News

The exhibition catalogue Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich, by Soika and the Cambridge historian Bernhard Fulda, provides a new historical narrative for an artist who fashioned himself a martyr of the Nazi regime—a narrative that has had political reverberations for the current German government. 
 

Bard College is well represented in this year’s Grammy nominations. The Broadway production of Oklahoma!—which began at Bard and stars Patrick Vaill ’07—received a nomination for Best Musical Theater Album for the 2019 cast recording. The audio recording of Beastie Boys Book, containing stories about the late founding member Adam Yauch ’86, was nominated for Best Spoken Word Album. The Black Pumas, with Vince Chiarito ’08 on bass, received a nomination for Best New Artist. 

The collaborative work by Tanowitz and classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein—performed by Dinnerstein and Pam Tanowitz Dance—will have its New York premiere at the Joyce Theater on December 10.

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is pleased to announce that Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, has been selected as the recipient of the 2020 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of CCS Bard. For the past 21 years, the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence has celebrated and awarded the individual achievements of a distinguished curator whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive of exhibition-making today. The award reflects CCS Bard’s commitment to recognizing individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice. This year the award will be presented to Butler by artist Andrea Fraser at a gala celebration and dinner co-chaired by CCS Bard Board of Governors member Lonti Ebers and Chairman of the CCS Bard Board Martin Eisenberg, and will take place on April 7, 2020, at One Manhattan West, 395 9th Avenue, in New York City. Event location provided by Brookfield Properties with additional generous support from Lonti Ebers.

“Connie Butler represents the best of curating; independently minded, always curious, dedicated to artists and consistently bold in the scope of her exhibitions and choices of subject.  Her exhibitions are touchstones of curating in the United States—helping to redefine subjects and the institutions where she works.” —Tom Eccles, Executive Director, CCS Bard

The awardee is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. Past recipients include Harald Szeemann (1998), Marcia Tucker (1999), Kasper König (2000), Paul Schimmel (2001), Susanne Ghez (2002), Kynaston McShine (2003), Walter Hopps (2004), Kathy Halbreich and Mari Carmen Ramírez (2005), Lynne Cooke and Vasif Kortun (2006), Alanna Heiss (2007), Catherine David (2008), Okwui Enwezor (2009), Lucy Lippard (2010), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2011), Ann Goldstein (2012), Elisabeth Sussman (2013), Charles Esche (2014), Christine Tohme and Martha Wilson (2015), Thelma Golden (2016), Nicholas Serota (2017), Lia Gangitano (2018), and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2019).

“I am thrilled to receive the Audrey Irmas prize for curatorial excellence. The history of this award is truly a distinguished one and it is an honor to be among such incredible colleagues at this critical time in our field. Now more than ever our work matters and I continue to follow and support the work of artists and believe in the future of museums.” —Connie Butler

The 2020 award will once again be given under the name of patron Audrey Irmas, who has bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize of $25,000. Irmas is an emeritus board member of CCS Bard and an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award has been designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, and is based on his 2006 commission Bard Enter, conceived for the entrance to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.

Connie Butler is the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, where she has organized numerous exhibitions including the biennial of Los Angeles artists Made in L.A. (2014), Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth (2015) and Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space (2017). She also co-curated Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions which opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in April of 2018 and at the Hammer in October 2018; Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line, 2019 and Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence a retrospective exhibition which opened at the Hammer September 2019. From 2006 to 2013 she was The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she co-curated the first major Lygia Clark retrospective in the United States, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (2014); and co-curated On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010) and mounted Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, the first US retrospective of the artist’s career. Butler also organized the groundbreaking survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles where she was curator from 1996 to 2006.

You never know what you'll find in the Montgomery Place collection. The Curiosity Cabinet class, taught by Associate Professor of Art History Susan Merriam, meets regularly in the basement of the mansion at the Montgomery Place Campus to study some of the fascinating objects in the collection. Items include a mechanical cat, dueling pistols, and a chicken foot letter opener. The collection boasts well over 8,000 objects.

Students have been researching objects that illuminate the historical phenomenon of the curiosity cabinet. These collections of oddities, as small as a box or as large as a room, are precursors to the modern museum. In class on Tuesday, November 5, students gave presentations on their research, discussing such themes as shifting colonial structures in the era of the objects, the romanticism of nature and early American identity, and Victorian death culture.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, fabulous shells, valuable oil paintings, and exquisitely carved ivory pieces shared display space with oddly shaped vegetables, primitively taxidermied animals, and an array of other oddities in curiosity cabinets. Until relatively recently, scholars believed that the cabinets were merely eccentric exercises in the appreciation of peculiar or marvelous things. Recent research, however, has shown that the collections constitute a premodern system of classifying objects and an important step in the emergence of our modern taxonomic systems.

This course analyzes the emergence of the cabinets, the collecting practices that sustained them, the relationship between colonization and the cabinets, the curiosity aesthetic, and the role the cabinets played in the history of science. The main project for the course is to conceptualize and research a curiosity cabinet exhibition featuring objects from Montgomery Place. At least half of the classes during the semester meet at Montgomery Place, where students become familiar with the collections, learn about collections management, and do original research.

The exhibition of Montgomery Place objects and student research will take place at Stevenson Library over the winter, with an opening reception on December 10 from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
 

The winners of the 2019 Concerto Competition were announced on Saturday, November 2, after the final round of performances at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Twenty-one students in the Bard College Conservatory of Music competed for the honor over a three-day period. This year’s winners are two undergraduates—Gitta Markó ’20, violin, who performed Concerto funebre by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and Yixin Wang ’23, guzheng, who performed Fragrance of Jasmine Blossoms by Zhanhao He—and a second-year student in the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy, who performed Shéhérazade by Maurice Ravel. The three winners will perform as soloists with the Conservatory Orchestra, The Orchestra Now, or the American Symphony Orchestra during the 2020–21 season.

In “Evolution and Persistence: Bacewicz and Her Legacy,” Bard Music West “ensured that Bacewicz’s legacy continues to burn brightly.” Founded by Bard alumnae Allegra Chapman and Laura Gaynon, the organization presents an annual festival that endeavors to make 20th-century music relatable, in part by providing adequate context about the life and work of a single composer. This year’s festival presented three programs that illuminated the work of Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz.