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Lucas Blalock ’02, assistant professor of photography at Bard College, was interviewed in To Be Magazine. In conversation with Jasime Penman, Blalock discusses the interplay between new technologies and photography, his thoughts on meme culture, and what it’s like to teach in the same program where he once studied as a student. “In 2009, when I started leaning into working with Photoshop in a more evident way, photography had really great boundaries,” Blalock told Penman. “It was clear what was a photograph and what wasn’t a photograph, and it just wasn’t nearly as porous as it has become. As the technology changed, the potentials of my practice changed along with it, all the way up to the present. The markers I can pinpoint are digital printing, Photoshop, the smartphone and Instagram, and now, AI.”

When asked about what it is like teaching at the school where he studied, Blalock said, “I was thrilled to get the position. Bard has an amazing photography program and there are so many great artists who teach there. I was happy about it, but I don’t think I was ready for the level of uncanniness of teaching in a room I used to study in or being in the darkroom that I’d spent so many hours in.”

Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis contributed photos to an essay in the New York Times Opinion section. “Finding Beauty at Maximum Discount” by Crispin Sartwell, part of a wider Times series about discovering joy in the unexpected, is about the allure of Walmart and its “choices beyond number.” Davis’s photos of shelves and shoppers show the abundance of the supermarket chain through the thousands of colors and forms that stretch throughout its spaces. “The beauty of Walmart is that it is a realistic beauty,” Sartwell writes. “A practical beauty, a real beauty.”

Davis has taught photography at Bard since 2004. His work often focuses on small towns and incorporates photos with music. His latest photobook Normaltown, which is about everyday life in Athens, Georgia, was published in 2024.

Visiting Associate Professor of Writing Susan Fox Rogers has been awarded the Harvard Review Chapbook Prize for 2025. The prize is awarded every two years to works of nonfiction, including travel, memoir, and reportage, that are between 15,000 and 30,000 words. Rogers’s essay, “Guivi,” is about family secrets, following the posthumous letters of a reserved mother and their consequences. Rogers is currently working on a mystery novel set at a birding club in the Hudson Valley.

This year’s judge was Jerald Walker, who is a professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College. Walker describes Rogers as “a master essayist who also happens to have a few secrets of her own” and the essay as “a spellbinding study in humankind’s complexity.” “I savored every page, and yet somehow I was still unprepared for the cumulative power those pages would yield,” he writes.

Beto O’Byrne, visiting artist in residence in theater and performance at Bard College, along with the collective he cofounded, Radical Evolution Performance Collective, has received a New York City Small Theatres Fund Award. The award, in the amount of $15,500, is bestowed by ART/New York, an arts service organization dedicated to supporting New York City’s community of nonprofit theaters, and the Howard Gilman Foundation, which provides funding and support to New York City–based performing arts organizations that are reflective of its vibrant cultural community. One of 17 recipients elected from 182 applications, O’Byrne and Radical Evolution will receive two years of flexible funds to support their theater operations. Since its founding in 2011, Radical Evolution has been committed to creating artistic events that seek to understand the complexities of mixed-identity existence in the 21st century. The collective collaborates with people from many different identities to break down barriers between cultures and creative practices, and aims to seed the field of experimental and collaboratively created theater with practitioners who celebrate the intersectionality of perspectives and aesthetics of New York City.

Walid Raad, professor of photography at Bard College, has been announced as a recipient of a 2025 Trellis Foundation Milestone Grant. As one of 12 recipients named by the Trellis Art Fund, Raad will receive an unrestricted grant in the amount of $100,000, which will be disbursed in two installments over a two-year period. The award aims to provide support to artists who reflect a consistent, engaged practice and who have demonstrated a trajectory of creative excellence over the course of their career. Grantees will also be supported with career-development assistance, including workshops, and in November Trellis will host a retreat in upstate New York for 2024 and 2025 Milestone grantees to foster community-building. The winners, chosen by an anonymous five-person panel, range in age from 38 to 82 and were selected based on their demonstrated commitment to their respective practices, their unique contributions to their fields, and the consistently high quality of their work.

Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Grant for the project “Archaeological Archives as Inclusive Learning Laboratories,” one of seven established projects to be awarded the 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant of up to $100,000. The project focuses on American excavations at iconic sites, like Dura-Europos in Syria, which have shaped Western scholarship, which hardly includes mention of local communities whose labor made these excavations possible. Through oral histories, an enriched dataset, improved browsing interface, and digital training, their work “aims to insert and amplify local Syrian voices, giving communities a platform to share their stories alongside traditional archaeological narratives” and “to rebalance a one-sided history and make digital archives more accessible to a wider range of users.”

The Archaeological Archives project is an expansion of Chen’s International Digital Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), the first project to use a multilingual Linked Open Data dataset to reassemble and recontextualize institutionally- and disciplinarily-fragmented information descendent of colonially-entangled excavation histories. IDEA, which was funded over three years by the National Endowment for the Humanities, aims to address the dispersal of archival materials across the world by improving access to information for those in different disciplinary and linguistic areas. Its iteration at the Bard Center for Experimental Humanities, called IDEA_Lab@EH, has provided public-facing research opportunities for nearly 50 Bard undergraduates over the past three years. Chen hopes to further extend the impact of IDEA_Lab@EH through virtual learning opportunities throughout the Bard network.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) recently announced recipients of the 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Grants, which fund digital projects across the humanities and social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

The Wiháŋble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard College has been announced as the recipient of a $93,000 grant from the Wagner Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Boston. The grant will support the project “Cosmologyscape,” a multi-platform, socially engaged public art initiative co-lead by Wiháŋble S’a Center Director Dr. Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence and assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard, and artist and producer Alisha B. Wormsley MFA ’19.

“Cosmologyscape” will launch its next chapter with an exhibition at Wagner in January 2026, and will include features such as Dream Mosaic tiles visualizing collective dreams installed along long gallery walls, a comfortable Dream Office space in which attendees can gather and rest, digital projections showcasing a localized “Boston Dreaming” webpage, and other installations. The project, which solicits dreams from the public that are translated into quilting patterns generated from 26 Black and Lakota symbols, aims to activate rest and dreaming as liberatory acts through sculpture, digital engagement, and community programming.

“This grant affirms that dreaming is a vital, collective act—and that rest, vision, and story are the seeds of real change,” said Dr. Suzanne Kite, director of the Wiháŋble S’a Center. “With support from the Wagner Foundation, ‘Cosmologyscape’ can continue unfolding as a cosmic quilt—each dream a thread, weaving together Black and Indigenous futures across time, land, and memory.”

Wagner Foundation is a Cambridge, MA-based foundation that invests in health equity, economic prosperity, and cultural transformation across the globe. Wagner Foundation prioritizes work that strengthens equitable systems and views artists as leaders and changemakers who are critical voices in interrogating the past, wrestling with the current moment, and envisioning alternative futures. Learn more at wfound.org.