All Bard News by Date
listings 1-4 of 4
September 2024
09-09-2024
The novella The Plotinus by Bard alumna Rikki Ducornet ’64 was reviewed by Marina Warner in the New York Review of Books. Ducornet’s fifteenth work of fiction, The Plotinus is about a futuristic narrator who is arrested for going on a walk, and it incorporates a style Warner calls “[something] between astringent honesty, madcap fantasy, parodic sci-fi, surreal absurdism, metaphysical absorption, and rapturous lyric.”
Ducornet earned her BA from Bard in fine arts before publishing her first book The Stain in 1984. Throughout her career, she’s followed the trajectory of Surrealist authors and the Latin American literary tradition of the “marvelous real.” In addition to her writing, she has illustrated books by authors including Jorge Luis Borges and Anne Waldman. Warner writes that The Plotinus forms “an arc of feeling [tracing] the transformation of the narrator from despairing to loving,” comparing the novella to sci-fi works by authors like Ursula K. LeGuin, Doris Lessing, and China Miéville. Her many honors include The Bard College Arts and Letters Award (1998), The Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (2004), and The Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008), among others.
Ducornet earned her BA from Bard in fine arts before publishing her first book The Stain in 1984. Throughout her career, she’s followed the trajectory of Surrealist authors and the Latin American literary tradition of the “marvelous real.” In addition to her writing, she has illustrated books by authors including Jorge Luis Borges and Anne Waldman. Warner writes that The Plotinus forms “an arc of feeling [tracing] the transformation of the narrator from despairing to loving,” comparing the novella to sci-fi works by authors like Ursula K. LeGuin, Doris Lessing, and China Miéville. Her many honors include The Bard College Arts and Letters Award (1998), The Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (2004), and The Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008), among others.
09-03-2024
Heeryoon Shin, assistant professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, has been awarded an individual fellowship of $5,500 from the Asian Cultural Council in support of a new project in India. Shin’s research will focus on investigating the localized reception of blue-and-white ceramics in colonial India, and examine the innovative architectural reuse of Chinese, Dutch, and British ceramics in Indian interiors. Blue-and-white ceramics incorporated into palace interiors have been seen as derivative imitations of European practices of collecting and displaying ceramics, or have often been considered too foreign to be part of the narrative of India’s national art history. Shin’s project aims to reframe these historical spaces as sites of multilayered cultural exchanges facilitated by the creativity of Indian patrons and artists—and to ultimately contribute to the decolonization of global art history by emphasizing the Indian agency and initiative in ceramic practices and histories.
09-03-2024
Orange Blossom Trail, a new book of photography by Bard alumnus Joshua Lutz ’97 MFA ’05, documents the lives of workers along a 400-mile stretch of highway from Georgia to Miami. Three texts by author George Saunders accompany Lutz’s photographs, which display an “austere frankness,” writes Walker Mimms in a review for the New York Times. “Though not without dignity—see Lutz’s portraits of fruit inspectors, as they glance up from a conveyor belt of tumbling oranges—his photos lack any social agenda,” Mimms continues, an effect that is emphasized by inclusion of the Saunders texts. Mimms walks away surprised not only by the collaboration itself, but its commitment to portraying “the demoralizing American grind with an attitude between sympathy and resignation. An attitude that’s rare in art because we seldom admit it to ourselves.”
09-03-2024
An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts, interviewed the renowned photographer Dawoud Bey, her friend and peer, for Bomb magazine’s Oral History Project, which aims to document the stories of distinguished visual artists of the African Diaspora. In conversation with Lê, Bey discusses his experiences as an artist, photographer, and educator, and the journey that has now cemented him within a legacy and tradition of contemporary Black photographers in the United States. “I felt beholden to that piece of the history that I had been responding to,” Bey said. “I wanted to extend that and also apply that history to the Black subject in a way that elevated the Black subject in the photograph, in a way that cut through the stereotypical, more socially pathologically driven representations of African American subjects in photographs. I started out wanting to make work in opposition to those kinds of stereotypical pathology-driven photographs. But as I began working and immersing myself in the work, that receded to the point where my ambition was to make the most honest, clear-eyed, resonant representation of what was in front of me.”
listings 1-4 of 4