination of the life and times of Erich Wolfgang Korngold – the Viennese prodigy whose lush Romanticism would come to define the quintessential Hollywood sound – features themed concerts and panel discussions, together with a film series exploring “Korngold and the Poetry of Cinema,” and the long overdue American premiere of the grand opera that the composer considered his masterpiece, The Miracle of Heliane (“Das Wunder der Heliane”), in a fully staged new production by German director Christian Räth. To complement these offerings, Daniel Fish’s acclaimed staging of Michael Gordon’s Acquanetta provides an alternative look at Hollywood’s Golden Age, and Evidence, A Dance Company makes its festival debut with the world premiere of Grace and Mercy, a new SummerScape commission from choreographer and company founder Ronald K. Brown, with live music from Meshell Ndegeocello, Peven Everett, and Gordon Chambers. Cabaret and jazz highlight a generous program of events in Bard’s authentic and sensationally popular Belgian Spiegeltent. Taking place between June 29 and August 18 in the Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s picturesque Hudson Valley campus, SummerScape 2019 once again makes for a full “seven weeks of cultural delight” (International Herald Tribune). London’s Times Literary Supplement lauds Bard SummerScape as “the most intellectually ambitious of America’s summer music festivals,” while Bloomberg News calls it “the smartest mix of events within driving distance of New York.” Travel and Leisure reports, “Gehry’s acclaimed concert hall provides a spectacular venue for innovative fare.” The New York Times calls SummerScape “a hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure,” Newsday finds it “brave and brainy,” Musical America judges it “awesomely intensive,” and the New York Post observes, “It’s hard not to find something to like, and it’s even harder to beat the setting.” Time Out New York, naming the festival one of “New York’s 20 coolest out-of-town spots,” declares: “The experience of entering the Fisher Center and encountering something totally new is unforgettable and enriching.”
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape/

CCS Bard presents 14 exhibitions with more than 40 artists, offering a wide-ranging museum presentation organized by the graduating class of the Masters of Arts Curatorial Program. On view April 7–May 26.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3122

The Lab for Teen Thinkers is a public humanities program that prepares rising juniors and seniors for future academic and professional success through civic development, mentoring, and internships.
http://www.bard.edu/news/features/?id=251

Teaching artists are Quilan “Cue” Arnold, Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie, Beth Gill, and Nia Love.

The Bard College Dance Program and the American Dance Festival have begun a new partnership that seeks to challenge the way dance is taught in higher education. Uniting critical inquiry and professional practice, the new program contextualizes students’ training with an annual focus on a pressing contemporary topic.

The partnership’s first year examines how two influential roots of modern dance—the African diaspora and Western European dance traditions—operate within contemporary practice and in particular how the education of dancers at American colleges and universities can be reimagined.

Leah Cox, dean of the American Dance Festival and Term Associate Professor of Dance at Bard, leads the partnership. Cox selected ADF faculty that seek to decolonize their classrooms by challenging the way that dance is traditionally taught. Each ADF faculty member represents a unique area of expertise and presents students with ways to overcome divisions within the dance field or between the field and the world at large.

“One of the most pressing issues we are dealing with as educators is the way that whiteness has structured the academy,” stated Leah Cox, who was a longtime member of the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company. “In dance, the influence of whiteness appears in content, pedagogy, and the way we create and organize courses. Western European–based forms are usually prioritized as foundational, and the way courses are structured—separating technique, composition, and improvisation, for instance—reflects a Western understanding of dance. The Bard-ADF partnership courses challenge these norms.”
This new partnership builds on the Bard Dance Program’s two previous professional partnerships, which began with the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane Company (2009–15), then followed with the Trisha Brown Dance Company (2015–18). Maria Simpson, Bard College Dance Program director, states, “The Program was keen to pursue the next professional partnership with an entity that not only cultivates multiple artistic voices but also prioritizes the contemporary education of the dancer—an education that cannot lean exclusively in a Eurocentric direction.”

In the last five years, Bard’s Dance Program has expanded its curriculum to offer dance forms such as Palestininan Dabkeh and Contemporary West African Dance. The ADF partnership continues to build on Bard’s efforts to diversify the curriculum by creating courses that put different dance forms in conversation with one another. Working together, Cox and ADF faculty members designed partnership courses to provoke critical reflection among students through innovative pedagogy and collaborative teaching. Partnership activities in 2018–19 include:

• In the fall, choreographer and performer Nia Love cotaught two levels of contemporary movement practice with Cox exploring alignments with African diasporic and Western European dance forms.
• This spring hip-hop artist Quilan “Cue” Arnold teaches a movement course investigating the practical and pedagogical through-lines and differences between hip-hop and postmodern dance forms. Arnold also teaches a seminar in American popular dance and culture studies.
• “Bessie” Award–winning choreographer Beth Gill will engage students in physical research toward the development of her next creative project. Gill’s repertory class will ask students to examine how they currently locate an idea of themselves within various frameworks of politics, culture, psychology, family, race, gender, and sexuality. The class will culminate in an informal performance on May 15.
• B-girl, choreographer, and performer Ephrat “Bounce” Asherie will be the partnership artist in residence. Asherie will develop a new solo, work with students, and present her latest work, Odeon, at Bard’s Fisher Center on April 13 and 14, 2019.

“I’m thrilled to be working at Bard again,” stated Beth Gill, an ADF faculty member. “My past experience with Bard students was rich and inspiring and led to a whole new phase of working inside of my creative process.”

The partnership reflects the vision of the ADF School, which is known for its Summer Dance Intensive, Pre-Professional Dance Intensive, and Dance Professionals Workshop. “The School must be responsive and adaptable,” Cox said. “Today’s dance artists want their dance practice to reflect their identities and causes, and they want to challenge binaries that isolate us from each other.”

The ADF family of artists and faculty has grown to include newer members who engage these contemporary concerns, such as E. Moncell Durden, Gesel Mason, Michelle Gibson, and Abby Zbikowski, in addition to legends in the field like “Baba Chuck” Davis, Gerri Houlihan, Dianne MacIntyre, and Donald McKayle. The School has extended its curriculum to offer a weekly meeting group to discuss race, as well as regular discussions and reading groups on gender, sexuality, and social justice in the arts. In conjunction with its unwavering emphasis on professional training and contact with an international roster of companies and choreographers, these new offerings continue to make ADF an essential destination for dance artists worldwide.

More about the American Dance Festival

More about the Bard College Dance Program
 

Having Produced and Premiered Tanowitz’s Immensely Acclaimed Four Quartets, Bard Fisher Center Will Commission Three New Works by the Choreographer, Including a Collaboration with Sara Mearns, and Will Develop a Digital Archive of Her Body of Work

Bard Fisher Center announced today that it has selected Pam Tanowitz as its first Choreographer in Residence. Her residency is underwritten by a $1.2 million gift from dance philanthropists Jay Franke and David Herro. The appointment follows the success of Tanowitz’s Four Quartets, which was produced by and premiered at the Fisher Center last summer. The New York Times hailed the production as “the most sublime dance-theater creation this century: a dance for the soul.” 

In an era when many contemporary choreographers are working on an independent basis outside of traditional dance company structures, the Franke/Herro grant provides stability, generous funding, and optimal working conditions to Tanowitz and her collaborators. The three-year residency, which begins this month and concludes in December 2021, includes salaries and benefits for Tanowitz and select collaborators, administrative and touring support, rehearsal space, and professional development. In committing its space and staff resources to this full-service residency for three years, the Center is reimagining how it might support the creation of large-scale and ambitious art on a college campus, and piloting a development and research model that it hopes will prove scalable and replicable elsewhere in the field of American dance.

Bard Fisher Center will commission three new Tanowitz dances, beginning with a new work created in collaboration with New York City Ballet principal dancer Sara Mearns. Tanowitz’s second work, which she envisions as the concluding part of a trilogy that began with New Work for Goldberg Variations and Four Quartets, will premiere in the Center’s 2021 SummerScape Festival. The third commissioned work will be Tanowitz’s first performance to be sited in a museum or gallery space.

A major component of the residency will be the development of a digital archive of Tanowitz’s oeuvre, including the remounting and documentation of several of her performances. These archival initiatives will make her body of work more widely accessible to dance scholars, students, and the general public.

Finally, Tanowitz and her collaborators will engage broadly with Bard’s undergraduate programs through teaching, showings and performances, student access to rehearsals, and campuswide dialogue about the creative process.

As a creative research institution embedded on the campus of a premiere liberal arts college, the Fisher Center endeavors to pioneer a new and future-facing model of partnership between independent artists and arts organizations, on university campuses and beyond. In recent years the Center has created extended residencies for such artists as Sarah Michelson, Justin Vivian Bond, Will Rawls, Tania El Khoury, and Daniel Fish. Often this commitment includes a high level of production, financial, and administrative support for the artists. These efforts reflect the Fisher Center’s commitment to providing extended support for leading artists by shepherding projects from their initial development to their premiere, and beyond through management of the project’s touring, field advocacy, and career development for the artist.

Through this first-time gift to the Bard, Jay Franke and David Herro’s visionary leadership allows the Fisher Center to realize its commitment to new models of support at an unprecedented level. Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s Artistic Director for Theater and Dance, noted: “Pam Tanowitz’s appointment as Choreographer in Residence is a remarkable intervention in her creative life. The infrastructural and producing support she will receive at the Center will allow her the time and resources to develop her most ambitious productions, and the Fisher Center is reimagining its own practices as a site for the documentation, archiving, study, teaching, and dissemination of her choreographic work. Pam is one of our country’s greatest contemporary artists, who has already changed the landscape of American dance. Her choreographic works combine formal sophistication and invention, a curiosity about the possibilities of the body in motion, intellectual rigor, philosophical inquiry, a deep awareness of dance history that paradoxically points to the future, and staggering beauty. It’s thrilling to welcome her to the Fisher Center as a colleague, and to deepen our creative partnership over the next three years.”

In making the grant, Jay Franke said: “We are honored to make this gift in support of Pam’s voice, and to help elevate her work to new heights with the Fisher Center. It’s so exciting when an idea as bold and courageous as this program makes its way to the dance field. We hope our support inspires other major gifts that will create new possibilities for other American choreographers.”

“We are grateful for Jay and David’s inspired philanthropy, which demonstrates their long-term commitment to supporting transformative change in the field of dance” stated Bob Bursey, the Fisher Center’s Executive Director. “We look forward to deepening our relationship with Pam, which began with a commission and presentation in 2015, and continued with the three-year development of Four Quartets. We hope to demonstrate the possibilities for arts centers to work creatively with artists to address the evermore pressing challenges they face.”

In beginning her residency, Pam Tanowitz said: “I’m blown away by the forward-thinking minds of Jay Franke, David Herro, and the leaders of Bard Fisher Center. With this generous and unprecedented support, the company can continue our momentum after the success of Four Quartets. Simply put—it will give me the freedom to keep going.”

High-resolution images of Pam Tanowitz are available here. High-resolution images of Four Quartets are available here.

About Bard Fisher Center
Bard Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs. At once a premiere professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, Bard Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas and perspectives from the past, present, and future.

The organization’s home is the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. Bard Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Productions developed by the Fisher Center have been presented at venues including Lincoln Center, BAM, St. Ann’s Warehouse, Walker Arts Center, and Barbican (London). fishercenter.bard.edu

The Fisher Center illustrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Building on a 150-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. bard.edu

About Pam Tanowitz
Pam Tanowitz is a celebrated New York–based choreographer and collaborator known for her unflinchingly postmodern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance to explore dance making with a consistent community of dancers.

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.” Other honors include an Outstanding Production Bessie award in 2009 for her dance Be In the Gray with Me, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in 2010, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University in 2013–14, a fall 2016 fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU, and named a 2016–17 City Center Choreography Fellow. Her work was selected by the New York Times Best of Dance series in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, and 2018.

When awarding Ms. Tanowitz the 2017 Baryshnikov Arts Center Cage Cunningham Fellowship, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the center’s artistic director, said in a statement that “her work is not an imitation of dance history, but is a distinct intellectual journey.” Her 2017 dance New Work for Goldberg Variations, created for her company in collaboration with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, was called a “rare achievement” (The New York Times). Her most recent work, the 2018 creation Four Quartets, 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).

She has been commissioned by The Joyce Theater, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Bard Fisher Center, 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.

Tanowitz has created or set work for City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival, The Juilliard School, Ballet Austin, New York Theater Ballet and Saint Louis Ballet; and has been a guest choreographer at Barnard College, Princeton University, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Marymount Manhattan College and Purchase College.

Originally from New Rochelle, New York, Tanowitz holds degrees from The Ohio State University and Sarah Lawrence College, and is currently a visiting guest artist at Rutgers University. Upcoming commissions from Paul Taylor American Dance, The Graham Company, and The Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America will expose new audiences to her work.
 

Multiple Grammy Award–winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant returns to the Fisher Center for a special winter concert on December 22, accompanied by Franco-American pianist Dan Tepfer.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3104

Bard SummerScape's production of Oklahoma!, widely acclaimed as one of the year's best, heads to the Circle in the Square Theatre following a highly touted run at St. Ann’s Warehouse.
http://www.bard.edu/news/features/?id=238

The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co. (1983-2004) at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College is lauded as one of the best exhibitions of the year.
http://www.bard.edu/news/features/?id=237

New Annandale House, the two-story multipurpose media studio that houses the Bard College Center for Experimental Humanities, has won a New York Design Gold Award from DRIVENxDESIGN.
http://www.bard.edu/news/features/?id=231

One of New York City’s most exciting young theater companies, New Saloon, founded by three Bard alumni, returns to Bard with their kaleidoscopic adaptation of Uncle Vanya.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3095

The Bard College Conservatory Orchestra performs at the Fisher Center on Saturday, December 1, at 8:00 p.m. with guest conductor Xian Zhang.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3096

“Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today” will be held at BHSEC Manhattan on October 31, followed by a lunch hour talk at Bard at Brooklyn Public Library on November 1.
http://www.bard.edu/news/features/?id=212

Pioneering jazz composer and pianist Vijay Iyer and Nigerian American writer, photographer, and Bard faculty member Teju Cole present a live collaboration, Blind Spot, on October 26.
http://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/blind-spot/

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named artist Wu Tsang, cochair of Bard MFA’s Film/Video Program, a recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3078

OBIE award–winning interactive media artist Andrew Schneider and his collaborators perform NERVOUS/SYSTEM, a Live Arts Bard commission, at the Fisher Center October 12–14.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3077

Bard College will host the exhibition Weightier than Mount Tai, Lighter than a Feather: Human Rights Experience of Chinese Contemporary Art in the Bertelsmann Campus Center.
http://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3074