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The Bard Baroque Ensemble, under the direction of Renée Anne Louprette, presents a concert dedicated to the memory of Frederick Fisher Hammond (1937–2023), Professor Emeritus, Irma Brandeis Chair of Romance Cultures and Music History at Bard College. Presented with the Bard Chamber Singers, Bard Preparatory Division Chorus, and the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, the program includes works by Bach, Handel, and Mozart and features the rededication of Frederick Hammond’s two restored William Dowd harpsichords. The performance will be held on Saturday, April 19 at 7 pm in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. This is the Bard Baroque Ensemble’s debut concert in the Sosnoff Theater. The concert is free and open to the public. For information visit fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/ or call 845-758-7900 (Mon–Fri 10 am–5 pm).

The evening’s program celebrates the restoration of Professor Hammond's French double-manual and Italian single-manual harpsichords—now a part of Bard College’s collection of early keyboard instruments—featuring them in the Concerto for Two Harpsichords, Strings, and Continuo in C Minor, BWV 1060 by Johann Sebastian Bach, with Sophia Cornicello and Raymond Erickson as harpsichord soloists. One of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's most popular and enduring works, Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550, opens the program, interpreted by the Ensemble with a Baroque sensibility. Bard faculty member and distinguished tenor Rufus Müller presents the ravishing opening aria from Handel’s Serse: Ombra mai fu (Never was a shade). The program concludes with Bach's Cantata No. 1: Wie schön leuchtet Der Morgenstern (How brightly shines the Morningstar), featuring the Bard Chamber Singers, Preparatory Division Children's Chorus, and soloists from the Graduate Vocal Arts Program. This luminous chorale-cantata—originally conceived for the Feast of the Annunciation—is presented here in the context of transition from darkness to light, on the date of Holy Saturday within the Christian Church. Valentina Grasso, assistant professor of history at Bard, will present a reading from Dante’s Divine Comedy—in lieu of the traditional Lutheran sermon—at the center of Bach’s 1724 masterpiece. 

When the recent Los Angeles wildfires burned down the Altadena home of artist Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12, his brick fireplace and chimney were the only structures left standing. “I began thinking about the resilience of these chimneys,” Aparicio told Hyperallergic. “I’m always looking at symbols that can hold both sides of an emotion: resilience and trauma.” In his first painting since the fires, Aparicio collaborated with Bay Area artist and activist David Solnit and a group of about two dozen volunteers to create a protest painting made with paint that was mixed by Solnit using pigments made from ash and charcoal collected at Altadena burn sites. Aparicio’s black-and-white painting depicts his chimney and fireplace standing among charred ruins and belching dark black smoke. The words “Invest in Communities, Not Fossil Fuels” are printed in both English and Spanish. Environmental activists assert that oil and gas companies have directly contributed to climate change–fueled disasters, like wildfires, that are devastating communities. Aparicio’s painting was unveiled at a Pasadena rally calling for CalPERS, the nation’s largest public pension fund, to fully divest from fossil fuels. An identical painting was unveiled the same day at another rally in front of the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond in northern California.

Betsy Clifton, lecturer in Architecture at Bard College, and Jesse McCormick, former visiting lecturer in Architecture at Bard, have received a 2024 Independent Project Grant from the Architectural League of New York and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) in support of their project, Toxic Assets, Seeing Like a Land Bank. Through an exhibition hosted in collaboration with the architecture collective Citygroup, Toxic Assets will synthesize and translate the history, activity, politics, and potential futures of land banks to an architecture-allied audience. By interrogating the role of land banks in urban development, the project illuminates how these institutions shape the built environment and contribute to larger conversations about equity, policy, and spatial justice. This research and exhibition process has also provided an opportunity for two Bard undergraduate students, Anderson Fletcher ’26 and Noah Protas ’26, to engage with the project as an independent study.
 

Grace Miller-Trabold ’26, a junior art history and visual culture and human rights major at Bard College with a concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies, has been awarded a Projects for Peace Grant for $10,000 by the Davis Foundation. Miller-Trabold’s project, “Connecting Threads: Reciprocity and Gratitude as Pedagogies of Peace in Oaxacan Textile,” will provide resources for youth workshops on Indigenous Oaxacan textile traditions, which will take place in Oaxaca, Mexico, and in Poughkeepsie, New York.

“The preservation of these textile traditions, despite colonization and the imperialization of global capitalist markets, exemplify a cultural resilience that is rooted in communal practices which emphasize belonging, presence, and peace,” Miller-Trabold writes in her proposal. “The artistic medium of textile is inherently peacebuilding as it cultivates a multigenerational, community centered experience that is grounded in intentionality, gratitude, and reciprocity.”

Grace will organize and host two weeks of art workshops for youth in Teotitlan del Valle, Mexico, who will work with the Zapotec community on textile traditions and practices. The small artworks they produce will travel back to the US with Miller-Trabold, who will then facilitate workshops for youth groups in New York to collaborate on these projects at educational institutions in Poughkeepsie, using the same traditional dyeing and weaving traditions, before those collaborative works are returned to Oaxaca. The project aims to create spaces of peace across national borders and across generations in which textile traditions that incorporate ancestral Zapotec ecological knowledge and artistic expertise can be continued and shared.

She “will work closely with farms and gardens in our community to grow plants suitable for use as dyes,” said Paul Mairenthal, the director of the Trustee Leader Scholar Program at Bard, where Miller-Trabold developed her project. “Her project is about history, tradition, memory and community building through textiles. It has a lot of great possibilities.”

Projects for Peace, a Davis Foundation initiative facilitated by Middlebury College in Vermont, is a global program that partners with other educational institutions to identify and support peacebuilders and changemakers across college campuses. Every year, 100 or more student leaders are awarded a grant in the amount of $10,000 each to implement a “Project for Peace” anywhere in the world. To learn more, visit: middlebury.edu/projects-for-peace

Bard professors Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities, and An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts, have been announced as newly elected 2025 members of the Academy of Arts and Letters. Mendelsohn and Lê, who are among 24 new members to join the organization in 2025, were elected in recognition of notable achievements in their fields into the departments of Literature and Art, respectively. They will be inducted into Arts and Letters during its annual ceremonial in May, where writer and member Caryl Phillips will deliver the keynote address. Founded in 1898, the American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. Its members distribute over $1.2 million in awards annually, fund concerts and new works of musical theater, donate art to museums across the US, and present exhibitions, talks, and events for the public in New York City.

Filmmaker and Bard alumna Gia Coppola ’09, director and producer of The Last Showgirl starring Pamela Anderson, was honored at the 2025 Kodak Film Awards, which celebrate the artistry of cinematography. Coppola received the Auteur Award—which is bestowed in recognition of extraordinary talent, discernment, and perspective in cinematic arts—for her directorial achievements. The annual Kodak Film Awards, now in its seventh year, recognize acclaimed visual artists who are unyielding in their artistic process and celebrate industry partners who contribute to the support of analog film.

Visiting Artist in Residence and alumna Tschabalala Self ’12 was commissioned to create portraits of the Washington family—father Denzel and sons John David and Malcolm—who were behind the recent movie adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Piano Lesson. Denzel, John David, and Malcolm respectively produced (with his daughter Katia), starred in, and directed the film. Rochelle Steiner writes for TheWrap, “In Self’s hands, images of the Washingtons are intertwined with the film’s characters, such that the real and fictional commingle as references that exemplify Black America.” Inspired by and named after a 1984 Romare Bearden lithograph, The Piano Lesson is one of Self’s favorite August Wilson plays. “When looking at the play’s origin within the context of American slavery, the significance of home for the characters in the play and the figures depicted in Bearden’s piece becomes all the more poignant when you realize the legacy of separation, loss and displacement inflicted on their ancestors,” says Self. 

Her newly installed exhibition Tschabalala Self: Dream Girl is on view February 15–April 26, 2025 at Jeffrey Dietch in Los Angeles.