All Bard News by Date
February 2023
02-08-2023
Photographer Lisa Kereszi ’95 has won a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation biennial competition award for $20,000 granted to dedicated artists whose work shows promise of further development. Kereszi is among 20 artists selected by the foundation for the 2022 biennial competition. The monetary grant is intended to give artists the opportunity to produce new work and to push the boundaries of their creativity. By doing so, it seeks to make a difference in the lives of the recipients at a moment in their career when they need it most. The awards, accompanied with the prestigious recognition, enhance the visibility and stature of artists in the art world.
Artists who work in painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, video, and craft media are eligible for the award. Approximately 50 designated nominators from throughout the United States recommend candidates to be considered. Nominees are then reviewed and vetted by a jury of seven individuals. Nominators and jury members are artists, critics, museum professionals, and members of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
Lisa Kereszi was born in 1973 in Pennsylvania and grew up outside Philadelphia with a father who ran the family auto junkyard and a mother who owned an antique shop. In 1995, she graduated from Bard College with a BA in photography and literature/creative writing. In 2000, Kereszi went on to earn an M.F.A. in photography from the Yale School of Art, where she has taught since 2004 and is now Senior Critic in Photography and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art. She recently was a MacDowell Fellow and a Gardner Fellowship Finalist. Her work is in many private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Study Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Her publications include: The More I Learn About Women (2014), Joe’s Junk Yard (2012), Fun and Games (2009), Fantasies (2008), Governor’s Island (2004), and Lisa Kereszi: Photographs (2003). She has two books coming out later this year, including one published by Minor Matters, the photobook imprint run by fellow Bardian, Michelle Dunn Marsh ‘95.
About the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
Established in 1918 by L.C. Tiffany, son of Charles Lewis Tiffany who founded the New York jewelry store Tiffany & Co., the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation is the earliest artist-endowed foundation in the United States, and is the first created by an artist during his or her lifetime. In 1946 the Foundation changed its program from the operation of an artists’ retreat to the bestowing of grants to artists. These grants were awarded annually through a competition in painting, sculpture, graphics, and textile design; a range of categories reflecting Tiffany’s manifold talents and interests. Each year applicants sent examples of their work to the National Academy of Design, where it was exhibited and judged. The Foundation also supported a plan by which artworks were purchased and donated to institutions, an apprenticeship program enabling young craftspeople to work with masters, and a program of direct grants to young painters and sculptors. In 1980, the grant programs were consolidated into a biennial competition. Today, the competition grants $20,000 awards to artists selected for their talent and individual artistic strength. Since 1980, the competition has granted $9,534,000 in awards to 491 artists nationwide.
Artists who work in painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, video, and craft media are eligible for the award. Approximately 50 designated nominators from throughout the United States recommend candidates to be considered. Nominees are then reviewed and vetted by a jury of seven individuals. Nominators and jury members are artists, critics, museum professionals, and members of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
Lisa Kereszi was born in 1973 in Pennsylvania and grew up outside Philadelphia with a father who ran the family auto junkyard and a mother who owned an antique shop. In 1995, she graduated from Bard College with a BA in photography and literature/creative writing. In 2000, Kereszi went on to earn an M.F.A. in photography from the Yale School of Art, where she has taught since 2004 and is now Senior Critic in Photography and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art. She recently was a MacDowell Fellow and a Gardner Fellowship Finalist. Her work is in many private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Study Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Her publications include: The More I Learn About Women (2014), Joe’s Junk Yard (2012), Fun and Games (2009), Fantasies (2008), Governor’s Island (2004), and Lisa Kereszi: Photographs (2003). She has two books coming out later this year, including one published by Minor Matters, the photobook imprint run by fellow Bardian, Michelle Dunn Marsh ‘95.
About the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
Established in 1918 by L.C. Tiffany, son of Charles Lewis Tiffany who founded the New York jewelry store Tiffany & Co., the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation is the earliest artist-endowed foundation in the United States, and is the first created by an artist during his or her lifetime. In 1946 the Foundation changed its program from the operation of an artists’ retreat to the bestowing of grants to artists. These grants were awarded annually through a competition in painting, sculpture, graphics, and textile design; a range of categories reflecting Tiffany’s manifold talents and interests. Each year applicants sent examples of their work to the National Academy of Design, where it was exhibited and judged. The Foundation also supported a plan by which artworks were purchased and donated to institutions, an apprenticeship program enabling young craftspeople to work with masters, and a program of direct grants to young painters and sculptors. In 1980, the grant programs were consolidated into a biennial competition. Today, the competition grants $20,000 awards to artists selected for their talent and individual artistic strength. Since 1980, the competition has granted $9,534,000 in awards to 491 artists nationwide.
02-07-2023
Tanya Marcuse SR ’81, artist in residence in the Photography Program at Bard, has received a MacDowell Artist Residency Fellowship for spring/summer 2023. Marcuse’s fellowship will support work toward the completion of her project, Book of Miracles, to be published by Nazraeli Press. This project, in direct conversation with the 16th-century Book of Miracles, a compendium of biblical, astronomical, and apocalyptic miracles, aims to visualize phenomena that seems to defy the laws of nature, using fire, paint, and the staging of fantastical scenes. Photography often walks a thin line between fact and fiction, or dwells in a realm where the two cannot be distinguished; the proposed work takes part in this pendulum swing between belief and doubt.
MacDowell Fellows’ applications are reviewed by a panel of esteemed professionals in each discipline. These panelists make their selections based on applicants’ vision and talent as reflected by a work sample and 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. Marcuse was previously a MacDowell Fellow in 2018.
MacDowell Fellows’ applications are reviewed by a panel of esteemed professionals in each discipline. These panelists make their selections based on applicants’ vision and talent as reflected by a work sample and 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. Marcuse was previously a MacDowell Fellow in 2018.
02-07-2023
Unlike other performance art retrospectives, Algorithmic Theater: An Annie Dorsen Retrospective does not distill so much as it re-presents many of Annie Dorsen’s iconic performances. Writing for Artforum, Miriam Felton-Dansky, associate professor of theater and performance, considers Dorsen’s algorithmically infused works in our current context. “Dorsen began collaborating with computers well before algorithm was a commonplace term in digital and social media discourse,” she writes. Appropriately, many of the pieces in the retrospective use what would now be considered “outdated” software and code. The artist uses these artifacts, Felton-Dansky argues, “not for the sake of nostalgia or kitsch but because these particular systems—conserved over years by Dorsen—are the trained performers that ‘know’ how to execute the show.” In A Piece of Work, the text of Hamlet is given over to code, producing five abbreviated versions of the play. The performance of A Piece of Work briefly involves a human actor, who enters in act three, “vocalizing computer-generated text fed to him through an in-ear device” that varies from performance to performance. Like much of Dorsen’s work, Felton-Dansky writes, A Piece of Work “offers a means of contemplating the myriad ways humans can be absent or abstracted from one another, distilled into statistics or collapsed into scrolling social media posts.”
January 2023
01-31-2023
Susan L. Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, has been awarded a 2023 Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency. The program, which she will attend at the Dora Maar House in Provence, France, during September 2023, has been internationally recognized as one of the most respected residencies for those working in the arts and humanities. Aberth, working alongside her longtime collaborator Tere Arcq—the leading scholar on Spanish-born Mexican artist Remedios Varo—will complete Cauldrons & Curanderas: The Magical Relationship of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, an illustrated historical account of the magical and artistic works produced by the two artists working together. “I am particularly grateful for this residency at the Dora Maar House because it is at the home of a great surrealist woman photographer whom I have long admired and taught in my classes at Bard College,” Aberth said. “It seems particularly appropriate then for me and my colleague, Tere Arcq, to be there in France working on Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, especially since they also spent meaningful periods of time in France.”
The residency will allow Aberth and Arcq a dedicated period of time to work side by side, and they believe that the insights they document about the shared projects of the two artists can serve as a blueprint for how women creators can join together in creating ventures that are greater than the sum of their parts. “Carrington and Varo forged a new path for women artists by exploring together certain esoteric arenas that had long been neglected and even disdained by the art world,” Aberth continued. “In rediscovering women’s mysteries and spiritual involvements in ways that directly impacted their artistic practice, they introduced to the art world the importance and necessity of female creative collaborations, in juxtaposition to centuries of celebrating male collaborations exclusively.”
Further reading:
Professor Susan Aberth and Alumnus Gilbert Vicario CCS ’96 Granted Curatorial Research Fellowship by Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
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 residency will allow Aberth and Arcq a dedicated period of time to work side by side, and they believe that the insights they document about the shared projects of the two artists can serve as a blueprint for how women creators can join together in creating ventures that are greater than the sum of their parts. “Carrington and Varo forged a new path for women artists by exploring together certain esoteric arenas that had long been neglected and even disdained by the art world,” Aberth continued. “In rediscovering women’s mysteries and spiritual involvements in ways that directly impacted their artistic practice, they introduced to the art world the importance and necessity of female creative collaborations, in juxtaposition to centuries of celebrating male collaborations exclusively.”
Further reading:
Professor Susan Aberth and Alumnus Gilbert Vicario CCS ’96 Granted Curatorial Research Fellowship by Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
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
01-31-2023
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded a Curatorial Research Fellowship to Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, and Bard alumnus Gilbert Vicario CCS ’96, chief curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). The fellowship of $50,000 will fund their research for a new exhibition planned for 2024 at PAMM, which will examine metaphysical and esoteric impulses that influenced a cohort of artistic and academic individuals in the Americas in the 20th century, with a prominent focus on women, queer, and marginalized artists. “The Spring 2022 grantees are notable for their resilience, ingenuity, and dedication to supporting artists at every stage of their careers,” said Rachel Bers, the program director at the foundation. “As the culture shifts, they work side by side with artists to find ways to critically and creatively engage the forces that shape our world.”
Further reading:
Bard College Professor Susan Aberth Awarded a Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency
Further reading:
Bard College Professor Susan Aberth Awarded a Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency
01-31-2023
Bard College Assistant Professor of Dance Souleymane Badolo and MFA alum in Music/Sound and American and Indigenous Studies Program faculty member Kite (aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18) have won 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards, which will fund the creation of experimental, risk-taking projects that push boundaries formally and thematically, venturing into wild, out-there, never-before-seen concepts, and future universes real or imagined.
Creative Capital awarded 50 groundbreaking projects—comprising 66 individual artists—focused on Technology, Performing Arts, and Literature, as well as Multidisciplinary and Socially Engaged forms. Souleymane Badolo (with Jacob Bamogo) won an award in Dance. Kite won an award in Technology. Awardees will receive varying amounts up to $50,000 in direct funding to help finance their projects and build thriving artistic careers. The award provides a range of grant services from industry connections and financial planning to peer mentorship and community-building opportunities. Grant funding is unrestricted and may be used for any purpose to advance the project, including, but not limited to, studio space, housing, groceries, staffing, childcare, equipment, computers, and travel. The combined value of the 2023 Creative Capital Awards totals more than $2.5 million in artist support.
“The 2023 Creative Capital cohort reaffirms the unpredictable and radical range of ideas alive in the arts today—from artists working in Burkina Faso to Cambodia and across the United States. We continue to see our democratic, open-call grantmaking process catalyze visionary projects that will influence our communities, our culture, and our environment,” said Christine Kuan, Creative Capital President Executive Director.
The Creative Capital grant is administered through a national open call, a democratic process involving external review of thousands of applications by international industry experts, arts administrators, curators, scholars, and artists. The 2023 grantee cohort comprises 75% BIPOC artists, representing Asian, Black or African American, Latinx, Native American or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern-identified artists; 10% of artists identify as having a disability; and 59% of artists identify as women, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. The cohort includes emerging, mid-career, and established artists between the ages of 25 and 69. The artists are affiliated with all regions of the United States and its territories, as well as artists based in Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Germany, and Japan.
Kite also won a 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Media. The award honors her creative accomplishments and supports her ongoing artistic and professional development. Kite is one of 45 USA Fellows across 10 creative disciplines who will receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards. USA Fellowships are awarded to artists at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. Fellowships are awarded in the following disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. Learn more about USA Fellowships here.
Souleymane ‘Solo’ Badolo is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Burkina Faso–based troupe Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dance with Western contemporary dance. A native of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Badolo began his professional career with the African dance company DAMA. He has also performed with Salia nï Seydou and the National Ballet of Burkina Faso, and worked with French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier. Badolo and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa. He appeared in the 2015 BAM Next Wave Festival; has created solo projects for Danspace, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Harlem Stage, the 92nd Street Y, and New York’s River to River Festival; and was commissioned to create a dance for Philadanco as part of James Brown: Get on the Good Foot, which was produced by the Apollo Theater and toured nationally and internationally. He was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2011 as outstanding emerging choreographer, received the Juried Bessie Award in 2012, and a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for his piece Yimbégré, which “gloriously communicated the clash and reconciliation of the different traditions held within one’s life, one’s body.” The Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts has supported Badolo’s ongoing research in Africa. He graduated with an MFA from Bennington in June 2013. He has been on the Bard College faculty since 2017 and previously taught at the New School, Denison University, and Bennington College.
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). Kite’s scholarship and practice explores contemporary Lakota ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Learning and compositional systems for body interface movement performances, interactive and static sculpture, immersive video and sound installations, poetry and experimental lectures, experimental video, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Her work has been featured in various publications, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines”, and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) (2019) was featured on the cover of Canadian Art.
Creative Capital awarded 50 groundbreaking projects—comprising 66 individual artists—focused on Technology, Performing Arts, and Literature, as well as Multidisciplinary and Socially Engaged forms. Souleymane Badolo (with Jacob Bamogo) won an award in Dance. Kite won an award in Technology. Awardees will receive varying amounts up to $50,000 in direct funding to help finance their projects and build thriving artistic careers. The award provides a range of grant services from industry connections and financial planning to peer mentorship and community-building opportunities. Grant funding is unrestricted and may be used for any purpose to advance the project, including, but not limited to, studio space, housing, groceries, staffing, childcare, equipment, computers, and travel. The combined value of the 2023 Creative Capital Awards totals more than $2.5 million in artist support.
“The 2023 Creative Capital cohort reaffirms the unpredictable and radical range of ideas alive in the arts today—from artists working in Burkina Faso to Cambodia and across the United States. We continue to see our democratic, open-call grantmaking process catalyze visionary projects that will influence our communities, our culture, and our environment,” said Christine Kuan, Creative Capital President Executive Director.
The Creative Capital grant is administered through a national open call, a democratic process involving external review of thousands of applications by international industry experts, arts administrators, curators, scholars, and artists. The 2023 grantee cohort comprises 75% BIPOC artists, representing Asian, Black or African American, Latinx, Native American or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern-identified artists; 10% of artists identify as having a disability; and 59% of artists identify as women, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. The cohort includes emerging, mid-career, and established artists between the ages of 25 and 69. The artists are affiliated with all regions of the United States and its territories, as well as artists based in Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Germany, and Japan.
Kite also won a 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Media. The award honors her creative accomplishments and supports her ongoing artistic and professional development. Kite is one of 45 USA Fellows across 10 creative disciplines who will receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards. USA Fellowships are awarded to artists at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. Fellowships are awarded in the following disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. Learn more about USA Fellowships here.
Souleymane ‘Solo’ Badolo is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Burkina Faso–based troupe Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dance with Western contemporary dance. A native of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Badolo began his professional career with the African dance company DAMA. He has also performed with Salia nï Seydou and the National Ballet of Burkina Faso, and worked with French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier. Badolo and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa. He appeared in the 2015 BAM Next Wave Festival; has created solo projects for Danspace, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Harlem Stage, the 92nd Street Y, and New York’s River to River Festival; and was commissioned to create a dance for Philadanco as part of James Brown: Get on the Good Foot, which was produced by the Apollo Theater and toured nationally and internationally. He was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2011 as outstanding emerging choreographer, received the Juried Bessie Award in 2012, and a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for his piece Yimbégré, which “gloriously communicated the clash and reconciliation of the different traditions held within one’s life, one’s body.” The Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts has supported Badolo’s ongoing research in Africa. He graduated with an MFA from Bennington in June 2013. He has been on the Bard College faculty since 2017 and previously taught at the New School, Denison University, and Bennington College.
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). Kite’s scholarship and practice explores contemporary Lakota ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Learning and compositional systems for body interface movement performances, interactive and static sculpture, immersive video and sound installations, poetry and experimental lectures, experimental video, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Her work has been featured in various publications, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines”, and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) (2019) was featured on the cover of Canadian Art.
01-31-2023
Technological disruption is nothing new to cinema, writes Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick for Wired. “Early film theorists considered silent cinema a universal language until ‘talkies’ transformed storytelling for the big screen,” he writes. Still, the advent and proliferation of audiovisual content created entirely by artificial intelligence “elicits a special kind of anxiety for the film and TV industry’s creative classes.” Concerns regarding the use of these technologies are merited, Glick writes, especially with respect to “synthetic resurrection,” where the likeness of a deceased actor is used posthumously in a film. Still, positive uses of the technologies abound, including in human rights documentaries, where powerful testimony can be portrayed without sacrificing the anonymity of the subject. Text-to-video, wherein a user inputs a textual prompt from which an AI produces visuals, can result in projects that are exciting in their “strangeness and messiness,” he writes. Most appealing to Glick are those works which combine the human element with the artificial in a kind of collaboration between man and machine: “These projects point to the productive frictions of mixed-media and cross-platform practices.”
01-31-2023
In the spring of 2023, Julia Rosenbaum, associate professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, will teach at the Freie Universität in Berlin via the Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship. Terra Foundation Visiting Professorships at Freie Universität Berlin are integrated into the curriculum and research programs of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies. “The particular setting of the John F. Kennedy Institute offers rich opportunities to students to situate their study of American art in dialogue with disciplines such as cultural studies, cultural history, literature, and sociology,” writes the Terra Foundation. “I am very grateful to have been chosen for the Terra professorship and am excited for the research and teaching opportunities of this transatlantic cultural collaboration,” Rosenbaum said.
01-30-2023
The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz is the recipient of a $71,000 exhibitions grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, which will support a spring 2024 exhibition, guest curated by Bard College Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Tom Wolf, focusing on four diverse, early-twentieth-century artists: Miguel Covarrubias, Isami Doi, Aaron Douglas, and Winold Reiss.
The Dorsky Museum exhibition, tentatively titled “Global Connections: Four Artists in New York in the 1920s,” is one of 57 projects supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art through its latest round of grant funding.
The exhibition is a temporary loan exhibition based on extensive original research into histories of cross-cultural inspiration and influence among the diverse artists Covarrubias, Doi, Douglas and Reiss (Mexican, Japanese Hawaiian, African American and German American, respectively).
Unpacking the connections between these four artists and focusing on artwork they produced that relates to the United States, Europe, Asia, and Mexico, this exhibition will further the discourse on multiculturalism in American art. Together, these four artists from different backgrounds illustrate a thus-far untold story of American art that raises challenging questions about histories of race, representation and multiculturalism that are relevant and necessary today.
The concept stems from the research of guest curator Wolf, a specialist in twentieth century American art, Asian American artists, and art colonies. Wolf previously received an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant in support of his research and writing for this project.
“When the initial proposal for this project was shared with the Museum Exhibitions Committee, our group of expert advisors expressed unequivocal support and great eagerness for the project,” said Anna Conlan, the Neil C. Trager Director of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. “From the beginning, I personally have been captivated by this story and have encouraged Professor Wolf to pursue it.”
“Global Connections” is planned to open on Feb. 3, 2024 and will occupy 3,500 feet of gallery space in The Dorsky Museum, centering paintings, prints, drawings and books. It will include a self-portrait by each artist, as well as works that reflect each of their ethnic heritage and enthusiasm for multiculturalism.
Tom Wolf is a frequent collaborator with The Dorsky who serves as a member of the Museum’s Exhibitions Committee and has previously guest curated exhibitions including “Eva Watson-Schütze: Photographer” in 2009 and “Carl Walters and Woodstock Ceramic Arts” in 2017.
About the Terra Foundation for American Art
The Terra Foundation for American Art, established in 1978 and having offices in Chicago and Paris, supports organizations and individuals locally and globally with the aim of fostering intercultural dialogues and encouraging transformative practices that expand narratives of American art, through the foundation’s grant program, collection and initiatives. More information about the Terra Foundation for American Art’s history and mission is available here.
The Dorsky Museum exhibition, tentatively titled “Global Connections: Four Artists in New York in the 1920s,” is one of 57 projects supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art through its latest round of grant funding.
The exhibition is a temporary loan exhibition based on extensive original research into histories of cross-cultural inspiration and influence among the diverse artists Covarrubias, Doi, Douglas and Reiss (Mexican, Japanese Hawaiian, African American and German American, respectively).
Unpacking the connections between these four artists and focusing on artwork they produced that relates to the United States, Europe, Asia, and Mexico, this exhibition will further the discourse on multiculturalism in American art. Together, these four artists from different backgrounds illustrate a thus-far untold story of American art that raises challenging questions about histories of race, representation and multiculturalism that are relevant and necessary today.
The concept stems from the research of guest curator Wolf, a specialist in twentieth century American art, Asian American artists, and art colonies. Wolf previously received an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant in support of his research and writing for this project.
“When the initial proposal for this project was shared with the Museum Exhibitions Committee, our group of expert advisors expressed unequivocal support and great eagerness for the project,” said Anna Conlan, the Neil C. Trager Director of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. “From the beginning, I personally have been captivated by this story and have encouraged Professor Wolf to pursue it.”
“Global Connections” is planned to open on Feb. 3, 2024 and will occupy 3,500 feet of gallery space in The Dorsky Museum, centering paintings, prints, drawings and books. It will include a self-portrait by each artist, as well as works that reflect each of their ethnic heritage and enthusiasm for multiculturalism.
Tom Wolf is a frequent collaborator with The Dorsky who serves as a member of the Museum’s Exhibitions Committee and has previously guest curated exhibitions including “Eva Watson-Schütze: Photographer” in 2009 and “Carl Walters and Woodstock Ceramic Arts” in 2017.
About the Terra Foundation for American Art
The Terra Foundation for American Art, established in 1978 and having offices in Chicago and Paris, supports organizations and individuals locally and globally with the aim of fostering intercultural dialogues and encouraging transformative practices that expand narratives of American art, through the foundation’s grant program, collection and initiatives. More information about the Terra Foundation for American Art’s history and mission is available here.
01-23-2023
Filmmakers Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 and Sky Hopinka have been awarded JustFilms grants through the Ford Foundation in support of their documentary film projects. Asili, associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, received a grant for his new project Don & Moki: Organic Music Society. Hopinka, assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard and 2022 MacArthur Fellow, received a grant for his continuing project Powwow People.
One of the largest documentary funds in the world and a part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program, JustFilms provided over $4 million to support 68 innovative film projects in the United States and around the world that are centered on social justice issues.
Don & Moki: Organic Music Society, directed by Ephraim Asili and produced by Asili and Naima Karlsson, is a feature-length documentary exploring the collaborative and communal art practice developed and practiced by jazz multi-instrumentalist, theorist, and educator Don Cherry and his wife and primary collaborator, visual artist Moki Cherry.
Powwow People, directed by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) and produced by John Cardellino and Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk), is a film told through Hopinka's distinct artistic style and lens of personal lived experience. It is a meditation on the nebulous places of community and survivance that are powwows, poetically depicting Native American singers and dancers as they live their lives, maintain their cultural traditions, and prepare for an upcoming powwow, one organized, hosted, and documented through the production of this film.
One of the largest documentary funds in the world and a part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program, JustFilms provided over $4 million to support 68 innovative film projects in the United States and around the world that are centered on social justice issues.
Don & Moki: Organic Music Society, directed by Ephraim Asili and produced by Asili and Naima Karlsson, is a feature-length documentary exploring the collaborative and communal art practice developed and practiced by jazz multi-instrumentalist, theorist, and educator Don Cherry and his wife and primary collaborator, visual artist Moki Cherry.
Powwow People, directed by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) and produced by John Cardellino and Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk), is a film told through Hopinka's distinct artistic style and lens of personal lived experience. It is a meditation on the nebulous places of community and survivance that are powwows, poetically depicting Native American singers and dancers as they live their lives, maintain their cultural traditions, and prepare for an upcoming powwow, one organized, hosted, and documented through the production of this film.
01-23-2023
Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music Maria Sonevytsky, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, reflects on how a Ukrainian phrase has transformed into a viral wartime slogan. “Good evening, we are from Ukraine,” a seemingly casual statement, has accumulated multiple meanings and layers throughout its evolution into an inclusive rallying cry for those who call the country home. “This phrase, which began as a musician’s offhand stage banter sampled into an EDM anthem, became a slogan invoked by Ukrainian politicians, soldiers, intellectuals, keyboard warriors, and their supporters around the globe,” she writes. For Sonevytsky, the brilliance of the statement is how its innocuous phrasing, at first glance a simple greeting, masks its inherent radicalism and defiance of the Russian’s state’s attempts to deny Ukraine’s existence. “The slogan works precisely because it does not traffic in the essentializing rhetoric of being Ukrainian,” she continues. “It is not for an individual declaring an identity: ‘I am Ukrainian.’ It is instead a collective, matter-of-fact statement: ‘We are from Ukraine.’ This also implies—and I still resent that this must be said, but here we are—that Ukraine exists, is a legitimate place, and contains people who claim it as home.”
01-17-2023
This January, the American Academy of Arts and Letters announced the winners of the 2023 Charles Ives Opera Prize and the Marc Blitzstein Memorial Awards. Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek will each receive a Marc Blitzstein Memorial Award of $10,000, which are given in the memory of Marc Blitzstein to composers, lyricists, or librettists to encourage the creation of works of merit for musical theater and opera. Mazzoli and Vavrek have collaborated on the operas Breaking the Waves, Proving Up, Songs from the Uproar, and The Listeners. In 1965 the friends of Academy member Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) set up a fund in his memory for an award, now $10,000, to be given periodically to a composer, lyricist, or librettist, to encourage the creation of works of merit for musical theater and opera. The awards, to be given at the annual Ceremonial in May, “reflect the essential mission of the Academy to recognize, identify, and reward works of highest aspiration and superior craft by contemporary artists in our culture,” said Yehudi Wyner, a composer member and former president of the Academy.
01-10-2023
In 1965, Life hired photojournalist and Bard alumnus Steven Schaprio ’55 to photograph the then-ascendant Andy Warhol for the magazine. Life never published the photo series, and only now are they being published posthumously after Schapiro’s death in 2022. Rolling Stone featured a series of photos from Andy Warhol and Friends: 1965–1966, which “includes many never-before-seen documents of a pivotal time in Warhol’s life as he helped shape popular culture for decades to come.”
01-04-2023
ARTnews highlighted individuals and institutions that had a significant impact on public engagement with Indigenous art in 2022, including Bard College on the short list. In September, the College announced a transformational $25 million endowment gift from the Gochman Family Foundation to support a renamed American and Indigenous Studies Program. A matching commitment by the Open Society Foundations will create a $50 million endowment for Native American and Indigenous Studies in undergraduate and graduate academics and the arts in Annandale, to include a center for Indigenous Studies and the appointment of an Indigenous Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard).
01-04-2023
Filmmaker and Bard professor Ephraim Asili spoke with Metal magazine about navigating his various roles as artist and teacher. “I can't see a situation in the future, no matter how well things go commercially, where I would not want to teach. I get too much out of it in terms of being able to relate to people of a certain age, with a fresh mindset around the medium and the world in general. It's something that I get endless inspiration from. I've also been able to hire former students to work with me on my projects, and that has gone well for me, and for students that I've worked with. Is that something that I anticipated? I think so.” Ephraim Asili is associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program. He is an alumnus of Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Class of 2011. Asili has taught on the faculty at Bard since 2015.
December 2022
12-20-2022
“Jon Batiste is not afraid of a jazzy suit,” writes André-Naquian Wheeler for Vogue. Photography by Visiting Artist in Residence Jasmine Clarke ’18 accompanies Wheeler’s article, showing Batiste preparing for his first performance at the White House. Batiste, who performed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and France’s national anthem “La Marseillaise,” requested that his family be in attendance, and especially his wife, the writer Suleika Jaouad, who has written about her diagnosis of an aggressive form of leukemia. “Seeing Suleika step out for her first public outing in a year after her cancer treatment meant a lot,” Batiste said. Batiste’s 89-year-old grandfather, an activist, also in attendance, commented on the symbolism of Batiste’s inclusion in the state dinner. “Discussing with [him] how the original builders of the White House were enslaved Americans whilst walking into the State Dinner as honored guests was quite a moment,” Batiste said. Clarke’s photography captures Batiste and guests preparing for the event, the musician’s excitement clear from Clarke’s vulnerable candids and striking portraits.
12-20-2022
Five Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. The recipients of this cycle’s Gilman scholarships are American undergraduate students attending 452 U.S. colleges and represent 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These Gilman Scholars will study or intern in 81 countries through October 2023.
Written Arts major Havvah Keller ’24, from Montpelier, Vermont, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study in Valparaíso, Chile, on CEA’s Spanish Language and Latin American Studies program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, for spring 2023. “Receiving this scholarship means that I will be able to fulfill my dream of studying Spanish in total immersion, living with a local family in an art-filled, exuberant city, and studying Latin American and Chilean poetry and literature, as well as many other subjects such as Latin American history, Indigenous dances and arts of the Mapuche people, and making international friends of all backgrounds. I am eternally grateful to Gilman for helping me plant the seeds which will open many incredible doors for me in my life this spring, and beyond,” said Keller.
Philosophy and German Studies joint major Bella Bergen ’24, from Broomfield, Colorado, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman Scholarship allows me to pursue studying abroad in Berlin, Germany. I have never left the country despite a deep desire to do so, and the Gilman Scholarship helps me finally accomplish this goal. As a joint major in Philosophy and German Studies, my studies and language proficiency will both benefit greatly from my time in Germany. Ich freue mich auf Berlin,” said Bergen.
Art History and Visual Culture major Elsa Joiner ’24, from Dunwoody, Georgia, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman scholarship will enable me to study the subject of my dreams, sound art, in the city of my greatest fantasies, Berlin, Germany. With the scholarship, I plan to explore the role of sound in identity formation and develop my skills as a deep listener, eventually returning to America with the strongest ears in the world and, perhaps, the sharpest mind,” said Joiner.
Art History and Visual Culture and Film Studies joint major Sasha Alcocer ’24, from New York, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “As a first-generation American, I am incredibly honored and humbled by the support from the Gilman scholarship to pursue this unique opportunity to learn from and connect with like-minded international students and Berlin-based creatives. Having grown up in New York City, I’ve always been interested in artistic communities and cultural history, therefore Berlin could not be a better place to be immersed in for my studies abroad,” said Alcocer.
Asian Studies and GIS joint major Kelany De La Cruz ’24, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship, in addition to a $5,000 Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) scholarship and a $5,000 Freeman ASIA scholarship, to study in Taipei, Taiwan, on the CET Taiwan program for spring 2023. “To me these scholarships mean encouragement to follow my academic and professional dreams because I would not have been able to study abroad without them,” said De La Cruz.
Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 36,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study.
As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”
The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org
Written Arts major Havvah Keller ’24, from Montpelier, Vermont, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study in Valparaíso, Chile, on CEA’s Spanish Language and Latin American Studies program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, for spring 2023. “Receiving this scholarship means that I will be able to fulfill my dream of studying Spanish in total immersion, living with a local family in an art-filled, exuberant city, and studying Latin American and Chilean poetry and literature, as well as many other subjects such as Latin American history, Indigenous dances and arts of the Mapuche people, and making international friends of all backgrounds. I am eternally grateful to Gilman for helping me plant the seeds which will open many incredible doors for me in my life this spring, and beyond,” said Keller.
Philosophy and German Studies joint major Bella Bergen ’24, from Broomfield, Colorado, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman Scholarship allows me to pursue studying abroad in Berlin, Germany. I have never left the country despite a deep desire to do so, and the Gilman Scholarship helps me finally accomplish this goal. As a joint major in Philosophy and German Studies, my studies and language proficiency will both benefit greatly from my time in Germany. Ich freue mich auf Berlin,” said Bergen.
Art History and Visual Culture major Elsa Joiner ’24, from Dunwoody, Georgia, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman scholarship will enable me to study the subject of my dreams, sound art, in the city of my greatest fantasies, Berlin, Germany. With the scholarship, I plan to explore the role of sound in identity formation and develop my skills as a deep listener, eventually returning to America with the strongest ears in the world and, perhaps, the sharpest mind,” said Joiner.
Art History and Visual Culture and Film Studies joint major Sasha Alcocer ’24, from New York, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “As a first-generation American, I am incredibly honored and humbled by the support from the Gilman scholarship to pursue this unique opportunity to learn from and connect with like-minded international students and Berlin-based creatives. Having grown up in New York City, I’ve always been interested in artistic communities and cultural history, therefore Berlin could not be a better place to be immersed in for my studies abroad,” said Alcocer.
Asian Studies and GIS joint major Kelany De La Cruz ’24, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship, in addition to a $5,000 Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) scholarship and a $5,000 Freeman ASIA scholarship, to study in Taipei, Taiwan, on the CET Taiwan program for spring 2023. “To me these scholarships mean encouragement to follow my academic and professional dreams because I would not have been able to study abroad without them,” said De La Cruz.
Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 36,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study.
As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”
The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org
12-13-2022
At the 66th Evening Standard Theatre Awards celebration in London, Daniel Fish’s UK iteration of his Tony Award–winning re-orchestrated revival of Oklahoma! was named Best Musical, and Patrick Vaill ’07 took home the Best Musical Performance Award for his role as Jud Fry in the play. Vaill originated the role 15 years ago as a theater and performance senior in Fish’s 2007 Bard staging, which had been commissioned by the then Director of Bard’s Theater Program JoAnne Akalaitis. When Fish adapted the production for Bard’s 2015 SummerScape season, Vaill was cast again as Jud Fry and stayed in this role as the production went from off-Broadway to Broadway. The only remaining original cast member, Vaill joins a mixed British and American cast for the London production. “To be received by the audience and the city in this way is beyond anybody’s reasonable expectation of life,” Vaill said.
12-09-2022
In November 2023, the Museum of Modern Art will present the first exhibition of Professor An-My Lê’s powerful photographs alongside her forays into film, video, textiles, and sculpture. “For 30 years, the photographs of artist An-My Lê have engaged the complex fictions that inform how we justify, represent, and mythologize warfare and other forms of conflict,” reads MoMA’s announcement of the exhibition. “Lê does not take a straightforward photojournalistic approach to depicting combat. Rather, with poetic attention to politics and landscape, she meditates on the meaning of perpetual violence, war’s environmental impact, and the significance of diaspora.”
An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers will include ever-before-seen embroideries and rarely shown photographs from her Delta and Gabinetto series, which explore the relationship between mass media, gender, labor, and violence. And an immersive installation created especially for the exhibition attests to the artist’s long-standing consideration of the cinematic dimensions of photography and war.
An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. She is a recipient the MacArthur Fellowship (2012), New York State Foundation for the Arts grant (1996), and Guggenheim Fellowship (1997). She has been a member of the faculty since 1998.
This exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography; with Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.
An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers will include ever-before-seen embroideries and rarely shown photographs from her Delta and Gabinetto series, which explore the relationship between mass media, gender, labor, and violence. And an immersive installation created especially for the exhibition attests to the artist’s long-standing consideration of the cinematic dimensions of photography and war.
An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. She is a recipient the MacArthur Fellowship (2012), New York State Foundation for the Arts grant (1996), and Guggenheim Fellowship (1997). She has been a member of the faculty since 1998.
This exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography; with Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.
12-06-2022
After the liberation of Kherson in November 2022, residents could be heard in the streets singing the Ukrainian national anthem. Alongside it, however, another song was being sung. “‘Oi u luzi chervona kalyna,’ or ‘Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow,’ has become a symbol of resistance against Russian aggression,” writes Daniel Ofman for The World. Maria Sonevystky, associate professor of anthropology and music, told Ofman the song “is closely identified with Ukrainian poetry and music,” and that Ukrainian folk songs often employ naturalistic imagery. “Oi u luzi chervona kalyna” is no different, using the “red viburnum” from which the song takes its name as a grounding metaphor for liberation. “From that kind of opening image, you unspool a kind of metaphor, or a story about politics, or the complexity of life, and that’s the case here, too,” said Sonevystky.
12-01-2022
On the podcast A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers, Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts and director of the Photography Program at Bard, discusses his recently published book, a memoir, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, with the host, fellow photographer, Ben Smith. In the interview, Shore talks about the nature of the visual medium of photographs, the flow state of capturing images with a camera, his teaching practice, and the three stages of mastering the discipline of photography, among many other topics. “Photography does something else that words can’t do. It’s not a limitation. It is what the medium is,” he says about the adage: a photograph is worth a thousand words.
12-01-2022
This year, various media outlets are selecting works by Bard faculty members for their Best of 2022 lists. Some notable mentions include:
Assistant Professor of Music Angelica Sanchez’s album Sparkle Beings is named one of the Best Jazz Albums of 2022 by the New York Times.
Professor of Literature Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True is named one of the 10 Best Books of 2022 by the New York Times Book Review and The Best Books of 2022 by the New Yorker.
Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi’s Botticelli’s Secret is named one of the Best Books of 2022 So Far in nonfiction by the New Yorker.
James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People is named among 100 Notable Books of 2022 by the New York Times Book Review.
Bard Graduate Center's Threads of Power: Lace From the Textilmuseum St. Gallen featured in the New York Times Best Art Books of 2022.
Assistant Professor of Music Angelica Sanchez’s album Sparkle Beings is named one of the Best Jazz Albums of 2022 by the New York Times.
Professor of Literature Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True is named one of the 10 Best Books of 2022 by the New York Times Book Review and The Best Books of 2022 by the New Yorker.
Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi’s Botticelli’s Secret is named one of the Best Books of 2022 So Far in nonfiction by the New Yorker.
James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People is named among 100 Notable Books of 2022 by the New York Times Book Review.
Bard Graduate Center's Threads of Power: Lace From the Textilmuseum St. Gallen featured in the New York Times Best Art Books of 2022.
October 2022
10-21-2022
Renée Anne Louprette, assistant professor of music, director of the Bard Baroque Ensemble, and College organist, is spending her fall semester sabbatical conducting research supported by a Fulbright US Scholar Award in Brașov, Romania. Hosted by Transylvania University, Louprette’s project focuses on the rich cultural heritage of historic pipe organs in the Transylvanian region and the efforts of local artisans to rescue, preserve, and restore these instruments. She has given recital performances in the urban centers of Brașov and Sibiu, completed audio and video recordings of 18th-century instruments in fortified churches of Mediaș, Saschiz, and Hărman, and of the 1930 Wegenstein organ in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Bucharest. She is also conducting interviews and collecting critical documentation related to notable 18th-century organ builders and recent restorations. She hopes that these efforts will help cast new light on this precious musical heritage unique to Romania as a cross-cultural center of Eastern Europe.
10-18-2022
On January 7, 2021, Venezuela’s Special Action Forces raided the La Vega neighborhood of Caracas, leaving 23 people dead in what the community calls the “La Vega massacre.” The special police unit has been accused of targeting working-class neighborhoods, criminalizing young men for where they live as it attempts to root out gang activity. As part of an ongoing project supported by the Pulitzer Center and a Getty Images Inclusion Grant, Bard alumna Lexi Parra ’18 gets to know the women of La Vega who are maintaining their community and pushing back against state and gang violence.
Lexi Parra majored in human rights and photography at Bard College.
Lexi Parra majored in human rights and photography at Bard College.
Further Reading
- As gang, police violence rages, a neighborhood tries to connect (Washington Post)
- Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
- Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects for Peace Prize
10-14-2022
Jessie Montgomery, composer in residence at Bard, has been named Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year. “Jessie Montgomery grew up surrounded by jazz and activism. A Juilliard-trained violinist, she gravitated towards composition in her 20s, and later learned to associate her own Black identity with her music. The resulting body of work has been embraced all around the world for its freshness and energy,” writes Musical America. The 62nd annual Musical America awards will be presented at an awards ceremony in New York City on December 4.
Bard composer in residence Missy Mazzoli (2022) and Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts Joan Tower (2020) were recent recipients of this award.
Bard composer in residence Missy Mazzoli (2022) and Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts Joan Tower (2020) were recent recipients of this award.
10-13-2022
Bard College Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Sky Hopinka has been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. Hopinka, a filmmaker, video artist, and photographer, is one of this year’s 25 recipients of the prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In a statement about his work, the MacArthur Foundation says, “Hopinka layers imagery, sound, and text to create an innovative cinematic language. His short and feature-length films traverse both Indigenous histories and contemporary experiences . . . Hopinka is creating a body of work that not only represents the lives of Indigenous peoples but incorporates their worldviews into the strategies of representation itself.”
The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selection of MacArthur Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.
MacArthur Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee, recipients learn of their selection only when they receive a call from the MacArthur Foundation just before the public announcement. Thirteen Bard faculty members have previously been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.
Sky Hopinka received a BA (2012) from Portland State University and an MFA (2016) from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He is currently an assistant professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College. His work has been shown at numerous film festivals including Sundance, Park City and Salt Lake City, UT; Courtisane, Ghent; Punto de Vista, Pamplona; Milwaukee Film Festival; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; and Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has also exhibited work at venues including Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians.
Bard alumnus and artist Paul Chan MFA '03 has also been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. "He draws on a wealth of cultural touchstones—from classical philosophy to modern literature, critical theory, and hip-hop culture—to produce works that respond to our current political and social realities, making those realities more immediately available to the mind for contemplation and critical reflection," stated the MacArthur Foundation.
Paul Chan received a BFA (1996) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA (2003) from Bard College. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Schaulager, Basel. He is also the founder and publisher of Badlands Unlimited (established 2010). He received the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters in 2021.
More about Sky Hopinka's Award from the MacArthur Foundation
The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selection of MacArthur Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.
MacArthur Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee, recipients learn of their selection only when they receive a call from the MacArthur Foundation just before the public announcement. Thirteen Bard faculty members have previously been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.
Sky Hopinka received a BA (2012) from Portland State University and an MFA (2016) from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. He is currently an assistant professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College. His work has been shown at numerous film festivals including Sundance, Park City and Salt Lake City, UT; Courtisane, Ghent; Punto de Vista, Pamplona; Milwaukee Film Festival; Chicago Underground Film Festival; Toronto International Film Festival; and Ann Arbor Film Festival. He has also exhibited work at venues including Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. Hopinka is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and a descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians.
Bard alumnus and artist Paul Chan MFA '03 has also been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. "He draws on a wealth of cultural touchstones—from classical philosophy to modern literature, critical theory, and hip-hop culture—to produce works that respond to our current political and social realities, making those realities more immediately available to the mind for contemplation and critical reflection," stated the MacArthur Foundation.
Paul Chan received a BFA (1996) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA (2003) from Bard College. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Schaulager, Basel. He is also the founder and publisher of Badlands Unlimited (established 2010). He received the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters in 2021.
Further Reading
Bard Alumnus Paul Chan MFA ’03 Named 2022 MacArthur FellowMore about Sky Hopinka's Award from the MacArthur Foundation
10-04-2022
Alex Kitnick, assistant professor of art history and visual culture at Bard, writes about the art of Wolfgang Tillmans for Artforum. The German photographer’s career is the subject of “Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear,” a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. “I think we can describe much of Tillmans’s work as at once utopian and deeply presentist. Liberal in spirit, it makes room for many things,” Kitnick writes. “The utopian seems like the wrong designation for his work. The utopian is always ahead of us. But there is no future here—everything is right now.”
10-04-2022
Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music, reviewed Codeine’s lost album, Dessau, for NPR. Recorded in June 1992 at Harold Dessau Recording studio in New York City, the album consists mostly of songs that appeared on later albums, some in similar form and others considerably changed. For Hennies, the recordings evoke teenage memories of her band sharing a bill with Codeine at a daylong concert in Louisville, Kentucky in 1993. Listening to the album years later, Hennies writes, “Dessau feels like a ghost.”
September 2022
09-20-2022
The Chicago-based Floating Museum, an art collective codirected by Bard alumnus Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford ’07, will serve as the artistic team leading the fifth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, or CAB 5. Titled This is a Rehearsal, CAB 5 “will build on and expand the collective’s ongoing work,” writes Matt Hickman for the Architect’s Newspaper. “Floating Museum is organized to work at the intersection of disciplines, where civic participation inspires and shapes our process. It’s both a thrill and challenge to collaborate with the CAB as the artistic team of the 2023 edition,” said the members of Floating Museum. With This is a Rehearsal, the collective hopes to showcase work that demonstrates the ways in which “contemporary environmental, political, and economic issues are shared across national boundaries but are addressed differently around the world through art, architecture, infrastructure, and civic participation.” CAB 5, This is a Rehearsal, is scheduled to open September 2023.
09-13-2022
Assistant Professor of Music Angelica Sanchez’s newest acoustic-trio album Sparkle Beings will be released by Sunnyside Records on September 23 and is featured in the New York Times culture section’s fall preview. “This pianist and composer has yet to receive her full due, but at 50 she continues to churn out fabulous acoustic free jazz recordings at an unfettered clip,” writes Giovanni Russonello for the New York Times.
09-13-2022
Novelist Stephanie LaCava profiles her friend, multidisciplinary artist, and Bard studio arts alumna Carolee Shneemann ’59 for the Guardian. Shneemann (1939–2019) was among the founding artists of the Judson Dance Theater, alongside the late Trisha Brown and Aileen Passloff (Professor Emerita of Dance at Bard). Shneemann created boundary-breaking, embodied art that included kinetic theater, film, photography, sculpture, and writing, however, she always considered herself a painter. While in her lifetime, gallery representation and critical recognition was elusive, her legacy is receiving more attention. “Postmortem, the accolades come fast for Carolee. They were never so forthcoming when she was still pushing the limits of earthbound energy, inhabiting her body,” writes LaCava. “Body Politics,” the first UK survey of Schneemann’s work, is on view at the Barbican in London until January 8, 2023.
09-13-2022
An exhibition in Catskill features work by the Columbia Collective, a multimedia arts group of female and trans incarcerated artists that was founded by Maggie Hazen, visiting artist in residence at Bard College. Anna Schupack ’22 helped Hazen organize the exhibition to promote the artists in the collective while bringing attention to problems in the juvenile justice system. Sofia Thieu D’Amico CCS ’22 curated the show. The exhibition was funded by Bard’s Margarita Kuchma Project Award, which Schupack and Sarah Soucek ’22 won in July. Talking Back: Artists of the Columbia Collective, runs through September 25 at Foreland Contemporary Arts Campus in Catskill.
The Foreland galleries will host an artist talk and panel discussion for the exhibition on September 14 at 6:30 pm, in person and on Zoom, moderated by D'Amico:
This event is free and open to the public, with Alison Cornyn of the Incorrigibles Project and Mark Loughney, artist of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, focusing on the intersections of cultural and carceral systems, tapping our prison history archives, the crisis of youth incarceration, and visions of a decarcerated future. They will ask: How do we identify modes of abolition and advocacy, create critical projects, and identify the reaches of our prison industrial complex? Following artist presentations and discussion will be a Q&A session with panelists and Columbia Collective founder Maggie Hazen.
The Foreland galleries will host an artist talk and panel discussion for the exhibition on September 14 at 6:30 pm, in person and on Zoom, moderated by D'Amico:
This event is free and open to the public, with Alison Cornyn of the Incorrigibles Project and Mark Loughney, artist of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, focusing on the intersections of cultural and carceral systems, tapping our prison history archives, the crisis of youth incarceration, and visions of a decarcerated future. They will ask: How do we identify modes of abolition and advocacy, create critical projects, and identify the reaches of our prison industrial complex? Following artist presentations and discussion will be a Q&A session with panelists and Columbia Collective founder Maggie Hazen.
09-13-2022
After a nearly decade-long break, the trio that helped spark New York’s early 2000s rock revival is back with Cool It Down, “an expansive album that dares to imagine a bold, fresh future.” The New York Times profiles the band, featuring Bard alum Nick Zinner ’98 on guitar, as they return to the studio and the stage with a new perspective in their 40s, after moving cross-country, starting families, and years pursuing their own musical and artistic projects. The new album tackles serious themes such as climate change and the longing for closeness in the aftermath of the pandemic, but ultimately the band is on a mission to bring a sense of joy and hope to audiences.
09-13-2022
Sky Hopinka, assistant professor of film and electronic arts, talks with the BBC about his new documentary, Kicking the Clouds, which has been shortlisted for the BBC's LongShots film festival. Hopinka, who is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, talks about how a 50-year-old recording of a language lesson between his mother and grandmother sparked the film, which the BBC calls “dreamy and soulful ... a poetic road trip into the history of a family and the disappearing language of a tribe.”
From September 8 to September 19, viewers can vote for their favorite film and choose the winner of the LongShots Audience Award. Dedicated this year to the theme of “Journeys,” LongShots spotlights the best short documentaries from the most interesting emerging filmmakers worldwide, handpicked by some of the most prestigious film festivals around the world.
From September 8 to September 19, viewers can vote for their favorite film and choose the winner of the LongShots Audience Award. Dedicated this year to the theme of “Journeys,” LongShots spotlights the best short documentaries from the most interesting emerging filmmakers worldwide, handpicked by some of the most prestigious film festivals around the world.
August 2022
08-30-2022
As part of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Nayland Blake ’82, “bearish, Merlin-bearded, soft-spoken in the manner of a blacksmith teaching kindergartners,” offers advice to artists as part of their performance series “Got an Art Problem?” Writing for the New Yorker, Hannah Seidlitz outlines Blake’s contributions to this year’s Biennial, including “Rear Entry” and “Gender Discard Party,” in which “guests were invited to ‘bring your own baggage’ and dance away the woes of classification.” With “Got an Art Problem?,” Blake schedules meetings with guests who are asked to “illustrate their art problems,” which Blake then talks through with the guest until their time is up. Offering advice to one guest, an artist who goes by Zaun whose work attempts “to visualize the living grid,” Blake asked a very simple question: “What is a game?” “A game is a system of rules that organize behavior,” Blake said. “What’s delightful is seeing somebody operate within those rules and yet do this unexpected thing.”
08-30-2022
Visiting Artist in Residence Andy Robert’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, Ti Zwazo Clarendon: You Can Go Home Again; You Just Can’t Stay, opens September 16 at the Michael Werner Gallery in London. His paintings challenge a static understanding of history. Describing his method, Robert says “in questioning how an image comes into the world, and into being, I want to own up, to admit at any point, a painting, an image can change direction and isn’t fixed.” Robert’s work will also be shown at the 58th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Established in 1896 by the Carnegie Museum of Art and organized every three to four years, the Carnegie International is the longest-running North American exhibition of international art and presents an overview of how art and artists respond to the critical questions of our time. The 58th Carnegie International, which is titled Is it morning for you yet?, runs from September 24, 2022, to April 2, 2023.
08-23-2022
Pony, a play by Sylvan Oswald that “would demand a stage world populated by a spectrum of queer and trans characters,” first premiered in 2011. Now, 11 years later, Pony returns for its second production, having evolved in that interim decade, writes Miriam Felton-Dansky, professor of theater and performance, for American Theatre. “This production also allows the play new life in the wake of revisions Oswald has made over many years in response to evolving conversations about LGBTQ+ experience,” she writes. Another evolution, Oswald told Felton-Dansky, was in the second production’s casting, which found “enough transmasculine actors to fill the roles” and “a community ready and waiting for this play, neither of which were a given even 10 years ago.” Pony is playing now through September 4 in Portland, Maine, as part of the Portland Theater Festival.
08-16-2022
Bard College Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen has been awarded $350,000 by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to fund her project, the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a digital archive of materials related to the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, Syria, a multicultural center of the ancient world that has been threatened in recent years by looting and conflict. IDEA aims at virtual reassembly and recontextualization of archaeological information from a uniquely preserved archaeological site of cross-disciplinary significance. The NEH grant period is July 2022 through June 2025.
“We couldn’t be happier or more humbled to receive the support of the NEH to bring about this important work,” says Chen. “What I’m most excited about are the ways the grant funds will allow us to provide hands-on learning opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, as well as displaced Syrians, all the while making an ethical impact on data from one of the most important archaeological resources we have about life in the ancient world.”
Located on the frontier between the Roman and Persian Empires, Dura-Europos is a rare archaeological resource. Nicknamed “Pompeii of the East” due to its extraordinary degree of preservation, Dura-Europos provides well-preserved and juxtaposed Jewish, Christian, and pagan sanctuaries, and textual remains in a variety of Mediterranean and Semitic languages. The site offers glimpses into the ubiquitous ancient multiculturalism and domestic coexistence of different ethnic groups, reflecting the historical and cultural complexity of life in a frontier city, spanning from 300 BCE to the 250s CE.
Since 1920, European excavations involving multiple institutional partners and well-intentioned efforts to share-out access to physical objects from this important site have led to the dispersal of Dura’s artifacts into collections across the world, largely residing in European and American collections catalogued exclusively in Western languages (primarily English, and some in French). Using the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD), IDEA endeavors to create a comprehensive and extensible digital archive whose data points can be freely reused, and to develop a web application that provides multilinguistic access to the integrated Dura-Europos archival resources in a single interface, together with geo-located visualizations to enhance data intelligibility at a glance.
Ultimately, one of IDEA’s long-term aims is to help democratize processes of knowledge-creation relevant to Dura-Europos. With a great number of Dura-Europos artifacts housed in Western collections and historically only searchable in English (or, less often, French), the number of Middle Eastern scholars that have been able to engage in scholarship related to this important site has been unsurprisingly limited. Establishing multilingual (especially Arabic) accessibility for the site’s archaeological data via the IDEA web application is intended to serve as a steppingstone to the creation of international data-shaping collaborations in the post-grant period.
At Bard, Chen plans to collaborate with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) and Bard College Berlin on this project. The project will support a CCS Bard fellow each year. The CCS Bard fellows’ participation in the project will expose them to the range of applications of LOD for collections cataloging and information discoverability. Further, in collaboration with the Middle Eastern Studies Program and Bard College Berlin, IDEA will establish remote linked data training workshops for native Arabic-speakers. These remote workshops will in part supply Arabic-language translations for artifact records and further the project goal of increasing Arabic-language searchability of content related to the archaeological site.
IDEA’s core team members also include Co-Principal Investigator Holly Rushmeier, Katherine Thornton, Kenneth Seals-Knutt, Adnan Al Mohamad, and Scott DiGiulio. To learn more, visit duraeuroposarchive.org.
“We couldn’t be happier or more humbled to receive the support of the NEH to bring about this important work,” says Chen. “What I’m most excited about are the ways the grant funds will allow us to provide hands-on learning opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, as well as displaced Syrians, all the while making an ethical impact on data from one of the most important archaeological resources we have about life in the ancient world.”
Located on the frontier between the Roman and Persian Empires, Dura-Europos is a rare archaeological resource. Nicknamed “Pompeii of the East” due to its extraordinary degree of preservation, Dura-Europos provides well-preserved and juxtaposed Jewish, Christian, and pagan sanctuaries, and textual remains in a variety of Mediterranean and Semitic languages. The site offers glimpses into the ubiquitous ancient multiculturalism and domestic coexistence of different ethnic groups, reflecting the historical and cultural complexity of life in a frontier city, spanning from 300 BCE to the 250s CE.
Since 1920, European excavations involving multiple institutional partners and well-intentioned efforts to share-out access to physical objects from this important site have led to the dispersal of Dura’s artifacts into collections across the world, largely residing in European and American collections catalogued exclusively in Western languages (primarily English, and some in French). Using the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD), IDEA endeavors to create a comprehensive and extensible digital archive whose data points can be freely reused, and to develop a web application that provides multilinguistic access to the integrated Dura-Europos archival resources in a single interface, together with geo-located visualizations to enhance data intelligibility at a glance.
Ultimately, one of IDEA’s long-term aims is to help democratize processes of knowledge-creation relevant to Dura-Europos. With a great number of Dura-Europos artifacts housed in Western collections and historically only searchable in English (or, less often, French), the number of Middle Eastern scholars that have been able to engage in scholarship related to this important site has been unsurprisingly limited. Establishing multilingual (especially Arabic) accessibility for the site’s archaeological data via the IDEA web application is intended to serve as a steppingstone to the creation of international data-shaping collaborations in the post-grant period.
At Bard, Chen plans to collaborate with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) and Bard College Berlin on this project. The project will support a CCS Bard fellow each year. The CCS Bard fellows’ participation in the project will expose them to the range of applications of LOD for collections cataloging and information discoverability. Further, in collaboration with the Middle Eastern Studies Program and Bard College Berlin, IDEA will establish remote linked data training workshops for native Arabic-speakers. These remote workshops will in part supply Arabic-language translations for artifact records and further the project goal of increasing Arabic-language searchability of content related to the archaeological site.
IDEA’s core team members also include Co-Principal Investigator Holly Rushmeier, Katherine Thornton, Kenneth Seals-Knutt, Adnan Al Mohamad, and Scott DiGiulio. To learn more, visit duraeuroposarchive.org.
08-16-2022
Originally published in LitHub’s “The Craft of Writing” newsletter, Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante’s article explores her writing process and how her most recent book, Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (illustrated by Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91), “stemmed from a strong initial emotion” about the place she’s lived for the past 22 years, and took shape intuitively, without a predetermined structure or result in mind. “Going into the writing I like to cultivate a particular juncture between knowing and not knowing—having all the facts but remaining uncertain how they fit together. It’s a delicate balance, because if you know too little what you write will be halting and opaque, and if you know too much it will be dead on the page, a mere transcription after the fact,” writes Sante. “In any case, whatever ideas and speculations may occupy the writer’s head, writing does not begin with an idea; it begins with a sentence.”
08-16-2022
Christine Shoshannah ’06 (formerly known by her surname Dominguez), who majored in music, returned to her hometown of Newburgh, New York, to host a benefit concert and album release event. A portion of the proceeds raised from the event will be donated to Safe Harbors of the Hudson, a nonprofit supporting homeless and low-income families in Newburgh. Shoshannah is a Grammy-nominated songwriter and award-winning singer with a new album Faithful For Free. She graduated one year early from Newburgh Free Academy to jump-start her music career before enrolling at Bard.
08-16-2022
The video artist Isaac Julien and the cultural theorist and Bard professor Kobena Mercer explore the legacy of Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Locke, his relationship with so-called “primitive” African sculpture, and the “queering of the New Negro.” Professor Mercer’s new book Alain Locke and the Visual Arts (Yale University Press, 2022) is discussed in the New Yorker in tandem with Julien's new multiscreen commission, “Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die),” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Kobena Mercer is the Charles P. Stevenson Chair in Art History and the Humanities, a joint appointment between the Art History and Visual Culture Program in the undergraduate College, and the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS).
08-15-2022
Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 says his photographs of fireflies can range from “a spa for the eyes” to “almost pure chaos.” For NPR, Lara Pellegrinelli spoke with Mauney, who has spent almost a decade photographing fireflies in the Hudson Valley, using Photoshop to painstakingly compile hundreds of timed exposures into a single image. The images, Pellegrinelli writes, are catching the eye of artists and scientists alike, sparking the interest of researchers pursuing “new evidence that firefly swarms can synchronize their flashes.” Mauney is now a part of a group of volunteers helping collect data for computer scientist and biophysicist Dr. Orit Peleg of the BioFrontiers Institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Still, for Mauney, the images, and the process of composing them, are the primary thing. “I never get tired of it,” Mauney says. “And I never get tired of the challenge and the puzzle of trying to construct the images — and trying to construct a good image, because it’s not enough for me to let the bugs do the heavy lifting.”
08-02-2022
Lexi Parra ’18, who majored in human rights and photography at Bard, has been selected as one of eight photojournalists from around the world to be collectively awarded $40,000 in grants from Getty Images, a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace. Parra is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based in Caracas, Venezuela. Her work focuses on youth culture, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience.
The annual Getty Images Inclusion Grants aim to support emerging editorial talent within underrepresented groups, offering aspiring photojournalists the creative means and solutions to pursue education that will enable careers within the industry. Eight grants of $5,000 each were awarded to editorial photographers and videographers from different professional specialties, including News, Sport, Arts & Entertainment, and Multimedia. Parra was selected for her work in news photography. Recipients were selected by an esteemed panel of judges comprising accomplished professionals from the fields of photography and journalism and convened by Women Photograph, a non-profit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists; Diversify Photo, a community of photographers, editors, and visual producers working to diversify how people interact with media; and Getty Images.
The annual Getty Images Inclusion Grants aim to support emerging editorial talent within underrepresented groups, offering aspiring photojournalists the creative means and solutions to pursue education that will enable careers within the industry. Eight grants of $5,000 each were awarded to editorial photographers and videographers from different professional specialties, including News, Sport, Arts & Entertainment, and Multimedia. Parra was selected for her work in news photography. Recipients were selected by an esteemed panel of judges comprising accomplished professionals from the fields of photography and journalism and convened by Women Photograph, a non-profit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists; Diversify Photo, a community of photographers, editors, and visual producers working to diversify how people interact with media; and Getty Images.
July 2022
07-26-2022
Asleep on the job? Dr. Sara Mednick ’95, Bard alumna and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, says that could be a good thing for productivity. Speaking with Discover magazine, Mednick shared insights into the cognitive benefits of naps, which “benefit everything that nighttime sleep helps, including emotional regulation, attention, alertness, motor function and memory.” The length and timing of a nap also impacts its effects on our well-being, with higher benefits from naps before 1 pm, leading many companies and universities to create “designated sleeping pods to allow students and employees to nap whenever they need to.” Building off of findings from a 2018 paper coauthored by Mednick, Discover outlines that while “the benefits of napping may vary across different individuals,” given their many cognitive benefits, it might be time to reconsider how naps fit into our personal and professional lives.
07-26-2022
For her “lyrical and haunting” Senior Project, I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, Alice Fall ’22 won second place in Lenscratch’s 2022 Student Prize Awards. “In Alice Falls’s I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, images are alive, the still photographs aren’t still,” writes Alexa Dilworth. Fall will receive $750 as well as a mini exhibition on the Curated Fridge as part of the prize package. In an interview with Lenscratch, Fall described her process and artistic philosophy. “When I am in tune with my body and emotion and the way I physically respond to an image—whether I am making work or engaging with images I’ve already made, my vision is sharpest,” she said.
07-19-2022
Bard College’s Division of the Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Anne Hunnell Chen as Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year.
Anne Hunnell Chen specializes in the art and archaeology of the globally connected Late Roman world. She is the founder and director of the NEH-funded International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), aimed at virtual reassembly and recontextualization of archaeological information from a uniquely preserved archaeological site of cross-disciplinary significance. Dr. Chen has published on Roman, Persian, and Digital Humanities topics, and taught equally wide-ranging coursework.
In addition, she is currently at work on a monograph, Tetrarchic Art, Architecture, and Ideology Between East and West (284-325 CE). Taking a transculturally-sensitive, multimedia, and contextual approach, hers is the first book to treat the imperial art of this critical transitional era in its own right, rather than as an accessory in a longue durée narrative. She argues that emperors of this era sensitively adjusted their ideological messaging to address ever-evolving internal and external political pressures—including inordinate pressure from the Persian Sassanid East—and that the stylistic abstraction most commonly associated with the imperial art of the period was not as all-pervasive as generally assumed.
She has excavated at the Roman Baths in Iesso (Spain), and at the Roman imperial palace at Felix Romuliana (Serbia), a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2013–14, she spent a year as a fellow in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she worked on the international loan exhibition Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. Dr. Chen also serves as co-chair of the international Pelagios Network, and an historical consultant for the Virtual Center for Late Antiquity (VCLA).
She earned her B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fields of Art History and Classical Studies, and her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Bard community, she taught at Brown, Hofstra, and Yale Universities.
Anne Hunnell Chen specializes in the art and archaeology of the globally connected Late Roman world. She is the founder and director of the NEH-funded International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), aimed at virtual reassembly and recontextualization of archaeological information from a uniquely preserved archaeological site of cross-disciplinary significance. Dr. Chen has published on Roman, Persian, and Digital Humanities topics, and taught equally wide-ranging coursework.
In addition, she is currently at work on a monograph, Tetrarchic Art, Architecture, and Ideology Between East and West (284-325 CE). Taking a transculturally-sensitive, multimedia, and contextual approach, hers is the first book to treat the imperial art of this critical transitional era in its own right, rather than as an accessory in a longue durée narrative. She argues that emperors of this era sensitively adjusted their ideological messaging to address ever-evolving internal and external political pressures—including inordinate pressure from the Persian Sassanid East—and that the stylistic abstraction most commonly associated with the imperial art of the period was not as all-pervasive as generally assumed.
She has excavated at the Roman Baths in Iesso (Spain), and at the Roman imperial palace at Felix Romuliana (Serbia), a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2013–14, she spent a year as a fellow in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she worked on the international loan exhibition Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. Dr. Chen also serves as co-chair of the international Pelagios Network, and an historical consultant for the Virtual Center for Late Antiquity (VCLA).
She earned her B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fields of Art History and Classical Studies, and her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Bard community, she taught at Brown, Hofstra, and Yale Universities.
07-11-2022
Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of painter Andy Robert as Visiting Artist in Residence in the Studio Arts Program for the fall 2022 semester.
Andy Robert (b. 1984, Les Cayes, Haiti) is a painter who conceptually negotiates abstraction with recognizable imagery; his paintings wrestle between the lyrical and the concrete. In a play of content and form, Robert’s paintings draw from a breadth of historical and personal references, which enjoys the tinkering that comes with painting pictures. Andy Robert lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
“I want my paintings to feel like sketches—quick with the immediacy and intimacy of a rough draft, haptic but thought out in terms of their scale, detail and consideration. As with a thumbnail, my intuitive, beginning impulses, gestural marks of dry-brushing and scraping; of adding and removing of paint and line considered and preserved and valued throughout the painting as it approaches its finish, its resolve.”
Through experimentation he has arrived at a deeply personal and an inventive, deconstructive approach to painting that relies on the premise that images are to be bent and folded, taken apart and put back together again; and a belief that art is a philosophical means to look at and examine things—to question, test ideas, and engage with the world. And that in painting a picture something is being taken apart to put back together; there is an inherent risk in breaking it.
A diasporic Haitian-American immigrant and painter, Andy Robert views the world critically as a contradiction of mass-communication and increased voicelessness. Interior and contemplative —like the telling of memory or that of a song, his topographical abstractions favor a wandering, poetic ambiguity, and a breaking free that is a strategic opacity abetted by his deconstructive application of paint, mosaic-like accumulations in assemblage, exhaust and come to.
Recent solo exhibitions include Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Significant group shows include MoMA PS1: Greater New York Exhibition (2021); Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Curated by Duro Olowu, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2020); Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe & Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); and We Go as They: Artists in Residence 2016-17, Studio Museum in Harlem (2016 – 2017).
Robert was a special gift recipient from The Estate of Pierre Guyotat (2021); the recipient of the Benny Andrews Fellowship for the MacDowell Residency in Peterborough, NH (2020); a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient (2019); and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award Recipient (2019).
He was in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Skowhegan, ME (2016); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016) and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2015). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The AstrupFearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL.
Andy Robert was recently named on the artist list for the 2022 edition of the Carnegie International, the United States’ oldest biennial-style show.
Andy Robert (b. 1984, Les Cayes, Haiti) is a painter who conceptually negotiates abstraction with recognizable imagery; his paintings wrestle between the lyrical and the concrete. In a play of content and form, Robert’s paintings draw from a breadth of historical and personal references, which enjoys the tinkering that comes with painting pictures. Andy Robert lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
“I want my paintings to feel like sketches—quick with the immediacy and intimacy of a rough draft, haptic but thought out in terms of their scale, detail and consideration. As with a thumbnail, my intuitive, beginning impulses, gestural marks of dry-brushing and scraping; of adding and removing of paint and line considered and preserved and valued throughout the painting as it approaches its finish, its resolve.”
Through experimentation he has arrived at a deeply personal and an inventive, deconstructive approach to painting that relies on the premise that images are to be bent and folded, taken apart and put back together again; and a belief that art is a philosophical means to look at and examine things—to question, test ideas, and engage with the world. And that in painting a picture something is being taken apart to put back together; there is an inherent risk in breaking it.
A diasporic Haitian-American immigrant and painter, Andy Robert views the world critically as a contradiction of mass-communication and increased voicelessness. Interior and contemplative —like the telling of memory or that of a song, his topographical abstractions favor a wandering, poetic ambiguity, and a breaking free that is a strategic opacity abetted by his deconstructive application of paint, mosaic-like accumulations in assemblage, exhaust and come to.
Recent solo exhibitions include Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Significant group shows include MoMA PS1: Greater New York Exhibition (2021); Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Curated by Duro Olowu, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2020); Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe & Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); and We Go as They: Artists in Residence 2016-17, Studio Museum in Harlem (2016 – 2017).
Robert was a special gift recipient from The Estate of Pierre Guyotat (2021); the recipient of the Benny Andrews Fellowship for the MacDowell Residency in Peterborough, NH (2020); a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient (2019); and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award Recipient (2019).
He was in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Skowhegan, ME (2016); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016) and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2015). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The AstrupFearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL.
Andy Robert was recently named on the artist list for the 2022 edition of the Carnegie International, the United States’ oldest biennial-style show.
07-05-2022
Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts and Director of Film and Electronic Arts Ephraim Asili directed the Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2023 Men’s fashion show in Paris. A tribute to Victor Abloh, fashion designer and creative director for Louis Vuitton who passed away in November 2021, the show opened with a cinematic prelude conceived and directed by Asili. Asili’s film, titled Strange Math, explores the relationship between imagination and reality, which are central themes to the collection. The show’s soundtrack was a combination of the score for the film, “Enlightenment” by the Sun Ra Arkestra, Florida A&M University in Tallahassee's a live performing marching band The Marching 100, and featured live performance by Kendrick Lamar.
June 2022
06-28-2022
The detective, as a figure, looms large in the “American mythology,” says Theo Wenner ’09, speaking to Interview about his new book of photography, Homicide. “It’s like a Western, or baseball,” Wenner says. “I wanted to see what it looks like now. Does it actually exist like you think it does? The way they dress, the way they talk?” In creating Homicide, which visually documents a year spent alongside the NYPD’s North Brooklyn Homicide squad, Wenner says his studies with Stephen Shore at Bard informed his approach to this work of photojournalism. “It’s not one single thing that Shore imparts on you. You start to realize the importance of objects,” Wenner says. Objects, Wenner says, can be more true than a portrait, which captures a projection of how someone wishes to be seen. Objects, by contrast, are “unbiased,” especially when it comes to the grim subject matter of Homicide. “You’re staring at the person’s face and it’s like they got caught mid-sentence, the eyes open and looking off into wherever, there’s like a yellow M&Ms wrapper next to the victim,” Wenner says. “Those little details take on so much significance.”
06-21-2022
Best known for Opus 40, “a massive hand-built sculpture, with ramps, walls, and pedestals, covering 6.5 acres in Saugerties” and “one of the first American ‘earthworks,’” the life and work of Harvey Fite ’30 will be presented in a retrospective running June 3–July 10, 2022, at the at Emerge Gallery and Lamb Center. Ahead of the exhibition, Chronogram covered the span of Fite’s life, including the influence dyslexia had on his life and his “fierce passion” and “geniality.” “Every life is a journey, but some people voyage farther than others,” writes Sparrow, noting Fite’s ultimate goal of “[reducing] the human body to its essential form, almost the way driftwood is smoothed by the action of water.” Let the Stone Tell the Story: An Inside Look at Sculptor Harvey Fite’s Studio Work runs June 3–July 10, 2022, at Emerge Gallery and the Lamb Center in Saugerties, New York.