News

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) today announced the creation of a $50-million endowment, comprising a $25-million gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and a matching commitment of $25 million from George Soros as part of Bard College’s transformational $1-billion endowment drive. Established in 1990, CCS Bard is the first institution of its kind in the United States dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, an interdisciplinary field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform contemporary art exhibition-making and practice. This unprecedented donation, initiated by the Hessel Foundation in honor of CCS Bard’s 30^th anniversary year, enables CCS Bard to continue its pathbreaking work in perpetuity.

The Hessel Foundation gift builds on over three decades of visionary support from CCS Bard Co-Founder Marieluise Hessel. In the late 1980s, the Foundation entrusted its growing collection of contemporary art to Bard for the exclusive use of its students and faculty, laying the groundwork for the creation of CCS Bard in 1990. Since that time, the Foundation has been an enduring supporter of CCS Bard with transformational gifts including the construction of the Hessel Museum of Art in 2006 and the expansion of the library, special collections, and archives in 2015, alongside annual operating contributions that have inspired many others to support the institution. Its collection, which forms the cornerstone of CCS Bard’s master’s program and the basis for many of its exhibitions at the museum, has grown to encompass approximately 2,000 works of art and is today considered to be among the most important collections of contemporary art on a university campus. Support from the Foundation has also enabled CCS Bard to provide 90% of incoming students with financial aid.

“This gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation marks a milestone moment in the 30-year history of CCS Bard,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “The groundwork that Marieluise established in co-founding the institution has catalyzed a shift in the field and, by extension, has advanced bold new discourses in contemporary art. In sustaining CCS Bard for generations to come, Marieluise’s generosity will allow us to build on that legacy and continue to advance new ideas in curatorial practice and contemporary art. Above all, it is a gift to the future.”

“CCS Bard is an integral part of the Bard College community, and we are immensely grateful for Marieluise’s enduring leadership and support. Her generous gift ensures that the groundbreaking work at CCS continues to flourish as it further advances Bard’s overall mission of fostering rigorous programs of free inquiry and creativity,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein.

“For the past 30 years, CCS Bard has had an outsized impact within the art world,” said Marieluise Hessel, Co-Founder of CCS Bard. “It is a privilege to be able to celebrate three decades of sustained, transformational inquiry and experimentation into curatorial studies and exhibition-making with this gift. I know that this program will continue to lead the way in finding new stories to tell, artists to champion, and boundaries to push.”

In celebration of its 30^th anniversary, CCS Bard is currently presenting two exhibitions that draw significantly from the Marieluise Hessel Collection: Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection comprises more than 75 works on paper and drawings collected by Hessel over the course of more than four decades to explore the artistic intimacy achieved by the medium; and With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, the first large-scale North American survey of the groundbreaking women-led Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s, showcasing major works from the Collection alongside significant loans to trace the movement's reach in postwar American art.

In addition, this fall CCS Bard will publish the first comprehensive publication on the Marieluise Hessel Collection, examining the impact of the collection on CCS Bard students through original writing from CCS alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Serubiri Moses, and Gabi Ngcobo, among many others.

About Marieluise Hessel and the Marieluise Hessel Foundation
Born in Munich in 1939, Marieluise Hessel began collecting contemporary art in the 1960s. From the first works purchased from Heiner Friedrich in Germany, the Hessel Collection, which is held in trust by the Foundation, has grown contemporaneously with artists working from the middle of the 20th century through the present. The Collection today is considered among the most important contemporary art collections on a university campus and is remarkable for its breadth, eclecticism, and embrace of undervalued and difficult works of art. Hessel co-founded CCS Bard in 1990, launching a groundbreaking new type of institution dedicated to nurturing the next generation of contemporary art curators and critics.

About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection at its core, alongside extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice since its founding in 1990. Through its rigorous, interdisciplinary program and unmatched resources, CCS Bard provides unparalleled opportunities for students to research and organize museum exhibitions on an independent basis, and in so doing acts as a key platform for the next generation of curators, artists, and art world leaders in the earliest stages of their careers. CCS Bard receives support from a range of public and private foundations and individuals, including major support from the Luma Foundation, The Laura-Lee Whittier Woods Foundation, the Keith Haring Foundation, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation among others.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at its main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

Media Contacts
Resnicow and Associates 
Juliet Sorce / Daniel Rechtschaffen
jsorce@resnicow.com / drechtschaffen@resnicow.com
212-671-5158 / 212-671-5188
https://ccs.bard.edu/

After 40 years in prison, Gregory Mingo was pardoned on the night of Monday, August 23, along with several other incarcerated people, in one of Andrew Cuomo’s last acts as governor of New York State. Bard College students in HR 321, Advocacy Video, worked together with students in the Defenders Clinic at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to create short video self-presentations by applicants for clemency in fall 2020, including one with Mr. Mingo. The Bard-CUNY team visited Mr. Mingo in prison in the midst of the pandemic to interview him.

To be granted clemency is a rare victory after an arduous process on the part of the incarcerated individual and their advocates. “There could not be a better person to leave prison and rejoin the rest of us,” wrote Thomas Keenan and Brent Green, who cotaught the class, in a message to the Bard community. Watching the video, they said, “you can easily see why the Governor's decision was long overdue. Advocating for basic human rights and decency, especially in apparently enlightened situations like ours, ought to be unnecessary. The reason we teach this at Bard, and attempt to put it into practice, is that it's not, and because sometimes—but who knows when—it works.”

Advocacy Video is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences class cotaught by Thomas Keenan, professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Program, and Brent Green, visiting artist in residence. This is a Human Rights course crosslisted with Film and Electronic Arts. The four videos produced by students in fall 2020 are available on the Human Rights Program website.
https://hrp.bard.edu/advocacy-video-clemency/

The National Endowment for the Arts has approved a $30,000 Grants for Arts Projects award for “Freedom on the Move: Songs in Flight,” a project envisioned and led by art song organization Sparks & Wiry Cries for the commission of two world premieres and a subsequent performance tour in 2023. This ambitious musical project is a direct response to Cornell University’s Freedom on the Move (FOTM) database, housing digitized, searchable fugitive slave advertisements, resulting in a co-commission by Sparks & Wiry Cries and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. The grant was written by Sparks cofounders Martha Guth, Ithaca College, and Erika Switzer, Bard artist in residence; director, Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship; and faculty in Bard’s undergraduate Music Program, Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and Conservatory of Music, with Sparks Managing Editor Lucy Fitz Gibbon, faculty in Bard College's Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program.

The first commission is a song cycle by composer Shawn Okpebholo featuring four prominent classical musicians—soprano Karen Slack, countertenor Reginald Mobley, baritone Will Liverman, and pianist and Bard Conservatory faculty Howard Watkins—interlaced with material curated and performed by the singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Okpebholo’s cycle sets poetry curated by Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Duke University, whose work along with that of poet Crystal Simone Smith, Duke University, contextualizes and responds to documents in the FOTM database. This interdisciplinary song cycle will be accompanied by a choral work by Joel Thompson, drawing on the Spiritual tradition as well as the FOTM database. After a New York City premiere in early 2023, the project will travel to Philadelphia, Durham, and the Finger Lakes region of New York, in performances co-presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Lincoln University, Duke University, Cornell University, Ithaca College, the Harriet Tubman Home, Inc., in partnership with Sparks & Wiry Cries.

This project is among the more than 1,100 projects across America totaling nearly $27 million that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2021 funding.

“As the country and the arts sector begin to imagine returning to a post-pandemic world, the National
Endowment for the Arts is proud to announce funding that will help arts organizations such as Cornell’s Music Department reengage fully with partners and audiences,” said NEA Acting Chairman Ann Eilers. “Although the arts have sustained many during the pandemic, the chance to gather with one another and share arts experiences is its own necessity and pleasure.”

For more information on the projects included in the Arts Endowment grant announcement, visit
arts.gov/news.

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About Sparks & Wiry Cries
Sparks & Wiry Cries curates opportunities for art song creators, performers, and scholars through innovative initiatives that capture the stories of our diverse communities. For more information, visit sparksandwirycries.org.


About Freedom on the Move
Due to the breaking of family bonds and the illegality of literacy amongst enslaved people, there
remains a paucity of written records to track individual lives during the period of slavery. The Freedom on the Move database notes that it compiles “thousands of stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place. Created to control the movement of enslaved people, the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives—their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.” Cornell Department of History’s Dr. Ed Baptist and William Block, director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), are the principal investigators for FOTM, a joint project of the Department of History, CISER and Cornell University Library. Songs in Flight seeks to bring awareness to these individuals and to the creative possibilities made possible through FOTM, building a living monument to this erased history by highlighting stories of strength rather than stories of oppression. For more information, visit freedomonthemove.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/27/21)

The Posse Foundation is expanding to recruit art students in Puerto Rico through a new project launched in collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Miranda Family Fund and Bard College. Beginning this fall, the college success and youth leadership development organization will identify, select and train cohorts of high school seniors in Puerto Rico interested in pursuing undergraduate arts degrees at mainland US colleges.

Bard, which worked closely with Posse to initiate this new leadership scholarship, is offering full-tuition funding for study in its renowned arts programs and will recruit the inaugural class of Puerto Rico Arts Posse Scholars this fall. 

“As the son of two Puerto Rican migrants, this project is especially meaningful to me,” says Lin-Manuel, the award-winning creator and star of the Broadway musicals In the Heights and Hamilton. “So much of my work as an artist is informed and enriched by my Puerto Rican heritage. I’m excited to partner with Posse to increase opportunities for the next generation of Boricuas to lead as actors, musicians, painters, dancers, sculptors.”

This new effort is the latest expansion of the Posse Arts initiative, which aims to create a diverse pipeline of leaders in both fine arts and performing arts fields. Bard joins California Institute of the Arts—which will recruit Arts Posse students from New York City this fall—as a premier partner. Over the next five years, Bard will award in excess of $10 million in full-tuition scholarships to Arts Posse Scholars from Puerto Rico.

“We’re delighted to be the first institutional partner for the new Posse Arts Program in Puerto Rico,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “Recruiting a cohort of young artists from Puerto Rico for our Arts Division aligns perfectly with our belief in the importance of the arts in higher education and in increasing access. We are excited to be embarking on this new project with Posse and look forward to selecting the first class in December and welcoming them to our campus.”

Winners of the prestigious award will be selected for their exceptional leadership potential as well as artistic ability. Like all Posse Scholars, Puerto Rico Arts Posse Scholars will receive full-tuition scholarships from participating institutions, where they will attend as members of a team. Other supports will include eight months of pre-college training leading up to matriculation and faculty mentoring once enrolled.

Posse Scholars—a majority of whom are first-generation collegegoers from low-income BIPOC communities—reflect the diversity of their school districts. To be considered for the award, students must first be nominated by their high school or a community-based organization. Nominees then take part in Posse’s Dynamic Assessment Process, an innovative, nontraditional method for assessing leadership and academic potential.

The Posse Arts Program was launched on April 15 at an event hosted by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Warner Bros. Pictures. Former First Lady Michelle Obama celebrated the new initiative in a message to attendees, saying, “Thank you for what you are doing; it couldn’t be more important. Behind every great artist—just like every great engineer, doctor, lawyer, business leader, and, yes, president and first lady—is a great Posse.”

As part of their involvement with the new arts program in Puerto Rico, Lin-Manuel and the Miranda Family Fund together with the Flamboyan Foundation and the Hispanic Federation—organizations with wide footprints in Puerto Rico—will work with Posse to establish a network of nominators throughout the island. They will also assemble a group of accomplished artists in a diversity of fields to help enrich various aspects of the program.

“Bringing Posse to Puerto Rico is a dream project,” says Luis Miranda, Jr., a leading political strategist and father of Lin-Manuel. “Puerto Rico is home to so many brilliant young people who are gifted artists. This Posse expands their horizons so they can pursue their creative aspirations at a professional level. Connecting them to leading institutions like Bard not only expands opportunities for them to hone their craft and build successful careers as artists, but also helps position them to lead in their fields. That’s exciting.”

The Posse Foundation plans to grow its arts initiative—both in Puerto Rico and in the contiguous United States—to include six top-tier arts colleges. At capacity, the program will support 300 Arts Posse Scholars annually, providing upwards of $12 million in full-tuition scholarships each year.

 “It’s difficult to overstate the importance of having leaders in the arts who reflect our unique diversity,” says Posse President and Founder Deborah Bial. “So much of who we are and who we can imagine ourselves becoming hinges on representation. Our expansion to Puerto Rico is a natural extension of Posse’s mission to build a diverse, equitable, inclusive leadership network we can all be proud of. I’m so thankful to Lin-Manuel and President Botstein at Bard for collaborating on this exciting initiative.”

# # #

About The Posse Foundation
Posse started in 1989, inspired by a student who said, “I never would have dropped
out of college if I’d had my Posse with me.” Posse recruits students as seniors in high school, works with them through an eight-month pre-collegiate training program, supports them through all four years of college, and helps them secure competitive internships and leadership-track jobs. 

Posse Scholars represent the diversity of the cities from which they are recruited and are majority first-generation collegegoers. To be considered for the award, students must first be nominated by their high school or a community-based organization. Nominees then take part in Posse’s Dynamic Assessment Process, an innovative, nontraditional method for assessing leadership and academic potential.

Posse partners with 63 highly selective colleges and recruits dynamic students from more than 20 cities across the United States. To date, more than 10,000 students have won over $1.6 billion in scholarships from Posse partner colleges and universities. Most important, Scholars graduate at a rate of 90 percent—a rate that well exceeds the national average and equals or exceeds the average graduation rates at most selective colleges in the United States.

For more information about The Posse Foundation, visit possefoundation.org.

To nominate a student from Puerto Rico, visit possefoundation.org/recruiting-students/arts-nominations

 
https://www.possefoundation.org/

Bard College is pleased to announce that Daaimah Mubashshir will join the College’s Theater and Performance Program as Playwright in Residence, effective fall 2021. A playwright and theater-maker, Mubashshir is the artistic director of {EDAP}, which “produces moving image work, text, and performance to give audiences a kinetic experience of black bodies freeing themselves from the bondage of our past.”

About Daaimah Mubashshir
Daaimah Mubashshir is a playwright and theatre-maker. Her work has been commissioned by the Guthrie Theater and 3 Hole Press. Awards include a 2020-2022 WP Theater Lab Fellowship, 2019-2022 Core Writer Fellowship (Playwrights Center, MN), an 2018 Audrey Residency (New Georges), a MacDowell Fellowship, a Catwalk Institute Residency, a Foundation of Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. She is also a proud alumna of Fire This Time Festival.

Her published works include Molasses and A Blue Coat - Kenyon Review Online, The Zero Loop (No Tokens Journal), Come with Me - Solve for X in The Occasional 2, edited by Will Arbery (53rd State Press), and The Immeasurable Want of Light (3 Hole Press). Selected stage plays include Room Enough (Fire This Time Festival, Pride Plays), The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente, and Emily Black is A Total Gift (New Georges).

Daaimah has been a guest speaker at Yale School of Drama, Williams College, Skidmore College, and Kennesaw State University. For more information, visit daaimahmubashshir.com and everydayafroplay.com.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/18/21)

The American Academy in Berlin has awarded Christopher H. Gibbs, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, a 2021-22 Berlin Prize. The Berlin Prize is awarded annually to American or US-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields, from the humanities and social sciences to journalism, public policy, fiction, the visual arts, and music composition. Gibbs, who is also artistic codirector of the Bard Music Festival and a professor at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, was named a spring 2022 Berlin Prize fellow. Fellows spend a semester at the Academy’s lakeside Hans Arnhold Center, a historic nineteenth-century villa located in Berlin’s Wannsee district.

“Gibbs has long been committed to so-called public musicology, especially to forging links between music scholarship and general audiences through curated concerts and festivals,” writes the American Academy in Berlin in its award citation. “In Berlin, he will explore the past, present, and future of concert life in the city.”

“I am thrilled by the opportunity to think intensely about curation, something familiar with museums but much less so with music,” said Gibbs. “Berlin’s rich musical history and its innovative scene today provide abundant material to help reimage the future, especially in the wake of the pandemic and amid struggles for social justice.”

About the 2021-22 Berlin Prize
Chosen by an independent selection committee, the 2021-22 class of Berlin Prize fellows will pursue a wide array of scholarly and artistic projects, including histories of the legalities of small wars among European empires, the Visigothic political order, competing conceptions of self-government in English and American political thought, Algerian Jewish life, and the Greek Revolution; two new novels and a graphic memoir; investigations into lithium extraction in the US, Chile, and Argentina; EU-China-US relations in the context of global supply chains; the relationship between declining coal-use and the rise of populism; European attitudes toward global democratic decline; and new works by a composer, translator, and two visual artists.

The Berlin Prize provides recipients the time and resources to advance important scholarly and artistic projects, free from the constraints of other professional obligations. Fellows work throughout the semester with Berlin peers and institutions in the Academy’s well-established network, forging meaningful connections that lead to lasting transatlantic relationships. During their stays, fellows engage German audiences through lectures, readings, and performances, which form the core of the American Academy’s public program. For more information, click here.

About Christopher H. Gibbs
Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College; faculty, Bard College Conservatory of Music; and artistic codirector, Bard Music Festival. He is the executive editor of The Musical Quarterly; editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (1997); author of The Life of Schubert (2000), which has been translated into five languages; coeditor of Franz Liszt and His World (2006) and Franz Schubert and His World (2014); and coauthor of The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition (2013; 2nd ed., 2018). He is a contributor to New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 19th-Century Music, Schubert durch die Brille, Current Musicology, Opera Quarterly, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Additionally, he has served as program annotator and musicological consultant to the Philadelphia Orchestra (2000– ); musicological director of the Schubertiade at the 92nd Street Y in New York City; musicological adviser for the Schubert Festival at Carnegie Hall (1997); and artistic codirector of the Bard Music Festival (2003– ). Among Gibbs’s previous honors were the Dissertation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Institute, ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award, and American Council of Learned Societies fellowship. He previously taught at SUNY Buffalo (1993–2003). BA, Haverford College; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. At Bard since 2002.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/13/21)

The Fountain Film Festival, a student-led project sponsored by the Open Society University Network and Bard College Berlin, has announced audience awards given to short student films screened online May 8 and 9. The Best Film Award went to Sirens by Alina Asylbekova from American University of Central Asia and the Audience Award went to 8 de Marzo by Ariela Madera from Bard College.
https://opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org/newsroom/fountain-film-festival-announces-award-winning-student-films-2021-05-11

The Bard College Art History and Visual Culture Program announces the appointment of Heeryoon Shin as tenure track faculty, effective fall 2021. Shin specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on early modern and colonial India.

About Heeryoon Shin
Heeryoon Shin’s current book project, tentatively titled Temples Between Empires: Architectural Encounters in Banaras, ca. 1750-1850, explores architectural revival, cross-cultural exchange, and historiography during the fraught moments of transition between the Mughal and British empires through the lens of temple architecture in the Hindu pilgrimage city of Banaras. Shin’s work on temple architecture is part of a larger interest in the complexity of global and local exchanges fostered by travel, trade, and colonialism, and she is currently developing a second project on the global circulation of blue-and-white ceramics and their interaction with the local production and use in South Asia. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Samsung Scholarship Foundation, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and published in Artibus Asiae and Journal 18.

Shin received her PhD in the History of Art at Yale University in 2015. She also has secondary training in East Asian art from Seoul National University in South Korea, where she received her BA and completed MA coursework in Art History. Her transnational research interests and training tie into her teaching, which ranges from introductory courses on South Asian art and Korean art to broader thematic courses that emphasize interregional connections across Asia and beyond, including art and ritual, architecture and empire, and decorative arts and maritime trade. In Fall 2021, she is excited to teach new courses on the visual cultures of colonial South Asia and the history and politics of craft with a focus on twentieth-century South Asia, Japan, and Korea. Before coming to Bard, she taught at Colorado College, Williams College, and Vanderbilt University, where she recently received a COVID-19 Innovative Teaching Award. 

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/11/21)
 

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded five Bard faculty and Bard MFA faculty and graduates 2021 Guggenheim Fellowships. Bard Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, Bard MFA faculty Roberto Tejada and A.K. Burns MFA ’10, and MFA graduates Luba Drozd MFA ’15 and Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 were named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows. Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 3,000 applicants, Asili, Tejada, Burns, Drozd, and Lusztig were among a diverse group of 184 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2021 Fellowship.

“We are delighted and impressed that so many Bard MFA alums and faculty have been named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows,” said Hannah Barrett, director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. “The Milton Avery School for the Arts wishes to congratulate these faculty and alumni on their 2021 Guggenheim awards. Their recognition is richly deserved and we will follow their careers with pride and admiration.”

“As an experimental filmmaker, our colleague Ephraim Asili has won critical acclaim for The Diaspora Suite (2017), an ambitious cycle of 16 mm short films, and most recently his feature-length The Inheritance (2020), a poetic meditation on history, politics, art, and Black liberation,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre d’Albertis. “Asili's presence on the faculty of Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program represents for our students both deep continuity with Bard's storied past as a haven for artistic experimentation and a stunningly contemporary approach to documentary and narrative with full awareness of the urgency of our present moment.”

“I am thrilled to announce this new group of Guggenheim Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, “especially since this has been a devastating year in so many ways. A Guggenheim Fellowship has always been meaningful, but this year we know it will be a lifeline for many of the new Fellows at a time of great hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. The work supported by the Fellowship will help us understand more deeply what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do what they were meant to do.”

Created in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Foundation has offered fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions. The great range of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. In all, 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 73 different academic institutions, 28 states and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. For more information on the 2021 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 is a filmmaker, artist, educator and DJ whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His award-winning films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA PS1, LAMOCA, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Whitney Museum, and The Barbican Center in London. Asili's 2020 feature debut, The Inheritance, premiered at the 2020 Toronto International film festival and was recently acquired for distribution by Grasshopper Films. As a DJ, Asili has been a regular program host on WGXC, and done guest sets for NTS Radio, Afropop Worldwide, and WFMU. He also hosts a monthly dance party Botanica. Asili currently resides in Hudson, NY, and is a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard.

Roberto Tejada, Bard MFA writing faculty, is the author of poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold  (Krupskaya, 2006), Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish translation, and a LatinX poetics of the Americas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019). He is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and with Michelle White and others the co-author of Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021) He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.

A.K. Burns MFA ’10, Bard MFA film & video faculty, is an interdisciplinary artist who views the body as a contentious domain wherein issues of gender, labor, ecology and sexuality are negotiated. Burns is currently producing Negative Space, a cycle of video-installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The opening episode, A Smeary Spot (2015) debuted at Participant Inc., NY, followed by an exhibition at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR, in 2016. The second in this series, titled Living Room (2017) debut at the New Museum, and was subsequently exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2018. Additionally in 2018 Burns exhibited a new video work titled Survivors Remorse (2018) at the Harvard Museum and a public sculpture The Dispossessed (2018) at the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial. As a frequent collaborator and advocate for labor issues in the Arts, Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Great Economy) in 2008. Burns’ works can be found in public collations including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was also a 2018 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts, a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University as well as a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award.

Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 is a filmmaker, visual artist, and archival researcher. She is a professor, Film & Digital Media, and director, Center for Documentary Arts & Research (CDAR), at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Her film and video work mines old images, technologies, and objects for new meanings in order to reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of her work is centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001), the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011), and her newest performative documentary feature Yours in Sisterhood (2018). Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and RIDM Montréal, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She was the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal.

Luba Drozd MFA ’15 is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist. She earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Her films and installations articulate the absurd in the established exploitative social structures and demonstrate how the systems of control are manifested and echoed in restrictive architectural environments. Luba’s works screened at Smack Mellon, Apexart, Anthology Film Archives, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and Art in General. She is a 2015 Media Arts fellow at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY. In 2020, Drozd was featured by the New York Post as “hero of the day” and highlighted in the New York Times for her work making and distributing face shields for hospital workers in the early weeks of the pandemic. Drozd is a recipient of the 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Arts. Her two-room site specific sound, sculpture, and 3D animation installation piece, “The Aesthetic Limits of Water,” was commissioned and exhibited by the Hessel Museum in 2020.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(4/09/21)
 

On Saturday, April 24, the Bard College Dance Program presents A Celebration of Aileen Passloff (1931–2020). For over 40 years, Aileen Passloff was the L. May Hawver and Wallace Benjamin Flint Professor of Dance at Bard, in addition to her numerous contributions to the field of dance. In celebration of her life and work, Passloff’s former students Arthur Aviles ’87, Charlotte Hendrickson ’07, and EmmaGrace Skove-Epes ’08 will give tribute performances.

“I was strong and tireless and full of passion and loved dancing as deeply as one could ever love anything.”—Aileen Passloff

The free, live-streamed event takes place at 4 p.m. and will feature guest speakers, as well as pre-recorded messages and video archives of Aileen’s work. The celebration is presented in collaboration with the Fisher Center at Bard, the President’s Office, the Dean’s Office, and the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs. For more information and to watch, please visit the Fisher Center’s virtual stage, UPSTREAMING, by clicking here.

“I am thrilled to help to create an event to celebrate my mentor and inspiration, Aileen Passloff,” said Bard Professor of Dance Jean Churchil. “All of my work in the dance studio, as a teacher and as a choreographer, is informed by her passion for the arts, and I know that I am only one of so very many people. By her example, she taught us to understand that the arts are essential to our lives. She taught many aspiring artists to understand that to try to make art is to try to make a profound difference in the world. For Aileen, and for many of us whose lives were enriched by her, to try to make art is to discover, to uncover, and to cultivate the courage to be fully alive.”

Aileen Passloff, Professor of Dance at Bard College for over four decades, was born in New York City in 1931. She began performing professionally at the age of 14 for the renowned modern dance choreographer James Waring, and was passionately committed to the art of the dance for 67 more years. Whether it was ballet, experimental dance, or “dance theater,” Aileen was devoted to learning more about the art of the body moving through space; she continued to dance and to choreograph until her death in November, 2020.

Passloff studied dance at Bennington College; she then led her own company for ten years in New York City. During her performing career she danced with, amongst others, Katherine Litz, Toby Armour and Remy Charlip. She also developed a passion for the art of Flamenco, which prompted her to travel annually to Spain to study. Recently, she appeared in two films by Marta Renzi: “Her Magnum Opus” (2017), in which Passloff portrays the beloved teacher of a group of artists, and a short documentary, “Arthur & Aileen” (2012).

As a beloved teacher of many generations of Bard students and professional dancers, she continued to choreograph until the very last weeks of her life. The Celebration of Aileen Passloff will feature several recordings of her dances as well as live performances by three of her former students, Charlotte Hendrickson, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes, and Arthur Aviles. Other students of Aileen Passloff have included the choreographers Joanna Haigood, David Parker, Dusan Tynek, costume designer Liz Prince, and the director Ann Bogart.
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/a-celebration-of-aileen-passloff

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College has announced the launch of a pioneering master of arts program in human rights and the arts, and looks forward to welcoming the inaugural class in fall 2021. Designed by the Center’s core faculty team of Tania El Khoury, Thomas Keenan, Gideon Lester, and Ziad Abu-Rish, the interdisciplinary program will bring together scholars, artists, and activists from around the world to explore the productive and contentious relation between the arts and struggles for truth and justice. The program expands the curricular and extracurricular elements of the OSUN Center, directed by El Khoury.
 
The Center has set a May 1 priority application deadline and a June 15 final deadline. Ample need-based financial aid is available to cover tuition and other expenses. The following information sessions will be open to the public and prospective applicants (please register by emailing hra@bard.edu with full name and intended session to receive a Zoom link).

• Tuesday, April 6, at 8:30am NYC Time (2:30pm Vienna / 6:30pm Dhaka)
• Wednesday, April 7, at 4:00pm NYC Time (10pm Vienna / 2:00am Dhaka)
• Monday, April 12, at 8:00am NYC Time (2:00pm Vienna / 6:00pm Dhaka)
• Friday, April 15, at 4:00pm NYC Time (10pm Vienna / 2:00am Dhaka)

https://chra.bard.edu/ma_launch_2021/

“Akie was one of my favorite singers, before he joined the band,” singer Rachael Price tells Variety. “I was literally starstruck when he joined. I was like, I cannot believe somebody of this caliber of voice is sitting behind me playing piano.” Bassist Bridget Kearney adds, “(Akie) has many talents that he brings to the table and contributed a lot to the writing on this record and also of course to the character of the recordings, not only with his keyboard playing, but with his singing.”
https://variety.com/2021/music/news/lake-street-dive-obviously-album-interview-1234930088/

Bard College Conservatory student Sophia Kathryn Jackson ’25 has been selected as a 2021 Frederick Douglass Global Fellow, an honor awarding her a full scholarship to represent Bard in a summer study abroad program focused on leadership, intercultural communication, and social justice. Jackson is one of just 14 high-achieving student leaders from diverse backgrounds selected for this prestigious award. The Council for International Educational Exchange (CIEE) announced the 2021 cohort of Frederick Douglass Global Fellows in an online St. Patrick’s Day roundtable where the fellows were congratulated by Vice President Kamala Harris, Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, and Nettie Washington Douglass, the great-great-granddaughter of Frederick Douglass.

 “You will create friendships around the globe as an extension of the work we do as a country to inspire and to work on and to build on the friendships we have around the world,” said Vice President Harris. “Many of you know that I attended Howard University, a school that was founded at a time when few recognized the potential of Black students to be leaders. At HBCUs, and at fellowship programs like this, students of color are prepared to lead. Like Frederick Douglass in Ireland, you can come as you are, and you can leave who you aspire to be.”

A double major in biology and music performance, Jackson was selected as a Frederick Douglass Global Fellow because of her academic excellence, communication skills, and commitment to social justice. A highlight of Sophia’s service to her community is the Music Mentorship Initiative, a program she cofounded, through which she and other undergraduate musicians provide free private music instruction over Zoom for students who could not otherwise afford lessons. Jackson anticipates her time in Dublin will be transformative. “Growth is a byproduct of being exposed to new and uncertain experiences,” she said in her application video. “Being confronted with the challenges of being in a new place and being able to work through them with the perspectives of my cohort will lead to the start of a growth that I envision will continue to bloom throughout my collegiate years and influence my service-based path.”

Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs will co-sponsor the 2021 Frederick Douglass Global Fellows in Dublin, Ireland, to honor the 175^th anniversary of the meeting between 27-year-old abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the Irish reformer Daniel O’Connell in Dublin in 1845.

“I was delighted to join Vice President Harris this morning in meeting these exceptional young people,” said Prime Minister Martin. “Frederick Douglass has a vital and valued legacy on either side of the Atlantic and my Government is delighted to mark the 175th anniversary of his historic tour of Ireland by welcoming 20 brilliant American students from minority backgrounds to follow in the great abolitionist’s footsteps and learn of the influential relationship between Daniel O’Connell and Frederick Douglass.”

In Ireland, Frederick Douglass Global Fellows will study leadership, effective communication, and strategies to affect positive social change as they explore the life stories and legacies of Frederick Douglass and Daniel O’Connell.

“It’s fitting that this diverse group of young people will have the opportunity to develop their leadership skills in a place so special to Frederick Douglass,” said Nettie Washington Douglass, chairwoman and co-founder of Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, and the great-great-granddaughter of Frederick Douglass and great-granddaughter of Booker T. Washington. “The welcome and respect with which Frederick was greeted across his tour of Ireland affected him profoundly. I can think of no better place for future American leaders to gain a global perspective and prepare to be agents of change.”

The Frederick Douglass Global Fellowship was launched in 2017 by CIEE to expand access to international education to underrepresented students. In addition to funding the Frederick Douglass Global Fellows, CIEE provides all students who complete the fellowship application a $1,500 grant to attend a CIEE summer study abroad program. Known as the Frederick Douglass Summer Scholars Grant, this award is matched by many colleges and universities, making an international education experience financially attainable for many more students from diverse backgrounds. To learn more about the Frederick Douglass Global Fellowship, visit ciee.org/FDGF.

About the Council on International Educational Exchange
CIEE, the country's oldest and largest nonprofit study abroad and intercultural exchange organization, transforms lives and builds bridges by promoting the exchange of ideas and experiences. To help people develop skills for living in a globally interdependent and culturally diverse world, CIEE sponsors a wide variety of opportunities for cultural exchange, including work exchange programs, teach abroad programs, and a worldwide portfolio of study abroad and internship programs for college and high school students. www.ciee.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(3/17/21)
 

Double Edge Theatre presents a conversation between Artistic Director Stacy Klein and renowned Surrealist scholar Susan L. Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College. Aberth consulted with Double Edge Theatre in its development of the world premiere this month of Leonora, la maga y la maestra, a play inspired by the visual art, writings, and life of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington and her mentorship of a long line of male artists. Aberth's books Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries) and the recently published The Tarot of Leonora Carrington (Fulgur Press) were influential in the process. This conversation streamed live on March 7.
 
Double Edge Theatre is located in Ashfield, Massachusetts. Learn more about their work on Leonora Carrington on their website.
 
Read more in Artnet about the recent discovery by the curator Tere Arcq of a suite of tarot designs Carrington created for the Major Arcana. The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, by Arcq and Professor Aberth, is the first book examining these newly discovered works. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJUTP82shOY&t=2s

Bard College alumnus Buddy Enright ’84 was the executive producer of the Golden Globe Award–winning feature comedy hit, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, which was released in October 2020 on Amazon Prime. The film won at the Golden Globes for Best Picture – Musical/Comedy, Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical/Comedy (Sacha Baron Cohen), and Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical/Comedy (Maria Bakalov).

Enright was also nominated for the 2020 Emmy Award for best comedy series, Dead to Me (Netflix). He produced seasons 1 and 2, and is preparing season 3 for release this year.

Featuring Exhibitions of Emerging Artists and Underexplored Movements, Major New Publications, and Conversations Examining Pressing Issues in Contemporary Art, Season Includes: 
 

• The first comprehensive catalog of CCS Bard co-founder Marieluise Hessel’s expansive and eclectic collection of contemporary art, featuring essays from nearly fifty CCS Bard alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Zeynep Öz, and Serubiri Moses.

 

• A sweeping exhibition of drawings and works on paper spanning more than four decades of collecting by Hessel and encompassing works from a diverse range of artists including Nicole Eisenman, Rashid Johnson, Arnulf Rainer, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, and Nancy Spero.

 

• A conference on Black exhibition histories, gathering leading curators, critics, museum directors, and artists from around the world to explore pioneering exhibitions that have shaped contemporary understanding of Black art.

 

• A major survey of the groundbreaking yet understudied Pattern and Decoration movement, investigating its defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine or ornamental through work from more than 45 artists, including major works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection.

 

• Thirteen individual thesis exhibitions from CCS Bard’s 2021 graduating class, ranging from the first-ever solo exhibition of young Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro; an exhibition on the intersection of education and technology that provides a prehistory to our current moment of Zoom education; and a group show of performances by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Steffani Jemison.

 

• A celebration of CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year honoring co-founder Marieluise Hessel through roundtable discussions exploring the future of private collecting for the public good.

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) today announced its 30th anniversary season of programming, including new scholarship and significant exhibitions drawn from the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, solo and group exhibitions of emerging artists and underexplored art movements, and gatherings investigating critical topics in contemporary curatorial practice including the future of collecting and Black exhibition histories. Running from spring through fall 2021, CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year of programming reflects the multifaced work of a pioneering institution dedicated to transforming the curatorial field.

Established in 1990, CCS Bard is an incubator for experimentation in exhibition-making and the leading institution dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies—a discipline exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform curatorial practice and exhibition-making. Throughout its 30-year history, CCS Bard has actively recruited perspectives underrepresented in contemporary art discourse and cultivated a student body representing a diverse spectrum of backgrounds in an effort to transform the curatorial field. CCS Bard provides unparalleled resources to its student body to support their studies, including the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, comprised of more than 3,000 objects collected contemporaneously from the 1960s to the present day; CCS Bard’s exceptional archive of exhibition histories, curatorial papers, and rare catalogues; and the Hessel Museum of Art, a 17,000-square-foot facility that is home to the Hessel Collection as well as exhibitions curated by CCS Bard faculty, students, and guest curators from around the world. CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year of programming builds on these resources and history to examine the latest ideas in contemporary art and curatorial practice.

A highlight of the year will be a series of celebratory events, currently planned for June 2021, that will honor Marieluise Hessel by bringing together CCS Bard alumni, artists, and other leading practitioners from across the field to explore the most urgent ideas in contemporary art.

“CCS Bard formed at a crucial time in the development of curatorial studies as a field and our program has striven throughout this time to anticipate and embrace cutting-edge ideas through its exhibitions, collections, programs, and curriculum,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “Our position as a critical platform in the contemporary arts dialogue is due in no small part to the original vision and continued support of Marieluise Hessel, who remains an integral force in our community through her generosity and commitment to our program. It is only fitting that we mark CCS Bard’s 30^th anniversary with exhibitions, programs, and a catalogue that honor Marieluise’s incomparable impact.”

“Our 30^th anniversary has inspired us to reflect upon the incredible resources Marieluise has provided to CCS Bard,” added Lauren Cornell, Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. “Marieluise’s incredible generosity and vision has allowed for the creation of a learning environment for curators like no other. Working with the Collection, Library and Archives, and with a luminary faculty, our graduate students are encouraged to rethink the curatorial field and to advance it through critical research and inventive exhibitions that chart new narratives in art and culture.”

More information on CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year of programming follows below.

2021 Graduate Student Exhibitions and Projects
CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art
April 3 – May 30, 2021

As a core component of CCS Bard’s program, second-year students explore the Hessel Collection and conduct original research into emerging artists’ practices to mount individual exhibitions, while the first-year class works collaboratively to develop a single exhibition mining new aspects of the Hessel Collection. Often a platform for significant artists in the earliest stages of their careers, second-year thesis exhibitions in spring 2021 include the first-ever solo exhibition of young Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro; an exhibition exploring the intersection of education and technology that provides a prehistory to our current moment of Zoom education; and a group show of performances by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Steffani Jemison. The range of artists, movements, and themes explored in these thirteen individual exhibitions reflect the diverse backgrounds and perspectives represented by CCS Bard’s student body, and continue CCS Bard’s commitment to providing a platform for underrepresented voices to transform the curatorial field.

The Marieluise Hessel Collection Volumes I & II
Publication date: April 2021

The first comprehensive catalog of CCS Bard co-founder Marieluise Hessel’s expansive and eclectic collection, this two-volume publication chronicles Hessel’s work collecting from artists and galleries from the 1960s through the present day while simultaneously charting the development of CCS Bard with the Hessel Collection at its core. The Marieluise Hessel Collection Volumes I & II examines the impact of Hessel’s collection—singular for both the range and eclecticism of its holdings as well as its position at the core of a curatorial studies graduate program—through essays by nearly fifty CCS Bard alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Zeynep Öz, and Serubiri Moses, among others, in a fully illustrated, two-volume publication designed by Zak Group.

Advance press copies may be requested by contacting Daniel Rechtschaffen (drechtschaffen@resnicow.com / 212-671-5188).

Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection
CCS Bard Galleries
June 26 – October 17, 2021

Closer to Life is an exhibition of over 75 drawings and works on paper that span more than four decades of collecting by philanthropist Marieluise Hessel, who co-founded the Center for Curatorial Studies in 1990. As a reflection of Hessel’s expansive collection and the geographic trajectory of her life, from early years in post-war Germany to residence in Mexico City and on to New York City and the United States in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the exhibition is organized around these three spheres of influence that characterize the collection from origins to the present day, with works from a diverse range of artists including Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Rashid Johnson, Arnulf Rainer, Nancy Spero, Rosemarie Trockel, Germán Venegas and Kara Walker. In addition to drawings and works on paper, the exhibition also includes a large selection of archival materials and ephemera such as rare artist books, prints, editions, and correspondence drawn from CCS Bard’s extensive archives. Revisiting different artistic periods and contexts, the exhibition draws out contrasts and comparisons between artists, modes of representation, and the continuing vitality of drawing and paper as an artistic medium.

Closer to Life is curated by Tom Eccles and Amy Zion. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 380-page catalogue of the Marieluise Hessel collection of works on paper, edited by Tom Eccles and Amy Zion with contributions by Paul Chan, Lynne Cooke, Gabriela Jauregui, and Michael Newman. The catalogue is published by Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and designed by Zak Group.

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985
Hessel Museum of Art
June 26 – November 28, 2021

The first full-scale scholarly North American survey of the groundbreaking yet understudied Pattern and Decoration art movement, the exhibition spans the years 1972 to 1985 and features forty-five artists from across the United States working in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, textiles, installation art, and performance documentation. Originally on view at MOCA Grand Avenue from October 2019 through May 2020, With Pleasure examines the movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and their significant influence on post-war American art.

Often described as the first contemporary art movement comprised of majority female artists, Pattern and Decoration defied the dominance of modernist art by embracing the much-maligned category of the decorative. Working across mediums that evoke a pluralistic array of sources—from Islamic architectural ornamentation to American quilts, wallpaper design, Persian carpets, and Japanese Imari ware ceramics—artists consciously rejected the aesthetics of minimalism, modernist ambitions to purity and self-reflexivity, and conceptual art’s demotion of the handmade. Artists featured in the exhibition include Sam Gilliam, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Ree Morton, Judy Pfaff, Faith Ringgold, and Miriam Schapiro, among others.

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is organized by MOCA Curator Anna Katz with Assistant Curator Rebecca Lowery. The accompanying 328-page exhibition catalogue is edited by Anna Katz and features seven newly commissioned essays by Katz, Elissa Auther, Alex Kitnick, Rebecca Skafsgaard Lowery, Kayleigh Perkov, Sarah-Neel Smith, and Hamza Walker, as well as artist biographies, a bibliography, an exhibition history, and reprints of historically significant writings. Designed by Green Dragon Office, the catalogue is published by MOCA, in association with Yale University Press.

Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display
Conference to be held November 2021 at CCS Bard

The latest milestone in CCS Bard’s Black Exhibition Histories initiative—which was launched in 2019 to collect understudied archives of influential Black scholars, curators, gallerists, and artists—this scholarly conference aims to expand the field of exhibition histories by exploring a selection of pioneering exhibitions that have shaped contemporary understanding of Black art. Curated by CCS Bard Senior Academic Advisor and Luma Foundation Fellow Nana Adusei-Poku, Reshaping the Field is the first of its kind to focus exclusively on exhibitions of African diasporic art presented in the United States and the U.K., and features panelists including Bridget Cooks, Richard Powell, Cheryl Finley, Jamaal B. Sheats, Lucy Steeds, and Languid Hands (Imani Robinson and Rabz Lansiquot), among many others. Bringing together these and other art historians, curators, and artists who have researched or borne witness to these historic events, CCS Bard’s convening will be an opportunity to gather knowledge that bridges art historical research and oral history while also generating new primary sources.


About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art at its core, alongside extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice since its founding in 1990. Through its rigorous, interdisciplinary program and unmatched resources, CCS Bard provides unparalleled opportunities for students to research and organize museum exhibitions on an independent basis, and in so doing acts as a key platform for the next generation of curators, artists, and art world leaders in the earliest stages of their careers. CCS Bard receives support from a range of public and private foundations and individuals, including major support from the Luma Foundation.

Media Contacts
Resnicow and Associates
Juliet Sorce / Sarah Morris / Daniel Rechtschaffen
jsorce@resnicow.com/ smorris@resnicow.com/ drechtschaffen@resnicow.com
212-671-5158 / 212-671-5165 / 212-671-5188

 
https://ccs.bard.edu/

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Kobena Mercer as 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). Mercer, who comes to Bard from Yale University, will assume his faculty position in fall 2021.

“We are delighted that Kobena Mercer has chosen to accept the Stevenson professorship,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “It is an honor to have as distinguished a scholar and teacher as Professor Mercer, whose wide-ranging work spanning the arts and humanities feels crucial to Bard’s mission, as a member of our undergraduate and graduate faculties.”

“I am honored beyond words to be coming to Bard, which is renowned worldwide for its interdisciplinary excellence,” said Mercer. “Not only have I found the best home for my scholarship, which cuts across Art History, Black Studies, and Cultural Studies, but I am also looking forward to collaborating with Bard’s innovative arts and humanities programs to further grow a liberal arts education that is critically responsive to the urgent questions we face today.”

“Mercer joining the faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, is momentous for the graduate program. His luminary scholarship has fundamentally shaped our fields of focus and his writing is already essential to our curriculum,” said Lauren Cornell, director of the graduate program at CCS Bard. “He is one of the leading figures of Cultural Studies, Art History, and Black Studies, and it is an enormous privilege that his perspective will be available firsthand to CCS graduate students.”

Kobena Mercer teaches modern and contemporary art in the Black Atlantic, examining African American, Caribbean and Black British artists with critical methods from cultural studies. His work has significantly transformed current thinking about art and identity. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994), his first book, was a groundbreaking contribution to multiple fields, bringing a Black British perspective to wide-ranging cultural forms that arose from the volatile transformations of the 1980s. This collection of essays was followed by influential studies on artists including Romare Bearden, Keith Piper, Isaac Julien, and James VanDerZee.  Throughout his career, Mercer’s research has illuminated the art of our time through evolving frameworks and subjects. His recent essay collection, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (2016), examined artists such as John Akomfrah, Renée Green, and Kerry James Marshall, showing how Black artists contributed to art’s transformation in an age of globalization. He edited and introduced Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (2017), and prior to that he conceived and edited the Annotating Art’s Histories series, published by MIT, whose titles are Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Culture (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008). Over the last few years his exhibition catalogue contributions include Wilfredo Lam at Centre Pompidou, Frank Bowling at Haus der Kunst, Adrian Piper at Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Theaster Gates at Tate Liverpool. His forthcoming book is Alain Locke and the Visual Arts, published by Yale University Press in 2022.

A prolific and dedicated teacher, Mercer has taught at Yale University, New York University, University of California Santa Cruz and Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he earned his PhD. Educated in Ghana and England, he is an inaugural recipient of the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, awarded by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2006.2/17/21
 

Radical listening, electricity blackouts in Lebanon, participatory art and political art—Tania El Khoury talks with DRAFF about her artistic practice in this mini-documentary. Tania El Khoury is a distinguished artist in residence in the Theater and Performance Program and director of the new OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard.
https://www.draff.net/tania-el-khoury.html

Video and installation artist Carolyn Lazard ’10 is the recipient of a 2021 United States Artists (USA) fellowship. The Chicago-based arts nonprofit announced 60 winners of its 2021 fellowships, marking the largest fellowship class in its 15-year history. Each of the selected artists, working across 10 creative disciplines, will receive an unrestricted $50,000 cash award.
https://www.artforum.com/news/united-states-artists-announces-2021-usa-fellows-84962

“Sasha Phyars-Burgess’s Untitled features essays, poems and stunning photographs that delve into the black experience and the true meaning of ‘home,’” writes Elena Goodinson in the Guardian. Phyars-Burgess explains: “I am trying to make sense of a place that is not responsible for my upbringing but is wholly responsible for my existence. The place that leaks into my daily references and confuses me about what I call home. I do not always understand this place, though I long to be a part of it.” The volume includes a conversation between Phyars-Burgess and fellow artists Juliana Huxtable ’10 and Carolyn Lazard ’10.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2021/jan/28/african-diaspora-sasha-phyars-burgess-untitled-in-pictures

Bard College announced today that artist George Condo has made a significant gift supporting the arts on campus, including a new online concert series and a dedicated $400,000 fund underwriting scholarships, musical events, and exhibitions at Bard’s Conservatory of Music, The Orchestra Now, the Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Masters in Fine Art programs. Among those scholarships is the new Inclusive Excellence in Music Scholarship Program that addresses inequities in access to higher education in music.

“The Condo Concerts,” presented by the Bard College Conservatory of Music and CCS Bard, begins February 19 with a performance by violinist Leila Josefowicz, winner of the Avery Fisher Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, and continues with recitals by The Fred Sherry Quartet on March 14 and April 18, and clarinetist Anthony McGill on May 2. Full details on upcoming performances follow below.

“During one of the most challenging times for colleges in the United States, I wanted to provide both funding and inspirational programming for students,” says Condo, whose daughter, Raphaelle, graduated from Bard in 2018. “Bard College is a place where my daughter thrived and one where the arts are central to the student experience.”

“We are grateful to George Condo for his support not only of the students at Bard, but also for underwriting these concerts and supporting the great musicians on this series, whose opportunities to perform have been so limited by the pandemic,” said Bard Conservatory Director Franks Corliss.

In establishing this fund, Condo created a special edition etching being sold through Hauser & Wirth, with all proceeds dedicated to supporting the arts at Bard. For more information on purchasing Condo’s etching, contact Cristopher Canizares at Hauser & Wirth.

About the Condo Concert Series
The first concert in the series, streaming February 19 at 8 pm, is a solo performance by the internationally renowned violinist Leila Josefowicz, winner of the Avery Fisher Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her program combines a Partita by J. S. Bach with a new work by the noted conductor and composer Matthias Pintscher, La Linea Evocativa, that was composed for her in 2020 and inspired by Condo’s artwork.

For the next two concerts, streaming on March 14 and April 18, Josefowicz will perform as part of the Fred Sherry String Quartet with her renowned colleagues, violinist Jesse Mills, violist Hsin-Yun Huang, and cellist Fred Sherry, to perform string quartets by Schoenberg and Schubert, and other works to be announced.

The final concert in the series will be a recital by clarinetist Anthony McGill, who is the principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic and a recipient of the 2020 Avery Fisher Career Prize.

The Condo Concerts Spring 2021 programs

Friday, February 19, at 8 pm
Matthias Pintscher La Linea Evocativa (2020)
Bach Partita No. 2 BWV 1004
Leila Josefowicz, violin

Sunday, March 14, at 3 pm
Schoenberg String Quartet #1, Opus 7
Fred Sherry String Quartet, with Leila Josefowicz and Jesse Mills, violins, Hsin-Yun Huang, viola, and Fred Sherry, cello.

Sunday, April 18, at 7 pm
Schubert String Quartet No. 15 in G Major
Fred Sherry String Quartet, with Leila Josefowicz and Jesse Mills, violins, Hsin-Yun Huang, viola, and Fred Sherry, cello.

Sunday, May 2, at 3 pm 
Anthony McGill, clarinet

Please click here for reservations and additional program details.


About the Artists
Leila Josefowicz’s passionate advocacy of contemporary music for the violin is reflected in her diverse programs and enthusiasm for performing new works. In recognition of her outstanding achievement and excellence in music, she won the 2018 Avery Fisher Prize and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, joining prominent scientists, writers and musicians who have made unique contributions to contemporary life.
 
Highlights of Josefowicz’s 2019/20 season include opening the London Symphony Orchestra’s season with Sir Simon Rattle and returning to San Francisco Symphony with the incoming Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen to perform his Violin Concerto. Other engagements include concerts with Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, where she will be working with conductors at the highest level, including Susanna Mälkki, Matthias Pintscher and John Adams.
 
A favourite of living composers, Josefowicz has premiered many concertos, including those by Colin Matthews, Steven Mackey and Esa-Pekka Salonen, all written specially for her. This season, she will perform the UK premiere of Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Dalia Stasevska. Other recent premieres include John Adams’ Scheherazade.2 (Dramatic Symphony for Violin and Orchestra) in 2015 with the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert, and Luca Francesconi’s Duende – The Dark Notes in 2014 with Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Susanna Mälkki. Josefowicz enjoyed a close working relationship with the late Oliver Knussen, performing various concerti, including his violin concerto, together over 30 times.
 
Alongside pianist John Novacek, with whom she has enjoyed a close collaboration since 1985, Josefowicz has performed recitals at world-renowned venues such as New York’s Zankel Hall, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center and London’s Wigmore Hall, as well as in Reykjavik, Chicago, San Francisco and Santa Barbara. This season, they appear together at Washington DC’s Library of Congress, New York’s Park Avenue Armory and Amherst College. She will also join Thomas Adès in recital to perform the world premiere of his new violin and piano work at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Japanese premiere at the Tokyo Opera City Cultural Foundation.
 
Recent highlights include engagements with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and Boston and Finnish Radio symphony orchestras. In summer 2019, Josefowicz took part in a special collaboration between Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Royal Ballet, and Company Wayne McGregor featuring the music of composer-conductor Thomas Adès.
 
Josefowicz has released several recordings, notably for Deutsche Grammophon, Philips/Universal and Warner Classics and was featured on Touch Press’s acclaimed iPadapp, The Orchestra. Her latest recording, released in 2019, features Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Violin Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted byHannu Lintu. She has previously received nominations for Grammy Awards for her recordings of Scheherazade.2 with the St Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson, and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.Violist Hsin-Yun Huang has forged a career by performing on international concert stages, commissioning and recording new works, and nurturing young musicians. Highlights of her 2017–2018 season included performances as soloist under the batons of David Robertson, Osmo Vänskä, Xian Zhang, and Max Valdés in Beijing, Taipei, and Bogota. She is also the first solo violist to be presented in the National Performance Center of the Arts in Beijing and was featured as a faculty member with Yo-Yo Ma and his new initiative in Guangzhou. She has commissioned compositions from Steven Mackey, Shih-Hui Chen, and Poul Ruders. Her 2012 recording for Bridge Records, titled Viola Viola, won accolades from Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine. Her next recording will be the complete unaccompanied sonatas and partitas of J. S. Bach, in partnership her husband, violist Misha Amory.

Ms. Huang regularly appears at festivals, including Marlboro, Spoleto, Ravinia, Santa Fe, and Music@Menlo, among many others. Huang first came to international attention as the gold medalist in the 1988 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition. In 1993, she was the top-prize winner in the ARD International Competition in Munich and was awarded the highly prestigious Bunkamura Orchard Hall Award. A native of Taiwan, she received degrees from the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Curtis Institute of Music, and The Juilliard School. She now serves on the faculties of Juilliard and Curtis and lives in New York City.Two-time Grammy nominated violinist Jesse Mills performins music of many genres, from classical to contemporary, as well as composed and improvised music of his own. Since his concerto debut at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, Mr. Mills has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada. He has been a soloist with the Phoenix Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the New Jersey Symphony, the Green Bay Symphony, Juilliard Chamber Orchestra, the Denver Philharmonic, the Teatro Argentino Orchestra (in Buenos Aires, Argentina), and the Aspen Music Festival's Sinfonia Orchestra.

As a chamber musician Jesse Mills has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada, including concerts at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street Y, the Metropolitan Museum, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Boston's Gardener Museum, Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, and the Marlboro Music Festival. He has also appeared at prestigious venues in Europe, such as the Barbican Centre of London, La Cité de la Musique in Paris, Amsterdam’s Royal Carré Theatre, Teatro Arcimboldi in Milan, and the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Mills is co-founder of Horszowski Trio and Duo Prism, a violin-piano duo with Rieko Aizawa, which earned 1st Prize at the Zinetti International Competition in Italy in 2006.

Mills is also known as a pioneer of contemporary works, a renowned improvisational artist, as well as a composer. He earned Grammy nominations for his performances of Arnold Schoenberg's music, released by NAXOS in 2005 and 2010. He can also be heard on the Koch, Centaur, Tzadik, Max Jazz and Verve labels for various compositions of Webern, Schoenberg, Zorn, Wuorinen, and others. As a member of the FLUX Quartet from 2001-2003, Mills performed music composed during the last 50 years, in addition to frequent world premieres. As a composer and arranger, Mills has been commissioned by venues including Columbia University’s Miller Theater, the Chamber Music Northwest festival in Portland, OR and the Bargemusic in NYC.

Jesse Mills began violin studies at the age of three. He graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School in 2001. He studied with Dorothy DeLay, Robert Mann and Itzhak Perlman. Mr. Mills lives in New York City, and he is on the faculty at Longy School of Music of Bard College and at Brooklyn College.Fred Sherry has introduced audiences on five continents and all fifty United States to the music of our time for over five decades. He was a founding member of TASHI and Speculum Musicae, Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and has been a member of the Group for Contemporary Music, Berio's Juilliard Ensemble and the Galimir String Quartet. He has also enjoyed a close collaboration with jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea.
Elliott Carter, Mario Davidovsky, Steve Mackey, David Rakowski, Somei Satoh, Charles Wuorinen and John Zorn have written concertos for Sherry, and he has premiered solo and chamber works dedicated to him by Milton Babbitt, Derek Bermel, Jason Eckardt, Lukas Foss, Oliver Knussen, Peter Lieberson, Donald Martino and Toru Takemitsu among others.

Fred Sherry’s vast discography encompasses a wide range of classic and modern repertoire; he has been soloist and “sideman” on hundreds of commercial and esoteric recordings. Mr. Sherry was the organizer for Robert Craft’s New York recording sessions from 1995-2012. Their longstanding collaboration produced celebrated performances of the Schoenberg Cello Concerto, all four String Quartets and the String Quartet Concerto as well as major works by Stravinsky and Webern.

Mr. Sherry's book 25 Bach Duets from the Cantatas was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 2011, the revised edition was released in 2019. C.F. Peters unveiled his treatise on contemporary string playing, A Grand Tour of Cello Technique in 2018. He is a member of the cello faculty of The Juilliard School, The Mannes School of Music and The Manhattan School of Music.Clarinetist Anthony McGill is one of classical music’s most recognizable and brilliantly multifaceted figures. He serves as the principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic — that orchestra’s first African-American principal player — and maintains a dynamic international solo and chamber music career. Hailed for his “trademark brilliance, penetrating sound and rich character” (The New York Times), as well as for his “exquisite combination of technical refinement and expressive radiance” (The Baltimore Sun), McGill also serves as an ardent advocate for helping music education reach underserved communities and for addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in classical music. He was honored to take part in the inauguration of President Barack Obama, premiering a piece written for the occasion by John Williams and performing alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Gabriela Montero.

McGill’s 2019-20 season includes the premiere of a new work by Tyshawn Sorey at the 92Y, and a special collaboration with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato at Carnegie Hall. He will be a featured soloist at the Kennedy Center performing the Copland concerto at the SHIFT Festival of American Orchestras with the Jacksonville Symphony, and will also perform concertos by Copland, Mozart, and Danielpour with the Richmond, Delaware, Alabama, Reno, and San Antonio Symphonies. Additional collaborations include programs with Gloria Chien, Demarre McGill, Michael McHale, Anna Polonsky, Arnaud Sussman, and the Pacifica Quartet.

McGill appears regularly as a soloist with top orchestras around North America including the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, Baltimore Symphony, San Diego Symphony, and Kansas City Symphony. As a chamber musician, McGill is a favorite collaborator of the Brentano, Daedalus, Guarneri, JACK, Miró, Pacifica, Shanghai, Takacs, and Tokyo Quartets, as well as Emanuel Ax, Inon Barnatan, Gloria Chien, Yefim Bronfman, Gil Shaham, Midori, Mitsuko Uchida, and Lang Lang. He has led tours with Musicians from Marlboro and regularly performs for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Festival appearances include Tanglewood, Marlboro, Mainly Mozart, Music@Menlo, and the Santa Fe, Seattle, and Skaneateles Chamber Music Festivals.

In January 2015, McGill recorded the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto together with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic, which was released on DaCapo Records. He also recorded an album together with his brother Demarre McGill, principal flute of the Seattle Symphony, and pianist Michael McHale; and one featuring the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintet with the Pacifica Quartet that were both released by Cedille Records.

A dedicated champion of new music, in 2014, McGill premiered a new piece written for him by Richard Danielpour entitled “From the Mountaintop” that was commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, and Orchestra 2001. McGill served as the 2015-16 Artist-in-Residence for WQXR and has appeared on Performance Today, MPR’s St. Paul Sunday Morning, and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. In 2013, McGill appeared on the NBC Nightly News and on MSNBC, in stories highlighting the McGill brothers’ inspirational story.

A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, McGill previously served as the principal clarinet of the Metropolitan Opera and associate principal clarinet of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. In-demand as a teacher, he serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Bard College’s Conservatory of Music. He also serves as the Artistic Advisor for the Music Advancement Program at the Juilliard School, on the Board of Directors for both the League of American Orchestra and the Harmony Program, and the advisory council for the InterSchool Orchestras of New York.2/11/21

The US-China Music Institute presents its second annual concert of symphonic music to celebrate the Lunar New Year in collaboration with musicians both here in New York and abroad.

The Sound of Spring will be offered free online in a livestream from the Fisher Center at Bard at 8 p.m. on Saturday, February 13. The program will feature a new performance by The Orchestra Now, conducted by Jindong Cai, along with performances from special guests including the Central Conservatory of Music Chinese Chamber Orchestra, the China NCPA Orchestra, the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, and the Contemporary Legend Theater from Taiwan. For information and reservations, click here.

The evening will be hosted by acclaimed pipa performer Wu Man and conductor Jindong Cai, who is the director of the US-China Music Institute. Musical selections include works by Tan Dun, Bao Yuankai, Wu Man, Julian Yu, Li Shaosheng, and more, plus a very special excerpt of a Chinese opera style adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Soloists include Wu Man performing a world premiere of her own composition for the pipa responding to this special time we are all experiencing; pianist and Bard faculty member Blair McMillan in the US-premiere of Li Shaosheng’s Spring China Capriccio; and Bard College Conservatory of Music undergraduate erhu major Beitong Liu performing with The Orchestra Now in two arrangements of traditional Chinese folk tunes. Kunqu opera masters Wu Hsing-kuo and Wei Han-min are the lead performers in the Contemporary Legend Theater adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The beginning of the concert will feature Tan Dun’s Internet ‘Eroica’ symphony to honor the many heroes worldwide who are working to combat the pandemic. The symphony will first be performed by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tan Dun, and then followed by a rearrangement of the same piece for the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra using all Chinese instruments.

The program also offers a sampling of traditional and contemporary Chinese symphonic, chamber, solo, and theatrical music, showcasing different regional folk traditions, as well as blending Chinese and Western instruments and musical forms. Musical selections will send a message of hope, gratitude, renewal, and new beginnings, in the spirit of the Chinese New Year tradition of the Spring Festival.

“The Lunar New Year is celebrated by people all around the world. This is the year of the Ox, which symbolizes strength and determination. We created this year’s program to give people some feelings of hope and looking forward to the future. We hope through music we can give you inspiration.” - Jindong Cai


Saturday, February 13, at 8 p.m.
Free tickets may be reserved in advance at
fishercenter.bard.edu/events/the-sound-of-spring-2021
Donations may be added to your reservation and are gratefully accepted.

More detailed program information please visit
barduschinamusic.org/events/sound-of-spring-2021

Contact information:
uschinamusic@bard.edu


Selected Artists’ Biographies

Conductor Jindong Cai is director of the US-China Music Institute, professor of music and arts at Bard College, and associate conductor of The Orchestra Now. Over his 30-year career in the United States, Cai has established himself as an active and dynamic conductor, scholar of Western classical music in China, and leading advocate of music from across Asia. Born in Beijing, Cai received his early musical training in China, where he learned to play violin and piano. He came to the United States for his graduate studies at the New England Conservatory and the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. In 1989, he was selected to study with famed conductor Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Center, and won the Conducting Fellowship Award at the Aspen Music Festival in 1990 and 1992.

Cai started his professional conducting career with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and has worked with numerous orchestras throughout North America and Asia. He maintains strong ties to his homeland and has conducted most of the top orchestras in China. Cai has served as the principal guest conductor of the China Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra since 2012. He is a three-time recipient of the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music. Cai serves as the principal guest conductor of the Mongolia State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Ulaanbaatar. In 2004 he joined Stanford University faculty as director of orchestral studies and conducted the Stanford Symphony Orchestra for 11 years. He is also the founder of the Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival. Cai founded the US-China Music Institute at the Bard Conservatory in 2017 and created the Institute’s the annual China Now Music Festival in the following year. In its first two seasons, China Now presented new works by some of the most important Chinese composers of our time, with concerts performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Bard’s Fisher Center, and Stanford University.

Together with his wife Sheila Melvin, Cai has coauthored many articles on the performing arts in China and the book Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese. Their latest book, Beethoven in China: How the Great Composer Became an Icon in the People’s Republic, was published by Penguin in September 2015.


Recognized as the world’s premier pipa virtuoso, Wu Man is a soloist, educator and composer who gives her lute-like instrument—which has a history of more than 2,000 years in China—a new role in both traditional and contemporary music. Wu Man has premiered hundreds of new works for the pipa, while spearheading multimedia projects to both preserve and create global awareness of China’s ancient musical traditions. Projects she has initiated have resulted in the pipa finding a place in new solo and quartet works, concertos, opera, chamber, electronic, and jazz music as well as in theater productions, film, dance, and collaborations with visual artists. She has performed in recital and with major orchestras around the world, is a frequent collaborator with ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet and Shanghai Quartets and The Knights, and is a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble. Wu Man has appeared in more than 40 recordings throughout her career, including seven Nominee Awards and the Silkroad Ensemble’s Grammy Award-winning recording Sing Me Home, featuring her own composition. She is also a featured artist in the 2015 documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Wu Man studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master's degree in pipa.  At age 13, she was hailed as a child prodigy and became a nationally recognized role model for young pipa players. She subsequently received first prize in the First National Music Performance Competition, among other awards, and participated in many premieres of works by Chinese composers. She moved to the U.S. in 1990 and was awarded the Bunting Fellowship at Harvard University in 1998. Wu Man was the first Chinese traditional musician to receive the United States Artist Fellowship (2008) and the first artist from China to perform at the White House. In 2013, she was named Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year. Now she is a distinguished Professor at both the Zhejiang and the Xi'an Conservatory, China. Wu Man serves as artistic advisor and teaches master classes for the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.


Pianist Blair McMillan is a member of the faculty of the Bard College Department of Music. He studied at Oberlin College, The Juilliard School, and the Manhattan School of Music. A pianist, chamber musician, improviser, concert series curator, his appearances as soloist include Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, le Poisson Rouge, Moscow Conservatory, Casals Hall (Tokyo), Miller Theatre. He has performed with American Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Albany Symphony, Juilliard Orchestra (Lincoln Center and tour of Japan). He is a member of the Da Capo Chamber Players, American Modern Ensemble, and the Avian Orchestra. His solo recordings include Soundings (Midnight Productions), Concert Music of Fred Hersch (Naxos), and Multiplicities '38 (Centaur). He has been at Bard since 2006.


About the Presenters

The US-China Music Institute was founded in 2018 by conductor Jindong Cai and Robert Martin, founding director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, with the mission to promote the study, performance, and appreciation of music from contemporary China and to support musical exchange between the United States and China. In partnership with the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the Institute has embarked on several groundbreaking projects including the first degree-granting program in Chinese instrument performance in a U.S. conservatory. barduschinamusic.org

Recognized as one of the finest conservatories in the United States, Bard College Conservatory of Music is guided by the principle that young musicians should be broadly educated in the liberal arts and sciences to achieve their greatest potential. The mission of the Conservatory is to provide the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music. The five-year, double-degree program combines rigorous conservatory training with a challenging and comprehensive liberal arts program. All Conservatory students pursue a double degree in a thoroughly integrated program and supportive educational community. Graduating students receive a bachelor of music and a bachelor of arts in a field other than music. At the Bard Conservatory the serious study of music goes hand in hand with the education of the whole person. Founded in 2005 by cellist and philosopher Robert Martin, the Conservatory welcomed the composer Tan Dun as its new dean in the summer of 2019. bard.edu/conservatory

The Orchestra Now (TŌN) is a group of vibrant young musicians from across the globe who are making orchestral music relevant to 21st-century audiences. They are lifting the curtain on the musicians’ experience and sharing their unique personal insights in a welcoming environment. Conductor, educator, and music historian Leon Botstein founded TŌN in 2015 as a master’s degree program at Bard College, where he also serves as president. The orchestra is in residence at Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, presenting multiple concerts there each season as well as taking part in the annual Bard Music Festival. It also performs regularly at the finest venues in New York and beyond, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere. The orchestra has performed with many distinguished conductors, including Fabio Luisi, Neeme Järvi, Gerard Schwarz, and JoAnn Falletta. theorchestranow.org

The Fisher Center at Bard develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present, as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 160-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. fishercenter.bard.edu(2.5.21)
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/events/the-sound-of-spring-2021/

Continuing its commitment to bring the world’s boldest artists and most exciting projects to audiences beyond the walls of our building, the Fisher Center at Bard announces its spring 2021 season of music and performance. The Fisher Center’s virtual stage, UPSTREAMING, extends its programming into the new year with As Far As Isolation Goes (Online), an interactive, one-on-one performance from live artist Tania El Khoury, cocurator of last season’s Live Arts Bard Biennial, and the new director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, based at Bard; The Future Is Present, a project intended to model community building with a focus on intimacy and discourse; as well as streamed concerts from The Orchestra Now and the Bard Conservatory College Orchestra; The Sound of Spring, a Chinese New Year celebration, from the US-China Music Institute, and a recital of French music with Piers Lane and Danny Driver, commissioned by the Bard Music Festival.

All events are available on UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage, adding to an already robust selection of archival HD opera recordings and contextual materials.

Reserve online or call the box office at 845-758-7900. Box office hours: Monday–Friday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. EST.

Program information

THE FUTURE IS PRESENT
Ongoing

In late 2020, artists Charlotte Brathwaite, Justin Hicks, Janani Balasubramanian, Sunder Ganglani, June Cross, and Alyssa Simmons initiated The Future Is Present: A Casting the Vote Project, a high-impact, liberatory media project. Across seven weeks, a small community of Black and Indigenous young artists/activists and a small community of young artists from Bard College (Adrian Costa, Megan Lacy, Cam Orr, Anya Petkovich, Taty Rozetta, Hakima SmithStone, Dani Wilder, and Mengchen Zhang) virtually cultivated intimacy and discourse. Over the course of these weeks, the youth cohort created demands on our collective future; now a process of amplifying those demands is underway. Using the youth cohort’s words to inspire scenes, animations, and other moving-image fragments, the Bard artists created a film for the youth cohort, to be released in February, as part of an ongoing collaborative process.

An introductory video, released on UPSTREAMING following the 2021 presidential inauguration, is an invitation for people to participate on terms that make sense in their communities.


TANIA EL KHOURY AND BASEL ZARAA
AS FAR AS ISOLATION GOES (ONLINE)
February 24 – March 21
Very limited availability
ZOOM
$20 ($5 Bard student tickets available through the Passloff Pass)

An online, interactive, one-on-one performance brings audience members into contact with people experiencing inhumane detention centers and a mental health system that disregards their political and emotional humanity. A collaboration between live artist Tania El Khoury and musician and street artist Basel Zaraa, and reimagined for an online context during the coronavirus lockdown, the piece builds on an earlier collaboration, As Far As My Fingertips Take Me, in which El Khoury commissioned Zaraa to record a rap song inspired by the journey his sisters made from Damascus to Sweden.

In As Far As Isolation Goes, Zaraa and El Khoury worked together to create another iteration of their previous piece focused on the mental and physical health experiences of refugees in the United Kingdom. Zaraa created a song inspired by conversations with friends and colleagues who have recently claimed refuge in the UK.


THE ORCHESTRA NOW (TŌN)
The Orchestra Now’s 2021 Season features livestreamed virtual concerts including a world premiere by Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music at Bard; Popcorn Superhet Receiver by Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead); Maestro Leon Botstein conducting Schoenberg and Bach; and more. All concerts, which are livestreamed from the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard, are free, but reservations are required.

SCHOENBERG & BACH
Sunday, February 7 at 2 p.m. EST
Leon Botstein conductor

TŌN Music Director Leon Botstein kicks off the spring season with J.S. Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto and Arnold Schoenberg’s romantic tone poem Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). Also on the program are works for string orchestra by Venezuelan composer Teresa Carreño and Polish composer Witold Lutosławski.

J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
Witold Lutosławski Funeral Music
Teresa Carreño Serenade for Strings
Arnold Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night)


NEW & CLASSIC WORKS FOR STRINGS
Sunday, February 21 at 2 p.m. EST
James Bagwell conductor

This concert features the world premiere of a new work by composer Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music at Bard; and the 2005 piece Popcorn Superhet Receiver by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, which was used in the film There Will Be Blood. The program also includes Edvard Grieg’s classic Holberg Suite and a popular work by Vaughan Williams.

Sarah Hennies New Work TBA
Jonny Greenwood Popcorn Superhet Receiver
Ralph Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Edvard Grieg Holberg Suite


ANDRÉS RIVAS CONDUCTS THE ORCHESTRA NOW
Sunday, March 7 at 2 p.m. EST

TŌN Assistant Conductor Andrés Rivas leads this March concert by The Orchestra Now, livestreamed online for free from the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard. Music on the program will be announced in the weeks preceding the concert.


ZACHARY SCHWARTZMAN CONDUCTS THE ORCHESTRA NOW
Saturday, March 20 at 8 p.m. EST

TŌN Resident Conductor Zachary Schwartzman leads this March concert by The Orchestra Now, livestreamed online for free from the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard. Music on the program will be announced in the weeks preceding the concert.


AN APRIL CONCERT WITH LEON BOTSTEIN
Saturday, April 10 at 8 p.m. EST

TŌN Music Director Leon Botstein leads this April concert by The Orchestra Now, livestreamed online for free from the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard. Music on the program will be announced in the weeks preceding the concert.


A MAY CONCERT WITH LEON BOTSTEIN
Saturday, May 1 at 8 p.m. EST

TŌN Music Director Leon Botstein leads this May concert by The Orchestra Now, livestreamed online for free from the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard. Music on the program will be announced in the weeks preceding the concert.


THE US-CHINA MUSIC INSTITUTE
THE SOUND OF SPRING
Saturday, February 13 at 8 p.m. EST
Prerecorded concert streamed online
Free; reservations required

A concert of symphonic music to celebrate the Lunar New Year, featuring a new performance by The Orchestra Now conducted by Jindong Cai, along with performances from orchestras in Asia including the China NCPA Orchestra and the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra.

This year’s concert will carry a message of hope, renewal, and new beginnings, in the spirit of the Chinese New Year tradition of the spring festival.


BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL
FRENCH MUSIC RECITAL
Pre-recorded recital streamed on demand February 19–25
$15, $25, $35 ($5 Bard student tickets available through the Passloff Pass)

A recital of French music with Danny Driver and Piers Lane commissioned by the Bard Music Festival, featuring works by César Franck, Lili Boulanger, Gabriel Fauré, and Camille Saint-Saëns.


BARD COLLEGE CONSERVATORY ORCHESTRA
Saturday, March 13 at 8 p.m. EST
Livestreamed from the Sosnoff Theater
Free; reservations required

Leon Botstein and Andrés Rivas lead the Bard College Conservatory of Music in a program with works by Richard Strauss, William Grant Still, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and Peter Illych Tchaikovsky.


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

ABOUT THE FISHER CENTER AT BARD
The Fisher Center at Bard develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present, as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 160-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.(2.1.21)
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/

The British-born artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is one of the more fascinating figures to emerge from the Surrealist movement. The magical themes of Carrington’s otherworldly paintings are well-known, but the recent discovery of a suite of tarot designs she created for the Major Arcana was a revelation for scholars and fans of Carrington alike. Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, and curator Tere Arcq examine their new discovery in The Tarot of Leonora Carrington (Fulgur Press, 2020). 

“Once we saw the tarot, we immediately knew that this was very important to the iconography,” says Professor Aberth. “For many years, people thought her work was playful, a bit like fairy tales. But it’s a very serious study of esoteric principles—primary among them the tarot.”
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/leonora-carrington-tarot-new-book-1931837

The Bard College Dance Program is pleased to announce that Yebel Gallegos, a dance artist from El Paso, Texas, will be joining the Bard Dance Program faculty in fall 2021.

“I am looking forward to Yebel joining the dance faculty at Bard,” said Maria Simpson, director of the Dance Program at Bard. “His accomplishments as an artist in the U.S. and Mexico and his research into the history of dance in Mexico through the lens of border politics, are a robust combination that I am certain will draw students to his courses and colleagues to collaborative projects.”

Cameron McKinney and Alanna Morris-Van Tassel will be the spring 2021 Bard Dance Program/Gibney Partnership Teaching Fellows. McKinney and Morris-Van Tassel will be teaching the Intermediate/Advanced Modern and Dance Repertory courses. The Bard/Gibney Partnership was launched in fall 2020 by the Bard Dance Program and GIBNEY, a New York City–based dance and social justice organization led by Founder, Artistic Director, and CEO Gina Gibney. The Partnership provides unique opportunities for Bard students to work closely with Gibney’s resident dance troupe, Gibney Company, a commission-based, repertory company that works with renowned and rising international choreographers representing a broad range of aesthetics and techniques. For more information, visit dance.bard.edu/gibney.

“We are very excited to have Cameron and Alanna on board for the spring semester,” said Simpson. “Each represents a unique and dynamic boundary-pushing point of view in their work in Dance and I am thrilled that the students will have the opportunity to work with them this spring.”

Yebel Gallegos, a dance artist from El Paso, Texas, played an important role in the founding of Cressida Danza Contemporánea in Yucatán, Mexico. During his time in Cressida Danza he served as dancer, company teacher, rehearsal director, and academic coordinator for the Conservatorio de Danza de Yucatán. While in Mexico, he also helped in the creation and implementation of the Festival Yucatán Escénica, an international contemporary dance festival hosted by Cressida Danza. Yebel recently concluded a six-year tenure working full time with the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, based in Salt Lake City, Utah. While in Utah, he also involved himself in projects with local artists, as well as teaching various population groups in Utah and across the United States. He has performed work from artists such as; Twyla Tharp, Doug Varone, Ann Carlson, Daniel Charon, Stephen Koester, Netta Yerushalmy, Claudia LaVista, Joanna Kotze, Jonah Bokaer, among others. Yebel has had the fortune to travel internationally as a performer and educator to countries such as; South Korea, Mongolia, France, Austria, and Chile. He earned his BFA in dance, both from the University of Texas at Austin and from the Escuela Profesional de Danza de Mazatlán, directed by Delfos Dance Company. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, where he is expected to receive his Master in Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington in the Spring of 2021.

Cameron McKinney, the artistic director of Kizuna Dance, is a New York City-based choreographer and educator. With over 15 years of Japanese language study, he created Kizuna Dance with the mission of using contemporary floorwork to create works that celebrate the Japanese culture. He was recently selected as a 2019-20 U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellow to collaborate with renowned Japanese choreographer Toru Shimazaki and present work in showcases in Japan alongside the 2020/2021 Tokyo Olympic Games’ events. He is a 2020 Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellow at The School at Jacob’s Pillow (under the direction of Dianne McIntyre and Risa Steinbeirg), a 2017-18 Alvin Ailey Foundation New Directions Choreography Lab Fellow, and a 2018 Asian Cultural Council Individual Grantee. Through Kizuna Dance, Cameron has presented work and taught in fifteen states and in Japan, Mexico, France, and the UK. His commissions include Princeton University, twice from the Joffrey Ballet School, twice from the Let’s Dance International Frontiers Festival, The Dance Gallery Festival, LIU Brooklyn, CREATE:ART, The Thacher School, and SUNY Brockport, among numerous others. His teaching credits include Adjunct Lecturer positions at Princeton University and Queensborough Community College, and he has taught on faculty at Gibney Dance since 2016. He has also taught on faculty at the Joffrey Dance School, the Charlotte Dance Festival, the Tennessee Dance Festival, the Southern Vermont Dance Festival, and Williamsburg Movement and Arts Center. He is currently building Nagare Technique, a training module that blends street dance styles and contemporary floorwork. Through Kizuna Dance’s new Culture Commissions program, he also directly supports emerging artists through commissions for new works created through research-oriented explorations into the Japanese culture.

Brooklyn native and Saint Paul-based artist Alanna Morris-Van Tassel, is a dancer, choreographer, educator, and artist organizer whose work excavates cultural retention and fragmentation within Caribbean diasporic identity. Morris Van Tassel was named one of Dance Magazine's “25 to Watch!” for 2018 and City Pages’ Artist of the Year for 2018. She was a featured dancer with Minnesota-based dance company TU Dance (2007-2017), a TU Dance Artistic Associate (2020), and is a current advisor to Springboard Danse Montreal. Her self-produced solo project,“Yam, Potatoe an Fish!” was named Star Tribune’s Best of Dance (2018) and earned her City Pages’ Best Choreographer (2019).

Morris-Van Tassel is artistic director of Alanna Morris-Van Tassel Productions (AMVTP), founded in 2017 to produce dance, education, and community-building initiatives. She was a 2015 McKnight Dance Fellow. Morris-Van Tassel is a graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City and holds a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School. She is currently building a performance art project, Black Light, which explores the nobility of black-ness, divine feminine expression, and primordial creativity. alannamvt.com.

For more information about the Bard Dance Program, please visit dance.bard.edu.

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

For the past 50 years, Bard alumnus Chris Claremont ’72 has graced the Marvel Universe with his brilliant storytelling—creating and defining some of its most iconic heroes and building the framework for one of its most treasured franchises. In the Chris Claremont Anniversary Special, the acclaimed writer returns to the world of the X-Men with a brand-new story.

 
https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/marvel-honors-the-legendary-chris-claremont-with-anniversary-special

“The trauma imposed by these land seizures is still felt, even as nearly nine million people depend daily on the water system,” the series introduction states. “New York’s reservoirs exemplify the social compact that undergirds ambitious public infrastructures, while the stories of their making emphasize divisions between city and country, wealth and poverty, the potentials and risks inherent in large-scale environmental intervention.”
https://placesjournal.org/series/reservoir-nature-culture-infrastructure/?cn-reloaded=1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

# # #

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


 
https://www.theorchestranow.org/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gustav Mahler
Adagietto from Symphony No. 5

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


BARD COLLEGE CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC

Tan Dun, Dean

Frank Corliss, Director

Marka Gustavsson, Associate Director

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

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

 
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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