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Bard College announces the appointment of Hannah Barrett as director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Prior to this appointment, Barrett, an award-winning artist and educator who has taught, lectured, and exhibited widely, was the international program coordinator at Bard College Berlin. Barrett succeeds Arthur Gibbons, who served as director of the Bard MFA program since 1990. Gibbons will continue teaching at Bard as professor of sculpture in the College’s Division of the Arts.

“I am delighted that Hannah Barrett has accepted the appointment as the new Director of the MFA program, one of Bard’s most distinguished graduate programs and one of the finest MFA programs in the country,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “She has been a terrific colleague and is uniquely suited to take this vital task on. She follows the remarkable, long, and distinguished tenure of Arthur Gibbons, who led the MFA to achieve its international renown. I thank Hannah and the faculty in the MFA program for their cooperation in finding a path to continue the excellent and innovative work of the MFA in this challenging time.”

Hannah Barrett is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based artist. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven her painting for over a decade, which has led to the current exploration of dandy monsters in domestic space. Recent exhibitions include a 2020 retrospective at Childs Gallery, Boston, a two-person invitational in 2019 at La MaMa Galleria, and a solo at Yours Mine and Ours Gallery in 2018. Selected group shows include Spring Break 2020, Platform Project Space, Dumbo NY, Kate Werble and Calicoon galleries in NYC, Mother Gallery, Beacon NY, and September Gallery in Hudson NY. Museum Shows include the Decordova Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Time Out New York, and Modern Painters. Barrett is on the curatorial staff of Soloway Gallery in Williamsburg. Barrett is also the illustrator of a vegan and lesbian themed children’s book “Nuts in Nutland”. Prior to coming to Bard, Barrett taught painting and drawing for 18 years and was on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Pratt Institute Brooklyn. Barrett holds a BA in studio art and German literature from Wellesley College and an MFA in painting from Boston University.

Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student—serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist students engage with accomplished faculty members, while developing their individual studio practices. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography, and music/sound.

New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley calls the Bard Theater and Performance Program production of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest “deeply moving” and “fervently inventive.”

“I used to think that most art is kind of stingy. There is a demand in much of art to read the text panel to understand what you are experiencing. Generosity and openness are important to me, so that the viewer is not intimidated, threatened, or belittled. There’s no coming to school and feeling like you didn’t get the homework done. You can enjoy it, even if you don’t know everything about it.”
 

A Zoom production by Bard College students gets a second life as a copresentation with Bard's Fisher Center and the off-Broadway Theatre for a New Audience, with sets, lights, props, and live editing.

The New York Times also highlighted Mad Forest at Theatre for a New Audience as one of its top "theater performances to stream this week."

New York–based collective FOREIGN OBJECTS has been selected as Bard Graduate Center’s (BGC) inaugural Digital Artist in Residence. Inspired by the BGC Gallery exhibition Eileen Gray, the group is working to create an interactive project that explores how smart cooking technologies have reimagined the role of the kitchen in the contemporary home.

In this two-hour conversation with Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian, art critic and poet John Yau ’72 talks about his life, how he got into art writing, stories from his childhood, and other influences on his work.

With theaters and nightclubs closed, magicians have pivoted to remote performance. New York Times media critic Alexis Soloski takes in Bard alumnus Noah Levine’s “nifty sleights of hand” courtesy of Zoom.

Christine Sun Kim and Xaviera Simmons are among the 35 artists and designers who are making works to display across digital screens throughout New York City, Boston, and Chicago in recognition of the continued service of essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Organized by Times Square Arts, For Freedoms, and Poster House, the public art campaign aims to “encourage a sense of community and pride among New Yorkers, and give artists the opportunity to express their gratitude and optimism through the power of art.”

Pianist and composer Ran Blake ’60 is the 2020 recipient of the Boston Jazz Hero award from the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA). Blake is one of 27 jazz heroes in 23 cities across the country chosen as “activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz.”

Bard alumnae Carolyn Lazard ’10 and Tschabalala Self ’12 are among the 20 artists selected by the Tiffany Foundation to receive the unrestricted $20,000 grants. Established in 1980, the foundation’s grants program has awarded more than $9.5 million to 500 contemporary artists working throughout the United States.

The Bard College Theater and Performance Program has been invited by Theatre for a New Audience, in Brooklyn, to give three more live online performances of Mad Forest, as a coproduction with the Fisher Center. Bard students will be performing (virtually) off-Broadway. Performances on May 22, 24, and 27.

Mad Forest premiered on April 10 as the Theater and Performance Program's first-ever virtual production. Originally slated for the Fisher Center stage, the creative team transformed the work for live webcast. Ashley Tata directs this reimagining of Caryl Churchill's sly, funny, and surreal account of the Romanian Revolution, performed live by actors in isolation from 14 remote locations using a specially modified version of Zoom.

The live webcast of Mad Forest was a project of UPSTREAMING: the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage. Learn more about the production and watch UPSTREAMING performances on the Fisher Center's website.

“I am always pushing and pulling against aspects of the political inside my practice, with politics as clearly foundational,” says Simmons. “I think it’s really important to consider new ways of seeing and new ways of living, new ways that can become politically tangible should we act as a group with compassion and creativity.”

Bard Artist in Residence Jack Ferver and ballet/contemporary dancer Reid Bartelme, the odd couple of the dance world, provide essential stay-at-home relief with their weekly podcast, writes New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas. “Listening to ‘What’s Going On With Dance and Stuff,’ their chatty and illuminating podcast, feels like being with good friends—and that’s a rare sort of lifeline in these days of social isolation.”

Bard alumna Diya Vij ’08, associate curator of public programs for New York City’s High Line, talks to Hyperallergic about her interest in nurturing “the health and well-being of individuals, the city, and the planet through art-centered and civically oriented happenings, on and off the High Line.”