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Two Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Art history and Italian studies major Francesca Houran ’23 has been awarded $5,000 towards her studies at the University of Trento in Italy, where she will be the first to participate in a newly established tuition exchange program with Bard. “Through studying abroad, I hope to further my knowledge of the hermaphrodite within the context of the Italian Renaissance and how it influences the gender binary in contemporary Italy. I am also excited to explore the ascending, vertically-oriented architecture of museums, churches, and monuments that prompts climbing and physical ascension as a symbol of conquest and hierarchy,” says Houran. “My overarching goal is to build a foundation for a career in ethical museum curation and nuanced communication of histories surrounding gender, race, and colonialism—a goal that traveling through the Gilman Scholarship will make possible for me as a low-income college student.”

Biology major and premed student Emma Tilley ’23 has been awarded $4,500 to study via Bard’s tuition exchange at the University College Roosevelt in the Netherlands. “I am grateful for the Gilman scholarship and excited for the opportunity to travel abroad and learn more about international healthcare systems and the ways that Covid has impacted nations differently. My additional focus is to continue working on promoting inclusion in STEM on a global scale,” says Tilley.

Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 34,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. 

As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”

The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org.

In a thorough exploration of recent photography books for the New York Times, Lucy Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, reviews works by Annie Leibovitz, Harry Gruyaert, Catherine Opie, and more, as well as a new book by Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. Sante calls the physical mass of Gilles’ new work “intimidating,” going on to say that the book is nothing less than “capacious.”

Documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, these “two enormous volumes of plates, the size of 19th-century ledgers, and an accompanying almanac” provide the reader with something unique, Sante writes, “not a timeline but a series of existential crises that recur like rituals, that also play out in headlines, TV news footage and, above all, graffiti, rises in waves and recedes into choppiness, as capacious as a 19th-century novel but as indeterminate as an ocean.” Gilles’ photos are “never at rest,” she writes, with violence “always imminent if not present.”
Sante goes on to review a bevy of books by other “masters of the form,” including new work by Annie Leibowitz and Catherine Opie. Calling Opie “a portraitist of unusual poise,” whose subjects are often “trans people, butch lesbians, [and] fetishists of diverse sorts,” Sante writes that Opie’s “stately presentations have done much to infuse dignity into their public perception.” Later, reviewing work by Mitch Epstein, who “works like a nonfiction writer,” Sante notes his skill as a sort of aesthetic documentarian. “His photographs are always lucid and eloquent,” she writes, “and often very beautiful despite their grim subjects.”

Full Story in the New York Times

A new 14-minute work by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, was reviewed in the New York Times. “Imaginative writing for percussion and bustling rhythmic activity — long traits of Tower’s music — course through this restless, episodic score,” writes Anthony Tommasini. Tower, “as inventive as ever,” debuted the piece with the New York Philharmonic as part of Project 19, which commissioned 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment. “1920/2019” represented the resumption of the series and a return of Tower’s “multilayered, meter-fracturing” style.

Read the Review in the New York Times

 

“Understood or not, McLuhan’s work was influential in its time, and with Distant Early Warning, Alex Kitnick shows how it spoke to numerous artists of the avant-garde,” writes Kelvin Browne in Literary Review Canada. “These artists may already have been aware, even if not consciously, that twentieth-century media consumption was leading to a significant cultural shift, but McLuhan’s analysis helped give shape to their intuitions. That’s why, Kitnick argues, McLuhan should be considered more relevant today than he is: not because of his role in nascent media studies but because he was a bona fide player in the art world.”

Kitnick describes his new book as an introduction to McLuhan’s theory of art. Each chapter positions McLuhan, who is most famous for the idea that “the medium is the message,” into context with individual contemporary artists through “concrete points of contact.” In doing so, Kitnick wants to “to reimagine the relationship between theory and practice, criticism and art.” Alex Kitnick is assistant professor of art history and visual culture and faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

“Author Lucy Sante is at an interesting point in her life, looking backward and forward simultaneously,” writes Bob Krasner for the Villager. “With the release of her latest book, a collection of essays entitled Maybe the People Would Be the Times, she has gathered together pieces that form a kind of memoir—even in the fiction that weaves in and out of the examinations of music, art, tabloids, photography and her life in the East Village many years ago. Between the creation of this book and its actual publication, Sante has entered a new phase of her life [...] In her mid-60’s, Sante has recently come out as transgender, changed her name and is happily living her life with a new set of pronouns.” Lucy Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1999.

The French newspaper Le Monde reviews S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence Kelly Reichardt’s film First Cow as a “chef-d’œuvre” or “masterpiece” and calls her one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema. In French.

Bard Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Yebel Gallegos joins Joanna Kotze in conversation for Long Distance Dance Dialogues Exchange #8. In the exchange, Gallegos talks about his journey as a musician in high school, to dancing, and now to being an educator. They also discuss borders, culture, and balancing all of one's passions, interests, and selves. The second part of the exchange is video of movement that has been relayed from Milka Djordjevich in Los Angeles to Yebel Gallegos in Annandale-on-Hudson. Djordjevich does her original movement and then both Djordjevich and Gallegos do Djordjevich's movement, which Gallegos learned. Gallegos will add onto this and that movement will be passed on to Sarah Beth Oppenheim in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Long Distance Dance Dialogues is a series of exchanges between Joanna Kotze and 12 dancers/choreographers around the world and throughout the United States between January–December 2021. Each exchange begins with a video interview that will be archived online and shared with the public once a month beginning in March 2021. The discussion is followed by sharing one minute or less of movement, as a relay, from one dancer to the next, linking us together through the making, learning, and documenting of dance. Each relay of movement will also be archived and shared online in its intentionally raw, unpolished form, once a month. At the end of the year, a film bringing together all parts of the relay will be shared as a record of the project. 

Aperture has announced the shortlists for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, which include Bard alumna Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10 and Photography Program faculty members Farah Al Qasimi and Gilles Peress. Phyars-Burgess is listed in the First Book category for Untitled (Capricious Publishing, 2021). On the Photobook of the Year list, Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography Farah Al Qasimi was selected for Hello Future (Capricious Publishing, 2021) and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress was chosen for Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Steidl, 2021). Initiated in 2012, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. The jury reviewed more than 800 submissions this year and selected only 35 books. A final jury will select winners next month.

An Immersive Experience of Harmony, Poetry and Gesture, Featuring 50 Singers

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY—The Fisher Center LAB (Fisher Center at Bard’s residency and commissioning program) and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities have teamed up to develop and present a new iteration of The Gauntlet, an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol. Performed on and around the lawn of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, including on the Olafur Eliasson installation “the parliament of reality,” performances will take place on Friday, October 15 at 5:30 pm; Saturday, October 16 at 1 pm and 3 pm; and Sunday, October 17 at 5:30pm. Tickets are $25. Bard students may access tickets for $5 made possible by the Passloff Pass. To purchase or reserve tickets visit fishercenter.bard.edu, call 845-758-7900 (Mon–Fri 10am – 5pm), or email [email protected].

An intimate, personal experience utilizing the exterior landscapes of the Fisher Center, audiences will be led through musical corridors of sonic architecture formed by the human voice. The Gauntlet is site-specific and bespoke. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.” 

“Freedom in the sense of the power to act and speak in public spaces is at the heart of Hannah Arendt’s political thinking,” said Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center. “For Arendt, freedom happens in a public space. The Gauntlet is so exciting because it brings people together to experience thinking about freedom in a collective space. And the setting in Olafur Eliasson’s ‘parliament of reality’ provides a context of democratic spaces in which to experience thinking about freedom to act in the practice of self-government. I can’t think of a better way to conclude the Arendt Center’s conference on ‘Revitalizing Democracy and Spaces of Freedom.’” 

The libretto, written by Shirey and Karol, is comprised of text generated from 20 “movement interviews” with local activists, organizers, artists, scholars, elected officials, and citizens, conducted by Karol as a way to explore individual and collective experiences on the theme of freedom. The Gauntlet will bathe audiences in waves of harmony, poetry and gesture, sung by a choir of 50 singers, assembled from all corners of the Bard College and Hudson Valley community. Audiences are led through the performance by four dancers (Karol, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Effy Grey, and Remi Harris). 

Shirey composes the score utilizing melodies and harmonies that are passed from singer to singer in a chain of exchange, creating a “gauntlet” of sound and story, exchanged through the immersive performance as audience members flow through the pathways of sound. Says Shirey about the process, “I am constantly imagining how the audience will hear these stories as a rush of words flowing by, in exchange from singer to singer. The hope is to write grounded phrases and fractile melodies that bloom the minds of the listener.”
 

Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress, who has chronicled war and its aftershocks all over the world, was at home in Brooklyn on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he got a call from his studio manager, telling him to turn on the TV: a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. “I looked at it, and it was evident that it was not only a major incident but that it was not an accident; it was an attack,” Peress recalled in the New Yorker.

The digitally remastered Arthur Avilés Collection includes video documentation spanning this groundbreaking dancer/choreographer’s decades-long career. To mark its publication, the Hemispheric Institute and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!) are cosponsoring Naked Vanguard: The Arthur Aviles Archive in Motion, a series of conversations and performances that are available for streaming through the Institute’s HemiTV portal.

“Jim Jarmusch’s small, eerie collages are all about faces,” writes Sante in the Paris Review. “And about the bodies attached to those faces. And about what happens when faces get switched off onto other bodies. You could say that Jarmusch, ever the director, is engaging in exploratory casting. He wants to see Stanley Kubrick in the role of a golfer, and Nico as a Vegas crooner, and Jane Austen winding up on the mound, and Albert Einstein as a rock star, and Bernie Sanders as a dog. Andy Warhol, meanwhile, just goes ahead and casts himself in every role, turning all of them into ‘Andy Warhol.’” Luc Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College.

“For Pfaff, more is more,” writes Andre van der Wende for the Provincetown Independent. “Her work is characterized by an eyes-wide-open, constantly curious approach, finding new ways of seeing—fresh nooks and crannies relating to science, psychology, astronomy, or the body.” The show is on view through October 31 at the Gaa Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Judy Pfaff is the Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) today announced the creation of a $50-million endowment, comprising a $25-million gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and a matching commitment of $25 million from George Soros as part of Bard College’s transformational $1-billion endowment drive. Established in 1990, CCS Bard is the first institution of its kind in the United States dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, an interdisciplinary field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform contemporary art exhibition-making and practice. This unprecedented donation, initiated by the Hessel Foundation in honor of CCS Bard’s 30^th anniversary year, enables CCS Bard to continue its pathbreaking work in perpetuity.

The Hessel Foundation gift builds on over three decades of visionary support from CCS Bard Co-Founder Marieluise Hessel. In the late 1980s, the Foundation entrusted its growing collection of contemporary art to Bard for the exclusive use of its students and faculty, laying the groundwork for the creation of CCS Bard in 1990. Since that time, the Foundation has been an enduring supporter of CCS Bard with transformational gifts including the construction of the Hessel Museum of Art in 2006 and the expansion of the library, special collections, and archives in 2015, alongside annual operating contributions that have inspired many others to support the institution. Its collection, which forms the cornerstone of CCS Bard’s master’s program and the basis for many of its exhibitions at the museum, has grown to encompass approximately 2,000 works of art and is today considered to be among the most important collections of contemporary art on a university campus. Support from the Foundation has also enabled CCS Bard to provide 90% of incoming students with financial aid.

“This gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation marks a milestone moment in the 30-year history of CCS Bard,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “The groundwork that Marieluise established in co-founding the institution has catalyzed a shift in the field and, by extension, has advanced bold new discourses in contemporary art. In sustaining CCS Bard for generations to come, Marieluise’s generosity will allow us to build on that legacy and continue to advance new ideas in curatorial practice and contemporary art. Above all, it is a gift to the future.”

“CCS Bard is an integral part of the Bard College community, and we are immensely grateful for Marieluise’s enduring leadership and support. Her generous gift ensures that the groundbreaking work at CCS continues to flourish as it further advances Bard’s overall mission of fostering rigorous programs of free inquiry and creativity,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein.

“For the past 30 years, CCS Bard has had an outsized impact within the art world,” said Marieluise Hessel, Co-Founder of CCS Bard. “It is a privilege to be able to celebrate three decades of sustained, transformational inquiry and experimentation into curatorial studies and exhibition-making with this gift. I know that this program will continue to lead the way in finding new stories to tell, artists to champion, and boundaries to push.”

In celebration of its 30^th anniversary, CCS Bard is currently presenting two exhibitions that draw significantly from the Marieluise Hessel Collection: Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection comprises more than 75 works on paper and drawings collected by Hessel over the course of more than four decades to explore the artistic intimacy achieved by the medium; and With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, the first large-scale North American survey of the groundbreaking women-led Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s, showcasing major works from the Collection alongside significant loans to trace the movement's reach in postwar American art.

In addition, this fall CCS Bard will publish the first comprehensive publication on the Marieluise Hessel Collection, examining the impact of the collection on CCS Bard students through original writing from CCS alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Serubiri Moses, and Gabi Ngcobo, among many others.

About Marieluise Hessel and the Marieluise Hessel Foundation
Born in Munich in 1939, Marieluise Hessel began collecting contemporary art in the 1960s. From the first works purchased from Heiner Friedrich in Germany, the Hessel Collection, which is held in trust by the Foundation, has grown contemporaneously with artists working from the middle of the 20th century through the present. The Collection today is considered among the most important contemporary art collections on a university campus and is remarkable for its breadth, eclecticism, and embrace of undervalued and difficult works of art. Hessel co-founded CCS Bard in 1990, launching a groundbreaking new type of institution dedicated to nurturing the next generation of contemporary art curators and critics.

About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection at its core, alongside extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice since its founding in 1990. Through its rigorous, interdisciplinary program and unmatched resources, CCS Bard provides unparalleled opportunities for students to research and organize museum exhibitions on an independent basis, and in so doing acts as a key platform for the next generation of curators, artists, and art world leaders in the earliest stages of their careers. CCS Bard receives support from a range of public and private foundations and individuals, including major support from the Luma Foundation, The Laura-Lee Whittier Woods Foundation, the Keith Haring Foundation, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation among others.

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 its 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.

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Avilés, award-winning Bronx-based dancer/choreographer, will perform in two events and be celebrated by NYU's Hemispheric Institute. After graduating from Bard, Avilés joined the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. In 1998, he co-founded The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!), a performance space that blazed a path for professional art and dance in the Bronx. Avilés received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bard in 2015, a Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) award, and multiple Bessie Awards including a 2020 Bessie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance.

After 40 years in prison, Gregory Mingo was pardoned on the night of Monday, August 23, along with several other incarcerated people, in one of Andrew Cuomo’s last acts as governor of New York State. Bard College students in HR 321, Advocacy Video, worked together with students in the Defenders Clinic at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to create short video self-presentations by applicants for clemency in fall 2020, including one with Mr. Mingo. The Bard-CUNY team visited Mr. Mingo in prison in the midst of the pandemic to interview him.

To be granted clemency is a rare victory after an arduous process on the part of the incarcerated individual and their advocates. “There could not be a better person to leave prison and rejoin the rest of us,” wrote Thomas Keenan and Brent Green, who cotaught the class, in a message to the Bard community. Watching the video, they said, “you can easily see why the Governor's decision was long overdue. Advocating for basic human rights and decency, especially in apparently enlightened situations like ours, ought to be unnecessary. The reason we teach this at Bard, and attempt to put it into practice, is that it's not, and because sometimes—but who knows when—it works.”

Advocacy Video is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences class cotaught by Thomas Keenan, professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Program, and Brent Green, visiting artist in residence. This is a Human Rights course crosslisted with Film and Electronic Arts. The four videos produced by students in fall 2020 are available on the Human Rights Program website.

Ink showcases an unusual body of work by Tanya Marcuse that came about serendipitously after her young son insisted on trying nocturnal squid fishing one summer in Maine. Unlike the majority of the photographer’s large-scale, elaborate works, these images—of squid arrayed on newsprint—were made with an iPhone camera, a more spontaneous and versatile tool.

“I loved the interplay between the abstraction of the black ink leaking from an uncanny underwater creature and the pages of the NY Times, with its own collision of image and text, reportage, and advertising,” says Marcuse. “I was initially struck by the simple uncanny confluence of newspaper fact and primordial ooze, but as the work unfolded that relationship became more complex and less obvious. Over time, the squid became more and more lyrical to me, and less grotesque. I got more and more interested in the ink with and without the squid’s bodies, the way the bodies of the squid and their ink could ‘draw’ with a kind of intention and gesture, both obscuring and elucidating the newspaper images and text.” 

Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s novel Septology “showcases a static protagonist who stares endlessly at a painting, seeking its meaning while ruminating on his past. The book sounds, in summary, terrible: pretentious, self-serious, unendurable. This makes it all the more remarkable how wonderful it is,” writes Bard Writer in Residence Wyatt Mason. “The book evades all those pitfalls to become something quite different from what it might seem, something that, like all great novels, somehow exceeds our prior idea of what a novel is.”

“Having not lived in this area for most of my life, I’ve seen the visual narrative of New Orleans and South Louisiana being dominated by aerial imagery of the coast, demonstrating how much land is being lost, or of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Those are the iconic images that are used to communicate Louisiana's environmental challenges. It’s not to say that those images aren’t important and documentary photography isn’t needed. But I think that there’s so much more room to visually explore these issues in a way that engages people more rather than relying on the fear tactics to encourage people to act.”

“This spring, the first year of classes came to a close at a new undergraduate program in architecture at Bard College, a 2,000-student liberal arts school in rural Annandale, New York. According to the co-directors, Professors Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams, designing Bard Architecture’s new curriculum has been an opportunity to rethink architectural education by asking: What is architecture in the first place?”