News

Hudson Valley Balinese Gamelan Orchestras will host their annual spring concert on Friday May 9, at Bard College’s Olin Auditorium, with gamelans Giri Mekar and Chandra Kanchana. The program, featuring Balinese music and dance, begins at 8 p.m. Guest artists for this concert include Dr. Pete Steele from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Gamelan Dharmaswara, renowned Balinese dancer Shoko Yamamuro, and artistic director Professor Pak I. Nyoman Suadin, and a cast of over 40 students and community members.

On April 4, Bard College Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman and Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman took the stage at the Fisher Center for a historic conversation about cartooning and writing, working across artistic mediums, friendship, identity, and more.

Photographer Stephen Shore talks about his time in Israel and the West Bank creating work for From Galilee to the Negev, plus a look at his early years working in the medium.

Governors Island is getting a makeover, and Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, is organizing the park's new public art initiative.

Jazz musician and Bard MFA music/sound faculty member Matana Roberts is one of the inaugural recipients of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's Impact Awards. The new awards are part of the Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards, a special, 10-year initiative to support artists with flexible, multiyear funding in response to financial challenges that are specific to the performing arts. Doris Duke Impact Award recipients receive $80,000. Since commencing in April 2012, the program has awarded a total of $18.1 million to artists in the fields of jazz, dance and theater.

Taylor Davis's sculptures necessitate engaged reorientation on the part of the viewer. Her works—for example, the text cylinders in this exhibition—require "at least six orbital journeys" in order to be fully understood.

Bard alumni/ae Sean Colonna '12, Thomas "Parker" Hatley '13, and Molly McFadden MFA '12 have been awarded 2014–2015 Fulbright Scholarships. Colonna and McFadden will be working in Germany, Colonna teaching English and McFadden investigating current movements in the field of art and disabilities. Hatley has been selected for an English Teaching Assistant Award to Mexico.

With her debut film—Palo Alto, based on the short story collection by James Franco—the 27-year-old Coppola makes her own place in the family film dynasty.

When comics legends Neil Gaiman and Art Spiegelman shared the stage at the Fisher Center earlier this month, their discussion ranged across art forms and into history both personal and global.

The Bard College Photography Program announces that senior Max Gavrich is the first winner of the college's Lugo Land Prize. The award allows a graduating Bard photography major the opportunity to travel to the northern Italian city of Lugo to produce a new body of work. The student will be flown to Italy, receive room and board, and be aided in the development and production of a project of their devising in the town. Working with a designer in Lugo, the student will also make a limited-edition artist's book. The award provides an outstanding opportunity for the winner to continue his or her photographic practice after graduating from Bard.

Bard MFA Music/Sound faculty member Matana Roberts has been named as a recipient of the distinguished Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, which carries a prize of $75,000. Every year five mid-career, risk-taking artists in the categories of dance, film/video, music, theater, and visual arts are each selected to receive an award from the foundation. "Visionary composer, avant-garde saxophonist, and sound artist Matana Roberts was chosen as the winner in Music for her charismatic, powerful renderings of sound," says awards director Irene Borger. On May 9, the recipients will receive their awards at a private celebratory luncheon at the Herb Alpert Foundation in Santa Monica, California.

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presents the exhibitions Deviance Credits and Footnotes opening on April 13. Deviance Credits comprises 13 exhibitions and projects curated by second-year students in the graduate program in curatorial studies and contemporary art. Brought together in one exhibition, each gallery presents innovative approaches to contemporary art and exhibition making with over 35 artists, many of whom have created works specifically for the context of the Hessel Museum. The artworks selected for Footnotes are housed in the CCS Bard Hessel Museum, but their representations, meanings, and contexts exceed their physical locality. This exhibition spatially contextualizes artworks by rethinking the relationship between title, text, and footnote. Footnotes is co-curated by the class of 2015 M.A. candidates. Both exhibitions will be on view through May 25.

Learn more about Deviance Credits and Footnotes.

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College presents the American Symphony Orchestra on Friday, April 11, and Saturday, April 12, at 8 p.m. The program includes Johann Strauss Jr.’s Emperor Waltz, Accelerations, and On the Beautiful Blue Danube; Julius Conus’s Violin Concerto, featuring Zhi Ma ’15, violin; and Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 2. The concert will be conducted by Leon Botstein, music director. There will be a special preconcert talk by Alexander Bonus, assistant professor of music at Bard College, beginning at 7 p.m.

On Thursday, April 10, the Written Arts Program at Bard College presents a reading by Rikki Ducornet (Bard ’64). A poet, fiction writer, and visual artist, Ducornet’s many books include the recent novels Netsuke, Gazelle, The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition, and Phosphor in Dreamland. Publisher’s Weekly said of her story collection The Complete Butcher’s Tales: “[It’s] told in prose of such beauty that one can't help silently mouthing the words. Fluid, studied, almost overripe, it is also intensely visual.”

Live Arts Bard (LAB) is a partnership between the Theater and Performance Program and the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. As its acronym suggests, Live Arts Bard is a laboratory for new performance. Each year LAB will provide residencies for individual artists, or groups of collaborators, in theater, performance, dance, live arts, and allied art forms. Its aim is to develop a fertile and nurturing community of visiting artists and students, who work side by side to generate projects and new creative methodologies.