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Visiting Artist in Residence Andy Robert’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, Ti Zwazo Clarendon: You Can Go Home Again; You Just Can’t Stay, opens September 16 at the Michael Werner Gallery in London. His paintings challenge a static understanding of history. Describing his method, Robert says “in questioning how an image comes into the world, and into being, I want to own up, to admit at any point, a painting, an image can change direction and isn’t fixed.” Robert’s work will also be shown at the 58th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Established in 1896 by the Carnegie Museum of Art and organized every three to four years, the Carnegie International is the longest-running North American exhibition of international art and presents an overview of how art and artists respond to the critical questions of our time. The 58th Carnegie International, which is titled Is it morning for you yet?, runs from September 24, 2022, to April 2, 2023.

As part of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Nayland Blake ’82, “bearish, Merlin-bearded, soft-spoken in the manner of a blacksmith teaching kindergartners,” offers advice to artists as part of their performance series “Got an Art Problem?” Writing for the New Yorker, Hannah Seidlitz outlines Blake’s contributions to this year’s Biennial, including “Rear Entry” and “Gender Discard Party,” in which “guests were invited to ‘bring your own baggage’ and dance away the woes of classification.” With “Got an Art Problem?,” Blake schedules meetings with guests who are asked to “illustrate their art problems,” which Blake then talks through with the guest until their time is up. Offering advice to one guest, an artist who goes by Zaun whose work attempts “to visualize the living grid,” Blake asked a very simple question: “What is a game?” “A game is a system of rules that organize behavior,” Blake said. “What’s delightful is seeing somebody operate within those rules and yet do this unexpected thing.” 

Pony, a play by Sylvan Oswald that “would demand a stage world populated by a spectrum of queer and trans characters,” first premiered in 2011. Now, 11 years later, Pony returns for its second production, having evolved in that interim decade, writes Miriam Felton-Dansky, professor of theater and performance, for American Theatre. “This production also allows the play new life in the wake of revisions Oswald has made over many years in response to evolving conversations about LGBTQ+ experience,” she writes. Another evolution, Oswald told Felton-Dansky, was in the second production’s casting, which found “enough transmasculine actors to fill the roles” and “a community ready and waiting for this play, neither of which were a given even 10 years ago.” Pony is playing now through September 4 in Portland, Maine, as part of the Portland Theater Festival.

Bard College Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen has been awarded $350,000 by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to fund her project, the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a digital archive of materials related to the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, Syria, a multicultural center of the ancient world that has been threatened in recent years by looting and conflict. IDEA aims at virtual reassembly and recontextualization of archaeological information from a uniquely preserved archaeological site of cross-disciplinary significance. The NEH grant period is July 2022 through June 2025.

“We couldn’t be happier or more humbled to receive the support of the NEH to bring about this important work,” says Chen. “What I’m most excited about are the ways the grant funds will allow us to provide hands-on learning opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, as well as displaced Syrians, all the while making an ethical impact on data from one of the most important archaeological resources we have about life in the ancient world.”

Located on the frontier between the Roman and Persian Empires, Dura-Europos is a rare archaeological resource. Nicknamed “Pompeii of the East” due to its extraordinary degree of preservation, Dura-Europos provides well-preserved and juxtaposed Jewish, Christian, and pagan sanctuaries, and textual remains in a variety of Mediterranean and Semitic languages. The site offers glimpses into the ubiquitous ancient multiculturalism and domestic coexistence of different ethnic groups, reflecting the historical and cultural complexity of life in a frontier city, spanning from 300 BCE to the 250s CE.

Since 1920, European excavations involving multiple institutional partners and well-intentioned efforts to share-out access to physical objects from this important site have led to the dispersal of Dura’s artifacts into collections across the world, largely residing in European and American collections catalogued exclusively in Western languages (primarily English, and some in French). Using the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD), IDEA endeavors to create a comprehensive and extensible digital archive whose data points can be freely reused, and to develop a web application that provides multilinguistic access to the integrated Dura-Europos archival resources in a single interface, together with geo-located visualizations to enhance data intelligibility at a glance.

Ultimately, one of IDEA’s long-term aims is to help democratize processes of knowledge-creation relevant to Dura-Europos. With a great number of Dura-Europos artifacts housed in Western collections and historically only searchable in English (or, less often, French), the number of Middle Eastern scholars that have been able to engage in scholarship related to this important site has been unsurprisingly limited. Establishing multilingual (especially Arabic) accessibility for the site’s archaeological data via the IDEA web application is intended to serve as a steppingstone to the creation of international data-shaping collaborations in the post-grant period. 

At Bard, Chen plans to collaborate with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) and Bard College Berlin on this project. The project will support a CCS Bard fellow each year. The CCS Bard fellows’ participation in the project will expose them to the range of applications of LOD for collections cataloging and information discoverability. Further, in collaboration with the Middle Eastern Studies Program and Bard College Berlin, IDEA will establish remote linked data training workshops for native Arabic-speakers. These remote workshops will in part supply Arabic-language translations for artifact records and further the project goal of increasing Arabic-language searchability of content related to the archaeological site.

IDEA’s core team members also include Co-Principal Investigator Holly Rushmeier, Katherine Thornton, Kenneth Seals-Knutt, Adnan Al Mohamad, and Scott DiGiulio. To learn more, visit duraeuroposarchive.org.

Originally published in LitHub’s “The Craft of Writing” newsletter, Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante’s article explores her writing process and how her most recent book, Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (illustrated by Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91), “stemmed from a strong initial emotion” about the place she’s lived for the past 22 years, and took shape intuitively, without a predetermined structure or result in mind. “Going into the writing I like to cultivate a particular juncture between knowing and not knowing—having all the facts but remaining uncertain how they fit together. It’s a delicate balance, because if you know too little what you write will be halting and opaque, and if you know too much it will be dead on the page, a mere transcription after the fact,” writes Sante. “In any case, whatever ideas and speculations may occupy the writer’s head, writing does not begin with an idea; it begins with a sentence.”

Christine Shoshannah ’06 (formerly known by her surname Dominguez), who majored in music, returned to her hometown of Newburgh, New York, to host a benefit concert and album release event. A portion of the proceeds raised from the event will be donated to Safe Harbors of the Hudson, a nonprofit supporting homeless and low-income families in Newburgh. Shoshannah is a Grammy-nominated songwriter and award-winning singer with a new album Faithful For Free. She graduated one year early from Newburgh Free Academy to jump-start her music career before enrolling at Bard.

The video artist Isaac Julien and the cultural theorist and Bard professor Kobena Mercer explore the legacy of Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Locke, his relationship with so-called “primitive” African sculpture, and the “queering of the New Negro.” Professor Mercer’s new book Alain Locke and the Visual Arts (Yale University Press, 2022) is discussed in the New Yorker in tandem with Julien's new multiscreen commission, “Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die),” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Kobena Mercer is the Charles P. Stevenson Chair in Art History and the Humanities, a joint appointment between the Art History and Visual Culture Program in the undergraduate College, and the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS).

Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 says his photographs of fireflies can range from “a spa for the eyes” to “almost pure chaos.” For NPR, Lara Pellegrinelli spoke with Mauney, who has spent almost a decade photographing fireflies in the Hudson Valley, using Photoshop to painstakingly compile hundreds of timed exposures into a single image. The images, Pellegrinelli writes, are catching the eye of artists and scientists alike, sparking the interest of researchers pursuing “new evidence that firefly swarms can synchronize their flashes.” Mauney is now a part of a group of volunteers helping collect data for computer scientist and biophysicist Dr. Orit Peleg of the BioFrontiers Institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Still, for Mauney, the images, and the process of composing them, are the primary thing. “I never get tired of it,” Mauney says. “And I never get tired of the challenge and the puzzle of trying to construct the images — and trying to construct a good image, because it’s not enough for me to let the bugs do the heavy lifting.”

Lexi Parra ’18, who majored in human rights and photography at Bard, has been selected as one of eight photojournalists from around the world to be collectively awarded $40,000 in grants from Getty Images, a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace. Parra is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based in Caracas, Venezuela. Her work focuses on youth culture, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. 
 
The annual Getty Images Inclusion Grants aim to support emerging editorial talent within underrepresented groups, offering aspiring photojournalists the creative means and solutions to pursue education that will enable careers within the industry. Eight grants of $5,000 each were awarded to editorial photographers and videographers from different professional specialties, including News, Sport, Arts & Entertainment, and Multimedia. Parra was selected for her work in news photography. Recipients were selected by an esteemed panel of judges comprising accomplished professionals from the fields of photography and journalism and convened by Women Photograph, a non-profit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists; Diversify Photo, a community of photographers, editors, and visual producers working to diversify how people interact with media; and Getty Images.