News

Renée Anne Louprette, assistant professor of music, director of the Bard Baroque Ensemble, and College organist, is spending her fall semester sabbatical conducting research supported by a Fulbright US Scholar Award in Brașov, Romania. Hosted by Transylvania University, Louprette’s project focuses on the rich cultural heritage of historic pipe organs in the Transylvanian region and the efforts of local artisans to rescue, preserve, and restore these instruments. She has given recital performances in the urban centers of Brașov and Sibiu, completed audio and video recordings of 18th-century instruments in fortified churches of Mediaș, Saschiz, and Hărman, and of the 1930 Wegenstein organ in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Bucharest. She is also conducting interviews and collecting critical documentation related to notable 18th-century organ builders and recent restorations. She hopes that these efforts will help cast new light on this precious musical heritage unique to Romania as a cross-cultural center of Eastern Europe.

On January 7, 2021, Venezuela’s Special Action Forces raided the La Vega neighborhood of Caracas, leaving 23 people dead in what the community calls the “La Vega massacre.” The special police unit has been accused of targeting working-class neighborhoods, criminalizing young men for where they live as it attempts to root out gang activity. As part of an ongoing project supported by the Pulitzer Center and a Getty Images Inclusion Grant, Bard alumna Lexi Parra ’18 gets to know the women of La Vega who are maintaining their community and pushing back against state and gang violence. 

Lexi Parra majored in human rights and photography at Bard College.

Further Reading

• As gang, police violence rages, a neighborhood tries to connect (Washington Post)
• Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
• Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects for Peace Prize

Jessie Montgomery, composer in residence at Bard, has been named Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year. “Jessie Montgomery grew up surrounded by jazz and activism. A  Juilliard-trained violinist, she gravitated towards composition in her 20s, and later learned to associate her own Black identity with her music. The resulting body of work has been embraced all around the world for its freshness and energy,” writes Musical America. The 62nd annual Musical America awards will be presented at an awards ceremony in New York City on December 4.

Bard composer in residence Missy Mazzoli (2022) and Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts Joan Tower (2020) were recent recipients of this award.

Bard College Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Sky Hopinka has been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. Hopinka, a filmmaker, video artist, and photographer, is one of this year’s 25 recipients of the prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In a statement about his work, the MacArthur Foundation says, “Hopinka layers imagery, sound, and text to create an innovative cinematic language. His short and feature-length films traverse both Indigenous histories and contemporary experiences . . . Hopinka is creating a body of work that not only represents the lives of Indigenous peoples but incorporates their worldviews into the strategies of representation itself.”

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 MacArthur 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. 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.

MacArthur Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee, recipients learn of their selection only when they receive a call from the MacArthur Foundation just before the public announcement. Thirteen Bard faculty members have previously been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.

Sky Hopinka received a BA (2012) from Portland State University and an MFA (2016) from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He is currently an assistant professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College. His work has been shown at numerous film festivals including Sundance, Park City and Salt Lake City, UT; Courtisane, Ghent; Punto de Vista, Pamplona; Milwaukee Film Festival; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; and Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has also exhibited work at venues including Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians.

Bard alumnus and artist Paul Chan MFA '03 has also been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. "He draws on a wealth of cultural touchstones—from classical philosophy to modern literature, critical theory, and hip-hop culture—to produce works that respond to our current political and social realities, making those realities more immediately available to the mind for contemplation and critical reflection," stated the MacArthur Foundation.

Paul Chan received a BFA (1996) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA (2003) from Bard College. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Schaulager, Basel. He is also the founder and publisher of Badlands Unlimited (established 2010). He received the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters in 2021.

Further Reading

Bard Alumnus Paul Chan MFA ’03 Named 2022 MacArthur Fellow
More about Sky Hopinka's Award from the MacArthur Foundation

Alex Kitnick, assistant professor of art history and visual culture at Bard, writes about the art of Wolfgang Tillmans for Artforum. The German photographer’s career is the subject of “Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear,” a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. “I think we can describe much of Tillmans’s work as at once utopian and deeply presentist. Liberal in spirit, it makes room for many things,” Kitnick writes. “The utopian seems like the wrong designation for his work. The utopian is always ahead of us. But there is no future here—everything is right now.” 

Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music, reviewed Codeine’s lost album, Dessau, for NPR. Recorded in June 1992 at Harold Dessau Recording studio in New York City, the album consists mostly of songs that appeared on later albums, some in similar form and others considerably changed. For Hennies, the recordings evoke teenage memories of her band sharing a bill with Codeine at a daylong concert in Louisville, Kentucky in 1993. Listening to the album years later, Hennies writes, “Dessau feels like a ghost.” 

The Chicago-based Floating Museum, an art collective codirected by Bard alumnus Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford ’07, will serve as the artistic team leading the fifth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, or CAB 5. Titled This is a Rehearsal, CAB 5 “will build on and expand the collective’s ongoing work,” writes Matt Hickman for the Architect’s Newspaper. “Floating Museum is organized to work at the intersection of disciplines, where civic participation inspires and shapes our process. It’s both a thrill and challenge to collaborate with the CAB as the artistic team of the 2023 edition,” said the members of Floating Museum. With This is a Rehearsal, the collective hopes to showcase work that demonstrates the ways in which “contemporary environmental, political, and economic issues are shared across national boundaries but are addressed differently around the world through art, architecture, infrastructure, and civic participation.” CAB 5, This is a Rehearsal, is scheduled to open September 2023.

After a nearly decade-long break, the trio that helped spark New York’s early 2000s rock revival is back with Cool It Down, “an expansive album that dares to imagine a bold, fresh future.” The New York Times profiles the band, featuring Bard alum Nick Zinner ’98 on guitar, as they return to the studio and the stage with a new perspective in their 40s, after moving cross-country, starting families, and years pursuing their own musical and artistic projects. The new album tackles serious themes such as climate change and the longing for closeness in the aftermath of the pandemic, but ultimately the band is on a mission to bring a sense of joy and hope to audiences.
 

Sky Hopinka, assistant professor of film and electronic arts, talks with the BBC about his new documentary, Kicking the Clouds, which has been shortlisted for the BBC's LongShots film festival. Hopinka, who is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, talks about how a 50-year-old recording of a language lesson between his mother and grandmother sparked the film, which the BBC calls “dreamy and soulful ... a poetic road trip into the history of a family and the disappearing language of a tribe.”

From September 8 to September 19, viewers can vote for their favorite film and choose the winner of the LongShots Audience Award. Dedicated this year to the theme of “Journeys,” LongShots spotlights the best short documentaries from the most interesting emerging filmmakers worldwide, handpicked by some of the most prestigious film festivals around the world.

Assistant Professor of Music Angelica Sanchez’s newest acoustic-trio album Sparkle Beings will be released by Sunnyside Records on September 23 and is featured in the New York Times culture section’s fall preview. “This pianist and composer has yet to receive her full due, but at 50 she continues to churn out fabulous acoustic free jazz recordings at an unfettered clip,” writes Giovanni Russonello for the New York Times.

Novelist Stephanie LaCava profiles her friend, multidisciplinary artist, and Bard studio arts alumna Carolee Shneemann ’59 for the Guardian. Shneemann (1939–2019) was among the founding artists of the Judson Dance Theater, alongside the late Trisha Brown and Aileen Passloff (Professor Emerita of Dance at Bard). Shneemann created boundary-breaking, embodied art that included kinetic theater, film, photography, sculpture, and writing, however, she always considered herself a painter. While in her lifetime, gallery representation and critical recognition was elusive, her legacy is receiving more attention. “Postmortem, the accolades come fast for Carolee. They were never so forthcoming when she was still pushing the limits of earthbound energy, inhabiting her body,” writes LaCava. “Body Politics,” the first UK survey of Schneemann’s work, is on view at the Barbican in London until January 8, 2023. 

An exhibition in Catskill features work by the Columbia Collective, a multimedia arts group of female and trans incarcerated artists that was founded by Maggie Hazen, visiting artist in residence at Bard College. Anna Schupack ’22 helped Hazen organize the exhibition to promote the artists in the collective while bringing attention to problems in the juvenile justice system. Sofia Thieu D’Amico CCS ’22 curated the show. The exhibition was funded by Bard’s Margarita Kuchma Project Award, which Schupack and Sarah Soucek ’22 won in July. Talking Back: Artists of the Columbia Collective, runs through September 25 at Foreland Contemporary Arts Campus in Catskill.

The Foreland galleries will host an artist talk and panel discussion for the exhibition on September 14 at 6:30 pm, in person and on Zoom, moderated by D'Amico:
This event is free and open to the public, with Alison Cornyn of the Incorrigibles Project and Mark Loughney, artist of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, focusing on the intersections of cultural and carceral systems, tapping our prison history archives, the crisis of youth incarceration, and visions of a decarcerated future. They will ask: How do we identify modes of abolition and advocacy, create critical projects, and identify the reaches of our prison industrial complex? Following artist presentations and discussion will be a Q&A session with panelists and Columbia Collective founder Maggie Hazen.

Visiting Artist in Residence Andy Robert’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, Ti Zwazo Clarendon: You Can Go Home Again; You Just Can’t Stay, opens September 16 at the Michael Werner Gallery in London. His paintings challenge a static understanding of history. Describing his method, Robert says “in questioning how an image comes into the world, and into being, I want to own up, to admit at any point, a painting, an image can change direction and isn’t fixed.” Robert’s work will also be shown at the 58th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Established in 1896 by the Carnegie Museum of Art and organized every three to four years, the Carnegie International is the longest-running North American exhibition of international art and presents an overview of how art and artists respond to the critical questions of our time. The 58th Carnegie International, which is titled Is it morning for you yet?, runs from September 24, 2022, to April 2, 2023.

As part of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Nayland Blake ’82, “bearish, Merlin-bearded, soft-spoken in the manner of a blacksmith teaching kindergartners,” offers advice to artists as part of their performance series “Got an Art Problem?” Writing for the New Yorker, Hannah Seidlitz outlines Blake’s contributions to this year’s Biennial, including “Rear Entry” and “Gender Discard Party,” in which “guests were invited to ‘bring your own baggage’ and dance away the woes of classification.” With “Got an Art Problem?,” Blake schedules meetings with guests who are asked to “illustrate their art problems,” which Blake then talks through with the guest until their time is up. Offering advice to one guest, an artist who goes by Zaun whose work attempts “to visualize the living grid,” Blake asked a very simple question: “What is a game?” “A game is a system of rules that organize behavior,” Blake said. “What’s delightful is seeing somebody operate within those rules and yet do this unexpected thing.” 

Pony, a play by Sylvan Oswald that “would demand a stage world populated by a spectrum of queer and trans characters,” first premiered in 2011. Now, 11 years later, Pony returns for its second production, having evolved in that interim decade, writes Miriam Felton-Dansky, professor of theater and performance, for American Theatre. “This production also allows the play new life in the wake of revisions Oswald has made over many years in response to evolving conversations about LGBTQ+ experience,” she writes. Another evolution, Oswald told Felton-Dansky, was in the second production’s casting, which found “enough transmasculine actors to fill the roles” and “a community ready and waiting for this play, neither of which were a given even 10 years ago.” Pony is playing now through September 4 in Portland, Maine, as part of the Portland Theater Festival.

Bard College Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen has been awarded $350,000 by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to fund her project, the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a digital archive of materials related to the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, Syria, a multicultural center of the ancient world that has been threatened in recent years by looting and conflict. IDEA aims at virtual reassembly and recontextualization of archaeological information from a uniquely preserved archaeological site of cross-disciplinary significance. The NEH grant period is July 2022 through June 2025.

“We couldn’t be happier or more humbled to receive the support of the NEH to bring about this important work,” says Chen. “What I’m most excited about are the ways the grant funds will allow us to provide hands-on learning opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, as well as displaced Syrians, all the while making an ethical impact on data from one of the most important archaeological resources we have about life in the ancient world.”

Located on the frontier between the Roman and Persian Empires, Dura-Europos is a rare archaeological resource. Nicknamed “Pompeii of the East” due to its extraordinary degree of preservation, Dura-Europos provides well-preserved and juxtaposed Jewish, Christian, and pagan sanctuaries, and textual remains in a variety of Mediterranean and Semitic languages. The site offers glimpses into the ubiquitous ancient multiculturalism and domestic coexistence of different ethnic groups, reflecting the historical and cultural complexity of life in a frontier city, spanning from 300 BCE to the 250s CE.

Since 1920, European excavations involving multiple institutional partners and well-intentioned efforts to share-out access to physical objects from this important site have led to the dispersal of Dura’s artifacts into collections across the world, largely residing in European and American collections catalogued exclusively in Western languages (primarily English, and some in French). Using the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD), IDEA endeavors to create a comprehensive and extensible digital archive whose data points can be freely reused, and to develop a web application that provides multilinguistic access to the integrated Dura-Europos archival resources in a single interface, together with geo-located visualizations to enhance data intelligibility at a glance.

Ultimately, one of IDEA’s long-term aims is to help democratize processes of knowledge-creation relevant to Dura-Europos. With a great number of Dura-Europos artifacts housed in Western collections and historically only searchable in English (or, less often, French), the number of Middle Eastern scholars that have been able to engage in scholarship related to this important site has been unsurprisingly limited. Establishing multilingual (especially Arabic) accessibility for the site’s archaeological data via the IDEA web application is intended to serve as a steppingstone to the creation of international data-shaping collaborations in the post-grant period. 

At Bard, Chen plans to collaborate with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) and Bard College Berlin on this project. The project will support a CCS Bard fellow each year. The CCS Bard fellows’ participation in the project will expose them to the range of applications of LOD for collections cataloging and information discoverability. Further, in collaboration with the Middle Eastern Studies Program and Bard College Berlin, IDEA will establish remote linked data training workshops for native Arabic-speakers. These remote workshops will in part supply Arabic-language translations for artifact records and further the project goal of increasing Arabic-language searchability of content related to the archaeological site.

IDEA’s core team members also include Co-Principal Investigator Holly Rushmeier, Katherine Thornton, Kenneth Seals-Knutt, Adnan Al Mohamad, and Scott DiGiulio. To learn more, visit duraeuroposarchive.org.

Originally published in LitHub’s “The Craft of Writing” newsletter, Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante’s article explores her writing process and how her most recent book, Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (illustrated by Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91), “stemmed from a strong initial emotion” about the place she’s lived for the past 22 years, and took shape intuitively, without a predetermined structure or result in mind. “Going into the writing I like to cultivate a particular juncture between knowing and not knowing—having all the facts but remaining uncertain how they fit together. It’s a delicate balance, because if you know too little what you write will be halting and opaque, and if you know too much it will be dead on the page, a mere transcription after the fact,” writes Sante. “In any case, whatever ideas and speculations may occupy the writer’s head, writing does not begin with an idea; it begins with a sentence.”

Christine Shoshannah ’06 (formerly known by her surname Dominguez), who majored in music, returned to her hometown of Newburgh, New York, to host a benefit concert and album release event. A portion of the proceeds raised from the event will be donated to Safe Harbors of the Hudson, a nonprofit supporting homeless and low-income families in Newburgh. Shoshannah is a Grammy-nominated songwriter and award-winning singer with a new album Faithful For Free. She graduated one year early from Newburgh Free Academy to jump-start her music career before enrolling at Bard.

The video artist Isaac Julien and the cultural theorist and Bard professor Kobena Mercer explore the legacy of Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Locke, his relationship with so-called “primitive” African sculpture, and the “queering of the New Negro.” Professor Mercer’s new book Alain Locke and the Visual Arts (Yale University Press, 2022) is discussed in the New Yorker in tandem with Julien's new multiscreen commission, “Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die),” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Kobena Mercer is the Charles P. Stevenson Chair in Art History and the Humanities, a joint appointment between the Art History and Visual Culture Program in the undergraduate College, and the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS).

Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 says his photographs of fireflies can range from “a spa for the eyes” to “almost pure chaos.” For NPR, Lara Pellegrinelli spoke with Mauney, who has spent almost a decade photographing fireflies in the Hudson Valley, using Photoshop to painstakingly compile hundreds of timed exposures into a single image. The images, Pellegrinelli writes, are catching the eye of artists and scientists alike, sparking the interest of researchers pursuing “new evidence that firefly swarms can synchronize their flashes.” Mauney is now a part of a group of volunteers helping collect data for computer scientist and biophysicist Dr. Orit Peleg of the BioFrontiers Institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Still, for Mauney, the images, and the process of composing them, are the primary thing. “I never get tired of it,” Mauney says. “And I never get tired of the challenge and the puzzle of trying to construct the images — and trying to construct a good image, because it’s not enough for me to let the bugs do the heavy lifting.”

Lexi Parra ’18, who majored in human rights and photography at Bard, has been selected as one of eight photojournalists from around the world to be collectively awarded $40,000 in grants from Getty Images, a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace. Parra is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based in Caracas, Venezuela. Her work focuses on youth culture, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. 
 
The annual Getty Images Inclusion Grants aim to support emerging editorial talent within underrepresented groups, offering aspiring photojournalists the creative means and solutions to pursue education that will enable careers within the industry. Eight grants of $5,000 each were awarded to editorial photographers and videographers from different professional specialties, including News, Sport, Arts & Entertainment, and Multimedia. Parra was selected for her work in news photography. Recipients were selected by an esteemed panel of judges comprising accomplished professionals from the fields of photography and journalism and convened by Women Photograph, a non-profit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists; Diversify Photo, a community of photographers, editors, and visual producers working to diversify how people interact with media; and Getty Images. 

Asleep on the job? Dr. Sara Mednick ’95, Bard alumna and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, says that could be a good thing for productivity. Speaking with Discover magazine, Mednick shared insights into the cognitive benefits of naps, which “benefit everything that nighttime sleep helps, including emotional regulation, attention, alertness, motor function and memory.” The length and timing of a nap also impacts its effects on our well-being, with higher benefits from naps before 1 pm, leading many companies and universities to create “designated sleeping pods to allow students and employees to nap whenever they need to.” Building off of findings from a 2018 paper coauthored by Mednick, Discover outlines that while “the benefits of napping may vary across different individuals,” given their many cognitive benefits, it might be time to reconsider how naps fit into our personal and professional lives.

For her “lyrical and haunting” Senior Project, I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, Alice Fall ’22 won second place in Lenscratch’s 2022 Student Prize Awards. “In Alice Falls’s I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, images are alive, the still photographs aren’t still,” writes Alexa Dilworth. Fall will receive $750 as well as a mini exhibition on the Curated Fridge as part of the prize package. In an interview with Lenscratch, Fall described her process and artistic philosophy. “When I am in tune with my body and emotion and the way I physically respond to an image—whether I am making work or engaging with images I’ve already made, my vision is sharpest,” she said.

Bard College’s Division of the Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Anne Hunnell Chen as Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year.

Anne Hunnell Chen specializes in the art and archaeology of the globally connected Late Roman world. She is the founder and director of the NEH-funded International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), aimed at virtual reassembly and recontextualization of archaeological information from a uniquely preserved archaeological site of cross-disciplinary significance. Dr. Chen has published on Roman, Persian, and Digital Humanities topics, and taught equally wide-ranging coursework.

In addition, she is currently at work on a monograph, Tetrarchic Art, Architecture, and Ideology Between East and West (284-325 CE). Taking a transculturally-sensitive, multimedia, and contextual approach, hers is the first book to treat the imperial art of this critical transitional era in its own right, rather than as an accessory in a longue durée narrative. She argues that emperors of this era sensitively adjusted their ideological messaging to address ever-evolving internal and external political pressures—including inordinate pressure from the Persian Sassanid East—and that the stylistic abstraction most commonly associated with the imperial art of the period was not as all-pervasive as generally assumed.

She has excavated at the Roman Baths in Iesso (Spain), and at the Roman imperial palace at Felix Romuliana (Serbia), a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2013–14, she spent a year as a fellow in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she worked on the international loan exhibition Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. Dr. Chen also serves as co-chair of the international Pelagios Network, and an historical consultant for the Virtual Center for Late Antiquity (VCLA).

She earned her B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fields of Art History and Classical Studies, and her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Bard community, she taught at Brown, Hofstra, and Yale Universities.

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of painter Andy Robert as Visiting Artist in Residence in the Studio Arts Program for the fall 2022 semester.

Andy Robert (b. 1984, Les Cayes, Haiti) is a painter who conceptually negotiates abstraction with recognizable imagery; his paintings wrestle between the lyrical and the concrete. In a play of content and form, Robert’s paintings draw from a breadth of historical and personal references, which enjoys the tinkering that comes with painting pictures. Andy Robert lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

“I want my paintings to feel like sketches—quick with the immediacy and intimacy of a rough draft, haptic but thought out in terms of their scale, detail and consideration. As with a thumbnail, my intuitive, beginning impulses, gestural marks of dry-brushing and scraping; of adding and removing of paint and line considered and preserved and valued throughout the painting as it approaches its finish, its resolve.”

Through experimentation he has arrived at a deeply personal and an inventive, deconstructive approach to painting that relies on the premise that images are to be bent and folded, taken apart and put back together again; and a belief that art is a philosophical means to look at and examine things—to question, test ideas, and engage with the world. And that in painting a picture something is being taken apart to put back together; there is an inherent risk in breaking it. 

A diasporic Haitian-American immigrant and painter, Andy Robert views the world critically as a contradiction of mass-communication and increased voicelessness. Interior and contemplative —like the telling of memory or that of a song, his topographical abstractions favor a wandering, poetic ambiguity, and a breaking free that is a strategic opacity abetted by his deconstructive application of paint, mosaic-like accumulations in assemblage, exhaust and come to.  

Recent solo exhibitions include Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Significant group shows include MoMA PS1: Greater New York Exhibition (2021); Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Curated by Duro Olowu, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2020); Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe & Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); and We Go as They: Artists in Residence 2016-17, Studio Museum in Harlem (2016 – 2017). 

Robert was a special gift recipient from The Estate of Pierre Guyotat (2021); the recipient of the Benny Andrews Fellowship for the MacDowell Residency in Peterborough, NH (2020); a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient (2019); and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award Recipient (2019). 

He was in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Skowhegan, ME (2016); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016) and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2015). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The AstrupFearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL.

Andy Robert was recently named on the artist list for the 2022 edition of the Carnegie International, the United States’ oldest biennial-style show.

Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts and Director of Film and Electronic Arts Ephraim Asili directed the Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2023 Men’s fashion show in Paris. A tribute to Victor Abloh, fashion designer and creative director for Louis Vuitton who passed away in November 2021, the show opened with a cinematic prelude conceived and directed by Asili. Asili’s film, titled Strange Math, explores the relationship between imagination and reality, which are central themes to the collection. The show’s soundtrack was a combination of the score for the film, “Enlightenment” by the Sun Ra Arkestra, Florida A&M University in Tallahassee's a live performing marching band The Marching 100, and featured live performance by Kendrick Lamar. 

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

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.

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.
 

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.