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A mainstage production of Puntila and Matti, His Hired Man (1948) by Bertolt Brecht, conducted by the Theater and Performance Program at Bard, was reviewed in the Millbrook Independent. Directed by Rebecca Wright and performed at the Fisher Center’s LUMA Theater, Brecht’s play was based on stories by playwright Hella Wuolijoki and translated by Ralph Mannheim. “This excellent and robust student production, set in Finland, evokes striking, trenchant parallels to our contemporary situation in the United States, where power has been translated from a dysfunctional democracy to totalitarian improvisation,” writes Kevin T. McEneaney. 

Bard’s Theater and Performance Program offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts-based approach to the making and study of theater and performance, and embraces a wide range of performance practices, from live art and interactive installation to classical theater from around the globe.
 

The Mastermind, the latest film by S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence Kelly Reichardt, starring Gaby Hoffmann ’04, was reviewed as a New York Times Critic’s Pick. The film, set in the 1970s, follows an unemployed family man and amateur art thief J.B. Mooney, played by Josh O’Connor, as he sets out on his first heist. “Reichardt’s movies are intimate, discreet and don’t ostentatiously deviate from narrative film conventions,” writes Manohla Dargis. “She doesn’t broadcast her ideas visually or with speeches but instead lets them percolate, so they trickle into the stories.”

Reichardt has taught in Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program since 2006, which integrates a wide variety of creative practices with the study of history and criticism of the medium.
 

For Interview magazine, writer and director Jordan Tannahill spoke with Bard alumnus Arthur Tress ’62 about his new book of photography, The Ramble. The book is a collection of photographs from the 1960s of an “overgrown stretch of Central Park that’s served as a cruising ground for gay men for nearly a century,” Tannahill writes. The photographs, Tress says, weren’t initially taken with any kind of publication in mind, given their subject and the politics of the time. “Well, at that time, there really was no audience or publications that would show gay photography,” Tress said. “They were mostly for myself, but I had a sense that they were historically important.” Some of the photographs were taken “surreptitiously,” Tress said, but others were semiposed: “My work has always been a little bit of improvised, stage-directed imagery, especially in portraits, so it’s kind of a combination. I call it a sort of ‘poetic documentary.’” The Ramble, published by Stanley/Barker, will be released November 1, 2025.

Stephen Shore, Photography Program director and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts at Bard College, explores the complexity of photographing the color red in an essay for Aperture magazine. Shore discusses how in photography, red objects sometimes appear flat and monochromatic, and “without the tonal gradation that we read as dimensionality, they didn’t ‘sit’ in the spatial illusion of an image,” which can register to the eye as red objects disrupting the structure of the photo. He goes on to explain the complications that arise with red in the context of “gamut”—which is the range of colors that film or a digital sensor can record—and how shades of red that fall outside the gamut of a particular device are typically substituted with the closest reproducible red in a process called “clipping,” which can lead to distortions in tonal gradation and saturation. “If a painter were to see a red door and want it to turn black, they would have that option. A photographer wouldn’t. We, as photographers, are tied to the world in front of us,” Shore writes. “Knowing this, whenever possible I avoided red unless it was central to the image, unless it accorded with the image’s structure. Otherwise, it was obvious and problematic.”

The Photography Program at Bard College offers instruction in the medium while providing a historical and aesthetic framework for student development within the context of a broad-based liberal arts education.