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Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, will represent the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte in 2024. Gibson, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is one of the first Indigenous artists to represent the country at the Biennale. The Biennale Arte 2024 is being curated by Adriano Pedrosa, who received this year’s CCS Bard Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. Gibson told the New York Times: “The last 15 years of my career have been about turning inward and trying to make something I really wanted to see in the world. Now I want to expand the way people think about Indigeneity.” According to the Times, the artist’s Hudson Valley studio is working on a multimedia installation and performances that will open in April 2024 and be titled “the space in which to place me,” referring to a poem by Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation.

“[W]ell staged and excitingly sung, Henri VIII revealed itself as a grand and compelling, often thrilling work that deserves a more frequent spot on stages,” writes Zachary Woolfe in his critic’s pick review for the New York Times. “The piece has been treated lovingly at Bard, in a vibrant but restrained staging by Jean-Romain Vesperini.” Popular in its day but rarely performed now, Saint-Saëns’s 1883 opera focuses on Henry’s break with the Catholic Church, the end of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and his love for Anne Boleyn. The production opened last Friday at the Fisher Center as part of the 20th anniversary SummerScape season. Performances run through Sunday, July 30. 
 

On Friday, August 4, the Bard Music Festival returns with an intensive two-week exploration of “Vaughan Williams and His World.” In 11 themed concert programs, the festival’s 33rd season examines the great but frequently misunderstood English and Welsh composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of the 20th century’s preeminent symphonists, contextualizing the composer among his fellow Victorians, Edwardians, and Moderns (Weekend One: August 4–6), and exploring his role in creating what may be considered A New Elizabethan Age? (Weekend Two: August 10–13). Complemented by two special events in nearby Rhinebeck, these concerts take place in the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Bard College’s idyllic Hudson River campus. New Yorkers can take round-trip bus transportation to the final concert (see details below), and home audiences around the world can enjoy livestreams of Programs 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, and 11 on Upstreaming, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage. A centerpiece of the 20th Bard SummerScape festival, the Bard Music Festival also represents a highlight of the Fisher Center’s landmark 20th anniversary season, “Breaking Ground.”

“One of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture” (NYC Arts, THIRTEEN/WNET), festival founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein is music director of both the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra, The Orchestra Now (TŌN). For his first, livestreamed ASO appearance, Botstein leads two late Vaughan Williams symphonies – the darkly atmospheric Seventh (“Sinfonia Antartica”), a work scored for vast forces, and the award-winning, vividly orchestrated Eighth – as well as music by Jean Sibelius, William Walton and Vaughan Williams’s woefully underrated student Elizabeth Maconchy [Program 9]. Botstein and the ASO also give a livestreamed performance of Vaughan Williams’s Shakespearean comic opera, Sir John in Love, starring bass-baritone Craig Colclough as Falstaff alongside sopranos Brandie Sutton and Ann Toomey, mezzo-sopranos Lucy Schaufer and Sarah Saturnino, tenor Joshua Blue, and the Bard Festival Chorale in a rare, semi-staged production by Alison Moritz [Program 11]. The director explains:

“In creating a concert staging of this bucolic comedy for Bard, I wanted to lean into the festival atmosphere of Bard in the summertime. … The gentle humor in this lyric comedy of manners comes from misunderstandings between the sexes and between classes, and I wanted to make sure that these themes would be immediately enjoyable by today’s audiences. So, instead of setting the story in Elizabethan Windsor, we have created a summer holiday inspired by English humorist P.G. Wodehouse’s classic Blandings countryside – filled with tea and crumpets, lawn games, cocktail parties, savvy servants, and plus-fours.”

Botstein conducts TŌN in performances of Vaughan Williams’s famed Tallis Fantasia and neo-classical D-minor Violin Concerto, featuring Naumburg Competition winner Grace Park [Program 1], as well as three of the composer’s mature orchestral works: Job, A Masque for Dancing; the seldom-programmed, blisteringly uncompromisingly Fourth Symphony; and the C-major Piano Concerto, in a two-piano arrangement showcasing festival favorites Danny Driver, a Gramophone Award nominee, and Piers Lane, for whom “no praise could be high enough” (Gramophone) [Program 3]. Led by James Bagwell and Zachary Schwartzman, TŌN also gives livestreamed accounts of music by British composers Frederick Delius, Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Peter Warlock, and Grace Williams, together with Vaughan Williams’s Five Variants of “Dives and Lazarus” for harp and strings; The Lark Ascending, featuring violinist Bella Hristova, “a player of impressive power and control” (Washington Post); and the seldom programmed Flos Campi, the composer’s sensuous, wordless setting of erotic verses from the biblical Song of Solomon, with Tokyo Competition winner Luosha Fang as viola soloist [Program 7].

The festival’s chamber highlights include accounts of both Vaughan Williams’s Second String Quartet [Program 8], and Samuel Barber’s Serenade [Program 10] by the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet. The Horszowski Trio – “the most compelling American group to come on the scene” (New Yorker) – performs “Per aspera ad astra,” the tightly constructed Third Piano Trio by Vaughan Williams’s teacher Charles Villiers Stanford, and the Cleveland Quartet Award-winning Ariel Quartet joins Grammy-nominated clarinetist Todd Palmer for the Clarinet Quintet by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whom Stanford considered his most gifted pupil [Program 2]. With Danny Driver, members of the group also undertake Herbert Howells’s Piano Quartet, one of the great masterworks of British impressionism [Program 5]. “One of New York’s finest organists” (New York Times), Renée Anne Louprette plays the newly renovated organ of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in nearby Rhinebeck, where the festival makes its first foray off-campus with two special programs of “Music for School, Parish, and Home.”

As in previous seasons, all choral works showcase the Bard Festival Chorale and James Bagwell. Hailed as “one of the high points of every Bard Festival” (New York Arts), this season’s annual choral program also represents the second special event at Rhinebeck’s Episcopal Church of the Messiah. Surveying 350 years of English choral music in the ecclesiastical environment for which it was written, “The Anglican Choral Tradition” features composers ranging from William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons to Howells and Benjamin Britten, interspersed with organ works by Vaughan Williams and Ethel Smyth.

Soprano Katherine Lerner Lee, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy, tenor Maximillian Jansen, and baritone Tyler Duncan trace the evolution of a uniquely British sound in “Heirs and Rebels: British Art Songs,” a concert with commentary by Scholar-in-Residence Byron Adams [Program 4]. Similarly, soprano Ann Toomey, mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, tenor Martin Luther Clark, and baritone Theo Hoffman offer an entertaining and wholly original tour through half a century of British light music, in a concert with commentary by award-winning author Christina Baade [Program 6]. Other vocal highlights include a rendition of Vaughan Williams’s beloved song cycle On Wenlock Edge by three-time Grammy-nominated tenor Nicholas Phan, “one of the world’s most remarkable singers” (Boston Globe) [Program 5].

Supplementary events and companion book
Besides the eleven concert programs and two special events, there will be two free panel discussions – “Composer and Nation” and “The Artist in Time of War” – and a series of informative pre-concert talks, all free to ticket-holders, by scholars including Christina Bashford, Michael Beckerman, Daniel M. Grimley, Imani Danielle Mosley, Philip Rupprecht, Eric Saylor, Tiffany Stern, and Richard Wilson. SummerScape and ASO also present the first major American production of Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII, a French grand opera set in Tudor England (July 21–30). Edited by Bard’s 2023 Scholars-in-Residence Byron Adams, a contributor to both the Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams and Vaughan Williams Studies, and Daniel M. Grimley, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, the companion book Vaughan Williams and His World is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Round-trip bus transportation from New York City
Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for the festival finale, Program Eleven (August 13). This may be ordered online or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900, and the meeting point for pick-up and drop-off is at Lincoln Center on Amsterdam Avenue, between 64th and 65th Streets. More information is available here.

SummerScape tickets
Tickets for mainstage events start at $25 and livestreams are $20. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.

Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Ashley Tata’s production of “Farming,” a choral work by composer and Pulitzer finalist Ted Hearnes, was featured in NPR and reviewed in the New York Times as a Critic’s Pick. The nine-part song cycle, performed by the vocalists of the Crossing chamber choir, explores issues of colonialism, marketing, and consumption, and addresses food supply in the US, the business of big agriculture today, and the country’s Indigenous farmers. “The libretto pulls not only from Jeff Bezos and William Penn, but also the social media feed of Uber Eats and the FAQ page for a startup called Farmer's Fridge,” says Nate Chinen for NPR. “The direction, by Ashley Tata, really leaned into the surreal—the singers wore bright neon costumes and the lighting cues and choreography all played up this idea of a complex machine gone totally haywire.”

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) is pleased to present Stage Presence, the thesis exhibition of the Class of 2024. The exhibition brings together 23 distinct practices from candidates in the disciplines of film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. Stage Presence will be on view from July 15 through July 23 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook, New York, and evening presentations of time-based works—such as performances, readings and screenings—will be held at several locations on Bard’s campus. An opening reception will also be held on July 15, from 1 pm to 4 pm. For more information about exhibition hours, presentation locations, and accessibility, please visit bard.edu/mfa/thesis.

In its standard usage, the phrase “stage presence” refers to a performer’s capacity to command the attention of a room. The phrase was also used by art critic Michael Fried in 1967 to condemn minimalist artists’ rejection of modernist artistic values of autonomy and absorption. In Fried’s account the minimalists instead embraced “the situation” in which an art object and viewer existed together, reflexively confronting an audience with their relationship to viewing. Following Fried’s essay, the phrase has had many more lives within artistic contexts, from a postmodern reclamation to a contemporary embrace of its more commonplace associations.
 
When taken together, the distinct artistic practices of the Bard MFA Class of 2024 resonate with issues of stage presence. Experimentation with display structures; activations of text in space; investigations into mapping and absence; disruption of voice and conventional notions of authorship; emphasis on the scale of the body; and integration of theatrical techniques such as props or backdrops are just a few of the strategies by which these artists explore modes of presence, viewership, and relationality.

The Bard MFA thesis exhibition features works by MFA candidates Kaur Alia Ahmed, June Canedo de Souza, Francesse Dolbrice, Camonghne Felix, Christina Graham, Tallulah Haddon, Lara Carmen Hidalgo, Sam Lasko, Khan Lee, Lotte Leerschool, Eli Benjamin Neuman-Hammond, Mira Putnam, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, Natalia Rolón Sotelo, Francie Seidl Chodosh, Sydney Spann, Allie Taylor, Lauren Tosswill, Nora Treatbaby, Marty Two Bulls Jr., Sam Wenc, Alexa West, and Drew Zeiba.

Stage Presence is coordinated by Marina Caron (MA ’23), a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Caron is a curator, writer and researcher based in New York City. Her thesis exhibition, Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass, focused on the work of the prolific and under-recognized artist Bettina Grossman (b. New York, 1927; d. New York, 2021).

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, is showcasing works in several exhibitions this summer, including solo shows at the Aspen Art Museum and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. He is also featured in Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, a standout group show at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. His exhibitions are among a number of shows highlighting Indigenous American artists this summer. “These shows, as well as several thematic group exhibitions, create a moment of recognition for contemporary Indigenous art, providing historical context for the work being made today,” writes Annabel Keenan for Artsy. “I am glad to see a greater recognition that all Indigenous artists are unique and come from different cultural perspectives,” said Gibson, who is Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee. “I see an increase in the understanding of Indigenous makers, their intentions and their cultural perspectives, but there is so far to go. I’d like to think that these artists are being treated more as individuals rather than representative of a large and more general Indigenous community.”

The Fisher Center at Bard (Gideon Lester, artistic director and chief executive; Aaron Mattocks, chief operating officer) today announces that, in partnership with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA), it has received a $2,000,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work and livelihood of Tania El Khoury, a commissioned artist and guest cocurator at the Fisher Center, founding director of CHRA, and a distinguished artist in residence at Bard’s Theater & Performance Program. El Khoury’s live art engages the audience in close encounters with narratives drawn from the political realities of borders, displacement, and state violence. The grant will support her live art production and touring, her scholarly and artistic research, and her curatorial work at the Fisher Center and CHRA.

Over the next three years, the Fisher Center and El Khoury will re-imagine the collaboration between an institution and an artist and will develop ways in which an institution becomes a holistic home for an artist. El Khoury’s relationship with Bard began in 2017, when Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive, invited her to co-curate Where No Wall Remains, the 2019 edition of the institution’s biennial festival, which focused that year on the subject of borders and comprised eight new interdisciplinary artworks commissioned by El Khoury and Lester. El Khoury created a new work of her own for the festival, Cultural Exchange Rate, a multi-sensory performance installation that invites the audience to follow her own family’s relationship to borders and migration across a century of time. Cultural Exchange Rate continues to tour internationally in various languages, as do several other works by El Khoury.
                                                                                               
While developing Where No Wall Remains, El Khoury and Lester began to imagine a longer collaboration. Their work on the biennial led them, along with Tom Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Program at Bard, to envision a center that explores art practices that intersect with human rights advocacy through public programming and an international low-cost MA Program in Human Rights & the Arts. In 2021, the three of them, along with scholar Ziad Abu-Rish, founded the Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA), which is funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN). El Khoury directs CHRA while continuing to pursue her artistic practice and teaching.  
             
Lester and El Khoury have continued their curatorial work together with a second joint edition of the biennial, Common Ground: an international festival on the politics of land and food, produced by the Fisher Center in two installments: October 2022 and May 2023. In this festival, El Khoury premiered her work Memory of Birds, an interactive sound installation in the trees around the Fisher Center that evoked the imprint of political violence on contested lands. Common Ground also included three international editions, curated by artists in Palestine, Colombia, and South Africa, all of which were funded by CHRA.

Tania El Khoury said, “This generous grant from Mellon Foundation comes at a time when the live performance industry is experiencing a fundamental restructuring due to the recent pandemic and major shifts in public and private funding streams. The grant will allow me to further pursue my artistic and curatorial practices, deepen my experimentation with new models of collaboration and institution-building, and reflect on my trajectory as an artist working at the intersection of politics and research.”

The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant makes it possible for the Fisher Center and CHRA to offer El Khoury tangible resources to develop and disseminate ambitious, forward-thinking work, of her own and by other artists. This new model of artist-institution engagement follows the Fisher Center awarding Pam Tanowitz an ongoing residency in which the institution has taken over touring (of work including Four Quartets and Song of Songs, which the Fisher Center commissioned and premiered to immense acclaim) and other administrative support for her company, including a salary for Tanowitz. The Mellon grant helps the Fisher Center become an artistic home for El Khoury, providing resources in three key areas:

• Practice
• Infrastructure
• Livelihood

Gideon Lester says, “We are delighted to be partnering with Mellon to develop a new, comprehensive model of support for Tania that will allow her not only to create and disseminate her work, but to live an artist’s life with dignity. Tania is a visionary artist, curator, and thought leader, and it’s an honor for us to be able to help steward her creative practice and research. Institutions of higher learning have an essential role to play in the country’s artistic infrastructure. Mellon’s visionary philanthropy will help deepen and extend the Fisher Center’s commitment to long-term, holistic support for artists’ practice, infrastructure, and livelihood.” 

The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant comes amid a banner 20th anniversary year for the Fisher Center. The institution is currently producing its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, including the 2023 Bard SummerScape festival, which also celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The season culminates in a groundbreaking ceremony, on October 21, for The Fisher Center’s new 25,000-square-foot performing arts studio building, designed by Maya Lin, which will offer artists at all stages of their careers vastly expanded room to explore as they build works from the ground up. 

About Tania El Khoury
Tania El Khoury creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction.

El Khoury’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 33 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.

El Khoury is a Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Theater and Performance Program and Founding Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College. She holds a PhD in Theater Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. El Khoury is a co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a research and live art collective in Lebanon, and is associated with the Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK.
taniaelkhoury.com
instagram.com/taniaelk

The Fisher Center at Bard has become an incubator for commercially promising new work like Justin Peck’s Illinois, while holding tight to its experimental roots.
For the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler visits Bard’s Fisher Center in its 20th anniversary season, on the heels of a sold-out, extended run of Illinois, to talk with Fisher Center Artistic Director Gideon Lester, Illinois director Justin Peck, choreographer Pam Tanowitz, President Leon Botstein, and others about the Fisher Center’s past and future. “Since opening 20 years ago,” she writes, “the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary, and sometimes hard to describe hits.”