News

The Beastie Boys’ 1986 debut LP Licensed to Ill—the first rap disc to top the Billboard 200 album chart—is among the 2021 inductees into the Grammy Hall of Fame. “We are proud to announce this year’s diverse roster of Grammy Hall of Fame inductees and to recognize recordings that have shaped our industry and inspired music makers of tomorrow,” Harvey Mason Jr., chair and interim president/CEO of the Recording Academy, said in a statement.
 

“[New York City gallery] Broadway inaugurated its storefront space with a hypnotic show by the restlessly intelligent indigenous filmmaker Sky Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians,” writes Andrea K. Scott. “The show’s centerpiece, Lore, was a short film with the fragmentary internal logic of dreams and the intimate mood of late-night conversations, circling a band of friends in a practice-room reverie, with Hopinka on bass. Lore itself is a rehearsal of sorts: its audio consists of early drafts and excerpts of Hopinka’s searing prose poem ‘Perfidia,’ published as an elegant book by Wendy’s Subway.” Sky Hopinka is assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard.

“The film critics, assembling virtually, gave its top award to First Cow, a delicate tale of friendship and capitalism in mid-1800s Oregon Territory,” writes AP of the new film by Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard. “Reichardt’s film, released in theaters in March just days before the onset of COVID-19 forced cinemas to close nationwide, hasn’t been widely seen but remains one of the year’s most critically acclaimed films.”

“New York–based outfit Grasshopper Film has acquired North American rights to Ephraim Asili’s debut feature, The Inheritance, following its premiere at Toronto and screening at the New York Film Festival,” writes Variety. “A Pennsylvania-born filmmaker, Asili has been exploring different facets of the African diaspora for nearly a decade, and The Inheritance is based on his own experiences in a Black liberationist group.” Ephraim Asili is assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard and a graduate of the Bard MFA Program.

“Aileen exhibited tenderness toward this queer Puerto Rican boy/man from the mean streets of Jamaica, Queens, and the Bronx. Once, after I performed a dance I’d choreographed, she gently said, ‘Come here, Beauty.’ (She called all her students Beauty.),” writes Aviles. “Aileen possessed a beautiful mix of tenderness and wackiness that reminded me of dance pieces she created which evolved into series of movements that depicted the fantastical worlds that she loved to conjure, worlds of powerful beauty and strong grace.”

“Aparicio’s work points to the profound oneness of all things” writes Wallace Ludel in Cultured. For a recent series, the artist painted trees in the outer neighborhoods of his native Los Angeles with layers of rubber until the material was thick enough to peel off, at which point it functions almost like a tapestry, having absorbed both the natural and manmade textures of the tree. “A good place to start thinking about the work is the interaction between human mark making and the textures that nature makes,” says Aparicio, “and the ways in which these are connected.”

Khalil and Sweitzer will receive up to $50,000 in funding for their joint film project Nosferasta, one of 35 proposals chosen from more than 4,000 entries. The winning artists range in age from 20 to 80, with 76 percent identifying as BIPOC, 55 percent as female, and 10 percent as having a disability. In addition to project funding, winners are given access to career development services across fields, with the goal of fostering sustainable practices on which the artists may build.

The Brooklyn Museum commissioned Bard College artist in residence Jeffrey Gibson to revive a neglected collection. Collaborating with associate professor of history Christian Ayne Crouch, the curators “took aim at the museum’s archive, cracking open the ideological biases—the ignorant and often racist beliefs and values—on which its collecting was premised,” writes Lynne Cooke of Artforum. Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks at the Brooklyn Museum is curated by Jeffrey Gibson and Christian Ayne Crouch with Eugenie Tsai and Erika Umali, and is on view through January 10, 2021.

Sky Hopinka, Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts, made Holland Cotter’s New York Times “Best in Show” list for 2020 with his exhibition at CCS Bard, Sky Hopinka: Centers of Somewhere. Also, don’t miss Professor Hopinka’s interview with the Sundance Institute. He talks about centering Indigenous perspectives in experimental storytelling, how Native audiences respond to his work, and how his poetry has slowly worked its way into his filmography.

“‘We’re trying to work against the flatness of video as a medium and embed it in sculpture in new ways,’ Gabe Rubin says of an installation he and Felix Bernstein have been tinkering with,” writes Tina Shrike. “It’s the latest project in their multidisciplinary practice, which has unfolded, Rubin says, like an ‘endless slumber party’ over the past decade. ‘It’s a conceptual struggle too, against the flattening of everything in life,’ Bernstein is quick to add.”

“What I love most about Sillman’s writing is how you can feel her pawing around in the dark, trying to suss out not only the right words to use, but the right way to contend with her subjects: the work of her peers and forebears, and the unwieldy question of painting’s status in a world preoccupied with bigger problems,” writes Andrea Gyorody. “She adeptly pokes fun at theory and art history, but she’s at her best making the case for awkwardness, for all that ‘which is fleshy, funny, downward-facing, uncontrollable.’”