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Since its original publication in Mexico in 1955, Juan Rulfo’s sparse and haunting novel Pedro Páramo “has cast an uncanny spell on writers,” famously inspiring Gabriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude—yet for English-speaking readers it “remains something of a best-kept secret, a book that people either cherish or have never heard of,” writes Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. “The book shows its readers how to read all over again, the same way The Waste Land or Ulysses does, by bending the rules of literature so skillfully, so freely, that the rules must change thereafter.” Rulfo once suggested that Pedro Páramo, the only book Rulfo ever published, was meant to be read three times before understood. “Maybe the novel was also meant to be translated three times before it seeped more broadly and indelibly into the Anglophone consciousness. Maybe its time has finally come,” writes Luiselli, who deems the Mexican novel’s newly published and third English language translation by Douglas J. Weatherford “by far, the best of Rulfo in English.”

Samantha Simon ’26, a Bard student majoring in art history and visual culture, has been named as one of the members of the National Humanities Center’s 2023–24 Leadership Council. As a member of the council, which was established to help prepare a select group of students with humanities-based leadership skills, Simon will join 31 other students from around the US in a unique series of interactive experiences with humanities scholars and leaders.

Nominated by faculty from colleges and universities across the country, the student council members will receive professional development and mentoring from leading scholars and other humanities professionals as well as research support, opportunities for networking, and access to National Humanities Center programming and expertise. In round tables and discussion sessions, they will explore the essential importance of humanistic perspectives in addressing the concerns of contemporary society, and may focus on specific projects and engagement with the communities at their institutions.

“The exceptional students selected for the council this year are pursuing an assortment of majors, from art history to biochemistry to Middle Eastern studies, but they all share a deep interest and passion for the humanities,” said Jacqueline Kellish, the National Humanities Center’s director of public engagement. “We are looking forward to working with these brilliant young people in the coming months and exploring with them the ways that their humanities knowledge and training can help them forge successful careers and make a difference in their communities and beyond.”

The National Humanities Center is a private, nonprofit organization, and the only independent institute dedicated exclusively to advanced study in all areas of the humanities. Through public engagement intimately linked to its scholarly and educational programs, the center promotes understanding of the humanities and advocates for their foundational role in a democratic society.

Angelica Sanchez, assistant professor of music, was inspired by “the sounds of the pitch-dark woods at night” while composing her newest album, Nighttime Creatures. Reviewing the album for NPR’s Fresh Air, music critic Kevin Whitehead says that pastoral inspiration is felt throughout the record. “You get a sense of sonic depth, foreground versus background. That sort of spatial awareness is another thing one might cultivate in the woods at night, where the same animal cry can be charming or alarming, depending on distance,” Whitehead says. “For open-eared composer Angelica Sanchez, such encounters set the mind buzzing. On Nighttime Creatures, she bottles that open-air feeling and brings it into the studio.”

Five Bard Conservatory of Music and Music Program faculty members and alumni/ae have been nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY Awards. Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe is featured on the album Champion, nominated for Best Opera Recording. Bard Composers in Residence Jessie Montgomery and Missy Mazzoli are both nominees for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Mazzoli’s concerto Dark With Excessive Bright and Montgomery’s “Rounds” for piano and string orchestra (featured in pianist Awadagin Pratt’s Stillpoint) have been nominated for the GRAMMY. Julia Bullock MM ’11 has been nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her album Walking In The Dark. In the category of Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, music program alumnus Max Zbiral-Teller ’06, along with his House of Waters bandmates, has been nominated for On Becoming. The 2024 GRAMMYs, officially known as the 66th GRAMMY Awards, will take place Sunday, February 4 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

This fall, Bard College is launching the Bard Community Arts Collective, a collaboration between the Fisher Center at Bard, Bard Center for Civic Engagement (CCE), Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard), the Bard Conservatory, and The Orchestra Now (TŌN). The aim of the collective is to inspire connection and community through arts-based educational programming, coordinated in partnership with local organizations and schools.

Bard has long partnered with Hudson Valley artists, organizations, and schools, including the school systems of Kingston, Rhinebeck and Red Hook, as well as organizations such as Kite’s Nest, and the Boys & Girls Club of Ulster County. The Community Arts Collective will make Bard’s resources more accessible to these and other community partners, assisting with the development of new programs and connections within the region. It will partner with schools and community organizations to link the College’s educational resources with community interests.

The Arts Collective’s programs include a wide variety of arts events that are open to the public. Weekly rehearsals by the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra, including community engagement activities with the musicians and conductor, will be open to local school groups, and the Conservatory will perform at local events, such as its recent concert at the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston as part of the “Burning of Kingston” festival, a historical reenactment that commemorates the events that occurred in the city during the Revolutionary War.

The Orchestra Now has opened several dress rehearsals to children from local daycare and school programs, while CCS Bard will host tours for young visitors at its current exhibition, Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, the first large-scale exhibition of its kind to center performance and theater as an origin point for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Alaska Native artists.

The College sponsors a variety of student-led initiatives through its CCE Trustee Leader Scholars (TLS) program, run by Paul Marienthal. Sister2Sister, a student-led mentorship program run by Bard alumni Skylar Walker, provides guidance and opportunities for young women of color in Kingston with an arts focus, and will start its 6th consecutive year providing regular after school activities and annual conferences.

“It's been an honor watching our program grow from what was once a student-led TLS project to an institutionally supported entity,” said Walker. “The most touching part about this experience has been being able to genuinely connect, empower, and inspire young women who look like me. I am incredibly grateful that Bard has provided a platform and a space for programs like ours, it is truly what our youth need.”

Another TLS program, the Musical Mentorship Initiative, which is led by Bard Conservatory students, has offered free music lessons to children of all ages since the pandemic began in 2020. “The students constantly create and run new projects. The key is student ownership. We are good cheerleaders, but students with their imaginations blazing do the heavy lifting,” explains Marienthal.

The Collective will make coordination and innovation easier for community partners, acting as a transparent entity for interested organizations and schools to approach with ideas for collaboration. “The concept of a collective is powerful—we already see a shift in how we collaborate with communities making the College’s resources easier to access and better reflect shared interests. Here, interdisciplinary approaches to learning can evolve to respond to the community’s needs and desires for arts programming,” observed CCE’s Vice President for Civic Engagement Erin Cannan. “The Hudson Valley has always been an incubator for art and art making, and Bard has played a key role. This approach allows us to reach new organizations, schools, communities, and helps our students learn the power of community art building.”

For more information, contact [email protected].

“Like so many documentary photographers, I often pick a post or set up a frame and wait for something to happen within it,” Sam Youkilis ’16 said to i-D. “I truly believe in the camera’s ability to will things happening within its frame.” After publishing his debut monograph, Somewhere, Youkilis spoke with i-D and Interview magazine about capturing the mundane, his use of vertical video, and finding a following on Instagram. “I’m lucky that I’ve been able to find success in what I do on Instagram in a really organic way,” Youkilis said to Quinn Moreland ’15 for Interview. “And I am lucky that I’m able to share my work in a diaristic way where it’s very much an insight into my life from morning to the end of the day.” Somewhere, which totals more than 500 pages in length, represents this diaristic practice in a physical format, with the size of the monograph somewhere between the size of a postcard and an iPhone, with a purposeful intermixture of the commonplace and the grandiose. “The point of the book, in a way, is to level any hierarchy across this imagery and present my work democratically so no moment is given more value than others,” Youkilis said.

The Bard Prison Initiative hosted its long-running orchestral concert program at Eastern Correctional Facility last week. Conducted by Leon Botstein, the program included Beethoven, Bartók, and Duke Ellington’s New World A-Comin’ performed by Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music Marcus Roberts, accompanied by Jason Marsalis and others from Roberts’ band The Modern Jazz Generation. 

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra, an 80-student ensemble comprised primarily of undergraduates, performed on the stage of the prison’s auditorium for an audience of almost 150 incarcerated men. Yuchen Zhao, a second-year graduate student and violinist with the Conservatory Orchestra, told Andrew Checchia, who covered the concert for the Red Hook Daily Catch, that the men at Eastern were “the most focused audience in the world.” 

“This is a great opportunity to come together and enjoy a unique experience,” said Daniel F. Martuscello III, acting commissioner of New York State’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, before the performance. “People go to prison as punishment, but they shouldn’t be defined by the worst moments of their life.”

At MoMA, Professor ​​An-My Lê’s images of Vietnam, the American South, and the California desert “are tour-de-force beautiful.” Holland Cotter reviews Between Two Rivers, Lê’s MoMA exhibition, as a Critic’s Pick for the New York Times. “​​In Lê’s photographs we find the line between boot camp and theater, battle-prepping and playacting, almost comically blurred,” writes Cotter. An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1998.