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Listening to music, often a solitary activity, takes on new dimensions among a group of friends who have been meeting for 15 years to encounter songs together. Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91 writes about the Golden Ears and their weekly meetups in Tivoli, New York, and the particular pleasure of gathering to share music. “By now we’re used to listening to music for one another, in a way that privileges adventure over taste,” he writes. “Having a listening group as a sounding board of directors turns the sprawl of music history into a rolling conversation with friends, a renewable resource, an endless delight.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies; New Red Order, an Indigenous art collective whose core contributors are Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 (Ojibway) and Zack Khalil ’14 (Ojibway); and Trisha Baga MFA ’10 have received 2024 United States Artist (USA) Fellowships in the disciplines of Music and Visual Arts. Hennies, New Red Order, and Baga are among this year’s 50 awardees, encompassing artists and collectives spanning multiple generations, who are dedicated to their communities and committed to building upon shared legacies through artistic innovation, cultural stewardship, and multifaceted storytelling. USA Fellowships provide $50,000 in unrestricted money to artists across 10 creative disciplines. In addition to the award, current fellows have access to financial planning, career consulting, legal advice, and other professional services as requested. 

Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought.

New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) that collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. 

Trisha Baga is a Filipino-American artist working in stereoscopic 3D video installation, paint, clay, consumer grade electronics, and community performance. Compelled by an interest in what they call “the stuff that makes things stick together,” Baga recombines objects and images into scenarios that address issues related to the environment, technology, and identity.

Representing a broad diversity of regions and mediums, the USA Fellows are awarded through a peer-led selection process in the disciplines of Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing.

At the 66th annual GRAMMY Awards ceremony, the Recording Academy honored the 2024 GRAMMY winners. Among them, Bard Composer in Residence Jessie Montgomery won Best Contemporary Classical Composition, her first GRAMMY award, for her composition “Rounds.” Bard Conservatory of Music’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna Julia Bullock MM ’11 also won her first GRAMMY award, winning Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her album Walking in the Dark. Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe is featured on the album Blanchard: Champion, which won for Best Opera Recording. 

Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” is a composition for piano and string orchestra inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets, fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales), and the interdependency of all beings. 

Julia Bullock’s Walking in the Dark was recorded with her husband, conductor and pianist Christian Reif, and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. The album combines orchestral works by American composers John Adams and Samuel Barber with a traditional spiritual and songs by jazz legend Billy Taylor and singer-songwriters Oscar Brown, Jr., Connie Converse, and Sandy Denny.

The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Terence Blanchard’s Champion, an opera about young boxer Emile Griffith who rises from obscurity to become a world champion, was conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and featured a cast including mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe as Kathy Hagen. 
The GRAMMYs are voted on by more than 11,000 music professionals—performers, songwriters, producers, and others with credits on recordings—who are members of the Recording Academy. 

Further Reading:
Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” Wins 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition

Julia Bullock Wins First Grammy Award with Walking in the Dark, Her Solo Album Debut

The Metropolitan Opera wins 2024 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for Terence Blanchard’s Champion

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program, has won a 2024 Creative Capital Award for $50,000 to support his documentary film Eternal Rhythm. Creative Capital Awards provide artists with unrestricted project funding up to $50,000, bespoke professional development services, and community-building opportunities.

Eternal Rhythm explores the personal and artistic relationship between Don and Moki Cherry after the couple moved from New York to Moki’s native Sweden in 1970. There they began a decade-long collaboration that merged multicultural expressions of art, music, and radical living into a synergetic model for communal creativity. 

Creative Capital’s “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards in Visual Arts and Film/Moving Image total $2.5 million in grants to artists for the creation of 50 groundbreaking new works. Chosen from 5,600 applications, this year’s awards will fund 28 innovative visual arts projects and 22 film/moving image projects, representing 54 artists in total.

Artistic Director of Bard Conservatory of Music’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program and acclaimed mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe spoke to The Daily Catch ahead of her concert performance, Stephanie Blythe Sings Brahms, with The Orchestra Now at the Fisher Center on February 3–4. Renowned for the emotional depth of her performances, Blythe connects the lines of Brahm’s “Alto Rhapsody,” which uses Goethe’s poetry for lyrics, to “a feeling of a place where you can breathe. I understand the notion of breaking through and wanting to breathe. When you understand the universality of this music, you understand its essential nature,” says Blythe, who believes opera, when presented for what it actually is, can appeal to a broader, more popular audience. “Being able to illuminate and elevate opera in a new way is really important,” she said. “I find that far too often people who present opera feel like they need to repackage it. Opera doesn’t need to be excused. You don’t need to make it something else for people to appreciate it.”

“Every year since 2009, a handful of artists, engineers, musicians, and hobbyists from around the world arrive in Atlanta, Georgia, with one-of-a-kind instruments in tow,” writes Andrew Paul for Popular Science. Among them is Pippa Kelmenson ’17, inventor of the Bone Conductive Instrument, or BCI. Popular Science named the BCI, which “emits sound signals to vibrate individual body resonant frequencies to aid hard-of-hearing users,” as one of 2023’s most innovative musical inventions. According to Kelmenson, the BCI “calls for an inclusive and innovative way for users across the hearing spectrum to interact with sound.”

Bard College faculty members and alums will be among the 71 artists and collectives selected to participate in this year’s Whitney Biennial, the 81st installment of the landmark exhibition series. Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing opens on March 20. Works by Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies; Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies, Distinguished Artist in Residence in Studio Arts, and Bard MFA Faculty in Music/Sound Kite MFA ’18; and Bard MFA Faculty in Sculpture Lotus Laurie Kang MFA ’15 will be featured alongside those by alums Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20, Carolyn Lazard ’10, and Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12. The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College graduate Min Sun Jeon CCS ’22 helped to organize the exhibition.

The 2024 Whitney Biennial is organized by Chrissie Iles (Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator) and Meg Onli (Curator at Large), with Min Sun Jeon CCS ’22 and Beatriz Cifuentes. The performance program is organized by Iles and Onli, with guest curator Taja Cheek. The film program is organized by Iles and Onli, with guest curators Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker.

“After finalizing the list of artists last summer, we have built a thematic Biennial that focuses on the ideas of ‘the real,’” write the curators. “Society is at an inflection point around this notion, in part brought on by artificial intelligence challenging what we consider to be real, as well as critical discussions about identity. Many of the artists presenting works—including via robust performance and film programs—explore the fluidity of identity and form, historical and current land stewardship, and concepts of embodiment, among other urgent throughlines, and we are inspired by the work they are creating and sharing.”

Two Bard faculty members and two alumni/ae are recipients of MacDowell Fellowships. Carl Elsaesser, visiting artist in residence at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts, has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship to MacDowell's Residency Program in the Film/Video Artists category for fall/winter 2023. Elsaesser’s residency will support the completion of his project, Coastlines, a feature-length film that intertwines the ethnographic intricacies of Maine’s coastline with the intimate video diaries of a Portland family, inviting a reevaluation of evolving identities and artistic representation within the private and public spheres. Drawing from queer phenomenology and traditional historical narratives, the film challenges perceptions and redefines the boundaries of storytelling, revealing Maine’s dual role as a backdrop and active participant in shaping inhabitants’ sense of self.

Daaimah Mubashshir, playwright in residence at Bard, received a MacDowell Fellowship in MacDowell’s Artist Residency Program for fall 2023 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in support of their work on a new play about their great grandmother, Begonia Williams Tate, who defied all odds in Mobile, Alabama, in the late 19th century. Chaya Czernowin, a composer and Bard MFA ’88 in Music, and Bard alumna Hannah Beerman ’15, are also 2023 MacDowell Fellowship recipients. The MacDowell Fellowships are distributed by seven discipline-specific admissions panels who make their selections based on applicants’ vision and talent as reflected by work samples and a project description. Once at MacDowell, selected Fellows are provided a private studio, three meals a day, and accommodations for a period of up to six weeks. 

Student Artwork Exhibited on Billboard in Hudson and in Temporary Installation in Richard Abraham’s Memorial Park in Red Hook

Bard Community Arts Collective and the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard are pleased to announce the installation of several student artworks in Dutchess County and Columbia County.

How Long Will We Be Driving by Bard student James Wise ’26 is on view at a billboard located at 3391 US-9, Hudson, NY 12534 from December 20, 2023 to January 17, 2024. This work is presented through a partnership with Shandaken Projects’ public art initiative 14x48, which has exhibited new work by contemporary artists on billboards across New York State since 2021.

Additionally, works from students in the Studio Arts Program at Bard have been temporarily installed in Richard Abraham’s Memorial Park in Red Hook, as part of a pilot partnership with the Village of Red Hook’s Public Spaces Initiative Committee. 

These projects originated in an Extended Media course taught by artist Julia Weist in the Studio Arts Program at Bard. This class explores the potential of presenting art in an expanded field of engagement, including in the public realm, asking students to consider how the interpretation of their work changes when it is experienced in a mass media or civic context. In addition to exercises and instruction in the classroom, students visited the offices of Shandaken Projects and met with the Village of Red Hook’s Chair for the Public Spaces Initiative Committee, Ash Bradley-Rickard, and the Red Hook Village Board to learn more about opportunities for artists in the public sector. Each student created a two-dimensional billboard proposal, reviewed by Shandaken Projects, and a three-dimensional public art proposal, which was presented at a Village Board meeting on November 13, 2023. One billboard proposal was selected by Shandaken Projects for production, and every student proposal was approved for temporary installation in Richard Abraham’s Memorial Park.

The selected billboard, created by James Wise, was created by layering more than 50 AI-generated images. At first glance from the vantage of a moving car, the image appears to be a standard insurance ad. A closer look reveals that the uncanny advertisement includes only one legible question—“How long will we be driving?”—along with other text-like elements that are distorted and nonsensical. The billboard’s question highlights several challenging issues related to emerging technologies and the future of our planet, such as the loss of human autonomy that may come from an increased reliance on AI (including through self-driving cars) and the impact of driving carbon-polluting cars on a warming climate. The figure at the center of the ad, the avatar created by artificial intelligence to represent an insurance salesman, represents another troubling facet of algorithmic technology: these tools often closely reflect those who create them. The AI field is predominately white and male, and Wise’s artwork asks us to consider if those individuals who are in the driver’s seat of our tech future broadly represent the diverse communities that will use artificial intelligence. Wise said of the project, “Making a piece for the public takes what I’ve been doing within a class environment to a larger, more diverse audience, so I approached it as such. I sought to create something with enough depth to conjure a diverse array of reactions, regardless of what I intended, and I hope to see that reflected in public feedback to the project."

The student artwork installed in Richard Abraham’s Memorial Park spanned a variety of materials, from sculptures made from wood and steel to large format photographic prints. Each was developed with the park’s landscape and context in mind. Several of the pieces are interactive and all were made to be installed without impacting the local habitat native to the site. Although the temporary installation was not open to the public, this project served as a pilot program allowing the Village and Bard Community Arts Collective to imagine future collaborative opportunities. A student in the course, Elena Schneider ’27, said of the project, “Being able to make something to be displayed in the landscape where we live pushed me to create something I really care about and am proud of. I put a lot of work into my sculpture and it was very rewarding to see it come to life in such a beautiful place. I hope to have more opportunities to present student work in public places.”

Concerto for Piano (Homage to Beethoven) by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts and composition faculty of the Conservatory of Music at Bard, and Dark with Excessive Bright by Missy Mazzoli, Bard composer in residence, were both included in NPR's roundup of top ten classical albums of 2023. NPR music producer and classical music reviewer Tom Huizenga writes, "Now 85, Tower could rest on her achievements, but she's still fulfilling commissions with her singular, sturdy music," noting the many leading contemporary composers revere her, including Missy Mazzoli, whose album was also selected in this year's top ten. "[T]he album is tonal — in a Bartók or Joan Tower kind of way — with notes stacked to produce fresh, often unusual sounds," writes Huizenga, who says this album proves Mazzoli "can create shimmering instrumental music with large forces." 

Trudy Poux ’26, a current theater and performance major at Bard, plays the lead character in the TV pilot Do Nothings, which tells the story of Tamarin, a teenage singer-songwriter plagued by paralyzing stage fright. Produced in the Hudson Valley by their director, educator, and filmmaker mother Amy Poux, the show was inspired by Trudy’s real-life experiences. Trudy, who cowrote the script with their mother, says that LGBTQ+ screen narratives tend to focus on tragedy or the build up to coming out, “but thereʼs not a lot of media that shows what itʼs like to live day-to-day as a nonbinary person whoʼs already come out . . . The story is about everything else that happens in high school as well and itʼs really inspiring to see a story like that.”

Tschabalala Self ’12, visiting artist in residence at Bard, talks about being asked to do a portrait of Nicki Minaj for Vogue’s December digital cover—using photographer Norman Jean Roy’s cover shoot as a starting point. “I do not usually delve too deeply into realism,” she says, “so by working on this project, I realized something I already suspected, which is that a portrait is more about capturing someone’s aura, as opposed to their appearance.”

Alumnus Sam Asa Pratt ’14 performed at the 2023 Dance Magazine Awards Ceremony, where Pratt received a Harkness Promise Award alongside Amadi Washington. Their dance company, Baye & Asa, was praised by Harkness Foundation for Dance Executive Director Joan Finkelstein for its ability to “create political metaphors, interrogate systemic inequities, and contemporize ancient allegories.” Accepting the award, Pratt said, “In a contemporary world, there’s a lot of pressure to put yourself into a camp, to distill, succinctly and uncompromisingly, what you believe and where you stand. I think dance is uniquely positioned as an art form that can liberate thought into indeterminacy and to widen toward multiplicity instead of narrowing towards one singular thesis. Art remains one of the most advanced pieces of technology we have as a species.”

A posthumous album by Richard Teitelbaum, a member of Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) and former Bard College professor of music, has been included in Bandcamp’s 2023 list of Best Contemporary Classical Music. Symphony No. 107 — The Bard, a previously unreleased live recording, was performed in Olin Hall at Bard College in 2012, and was edited, mixed, and mastered by Matt Sargent, assistant professor of music at Bard, in October 2022. “The music builds from near-silence to unleash a spirited collage of texture and gesture, constantly mutating and blending, with live instrumental bits—on piano, shofar, or harmonica—seeping in, sometimes taking over, or blending within electronic soundscapes,” writes Peter Margasak for Bandcamp. Teitelbaum taught electronic and experimental music at Bard for over 30 years, and cochaired the music department of the Master of Fine Arts program. He was one of the founding members of the pioneering electronic music group MEV, created in Italy in 1966, together with Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski.

New York Times cochief art critic Holland Cotter names CCS Bard’s exhibition Indian Theater and An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers among his picks for the best art of 2023. “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art and Self-Determination Since 1969 at the Hessel Museum, Bard College, was, hands down, the most stimulatingly inventive contemporary group show I saw this year,” writes Cotter about the large-scale exhibition curated by CCS Bard Fellow in Indigenous Curatorial Studies Candice Hopkins. Cotter calls the work of photographer An-My Lê, who is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard, “lucid,” and notes that the main subject of Lê’s Museum of Modern Art survey, on view through March 9, is “war as a perpetual reality, nascent or active.”

See the Best Art of 2023 from the New York Times

Read the New York Times Review of Indian Theater

Read the New York Times Review of An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers
 

Isabel Ahlam Ahmed ’25, a Bard College student majoring jointly in film production and human rights, has received a scholarship from Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) for the spring 2024 semester. Ahmed is one of 66 undergraduates from around the country selected by 88 volunteer reviewers who scored 1,466 applications over three review phases, and with FEA's American University in Cairo (AUC) Access Partner Scholarship, she will attend AUC via the longstanding tuition exchange between AUC and Bard.

“As a first generation college student, I feel extremely proud and honored to be one of 66 people receiving an FEA scholarship,” Ahmed said. “For many students like me, the financial burden is a huge reason we are afraid to even consider going abroad, so receiving the FEA allows me to fully experience my excitement and plans. In addition to this, it also provides an FEA community of scholars and alumni to connect with, which has already made this process feel better supported, and I know it will feel even better to have access to this community while studying in Cairo.”

The Fund for Education Abroad supports US students with financial need who are traditionally underrepresented in study abroad. FEA aims to make life-changing, international experiences accessible to all by supporting students of color, community college, and first-generation college students. Of the 66 scholars awarded this application cycle, 90% identify as students of color and 39% identify as LGBTQ+. Males make up 32% of Spring 2024 Scholars; female, 64%; and non-binary, 4.5%. Additionally, 88% are first-generation college students, 30% are current or former community college students, and 67% have never left the US.

Since its inception in 2010, FEA has awarded more than $3.4 million in scholarships to more than 1,090 scholars, and supports students before, during, and after their study abroad experience with scholarships and programming.

“We are grateful to all of FEA’s supporters, donors, and partners who make study abroad scholarships possible,” said Angela Schaffer, the FEA executive director. “FEA is excited to be a part of the Spring 2024 Scholars’ international education journeys.”

For W magazine, Camille Okhio interviewed Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson about representing the United States in a solo exhibition at the upcoming Venice Biennale in 2024, his global journey as an Indigenous artist of Cherokee and Choctaw lineage, and his work. “Our motto in the Choctaw is self-determination,” says Gibson. “After college, my chief said to me, ‘You would be more effective out in the world; you don’t need to come back here. You are fulfilling what I have said our tribe will do one day if you go out and you are successful.’ I hope, through my practice, that I’m letting Indigenous people know they can move around the world freely.” Asked what has been left out of his narrative, Gibson answers: “The work is not beautiful for beauty’s sake. The beauty is a strategy.” 

Professor Emeritus of Photography Larry Fink—who joined the faculty in 1988 and taught at Bard for three decades—has died at the age of 82. Professor Fink is known for his frank photographs of New York high society and Hollywood stars, as well as his intimate images of rural America. “He treated the classroom like it was the Village Vanguard,” Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91 tells the New York Times. “It was completely improvisatory. A critique would involve mouth trumpet sounds, his own poetic raps and scat singing; maybe at some point he’d pull out his harmonica. On the one hand, it kneecapped the whole idea of art education, and on the other, if you were listening, it was completely profound.” 

“He adjusted the emotional temperature in any room,” writes Lucy Sante, who taught writing and photography at Bard for nearly 25 years, for Vanity Fair. “He was countrified, with his suspenders, his work boots, his wild grin and honking laugh, his utter disregard for decorum, but he had the chutzpah of a city boy and was so sophisticated he had no need to prove it. It further enhances any of his pictures to imagine Larry in the act of taking them.”

Mr. Fink was the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships, in 1976 and 1979. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many other institutions in the United States and abroad. He worked on assignment for numerous publications, including Manhattan, Inc., Vanity Fair, and the New York Times, and was the author of 12 books.

Further Reading

Larry Fink, Whose Photographs Were ‘Political, Not Polemical,’ Dies at 82 (New York Times)

A Fond Farewell to Photographer Larry Fink, 82 (Professor Sante for Vanity Fair)

In Memoriam: Bard Remembers the Life of Professor Larry Fink (from President Botstein)
 

Samantha Simon ’26, a Bard student majoring in art history and visual culture, has been named as one of the members of the National Humanities Center’s 2023–24 Leadership Council. As a member of the council, which was established to help prepare a select group of students with humanities-based leadership skills, Simon will join 31 other students from around the US in a unique series of interactive experiences with humanities scholars and leaders.

Nominated by faculty from colleges and universities across the country, the student council members will receive professional development and mentoring from leading scholars and other humanities professionals as well as research support, opportunities for networking, and access to National Humanities Center programming and expertise. In round tables and discussion sessions, they will explore the essential importance of humanistic perspectives in addressing the concerns of contemporary society, and may focus on specific projects and engagement with the communities at their institutions.

“The exceptional students selected for the council this year are pursuing an assortment of majors, from art history to biochemistry to Middle Eastern studies, but they all share a deep interest and passion for the humanities,” said Jacqueline Kellish, the National Humanities Center’s director of public engagement. “We are looking forward to working with these brilliant young people in the coming months and exploring with them the ways that their humanities knowledge and training can help them forge successful careers and make a difference in their communities and beyond.”

The National Humanities Center is a private, nonprofit organization, and the only independent institute dedicated exclusively to advanced study in all areas of the humanities. Through public engagement intimately linked to its scholarly and educational programs, the center promotes understanding of the humanities and advocates for their foundational role in a democratic society.

Since its original publication in Mexico in 1955, Juan Rulfo’s sparse and haunting novel Pedro Páramo “has cast an uncanny spell on writers,” famously inspiring Gabriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude—yet for English-speaking readers it “remains something of a best-kept secret, a book that people either cherish or have never heard of,” writes Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. “The book shows its readers how to read all over again, the same way The Waste Land or Ulysses does, by bending the rules of literature so skillfully, so freely, that the rules must change thereafter.” Rulfo once suggested that Pedro Páramo, the only book Rulfo ever published, was meant to be read three times before understood. “Maybe the novel was also meant to be translated three times before it seeped more broadly and indelibly into the Anglophone consciousness. Maybe its time has finally come,” writes Luiselli, who deems the Mexican novel’s newly published and third English language translation by Douglas J. Weatherford “by far, the best of Rulfo in English.”