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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.

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.”

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.

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

Bard College Assistant Professor of Dance Souleymane Badolo and MFA alum in Music/Sound and American and Indigenous Studies Program faculty member Kite (aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18) have won 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards, which will fund the creation of experimental, risk-taking projects that push boundaries formally and thematically, venturing into wild, out-there, never-before-seen concepts, and future universes real or imagined. 
 
Creative Capital awarded 50 groundbreaking projects—comprising 66 individual artists—focused on Technology, Performing Arts, and Literature, as well as Multidisciplinary and Socially Engaged forms. Souleymane Badolo (with Jacob Bamogo) won an award in Dance. Kite won an award in Technology. Awardees will receive varying amounts up to $50,000 in direct funding to help finance their projects and build thriving artistic careers. The award provides a range of grant services from industry connections and financial planning to peer mentorship and community-building opportunities. Grant funding is unrestricted and may be used for any purpose to advance the project, including, but not limited to, studio space, housing, groceries, staffing, childcare, equipment, computers, and travel. The combined value of the 2023 Creative Capital Awards totals more than $2.5 million in artist support. 
 
“The 2023 Creative Capital cohort reaffirms the unpredictable and radical range of ideas alive in the arts today—from artists working in Burkina Faso to Cambodia and across the United States. We continue to see our democratic, open-call grantmaking process catalyze visionary projects that will influence our communities, our culture, and our environment,” said Christine Kuan, Creative Capital President Executive Director. 
 
The Creative Capital grant is administered through a national open call, a democratic process involving external review of thousands of applications by international industry experts, arts administrators, curators, scholars, and artists. The 2023 grantee cohort comprises 75% BIPOC artists, representing Asian, Black or African American, Latinx, Native American or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern-identified artists; 10% of artists identify as having a disability; and 59% of artists identify as women, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. The cohort includes emerging, mid-career, and established artists between the ages of 25 and 69. The artists are affiliated with all regions of the United States and its territories, as well as artists based in Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Germany, and Japan. 
 
Kite also won a 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Media. The award honors her creative accomplishments and supports her ongoing artistic and professional development. Kite is one of 45 USA Fellows across 10 creative disciplines who will receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards. USA Fellowships are awarded to artists at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. Fellowships are awarded in the following disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. Learn more about USA Fellowships here.
 
Souleymane ‘Solo’ Badolo is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Burkina Faso–based troupe Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dance with Western contemporary dance. A native of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Badolo began his professional career with the African dance company DAMA. He has also performed with Salia nï Seydou and the National Ballet of Burkina Faso, and worked with French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier. Badolo and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa. He appeared in the 2015 BAM Next Wave Festival; has created solo projects for Danspace, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Harlem Stage, the 92nd Street Y, and New York’s River to River Festival; and was commissioned to create a dance for Philadanco as part of James Brown: Get on the Good Foot, which was produced by the Apollo Theater and toured nationally and internationally. He was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2011 as outstanding emerging choreographer, received the Juried Bessie Award in 2012, and a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for his piece Yimbégré, which “gloriously communicated the clash and reconciliation of the different traditions held within one’s life, one’s body.” The Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts has supported Badolo’s ongoing research in Africa. He graduated with an MFA from Bennington in June 2013. He has been on the Bard College faculty since 2017 and previously taught at the New School, Denison University, and Bennington College. 
 
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). Kite’s scholarship and practice explores contemporary Lakota ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Learning and compositional systems for body interface movement performances, interactive and static sculpture, immersive video and sound installations, poetry and experimental lectures, experimental video, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Her work has been featured in various publications, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines”, and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) (2019) was featured on the cover of Canadian Art.

Technological disruption is nothing new to cinema, writes Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick for Wired. “Early film theorists considered silent cinema a universal language until ‘talkies’ transformed storytelling for the big screen,” he writes. Still, the advent and proliferation of audiovisual content created entirely by artificial intelligence “elicits a special kind of anxiety for the film and TV industry’s creative classes.” Concerns regarding the use of these technologies are merited, Glick writes, especially with respect to “synthetic resurrection,” where the likeness of a deceased actor is used posthumously in a film. Still, positive uses of the technologies abound, including in human rights documentaries, where powerful testimony can be portrayed without sacrificing the anonymity of the subject. Text-to-video, wherein a user inputs a textual prompt from which an AI produces visuals, can result in projects that are exciting in their “strangeness and messiness,” he writes. Most appealing to Glick are those works which combine the human element with the artificial in a kind of collaboration between man and machine: “These projects point to the productive frictions of mixed-media and cross-platform practices.”

In the spring of 2023, Julia Rosenbaum, associate professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, will teach at the Freie Universität in Berlin via the Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship. Terra Foundation Visiting Professorships at Freie Universität Berlin are integrated into the curriculum and research programs of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies. “The particular setting of the John F. Kennedy Institute offers rich opportunities to students to situate their study of American art in dialogue with disciplines such as cultural studies, cultural history, literature, and sociology,” writes the Terra Foundation. “I am very grateful to have been chosen for the Terra professorship and am excited for the research and teaching opportunities of this transatlantic cultural collaboration,” Rosenbaum said.

The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz is the recipient of a $71,000 exhibitions grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, which will support a spring 2024 exhibition, guest curated by Bard College Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Tom Wolf, focusing on four diverse, early-twentieth-century artists: Miguel Covarrubias, Isami Doi, Aaron Douglas, and Winold Reiss.

The Dorsky Museum exhibition, tentatively titled “Global Connections: Four Artists in New York in the 1920s,” is one of 57 projects supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art through its latest round of grant funding. 

The exhibition is a temporary loan exhibition based on extensive original research into histories of cross-cultural inspiration and influence among the diverse artists Covarrubias, Doi, Douglas and Reiss (Mexican, Japanese Hawaiian, African American and German American, respectively).

Unpacking the connections between these four artists and focusing on artwork they produced that relates to the United States, Europe, Asia, and Mexico, this exhibition will further the discourse on multiculturalism in American art. Together, these four artists from different backgrounds illustrate a thus-far untold story of American art that raises challenging questions about histories of race, representation and multiculturalism that are relevant and necessary today. 

The concept stems from the research of guest curator Wolf, a specialist in twentieth century American art, Asian American artists, and art colonies. Wolf previously received an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant in support of his research and writing for this project.

“When the initial proposal for this project was shared with the Museum Exhibitions Committee, our group of expert advisors expressed unequivocal support and great eagerness for the project,” said Anna Conlan, the Neil C. Trager Director of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. “From the beginning, I personally have been captivated by this story and have encouraged Professor Wolf to pursue it.” 

“Global Connections” is planned to open on Feb. 3, 2024 and will occupy 3,500 feet of gallery space in The Dorsky Museum, centering paintings, prints, drawings and books. It will include a self-portrait by each artist, as well as works that reflect each of their ethnic heritage and enthusiasm for multiculturalism. 

Tom Wolf is a frequent collaborator with The Dorsky who serves as a member of the Museum’s Exhibitions Committee and has previously guest curated exhibitions including “Eva Watson-Schütze: Photographer” in 2009 and “Carl Walters and Woodstock Ceramic Arts” in 2017. 

About the Terra Foundation for American Art
The Terra Foundation for American Art, established in 1978 and having offices in Chicago and Paris, supports organizations and individuals locally and globally with the aim of fostering intercultural dialogues and encouraging transformative practices that expand narratives of American art, through the foundation’s grant program, collection and initiatives. More information about the Terra Foundation for American Art’s history and mission is available here.

Filmmakers Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 and Sky Hopinka have been awarded JustFilms grants through the Ford Foundation in support of their documentary film projects. Asili, associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, received a grant for his new project Don & Moki: Organic Music Society. Hopinka, assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard and 2022 MacArthur Fellow, received a grant for his continuing project Powwow People. 

One of the largest documentary funds in the world and a part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program, JustFilms provided over $4 million to support 68 innovative film projects in the United States and around the world that are centered on social justice issues.

Don & Moki: Organic Music Society, directed by Ephraim Asili and produced by Asili and Naima Karlsson, is a feature-length documentary exploring the collaborative and communal art practice developed and practiced by jazz multi-instrumentalist, theorist, and educator Don Cherry and his wife and primary collaborator, visual artist Moki Cherry.

Powwow People, directed by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) and produced by John Cardellino and Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk), is a film told through Hopinka's distinct artistic style and lens of personal lived experience. It is a meditation on the nebulous places of community and survivance that are powwows, poetically depicting Native American singers and dancers as they live their lives, maintain their cultural traditions, and prepare for an upcoming powwow, one organized, hosted, and documented through the production of this film. 

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music Maria Sonevytsky, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, reflects on how a Ukrainian phrase has transformed into a viral wartime slogan. “Good evening, we are from Ukraine,” a seemingly casual statement, has accumulated multiple meanings and layers throughout its evolution into an inclusive rallying cry for those who call the country home. “This phrase, which began as a musician’s offhand stage banter sampled into an EDM anthem, became a slogan invoked by Ukrainian politicians, soldiers, intellectuals, keyboard warriors, and their supporters around the globe,” she writes. For Sonevytsky, the brilliance of the statement is how its innocuous phrasing, at first glance a simple greeting, masks its inherent radicalism and defiance of the Russian’s state’s attempts to deny Ukraine’s existence. “The slogan works precisely because it does not traffic in the essentializing rhetoric of being Ukrainian,” she continues. “It is not for an individual declaring an identity: ‘I am Ukrainian.’ It is instead a collective, matter-of-fact statement: ‘We are from Ukraine.’ This also implies—and I still resent that this must be said, but here we are—that Ukraine exists, is a legitimate place, and contains people who claim it as home.”

This January, the American Academy of Arts and Letters announced the winners of the 2023 Charles Ives Opera Prize and the Marc Blitzstein Memorial Awards. Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek will each receive a Marc Blitzstein Memorial Award of $10,000, which are given in the memory of Marc Blitzstein to composers, lyricists, or librettists to encourage the creation of works of merit for musical theater and opera. Mazzoli and Vavrek have collaborated on the operas Breaking the Waves, Proving Up, Songs from the Uproar, and The Listeners. In 1965 the friends of Academy member Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) set up a fund in his memory for an award, now $10,000, to be given periodically to a composer, lyricist, or librettist, to encourage the creation of works of merit for musical theater and opera. The awards, to be given at the annual Ceremonial in May, “reflect the essential mission of the Academy to recognize, identify, and reward works of highest aspiration and superior craft by contemporary artists in our culture,” said Yehudi Wyner, a composer member and former president of the Academy.

In 1965, Life hired photojournalist and Bard alumnus Steven Schaprio ’55 to photograph the then-ascendant Andy Warhol for the magazine. Life never published the photo series, and only now are they being published posthumously after Schapiro’s death in 2022. Rolling Stone featured a series of photos from Andy Warhol and Friends: 1965–1966, which “includes many never-before-seen documents of a pivotal time in Warhol’s life as he helped shape popular culture for decades to come.”