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Susan L. Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, has been awarded a 2023 Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency. The program, which she will attend at the Dora Maar House in Provence, France, during September 2023, has been internationally recognized as one of the most respected residencies for those working in the arts and humanities. Aberth, working alongside her longtime collaborator Tere Arcq—the leading scholar on Spanish-born Mexican artist Remedios Varo—will complete Cauldrons & Curanderas: The Magical Relationship of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, an illustrated historical account of the magical and artistic works produced by the two artists working together. “I am particularly grateful for this residency at the Dora Maar House because it is at the home of a great surrealist woman photographer whom I have long admired and taught in my classes at Bard College,” Aberth said. “It seems particularly appropriate then for me and my colleague, Tere Arcq, to be there in France working on Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, especially since they also spent meaningful periods of time in France.” 

The residency will allow Aberth and Arcq a dedicated period of time to work side by side, and they believe that the insights they document about the shared projects of the two artists can serve as a blueprint for how women creators can join together in creating ventures that are greater than the sum of their parts. “Carrington and Varo forged a new path for women artists by exploring together certain esoteric arenas that had long been neglected and even disdained by the art world,” Aberth continued. “In rediscovering women’s mysteries and spiritual involvements in ways that directly impacted their artistic practice, they introduced to the art world the importance and necessity of female creative collaborations, in juxtaposition to centuries of celebrating male collaborations exclusively.”

Further reading:

Professor Susan Aberth and Alumnus Gilbert Vicario CCS ’96 Granted Curatorial Research Fellowship by Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts   

Bard Professor Susan Aberth and Curator Tere Arcq Publish First Book Dedicated to Newly Discovered Tarot Set Created by Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington and the Theatre: A Conversation with Professor Susan Aberth and Double Edge Theatre’s Stacy Klein

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded a Curatorial Research Fellowship to Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, and Bard alumnus Gilbert Vicario CCS ’96, chief curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). The fellowship of $50,000 will fund their research for a new exhibition planned for 2024 at PAMM, which will examine metaphysical and esoteric impulses that influenced a cohort of artistic and academic individuals in the Americas in the 20th century, with a prominent focus on women, queer, and marginalized artists. “The Spring 2022 grantees are notable for their resilience, ingenuity, and dedication to supporting artists at every stage of their careers,” said Rachel Bers, the program director at the foundation. “As the culture shifts, they work side by side with artists to find ways to critically and creatively engage the forces that shape our world.”

Further reading:

Bard College Professor Susan Aberth Awarded a Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency

Bard College Assistant Professor of Dance Souleymane Badolo and MFA alum in Music/Sound and American and Indigenous Studies Program faculty member Kite (aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18) have won 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards, which will fund the creation of experimental, risk-taking projects that push boundaries formally and thematically, venturing into wild, out-there, never-before-seen concepts, and future universes real or imagined. 
 
Creative Capital awarded 50 groundbreaking projects—comprising 66 individual artists—focused on Technology, Performing Arts, and Literature, as well as Multidisciplinary and Socially Engaged forms. Souleymane Badolo (with Jacob Bamogo) won an award in Dance. Kite won an award in Technology. Awardees will receive varying amounts up to $50,000 in direct funding to help finance their projects and build thriving artistic careers. The award provides a range of grant services from industry connections and financial planning to peer mentorship and community-building opportunities. Grant funding is unrestricted and may be used for any purpose to advance the project, including, but not limited to, studio space, housing, groceries, staffing, childcare, equipment, computers, and travel. The combined value of the 2023 Creative Capital Awards totals more than $2.5 million in artist support. 
 
“The 2023 Creative Capital cohort reaffirms the unpredictable and radical range of ideas alive in the arts today—from artists working in Burkina Faso to Cambodia and across the United States. We continue to see our democratic, open-call grantmaking process catalyze visionary projects that will influence our communities, our culture, and our environment,” said Christine Kuan, Creative Capital President Executive Director. 
 
The Creative Capital grant is administered through a national open call, a democratic process involving external review of thousands of applications by international industry experts, arts administrators, curators, scholars, and artists. The 2023 grantee cohort comprises 75% BIPOC artists, representing Asian, Black or African American, Latinx, Native American or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern-identified artists; 10% of artists identify as having a disability; and 59% of artists identify as women, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. The cohort includes emerging, mid-career, and established artists between the ages of 25 and 69. The artists are affiliated with all regions of the United States and its territories, as well as artists based in Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Germany, and Japan. 
 
Kite also won a 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Media. The award honors her creative accomplishments and supports her ongoing artistic and professional development. Kite is one of 45 USA Fellows across 10 creative disciplines who will receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards. USA Fellowships are awarded to artists at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. Fellowships are awarded in the following disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. Learn more about USA Fellowships here.
 
Souleymane ‘Solo’ Badolo is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Burkina Faso–based troupe Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dance with Western contemporary dance. A native of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Badolo began his professional career with the African dance company DAMA. He has also performed with Salia nï Seydou and the National Ballet of Burkina Faso, and worked with French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier. Badolo and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa. He appeared in the 2015 BAM Next Wave Festival; has created solo projects for Danspace, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Harlem Stage, the 92nd Street Y, and New York’s River to River Festival; and was commissioned to create a dance for Philadanco as part of James Brown: Get on the Good Foot, which was produced by the Apollo Theater and toured nationally and internationally. He was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2011 as outstanding emerging choreographer, received the Juried Bessie Award in 2012, and a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for his piece Yimbégré, which “gloriously communicated the clash and reconciliation of the different traditions held within one’s life, one’s body.” The Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts has supported Badolo’s ongoing research in Africa. He graduated with an MFA from Bennington in June 2013. He has been on the Bard College faculty since 2017 and previously taught at the New School, Denison University, and Bennington College. 
 
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). Kite’s scholarship and practice explores contemporary Lakota ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Learning and compositional systems for body interface movement performances, interactive and static sculpture, immersive video and sound installations, poetry and experimental lectures, experimental video, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Her work has been featured in various publications, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines”, and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) (2019) was featured on the cover of Canadian Art.

Technological disruption is nothing new to cinema, writes Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick for Wired. “Early film theorists considered silent cinema a universal language until ‘talkies’ transformed storytelling for the big screen,” he writes. Still, the advent and proliferation of audiovisual content created entirely by artificial intelligence “elicits a special kind of anxiety for the film and TV industry’s creative classes.” Concerns regarding the use of these technologies are merited, Glick writes, especially with respect to “synthetic resurrection,” where the likeness of a deceased actor is used posthumously in a film. Still, positive uses of the technologies abound, including in human rights documentaries, where powerful testimony can be portrayed without sacrificing the anonymity of the subject. Text-to-video, wherein a user inputs a textual prompt from which an AI produces visuals, can result in projects that are exciting in their “strangeness and messiness,” he writes. Most appealing to Glick are those works which combine the human element with the artificial in a kind of collaboration between man and machine: “These projects point to the productive frictions of mixed-media and cross-platform practices.”

In the spring of 2023, Julia Rosenbaum, associate professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, will teach at the Freie Universität in Berlin via the Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship. Terra Foundation Visiting Professorships at Freie Universität Berlin are integrated into the curriculum and research programs of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies. “The particular setting of the John F. Kennedy Institute offers rich opportunities to students to situate their study of American art in dialogue with disciplines such as cultural studies, cultural history, literature, and sociology,” writes the Terra Foundation. “I am very grateful to have been chosen for the Terra professorship and am excited for the research and teaching opportunities of this transatlantic cultural collaboration,” Rosenbaum said.

The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz is the recipient of a $71,000 exhibitions grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, which will support a spring 2024 exhibition, guest curated by Bard College Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Tom Wolf, focusing on four diverse, early-twentieth-century artists: Miguel Covarrubias, Isami Doi, Aaron Douglas, and Winold Reiss.

The Dorsky Museum exhibition, tentatively titled “Global Connections: Four Artists in New York in the 1920s,” is one of 57 projects supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art through its latest round of grant funding. 

The exhibition is a temporary loan exhibition based on extensive original research into histories of cross-cultural inspiration and influence among the diverse artists Covarrubias, Doi, Douglas and Reiss (Mexican, Japanese Hawaiian, African American and German American, respectively).

Unpacking the connections between these four artists and focusing on artwork they produced that relates to the United States, Europe, Asia, and Mexico, this exhibition will further the discourse on multiculturalism in American art. Together, these four artists from different backgrounds illustrate a thus-far untold story of American art that raises challenging questions about histories of race, representation and multiculturalism that are relevant and necessary today. 

The concept stems from the research of guest curator Wolf, a specialist in twentieth century American art, Asian American artists, and art colonies. Wolf previously received an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant in support of his research and writing for this project.

“When the initial proposal for this project was shared with the Museum Exhibitions Committee, our group of expert advisors expressed unequivocal support and great eagerness for the project,” said Anna Conlan, the Neil C. Trager Director of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. “From the beginning, I personally have been captivated by this story and have encouraged Professor Wolf to pursue it.” 

“Global Connections” is planned to open on Feb. 3, 2024 and will occupy 3,500 feet of gallery space in The Dorsky Museum, centering paintings, prints, drawings and books. It will include a self-portrait by each artist, as well as works that reflect each of their ethnic heritage and enthusiasm for multiculturalism. 

Tom Wolf is a frequent collaborator with The Dorsky who serves as a member of the Museum’s Exhibitions Committee and has previously guest curated exhibitions including “Eva Watson-Schütze: Photographer” in 2009 and “Carl Walters and Woodstock Ceramic Arts” in 2017. 

About the Terra Foundation for American Art
The Terra Foundation for American Art, established in 1978 and having offices in Chicago and Paris, supports organizations and individuals locally and globally with the aim of fostering intercultural dialogues and encouraging transformative practices that expand narratives of American art, through the foundation’s grant program, collection and initiatives. More information about the Terra Foundation for American Art’s history and mission is available here.

Filmmakers Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 and Sky Hopinka have been awarded JustFilms grants through the Ford Foundation in support of their documentary film projects. Asili, associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, received a grant for his new project Don & Moki: Organic Music Society. Hopinka, assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard and 2022 MacArthur Fellow, received a grant for his continuing project Powwow People. 

One of the largest documentary funds in the world and a part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program, JustFilms provided over $4 million to support 68 innovative film projects in the United States and around the world that are centered on social justice issues.

Don & Moki: Organic Music Society, directed by Ephraim Asili and produced by Asili and Naima Karlsson, is a feature-length documentary exploring the collaborative and communal art practice developed and practiced by jazz multi-instrumentalist, theorist, and educator Don Cherry and his wife and primary collaborator, visual artist Moki Cherry.

Powwow People, directed by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) and produced by John Cardellino and Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk), is a film told through Hopinka's distinct artistic style and lens of personal lived experience. It is a meditation on the nebulous places of community and survivance that are powwows, poetically depicting Native American singers and dancers as they live their lives, maintain their cultural traditions, and prepare for an upcoming powwow, one organized, hosted, and documented through the production of this film. 

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music Maria Sonevytsky, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, reflects on how a Ukrainian phrase has transformed into a viral wartime slogan. “Good evening, we are from Ukraine,” a seemingly casual statement, has accumulated multiple meanings and layers throughout its evolution into an inclusive rallying cry for those who call the country home. “This phrase, which began as a musician’s offhand stage banter sampled into an EDM anthem, became a slogan invoked by Ukrainian politicians, soldiers, intellectuals, keyboard warriors, and their supporters around the globe,” she writes. For Sonevytsky, the brilliance of the statement is how its innocuous phrasing, at first glance a simple greeting, masks its inherent radicalism and defiance of the Russian’s state’s attempts to deny Ukraine’s existence. “The slogan works precisely because it does not traffic in the essentializing rhetoric of being Ukrainian,” she continues. “It is not for an individual declaring an identity: ‘I am Ukrainian.’ It is instead a collective, matter-of-fact statement: ‘We are from Ukraine.’ This also implies—and I still resent that this must be said, but here we are—that Ukraine exists, is a legitimate place, and contains people who claim it as home.”

This January, the American Academy of Arts and Letters announced the winners of the 2023 Charles Ives Opera Prize and the Marc Blitzstein Memorial Awards. Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek will each receive a Marc Blitzstein Memorial Award of $10,000, which are given in the memory of Marc Blitzstein to composers, lyricists, or librettists to encourage the creation of works of merit for musical theater and opera. Mazzoli and Vavrek have collaborated on the operas Breaking the Waves, Proving Up, Songs from the Uproar, and The Listeners. In 1965 the friends of Academy member Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) set up a fund in his memory for an award, now $10,000, to be given periodically to a composer, lyricist, or librettist, to encourage the creation of works of merit for musical theater and opera. The awards, to be given at the annual Ceremonial in May, “reflect the essential mission of the Academy to recognize, identify, and reward works of highest aspiration and superior craft by contemporary artists in our culture,” said Yehudi Wyner, a composer member and former president of the Academy.

In 1965, Life hired photojournalist and Bard alumnus Steven Schaprio ’55 to photograph the then-ascendant Andy Warhol for the magazine. Life never published the photo series, and only now are they being published posthumously after Schapiro’s death in 2022. Rolling Stone featured a series of photos from Andy Warhol and Friends: 1965–1966, which “includes many never-before-seen documents of a pivotal time in Warhol’s life as he helped shape popular culture for decades to come.”

ARTnews highlighted individuals and institutions that had a significant impact on public engagement with Indigenous art in 2022, including Bard College on the short list. In September, the College announced a transformational $25 million endowment gift from the Gochman Family Foundation to support a renamed American and Indigenous Studies Program. A matching commitment by the Open Society Foundations will create a $50 million endowment for Native American and Indigenous Studies in undergraduate and graduate academics and the arts in Annandale, to include a center for Indigenous Studies and the appointment of an Indigenous Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard).

Filmmaker and Bard professor Ephraim Asili spoke with Metal magazine about navigating his various roles as artist and teacher. “I can't see a situation in the future, no matter how well things go commercially, where I would not want to teach. I get too much out of it in terms of being able to relate to people of a certain age, with a fresh mindset around the medium and the world in general. It's something that I get endless inspiration from. I've also been able to hire former students to work with me on my projects, and that has gone well for me, and for students that I've worked with. Is that something that I anticipated? I think so.” Ephraim Asili is associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program. He is an alumnus of Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Class of 2011. Asili has taught on the faculty at Bard since 2015.