News

Ahead of their first solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Carolyn Lazard ’10 spoke with Frieze about their work and how they incorporate Blackness, queerness, disability, and collectivity into their aesthetic. A cofounder of the art collective Canaries, “a network of women and gender non-conforming people living and working with autoimmune conditions and other chronic illnesses,” Lazard sometimes feels uncomfortable with the idea of individuation, of focusing on one artist over another. “The truth is that my work comes out of a long lineage of Black, disabled, and queer people making art,” they say. “My practice doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it is made in relation to the work of other artists who have come before me, and those whose work I learn about day to day.” 
 
Lazard’s work, which spans different mediums, progressed from a love of avant-garde cinema, which they first came into contact with at Bard. Recently, Lazard has experimented with providing multiple ways of presenting a single artwork, both visual and non-visual. “Access has this capacity to break through the boundaries of medium, because of the way it makes art necessarily iterative,” they say. “Through access, a single artwork might exist as a description, as a notation, as sign language, as a transcript or as a tactile object—depending on what people need.” Still, though these categories inform their work, they are resistant to the market trends which seek to define artists, especially Black artists, by a singular trait or identity. “Most museums seem committed to receiving Black art, Black aesthetics, and Black politics—provided it’s on the museum’s terms,” they say. “It’s a complex time to be a Black artist, but when has it not been?”
 
Read More in Frieze
 
Learn More about Carolyn Lazard: Long Take

Translating Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices” for the stage, Justin Peck collaborated with Shaw and Eva LeWitt ’07 to create Partita, a new ballet for the New York City Ballet. While developing Partita, Peck discovered Sol LeWitt, Eva’s father, was an inspiration for the original score, which led him to her work, which he described as having “a dimensionality and theatricality” integral to this new adaptation. For LeWitt, the ballet spoke to her sense of her own work, especially her use of gravity. “That’s so linked to dance, to humans moving through space, and to the voice too,” LeWitt says. “Those gravitational universes are important to all our art forms.” Partita, performed by eight dancers in sneakers, featured set design by LeWitt, whose “vibrantly colored hanging fabric sets” served as the backdrop for the ballet when it premiered January 27, 2022.
 
Full Story in the New York Times

“Photographer Tim Davis’s latest book, I’m Looking Through You, (Aperture, 2021) is a welcome respite from all the chaos and clamor unleashed in the world right now. It’s a book about the unbridled joys of ‘seeing’ with a camera. It’s also a love poem to the crazy, freewheeling streets of Los Angeles,” writes Kenneth Dickerman for the Washington Post. Tim Davis ’91 is associate professor of photography at Bard College. He has been a member of the Bard faculty since 2003.

 

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Joshua Glick as Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts for a three-year period from 2022 to 2025. Professor Glick’s research and teaching focus is the comparative histories of film, television, and radio; nonfiction media; race and representation; and the civic uses of emerging technology. He will also be teaching in Experimental Humanities.

Joshua Glick is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History (University of California Press, 2018). Josh’s current book explores the rising interest in nonfiction on both the left and right of the political spectrum. It examines, in particular, the way documentary’s proliferation across new platforms has transformed the relationship between Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C. Josh is also actively involved in public humanities projects, collaborating with archives, museums, and community organizations. As a Fellow at the Open Documentary Lab at MIT, he recently designed the interactive online curriculum: Media Literacy in the Age of Deepfakes. He also co-curated the exhibition currently up at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York: Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen. The show investigates the history of media manipulation, the rise of “deepfake” videos, and how synthetic media can be used for the public good. Josh holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Prior to coming to Bard, he was the Isabelle Peregrin Assistant Professor of English, Film & Media Studies at Hendrix College.

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Masha Shpolberg as Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts for a tenure-track position beginning in the 2022-2023 academic year. Professor Shpolberg’s research and teaching explore world cinema, with special attention to Russia and Eastern Europe, ecocinema, women’s cinema, and global documentary.

Masha Shpolberg’s first book project focuses on the aesthetics of labor in Polish cinema of the late socialist period, examining how filmmakers sought out new ways of representing the laboring body at a time of massive workers' strikes—and how they co-opted, confronted, or otherwise challenged the representational legacy of socialist realism. She is also currently working on two edited volumes: Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe, forthcoming from Berghahn Books, and Contemporary Russian Documentary, under contract at Edinburgh University Press. Masha has contributed film criticism to Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Tablet, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a Ph.D. in Film & Media Studies and Comparative Literature from Yale University. Prior to coming to Bard, Masha taught at Wellesley College and the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Multiple Bard faculty members, both former and present, as well as several alumni/ae will be featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Works by Rindon Johnson MFA ’18, Duane Linklater MFA ’13, and Jon Wang MFA ’19 will be featured alongside those by current and former faculty Nayland Blake ’82, Raven Chacon, Dave McKenzie, Adam Pendleton, and Lucy Raven MFA ’08. David Breslin, co-organizer of this edition of the Biennial, spoke with the New York Times about the curation of work that spoke to the social and political conflict that has taken place since the last Biennial in 2019. “Our hope is that this show permits a taking stock, a way of seeing what we’re maybe not at the end of, but in the middle of,” Breslin says, “and how art can help make sense of our times.” Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept will open on April 6, 2022 and will run through September 5, 2022. This year marks the 80th edition of the exhibition, the longest-running of its kind.

Full Story in the New York Times
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