News

Join Bard Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman for a remote, livestreamed conversation with Hugo Award–winning author N. K. Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy), whose new work The City We Became was released in March to great acclaim. Presented in association with Oblong Books & Music, the conversation is part of an ongoing Fisher Center series in which Gaiman discusses the creative process with another artist. The live webcast of this event is a project of UPSTREAMING: the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage.

GRAMMY Award–winning composer and longtime Bard professor Joan Tower’s first composition was “a total disaster.” Sixty years later, Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard, is one of the most celebrated composers in the world. Here, she talks with Kai Talim for Skip the Repeat about her wonderful childhood in Bolivia, her drive to compose, and how she, reluctantly at first, began to teach. “I came up here [to Bard] and I fell in love with this campus.... I love to teach. I didn’t know about that at the time. You have to start teaching to know whether you like it or not.”

Galleries and museums are getting creative about presenting work online during the coronavirus crisis. The Bard Graduate Center’s retrospective of works by architect-designer Eileen Gray, which opened a few weeks before lockdown, has now moved online, and it is well worth viewing virtually, writes the Times’s Jason Farago. “This exhibition and its website, with copious documents of [Gray’s] geometric carpets and tubular steel furniture, makes clear how central she was to this era of architecture, and how she transcended the house as a ‘machine for living’ to design places where you might actually want to live.”

Julia Bullock, Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna, offers the New York Times Frederica von Stade’s stunning performance of Massenet’s “Cendrillon” as her five minutes that will make you love opera.

The Spike Jonze documentary retells the band’s story from young NYC punks to hip-hop groundbreakers in a series of “raucous, poignant performances” (Rolling Stone). Jonze and Beastie Boys Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond talk to Esquire’s Johnny Davis about the making of the film, which premieres on Apple TV+ April 24.

The Bard College Dance Program and GIBNEY, a New York City–based dance and social justice organization led by Founder, Artistic Director, and CEO Gina Gibney, are creating a new partnership to begin in fall 2020. This will be the fourth professional partnership launched by the Dance Program, which began in 2009 with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.

The Bard Dance Program/Gibney Partnership will provide unique opportunities for Bard students to work closely with Gibney’s resident dance troupe, Gibney Company, a commission-based, repertory company that works with renowned and rising international choreographers representing a broad range of aesthetics and techniques.

Gibney Company artists and directors Amy Miller and Nigel Campbell, and Bard faculty member and Partnership Coordinator Tara Lorenzen* and Director of Dance Maria Simpson will spearhead the partnership.

Each semester, artists selected by Gibney’s leadership will teach courses embedded in Bard’s dance curriculum, including studio courses for all levels of dancers, as well as seminar courses that address discipline-specific topics, such as Dance Writing as Activism. A special feature of this partnership will be the opportunity to perform Bard Dance Senior Projects at Gibney Center in Manhattan in the spring. Gibney will also offer yearlong artistic advising of student choreographers. Extracurricular workshops and master classes will further enhance the educational field of study. Gibney Company’s residency at the College will include open rehearsals and a public showing. This partnership represents a wide-ranging vision of what dance can be in a liberal arts curriculum at a time when artist engagement in both local and global communities is essential.

*Tara Lorenzen has danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Stephen Petronio, Beth Gill, and Maria Hassabi, has worked for the American Dance Festival and Kaatsbaan|cultural park for dance on their education initiatives, and has been teaching in the Dance Program at Bard College since 2016.

“Life in the era of COVID-19, as in all times of crisis, amplifies our basic instincts. Do we become anxious or confident, selfish or generous, rigid or adaptable? The same applies to institutions. And right now, at this moment of national and global crisis, Bard College is demonstrating who we are: student-focused, innovative, entrepreneurial, and civically engaged.” —Jonathan Becker, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College

A broad network of Bard faculty and staff—including Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams in the Bard Architecture and Design Program; Maggie Hazen and Melinda Solis in Studio Arts; IT’s Doug O’Connor, Hayden Sartoris, and Christopher Ahmed; and the Philosophy Program’s Katie Tabb—has come together to produce face shields for frontline health-care workers who are grappling with a nationwide shortage of protective gear.

With two 3D printers loaned by Bard physicist Paul Cadden-Zimansky, Exo Adams and Santoyo-Orozco set up a makeshift lab in Tivoli to fabricate reusable face shields for health-care workers. When the lab is fully operational, they expect to produce up to 50 shields per week. Hazen and Solis have begun a production line as well, using 3D printers purchased with proceeds from a GoFundMe campaign established by MFA alumna Luba Drozd ’15 that has raised more than $20,000. A small batch of shields has already been distributed to Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson, New York, and the group is now looking for more distribution options in the Hudson Valley. Deliveries of face shields are also scheduled for Albany Medical Center and, in Dover, New Jersey, Saint Clare’s Hospital, where a Bard student’s relative works and on whose behalf the student made a request. Anyone interested in distribution or in assisting with the project should contact Doug O’Connor ([email protected]), who is centralizing the distribution efforts with the help of CCS Bard students.

And in Annandale, members of the Fisher Center’s Costume Shop—together with Audrey Smith from Buildings and Grounds, Rosalia Reifler from Environmental Services, and Saidee Brown from the President’s Office—have sewn nearly 200 face masks for the essential College employees who remain on campus.
 
To learn more about virtual engagement opportunities at Bard, visit Bard Connects.

Halter, who helped spearhead the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund to support out-of-work movie theater employees, talks to Film Comment’s Nellie Killian and Nicolas Rapold about the effects of the crisis on how we watch movies, what we’ve been watching, and the interesting overlaps between our ultramediated existence and experimental cinema.

How do you memorialize someone you’ve never met and whose name you may never know? In the audio piece Only Remains Remain, artist Freya Powell ’06 uses the structure of a Sophoclean chorus to create an elegy for the thousands of unidentified migrants who have died crossing the US southern border, and whose bodies are buried in unmarked graves across the border states. In  excerpts from a live performance developed as part of her residency at MoMA PS1, Powell utilizes pitch, intonation, breath, movement, and silence to embody a contemporary tragedy told through the story of Antigone.

Bard alumna Tschabalala Self ’12 talks to Vogue about celebrity culture, the uninhibited physicality of her work, and the use of fabric in her paintings. “I’m drawing with the sewing machine,” says Self. “I love this machine as an extension of my hand.”

Bard Photography Program faculty members Tim Davis and Stephen Shore, and other great photographers, are turning to Instagram to cure “corona claustrophobia” or to show how life has changed. “Pictures remind us that life does go on, and that there are spring snow storms,” says Shore, “for better or for worse. 

From war enactors to America’s southern border, An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, blurs the boundaries between photojournalism and fiction. Her work is currently featured in the “revelatory” career survey On Contested Terrain, at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art through July 26. (While the museum is temporarily closed because of the coronavirus, a video tour and selected images are available online at cmoa.org.)

The Bard College Theater and Performance Program presents a live-stream of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest on April 10 at 7 pm.

Romania. December 25, 1989. A dictator is executed. A totalitarian regime topples. What happens next? Caryl Churchill’s 1990 play depicts life during and after a repressive dictatorship. Reimagined as a digital presentation by a professional creative team and student performers, this 30-year old work approached from a 2020 point of view powerfully resonates with our current global state. ⠀
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YouTube Livestream ➡️ bit.ly/MadForestYT
Facebook Live ➡️ bit.ly/MadForestFB

#UPSTREAMINGFC #MADFORESTFC

 

Bard MFA alumna Luba Drozd has been working around the clock to make face shields for New York City hospitals in dire need of protective equipment during the COVID-19 emergency. With the help of a team of volunteers for distribution, she has been able to get nearly 200 masks to health care professionals in the city.

More great news for Bard first-year student Sonita Alizadeh this week: she has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia List in the Entertainment and Sports category. Alizadeh is an Afghan rapper and human rights activist. She escaped being sold into child marriage and is now a global advocate for women and girls, recently addressing the UN on child marriage.