News

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships to three Bard faculty members and four Bard alumnae. Felicia Keesing, David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, Laura Larson, cochair of photography at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Jordan Weber, visiting artist in residence at Studio Arts, artist Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20, photographer Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10, artist Jessica Segall ’00, and artist Martine Syms MFA ’17 have been named 2023 Guggenheim Fellows. 

Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 2,500 applicants, Keesing, Larson, Weber, Nguyen, Phyars-Burgess, Segall and Syms were among a diverse group of 171 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2023 Fellowship. Keesing was awarded a Fellowship for her research on the ecology of infectious diseases, Larson for her work in photography, Weber for his work in the arts, Nguyen for her work in the arts, Phyars-Burgess for her work in photography, Segall for her work in the arts, and Syms for her work in the arts. 

“Like Emerson, I believe that fullness in life comes from following our calling,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The new class of Fellows has followed their calling to enhance all of our lives, to provide greater human knowledge and deeper understanding. We’re lucky to look to them to bring us into the future.”

In all, 48 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 72 different academic institutions, 24 states and the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 50 Fellows have no current full-time college or university affiliation. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like the lasting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, democracy and policing, scientific innovation, climate change, and identity.

Created and initially funded in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought since its inception to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The great range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2023 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Felicia Keesing’s research focuses on the ecology of infectious diseases in New York's Hudson Valley and in the savannas of central Kenya. She holds a Bachelor of Science from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Keesing was awarded the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2000), and has been the recipient of grants from National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, among others. She was coeditor of Infectious Disease Ecology: Effects of Ecosystems on Disease and of Disease on Ecosystems (Princeton University Press, 2008), and has also contributed to articles such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecology Letters, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Ecology, BioScience, Conservation Biology, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, and Canadian Journal of Zoology. 

Laura Larson’s work looks to the history of photography as a documentary practice to tell personal and sociocultural narratives. From 2002-2019, she was represented by Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York, where she presented four one-person exhibitions, including Complimentary (2002), Apparition (2005), and Electric Girls and the Invisible World (2009). Larson’s work has been featured at a variety of institutions, including Art in General, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and TimeOut New York. Larson is also the author of two books, Hidden Mother (2017), and City of Incurable Women (2022), both of which feature her research into 19th century photography. 

Jordan Weber is a New York- and Midwest-based regenerative land sculptor and activist who works at the crossroads of social justice and environmental racism. He has been an inaugural Harvard LOEB/ArtLab Fellow, a Blade of Grass Fellow, and an Iowa Arts Council Fellow, and has held residencies at Yale University’s inaugural Environmental Humanities, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and Washington University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE2) in St. Louis. He has been the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2022 United States Artists Award, Creative Capital Award, Joan Mitchell Award, Tanne Arts Foundation award, and African American Leadership Forum Grant. Weber is also working with Bard College on plans for a public art project, details of which will be announced later this year.

Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20 is an artist who works with photography and time-based media. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS at SculptureCenter, New York, and The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Between Two Solitudes at Stereo, Warsaw; Tyrant Star at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Minor twin worlds, with Brandon Ndife, at Bureau, New York; Reoccurring Afterlife, at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; and Flesh Before Body at Bad Reputation, Los Angeles. Nguyen has also been featured in multiple group exhibitions, including Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York; Metabolic Rift at Berlin Atonal, Berlin; Made in L.A. 2020: a version at Hammer Museum and The Huntington, Los Angeles; and Bodies of Water: 13th Shanghai Biennale, at Power Station of Art, in Shanghai. Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, and The Escalette Collection of Art at Chapman University.

Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10 was born in Brooklyn, New York to Trinidadian parents and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is interested in using photography education as community empowerment, and her first monograph, Untitled, explores the African diaspora around the world. 

Jessica Segall ’00 is an artist who uses hostile and threatened landscapes as the sites for her work. While embedded in these sites, she plays with both the risk of engaging with the environment and the vulnerability of the environment itself. Segall's work is built on a foundation of research that often includes cross-disciplinary collaboration and collaboration with scientists, activists and non-human beings. Her work has been featured internationally, including at COP 26, The Fries Museum, the Coreana Museum of Art, the Havana Bienal, the Queens Museum of Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the National Museum of Jewish American History, the Inside Out Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, the National Gallery of Indonesia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Croatia, the Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery and the National Symposium for Electronic Art. Segall has also received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the Harpo Foundation, the Virginia A Groot Foundation, the FST Studioprojects Fund, the Puffin Foundation, the Arts Envoy Program and Art Matters. Her work has been featured in Cabinet Magazine, the New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Mousse Magazine and Art in America. Her work is in the collections of the Museum de Domijnen and the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. 

Martine Syms MFA ’17 is an artist who has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Her work has been shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and ICA London. She has also done commissioned work for brands such as Prada, Nike, and Celine, among others. She is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a United States Artists fellowship, the Tiffany Foundation award, and the Future Fields Art Prize. She is in a band called Aunt Sister and hosts Double Penetration, a monthly radio show on NTS. Syms also runs Dominica Publishing. 

Bard Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies has won two new awards in support of her professional work. Hennies is one of 14 American composers to receive a 2022 commission from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. Her commissioning award provides $12,000 to support the creation of new musical works as well as access to a subsidy of up to $4,000 for an ensemble to perform the premiere of the commissioned work. More than 500 composers have received this Fromm Music Foundation commission since 1952. 

Hennies has also received a 2023 USArtists International Second Round Award by the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, which provides grants of up to $18,000, in support of her participation at the international 2023 Archipel Festival in Geneva, Switzerland. At the Archipel Festival, Sarah will perform two of her own pieces, Falsetto (2016) for percussion and pre-recorded percussion, and Fleas (2017) for vibraphone and multiple handbells played by the public. She will also perform a concert of music by the American composer and percussionist, Michael Ranta.

Bard alumna Juliana Maitenaz ’22 has received an independent study–research Fulbright Scholarship to Brazil for the 2023–24 academic year. Her project, “Rhythm and Statecraft,” seeks to identify Brazilian percussion and rhythms as a method of cultural communication. Maitenaz, a former Conservatory student, graduated from Bard last May with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance. 

Her project, which she aims to conduct in São Paulo, will focus on how percussional elements in the Brazilian traditions of Carnival and Samba School performances are instrumental to the country’s statecraft and national identity. The goal of her research is to examine international communication and collaboration through cultural and musical diplomacy. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to learn more about the role Brazilian percussion plays as an inspiring means of cultural communication,” Maitenaz said. 

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. During their grants, Fulbrighters will meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences to facilitate cultural exchange.

Bard College Studio Arts Program presents the Class of 2023 Senior Thesis Spring Exhibitions.

UBS Bard Exhibition Center
45 O'Callaghan Lane
Red Hook, New York

USB Group Show 1
Oscar Haas, Catherine Lyu, Luca McCarthy, Olivia McLeod, Brandon Vanbach, Samaira Wilson, Bennett Wood, Cora Quinlan
Opening reception Saturday, April 8, 3–6 pm
On View April 8–22

UBS Group Show 2
McKinlay Daggatt, Aislinn Feldberg, Hannah French, Jacob Judelson, Georgia Lenz, Samantha Schwartz, Una Winn, Jackie Weddell, Jamie Toomey
Opening reception Saturday, May 6, 3–6 pm
On View May 6–20


Fisher Studio Arts Exhibitions
60 N Ravine Road
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Oga Li
Opening reception Saturday, April 8, 5–8 pm

Whitney Hagen
Opening reception Saturday, April 22, 5–8 pm

Chloe Raizner
Opening reception Saturday, April 29, 5–8 pm

Cam Goldberg
Opening reception Saturday, May 6, 5–8 pm

Odette Zhou
Opening reception Saturday, May 13, 5–8 pm

Bard Farm
Maya Miggins
Opening Saturday, May 13, 5 pm

Bard Chapel
Jackie Weddell
Performance Saturday, April 15, 7:30 pm

Avery Film Center, Integrated Arts Room
55 Blithewood Ave
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Rose Reiner
Performance Saturday, May 6

Nail Biter Opens the Organization’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground

The Fisher Center at Bard begins its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground with the world premiere of Bessie Award-winning choreographer Beth Gill’s Nail Biter, a dance work that moves the viewer through portals of myth, memoir, psychodrama, and horror. Performances take place March 31 – April 2 in the LUMA Theater. Gill has been acclaimed for “appl[ying] her discerning eye to… dark, chaotic, psychologically tangled worlds” (New York Times). In Nail Biter, characters emerge as a collection of representations of our collective unconscious, as the work pierces through the existential weight of our time and channels our contemporary angst and anxiety.

Nail Biter is Gill’s second commission from the Fisher Center LAB, following her 2016 performance Catacomb. Carrying out its mission to provide custom-made, meaningful support to artists over an extended time, The Fisher Center LAB  provided Gill with a “dreaming” commission in 2020. This allowed Gill to have financial support during the Pandemic lockdown and the opportunity to reimagine how she works. The initial ideas explored in Nail Biter emerged from that time, and in 2021 the piece was formally commissioned, with a developmental residency at the Fisher Center in May 2022. 

The choreographer dedicates Nail Biter to Rose-Marie Menes, her first dance teacher, who passed away in 2011, as Gill was, as she describes, “in the early stages of dreaming” this work. Gill says of her late mentor, “What I think about now as a professional choreographer and teacher is how unwavering Rose’s dedication to dance was. This field is not easy, and yet she always found ways to do more. She ran a company as well as the school and made multiple productions with hand-painted sets and costumes that she hand-sewed. She created epic worlds and romantic storylines for us to inhabit… She gave me dance and so much more: tradition, discipline, professionalism, obsession, creativity, romanticism, grace, power, and self-determination. She set the course of my career and my life. This piece is in honor of her.” 

Nail Biter brings together a team including Beth Gill (Choreographer), with her long-time collaborators Jon Moniaci (Composer), Baille Younkman (Costume Designer), Thomas Dunn (Lighting and Scenic Designer), Angela F. Kiessel (Production Stage Manager), and Michelle Fletcher (Manager, Beth Gill Works). Performers include Maggie Cloud, Jennifer Lafferty, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Marilyn Maywald Yahel, and Beth Gill. 

Gill’s new work kicks off a celebratory opening weekend for a milestone season that reflects the Fisher Center’s role as one of the country’s foremost cross-disciplinary producing institutions, and culminates with the groundbreaking for a new performing arts studio building designed by Maya Lin. On April 1, from 5:30–7:30pm, the Fisher Center will toast two decades of innovation with a 20th Anniversary Launch Party. On April 1 at 7pm and April 2 at 3pm, The Orchestra Now will perform Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, conducted by Maestro Leon Botstein with choral director James Bagwell. Missa solemnis is one of only three sacred works written by Beethoven, and a favorite piece of the late Richard B. Fisher, an influential champion of the arts and the Fisher Center’s namesake. 

Schedule and Ticketing Information

Performances take place in the Fisher Center at Bard’s LUMA Theater, March 31 at 7:30pm, and April 1 & 2 at 5pm. Running time is approximately 50 minutes with no intermission. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased here.

About Beth Gill

Beth Gill is an award-winning choreographer based in New York City since 2005. Her multidisciplinary works are captivating, cinematic timescapes, the product of long-term collaborations with celebrated artists. Gill is the proud recipient of the Herb Alpert, Doris Duke Impact, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and two “Bessie” awards. She has produced eight commissioned evening-length works met with critical acclaim. She has toured nationally and internationally and has been honored with (among others): Guggenheim Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project grant, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Artist in Residence.
Gill’s dances are serious, slow-moving, and chiseled, meditative experiences poised between performance and visual art. They feel like pressurized objects sustaining tension and seeking release. Paradoxically her work is both intimate and alienated, sensual and ascetic. She dreams and visualizes her dances, transforming her unconscious into iconographic choreography. The imagery and symbolism resonate, inviting audiences into associative thought. In this way, her work is in dialogue with contemporary psychology and folk traditions.

Credits

Nail Biter is co-commissioned by the Fisher Center at Bard, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Walker Art Center. The development of Nail Biter was supported by funding from the King’s Fountain and by CPR – Center for Performance Research’s Artist-in-Residence Program, which is made possible, in part, through Dance/NYC’s Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Beth Gill is fiscally sponsored by the Foundation for Independent Artists, Inc., a non-profit organization administered by Pentacle (DanceWorks, Inc). Pentacle is a non-profit management support organization for the performing arts.

The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, and Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. The 23-24 season of Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.

Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick spoke with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino about the manifold ways Hollywood employs artificial intelligence including de-aging star characters, creating synthetic voices, generating digital faces and imagery of crowds, and even using deepfake technology in documentaries to protect vulnerable onscreen subjects. AI’s entree into filmmaking spurs anxiety that it could supplant human creative labor like screenwriting, designing, and directing. “New tools and new technologies have always sustained a productive tension or creative tension with the status quo of the industry. But I’d say that the idea of complete replacement is not something I foresee happening, at least in the near future. Some of the most promising or interesting areas is how these tools have become part of the toolbox,” Glick said. He also discusses what is at stake in Hollywood’s business side using AI analytics to maximize profits by informing filmmakers and studios “what films might make the most money depending on what happens in the plot and depending on who is cast. It leads to this attempt to slow down and challenge risk, which I think is a problem,” notes Glick.

Photographer Emily Allen ’22 talks with F-Stop magazine about her inspirations, creative practice, and current project “Sit Tibi Terra Levis,” which originated as her Senior Project and was recently featured in the magazine. “With this portfolio, I hope to draw attention to photography as a process and an object and its humanity–its connection to death, to life, and to memory,” said Allen, who studied photography, classics, and medieval studies at Bard. “I used the techniques we use to attempt to preserve ourselves throughout history to preserve my images.” The photographic prints in her book were created using processes humans have historically used on our bodies after death. Some were brushed with oil according to ancient Greek rites, others soaked in honey as the Babylonians did, some were processed in simulation of modern American chemical embalming, and others incompletely fixed so they continue to degrade and decompose over time. In this project, Allen was fascinated by the kinds of similarities and subversions these processes had when used on photographs versus on our bodies.
 
When looking at images, Allen doesn’t have one strict definition of what a photograph can be, rather she looks for resonance. “Literally the word photograph means ‘light drawing’–to me anything made using light sensitive materials and light is a photograph whether it is representative of our physical world or not . . . A good photograph convinces me of the reality in the world within the boundaries of the paper–I have to believe in it. I love when photographs feel like bubbles, each containing their own little universe,” she says.

Nowhere Apparent, a new film by Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Jack Ferver, is “a poetic meditation on queer isolation and feelings of abandonment by a generation of potential parental figures as a result of a failed response to the AIDS epidemic,” writes Matt Moen for Paper magazine. “I am told by the majority that being queer is unnatural, that it doesn’t exist in the ‘natural world,’” Ferver said, when asked what queer isolation means to them. “I am also told by the majority that I chose it. Using this logic means: I have chosen not to exist.” Nowhere Apparent interrogates “what isn’t said, what is left out, what is abandoned,” bringing those things to light—a lens Ferver also uses in their teaching at Bard. “I teach at Bard College and start every semester talking about AIDS and the culture wars. That gap we will never heal,” they say. What can be done to address such silences and erasures? “Make work about it,” Ferver says to their students.

American theater and opera director and cofounder of SITI Company Anne Bogart ’74, who studied drama and dance at Bard and received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the College in 2014, has won a 2023 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement. The Obie Awards honor the highest caliber of off-Broadway and off-off Broadway theater to recognize brave work, champion new material, and advance careers in theater. Bogart accepted her honor at the 66th Obie Awards ceremony in New York City. 

“In 1974, fresh out of college, I moved to New York City. There was nowhere else in the world that made sense to me. I wanted to be where theater was happening. And I wanted to direct plays,” she said in her acceptance speech. In 1992, Bogart, along with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki and a group of like-minded artists interested in revitalizing and redefining contemporary theater in the United States, founded SITI Company. Bogart was honored by the Obie judges for her 30 years of work with SITI Company, an artistic ensemble company, which created more than 50 productions presented at venues around the world, and pushed the boundaries of contemporary theater through innovative approaches to actor training, collaboration, and cultural exchange. 

In December 2022, Bard’s Fisher Center presented the world premiere of SITI Company’s reimagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, codirected by Anne Bogart and Tony Award winner Darron L West. The work, commissioned by the Fisher Center, was the final production in SITI Company’s 30th anniversary “Finale Season.” 

Bhavesh Patel, Visiting Artist in Residence in Theater and Performance at Bard College, stars in Elyria, a new play by Deepa Purohit which was reviewed by the New York Times. Set in 1982 Ohio, it is a story of the Indian diaspora and centers around the tangled relationships between two women, Dhatta and Vasanta, and Charu, a doctor played by Patel who is husband to Dhatta and former lover of Vasanta. “Watching an actor steal a show is one of the absolute thrills of live performance,” writes Laura Collins-Hughes for the Times about Patel. Exploring motifs of family history, marriages, and parent-child relationships, the play crisscrosses continents from Africa to Europe and North America and weaves a complex tale from many converging narrative threads. “Patel’s Charu is perfect,” Collins-Hughes continues. “Charu is comic and reckless, selfish and decent, myopic and real. It’s an exhilarating performance, a work of actorly alchemy.”

Tania El Khoury, distinguished artist in residence in Theater and Performance at Bard College, and director at the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, received an honorable mention at Sharjah Biennial 15, for presenting two projects, The Search for Power and Cultural Exchange Rate. 

El Khoury is a live artist whose work engages the audience in close encounters with narratives drawn from the political realities of border, displacement, and state violence. She creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction.

Her work has also been translated into multiple languages and shown in 33 countries across six continents, in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of a Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award. 

El Khoury, who holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, is associated with Forest Fringe, a collective of artists in the United Kingdom, and is a cofounder of Dictaphone Group in Lebanon, a live art and urban research collective.

The Sharjah Biennial is an international platform for exhibition and experimentation for artists, which takes place in the city of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Since 1993, the Biennial has commissioned, produced and presented large-scale public installations, performances and films by artists around the world, bringing a broad range of contemporary art, cultural programmes and producers to the communities of Sharjah, the UAE and the region. 

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the 16 recipients of this year’s awards in music. Among the winners, Bard College Conservatory and Bard Film and Electronic Arts alumnus Luke Haaksma BA/BM ’21 was awarded a Charles Ives Scholarship. Charles Ives Scholarships are $7,500 each and awarded to composers for continued study in composition, either at institutions of their choice or privately with distinguished composers. Harmony Ives, the widow of Charles Ives, bequeathed to the Academy the royalties of Charles Ives’s music, which has enabled the Academy to give awards in composition since 1970. The award winners were selected by a committee of Academy members: Julia Wolfe (chair), Annea Lockwood, David Sanford, Christopher Theofanidis, Augusta Read Thomas, Chinary Ung, and Melinda Wagner. The awards will be presented at the Academy’s Ceremonial on May 24, 2023. Candidates for music awards are nominated by the 300 members of the Academy.

Luke Haaksma is a composer and filmmaker currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. His work has been performed at various festivals, universities, and venues throughout the United States and abroad. Haaksma is a past winner of both the Diana Wortham Emerging Artist Scholarship and the Ione M. Allen scholarship for the performing arts. His piano etude “Crystal Murk” was selected by Jihye Chang to be toured internationally as part of her multi-year solo recital project, “Continuum 88.” While an undergraduate at Bard College and the Conservatory, Haaksma studied composition with Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, and Lera Auerbach, piano with Blair McMillen, and Hammered Dulcimer with David Degge. He was the Conservatory’s  Joan Tower Composition Scholar. He was awarded the Sidney Peterson prize in experimental film, “Best Original Score” by the Dreamachine international film festival, and Official Selections from other Montreal and Los Angeles based festivals. Luke was honored as a 2021 National Hammered Dulcimer Championship finalist at the Walnut Valley music festival in Winfield, Kansas. His most recent string quartet, “talking” piece, was premiered in New York by The Rhythm Method as part of the Lake George Composers Institute. This past summer he was a fellow at the Brandeis Composers Conference. Luke began graduate studies at the Yale School of Music this past fall.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898 as an honor society of the country’s leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. Early members include William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Julia Ward Howe, Henry James, Edward MacDowell, Theodore Roosevelt, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton. The Academy’s 300 members are elected for life and pay no dues. In addition to electing new members as vacancies occur, the Academy seeks to foster and sustain an interest in Literature, Music, and the Fine Arts by administering over 70 awards and prizes totaling more than $1 million, exhibiting art and manuscripts, funding performances of new works of musical theater, purchasing artwork for donation to museums across the country, and presenting talks and concerts.

Bard College students in Michael Cohen’s architecture course Designing Potential Histories of El Bohio Off Anarchy Row took a trip to the East Village on Friday, February 24. Over pizza at Two Boots, they met with activists Carlos “Chino” Garcia and Joseph “Slima” Williams, two members of the CHARAS collective, to discuss their community and cultural work on the Lower East Side (Loisaida). The group also visited the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space and the architecture gallery a83. Professor Cohen and alumnus Phil Hartman ’79 led the trip. Phil’s daughter and fellow Bard alumna Odetta Hartman ’11 joined, as well.

Between 1978 to 2001, CHARAS organized educational, arts, and social programming that primarily served the growing Puerto Rican community, operating mainly out of the vacated Public School 64 building which they renamed “El Bohio,” or the hut. Today, PS 64 sits vacant and is directly adjacent to “Anarchy Row,” an encampment of unhoused people that has resisted multiple efforts to clear the settlement. In support of this unhoused population and the broader community of the East Village, students in Designing Potential Histories are imagining the adaptive reuse of the vacant school building and the appropriation of other sites on the block. 

As part of the 2023 Interviews Issue, the New Yorker published an interview with Stephen Shore conducted in 2021 by the late Peter Schjeldah. Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts and director of the Photography Program, spoke about his artistic practice and how it has changed during the course of his career. “While I may have questions or intentions that guide what I’m interested in photographing at a particular moment, and even guide exactly where I place my camera,” Shore says, “the core decision still comes from recognizing a feeling of deep connection, a psychological or emotional or physical resonance with the picture’s content.” Speaking to the difference between photography mediated by a viewfinder versus digital photography viewed through a screen, Shore sees more similarities than differences. “You don’t look through the camera but at a ground glass,” he says. “There is an awareness of looking not at the world but at an image of the world.” For his own practice, Shore says he values experimentation and newness. “I’ve gone through many phases over the years,” he says. “If I find myself repeating myself or if a visual strategy has devolved into a convention of my own making, I know it’s time to move on.”

Opus 40 has reached an agreement to purchase the historic home of Bard professor, alumnus, and artist Harvey Fite ’30. Bard College was a partner in the process, and will provide programming support in the house going forward, to include educational programs, workshops, and faculty residencies. Harvey Fite created Opus 40, the 6.5-acre bluestone sculpture park in Saugerties, New York, and built the house. The purchase was made possible in part by major support from the Thompson Family Foundation, the New York State Assembly, and the town of Saugerties.

Bard College President Leon Botstein said, “It’s an honor to participate in the preservation of this unique sculpture and land art made by an alumnus and long-time faculty member of Bard and our neighbor in the Hudson Valley. We look forward to expanding joint programming with Opus 40 in the future and are thankful to the Richards family for their efforts preserving Harvey Fite’s legacy.”

Harvey Fite was a member of the faculty at Bard College for 36 years and founded the College’s art department before his retirement in 1969.

Photographer Lisa Kereszi ’95 has won a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation biennial competition award for $20,000 granted to dedicated artists whose work shows promise of further development. Kereszi is among 20 artists selected by the foundation for the 2022 biennial competition. The monetary grant is intended to give artists the opportunity to produce new work and to push the boundaries of their creativity. By doing so, it seeks to make a difference in the lives of the recipients at a moment in their career when they need it most. The awards, accompanied with the prestigious recognition, enhance the visibility and stature of artists in the art world.

Artists who work in painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, video, and craft media are eligible for the award. Approximately 50 designated nominators from throughout the United States recommend candidates to be considered. Nominees are then reviewed and vetted by a jury of seven individuals. Nominators and jury members are artists, critics, museum professionals, and members of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees.  

Lisa Kereszi was born in 1973 in Pennsylvania and grew up outside Philadelphia with a father who ran the family auto junkyard and a mother who owned an antique shop. In 1995, she graduated from Bard College with a BA in photography and literature/creative writing. In 2000, Kereszi went on to earn an M.F.A. in photography from the Yale School of Art, where she has taught since 2004 and is now Senior Critic in Photography and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art. She recently was a MacDowell Fellow and a Gardner Fellowship Finalist. Her work is in many private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Study Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Her publications include: The More I Learn About Women (2014), Joe’s Junk Yard (2012), Fun and Games (2009), Fantasies (2008), Governor’s Island (2004), and Lisa Kereszi: Photographs (2003). She has two books coming out later this year, including one published by Minor Matters, the photobook imprint run by fellow Bardian, Michelle Dunn Marsh ‘95.

About the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
Established in 1918 by L.C. Tiffany, son of Charles Lewis Tiffany who founded the New York jewelry store Tiffany & Co., the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation is the earliest artist-endowed foundation in the United States, and is the first created by an artist during his or her lifetime. In 1946 the Foundation changed its program from the operation of an artists’ retreat to the bestowing of grants to artists. These grants were awarded annually through a competition in painting, sculpture, graphics, and textile design; a range of categories reflecting Tiffany’s manifold talents and interests. Each year applicants sent examples of their work to the National Academy of Design, where it was exhibited and judged. The Foundation also supported a plan by which artworks were purchased and donated to institutions, an apprenticeship program enabling young craftspeople to work with masters, and a program of direct grants to young painters and sculptors. In 1980, the grant programs were consolidated into a biennial competition. Today, the competition grants $20,000 awards to artists selected for their talent and individual artistic strength. Since 1980, the competition has granted $9,534,000 in awards to 491 artists nationwide.

Tanya Marcuse SR ’81, artist in residence in the Photography Program at Bard, has received a MacDowell Artist Residency Fellowship for spring/summer 2023. Marcuse’s fellowship will support work toward the completion of her project, Book of Miracles, to be published by Nazraeli Press. This project, in direct conversation with the 16th-century Book of Miracles, a compendium of biblical, astronomical, and apocalyptic miracles, aims to visualize phenomena that seems to defy the laws of nature, using fire, paint, and the staging of fantastical scenes. Photography often walks a thin line between fact and fiction, or dwells in a realm where the two cannot be distinguished; the proposed work takes part in this pendulum swing between belief and doubt.

MacDowell Fellows’ applications are reviewed by a panel of esteemed professionals in each discipline. These panelists make their selections based on applicants’ vision and talent as reflected by a work sample and project description. Once at MacDowell, selected Fellows are provided a private studio, three meals a day, and accommodations for a period of up to six weeks. Marcuse was previously a MacDowell Fellow in 2018.

Unlike other performance art retrospectives, Algorithmic Theater: An Annie Dorsen Retrospective does not distill so much as it re-presents many of Annie Dorsen’s iconic performances. Writing for Artforum, Miriam Felton-Dansky, associate professor of theater and performance, considers Dorsen’s algorithmically infused works in our current context. “Dorsen began collaborating with computers well before algorithm was a commonplace term in digital and social media discourse,” she writes. Appropriately, many of the pieces in the retrospective use what would now be considered “outdated” software and code. The artist uses these artifacts, Felton-Dansky argues, “not for the sake of nostalgia or kitsch but because these particular systems—conserved over years by Dorsen—are the trained performers that ‘know’ how to execute the show.” In A Piece of Work, the text of Hamlet is given over to code, producing five abbreviated versions of the play. The performance of A Piece of Work briefly involves a human actor, who enters in act three, “vocalizing computer-generated text fed to him through an in-ear device” that varies from performance to performance. Like much of Dorsen’s work, Felton-Dansky writes, A Piece of Work “offers a means of contemplating the myriad ways humans can be absent or abstracted from one another, distilled into statistics or collapsed into scrolling social media posts.”

Susan L. Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, has been awarded a 2023 Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency. The program, which she will attend at the Dora Maar House in Provence, France, during September 2023, has been internationally recognized as one of the most respected residencies for those working in the arts and humanities. Aberth, working alongside her longtime collaborator Tere Arcq—the leading scholar on Spanish-born Mexican artist Remedios Varo—will complete Cauldrons & Curanderas: The Magical Relationship of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, an illustrated historical account of the magical and artistic works produced by the two artists working together. “I am particularly grateful for this residency at the Dora Maar House because it is at the home of a great surrealist woman photographer whom I have long admired and taught in my classes at Bard College,” Aberth said. “It seems particularly appropriate then for me and my colleague, Tere Arcq, to be there in France working on Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, especially since they also spent meaningful periods of time in France.” 

The residency will allow Aberth and Arcq a dedicated period of time to work side by side, and they believe that the insights they document about the shared projects of the two artists can serve as a blueprint for how women creators can join together in creating ventures that are greater than the sum of their parts. “Carrington and Varo forged a new path for women artists by exploring together certain esoteric arenas that had long been neglected and even disdained by the art world,” Aberth continued. “In rediscovering women’s mysteries and spiritual involvements in ways that directly impacted their artistic practice, they introduced to the art world the importance and necessity of female creative collaborations, in juxtaposition to centuries of celebrating male collaborations exclusively.”

Further reading:

Professor Susan Aberth and Alumnus Gilbert Vicario CCS ’96 Granted Curatorial Research Fellowship by Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts   

Bard Professor Susan Aberth and Curator Tere Arcq Publish First Book Dedicated to Newly Discovered Tarot Set Created by Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington and the Theatre: A Conversation with Professor Susan Aberth and Double Edge Theatre’s Stacy Klein

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded a Curatorial Research Fellowship to Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, and Bard alumnus Gilbert Vicario CCS ’96, chief curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). The fellowship of $50,000 will fund their research for a new exhibition planned for 2024 at PAMM, which will examine metaphysical and esoteric impulses that influenced a cohort of artistic and academic individuals in the Americas in the 20th century, with a prominent focus on women, queer, and marginalized artists. “The Spring 2022 grantees are notable for their resilience, ingenuity, and dedication to supporting artists at every stage of their careers,” said Rachel Bers, the program director at the foundation. “As the culture shifts, they work side by side with artists to find ways to critically and creatively engage the forces that shape our world.”

Further reading:

Bard College Professor Susan Aberth Awarded a Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency