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Distinguished Writer in Residence Dawn Lundy Martin has been selected as one of 63 artists to receive a 2022 United States Artists (USA) Fellowship. Each year, individual artists and collaboratives are anonymously nominated to apply by a geographically diverse and rotating group of artists, scholars, critics, producers, curators, and other arts professionals. USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career. 
 
Martin is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. They are the author of several books and chapbooks, including A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007); Discipline (Nightboat Books, 2011), a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize; and Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life (Nightboat, 2015), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Their latest collection, Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press), won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2019.
 
Bard MFA candidate Marty Two Bulls Jr. is also a 2022 USA Fellow.

“Something this common needs to be normalized and talked about,” says Hannah Bronfman ’11 in an interview with Ebony. Bronfman chronicled her three-year fertility journey, including a painful miscarriage, on YouTube and Instagram, an experience she says helped her feel less alone. “So many of us suffer in silence and this kind of just felt like the appropriate thing to be discussing and emphasizing that there’s no shame in this journey,” she says. With the help of a doula and an OB she trusted, Bronfman had a safe vaginal birth at a private facility, an experience, she emphasized, she did not take for granted. “Obviously, that’s not what most Black women experience, and I want to do everything I can to speak out, bring awareness to the lack of access, and share resources to people who need them.”

Bard College Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse constructs painstaking sets for her photographs, using found materials from the natural world to create “a kind of living and dying diorama.” With large custom frames set under a canopy in her backyard, she arranges dense and detailed settings for her photographs with plants, skulls, decomposing fruit, and animals to create fantastical images. “[G]iving the viewer an immersive sense of wonder is paramount,” says Marcuse. 
 
In 2005, she embarked on a three-part, 14 year project, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven, moving from iconic, serial photographs of trees in Fruitless to lush, immersive, allegorical works in Fallen and Woven. The photographs in Woven are as large as 5 x 13 feet.

Tanya Marcuse is an alumna of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, AA ’81. She teaches in the Photography Program at Bard College and has been a member of the faculty since 2012.

Four Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. 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. The recipients of this cycle’s Gilman scholarships are American undergraduate students attending 536 U.S. colleges and represent 49 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, who will study or intern in 91 countries around the globe through April 2023. 

Computer science and Asian studies joint major Asyl Almaz ’24, from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, has been awarded $4,000 towards her studies via Bard’s Tuition Exchange at Waseda University in Tokyo for fall 2022. “Coming from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, it has not been an easy journey immersing myself into a different culture when I moved to America for college—let alone another one. I am so incredibly grateful to receive the Gilman scholarship to be able to spend a semester in Waseda. This will ensure that I will be able to not only step foot in another country and learn so many new things about Asian history and culture, but also to be able to afford the expenses that I will have to pay there,” said Almaz.

Music and Asian studies joint major Nandi Woodfork-Bey ’22, from Sacramento, California, has been awarded $3,500 to study at the American College of Greece for fall 2022. “I’m immensely grateful to have received the Gilman Scholarship. I look forward to spending a semester abroad in Greece as I expand and diversify my studies in music and culture. Studying abroad will help me build the global and professional skills needed to succeed in my future endeavors, and I’m thankful that the Gilman program has further helped me achieve this opportunity” said Woodfork-Bey.

Theater major Grant Venable ’24, from Sherman Oaks, California, received a Gilman-DAAD scholarship and has been awarded $5,000 to study at Bard College Berlin for fall 2022. “I am honored to be able to attend Bard College in Berlin with the help of the Gilman scholarship. This scholarship will allow me to pursue my passion for theater and challenge my work as a performance artist through my studies in Berlin,” said Venable.

Philosophy major Azriel Almodovar ’24, from Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, has been awarded $3,500 to study in Taormina, Italy on Bard’s Italian Language Intensive program in summer 2022. “Thanks to the Gilman Scholarship, I am able to study abroad with no financial issues and really take advantage of all that the Italian Intensive Program has to offer. I am very grateful for being a recipient and look forward to my time abroad,” said Almodovar.

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

Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History Susan Aberth, Critic in Residence Ed Halter, and Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Alex Kitnick were published in the May 2022 edition of Artforum, alongside alumnus Tim Griffin MFA ’99. Aberth reviewed Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art, an exhibition on view now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which includes work Aberth says “inspires us as we depart to contemplate how limited our human perceptions of this world and everything that surrounds it really are.” Halter reviewed the work of the Otolith Group, seeing in their body of work “intimations of a sixth sense that may be cinema’s truly primary role, an inner sense of space and time, of forward motion—that is to say, our deepest sense of orientation in the world, the basis for all image schemas and conceptual mapping.” Kitnick reviewed Lifes, on view now at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, an eclectic exhibition that includes, among other things, “nine marble lions occasionally mounted by dancers” and “a neo-Constructivist monument to interspecies intermingling.” Finally, Griffin reviewed the work of Virginia Overton, noting that her various sculptures “never quite let go of their histories.” 

Read “Don’t Give up the Ghost” by Aberth
 
Read “Today, in a Hundred Years” by Halter
 
Read “Group Think” by Kitnick

Read “Make History” by Griffin

Bard College’s Division of the Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Angelica Sanchez as assistant professor of music. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year. 
 
Pianist, composer, and educator Angelica Sanchez moved to New York from Arizona in 1995. Since moving to the East Coast Sanchez has collaborated with such notable artists as Wadada Leo Smith, Paul Motian, Richard Davis, William Parker, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Nicole Mitchell, Rob Mazurek, Tom Rainey, Tim Berne, Mario Pavone, amongst others. 
 
Her music has been recognized in national and international publications including Jazz Times, the New York Times, Down Beat, Jazziz and Chicago Tribune amongst others. She was also the 2008 recipient of a French/American Chamber Music America grant, the 2011 Rockefeller Brothers Pocantico artist residency, the 2021 Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice Score Compilation Grant, and the 2021 Civitella Fellowship, Italy. 
 
Sanchez’ debut solo CD “A Little House” was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and her recording with Marilyn Crispell “How to Turn the Moon” was chosen as one of the best recordings of 2020 in the New York City Jazz Record and was voted as one of the top 50 best recordings in 2020, NPR critics poll. Sanchez leads numerous groups including her nonet that will release a new recording in 2022 on the Pyroclastic label. A new trio recording with Michael Formanek and Billy Hart will be released on Sunnyside Records in 2022. Sanchez holds a master’s degree from William Paterson University in Jazz Arranging. www.angelicasanchez.com

The International Center of Photography (ICP) has honored Sky Hopinka, assistant professor of film and electronic arts, with a 2022 Infinity Award in Art. “ICP’s annual Infinity Awards celebrate visionary photographers and the power of the image,” said David E. Little, Executive Director of ICP. “This year, we honor artists whose bodies of work focus on environmental justice, climate change, conservation, and related environmental issues—among the most critical concerns of our time. We are proud to acknowledge the winners not only for their work, but for their contributions to conversations furthering images and imagemaking as forms of empowerment and catalysts for social change.”
 
The 2022 Infinity Award Categories and Recipients are: Sebastião Salgado (Lifetime Achievement), Gabriela Hearst (Trustees), Sky Hopinka (Art), Esther Horvath (Emerging Photographer) and  Acacia Johnson (Documentary Practice and Photojournalism). Recipients were honored at the 38th Annual Infinity Awards at Ziegfeld Ballroom in New York City. ICP is the world’s leading museum and school dedicated to photography and visual culture. Its annual Infinity Awards are among the leading honors for excellence in the field.

Bard professor and alumnus Tim Davis ’91 has created a “composite portrait of American housing, civic space, and civil service, photographed one mailbox at a time.” So writes Frances Richard in an essay in Places exploring Davis’s images, most of which were taken in upstate New York. “They say a lot about housing,” Davis observes. “Most Americans don’t own their own homes and these mailboxes, often overlain with multiple residents’ names, show the amazing diversity in our country. … They tell you who lives there in a way that is fairly shockingly revealing, in a time when anonymity is so prized; they represent a sense of porousness between the invisible interior of a home and the public.” Tim Davis is an associate professor of photography at Bard College. He has been a member of the faculty since 2003.