News

Gwen Laster, visiting artist in residence in music at Bard College, has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship to the MacDowell Residency Program in the Music Composition category for spring/summer 2026. While in residence, Laster will complete work on her project, “Is My Black Still Beautiful: Reflections on a Childhood in Detroit,” a mixed-media staged play with original music, storytelling, dance, and projected visuals. 

Laster’s project explores the global complexities of Colorism, a discriminatory practice within one’s own ethnic group based on a person’s complexion and skin tone, through the lens of a Black girl reared during the post–civil rights movement in Detroit. The music spans various genres from contemporary classical to Motown, blues, soul, R&B, and jazz—both free and traditional. “Is My Black Still Beautiful” will premiere in New York City on July 23 at Mabou Mines,and on September 26–27 at the Philipstown Depot Theater.

The Music Program, one of the largest programs on Bard’s campus, provides a wide range of musical concentrations, from classical composition and performance to jazz, electronic music, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory.

Katherine Boivin, associate professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, is the recipient of a 2026-27 Non-Residential Fellowship from the New Foundation for Art History (NFAH), a year-long fellowship awarded annually to mid-career scholars carrying out innovative work on the art of any era or culture. NFAH aims to identify and support early and mid-career scholars and scholarly projects which would not necessarily be sustained by other established avenues, and to provide support based not only on merit but on need in order to foster the best scholarship possible in the art history field.

The fellowship will contribute $50,000 in support of Boivin’s current project, Powers of Projection: Contingent Architecture and Medieval Subjectivity. The book considers everyday spaces in the medieval city, which were constructed and maintained through large-scale collaborative processes but which, through their small scale, addressed individual pedestrians. It asks how medieval people experienced these spaces and whether such fundamentally contingent architecture shaped the understanding of the self in relationship to society. The project guides readers from outside the gates of the medieval city into its very heart through a series of encounters with different projecting architectural features, including bridges, city gates, market stalls, and charnel houses.

Katherine M. Boivin is the author of Riemenschneider in Rothenburg: Sacred Space and Civic Identity in the Late Medieval City (Penn State University Press, 2021) and coeditor of Riemenschneider in Situ (Brepols, 2021) and Gothic Space: Studies in Celebration of Stephen Murray (Brill, 2026). Boivin’s work has been recognized with numerous fellowships and awards, including the Michèle Dominy Award for Teaching Excellence, a Samuel H. Kress Foundation Art History Grant, an NEH Summer Stipends Award, an ICMA Research Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Her research focuses on the dynamic interactions between art, architecture, and human activity in late medieval Europe.

About the New Foundation for Art History 
Founded in 2019, the New Foundation for Art History strives to serve the field in innovative ways that have been overlooked or underserved by existing institutions of its kind. The goal of the NFAH is to foster the best current research in Art History with a flexible approach to grant-making, and to lead by example towards a more equitable future of the discipline where excellence is promoted and rewarded in the broadest ways possible.

Sara J. Winston, associate director of the photography program and artist in residence, has been awarded the inaugural Helena Svetla Fund Grant, administered through the Patient Caregiver Artist Coalition (PCAC). PCAC, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit founded by Bard alum Jordan Rathkopf ’02, is dedicated to elevating the voices of patients and caregivers through art and storytelling, fostering empathy and inclusion in healthcare culture. This first grant from the fund supports artists working at the intersection of art and healthcare, and will support the production of Sara's forthcoming monograph, Infusion, to be published by Saint Lucy Books of Baltimore, MD. The book showcases over a decade of self-portraits made during monthly and biannual intravenous medical treatments for Multiple Sclerosis, alongside episodic creative nonfiction writing and an interview between the author and the artist Moyra Davey. Infusion will launch on January 30, 2027, in conjunction with a solo exhibition at CPW Kingston in Kingston, NY.

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.

Nayland Blake ’82, professor of studio arts at Bard College, was profiled in Hyperallergic. In an interview with Lisa Yin Zhang, Blake spoke about how their art and work affects their understanding of their own identity, what Pride Month means to them, and the movements that informed the work of their peers in queer art. “I think the models were the Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Rights movements—the insistence on the importance and centrality of work by women artists or, for lack of a better term, minority artists, all through the ’60s and ’70s,” Blake told Zhang. “To me, the lessons of those movements were: It’s not enough to just make something in your studio. You have to also be a scholar. You have to also be a writer. You have to be a person who champions other work, so that you build the context within which your work can be legible.” Blake’s first large-scale outdoor installation, “Haunt”: Being the Folly of One Victorya Spectre, will be on view at Art Omi in Columbia County, NY, on June 27. 

The Studio Arts Program at Bard provides a breadth of expanded offerings while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in basic techniques and principles, in an era when much contemporary art cannot be contained within the traditional categories and technology is transforming the production of visual images.

Jack Ferver, assistant professor of theater and performance at Bard College, was featured in the New York Times in an article about choreographer Martha Graham, whose work Ferver highlights in what the Times calls an “excellent exhibition” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The exhibition, Martha Graham: The Mother of Psychological Dance, takes place in five acts and addresses Graham’s sense of theatrical timing and structure. Gia Kourlas writes that the work of Graham’s that Ferver “responds to most and considers most necessary now involves Graham’s deep interest in psychology—how dance originating in an inner life was not only different, but radical.” 

The centennial exhibition curated by Ferver traces the arc of Graham’s groundbreaking career, centering her visionary approach to dance as psychological expression. Graham transformed the dancing body into a vessel for inner life, using movement to externalize emotion, memory, and the unconscious. “There was such an ask that Graham had for her audience,” Ferver told Kourlas. “I feel that what Freud gave to modern psychology is what Graham gave to dance.”

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.

Franz Nicolay, visiting instructor of music at Bard College, spoke at a Congressional hearing about a Live Nation/Ticketmaster antitrust case, reported Chronogram. The case concerned the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster which has resulted in a monopoly on event ticket sales in the United States. “Live music hasn’t been a healthy competitive market,” said Nicolay during the hearing. “Instead, a vertically integrated corporation that controls venues and tour promotion and ticketing and artist management, to the almost total control of many music markets, is, to a comical degree, the epitome of the kind of monopolistic power that antitrust law was created to address.”

“We, as artists, simply don’t have the range of city-to-city, venue-to-venue choices that would constitute a healthy ecosystem,” Nicolay continued. “It’s a problem of affordability, in an economic climate which, through drastically increasing gas prices, airfare, postage and international shipping fees for merchandise, and hardening borders, is making the touring on which our livings depend increasingly unaffordable for musicians. And that increased overhead… has a corresponding effect on affordability and access for fans.”

The Music Program, one of the largest programs on Bard’s campus, provides a wide range of musical concentrations, from classical composition and performance to jazz, electronic music, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory. 

Read more in Chronogram

Further Reading in Rural Intelligence