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Jazz pianist and Bard Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music Marcus Roberts was a featured artist in the dedication and gala concert held in the newly named Marian Anderson Hall in Philadelphia to honor the legacy of internationally renowned American contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson (1897–1993), who was the first Black singer to perform at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, reports NPR. Music and Artistic Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra Yannick Nézet-Séguin said, “To have exceptional artists like Queen Latifah, Angel Blue, Audra McDonald, Latonia Moore, and Marcus Roberts—themselves trailblazers in their fields—join us for this momentous occasion will make the evening even more special, as we continue to create a more representative art form. We hope that every person feels welcome in our music and in the concert hall, and that every performance in Marian Anderson Hall serves as a reminder of her legacy and as an inspiration.”

From June 6–26, 2024, Julia Weist, visiting artist in residence at Bard College, will be a visual art resident at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. Weist will spend this time working on a photographic collage of images and data obtained through a private investigator license granted to the artist by the New York Department of State. Weist plans to exhibit this project at Moskowitz Bayse Gallery in Los Angeles, California, in September 2024. The Yaddo residency is offered annually to approximately 275 professional creative artists from all nations, individually or as collaborative teams, working in choreography, film, literature, musical composition, painting, performance art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and video.

Born in Los Angeles, where he still works, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12 “finds beauty amid the ruin. His art engages serious social and political experience, but it succeeds by its refusal to be monolithic,” writes the Los Angeles Times. Aparicio’s current solo exhibition of recent works focuses on the various connections between Central America and Los Angeles—and posits multiple sites as a part of the same community and history as a crucial decolonizing strategy and one that problematizes the term “native.” In his cast rubber piece, “Who Do You Believe More, the Subversive or the Embassy? (W. Washington Blvd. and Hoover St., Los Angeles, CA),” specific use of materials that have a strong tie to pre-Hispanic cultures in Central America are key. The living ficus tree from which the work was cast is located at a major street intersection in the heart of the city’s El Salvadoran community. “Nature is scrutinized as an index of American culture. The landscape view subtly shifts. After seeing Aparicio’s show, you’re unlikely to look at our omnipresent ficus trees quite the same way again.” His show is on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA through June 16.

Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, visiting faculty in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, has been awarded a 2024 fellowship from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust (BBT) in support of her professional projects. The BBT Fellowship Program rewards musical excellence demonstrated by outstanding young musicians—for individuals and ensembles that have been selected from over 32 countries—with fellowships in 2024 being given to seven artists, including Fitz Gibbon. BBT winners are awarded between £20,000 and £30,000. There are no set criteria for how artists spend their budget. Winners are encouraged to be creative and to use their awards in a way that will help to establish and build their careers. Over the next three years, BBT’s fellowship funding will support Fitz Gibbon in the commissioning of new works, performances, and recordings. BBT also will provide advice, guidance, contacts, and public relations exposure. BBT artists join a supportive family that helps to advance their careers.

“I am overwhelmed with gratitude to have received one of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust’s 2024 Artist Fellowships. The nomination process asked me to dream about what I could accomplish with the kind of latitude that this funding and administrative support would represent, but I found the range of possibilities almost too tantalizing to imagine, as if I could permit myself only an oblique gaze at what might be,” wrote Fitz Gibbon upon receiving the fellowship.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon is noted for her “dazzling virtuoso singing” (Boston Globe) and believes that creating new works and recreating those lost in centuries past makes room for the diversity of voices integral to classical music’s future. Spotlighted as a Rising Star of Classical Music for 2024 in the February 20, 2024, edition of the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) Music Magazine, Fitz Gibbon is one of 15 young classical musicians that the BBC has identified worldwide who are making a prominent stamp on the industry, whether with concert performances, opera roles, or dazzling new recordings.

Ross Exo Adams and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, assistant professors of architectural studies and codirectors of the Architecture Program at Bard College, were interviewed in Koozarch. In conversation with Valerio Franzone, they discussed contemporary architecture pedagogy and the challenges for the field, as well as the opportunities that open when architecture can be taught in a liberal arts context. “Architectural tools should be taught not only to produce new spaces but also to map systems and relationships, similar to Forensic Architecture, to reset the tools of architecture so that they can play roles in forms of advocacy, and broader forms of spatial justice,” said Exo Adams.