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Bard College Artist in Residence Lothar Osterburg has been elected by the National Academy of Design as a National Academicians in the Class of 2025. Recognized for their contributions to contemporary American art and architecture, this year’s class of newly elected Academicians includes 27 artists and architects from across the United States. The Hudson Valley based, German native Lothar Osterburg is an artist, master printer, and teacher of copperplate photogravure. He has been teaching in the in Studio Arts Program at Bard since 1999.

“We are thrilled to welcome this extraordinary class of 27 artists and architects as members of the National Academy of Design as we celebrate our 200th anniversary,” said Gregory Wessner, executive director of the National Academy. “Their diverse and groundbreaking work reaffirms our enduring commitment to honoring innovation and excellence in contemporary art and architecture.”

The annual nomination and election of National Academicians dates back to the National Academy’s founding in 1825 as the United States’ first artist- and architect-led organization. New Academicians are nominated and elected by the current members of the National Academy, a growing community of 500 artists and architects across the country. In addition to providing leadership and vision for the National Academy and its programs and exhibitions, Academicians are also invited to donate a representative work—called the Diploma Work—to the National Academy’s collection. With more than 8,000 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, architectural drawings and models and more, the National Academy’s collection has been assembled almost entirely through the donations of its artists and architect members. It is one of the most significant collections of American art and architecture in the world.

As the 200th anniversary class of Academicians, these 27 individuals join the more than 2,400 artists and architects elected to the National Academy since its founding in 1825. Academicians include the most significant artists and architects in the United States over the past two centuries, ranging from Hudson River School painters like Frederic Church (1848), Thomas Cole (1826) and Asher Durand (1826), to contemporary practitioners like Marina Abramović (2013), Sanford Biggers (2023) and Julie Mehretu (2021) and architects such as Cass Gilbert (1906), Frank Lloyd Wright (1952) and Annabelle Selldorf (2012).

Artist Lothar Osterburg completed his studies in printmaking and experimental film at the Art Academy Braunschweig in Germany in 1989, received his training as master printer at Crown Point Press in San Francisco in the early 1990’s, and has operated his own printshop in New York since 1994. Osterburg has been at numerous artists residencies including the MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, the Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center in Maui, and the Cill Rialaig Arts Centre in Ballinskelligs, County Kerry, Ireland. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, both in 2010, two New York Foundations for the Arts Fellowships, and a 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Award for excellence in Printmaking. He has taught at Columbia University and Cooper Union and will retire from Bard College in fall 2025 after 27 years of teaching.

“To call Stephen Shore the most precocious photographer in the history of the medium is almost correct,” writes Chris Wiley for the New Yorker. Reviewing Early Work, the newly released book by Stephen Shore, director of the Photography Program and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts, Wiley remarks on the photographs in this new collection, which represent a period of Shore’s work from 1960–65. “Shore seems to have barrelled into his adolescence as a fully formed artist,” Wiley writes. While the photos in Early Work bear more resemblance to the work of photographers like Garry Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, or Robert Frank than Shore’s most famous works would come to, he was very clearly developing his own aesthetic, Wiley argues. “Shore was not simply aping the styles of his predecessors; he was hard at work cutting his own path.”

For the New Yorker, Philip Gourevich remembers a photo taken by Bard Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress on September 11, 2001. Gourevich and Peress were colleagues at the time, and Peress’s photography ran in the New Yorker’s September 2001 issue. Gourevich describes the photo, which shows two firefighters standing on a destroyed street, as “the last survivors of a lost time” recorded only by Peress. “Rather than making you see, Gilles lets you see—admitting you, with each click of the shutter, to join him as he enters into an immediate and transparent intimacy with lives lived in the teeth of history.”

Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition of animal sculptures on the facade of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art was featured as a Critic’s Pick in the New York Times. The Met’s Facade Commission invites contemporary artists to display their work outside the museum, and Gibson’s four sculptures are its newest addition. His sculptures, which are all of animals that lived inside Central Park, were made from driftwood found in the Hudson Valley, which Gibson carved, scanned, and cast in bronze before coloring.

Gibson recently represented the US at the Venice Biennale and has taught at Bard since 2012. The Times calls his facade exhibit the latest in a “stellar group of artists” and the one that “best understands the assignment of public sculpture [to] engage as wide an audience as possible, without offending, and still register as trenchant artwork.”

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The upcoming dance performance My Town by Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Jack Ferver was included in a roundup by the New York Times. In “10 Things We’re Excited About This Fall,” the Times showcased theater and artistic performances happening throughout the country over the next few months. This included My Town, Ferver’s dance-theater piece which will be performed at the NYU Skirball Center on November 21–22.

My Town is a queer reimagining of Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town. The Times describes the performance as “Ferver’s surreal brand of dark humor” that presents “a raw and exacting piece of dance-theater that looks at small-town life, [exploring] a more haunting side of existence.” Ferver has taught at Bard since 2013 in the Theater and Performance Program and the graduate Vocal Arts Program.

A survey of art works by Nayland Blake ’82, professor of Studio Arts at Bard College, will be on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City, from September 12 through October 25. For decades, Blake has made vital contributions to contemporary art and queer culture as an artist, curator, writer, and educator, and the three-part exhibition will be the largest show of their work in New York in nearly 20 years. The first part, Nayland Blake: Sex in the 90s, surveys Blake’s landmark works created in the midst of the ongoing AIDS crisis and the culture wars of the 1990s, many of which are on view for the first time in nearly 30 years. The second part, Inside: curated by Nayland Blake, includes works by 14 artists whose works Blake has “wanted to be in the presence of, to wander inside of, to refresh my eyes and mind with.” The final part of the exhibition, Session, will be an installation of Blake’s new sculptures, which build upon their works of the late 1980s. 

The Studio Arts Program at Bard features broad offerings beyond the traditional categories of art, while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in basic techniques and principles.