News

The National Endowment for the Arts has approved a $30,000 Grants for Arts Projects award for “Freedom on the Move: Songs in Flight,” a project envisioned and led by art song organization Sparks & Wiry Cries for the commission of two world premieres and a subsequent performance tour in 2023. This ambitious musical project is a direct response to Cornell University’s Freedom on the Move (FOTM) database, housing digitized, searchable fugitive slave advertisements, resulting in a co-commission by Sparks & Wiry Cries and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. The grant was written by Sparks cofounders Martha Guth, Ithaca College, and Erika Switzer, Bard artist in residence; director, Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship; and faculty in Bard’s undergraduate Music Program, Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and Conservatory of Music, with Sparks Managing Editor Lucy Fitz Gibbon, faculty in Bard College's Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program.

The first commission is a song cycle by composer Shawn Okpebholo featuring four prominent classical musicians—soprano Karen Slack, countertenor Reginald Mobley, baritone Will Liverman, and pianist and Bard Conservatory faculty Howard Watkins—interlaced with material curated and performed by the singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Okpebholo’s cycle sets poetry curated by Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Duke University, whose work along with that of poet Crystal Simone Smith, Duke University, contextualizes and responds to documents in the FOTM database. This interdisciplinary song cycle will be accompanied by a choral work by Joel Thompson, drawing on the Spiritual tradition as well as the FOTM database. After a New York City premiere in early 2023, the project will travel to Philadelphia, Durham, and the Finger Lakes region of New York, in performances co-presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Lincoln University, Duke University, Cornell University, Ithaca College, the Harriet Tubman Home, Inc., in partnership with Sparks & Wiry Cries.

This project is among the more than 1,100 projects across America totaling nearly $27 million that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2021 funding.

“As the country and the arts sector begin to imagine returning to a post-pandemic world, the National
Endowment for the Arts is proud to announce funding that will help arts organizations such as Cornell’s Music Department reengage fully with partners and audiences,” said NEA Acting Chairman Ann Eilers. “Although the arts have sustained many during the pandemic, the chance to gather with one another and share arts experiences is its own necessity and pleasure.”

For more information on the projects included in the Arts Endowment grant announcement, visit
arts.gov/news.

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About Sparks & Wiry Cries
Sparks & Wiry Cries curates opportunities for art song creators, performers, and scholars through innovative initiatives that capture the stories of our diverse communities. For more information, visit sparksandwirycries.org.


About Freedom on the Move
Due to the breaking of family bonds and the illegality of literacy amongst enslaved people, there
remains a paucity of written records to track individual lives during the period of slavery. The Freedom on the Move database notes that it compiles “thousands of stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place. Created to control the movement of enslaved people, the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives—their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.” Cornell Department of History’s Dr. Ed Baptist and William Block, director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), are the principal investigators for FOTM, a joint project of the Department of History, CISER and Cornell University Library. Songs in Flight seeks to bring awareness to these individuals and to the creative possibilities made possible through FOTM, building a living monument to this erased history by highlighting stories of strength rather than stories of oppression. For more information, visit freedomonthemove.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/27/21)

Dancers' Group, a service and presenting organization in the San Francisco Bay Area, has awarded $105,000 in grants to 30 Bay Area dance artists and organizations during its spring 2021 round of CA$H Dance. The CA$H Dance program, which has been supporting dance makers since 1999, was designed by artists for artists, and seeks to support artists and organizations that represent the broad diversity of dance in the Bay Area.

Izzy Barber ’11 and Jibade-Khalil Huffman ’03 are two of the artists whose work is now available via the just-launched e-commerce venture Platform, which partners with independent galleries to host sales of original artwork. Izzy is represented by James Fuentes LLC, a NYC gallery owned by fellow Bardian James Fuentes ’98.

The Posse Foundation is expanding to recruit art students in Puerto Rico through a new project launched in collaboration with Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Miranda Family Fund and Bard College. Beginning this fall, the college success and youth leadership development organization will identify, select and train cohorts of high school seniors in Puerto Rico interested in pursuing undergraduate arts degrees at mainland US colleges.

Bard, which worked closely with Posse to initiate this new leadership scholarship, is offering full-tuition funding for study in its renowned arts programs and will recruit the inaugural class of Puerto Rico Arts Posse Scholars this fall. 

“As the son of two Puerto Rican migrants, this project is especially meaningful to me,” says Lin-Manuel, the award-winning creator and star of the Broadway musicals In the Heights and Hamilton. “So much of my work as an artist is informed and enriched by my Puerto Rican heritage. I’m excited to partner with Posse to increase opportunities for the next generation of Boricuas to lead as actors, musicians, painters, dancers, sculptors.”

This new effort is the latest expansion of the Posse Arts initiative, which aims to create a diverse pipeline of leaders in both fine arts and performing arts fields. Bard joins California Institute of the Arts—which will recruit Arts Posse students from New York City this fall—as a premier partner. Over the next five years, Bard will award in excess of $10 million in full-tuition scholarships to Arts Posse Scholars from Puerto Rico.

“We’re delighted to be the first institutional partner for the new Posse Arts Program in Puerto Rico,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “Recruiting a cohort of young artists from Puerto Rico for our Arts Division aligns perfectly with our belief in the importance of the arts in higher education and in increasing access. We are excited to be embarking on this new project with Posse and look forward to selecting the first class in December and welcoming them to our campus.”

Winners of the prestigious award will be selected for their exceptional leadership potential as well as artistic ability. Like all Posse Scholars, Puerto Rico Arts Posse Scholars will receive full-tuition scholarships from participating institutions, where they will attend as members of a team. Other supports will include eight months of pre-college training leading up to matriculation and faculty mentoring once enrolled.

Posse Scholars—a majority of whom are first-generation collegegoers from low-income BIPOC communities—reflect the diversity of their school districts. To be considered for the award, students must first be nominated by their high school or a community-based organization. Nominees then take part in Posse’s Dynamic Assessment Process, an innovative, nontraditional method for assessing leadership and academic potential.

The Posse Arts Program was launched on April 15 at an event hosted by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Warner Bros. Pictures. Former First Lady Michelle Obama celebrated the new initiative in a message to attendees, saying, “Thank you for what you are doing; it couldn’t be more important. Behind every great artist—just like every great engineer, doctor, lawyer, business leader, and, yes, president and first lady—is a great Posse.”

As part of their involvement with the new arts program in Puerto Rico, Lin-Manuel and the Miranda Family Fund together with the Flamboyan Foundation and the Hispanic Federation—organizations with wide footprints in Puerto Rico—will work with Posse to establish a network of nominators throughout the island. They will also assemble a group of accomplished artists in a diversity of fields to help enrich various aspects of the program.

“Bringing Posse to Puerto Rico is a dream project,” says Luis Miranda, Jr., a leading political strategist and father of Lin-Manuel. “Puerto Rico is home to so many brilliant young people who are gifted artists. This Posse expands their horizons so they can pursue their creative aspirations at a professional level. Connecting them to leading institutions like Bard not only expands opportunities for them to hone their craft and build successful careers as artists, but also helps position them to lead in their fields. That’s exciting.”

The Posse Foundation plans to grow its arts initiative—both in Puerto Rico and in the contiguous United States—to include six top-tier arts colleges. At capacity, the program will support 300 Arts Posse Scholars annually, providing upwards of $12 million in full-tuition scholarships each year.

 “It’s difficult to overstate the importance of having leaders in the arts who reflect our unique diversity,” says Posse President and Founder Deborah Bial. “So much of who we are and who we can imagine ourselves becoming hinges on representation. Our expansion to Puerto Rico is a natural extension of Posse’s mission to build a diverse, equitable, inclusive leadership network we can all be proud of. I’m so thankful to Lin-Manuel and President Botstein at Bard for collaborating on this exciting initiative.”

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About The Posse Foundation
Posse started in 1989, inspired by a student who said, “I never would have dropped
out of college if I’d had my Posse with me.” Posse recruits students as seniors in high school, works with them through an eight-month pre-collegiate training program, supports them through all four years of college, and helps them secure competitive internships and leadership-track jobs. 

Posse Scholars represent the diversity of the cities from which they are recruited and are majority first-generation collegegoers. To be considered for the award, students must first be nominated by their high school or a community-based organization. Nominees then take part in Posse’s Dynamic Assessment Process, an innovative, nontraditional method for assessing leadership and academic potential.

Posse partners with 63 highly selective colleges and recruits dynamic students from more than 20 cities across the United States. To date, more than 10,000 students have won over $1.6 billion in scholarships from Posse partner colleges and universities. Most important, Scholars graduate at a rate of 90 percent—a rate that well exceeds the national average and equals or exceeds the average graduation rates at most selective colleges in the United States.

For more information about The Posse Foundation, visit possefoundation.org.

To nominate a student from Puerto Rico, visit possefoundation.org/recruiting-students/arts-nominations

 

“Adam Khalil’s work breaks and bends linear time, weaves narrative, documentary, and experimental forms together with humor and unapologetic political inquiry to address the ongoing trauma of colonization,” writes the Albert panel. “Above all, his practice is a collaborative one, with multiple collaborations and multiple roles within each collaboration. He and Zack Khalil ’14, his brother, are currently working on a new feature documentary about the repatriation of Native American human remains.”

Bard College is pleased to announce that Daaimah Mubashshir will join the College’s Theater and Performance Program as Playwright in Residence, effective fall 2021. A playwright and theater-maker, Mubashshir is the artistic director of {EDAP}, which “produces moving image work, text, and performance to give audiences a kinetic experience of black bodies freeing themselves from the bondage of our past.”

About Daaimah Mubashshir
Daaimah Mubashshir is a playwright and theatre-maker. Her work has been commissioned by the Guthrie Theater and 3 Hole Press. Awards include a 2020-2022 WP Theater Lab Fellowship, 2019-2022 Core Writer Fellowship (Playwrights Center, MN), an 2018 Audrey Residency (New Georges), a MacDowell Fellowship, a Catwalk Institute Residency, a Foundation of Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. She is also a proud alumna of Fire This Time Festival.

Her published works include Molasses and A Blue Coat - Kenyon Review Online, The Zero Loop (No Tokens Journal), Come with Me - Solve for X in The Occasional 2, edited by Will Arbery (53rd State Press), and The Immeasurable Want of Light (3 Hole Press). Selected stage plays include Room Enough (Fire This Time Festival, Pride Plays), The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente, and Emily Black is A Total Gift (New Georges).

Daaimah has been a guest speaker at Yale School of Drama, Williams College, Skidmore College, and Kennesaw State University. For more information, visit daaimahmubashshir.com and everydayafroplay.com.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/18/21)

The American Academy in Berlin has awarded Christopher H. Gibbs, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, a 2021-22 Berlin Prize. The Berlin Prize is awarded annually to American or US-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields, from the humanities and social sciences to journalism, public policy, fiction, the visual arts, and music composition. Gibbs, who is also artistic codirector of the Bard Music Festival and a professor at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, was named a spring 2022 Berlin Prize fellow. Fellows spend a semester at the Academy’s lakeside Hans Arnhold Center, a historic nineteenth-century villa located in Berlin’s Wannsee district.

“Gibbs has long been committed to so-called public musicology, especially to forging links between music scholarship and general audiences through curated concerts and festivals,” writes the American Academy in Berlin in its award citation. “In Berlin, he will explore the past, present, and future of concert life in the city.”

“I am thrilled by the opportunity to think intensely about curation, something familiar with museums but much less so with music,” said Gibbs. “Berlin’s rich musical history and its innovative scene today provide abundant material to help reimage the future, especially in the wake of the pandemic and amid struggles for social justice.”

About the 2021-22 Berlin Prize
Chosen by an independent selection committee, the 2021-22 class of Berlin Prize fellows will pursue a wide array of scholarly and artistic projects, including histories of the legalities of small wars among European empires, the Visigothic political order, competing conceptions of self-government in English and American political thought, Algerian Jewish life, and the Greek Revolution; two new novels and a graphic memoir; investigations into lithium extraction in the US, Chile, and Argentina; EU-China-US relations in the context of global supply chains; the relationship between declining coal-use and the rise of populism; European attitudes toward global democratic decline; and new works by a composer, translator, and two visual artists.

The Berlin Prize provides recipients the time and resources to advance important scholarly and artistic projects, free from the constraints of other professional obligations. Fellows work throughout the semester with Berlin peers and institutions in the Academy’s well-established network, forging meaningful connections that lead to lasting transatlantic relationships. During their stays, fellows engage German audiences through lectures, readings, and performances, which form the core of the American Academy’s public program. For more information, click here.

About Christopher H. Gibbs
Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College; faculty, Bard College Conservatory of Music; and artistic codirector, Bard Music Festival. He is the executive editor of The Musical Quarterly; editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (1997); author of The Life of Schubert (2000), which has been translated into five languages; coeditor of Franz Liszt and His World (2006) and Franz Schubert and His World (2014); and coauthor of The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition (2013; 2nd ed., 2018). He is a contributor to New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 19th-Century Music, Schubert durch die Brille, Current Musicology, Opera Quarterly, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Additionally, he has served as program annotator and musicological consultant to the Philadelphia Orchestra (2000– ); musicological director of the Schubertiade at the 92nd Street Y in New York City; musicological adviser for the Schubert Festival at Carnegie Hall (1997); and artistic codirector of the Bard Music Festival (2003– ). Among Gibbs’s previous honors were the Dissertation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Institute, ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award, and American Council of Learned Societies fellowship. He previously taught at SUNY Buffalo (1993–2003). BA, Haverford College; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. At Bard since 2002.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/13/21)

The Fountain Film Festival, a student-led project sponsored by the Open Society University Network and Bard College Berlin, has announced audience awards given to short student films screened online May 8 and 9. The Best Film Award went to Sirens by Alina Asylbekova from American University of Central Asia and the Audience Award went to 8 de Marzo by Ariela Madera from Bard College.

The photographs of An-My Lê play with assumptions about photographic truth and narrative, questioning how we process mediated information. Whether by capturing confederate monuments removed from their pedestals, war reenactments, or American soldiers training in 29 Palms, California, Lê reframes American history and its myriad legacies. She chooses viewpoints that, in her words, “speak to experiences of a shared past in an unfolding present.” In this live conversation, Lê speaks with Getty Museum assistant curator Mazie Harris about her experience traveling across the United States to make photographs.

The Bard College Art History and Visual Culture Program announces the appointment of Heeryoon Shin as tenure track faculty, effective fall 2021. Shin specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on early modern and colonial India.

About Heeryoon Shin
Heeryoon Shin’s current book project, tentatively titled Temples Between Empires: Architectural Encounters in Banaras, ca. 1750-1850, explores architectural revival, cross-cultural exchange, and historiography during the fraught moments of transition between the Mughal and British empires through the lens of temple architecture in the Hindu pilgrimage city of Banaras. Shin’s work on temple architecture is part of a larger interest in the complexity of global and local exchanges fostered by travel, trade, and colonialism, and she is currently developing a second project on the global circulation of blue-and-white ceramics and their interaction with the local production and use in South Asia. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Samsung Scholarship Foundation, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and published in Artibus Asiae and Journal 18.

Shin received her PhD in the History of Art at Yale University in 2015. She also has secondary training in East Asian art from Seoul National University in South Korea, where she received her BA and completed MA coursework in Art History. Her transnational research interests and training tie into her teaching, which ranges from introductory courses on South Asian art and Korean art to broader thematic courses that emphasize interregional connections across Asia and beyond, including art and ritual, architecture and empire, and decorative arts and maritime trade. In Fall 2021, she is excited to teach new courses on the visual cultures of colonial South Asia and the history and politics of craft with a focus on twentieth-century South Asia, Japan, and Korea. Before coming to Bard, she taught at Colorado College, Williams College, and Vanderbilt University, where she recently received a COVID-19 Innovative Teaching Award. 

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/11/21)
 

Day’s End (2014–21), located in Hudson River Park opposite the Whitney Museum of American Art, “is Hammons’s first permanent public artwork in more than three decades, located in tantalizing proximity to one of the many major institutions that the artist has spent a career impishly frustrating, critiquing, and flirting with,” writes Professor L’Official in Artforum. “Engaging with the nearby institution while evading it, it is a space of possibility that encloses no space at all. Its form is rigid, yet time and tide and air and light flow beneath, above, and through it, and the structure continually reframes the world as we move around it. It is infinitely propositional, an architectural frame to house unhoused improvisation.”

“Built on the gnawed bones of its predecessor, and reset in the modern-day South among members of a Black family that runs a barbecue restaurant, ‘Fat Ham’ refuses the tropes of Black suffering even as it engages the seriousness of the Shakespeare. It is the rare takeoff that actually takes off—and then flies in its own smart direction.” The world digital premiere of Fat Ham is streaming through May 23 as part of the Wilma Theater’s virtual spring season.