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Six Bard College faculty members have been named as recipients of grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) for 2025. NYSCA Support for Organizations grants were awarded to Erika Switzer, assistant professor of music and director of the Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship at Bard, Lucy Fitz Gibbon, visiting faculty in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music, and Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard.  Additionally, Bard College received a Support for Organizations Award for 2025 in the amount of $40,000. NYSCA Support for Artist grants were awarded to DN Bashir, assistant professor of theater and performance at Bard, and Ann Lauterbach, professor of languages and literature.The NYSCA grants are intended to increase access to arts funding and recognize the substantial economic and social impact of New York state’s arts and culture sector. 

Erika Switzer and Lucy Fitz Gibbon will receive a grant in support of operational expenses and projects at Sparks & Wiry Cries, an organization, cofounded by Switzer and where Fitz Gibbon serves as managing editor, that curates opportunities for art song creators, performers, and scholars with innovative initiatives. These projects will include the upcoming Brooklyn premieres of Meltdown, a dramatic work for mezzo and piano trio which engages the layered stories and science of climate change through the lens of a female glaciologist, and Skymother, which weaves together the family history of composer Timothy Long (Choctaw, Muscogee Creek) with the Haudenosaunee creation story, Sky Woman.

Sarah Hennies, along with her duo partner, Tristan Kasten-Krause, a bassist and composer, will receive the grant for their new work Saccades for double bass and percussion at the Wassaic Project, an artist-run nonprofit contemporary art gallery, artist residency, and art education center. The piece is to be performed in total darkness with a single candle flame.

Suzanne Kite will receive a grant for the proposed project, Owáǧo Uŋkíhaŋblapi (We Dream a Score), her first full orchestral work for her organizational partner, the American Composers Orchestra (ACO). The piece continues Kite’s exploration of individual, collective, and societal dreaming practices, using an Indigenous AI framework. NYSCA funding supports the development of an AI app in collaboration with the Brooklyn-based design firm School. Members of the ACO and the public will submit their dreams to the app, which transforms language into Lakȟóta Visual Language symbols. 

DN Bashir’s Hollow House, sponsored by JACK Arts Incorporated, follows a group of New York residents meeting at a farm-to-table restaurant in an old house in the Hudson Valley. Inspired by Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, it explores unspoken power dynamics and “the systems that hold us captive.” 
 
Ann Lauterbach will be awarded a grant in support of her project called “The Meanwhile: Linear Ruptures and Simultaneous Narratives,” which will have a performance and possible exhibition at the Flowchart Foundation. 

 

Artist and Bard alumnus Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12 has been recognized by ARTnews as a 2024 Emerging Artist of the Year. For his first solo museum presentation, which took place earlier this year, Aparicio was selected by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to take over part of its sprawling Geffen Contemporary location for the relaunch of its “MOCA Focus” exhibition series, which featured works he made between 2016 and 2023 alongside three site-specific commissions. “In Aparicio’s work there is a commitment to experimentation and to pushing materials to their limits, only to show us new ways of seeing and thinking,” ARTnews wrote of the exhibition. “This is the beginning of an incredibly promising career.” His work explores the visual and conceptual po­­ssibilities of globally ubiquitous raw materials and products of Indigenous knowledge of Latin America. In recent years, Aparicio has produced large scale rubber casts that document the social and economic relationships between Latin America and the United States through specific use of material, multiplicity of site and metaphorical gestures.