All Bard News by Date
December 2021
12-20-2021
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.
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.
12-07-2021
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
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
12-07-2021
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
Read the Review in the New York Times
November 2021
11-30-2021
“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.
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.
11-09-2021
“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.
October 2021
10-25-2021
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.
10-06-2021
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.
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.
10-05-2021
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.
September 2021
09-23-2021
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.”
09-14-2021
“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.
09-14-2021
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.
09-14-2021
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.
09-07-2021
“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.
August 2021
08-26-2021
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 30th 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 30th 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.
Media Contacts
Resnicow and Associates
Juliet Sorce / Daniel Rechtschaffen
[email protected] / [email protected]
212-671-5158 / 212-671-5188
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 30th 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.
Media Contacts
Resnicow and Associates
Juliet Sorce / Daniel Rechtschaffen
[email protected] / [email protected]
212-671-5158 / 212-671-5188
08-24-2021
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.
08-23-2021
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.
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.
08-10-2021
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.”
“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.”
08-10-2021
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.”
08-03-2021
“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.”
08-03-2021
“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?”
July 2021
07-27-2021
Hyperallergic profiles indigenous artists collective New Red Order—Adam Khalil '11, Zack Khalil '14, and Jackson Polys—which often uses a combination of satire and cryptic messaging to provide “a fresh lens through which viewers can question and even reframe their conflicted relationships with indigeneity.” Their latest installation, the culmination of a multiyear collaboration between NRO and Artists Space, “provides a thoughtful survey of the group’s history of productive antagonization both within and outside of the art world.” Through August 22 at Artists Space in Manhattan.
07-20-2021
Alex Kitnick reviews The Avant-Garde Museum, a recent anthology–cum–exhibition catalogue edited by Agnieszka Pindera and Jarosław Suchan and published by the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland. “[T]he avant-garde museum as a type has never been cogently theorized,” he writes. “This volume is a perfect place to start.” Alex Kitnick is assistant professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, and a faculty member at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies.
07-19-2021
Julia B. Rosenbaum, associate professor of art history, explores Frederic Church’s Olana for the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. In the late 1860s, following his success as a landscape painter, Church turned to architectural and interior design. He constructed a house at the center of Olana, his 250-acre property in New York’s Hudson Valley, that manipulated space and daylight as artistic materials. With house building, Church moved into an immersive, three-dimensional format, producing some of his most experimental work. Rosenbaum’s study treats his first-floor interiors as a deliberate composition, of a piece with his two-dimensional oeuvre, and specifically argues for Church’s design as an aesthetic culmination of his longstanding interest—across media—in issues of perception and proprioception. Julia B. Rosenbaum is a professor of art history and visual culture and chair of the Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College.
07-13-2021
Bard alum Hazel Gurland-Pooler’s film Storming Caesar’s Palace will receive a grant award of between $10,000 and $25,000 from Firelight Media’s Impact Campaign Fund. The Fund supports the creation of audience engagement and impact campaigns for nonfiction film projects by and for communities of color in the United States. Storming Caesar’s Palace is the untold story of Black women who took on presidents, the mob, and everyday Americans, challenging the pernicious myth of the “welfare queen.”
07-13-2021
Driven by a desire to “do everything differently,” in 2017 Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis dropped his ongoing projects and spent two years traveling to Los Angeles, resulting in I’m Looking Through You, an expansive monograph published by Aperture.
07-05-2021
Filmmaker and S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence Kelly Reichardt talks about adapting Jonathan Raymond’s novel The Half-Life into her critically acclaimed film First Cow. At Bard, where she teaches every fall, she showed her students the same films that went into her own research for First Cow; this includes Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy.
June 2021
06-29-2021
Since its founding, the New York–based arts nonprofit—established in 1985 by abstract artist Lee Krasner, the widow of Jackson Pollock—has awarded nearly 5,000 grants, totaling $82 million, to artists and nonprofit organizations around the world. McBride is one of six recipients of the foundation’s 2020–21 Lee Krasner Award, given to artists in recognition of their lifetime achievement.
06-29-2021
Best known as one-third of Palberta—the anarchic pop-rock group formed with fellow Bardians Ani Ivry-Block ’15 and Nina Ryser ’15—the 26-year-old songwriter steps out on her own with The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now, a solo compilation that brings together three of Konigsberg’s pop-leaning solo EPs and a handful of previously unreleased songs. “On first listen, the collection stands up as a debut album in its own right, showcasing Konigsberg’s breadth as a pop songwriter, from the rich a cappella harmonies of ‘Rock and Sin’ to the bubblegum throb of ‘It’s Just Like All the Clouds’ to the pretty, carefree-sounding folk of ‘Roses,’” writes Alex Robert Ross in Fader. “But the story of Konigsberg’s growth as a songwriter and a person is buried beneath the tracklist.”
06-29-2021
“The most intriguing artistic dialogue taking place this summer occurs at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where contemporary painter Tschabalala Self engages with Henri Matisse,” writes Chadd Scott in Forbes. “The exhibition (through September 19) presents 13 paintings by Self, completed from 2016 to the present, alongside two related sculptures, highlighting the artist’s ongoing consideration of the iconographic significance of the Black female form in contemporary culture.” Among the featured works is a new suite of three paintings of a female couple created in response to Matisse’s sculpture Two Women (1907–8) in the BMA’s collection. “Whenever you’re doing an institutional show it presents a unique opportunity, and the potential challenge, of contending with the history of the institution—the art within the institution’s collection,” says Self. “Now you’re involved in this larger conversation about art history.”
06-07-2021
Boston’s Greenway features artist and Bard alum Daniel Gordon’s first public art installation. Daniel Gordon on the Greenway is an exhibition that spans the length of the park and features photography, a mural, a soon-to-be installed sculpture, and canvases that will float high above park-goers heads.
May 2021
05-27-2021
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.
# # #
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.
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.
# # #
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)05-25-2021
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.
05-25-2021
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.
05-21-2021
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.”
# # #
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
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.”
# # #
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
05-18-2021
“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.”
05-18-2021
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.
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.
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(5/18/21)05-13-2021
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.
“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.
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(5/13/21)05-12-2021
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.
05-11-2021
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.
05-11-2021
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.
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.
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(5/11/21)05-04-2021
“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.
05-04-2021
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.”
April 2021
04-28-2021
Azikiwe Mohammed celebrates everyday heroes and small acts of care in his work. Through different media—painting, textiles, performative installations—he constructs spaces of safety and welcome for people of color and for immigrants whose space is often threatened.
04-20-2021
Olga Touloumi, assistant professor of architectural history at Bard College, has been awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend to support her scholarly book project The Global Interior: Modern Architecture and the Ordering of the World. Professor Touloumi joins other NEH Summer Stipends awardees in pursuing advanced, new research recognized to be of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both.
04-20-2021
Crip Time—a meditation on the task of organizing weekly medications and pills—explores cinematic time and the essential work of care. “It is a durational work, and duration plays a large part in my practice,” says Lazard. “My own interests in terms of the medium of video have a lot to do with video’s capacity to represent real time, a kind of duration that matches with our lived experience. I think it is really different from how we normally relate to video or cinema, in which we’re often put into a temporal pace that is accelerated and manipulated. And I think slowness has a lot to do with the mundane in some ways because our lives are made up of myriad slow experiences that are the foundation of keeping us alive.”
04-14-2021
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded five Bard faculty and Bard MFA faculty and graduates 2021 Guggenheim Fellowships. Bard Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, Bard MFA faculty Roberto Tejada and A.K. Burns MFA ’10, and MFA graduates Luba Drozd MFA ’15 and Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 were named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows. Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 3,000 applicants, Asili, Tejada, Burns, Drozd, and Lusztig were among a diverse group of 184 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2021 Fellowship.
“We are delighted and impressed that so many Bard MFA alums and faculty have been named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows,” said Hannah Barrett, director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. “The Milton Avery School for the Arts wishes to congratulate these faculty and alumni on their 2021 Guggenheim awards. Their recognition is richly deserved and we will follow their careers with pride and admiration.”
“As an experimental filmmaker, our colleague Ephraim Asili has won critical acclaim for The Diaspora Suite (2017), an ambitious cycle of 16 mm short films, and most recently his feature-length The Inheritance (2020), a poetic meditation on history, politics, art, and Black liberation,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre d’Albertis. “Asili's presence on the faculty of Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program represents for our students both deep continuity with Bard's storied past as a haven for artistic experimentation and a stunningly contemporary approach to documentary and narrative with full awareness of the urgency of our present moment.”
“I am thrilled to announce this new group of Guggenheim Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, “especially since this has been a devastating year in so many ways. A Guggenheim Fellowship has always been meaningful, but this year we know it will be a lifeline for many of the new Fellows at a time of great hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. The work supported by the Fellowship will help us understand more deeply what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do what they were meant to do.”
Created in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Foundation has offered fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions. The great range of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. In all, 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 73 different academic institutions, 28 states and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. For more information on the 2021 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.
Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 is a filmmaker, artist, educator and DJ whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His award-winning films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA PS1, LAMOCA, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Whitney Museum, and The Barbican Center in London. Asili's 2020 feature debut, The Inheritance, premiered at the 2020 Toronto International film festival and was recently acquired for distribution by Grasshopper Films. As a DJ, Asili has been a regular program host on WGXC, and done guest sets for NTS Radio, Afropop Worldwide, and WFMU. He also hosts a monthly dance party Botanica. Asili currently resides in Hudson, NY, and is a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard.
Roberto Tejada, Bard MFA writing faculty, is the author of poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006), Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish translation, and a LatinX poetics of the Americas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019). He is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and with Michelle White and others the co-author of Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021) He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.
A.K. Burns MFA ’10, Bard MFA film & video faculty, is an interdisciplinary artist who views the body as a contentious domain wherein issues of gender, labor, ecology and sexuality are negotiated. Burns is currently producing Negative Space, a cycle of video-installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The opening episode, A Smeary Spot (2015) debuted at Participant Inc., NY, followed by an exhibition at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR, in 2016. The second in this series, titled Living Room (2017) debut at the New Museum, and was subsequently exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2018. Additionally in 2018 Burns exhibited a new video work titled Survivors Remorse (2018) at the Harvard Museum and a public sculpture The Dispossessed (2018) at the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial. As a frequent collaborator and advocate for labor issues in the Arts, Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Great Economy) in 2008. Burns’ works can be found in public collations including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was also a 2018 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts, a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University as well as a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award.
Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 is a filmmaker, visual artist, and archival researcher. She is a professor, Film & Digital Media, and director, Center for Documentary Arts & Research (CDAR), at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Her film and video work mines old images, technologies, and objects for new meanings in order to reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of her work is centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001), the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011), and her newest performative documentary feature Yours in Sisterhood (2018). Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and RIDM Montréal, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She was the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal.
Luba Drozd MFA ’15 is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist. She earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Her films and installations articulate the absurd in the established exploitative social structures and demonstrate how the systems of control are manifested and echoed in restrictive architectural environments. Luba’s works screened at Smack Mellon, Apexart, Anthology Film Archives, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and Art in General. She is a 2015 Media Arts fellow at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY. In 2020, Drozd was featured by the New York Post as “hero of the day” and highlighted in the New York Times for her work making and distributing face shields for hospital workers in the early weeks of the pandemic. Drozd is a recipient of the 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Arts. Her two-room site specific sound, sculpture, and 3D animation installation piece, “The Aesthetic Limits of Water,” was commissioned and exhibited by the Hessel Museum in 2020.
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.
“We are delighted and impressed that so many Bard MFA alums and faculty have been named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows,” said Hannah Barrett, director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. “The Milton Avery School for the Arts wishes to congratulate these faculty and alumni on their 2021 Guggenheim awards. Their recognition is richly deserved and we will follow their careers with pride and admiration.”
“As an experimental filmmaker, our colleague Ephraim Asili has won critical acclaim for The Diaspora Suite (2017), an ambitious cycle of 16 mm short films, and most recently his feature-length The Inheritance (2020), a poetic meditation on history, politics, art, and Black liberation,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre d’Albertis. “Asili's presence on the faculty of Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program represents for our students both deep continuity with Bard's storied past as a haven for artistic experimentation and a stunningly contemporary approach to documentary and narrative with full awareness of the urgency of our present moment.”
“I am thrilled to announce this new group of Guggenheim Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, “especially since this has been a devastating year in so many ways. A Guggenheim Fellowship has always been meaningful, but this year we know it will be a lifeline for many of the new Fellows at a time of great hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. The work supported by the Fellowship will help us understand more deeply what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do what they were meant to do.”
Created in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Foundation has offered fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions. The great range of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. In all, 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 73 different academic institutions, 28 states and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. For more information on the 2021 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.
Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 is a filmmaker, artist, educator and DJ whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His award-winning films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA PS1, LAMOCA, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Whitney Museum, and The Barbican Center in London. Asili's 2020 feature debut, The Inheritance, premiered at the 2020 Toronto International film festival and was recently acquired for distribution by Grasshopper Films. As a DJ, Asili has been a regular program host on WGXC, and done guest sets for NTS Radio, Afropop Worldwide, and WFMU. He also hosts a monthly dance party Botanica. Asili currently resides in Hudson, NY, and is a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard.
Roberto Tejada, Bard MFA writing faculty, is the author of poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006), Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish translation, and a LatinX poetics of the Americas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019). He is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and with Michelle White and others the co-author of Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021) He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.
A.K. Burns MFA ’10, Bard MFA film & video faculty, is an interdisciplinary artist who views the body as a contentious domain wherein issues of gender, labor, ecology and sexuality are negotiated. Burns is currently producing Negative Space, a cycle of video-installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The opening episode, A Smeary Spot (2015) debuted at Participant Inc., NY, followed by an exhibition at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR, in 2016. The second in this series, titled Living Room (2017) debut at the New Museum, and was subsequently exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2018. Additionally in 2018 Burns exhibited a new video work titled Survivors Remorse (2018) at the Harvard Museum and a public sculpture The Dispossessed (2018) at the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial. As a frequent collaborator and advocate for labor issues in the Arts, Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Great Economy) in 2008. Burns’ works can be found in public collations including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was also a 2018 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts, a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University as well as a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award.
Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 is a filmmaker, visual artist, and archival researcher. She is a professor, Film & Digital Media, and director, Center for Documentary Arts & Research (CDAR), at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Her film and video work mines old images, technologies, and objects for new meanings in order to reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of her work is centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001), the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011), and her newest performative documentary feature Yours in Sisterhood (2018). Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and RIDM Montréal, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She was the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal.
Luba Drozd MFA ’15 is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist. She earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Her films and installations articulate the absurd in the established exploitative social structures and demonstrate how the systems of control are manifested and echoed in restrictive architectural environments. Luba’s works screened at Smack Mellon, Apexart, Anthology Film Archives, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and Art in General. She is a 2015 Media Arts fellow at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY. In 2020, Drozd was featured by the New York Post as “hero of the day” and highlighted in the New York Times for her work making and distributing face shields for hospital workers in the early weeks of the pandemic. Drozd is a recipient of the 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Arts. Her two-room site specific sound, sculpture, and 3D animation installation piece, “The Aesthetic Limits of Water,” was commissioned and exhibited by the Hessel Museum in 2020.
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.
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(4/09/21)04-06-2021
Huntt is among five recipients of the inaugural Sustainable Artist Grant, awarded by Brown Girls Doc Mafia in support of women and nonbinary people of color working in documentary film. These unrestricted grants support BGDM members whose filmmaking talents dovetail with their “clarity of purpose as an artist, engagement and dedication to community building, and strong potential to make a meaningful contribution to an evolving and expanding documentary field.” Filmmaker, curator, and fellow Bard alum Farihah Zaman ’05 was a member of the BGDM jury.
04-05-2021
On Saturday, April 24, the Bard College Dance Program presents A Celebration of Aileen Passloff (1931–2020). For over 40 years, Aileen Passloff was the L. May Hawver and Wallace Benjamin Flint Professor of Dance at Bard, in addition to her numerous contributions to the field of dance. In celebration of her life and work, Passloff’s former students Arthur Aviles ’87, Charlotte Hendrickson ’07, and EmmaGrace Skove-Epes ’08 will give tribute performances.
“I was strong and tireless and full of passion and loved dancing as deeply as one could ever love anything.”—Aileen Passloff
The free, live-streamed event takes place at 4 p.m. and will feature guest speakers, as well as pre-recorded messages and video archives of Aileen’s work. The celebration is presented in collaboration with the Fisher Center at Bard, the President’s Office, the Dean’s Office, and the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs. For more information and to watch, please visit the Fisher Center’s virtual stage, UPSTREAMING, by clicking here.
“I am thrilled to help to create an event to celebrate my mentor and inspiration, Aileen Passloff,” said Bard Professor of Dance Jean Churchil. “All of my work in the dance studio, as a teacher and as a choreographer, is informed by her passion for the arts, and I know that I am only one of so very many people. By her example, she taught us to understand that the arts are essential to our lives. She taught many aspiring artists to understand that to try to make art is to try to make a profound difference in the world. For Aileen, and for many of us whose lives were enriched by her, to try to make art is to discover, to uncover, and to cultivate the courage to be fully alive.”
Aileen Passloff, Professor of Dance at Bard College for over four decades, was born in New York City in 1931. She began performing professionally at the age of 14 for the renowned modern dance choreographer James Waring, and was passionately committed to the art of the dance for 67 more years. Whether it was ballet, experimental dance, or “dance theater,” Aileen was devoted to learning more about the art of the body moving through space; she continued to dance and to choreograph until her death in November, 2020.
Passloff studied dance at Bennington College; she then led her own company for ten years in New York City. During her performing career she danced with, amongst others, Katherine Litz, Toby Armour and Remy Charlip. She also developed a passion for the art of Flamenco, which prompted her to travel annually to Spain to study. Recently, she appeared in two films by Marta Renzi: “Her Magnum Opus” (2017), in which Passloff portrays the beloved teacher of a group of artists, and a short documentary, “Arthur & Aileen” (2012).
As a beloved teacher of many generations of Bard students and professional dancers, she continued to choreograph until the very last weeks of her life. The Celebration of Aileen Passloff will feature several recordings of her dances as well as live performances by three of her former students, Charlotte Hendrickson, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes, and Arthur Aviles. Other students of Aileen Passloff have included the choreographers Joanna Haigood, David Parker, Dusan Tynek, costume designer Liz Prince, and the director Ann Bogart.
“I was strong and tireless and full of passion and loved dancing as deeply as one could ever love anything.”—Aileen Passloff
The free, live-streamed event takes place at 4 p.m. and will feature guest speakers, as well as pre-recorded messages and video archives of Aileen’s work. The celebration is presented in collaboration with the Fisher Center at Bard, the President’s Office, the Dean’s Office, and the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs. For more information and to watch, please visit the Fisher Center’s virtual stage, UPSTREAMING, by clicking here.
“I am thrilled to help to create an event to celebrate my mentor and inspiration, Aileen Passloff,” said Bard Professor of Dance Jean Churchil. “All of my work in the dance studio, as a teacher and as a choreographer, is informed by her passion for the arts, and I know that I am only one of so very many people. By her example, she taught us to understand that the arts are essential to our lives. She taught many aspiring artists to understand that to try to make art is to try to make a profound difference in the world. For Aileen, and for many of us whose lives were enriched by her, to try to make art is to discover, to uncover, and to cultivate the courage to be fully alive.”
Aileen Passloff, Professor of Dance at Bard College for over four decades, was born in New York City in 1931. She began performing professionally at the age of 14 for the renowned modern dance choreographer James Waring, and was passionately committed to the art of the dance for 67 more years. Whether it was ballet, experimental dance, or “dance theater,” Aileen was devoted to learning more about the art of the body moving through space; she continued to dance and to choreograph until her death in November, 2020.
Passloff studied dance at Bennington College; she then led her own company for ten years in New York City. During her performing career she danced with, amongst others, Katherine Litz, Toby Armour and Remy Charlip. She also developed a passion for the art of Flamenco, which prompted her to travel annually to Spain to study. Recently, she appeared in two films by Marta Renzi: “Her Magnum Opus” (2017), in which Passloff portrays the beloved teacher of a group of artists, and a short documentary, “Arthur & Aileen” (2012).
As a beloved teacher of many generations of Bard students and professional dancers, she continued to choreograph until the very last weeks of her life. The Celebration of Aileen Passloff will feature several recordings of her dances as well as live performances by three of her former students, Charlotte Hendrickson, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes, and Arthur Aviles. Other students of Aileen Passloff have included the choreographers Joanna Haigood, David Parker, Dusan Tynek, costume designer Liz Prince, and the director Ann Bogart.
March 2021
03-29-2021
The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College has announced the launch of a pioneering master of arts program in human rights and the arts, and looks forward to welcoming the inaugural class in fall 2021. Designed by the Center’s core faculty team of Tania El Khoury, Thomas Keenan, Gideon Lester, and Ziad Abu-Rish, the interdisciplinary program will bring together scholars, artists, and activists from around the world to explore the productive and contentious relation between the arts and struggles for truth and justice. The program expands the curricular and extracurricular elements of the OSUN Center, directed by El Khoury.
The Center has set a May 1 priority application deadline and a June 15 final deadline. Ample need-based financial aid is available to cover tuition and other expenses. The following information sessions will be open to the public and prospective applicants (please register by emailing [email protected] with full name and intended session to receive a Zoom link).
The Center has set a May 1 priority application deadline and a June 15 final deadline. Ample need-based financial aid is available to cover tuition and other expenses. The following information sessions will be open to the public and prospective applicants (please register by emailing [email protected] with full name and intended session to receive a Zoom link).
- Tuesday, April 6, at 8:30am NYC Time (2:30pm Vienna / 6:30pm Dhaka)
- Wednesday, April 7, at 4:00pm NYC Time (10pm Vienna / 2:00am Dhaka)
- Monday, April 12, at 8:00am NYC Time (2:00pm Vienna / 6:00pm Dhaka)
- Friday, April 15, at 4:00pm NYC Time (10pm Vienna / 2:00am Dhaka)
03-20-2021
“Akie was one of my favorite singers, before he joined the band,” singer Rachael Price tells Variety. “I was literally starstruck when he joined. I was like, I cannot believe somebody of this caliber of voice is sitting behind me playing piano.” Bassist Bridget Kearney adds, “(Akie) has many talents that he brings to the table and contributed a lot to the writing on this record and also of course to the character of the recordings, not only with his keyboard playing, but with his singing.”