News

The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music announces the sixth season of the China Now Music Festival, from October 2 to 8. The festival’s major concerts will take place at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College and at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.

The China Now Music Festival is dedicated to promoting an understanding and appreciation of music from contemporary China through an annual series of concerts and academic activities. In the previous five seasons, China Now has attracted more than 10,000 live audience members, and nearly 100,000 viewers have participated in online programs. The sixth annual festival will focus on the theme The Bridge of Music, with an unprecedented series of uniquely curated events that will trace how generations of musicians and music organizations from the US and China have worked together and inspired each other through music exchange.

“Music is both the common wealth of human civilization and the unique creation of individual cultures and peoples,” said Jindong Cai, the artistic director of the China Now Music Festival. “It is a bringer of hope and joy, and a bridge to understanding. I hope that this year's China Now Music Festival will bring you this hope, joy, and understanding.”

The first concert program, “Bard East/West Ensemble and Special Guest Wu Man,” presents new arrangements of music by Tan Dun and Zhou Long, as well as several new works by outstanding young composers from China, including Tian Tian and Yao Chen, faculty members at the Central Conservatory of Music. It will be held on October 2 at the Bard Conservatory in Annandale-on-Hudson, and on October 4 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. The ensemble combines Chinese and Western instruments together as a new model of cross-cultural performance, consisting of a Western string quintet and seven Chinese instruments including dizi, erhu, pipa, ruan, suona, and guzheng, as well as Chinese and Western percussion. The program features renowned pipa virtuoso Wu Man performing “King Chu Doffs His Armour” by the Pulitzer Prize winner composer Zhou Long and based on the famous love story portrayed in the 1993 film Farewell My Concubine. It also includes Tan Dun’s Northwest Suite, a collection from his dance score “The Yellow Earth,” which blends traditional Chinese elements with contemporary concepts. 

The second program, “The Orchestra Now (TŌN) Celebrates the Music of Chen Yi and Zhou Long,” on October 6 at Bard’s Fisher Center and October 8 at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, will pay tribute to the extraordinary Chinese-American composers, along with works by their mentor and teacher, Chou Wen-Chung, and two of their acclaimed students, Zhou Juan and Li Shaosheng. Chen Yi and Zhou Long, two remarkable composers now in their 70s, had studied at Columbia University in the 1980s under composer Chou Wen-Chung, whose compositions reflected his deep connection to both Eastern and Western traditions. Chen Yi and Zhou Long were greatly influenced by their mentor’s fascination for exploring the intersection of different musical cultures, and over the decades of their storied careers in America, both have blended their cultural heritage with contemporary compositional techniques, resulting in a unique and captivating musical language. Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 3, My Musical Journey to America, was commissioned by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra for its centennial season and premiered by the SSO at Benaroya Hall on March 18, 2004, conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Zhou Long composed Beijing Rhyme in 2012 and it was commissioned by the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, first performed and recorded in September 2012 in Beijing, conducted by Tan Lihua.

The third program, “US-China Music Forum – Confronting Challenges and Looking to the Future,” on October 7 at Asia Society in New York City, will present an afternoon of engaging discussion and live music with a distinguished panel of musicians and leaders in the world of classical music performance and education, providing diverse perspectives on the future of US-China relations in music. The panel speakers will include Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and artistic director of The Orchestra Now (TŌN); composer Chen Yi, Lorena Searcy Cravens/ Millsap/ Missouri Distinguished Professor of Composition at University of Missouri, Kansas City; Gary Ginstling, president and CEO of the New York Philharmonic; and Yu Hongmei, chairwoman of  the University Council of the Central Conservatory of Music, China. The panel will be moderated by Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, and Jindong Cai, director of the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music. The forum will also feature live music performances by pipa virtuoso Liu Xiaojing from the Central Conservatory of Music, China, and members of the Bard East/West Ensemble.

EVENT DETAILS AND TICKETING

Program I: Bard East/West Ensemble and Special Guest Wu Man
Monday, October 2 at 8 pm
László Z. Bitó ‘60 Conservatory Building, Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Free and open to the public.
           
Wednesday, October 4 at 7 pm
(Pre-concert talk at 6:15 pm)
Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
The Shops at Columbus Circle, New York, NY
For tickets, visit: https://ticketing.jazz.org/15697/15698

Program II: The Orchestra Now (TŌN) Celebrates the Music of Chen Yi and Zhou Long
Friday, October 6 at 7 pm
(Q&A with the composers at 6 pm)
Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center at Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
For tickets, visit: https://tickets.fishercenter.bard.edu/3084/3085
           
Sunday, October 8 at 3:00 pm
(Q&A with the composers at 2:15 pm)
Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
The Shops at Columbus Circle, New York, NY
For tickets, visit: https://ticketing.jazz.org/15697/15700

Program III: US-China Music Forum – Confronting Challenges and Looking to the Future
Saturday, October 7 from 3 pm to 5 pm
Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium
Asia Society of New York
725 Park Avenue, New York, NY
For tickets, visit: https://asiasociety.org/center-us-china-relations/events/us-china-music-forum

For more information about the China Now Music Festival and for full programming details, please visit: barduschinamusic.org/the-bridge-of-music

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jindong Cai, artistic director
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 (TŌN). Previously, he was a professor of performance at Stanford University. 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. He is a three-time recipient of the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming for Contemporary Music. Cai started his conducting career with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and has worked with orchestras throughout North America and Asia. He has conducted most of the top orchestras in China.

At Bard, Cai founded the annual China Now Music Festival, which presents new works by some of the most important Chinese composers of our time. Concerts are performed by The Orchestra Now at Bard’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and Stanford University. In 2019, the festival premiered Men of Iron and the Golden Spike by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Zhou Long—a symphonic oratorio in commemoration of the Chinese railroad workers of North America on the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.

With his wife, Sheila Melvin, Cai has coauthored many articles on the performing arts in China, as well as two books, Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese and Beethoven in China: How the Great Composer Became an Icon in the People’s Republic.

Chen Bing, conductor
A professor in the Conducting Department at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM), Chen Bing is one of China’s most promising conductors. She has conducted concerts in more than a dozen countries in Asia, North America, South America, and Africa. Her repertoire covers a wide range of musical forms, including symphony, opera, choral works, Chinese music, and chamber music. She has conducted at a number of events for world leaders, heads of state, and ambassadors, and produced numerous albums, including Tug at China’s Heartstrings, which is in the permanent collection at the Library of Congress. She frequently conducts new concerts featuring a wide variety of both Chinese and Western pieces.

Wu Man, pipa
Prominent instrumentalist of traditional Chinese music, composer, and educator Wu Man has premiered hundreds of works for the pipa, and performed with major orchestras worldwide. She is a frequent collaborator with ensembles such as the Kronos and Shanghai Quartets and The Knights, and is a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble. Born in Hangzhou, Wu Man studied at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master’s degree in pipa. Wu received the 2023 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and was honored with the Asia Society’s Asia Arts Game Changers Award for her contributions to contemporary art. She is visiting professor at CCOM and a Distinguished Professor at the Zhejiang and the Xi’an Conservatories.

Liu Xiaojing, pipa
A pipa teacher in the Folk Music Department of the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM), Liu Xiaojing also is an instructor for the CCOM Plucked String Orchestra and a primary member of Zhang Hongyan’s Plucked String Band. She earned both her undergraduate and her master’s degrees at the Central Conservatory, studying with famed pipa player Zhang Hongyan and earning several scholarships. She has held solo concerts and participated in major state performances and cultural events, and has participated in exchange visits with more than 20 countries and regions.

Bryan Zhe Wang CMC ’24, guqin
Bryan Zhe Wang is among the first candidates in Bard Conservatory’s Master of Arts in Chinese Music and Culture, where he studies with guqin virtuoso Zhao Jiazhen of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Wang ranked first in both the traditional and nontraditional categories at the 2021 Singapore International Guqin Tournament. In 2022, he won the Bard Conservatory Concerto Competition.

The Bard East/West Ensemble aims to combine the instrumentation and musical traditions of the East and the West, to bring together Chinese music and Western music, and to seek a new model of cross-cultural music cooperation. Under the direction of Jindong Cai, the ensemble consists of young musicians from the Bard College Conservatory of Music and invites accomplished artists to collaborate as guest soloists.

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS  Bard) and Bard College’s Human Rights Project named author Suki Kim as the 2023-24 recipient of  the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Established in 2014, the fellowship supports an  annual faculty position that brings a prominent scholar, activist, or practicing artist to teach and conduct research within the CCS Bard graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program. The fellowship, which was fully endowed in 2022, represents a longstanding commitment by Bard College and the Keith Haring Foundation to support scholarship and creative practices at the intersection of art and activism.

Through her work as a journalist and author, Kim has provided unprecedented insights into one of  the world’s most secretive and dangerous dictatorships. Born in South Korea, Kim has been  traveling to North Korea since 2002, where she has contributed groundbreaking reporting on the  country to publications including the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the New Republic, and the New Yorker. In 2011, Kim published the New York Times bestseller, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014), based on her experience living  undercover in Pyongyang for six months with the country's future leaders during the final year of  Kim Jong-il’s reign. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the PEN Open Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Open Society Foundations fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Scholar  grant, an American Academy Berlin Prize, and a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship  at Harvard University. 

“It is an honor to welcome Suki Kim to Bard, where I am sure she will inspire a new generation to act boldly in advancing human rights in their respective fields,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of the center for curatorial Studies, Bard College. “As a novelist and significantly as an  investigative journalist, her work has led to real change in our world.”

“Suki Kim is at once a courageous risk-taker and a brilliant writer," said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard’s Human Rights Project. “That rare combination of political commitment and artistic  eloquence is exactly what the Haring Fellowship was created to honor." 

Kim’s appointment follows that of Haytham el-Wardany, the 2022-23 Haring Fellow. Additional details on the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism follow below, with more information on previous fellows found at ccs.bard.edu.

About Suki Kim
Suki Kim is an investigative journalist, a novelist, and the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea.

Kim’s New York Times bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014) is an unprecedented literary documentation of the world's most secretive gulag nation during the final year of Kim Jong-il’s reign. Her novel, The Interpreter (Farrar,  Straus, & Giroux, 2003) was the PEN Open Book Award winner and a PEN Hemingway Prize finalist.

She is currently working on her next nonfiction book The Prince and the Revolutionary: Children of  War (W.W. Norton), which was shortlisted for a 2022 Lukas Prize work-in-progress, given by  Columbia University School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Kim’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Washington  Post, Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Her TED Talk on her  experiences living undercover in North Korea has drawn millions of viewers. She has appeared in  media around the world including CNN, BBC, CBS, NBC, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. 

Kim served as a Ferris Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Princeton University in 2017. 

About the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College
Founded in 1990, 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  an 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. Broadly  interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty, and researchers to question the critical  and political dimension of art and its social significance.

About the Human Rights Project
The Human Rights Project, founded at Bard in 1999, introduced 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, the Human Rights Project has  collaborated with CCS Bard on the development of seminars, workshops, research projects, and  symposia aimed at exploring the intersections between human rights and the arts. While  academic in nature, this research and teaching 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  during his life. 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  communities impacted by systemic inequity. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure  that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.

The Keith Haring Foundation gives 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. The Foundation additionally maintains a collection of Haring’s art and archives and  funds exhibitions, programming, and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate the  artist’s work and philosophy. www.haring.com.

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra will present a performance from one of the most enduring films in cinema history with A Symphonic Night at The Movies: The Wizard of Oz, which will merge the 1939 cinematography produced by MGM Studios with a live symphony. The event, taking place in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater on Saturday, September 23, and Sunday, September 24, “marks the first time many of the student musicians will perform a so-called film concert, an experience that conservatory educators say will teach the popular side of the symphonic tradition,” writes Andrew Checchia for the Daily Catch. Conducted by James Bagwell, the orchestra’s rendition will accompany a screening of the film, replacing the film’s original songs and keeping precise timing with the original studio voice recordings. “This score was written for studio orchestras, and those scores sound good from the very beginning,” Bagwell told Checchia.

 

The Fisher Center at Bard continues its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground with the world premiere of Ulysses, from Elevator Repair Service, which the New York Times has called “one of New York City’s few truly essential theater companies,” September 21 – October 1 (opening Sunday, September 24). 

James Joyce’s Ulysses has fascinated, perplexed, scandalized, and/or defeated readers for over a century. ERS takes on this Mount Everest of twentieth-century literature having staged modernist works including Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—all with highly acclaimed results.

In the world premiere at the Fisher Center, seven ERS ensemble members—Dee Beasnael (7 Daughters of Eve), OBIE Award-winner Kate Benson (Fondly, Collette Richland), Maggie Hoffman (founding member, Radiohole), Vin Knight (Gatz, The Select (The Sun Also Rises), The Sound and the Fury, and more with ERS), OBIE Award-winner Scott Shepherd (Gatz, The Wooster Group), Christopher-Rashee Stevenson (Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge), and Stephanie Weeks (The Whitney Album)—sit down for a sober reading but soon find themselves guzzling pints, getting in brawls, and committing debaucheries as they careen on a fast-forward tour through Joyce’s funhouse of styles. With madcap antics and a densely layered sound design, ERS presents an eclectic sampling from Joyce’s life-affirming masterpiece.

Ulysses is directed by ERS Artistic Director John Collins, with co-direction and dramaturgy by Scott Shepherd and text by James Joyce. The production features set design by dots (The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Public Obscenities), costume design by Enver Chakartash (A Doll's House, Is This A Room on Broadway) and Assistant Costume Designer Caleb Krieg, lighting design by Marika Kent (ERS’s Seagull) and Assistant Lighting Designer Matt Lazarus, sound design by OBIE Award-winner Ben Williams (The Whitney Album), sound engineering by Gavin Price, projections by Matthew Deinhart (El Amor Brujo, ANIMUS ANIMA//ANIMA ANIMUS) and Assistant Projections Designer Alessandra Cronin, and props by Patrícia Marjorie (Wolf Play, Flex) and Assistant Properties Designer Ned Gaynor. Maurina Lioce (Fondly, Collette Richland; Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge) is the Assistant Director and Stage Manager, and Jack Ganguly is the Assistant Stage Manager. Hanna Novak of ERS is the producer.  

Ulysses is a Fisher Center LAB commission and is co-commissioned by Symphony Space, where the work was partly developed. Daphne Gaines, April Matthis, and Mark Barton contributed to the development of the work.

Performance Schedule and Ticketing

Performances of Ulysses take place in the LUMA Theater at the Fisher Center:
Thursday, September 21, at 8pm
Friday, September 22, at 8pm
Saturday, September 23, at 8pm
Sunday, September 24, at 3pm
Thursday, September 28, at 8pm
Friday, September 29, at 8pm
Saturday, September 30, at 2pm
Saturday, September 30, at 8pm
Sunday, October 1, at 3pm

Critics are welcome as of Saturday, September 23, at 8 pm for an official opening on Sunday, September 24, at 3 pm.

Tickets start at $25 ($5 for Bard students through the Passloff Pass) and can be purchased here. 

Credits
The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season is dedicated to the founders of the Fisher Center who have cultivated extraordinary artistic experiences—past, present, and future. We honor the memory of Richard B. Fisher, a true champion of the arts and Bard College, and his visionary leadership. 
The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.
 

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra presents a live symphony performance of the music from one of the most enduring films in cinema history with A Symphonic Night at The Movies: The Wizard of Oz. Conducted by James Bagwell, the orchestra’s rendition will accompany a recently remastered screening of the film, performing the film’s original songs by composer Harold Arlen and Academy Award-winning score by Herbert Stothart, accompanied by Judy Garland’s original 1939 studio recordings.

The event will take place in two viewings on Saturday, September 23, at 7 pm, and on Sunday, September 24, at 2 pm, in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Tickets start at $25 and sales benefit the Bard Conservatory Scholarship Fund. 

To reserve tickets, please visit here. 

Beginning in fall 2023, the Bard College Dance Program is launching a two-year partnership with Villa Albertine, a cultural institution that supports exchanges in arts and ideas between the United States, France, and beyond. Each semester, artists selected by Tara Lorenzen, director of Bard’s Dance Program, and Nicole Birmann Bloom, Villa Albertine’s program officer for the performing arts, in collaboration with Centre National de la Danse (CN D, Pantin, France) and other French choreographic centers, will teach technique and repertory courses in Bard’s dance curriculum.

“The Bard Dance Program is thrilled to partner with Villa Albertine,” said Lorenzen. “There has always been a robust exchange of innovative dance ideas between French-supported artists and the US and I look forward to continuing this tradition with the next generation of dance students here in Annandale.”

During the spring semester, a choreographer will conduct a one week creative residency in the Luma Theater/Fisher Center with a public showing for the Bard community and masterclasses for the student body.  A unique component of this partnership allows Bard dance students to participate in the international dance platform CAMPING at the CN D in Pantin, France, each June. CN D is a public institution created in 1998, devoted to the preservation of choreographic and dance culture. Its distinctive CAMPING dance festival gives students the opportunity to work with choreographers from around the globe, perform their own choreographic projects, and develop teaching practices by conducting morning classes with their peers.

The partnership is launching during Albertine Dance Season, the year-long exploration of dance from inception to performance that includes multi-city tours by French, France-based, African, and Caribbean companies, artistic residencies for up-and-coming choreographers, a dance-themed symposium featuring global leaders in the field, and more. 

“The team at Villa Albertine shares with Bard College the deepest appreciation of the true value of educational exchange and the enduring cultural benefits of arts in education,” said Gaëtan Bruel, cultural counselor and director of Villa Albertine. ” We have the greatest confidence that this two-year partnership will uniquely support and sustain Bard students in the enrichment of their arts experience while at Bard and shape their future artistry.”

Since 2009, the Bard Dance Program has hosted an in-residence dance company or performing arts organization bringing professional technique and composition to the academic program in the form of teaching, educational licensing projects, master classes, full-Company production residencies, and public performances.

This fall, choreographers and performers Marcela Santander (Chile/France) and Volmir Cordeiro (Brazil/France) will join the Dance faculty in Annandale-on-Hudson. Wanjiru Kamuyu (Kenya/France/USA) will have a discussion on September 18, 2023, based on her current touring project “An Immigrant’s Story” and her unique creative process.

Maria Q. Simpson, professor of dance at Bard College, has launched Three Ballet Teachers... (3BT) in collaboration with Zvi Gotheiner and Hannah Wiley. 3BT is an online resource featuring video documentation of original ballet class choreography by the three contemporary ballet teachers. “The website provides teachers of all levels of experience with choreographed center-floor sequences that can be used in full or in part, or as inspiration for their own classes,” Simpson said. The project came out of the mutual belief among Simpson, Gotheiner, and Wiley that ballet class choreography represents a huge body of unrecognized creative work, and that this work should be accessible. “3BT is looking to both highlight and exalt the training space and the choreography that occurs there as representative of the living history of the art form,” Simpson said.

Joining a growing list of fellows from Bard College, Bard faculty members Jessie Montgomery and Angelica Sanchez both received 2023 Civitella Ranieri Fellowships, spending their time in Umbria, Italy, working on individual projects and collaborating. Since 1995, Civitella Ranieri has hosted more than 1,000 fellows and director’s guests, including Bard faculty members Mary Caponegro and Jenny Xie, as well as Simon’s Rock alumna Alison Bechdel SR ’77, among others. Fellows are chosen through a nomination and jury process by a rotating group of distinguished artists, academics, and critics. They then spend four to six weeks living and working at the 15th-century castle the fellowship calls home.

“It has been great to have the time and space to work on these big projects surrounded by the beauty of the countryside, without the usual distractions that I face in the city,” said Montgomery, composer in residence at Bard College. “It has been especially nice to get to know my colleague, Angelica Sanchez, more as a person and artist. We are looking forward to a short upcoming presentation of a piece she wrote for violin and piano.” During her time at Civitella, Montgomery completed a new work for percussion quartet to be premiered at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in November in Indianapolis. She is also at work on a new percussion concerto for Cynthia Yeh, principal percussionist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Montgomery said she is looking forward to returning to Bard after this productive summer: “It will feel good to return to the academic year with new perspectives on my work and stronger connection to and understanding of our work.”

“My time at Civitella Ranieri has been wonderful,” said Sanchez, assistant professor of music. “Many Bard faculty have been fellows, and I’m happy to add my name to the list.” While at Civitella, Sanchez worked on a commission from the Jazz Gallery, to premiere this September. She is also at work on a piece for solo piano to debut in 2024. To have a Bard connection so far from home was not something she’d expected. “It was a nice surprise to meet Jesse Montgomery,” Sanchez said. “Her artistry inspired me to compose a piece for her that we will premiere at Civitella Ranieri.” Like Montgomery, Sanchez is excited about the prospect of translating her experience as a fellow back to Bard: “Having this uninterrupted time to work and develop my ideas has been invaluable to me, and I’m looking forward to sharing my experience at Civitella with Bard students.”

Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music at Bard College, has been awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Hennies, who is a composer, received an emergency grant to support her premiere of two major compositions at the Darmstadt Summer Festival in Darmstadt, Germany, with performances in August. Hennies participated in the Darmstadt Summer Course, where her two new hour-long works were each premiered. French ensemble Dedalus performed Hennies’ Motor Tapes, a work inspired by findings of neuroscientists Oliver Sacks and Rodolfo Llinás, the latter who “speaks of ‘motor tapes’ in connection with our motoric memory and compares it with neuronal processes underlying human creativity.” Hennies’ other new work, Borrowed Light, written for and performed by New York string ensemble Mivos String Quartet, “derives from a technique developed by American Shakers to install windows in interior walls of buildings to let in light from adjacent rooms with exterior windows.” 

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) was founded by John Cage, Jasper Johns, and other artists in 1963 with a mission to encourage, sponsor, and promote innovative work in the arts created and presented by individuals, groups, and organizations working in dance, music/sound, performance art/theater, poetry, and the visual arts. FCA’s Emergency Grants provide urgent funding for visual and performing artists who have sudden, unanticipated opportunities to present their work to the public when there is insufficient time to seek other sources of funding, or who are set to incur unexpected or unbudgeted expenses for projects close to completion with committed exhibition or performance dates. Emergency Grants is the only active, multidisciplinary program that offers immediate, project-based assistance of this kind to artists living and working anywhere in the United States, for projects occurring in the US and abroad.

Inheritance, a new installation inspired by the 2020 film of the same name by Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, program director and associate professor of film and electronic arts at Bard, is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In paintings, sculptures, videos, photos, and time-based media installations spanning from the 1970s to present day, the show is a meditation on the impacts of the past and legacies across the interwoven contexts of family, history, and aesthetics. “Inheritance reflects on multiple meanings of the word, whether celebratory or painful, from one era, person, or idea to the next,” reads the exhibit text. “The exhibition takes a layered approach to storytelling by interweaving narrative with documentary and personal experiences with historical and generational events.” The show, on view through February 2024, includes works by 43 leading artists, including Asili; An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard; Kevin Jerome Everson, former MFA visiting artist 2011; Kevin Beasley, former MFA visiting artist 2017; former MFA faculty in photography David Hartt and Emily Jacir, and WangShui, MFA ’19.

“I met Laura Steele while studying photography at Bard College,” writes Alice Fall ’22. “Her steadiness, intelligence, wit, and engagement with the world is grounding and immediately magnetic. Laura’s constant reminder to me, both inside and out of school, has been to trust my vision and intuition. I’m thankful for her for bringing me back to myself, again and again.” In this conversation for Lenscratch, the Bard alumna and Bard faculty member talk about the contours of collaboration, the tension between creative work and the imperative to market that work, and how a given tool or artistic process can limit or liberate the art.

Read the Conversation in Lenscratch

Further Reading
Alice Fall ’22 Wins Second Place in Lenscratch Student Awards

Bard alumnus Dan Whitener ’09 MM ’12 plays banjo for Gangstagrass, a hip-hop and bluegrass group that Farah Stockman called “a band that is making music that actually unites us” in a New York Times opinion piece. At a time when American culture is especially polarized, Gangstagrass makes music that seeks to invite social cohesion rather than division, and hopes to alleviate people’s fear of one another. “Those who are lucky enough to stumble on their live shows are likely to get sucked in by the oddball energy. They have die-hard fans who came for the bluegrass and stayed for the rap, and vice versa. Instead of pitting rural America against urban America,” Stockman writes, “Gangstagrass tries to appeal to both at the same time.”

Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts Joan Tower discusses more than 60 years of composing music, her inspirations (including visitations from dead composers), the changing landscape for women in composition, and her long tenure of teaching music at Bard with NPR’s music producer Tom Huizenga. When asked to describe her music, Tower confesses that it is hard to know one’s music but she can describe what she cares about. “My music is about rhythm, predominantly, the rhythm of ideas. And it's also organic, and it has a large-scale narrative. Usually, I only write in one movement, so I try to create an overall architecture for that one moment. It's also very important for me to be clear: I don't think my music ever gets complicated enough that you don't hear everything,” she says.

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, will represent the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte in 2024. Gibson, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is one of the first Indigenous artists to represent the country at the Biennale. The Biennale Arte 2024 is being curated by Adriano Pedrosa, who received this year’s CCS Bard Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. Gibson told the New York Times: “The last 15 years of my career have been about turning inward and trying to make something I really wanted to see in the world. Now I want to expand the way people think about Indigeneity.” According to the Times, the artist’s Hudson Valley studio is working on a multimedia installation and performances that will open in April 2024 and be titled “the space in which to place me,” referring to a poem by Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation.

“[W]ell staged and excitingly sung, Henri VIII revealed itself as a grand and compelling, often thrilling work that deserves a more frequent spot on stages,” writes Zachary Woolfe in his critic’s pick review for the New York Times. “The piece has been treated lovingly at Bard, in a vibrant but restrained staging by Jean-Romain Vesperini.” Popular in its day but rarely performed now, Saint-Saëns’s 1883 opera focuses on Henry’s break with the Catholic Church, the end of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and his love for Anne Boleyn. The production opened last Friday at the Fisher Center as part of the 20th anniversary SummerScape season. Performances run through Sunday, July 30. 
 

Stephanie Harris ’08 CCS ’13 is a special agent with the US Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) currently serving as a liaison at the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Harris is embedded with the US Women’s National Team and is responsible for ensuring the safety of players as they travel across the region to compete with teams from around the world. Along with her fellow DSS agents, she collaborates with US Soccer, FIFA, host-nation counterparts, and colleagues across the United States Government to identify and address potential threats to players and their staff.

At Bard, Harris majored in film and human rights as an undergraduate then went on to study curating at the Center for Curatorial Studies. She credits her experiences at Bard for inspiring a love of analysis and problem solving and writes: “Bard taught me to love learning and left me with an intellectual curiosity that is at the core of everything I do—whether it is art, diplomacy, or global security.” In her first year with DSS, Harris has traveled to more than 10 countries and empowers US and foreign dignitaries to conduct diplomacy safely around the world.

On Friday, August 4, the Bard Music Festival returns with an intensive two-week exploration of “Vaughan Williams and His World.” In 11 themed concert programs, the festival’s 33rd season examines the great but frequently misunderstood English and Welsh composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of the 20th century’s preeminent symphonists, contextualizing the composer among his fellow Victorians, Edwardians, and Moderns (Weekend One: August 4–6), and exploring his role in creating what may be considered A New Elizabethan Age? (Weekend Two: August 10–13). Complemented by two special events in nearby Rhinebeck, these concerts take place in the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Bard College’s idyllic Hudson River campus. New Yorkers can take round-trip bus transportation to the final concert (see details below), and home audiences around the world can enjoy livestreams of Programs 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, and 11 on Upstreaming, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage. A centerpiece of the 20th Bard SummerScape festival, the Bard Music Festival also represents a highlight of the Fisher Center’s landmark 20th anniversary season, “Breaking Ground.”

“One of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture” (NYC Arts, THIRTEEN/WNET), festival founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein is music director of both the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra, The Orchestra Now (TŌN). For his first, livestreamed ASO appearance, Botstein leads two late Vaughan Williams symphonies – the darkly atmospheric Seventh (“Sinfonia Antartica”), a work scored for vast forces, and the award-winning, vividly orchestrated Eighth – as well as music by Jean Sibelius, William Walton and Vaughan Williams’s woefully underrated student Elizabeth Maconchy [Program 9]. Botstein and the ASO also give a livestreamed performance of Vaughan Williams’s Shakespearean comic opera, Sir John in Love, starring bass-baritone Craig Colclough as Falstaff alongside sopranos Brandie Sutton and Ann Toomey, mezzo-sopranos Lucy Schaufer and Sarah Saturnino, tenor Joshua Blue, and the Bard Festival Chorale in a rare, semi-staged production by Alison Moritz [Program 11]. The director explains:

“In creating a concert staging of this bucolic comedy for Bard, I wanted to lean into the festival atmosphere of Bard in the summertime. … The gentle humor in this lyric comedy of manners comes from misunderstandings between the sexes and between classes, and I wanted to make sure that these themes would be immediately enjoyable by today’s audiences. So, instead of setting the story in Elizabethan Windsor, we have created a summer holiday inspired by English humorist P.G. Wodehouse’s classic Blandings countryside – filled with tea and crumpets, lawn games, cocktail parties, savvy servants, and plus-fours.”

Botstein conducts TŌN in performances of Vaughan Williams’s famed Tallis Fantasia and neo-classical D-minor Violin Concerto, featuring Naumburg Competition winner Grace Park [Program 1], as well as three of the composer’s mature orchestral works: Job, A Masque for Dancing; the seldom-programmed, blisteringly uncompromisingly Fourth Symphony; and the C-major Piano Concerto, in a two-piano arrangement showcasing festival favorites Danny Driver, a Gramophone Award nominee, and Piers Lane, for whom “no praise could be high enough” (Gramophone) [Program 3]. Led by James Bagwell and Zachary Schwartzman, TŌN also gives livestreamed accounts of music by British composers Frederick Delius, Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Peter Warlock, and Grace Williams, together with Vaughan Williams’s Five Variants of “Dives and Lazarus” for harp and strings; The Lark Ascending, featuring violinist Bella Hristova, “a player of impressive power and control” (Washington Post); and the seldom programmed Flos Campi, the composer’s sensuous, wordless setting of erotic verses from the biblical Song of Solomon, with Tokyo Competition winner Luosha Fang as viola soloist [Program 7].

The festival’s chamber highlights include accounts of both Vaughan Williams’s Second String Quartet [Program 8], and Samuel Barber’s Serenade [Program 10] by the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet. The Horszowski Trio – “the most compelling American group to come on the scene” (New Yorker) – performs “Per aspera ad astra,” the tightly constructed Third Piano Trio by Vaughan Williams’s teacher Charles Villiers Stanford, and the Cleveland Quartet Award-winning Ariel Quartet joins Grammy-nominated clarinetist Todd Palmer for the Clarinet Quintet by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whom Stanford considered his most gifted pupil [Program 2]. With Danny Driver, members of the group also undertake Herbert Howells’s Piano Quartet, one of the great masterworks of British impressionism [Program 5]. “One of New York’s finest organists” (New York Times), Renée Anne Louprette plays the newly renovated organ of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in nearby Rhinebeck, where the festival makes its first foray off-campus with two special programs of “Music for School, Parish, and Home.”

As in previous seasons, all choral works showcase the Bard Festival Chorale and James Bagwell. Hailed as “one of the high points of every Bard Festival” (New York Arts), this season’s annual choral program also represents the second special event at Rhinebeck’s Episcopal Church of the Messiah. Surveying 350 years of English choral music in the ecclesiastical environment for which it was written, “The Anglican Choral Tradition” features composers ranging from William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons to Howells and Benjamin Britten, interspersed with organ works by Vaughan Williams and Ethel Smyth.

Soprano Katherine Lerner Lee, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy, tenor Maximillian Jansen, and baritone Tyler Duncan trace the evolution of a uniquely British sound in “Heirs and Rebels: British Art Songs,” a concert with commentary by Scholar-in-Residence Byron Adams [Program 4]. Similarly, soprano Ann Toomey, mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, tenor Martin Luther Clark, and baritone Theo Hoffman offer an entertaining and wholly original tour through half a century of British light music, in a concert with commentary by award-winning author Christina Baade [Program 6]. Other vocal highlights include a rendition of Vaughan Williams’s beloved song cycle On Wenlock Edge by three-time Grammy-nominated tenor Nicholas Phan, “one of the world’s most remarkable singers” (Boston Globe) [Program 5].

Supplementary events and companion book
Besides the eleven concert programs and two special events, there will be two free panel discussions – “Composer and Nation” and “The Artist in Time of War” – and a series of informative pre-concert talks, all free to ticket-holders, by scholars including Christina Bashford, Michael Beckerman, Daniel M. Grimley, Imani Danielle Mosley, Philip Rupprecht, Eric Saylor, Tiffany Stern, and Richard Wilson. SummerScape and ASO also present the first major American production of Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII, a French grand opera set in Tudor England (July 21–30). Edited by Bard’s 2023 Scholars-in-Residence Byron Adams, a contributor to both the Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams and Vaughan Williams Studies, and Daniel M. Grimley, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, the companion book Vaughan Williams and His World is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Round-trip bus transportation from New York City
Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for the festival finale, Program Eleven (August 13). This may be ordered online or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900, and the meeting point for pick-up and drop-off is at Lincoln Center on Amsterdam Avenue, between 64th and 65th Streets. More information is available here.

SummerScape tickets
Tickets for mainstage events start at $25 and livestreams are $20. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.

Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Ashley Tata’s production of “Farming,” a choral work by composer and Pulitzer finalist Ted Hearnes, was featured in NPR and reviewed in the New York Times as a Critic’s Pick. The nine-part song cycle, performed by the vocalists of the Crossing chamber choir, explores issues of colonialism, marketing, and consumption, and addresses food supply in the US, the business of big agriculture today, and the country’s Indigenous farmers. “The libretto pulls not only from Jeff Bezos and William Penn, but also the social media feed of Uber Eats and the FAQ page for a startup called Farmer's Fridge,” says Nate Chinen for NPR. “The direction, by Ashley Tata, really leaned into the surreal—the singers wore bright neon costumes and the lighting cues and choreography all played up this idea of a complex machine gone totally haywire.”

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) is pleased to present Stage Presence, the thesis exhibition of the Class of 2024. The exhibition brings together 23 distinct practices from candidates in the disciplines of film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. Stage Presence will be on view from July 15 through July 23 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook, New York, and evening presentations of time-based works—such as performances, readings and screenings—will be held at several locations on Bard’s campus. An opening reception will also be held on July 15, from 1 pm to 4 pm. For more information about exhibition hours, presentation locations, and accessibility, please visit bard.edu/mfa/thesis.

In its standard usage, the phrase “stage presence” refers to a performer’s capacity to command the attention of a room. The phrase was also used by art critic Michael Fried in 1967 to condemn minimalist artists’ rejection of modernist artistic values of autonomy and absorption. In Fried’s account the minimalists instead embraced “the situation” in which an art object and viewer existed together, reflexively confronting an audience with their relationship to viewing. Following Fried’s essay, the phrase has had many more lives within artistic contexts, from a postmodern reclamation to a contemporary embrace of its more commonplace associations.
 
When taken together, the distinct artistic practices of the Bard MFA Class of 2024 resonate with issues of stage presence. Experimentation with display structures; activations of text in space; investigations into mapping and absence; disruption of voice and conventional notions of authorship; emphasis on the scale of the body; and integration of theatrical techniques such as props or backdrops are just a few of the strategies by which these artists explore modes of presence, viewership, and relationality.

The Bard MFA thesis exhibition features works by MFA candidates Kaur Alia Ahmed, June Canedo de Souza, Francesse Dolbrice, Camonghne Felix, Christina Graham, Tallulah Haddon, Lara Carmen Hidalgo, Sam Lasko, Khan Lee, Lotte Leerschool, Eli Benjamin Neuman-Hammond, Mira Putnam, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, Natalia Rolón Sotelo, Francie Seidl Chodosh, Sydney Spann, Allie Taylor, Lauren Tosswill, Nora Treatbaby, Marty Two Bulls Jr., Sam Wenc, Alexa West, and Drew Zeiba.

Stage Presence is coordinated by Marina Caron (MA ’23), a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Caron is a curator, writer and researcher based in New York City. Her thesis exhibition, Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass, focused on the work of the prolific and under-recognized artist Bettina Grossman (b. New York, 1927; d. New York, 2021).

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, is showcasing works in several exhibitions this summer, including solo shows at the Aspen Art Museum and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. He is also featured in Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, a standout group show at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. His exhibitions are among a number of shows highlighting Indigenous American artists this summer. “These shows, as well as several thematic group exhibitions, create a moment of recognition for contemporary Indigenous art, providing historical context for the work being made today,” writes Annabel Keenan for Artsy. “I am glad to see a greater recognition that all Indigenous artists are unique and come from different cultural perspectives,” said Gibson, who is Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee. “I see an increase in the understanding of Indigenous makers, their intentions and their cultural perspectives, but there is so far to go. I’d like to think that these artists are being treated more as individuals rather than representative of a large and more general Indigenous community.”

The Fisher Center at Bard has become an incubator for commercially promising new work like Justin Peck’s Illinois, while holding tight to its experimental roots.
For the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler visits Bard’s Fisher Center in its 20th anniversary season, on the heels of a sold-out, extended run of Illinois, to talk with Fisher Center Artistic Director Gideon Lester, Illinois director Justin Peck, choreographer Pam Tanowitz, President Leon Botstein, and others about the Fisher Center’s past and future. “Since opening 20 years ago,” she writes, “the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary, and sometimes hard to describe hits.”

The Fisher Center at Bard (Gideon Lester, artistic director and chief executive; Aaron Mattocks, chief operating officer) today announces that, in partnership with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA), it has received a $2,000,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work and livelihood of Tania El Khoury, a commissioned artist and guest cocurator at the Fisher Center, founding director of CHRA, and a distinguished artist in residence at Bard’s Theater & Performance Program. El Khoury’s live art engages the audience in close encounters with narratives drawn from the political realities of borders, displacement, and state violence. The grant will support her live art production and touring, her scholarly and artistic research, and her curatorial work at the Fisher Center and CHRA.

Over the next three years, the Fisher Center and El Khoury will re-imagine the collaboration between an institution and an artist and will develop ways in which an institution becomes a holistic home for an artist. El Khoury’s relationship with Bard began in 2017, when Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive, invited her to co-curate Where No Wall Remains, the 2019 edition of the institution’s biennial festival, which focused that year on the subject of borders and comprised eight new interdisciplinary artworks commissioned by El Khoury and Lester. El Khoury created a new work of her own for the festival, Cultural Exchange Rate, a multi-sensory performance installation that invites the audience to follow her own family’s relationship to borders and migration across a century of time. Cultural Exchange Rate continues to tour internationally in various languages, as do several other works by El Khoury.
                                                                                               
While developing Where No Wall Remains, El Khoury and Lester began to imagine a longer collaboration. Their work on the biennial led them, along with Tom Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Program at Bard, to envision a center that explores art practices that intersect with human rights advocacy through public programming and an international low-cost MA Program in Human Rights & the Arts. In 2021, the three of them, along with scholar Ziad Abu-Rish, founded the Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA), which is funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN). El Khoury directs CHRA while continuing to pursue her artistic practice and teaching.  
             
Lester and El Khoury have continued their curatorial work together with a second joint edition of the biennial, Common Ground: an international festival on the politics of land and food, produced by the Fisher Center in two installments: October 2022 and May 2023. In this festival, El Khoury premiered her work Memory of Birds, an interactive sound installation in the trees around the Fisher Center that evoked the imprint of political violence on contested lands. Common Ground also included three international editions, curated by artists in Palestine, Colombia, and South Africa, all of which were funded by CHRA.

Tania El Khoury said, “This generous grant from Mellon Foundation comes at a time when the live performance industry is experiencing a fundamental restructuring due to the recent pandemic and major shifts in public and private funding streams. The grant will allow me to further pursue my artistic and curatorial practices, deepen my experimentation with new models of collaboration and institution-building, and reflect on my trajectory as an artist working at the intersection of politics and research.”

The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant makes it possible for the Fisher Center and CHRA to offer El Khoury tangible resources to develop and disseminate ambitious, forward-thinking work, of her own and by other artists. This new model of artist-institution engagement follows the Fisher Center awarding Pam Tanowitz an ongoing residency in which the institution has taken over touring (of work including Four Quartets and Song of Songs, which the Fisher Center commissioned and premiered to immense acclaim) and other administrative support for her company, including a salary for Tanowitz. The Mellon grant helps the Fisher Center become an artistic home for El Khoury, providing resources in three key areas:

• Practice
• Infrastructure
• Livelihood

Gideon Lester says, “We are delighted to be partnering with Mellon to develop a new, comprehensive model of support for Tania that will allow her not only to create and disseminate her work, but to live an artist’s life with dignity. Tania is a visionary artist, curator, and thought leader, and it’s an honor for us to be able to help steward her creative practice and research. Institutions of higher learning have an essential role to play in the country’s artistic infrastructure. Mellon’s visionary philanthropy will help deepen and extend the Fisher Center’s commitment to long-term, holistic support for artists’ practice, infrastructure, and livelihood.” 

The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant comes amid a banner 20th anniversary year for the Fisher Center. The institution is currently producing its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, including the 2023 Bard SummerScape festival, which also celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The season culminates in a groundbreaking ceremony, on October 21, for The Fisher Center’s new 25,000-square-foot performing arts studio building, designed by Maya Lin, which will offer artists at all stages of their careers vastly expanded room to explore as they build works from the ground up. 

About Tania El Khoury
Tania El Khoury creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction.

El Khoury’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 33 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.

El Khoury is a Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Theater and Performance Program and Founding Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College. She holds a PhD in Theater Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. El Khoury is a co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a research and live art collective in Lebanon, and is associated with the Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK.
taniaelkhoury.com
instagram.com/taniaelk

Artist Sara J. Winston, Bard’s Photography Program coordinator, writes about her experience living with multiple sclerosis in an opinion piece for the New York Times. Through her photographs and essay, Winston exposes the realities of life with a chronic condition managed by regular medical treatment. “Rather than orient myself to the cycle of the moon, I orient myself to the cycle of infusion. And it has become a system in my creative work. My body is a clock,” she writes. “Every 28 days, I point the camera toward myself to document my illness and care. I have used my time as a patient in the infusion suite, a place where I sometimes feel powerless, to reclaim my autonomy as an artist and photographer.”

“In the middle of June, a trio of Christmas trees hang upside down above a dimly lit stage at Bard College’s Fisher Center, north of New York City,” writes Bard alumna Quinn Moreland ’15 for Pitchfork. Reporting back from a dress rehearsal of Illinois, a stage adaptation of the acclaimed Sufjan Stevens album of the same name, Moreland spoke with Justin Peck, director, choreographer, and cowriter of the production, an “unusual project that the acclaimed ballet dancer and choreographer can’t quite define himself.”

“I couldn’t tell you if it’s a concert or dance-theater piece or musical,” Peck told Pitchfork. “It’s somewhere amidst all that but feels like its own thing.” Adapting the acclaimed album had long been an ambition of Peck’s, whose admiration for Stevens’s work stretches back to his teenage years, before the two became frequent collaborators. With the Fisher Center production, Peck and his cocreators sought to create something that would capture the spirit of Stevens’s Illinois, a 22-track epic that weaves personal experience with state history. Nostalgia for the album was also in Peck’s mind as he adapted it. “Not only does everyone love this album, they can tell me where they were when they first heard it, what they were going through, and how the album helped them understand themselves,” Peck says. “It’s an album that touched an entire generation.”

Artist Nayland Blake ’82, professor of studio arts and codirector of the Studio Arts Program at Bard, has collaborated with fashion label JCRT to launch the inaugural capsule collection of ATDM (“Artist, Title, Date, Medium”), a new clothing line of limited-run collections created with contemporary artists. Blake’s designs include a shirt printed with the phrase “This is clothing of the opposite gender”—a commentary on Arizona’s anti-LGBTQ+ Senate Bill 1026, which targets drag performances. “Blake, who is nonbinary, intends these pieces to function as wearable messages of resistance and support for trans people and anyone caught wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes,” writes Hyperallergic. In honor of Pride Month, all the profits from this ATDM x Nayland Blake collection will be donated to the Transgender Law Center, the largest trans-led organization for trans advocacy in the US, with $30,000 raised once all 400 of the limited-edition shirts are sold.

Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard College, spoke with the New Yorker about her life and process as a filmmaker and faculty member at Bard. “Reichardt is this country’s finest observer of ordinary grit, an American neorealist to place among the likes of Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, and Vittorio De Sica,” writes Doreen St. Félix for the New Yorker. “The regard for her takes on a hero aspect. It can often feel dazed because of the deep reserve of Reichardt’s stamina, which has carried her through her singular three-decade career.” Her eighth and latest feature film Showing Up, set in Portland about a sculptor named Lizzy, is a rejoinder to the trope of the artist at work and “projects the air of an encompassing thesis, an artist’s statement” by Reichardt.
 

Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music at Bard College, wrote about the alternative country band Souled American for NPR. The band, in Hennies’s view, arguably invented the genre—but since the release of its album Notes Campfire in 1996, the band has dwindled to near nonexistence, with its albums out of print and only a small number of performances in the last 27 years. But the group’s diehard fans have long made a concerted effort to revive interest, and now the full discography is available on Bandcamp for the first time. Souled American’s music renders “atmospheric, languid, and strange evocations of country living,” writes Hennies. “It’s a wonder that these songs work at all. The music is slow and loose with little regard for a consistent beat; the lyrics are poetic and frequently profound, but often cryptic and stunted. What ties it all together is the sound: Guitars twinkle and Adducci’s bass slides and glides in and out of chord progressions in support of drawling, yearning, and ultimately shockingly powerful voices.”

The curtain rises next week on Bard SummerScape’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground. Presented in New York’s Hudson Valley by the Fisher Center at Bard, also celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the seven-week annual arts festival opens next Friday with the world premiere of Illinois (June 23–July 2). A new SummerScape commission, Illinois is a full-length music-theater work based on the 2005 concept album of the same name by Grammy- and Oscar-nominated singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens. Directed and choreographed by Tony Award winner and frequent Stevens collaborator Justin Peck (Carousel on Broadway, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, New York City Ballet), with music and lyrics by Stevens and a story by Peck and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview, Marys Seacole), Illinois is an ecstatic pageant of storytelling, theater, dance, and live music that takes audiences on a wild ride through the American heartland. Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available on June 25, June 29, and July 2; more information is available here. There will also be a pre-performance, opening-night members’ toast (June 23), an exclusive opening-night after-party in the Spiegeltent with the cast and creative team (June 23), a pre-performance talk with Justin Peck (June 25), and a post-performance conversation with the performers (June 30).

SummerScape’s next mainstage event is the first major American production of Camille Saint-Saëns’s grand opera Henri VIII, featuring bass-baritone Alfred Walker and the American Symphony Orchestra in an original new staging by visionary French director Jean-Romain Vesperini (July 21–30).

Finally, over the last two weekends of SummerScape, the 33rd Bard Music Festival presents “Vaughan Williams and His World”: eleven themed concerts, plus panel discussions and special events, providing an in-depth re-examination of the great but frequently misunderstood British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (Aug 4–6; Aug 10–13). Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for Henri VIII (July 23 & 30) and the final program of the Bard Music Festival (Aug 13); more information is available here. Henri VIII and six concerts will also stream live to home audiences worldwide on Upstreaming, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage.

As in previous seasons, SummerScape’s one-of-a-kind Belgian Spiegeltent (June 22–Aug 12) provides a sumptuous environment for cutting-edge live music and dancing on Fridays, Saturdays, and some Sundays throughout the festival, with a new “Bluegrass on Hudson” series on Thursdays. Highlights of the Spiegeltent season include John Cameron Mitchell and Amber Martin, Nona Hendryx’s tribute to Betty Davis, Ari Shapiro with Matteo Lane, Alicia Hall Moran, Erin Markey, Jasmine Rice LaBeija, Britton and the Sting, Nicholas Galanin and Ya Tseen, Susanne Bartsch, Martha Redbone, The Hot Sardines, Lola Kirke ’12, and more. Members of the local community are also invited to a free, day-long 20th anniversary Community Celebration with a special performance from Latin Grammy-winning band Flor de Toloache at the Fisher Center (July 15).

Tickets for mainstage events start at $25. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.

What critics are saying about Bard SummerScape…

“Seven weeks of cultural delight.” (International Herald Tribune)
“A track record of reliable transcendence.” (New York Times)
“One of the major upstate festivals.” (New Yorker)
“A highbrow hotbed of culture.” (Huffington Post)
“The smartest mix of events within driving distance of New York.” (Bloomberg News)
“Leon Botstein’s Bard SummerScape and Bard Music Festival always unearth piles of buried treasure.” (New Yorker)
“One of the best lineups of the summer for fans of any arts discipline.” (New York Sun)
“One of the great artistic treasure chests of the tri-state area and the country.” (GALO magazine)
“One of the New York area’s great seasonal escapes.” (American Record Guide)
“A haven for important operas.” (New York Times)
“An indispensable part of the summer operatic landscape.” (Musical America)
“Essential summertime fare for the serious American opera-goer” (Financial Times, UK)
“Botstein and Bard SummerScape show courage, foresight and great imagination, honoring operas that larger institutions are content to ignore.” (Time Out New York)
“A spectacular venue for innovative fare.” (Travel and Leisure magazine)
“It’s hard not to find something to like, and it’s even harder to beat the setting.” (New York Post)
“The experience of entering the Fisher Center and encountering something totally new is unforgettable and enriching.” (Time Out New York)

…and about the Bard Music Festival

“The summer’s most stimulating music festival.” (Los Angeles Times)
“It has long been one of the most intellectually stimulating of all American summer festivals and frequently is one of the most musically satisfying.” (Wall Street Journal)
“Part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit.” (New York Times)
“A highlight of the musical year.” (Wall Street Journal)
“The most intellectually ambitious of America’s summer music festivals.” (Times Literary Supplement, London)
“One of the ‘Ten Can’t-Miss Classical Music Festivals.’” (NPR Music)
“A two-weekend musicological intensive doubling as a sumptuous smorgasbord of concerts.” (New York Times)
“An always intrepid New York event.” (Time Out New York)
“One of New York’s premier summer destinations for adventurous music lovers.” (New York Times)SummerScape 2023: key dates

June 22–Aug 12
Spiegeltent: live music and dancing

June 23–July 2
Music-theater: Illinois by Justin Peck, Sufjan Stevens and Jackie Sibblies Drury
(world premiere of new SummerScape commission)

July 15
20th Anniversary Community Celebration (free)

July 21–30
Opera: Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII (new production)

Aug 4–6
Bard Music Festival: Vaughan Williams and His World
   Weekend One: Victorians, Edwardians, and Moderns

Aug 10–13
Bard Music Festival: Vaughan Williams and His World
   Weekend Two: A New Elizabethan Age?

All programs subject to change


The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.
                                                                                                           
                                                     
Illinois is a co-commission of the Fisher Center, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Southbank Center, and TO Live, and has been made possible with a commissioning grant from The O’Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation, residency support from Project Springboard: Developing Dance Musicals, and The Ted & Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund. The production is generously supported by Emily Blavatnik and the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Additional funding has been received from the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ‘06 through the March Forth Foundation.

Henri VIII has received support from Villa Albertine.
The 2023 Bard Music Festival has received support from the Vaughan Williams Foundation.

Bard College has been awarded two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the Fisher Center’s presentation of Henri VIII by composer Camille Saint-Saëns, and the Sistema Side-by-Side Program at the Longy School of Music. The awards, both for $30,000, will support both the new production of the 1883 opera for Bard’s 2023 SummerScape festival, and the 2023–24 program of Sistema Side-by-Side, a musical and social mentoring program that pairs children ages 6–18 from neighborhood music programs and local schools with Longy conservatory student mentors for lessons, rehearsals, and performances.

The NEA, established in Congress in 1965, is an independent federal agency that is the largest funder of the arts and arts education in communities nationwide and a catalyst of public and private support for the arts. By advancing equitable opportunities for arts participation and practice, the NEA aims to foster and sustain an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States. Henri VIII and Sistema Side-by-Side are among 1,130 projects across the country that were selected for this second round of funding from the NEA’s Grants for Arts Projects, its largest grants program for organizations that provides comprehensive and expansive funding opportunities for communities.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is pleased to support a wide range of projects, including Bard College’s Henri VIII and Sistema Side-by-Side Program, demonstrating the many ways the arts enrich our lives and contribute to healthy and thriving communities,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “These organizations play an important role in advancing the creative vitality of our nation and helping to ensure that all people can benefit from arts, culture, and design.”

Conducted by Leon Botstein and performed by the American Symphony Orchestra along with a cast of eleven principals plus the Bard Festival Chorale and dancers, the Fisher Center’s production of Henri VIII is directed by an all-French creative team. The stateliness and grandeur of French grand opera represent a fitting choice for the 20th-anniversary celebration of the Fisher Center while the tradition of political commentary of this genre offers an urgent and cautionary tale for contemporary times.
 

      

Gabriel Kilongo ’15, Bard alumnus and founder of the art gallery Jupiter Contemporary in Miami, was interviewed by Artnet News about the founding of Jupiter and its upcoming exhibitions. “With the help of Martin Peretz and Leon Botstein, I went to Bard College on a full scholarship to study art history,” Kilongo told Artnet. “While there, I was introduced to many facets of the art world, and it immediately clicked.” In March 2022, he founded the gallery with the intention of highlighting and fostering emerging artists. “Our focus is to identify, exhibit, and develop artists who are off-the-beaten-path, and offer a breath of fresh air to the discourse of the art industry.” The next exhibition planned for Jupiter Contemporary will be a solo show featuring new work by Yongqi Tang, showcasing the broad scope of her practice in paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

The exhibition Leonora Carrington: Revelación, which was held at Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, was the first retrospective devoted to the artist in Spain and offered a fresh presentation of Carrington’s influences, thematic concerns, and technical and intellectual development, writes Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, for Artforum. The exhibition, coproduced with the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen and organized by Tere Arcq, Carlos Martín, and Stefan van Raay, highlighted previously unshown works from different stages in Carrington’s life and “marks a triumphant return to a country that was the site of one of the most transformative junctures of Carrington’s life: her traumatic incarceration in 1940 in the Santander asylum, where she experienced sexual violence and the enduring stigma of mental illness,” Aberth writes. “Carrington was curious about all avenues providing insight into the self,” she continues, “Including Jungian psychology, kabbalah, astrology, peyote, Tibetan Buddhism, and tarot, to name just a few.”

Further reading:

Bard College Professor Susan Aberth Awarded a Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency

Bard Professor Susan Aberth and Curator Tere Arcq Publish First Book Dedicated to Newly Discovered Tarot Set Created by Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington and the Theatre: A Conversation with Professor Susan Aberth and Double Edge Theatre’s Stacy Klein
 

The New York Times profiled the “singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic opera” Stranger Love and its collaborators, composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. The Times also reviewed the opera, naming it a Critic's Pick, calling it “an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small.”

Stranger Love premiered on Saturday, May 20, 2023—its only planned performance at the time of writing. Writer Zachary Woolfe tracked the project from its envisioning 11 years ago to its final incarnation: a six-hour, three-act production to be staged at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Contemporaneous, which Mattingly cofounded with David Bloom ’13 as an undergraduate at Bard, will play, with Bloom conducting. Whether Stranger Love will have a future performance after this weekend is unclear, though “Mattingly has dreamed of doing it at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.” Regardless, Mattingly and Bartscherer are at work on their next collaboration, the ambitiously titled “History of Life.”

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Walid Raad as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Photography in the Division of the Arts for the 2023–24 academic year. Raad is an artist whose works include photography, video, mixed media installations, and performances. His works include the creation of The Atlas Group, a fifteen-year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon, as well as the ongoing projects Scratching on Things I Could Disavow and Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut). His books include Walkthrough, The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead, My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair, and Let’s Be Honest The Weather Helped.

Raad’s solo exhibitions have been featured at institutions including the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza (Madrid), Louvre (Paris), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), ICA (Boston, USA), Museo Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico), Kunsthalle Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland), The Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, UK), Festival d’Automne (Paris, France), Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels, Belgium), The Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, Germany). 

His works have also been shown in Documenta 11 and 13 (Kassel, Germany), The Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), Whitney Bienniale 2000 and 2002 (New York, USA), Sao Paulo Bienale (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Istanbul Biennal (Istanbul, Turkey), Homeworks I and IV (Beirut, Lebanon) and other institutions across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. In addition, Raad is the recipient multiple grants, prizes, and awards, including the Aachener Kunstpreis (2018), ICP Infinity Award (2016), the Hasselblad Award (2011), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2007), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2007), the Camera Austria Award (2005), and a Rockefeller Fellowship (2003).

Tania El Khoury, distinguished artist in residence in the Theater and Performance Program at Bard and director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, has won a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for theater. The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts is an unrestricted prize of $75,000 given annually to risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater, and the visual arts. The theater award panel honored El Khoury for “her serious and playful, and complex work, her breadth of imagination, and powerful sense of ethical responsibility. Studying the political potential of live art, treating audiences as fellow investigators and researchers, inventing new forms and new ways of engagement with each project, she is opening new paths of meaning and creation.” El Khoury says, “I create work that actively resists borders. The internal and external borders, the visible and invisible, borders within our bodies, colonial borders, cities as borders, the art industry as a border, and national borders as a way to make people disappear.”

The Herb Alpert Award honors and supports artists respected for their creativity, ingenuity, and bodies of work, at a moment in their lives when they are poised to propel their art in new and unpredictable directions. The Herb Alpert Award recognizes experimenters who are making something that matters within and beyond their field. El Koury is among 11 recipients of the prize, the most ever awarded in a year. Nominated by artists and arts professionals, finalists were invited to submit work samples, and two winners were selected in each field. This year, Gideon Lester, artistic director of the Fisher Center, professor of theater and performance, and senior curator at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard, was among the theater panelists. 

Previous Bard recipients of the Herb Alpert Award include:
Martine Syms  MFA ’17, Visual Arts 2022
Adam Khalil ’11, Film/Video 2021
Sky Hopinka, Sherri Burt Hennessey Artist in Residence and assistant professor of film and electronic arts, Film/Video 2020
Pam Tanowitz, Bard’s first choreographer in residence at the Fisher Center, Dance 2019 
Jacqueline Goss, professor of film and electronic arts, Film/Video 2007
Peggy Ahwesh, professor emeritus of film and electronic art, Film/Video 2000
George Lewis, music/sound faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard, Music 1999

Choreographer Joanna Haigood ’79 is the recipient of a 2023 Rainin Fellowship for her work in dance. Now in its third year, this fellowship annually awards four visionary Bay Area artists working across the disciplines of dance, film, public space, and theater with unrestricted grants of $100,000. An initiative of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and administered by United States Artists, the fellowship funds artists who push the boundaries of creative expression, anchor local communities, and advance the field. Fellows also receive supplemental support tailored to address each fellow’s specific needs and goals, including financial planning, communications, and marketing help and legal services. The 2023 Fellows were nominated by Bay Area artists and cultural leaders and selected through a two-part review process with the help of national reviewers and a panel of four local jurors. Haigood is the artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre and was a recipient of a Bard Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters.

Haigood is a choreographer and site artist who has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative since 1980. Haigood’s stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by arts institutions including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d’Avignon. Haigood has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary young artists internationally at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque in France, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in England, Spelman College, and many more, including members of her company Zaccho Dance Theatre. Her honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship, USA Fellowship, New York Bessie Award, and the Doris Duke Artist Award.

Filmmaker Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, who is associate professor and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, has been selected as a member of the 2023–2024 cohort of Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellows for his work in the arts. During their fellowship year, this international cohort will work on projects that “contend with the urgent, the beautiful, and the vast: from reckoning with the challenges of climate change to creating digital models of iconic Italian violins to detecting distant galaxies.” Asili has been named a Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow, an honor which includes a stipend of $78,000 plus an additional $5,000 to cover project expenses. Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellows are provided studio or office space, use of the Film Study Center’s equipment and facilities, and access to libraries and other Harvard University resources during the fellowship year.

The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program annually selects and supports artists, scholars, and practitioners who bring both a record of achievement and exceptional promise to the institute. A Radcliffe fellowship offers scholars in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts—as well as writers, journalists, and other distinguished professionals—a rare chance to pursue ambitious projects for a full year in a vibrant interdisciplinary setting amid the resources of Harvard. The 2023–2024 fellows represent only 3.3 percent of the many applications that Radcliffe received.

Music Director Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now (TŌN) in Before and After Soviet Communism, a program examining seldom-heard masterpieces of Eastern European music by Karol Szymanowski, Boris Tishchenko, and György Kurtág during the rise and fall of Soviet communism. The performance is a preview of the same program to be given at Carnegie Hall on May 4.

Tickets: $25–$35 are available online at fishercenter.bard.edu, or by calling the Fisher Center at 845.758.7900. Ticket holders will need to comply with the venue’s health and safety requirements, which can be found here. 

Before and After Soviet Communism: A Carnegie Hall Preview
Fisher Center at Bard College, Sosnoff Theater
This program will also be performed at Carnegie Hall on May 4.
Saturday, April 29, 2023 at 7 PM
Sunday, April 30 at 2 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Sun-Ly Pierce, mezzo-soprano
Hiromi Kikuchi, violin (April 29)
Ken Hakii, viola (April 29)
Luosha Fang, violin (April 30)
Rosemary Nelis, viola (April 30)
Karol Szymanowski: Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin
György Kurtág: ...concertante...
Boris Tishchenko: Symphony No. 5
Szymanowski’s 1918 Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin was written during a time when the composer’s interests turned towards exoticism. Chinese-American mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, a Marilyn Horne Song Competition award-winner with frequent leading roles at Houston Grand Opera, is featured in this song cycle based on texts from the Polish poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz. The work evokes the improvisational cry of the men who call Muslims to prayer. Russian composer Boris Tishchenko’s Fifth Symphony is dedicated to Shostakovich in response to the death of his teacher, colleague, and friend. Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s early-21st-century ...concertante… consists of a single movement and a coda scored for large orchestra and two string soloists with a wide range of tonal color. Premiered in 2003 by the Danish National Symphony Radio Orchestra, the work won the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. The soloists in the April 29 performance are violinist Hiromi Kikuchi, and Ken Hakii, for whom Kurtág wrote this piece. The April 30 concert will feature violinist/violist Luosha Fang, 1st Prize-winner of the Tokyo International Viola Competition; and violist Rosemary Nelis, Brooklyn native, recording artist, violist for the Cassatt String Quartet, and faculty member of Kinhaven Music School.

The Orchestra Now
The Orchestra Now (TŌN) is a group of 54 vibrant young musicians from 13 different countries across the globe: Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Peru, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States. 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 Yale School of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Royal Academy of Music, and the New England Conservatory 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 Leonard Slatkin, Neeme Järvi, Gil Shaham, Fabio Luisi, Vadim Repin, Hans Graf, Peter Serkin, Gerard Schwarz, Tan Dun, 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. Recent releases include an album of piano concertos with Orion Weiss on Bridge Records, and the soundtrack to the motion picture Forte. 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 ton.bard.edu.

Leon Botstein
Leon Botstein is founder and music director of The Orchestra Now (TŌN), music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO), artistic codirector of Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival, and conductor laureate and principal guest conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (JSO), where he served as music director from 2003 to 2011. He has been guest conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Mariinsky Theatre, Russian National Orchestra in Moscow, Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, Taipei Symphony, Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra, and Sinfónica Juvenil de Caracas in Venezuela, among others. In 2018, he assumed artistic directorship of Campus Grafenegg and Grafenegg Academy in Austria.

Recordings include acclaimed recordings of Othmar Schoeck’s Lebendig begraben with TŌN, Hindemith’s The Long Christmas Dinner with the ASO, a Grammy-nominated recording of Popov’s First Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra, and other various recordings with TŌN, ASO, the London Philharmonic, NDR Orchestra Hamburg, and JSO, among others. He is editor of The Musical Quarterly and author of numerous articles and books, including The Compleat Brahms (Norton), Jefferson’s Children (Doubleday), Judentum und Modernität (Bölau), and Von Beethoven zu Berg (Zsolnay). Honors include Harvard University’s prestigious Centennial Award; the American Academy of Arts and Letters award; and Cross of Honor, First Class, from the government of Austria, for his contributions to music. Other distinctions include the Bruckner Society’s Julio Kilenyi Medal of Honor for his interpretations of that composer’s music, the Leonard Bernstein Award for the Elevation of Music in Society, and Carnegie Foundation’s Academic Leadership Award. In 2011, he was inducted into the American Philosophical Society.

The Fisher Center at Bard presents Illinois, a world premiere music-theater work based on Sufjan Stevens’ acclaimed album of the same name, June 23 – July 2. Directed and choreographed by Tony Award winner and frequent Stevens collaborator Justin Peck (Carousel on Broadway, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, New York City Ballet), with music and lyrics by Stevens and a story by Peck and Pulitzer Prize winner Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview, Marys Seacole), this union of visionary artists is an ecstatic pageant of storytelling, theater, dance, and live music. Frequent Stevens collaborator Timo Andres has created new arrangements of Stevens’ songs—which stretch from DIY folk and indie rock to marching band and ambient electronics—to be performed by a live band (led by Nathan Koci, music director of the Fisher Center’s Tony Award-winning production of Oklahoma!) and three vocalists (including Illinois album backing vocalist Shara Nova), with twelve dancers embodying and propelling their ambitious storytelling. Illinois leads audiences on a journey through the American heartland, from campfire storytelling to the edges of the cosmos.

Part of the Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, Illinois kicks off SummerScape 2023 (June–August, 2023), the Fisher Center’s annual summer festival, “a hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure,” (The New York Times). The production exemplifies the Fisher Center’s role as an internationally influential hub of artistic innovation and incubation, following works such as Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma! and Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets.   

Stevens’ 2005 concept album Illinois enjoys cult status for its lush orchestrations and wildly inventive portrayal of the state’s people, landscapes, and history, complete with UFOs, zombies, and predatory wasps. Peck transforms Stevens’ giddily melodic Americana collage into a full-length theatrical performance, working with Sibblies-Drury to thread together a narrative that honors the album’s structure—and draws movement from its moments of rhapsody, sweetness, anxiety, and anguish. As Pitchfork wrote of Illinois in a rare “9.2”-rated review, “Stevens has a remarkable habit of being rousing and distressing at the same time, prodding disparate emotional centers until it’s unclear whether it’s best to grab your party shoes or a box of tissues.”

Like many fellow millennials to whom Illinois bears an enduringly immediate emotional resonance, Peck encountered the album as a teenager. He says, “I remember hearing this album for the first time and just being blown away by the whole world that it opened up: the way it fluidly could move between such a variety of styles and compositions. One moment, it’s a folk murder ballad; the next, it’s abstract instrumental music; the next, it’s a group singalong. This was before I realized I wanted to make dances, but I thought, ‘this is someone who really has an innate ability to write music for dance and music for storytelling.’”

In the early 2010s, Peck contacted Stevens, asking for permission to choreograph a ballet to a portion of his electronic album Enjoy Your Rabbit. Though Stevens professed having little interest in ballet at the time, he gave the go-ahead. The full-length work that emerged, Peck’s Year of the Rabbit, and their resulting friendship and ongoing artistic partnership, completely changed the musician’s relationship with the form. As Stevens described to The New York Times, “[Justin] persuaded me to have an education and kind of curated my experience [of ballet].” Stevens became captivated by how ballet “is all about absence of self—there is no ego in it, even though there is extreme self-consciousness. Ballet is like proof of the existence of God.” Peck and Stevens went on to collaborate on arresting dance works including Everywhere We Go, In the Countenance of Kings, The Decalogue, and Principia. With Illinois, they harness the mutual inspiration they've developed throughout their collaboration to, for the first time, explore the form of music-theater.

The music-theater adaptation of Illinois had been percolating as an idea since Peck first articulated it on a whim at a dinner with Stevens in 2014; it finally takes exuberant form nearly a decade later, and with the collective imagination of a dynamic team, in its world premiere at the Fisher Center. Peck sought dancers who were not only technically extraordinary, but whose manner of gesture and expression made them exceptional storytellers. They include Kara Chan (Four Quartets), Ben Cook (Spielberg’s West Side Story), Jeanette Delgado (Spielberg’s West Side Story), Gaby Diaz (winner of Season 12, So You Think You Can Dance?), Tilly Evans-Krueger (Moulin Rouge! The Musical), Jonathan Fahoury (New York City Ballet), Jennifer Florentino (Spielberg’s West Side Story), Brandt Martinez (Moulin Rouge! The Musical), Craig Salstein (American Ballet Theatre, Spielberg’s West Side Story), Ahmad Simmons (Fosse/Verdon), Byron Tittle (In the Heights film), and Ricky Ubeda (winner of Season 11, So You Think You Can Dance?), with swings Jada German, Matthew Johnson, Zachary Gonder, and Dario Natarelli.

Shara Nova (the acclaimed musician who has sung on many Stevens albums and tours, and is celebrated for her work as My Brightest Diamond), Tasha (the Chicago musician who, per Pitchfork, “writes minimal, unpredictable songs that explore the in-between states of relationships with subtlety and grace”), and Tariq al-Sabir (a composer, vocalist, and music director called a “rising musical mastermind” by The Baltimore Examiner) perform vocals and on guitar and synths. The band comprises Christina Courtin (violin/viola), Domenica Fossati (flute), Daniel Freedman (drums), Sean Forte (piano and keys), Kathy Halvorson (oboe), Nathan Koci (banjo), Eleonore Oppenheim (bass), Brandon Ridenour (trumpet), Kyra Sims (horn), Jess Tsang (vibraphone).

The creative team includes Sufjan Stevens (Music and Lyrics, based on the album Illinois), Justin Peck (Director/Choreographer/Story), Jackie Sibblies Drury (Story), Olivier Award nominee Nathan Koci (Music Direction and Supervision), Timo Andres (Music Arrangements and Orchestrations), Tony Award nominee Adam Rigg (Scenic Design), Brandon Stirling-Baker (Lighting Design), Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung  (Costume Design), Garth MacAleavey (Sound Design), Andrew Diaz (Props Design), Julian Crouch (Masks), Adriana Pierce (Associate Direction & Choreography), Sean Forte (Associate Music Direction), and Natalie Hratko (Production Stage Manager).

Peck describes, “The proof of this album’s importance to a generation has come into play within the team that’s working on it. So many of us can pinpoint exactly where we were, what we were going through in our lives, what we connected to when we first heard this album. It’s both universal and incredibly specific, and personal. There’s so much inside of it. It’s this compressed thing, and it feels like if you decompressed it and laid it all out, it would be able to circle the globe eight times over.”

The Fisher Center at Bard’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground is a celebration of the artists, audiences, students, faculty, and communities that have written the Fisher Center’s story for its first two decades and will imagine it into the future. This milestone season for the organization that incubates vanguard artists’ boldest ideas unfolds with unbounded and genre-defying visions for dance, theater, opera, and public discourse. The season will culminate in a groundbreaking ceremony for The Fisher Center’s new 25,000-square-foot performing arts studio building, designed by Maya Lin, which will offer artists at all stages of their careers vastly expanded room to explore as they build works from the ground up.

Illinois Schedule and Information

Illinois will have its world premiere at the Fisher Center June 23 – July 2, with the press opening taking place at a Chicago theater to be announced soon.

Performances:
Friday, June 23 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, June 24 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, June 25 at 2 pm
Friday, June 30 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, July 1 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, July 2 at 2 pm

Sosnoff Theater
Tickets start at $25

Pre-Performance Toast for Members
Friday, June 23 at 6:30 pm

Opening Night Cast Party
Friday, June 23 at 9pm
Spiegeltent
Ticket price $150
Meet the artists and creative team at an exclusive after-party hosted at the fabulous SummerScape Spiegeltent.

Pre-Performance Talk
Sunday, June 25 at 1 pm

Post-Performance Conversation with the Artists
Friday, June 30

SummerScape Coach from New York City
Sunday, June 25 and Sunday, July 2

For complete information regarding tickets, special packages, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call 845-758-7900.

About Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens is a singer, songwriter, and composer living in New York. His preoccupation with epic concepts has motivated two state records (Michigan and Illinois), a collection of sacred and biblical songs (Seven Swans), an electronic album for the animals of the Chinese zodiac (Enjoy Your Rabbit), a full length partly inspired by the outsider artist Royal Robertson (The Age of Adz), a masterwork memorializing and investigating his relationship with his late mother (Carrie & Lowell), and two Christmas box sets (Songs for Christmas, vol. 1-5 and Silver & Gold, vol. 6-10).

BAM has commissioned two works from Stevens, a programmatic tone poem for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (The BQE) and an instrumental accompaniment to slow-motion rodeo footage (Round-Up). He has collaborated extensively with the New York City Ballet choreographer Justin Peck (Year of the Rabbit, Everywhere We Go, Countenance of Kings, Principia, The Decalogue, and Reflections). Stevens’ Planetarium, a collaborative album with Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, and James McAlister imbued with themes of the cosmos, was released in 2017 to widespread critical praise. Stevens also contributed three much-lauded songs to Luca Guadagnino’s critically acclaimed film Call Me By Your Name, including the Oscar and Grammy-nominated song “Mystery of Love.”

In 2020 he shared Aporia, a collaborative new age album made with his stepfather Lowell Brams, and his eighth studio album, The Ascension, a reflection on the state of humanity in freefall and a call for a total transformation of consciousness. In early 2021, he released Convocations, a five-volume, two-and-a-half-hour requiem mass for present times. The most recent studio album by Stevens—A Beginner’s Mind—features songs inspired in part by popular films. It was released in the fall of 2021 and is a collaboration with singer-songwriter Angelo DeAugustine.

About Justin Peck

Justin Peck is a Tony Award-winning choreographer, director, filmmaker, and dancer based in New York City. He is currently the acting Resident Choreographer of the New York City Ballet. Peck began choreographing in 2009 at the New York Choreographic Institute. In 2014, after the creation of his acclaimed ballet Everywhere We Go, he was appointed as Resident Choreographer of the New York City Ballet. He is the second person in the institution’s history to hold this title.

After attending the School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center from 2003-2006, Peck was invited to join the New York City Ballet as a dancer in 2006.  In 2013, Peck was promoted to the rank of Soloist, performing full-time through 2019 with the company.

Peck has created over 50 dance works—more than 20 for New York City Ballet. Working on a wide array of projects, Peck’s collaborators include composers Sufjan Stevens, The National, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, Dan Deacon, Caroline Shaw, Chris Thile, Stephen Sondheim, M83, Dolly Parton; visual artists Shepard Fairey, Marcel Dzama, Shantell Martin, John Baldessari, Jeffrey Gibson, George Condo, Steve Powers, Jules de Balincourt; fashion designers Raf Simons, Mary Katrantzou, Humberto Leon (Kenzo, Opening Ceremony), Tsumori Chisato, Dries Van Noten; and filmmakers Steven Spielberg, Sofia Coppola, Damien Chazelle, Elisabeth Moss, Frances Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Jody Lee Lipes.

In 2014, Peck was the subject of the documentary Ballet 422, which presents Peck’s craft and creative process as a choreographer in great detail as he creates New York City Ballet’s 422nd commissioned dance.Peck has worked extensively as a filmmaker. In particular, his focus has been exploring new innovative ways of presenting dance on film. Peck choreographed the feature films Red Sparrow (2016), West Side Story (2021) in collaboration with director Steven Spielberg, and Maestro (2022) in collaboration with director/actor/writer Bradley Cooper. Peck’s work as a director-choreographer for music videos includes: “The Dark Side of the Gym” (2017) for The National; “Thank You, New York” (2020) for Chris Thile; and “The Times Are Racing” (2017) for Dan Deacon. In 2018, Peck directed the New York Times’ Great Performers Series.

Peck choreographed the 2018 Broadway revival of Carousel. The production was directed by Jack O’Brien and starred Jessie Meuller, Joshua Henry, & Renée Fleming.

Peck’s honors include the National Arts Award (2018), the Golden Plate Honor from the Academy of Achievement (2019), the Bessie Award for his ballet Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes (2015), the Gross Family Prize for his ballet Everywhere We Go (2014), the World Choreography Award for West Side Story (2022), and the Tony Award for his work on Broadway’s Carousel (2018).

About Jackie Sibblies Drury

Plays include Marys Seacole (OBIE Award), Fairview (2019 Pulitzer Prize), Really, Social Creatures, and We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.

The presenters of her plays include Young Vic, Lincoln Center Theatre, Soho Rep., Berkeley Rep, New York City Players & Abrons Arts Center, Victory Gardens, Trinity Rep, Woolly Mammoth, Undermain Theatre, InterAct Theatre, Actors Theater of Louisville, Company One, and Bush Theatre. Drury has developed her work at Sundance, Bellagio Center, Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Soho Rep. Writer/Director Lab, New York Theatre Workshop, Bushwick Starr, LARK, and MacDowell Colony, among others.

She has received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a Jerome Fellowship at The LARK, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, and a Windham-Campbell Literary Prize in Drama.

Credits

Illinois is a co-commission of the Fisher Center, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Southbank Centre, TO Live, and the Perelman Performing Arts Center, and has been made possible with a commissioning grant from The O’Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation, residency support from Project Springboard: Developing Dance Musicals, and The Ted & Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund. The production is generously supported by Emily Blavatnik and the Blavatnik Family Foundation.

The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season is dedicated to the founders of the Fisher Center who have cultivated extraordinary artistic experiences—past, present, and future. We honor the memory of Richard B. Fisher, a true champion of the arts and Bard College, and his visionary leadership.

The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.

A special thank you to all who have made this special season possible. Thank you for your contribution to our artistic home.

About the Fisher Center at Bard

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 163-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.
The Center presents more than 200 world-class events and welcomes 50,000 visitors each year. The Fisher Center supports artists at all stages of their careers and employs more than 300 professional artists annually. The Fisher Center is a powerful catalyst for art-making regionally, nationally, and worldwide. Every year it produces 8 to 10 major new works in various disciplines. Over the past five years, its commissioned productions have been seen in more than 100 communities around the world. During the 2018–2019 season, six Fisher Center productions toured nationally and internationally. In 2019, the Fisher Center won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma!, which began its life in 2007 as an undergraduate production at Bard and was produced professionally in the Fisher Center’s SummerScape Festival in 2015 before transferring to New York City.

 
 

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents Marcus Roberts’ Modern Jazz Generation and the Bard Jazz Innovators, a concert led by award-winning pianist and composer Marcus Roberts. Roberts, who is also a professor of music at Bard, will perform with his eight-piece professional ensemble, Modern Jazz Generation, in a variety of player combinations throughout the evening with the Bard Jazz Innovators, a nine-piece student ensemble. The performance will take place at Olin Hall, Bard College, on April 20 at 8 pm. Admission is free, with a suggested donation of $15.

Pianist Marcus Roberts has been hailed as a “genius of the modern piano.” He is known throughout the world for his many contributions to jazz music, as well as his commitment to integrating the jazz and classical idioms to create something wholly new. Roberts’ rhythmic and melodic group improvisational style is the hallmark of his modern approach to the jazz trio.

“Mr. Roberts has dedicated himself to learning not only the jazz tradition but also the lilting music of the 19th century, and he brings an astonishing richness to his playing,” wrote Peter Watrous for the New York Times. 

About Marcus Roberts
Roberts grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, where his mother's gospel singing and the music of the local church left a lasting impact on his music. He began teaching himself to play piano at age five after losing his sight, but did not have his first formal lesson until age 12 while attending the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. At age 18, he went on to study classical piano at Florida State University with Leonidas Lipovetsky, the world-renowned classical concert pianist. 

Currently, Roberts is a Professor of Music at the Florida State University College of Music, where he received his B.A degree and a Professor of Music at Bard College. He also holds honorary doctoral degrees from The Juilliard School, Brigham Young University, and Bard College, and has won numerous awards and competitions over the years, including the Helen Keller Award for Personal Achievement. Roberts is known for his generosity, providing support and mentoring to a large network of younger musicians, and he continues to strive to find ways to serve the blind and other disabled communities. In 2021, he served as the Artistic Director for the centennial gala, The Art of Inclusion, for the American Foundation for the Blind. He was also a featured speaker/performer at the 2021 Disability:IN annual conference.

His critically-acclaimed legacy of recorded music reflects his tremendous artistic versatility, as well as his unique approach to jazz performance, and his recordings include solo piano, duets, and trio arrangements of jazz standards along with original suites of music for trio, large ensembles, and symphony orchestra. In addition to his renown as a performer, Roberts is also an accomplished composer. He has been commissioned by Chamber Music America, Jazz at Lincoln Center, ASCAP, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Savannah Music Festival. 

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships to three Bard faculty members and four Bard alumnae. Felicia Keesing, David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, Laura Larson, cochair of photography at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Jordan Weber, visiting artist in residence at Studio Arts, artist Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20, photographer Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10, artist Jessica Segall ’00, and artist Martine Syms MFA ’18 have been named 2023 Guggenheim Fellows. 

Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 2,500 applicants, Keesing, Larson, Weber, Nguyen, Phyars-Burgess, Segall and Syms were among a diverse group of 171 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2023 Fellowship. Keesing was awarded a Fellowship for her research on the ecology of infectious diseases, Larson for her work in photography, Weber for his work in the arts, Nguyen for her work in the arts, Phyars-Burgess for her work in photography, Segall for her work in the arts, and Syms for her work in the arts. 

“Like Emerson, I believe that fullness in life comes from following our calling,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The new class of Fellows has followed their calling to enhance all of our lives, to provide greater human knowledge and deeper understanding. We’re lucky to look to them to bring us into the future.”

In all, 48 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 72 different academic institutions, 24 states and the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 50 Fellows have no current full-time college or university affiliation. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like the lasting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, democracy and policing, scientific innovation, climate change, and identity.

Created and initially funded in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought since its inception to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the 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. The great range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2023 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Felicia Keesing’s research focuses on the ecology of infectious diseases in New York's Hudson Valley and in the savannas of central Kenya. She holds a Bachelor of Science from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Keesing was awarded the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2000), and has been the recipient of grants from National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, among others. She was coeditor of Infectious Disease Ecology: Effects of Ecosystems on Disease and of Disease on Ecosystems (Princeton University Press, 2008), and has also contributed to articles such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecology Letters, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Ecology, BioScience, Conservation Biology, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, and Canadian Journal of Zoology. 

Laura Larson’s work looks to the history of photography as a documentary practice to tell personal and sociocultural narratives. From 2002-2019, she was represented by Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York, where she presented four one-person exhibitions, including Complimentary (2002), Apparition (2005), and Electric Girls and the Invisible World (2009). Larson’s work has been featured at a variety of institutions, including Art in General, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and TimeOut New York. Larson is also the author of two books, Hidden Mother (2017), and City of Incurable Women (2022), both of which feature her research into 19th century photography. 

Jordan Weber is a New York- and Midwest-based regenerative land sculptor and activist who works at the crossroads of social justice and environmental racism. He has been an inaugural Harvard LOEB/ArtLab Fellow, a Blade of Grass Fellow, and an Iowa Arts Council Fellow, and has held residencies at Yale University’s inaugural Environmental Humanities, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and Washington University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE2) in St. Louis. He has been the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2022 United States Artists Award, Creative Capital Award, Joan Mitchell Award, Tanne Arts Foundation award, and African American Leadership Forum Grant. Weber is also working with Bard College on plans for a public art project, details of which will be announced later this year.

Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20 is an artist who works with photography and time-based media. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS at SculptureCenter, New York, and The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Between Two Solitudes at Stereo, Warsaw; Tyrant Star at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Minor twin worlds, with Brandon Ndife, at Bureau, New York; Reoccurring Afterlife, at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; and Flesh Before Body at Bad Reputation, Los Angeles. Nguyen has also been featured in multiple group exhibitions, including Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York; Metabolic Rift at Berlin Atonal, Berlin; Made in L.A. 2020: a version at Hammer Museum and The Huntington, Los Angeles; and Bodies of Water: 13th Shanghai Biennale, at Power Station of Art, in Shanghai. Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, and The Escalette Collection of Art at Chapman University.

Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10 was born in Brooklyn, New York to Trinidadian parents and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is interested in using photography education as community empowerment, and her first monograph, Untitled, explores the African diaspora around the world. 

Jessica Segall ’00 is an artist who uses hostile and threatened landscapes as the sites for her work. While embedded in these sites, she plays with both the risk of engaging with the environment and the vulnerability of the environment itself. Segall's work is built on a foundation of research that often includes cross-disciplinary collaboration and collaboration with scientists, activists and non-human beings. Her work has been featured internationally, including at COP 26, The Fries Museum, the Coreana Museum of Art, the Havana Bienal, the Queens Museum of Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the National Museum of Jewish American History, the Inside Out Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, the National Gallery of Indonesia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Croatia, the Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery and the National Symposium for Electronic Art. Segall has also received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the Harpo Foundation, the Virginia A Groot Foundation, the FST Studioprojects Fund, the Puffin Foundation, the Arts Envoy Program and Art Matters. Her work has been featured in Cabinet Magazine, the New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Mousse Magazine and Art in America. Her work is in the collections of the Museum de Domijnen and the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. 

Martine Syms MFA ’18 is an artist who has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Her work has been shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and ICA London. She has also done commissioned work for brands such as Prada, Nike, and Celine, among others. She is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a United States Artists fellowship, the Tiffany Foundation award, and the Future Fields Art Prize. She is in a band called Aunt Sister and hosts Double Penetration, a monthly radio show on NTS. Syms also runs Dominica Publishing. 

Jeffrey Gibson, visiting artist in residence at Bard College and a celebrated member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, is showcasing his work in an exhibition titled Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric, on view at the Nashville Frist Art Museum through April 23. The exhibition is “a clarion call for Indigenous power, queer recognition, and environmental resistance to the carnage of profit-mad commercial and industrial development,” writes Albert Bender for People’s World. His work in The Body Electric features a variety of paintings, sculptures, videos, and a mural, and draws deeply on his Indigenous heritage along with modernist explorations of color. “His art takes the viewer through a dazzling panoply of paintings, sculptures, films, and installations,” Bender continues. “Gibson is not only an accomplished artist but also a profound, insightful philosopher whose thoughts abundantly filter into his renderings.”

Tschabalala Self ’12, visiting artist in residence in Studio Arts, is the subject of her first solo European museum exhibition Tschabalala Self: Inside Out, on view at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland through June 18. Curated by Gianni Jetzer, the show centers the Black body, especially the female Black body, through the conceptual and compositional lens of the artist in what Self has termed as a “pantheon of invented characters.” Featuring the show in its weekly spotlight, Artnet News writes: “Though clearly deeply rooted in the tradition of painting, the compound of materials and techniques within Self’s two-dimensional compositions defy easy categorization . . . The figures are singular and specific, yet they are far from traditional portraiture.”

Bard Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies has won two new awards in support of her professional work. Hennies is one of 14 American composers to receive a 2022 commission from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. Her commissioning award provides $12,000 to support the creation of new musical works as well as access to a subsidy of up to $4,000 for an ensemble to perform the premiere of the commissioned work. More than 500 composers have received this Fromm Music Foundation commission since 1952. 

Hennies has also received a 2023 USArtists International Second Round Award by the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, which provides grants of up to $18,000, in support of her participation at the international 2023 Archipel Festival in Geneva, Switzerland. At the Archipel Festival, Sarah will perform two of her own pieces, Falsetto (2016) for percussion and pre-recorded percussion, and Fleas (2017) for vibraphone and multiple handbells played by the public. She will also perform a concert of music by the American composer and percussionist, Michael Ranta.

Bard alumna Juliana Maitenaz ’22 has received an independent study–research Fulbright Scholarship to Brazil for the 2023–24 academic year. Her project, “Rhythm and Statecraft,” seeks to identify Brazilian percussion and rhythms as a method of cultural communication. Maitenaz, a former Conservatory student, graduated from Bard last May with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance. 

Her project, which she aims to conduct in São Paulo, will focus on how percussional elements in the Brazilian traditions of Carnival and Samba School performances are instrumental to the country’s statecraft and national identity. The goal of her research is to examine international communication and collaboration through cultural and musical diplomacy. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to learn more about the role Brazilian percussion plays as an inspiring means of cultural communication,” Maitenaz said. 

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. During their grants, Fulbrighters will meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences to facilitate cultural exchange.

Bard College Studio Arts Program presents the Class of 2023 Senior Thesis Spring Exhibitions.

UBS Bard Exhibition Center
45 O'Callaghan Lane
Red Hook, New York

USB Group Show 1
Oscar Haas, Catherine Lyu, Luca McCarthy, Olivia McLeod, Brandon Vanbach, Samaira Wilson, Bennett Wood, Cora Quinlan
Opening reception Saturday, April 8, 3–6 pm
On View April 8–22

UBS Group Show 2
McKinlay Daggatt, Aislinn Feldberg, Hannah French, Jacob Judelson, Georgia Lenz, Samantha Schwartz, Una Winn, Jackie Weddell, Jamie Toomey
Opening reception Saturday, May 6, 3–6 pm
On View May 6–20


Fisher Studio Arts Exhibitions
60 N Ravine Road
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Oga Li
Opening reception Saturday, April 8, 5–8 pm

Whitney Hagen
Opening reception Saturday, April 22, 5–8 pm

Chloe Raizner
Opening reception Saturday, April 29, 5–8 pm

Cam Goldberg
Opening reception Saturday, May 6, 5–8 pm

Odette Zhou
Opening reception Saturday, May 13, 5–8 pm

Bard Farm
Maya Miggins
Opening Saturday, May 13, 5 pm

Bard Chapel
Jackie Weddell
Performance Saturday, April 15, 7:30 pm

Avery Film Center, Integrated Arts Room
55 Blithewood Ave
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Rose Reiner
Performance Saturday, May 6

Nail Biter Opens the Organization’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground

The Fisher Center at Bard begins its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground with the world premiere of Bessie Award-winning choreographer Beth Gill’s Nail Biter, a dance work that moves the viewer through portals of myth, memoir, psychodrama, and horror. Performances take place March 31 – April 2 in the LUMA Theater. Gill has been acclaimed for “appl[ying] her discerning eye to… dark, chaotic, psychologically tangled worlds” (New York Times). In Nail Biter, characters emerge as a collection of representations of our collective unconscious, as the work pierces through the existential weight of our time and channels our contemporary angst and anxiety.

Nail Biter is Gill’s second commission from the Fisher Center LAB, following her 2016 performance Catacomb. Carrying out its mission to provide custom-made, meaningful support to artists over an extended time, The Fisher Center LAB  provided Gill with a “dreaming” commission in 2020. This allowed Gill to have financial support during the Pandemic lockdown and the opportunity to reimagine how she works. The initial ideas explored in Nail Biter emerged from that time, and in 2021 the piece was formally commissioned, with a developmental residency at the Fisher Center in May 2022. 

The choreographer dedicates Nail Biter to Rose-Marie Menes, her first dance teacher, who passed away in 2011, as Gill was, as she describes, “in the early stages of dreaming” this work. Gill says of her late mentor, “What I think about now as a professional choreographer and teacher is how unwavering Rose’s dedication to dance was. This field is not easy, and yet she always found ways to do more. She ran a company as well as the school and made multiple productions with hand-painted sets and costumes that she hand-sewed. She created epic worlds and romantic storylines for us to inhabit… She gave me dance and so much more: tradition, discipline, professionalism, obsession, creativity, romanticism, grace, power, and self-determination. She set the course of my career and my life. This piece is in honor of her.” 

Nail Biter brings together a team including Beth Gill (Choreographer), with her long-time collaborators Jon Moniaci (Composer), Baille Younkman (Costume Designer), Thomas Dunn (Lighting and Scenic Designer), Angela F. Kiessel (Production Stage Manager), and Michelle Fletcher (Manager, Beth Gill Works). Performers include Maggie Cloud, Jennifer Lafferty, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Marilyn Maywald Yahel, and Beth Gill. 

Gill’s new work kicks off a celebratory opening weekend for a milestone season that reflects the Fisher Center’s role as one of the country’s foremost cross-disciplinary producing institutions, and culminates with the groundbreaking for a new performing arts studio building designed by Maya Lin. On April 1, from 5:30–7:30pm, the Fisher Center will toast two decades of innovation with a 20th Anniversary Launch Party. On April 1 at 7pm and April 2 at 3pm, The Orchestra Now will perform Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, conducted by Maestro Leon Botstein with choral director James Bagwell. Missa solemnis is one of only three sacred works written by Beethoven, and a favorite piece of the late Richard B. Fisher, an influential champion of the arts and the Fisher Center’s namesake. 

Schedule and Ticketing Information

Performances take place in the Fisher Center at Bard’s LUMA Theater, March 31 at 7:30pm, and April 1 & 2 at 5pm. Running time is approximately 50 minutes with no intermission. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased here.

About Beth Gill

Beth Gill is an award-winning choreographer based in New York City since 2005. Her multidisciplinary works are captivating, cinematic timescapes, the product of long-term collaborations with celebrated artists. Gill is the proud recipient of the Herb Alpert, Doris Duke Impact, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and two “Bessie” awards. She has produced eight commissioned evening-length works met with critical acclaim. She has toured nationally and internationally and has been honored with (among others): Guggenheim Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project grant, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Artist in Residence.
Gill’s dances are serious, slow-moving, and chiseled, meditative experiences poised between performance and visual art. They feel like pressurized objects sustaining tension and seeking release. Paradoxically her work is both intimate and alienated, sensual and ascetic. She dreams and visualizes her dances, transforming her unconscious into iconographic choreography. The imagery and symbolism resonate, inviting audiences into associative thought. In this way, her work is in dialogue with contemporary psychology and folk traditions.

Credits

Nail Biter is co-commissioned by the Fisher Center at Bard, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Walker Art Center. The development of Nail Biter was supported by funding from the King’s Fountain and by CPR – Center for Performance Research’s Artist-in-Residence Program, which is made possible, in part, through Dance/NYC’s Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Beth Gill is fiscally sponsored by the Foundation for Independent Artists, Inc., a non-profit organization administered by Pentacle (DanceWorks, Inc). Pentacle is a non-profit management support organization for the performing arts.

The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, and Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. The 23-24 season of Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.

Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick spoke with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino about the manifold ways Hollywood employs artificial intelligence including de-aging star characters, creating synthetic voices, generating digital faces and imagery of crowds, and even using deepfake technology in documentaries to protect vulnerable onscreen subjects. AI’s entree into filmmaking spurs anxiety that it could supplant human creative labor like screenwriting, designing, and directing. “New tools and new technologies have always sustained a productive tension or creative tension with the status quo of the industry. But I’d say that the idea of complete replacement is not something I foresee happening, at least in the near future. Some of the most promising or interesting areas is how these tools have become part of the toolbox,” Glick said. He also discusses what is at stake in Hollywood’s business side using AI analytics to maximize profits by informing filmmakers and studios “what films might make the most money depending on what happens in the plot and depending on who is cast. It leads to this attempt to slow down and challenge risk, which I think is a problem,” notes Glick.

Photographer Emily Allen ’22 talks with F-Stop magazine about her inspirations, creative practice, and current project “Sit Tibi Terra Levis,” which originated as her Senior Project and was recently featured in the magazine. “With this portfolio, I hope to draw attention to photography as a process and an object and its humanity–its connection to death, to life, and to memory,” said Allen, who studied photography, classics, and medieval studies at Bard. “I used the techniques we use to attempt to preserve ourselves throughout history to preserve my images.” The photographic prints in her book were created using processes humans have historically used on our bodies after death. Some were brushed with oil according to ancient Greek rites, others soaked in honey as the Babylonians did, some were processed in simulation of modern American chemical embalming, and others incompletely fixed so they continue to degrade and decompose over time. In this project, Allen was fascinated by the kinds of similarities and subversions these processes had when used on photographs versus on our bodies.
 
When looking at images, Allen doesn’t have one strict definition of what a photograph can be, rather she looks for resonance. “Literally the word photograph means ‘light drawing’–to me anything made using light sensitive materials and light is a photograph whether it is representative of our physical world or not . . . A good photograph convinces me of the reality in the world within the boundaries of the paper–I have to believe in it. I love when photographs feel like bubbles, each containing their own little universe,” she says.

Nowhere Apparent, a new film by Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Jack Ferver, is “a poetic meditation on queer isolation and feelings of abandonment by a generation of potential parental figures as a result of a failed response to the AIDS epidemic,” writes Matt Moen for Paper magazine. “I am told by the majority that being queer is unnatural, that it doesn’t exist in the ‘natural world,’” Ferver said, when asked what queer isolation means to them. “I am also told by the majority that I chose it. Using this logic means: I have chosen not to exist.” Nowhere Apparent interrogates “what isn’t said, what is left out, what is abandoned,” bringing those things to light—a lens Ferver also uses in their teaching at Bard. “I teach at Bard College and start every semester talking about AIDS and the culture wars. That gap we will never heal,” they say. What can be done to address such silences and erasures? “Make work about it,” Ferver says to their students.