News

Sky Hopinka, assistant professor of film and electronic arts, talks with the BBC about his new documentary, Kicking the Clouds, which has been shortlisted for the BBC's LongShots film festival. Hopinka, who is a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño people, talks about how a 50-year-old recording of a language lesson between his mother and grandmother sparked the film, which the BBC calls “dreamy and soulful ... a poetic road trip into the history of a family and the disappearing language of a tribe.”

From September 8 to September 19, viewers can vote for their favorite film and choose the winner of the LongShots Audience Award. Dedicated this year to the theme of “Journeys,” LongShots spotlights the best short documentaries from the most interesting emerging filmmakers worldwide, handpicked by some of the most prestigious film festivals around the world.

Visiting Artist in Residence Andy Robert’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, Ti Zwazo Clarendon: You Can Go Home Again; You Just Can’t Stay, opens September 16 at the Michael Werner Gallery in London. His paintings challenge a static understanding of history. Describing his method, Robert says “in questioning how an image comes into the world, and into being, I want to own up, to admit at any point, a painting, an image can change direction and isn’t fixed.” Robert’s work will also be shown at the 58th Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. Established in 1896 by the Carnegie Museum of Art and organized every three to four years, the Carnegie International is the longest-running North American exhibition of international art and presents an overview of how art and artists respond to the critical questions of our time. The 58th Carnegie International, which is titled Is it morning for you yet?, runs from September 24, 2022, to April 2, 2023.

As part of the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Nayland Blake ’82, “bearish, Merlin-bearded, soft-spoken in the manner of a blacksmith teaching kindergartners,” offers advice to artists as part of their performance series “Got an Art Problem?” Writing for the New Yorker, Hannah Seidlitz outlines Blake’s contributions to this year’s Biennial, including “Rear Entry” and “Gender Discard Party,” in which “guests were invited to ‘bring your own baggage’ and dance away the woes of classification.” With “Got an Art Problem?,” Blake schedules meetings with guests who are asked to “illustrate their art problems,” which Blake then talks through with the guest until their time is up. Offering advice to one guest, an artist who goes by Zaun whose work attempts “to visualize the living grid,” Blake asked a very simple question: “What is a game?” “A game is a system of rules that organize behavior,” Blake said. “What’s delightful is seeing somebody operate within those rules and yet do this unexpected thing.” 

Pony, a play by Sylvan Oswald that “would demand a stage world populated by a spectrum of queer and trans characters,” first premiered in 2011. Now, 11 years later, Pony returns for its second production, having evolved in that interim decade, writes Miriam Felton-Dansky, professor of theater and performance, for American Theatre. “This production also allows the play new life in the wake of revisions Oswald has made over many years in response to evolving conversations about LGBTQ+ experience,” she writes. Another evolution, Oswald told Felton-Dansky, was in the second production’s casting, which found “enough transmasculine actors to fill the roles” and “a community ready and waiting for this play, neither of which were a given even 10 years ago.” Pony is playing now through September 4 in Portland, Maine, as part of the Portland Theater Festival.

Bard College Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen has been awarded $350,000 by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to fund her project, the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), a digital archive of materials related to the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, Syria, a multicultural center of the ancient world that has been threatened in recent years by looting and conflict. IDEA aims at virtual reassembly and recontextualization of archaeological information from a uniquely preserved archaeological site of cross-disciplinary significance. The NEH grant period is July 2022 through June 2025.

“We couldn’t be happier or more humbled to receive the support of the NEH to bring about this important work,” says Chen. “What I’m most excited about are the ways the grant funds will allow us to provide hands-on learning opportunities for both graduate and undergraduate students, as well as displaced Syrians, all the while making an ethical impact on data from one of the most important archaeological resources we have about life in the ancient world.”

Located on the frontier between the Roman and Persian Empires, Dura-Europos is a rare archaeological resource. Nicknamed “Pompeii of the East” due to its extraordinary degree of preservation, Dura-Europos provides well-preserved and juxtaposed Jewish, Christian, and pagan sanctuaries, and textual remains in a variety of Mediterranean and Semitic languages. The site offers glimpses into the ubiquitous ancient multiculturalism and domestic coexistence of different ethnic groups, reflecting the historical and cultural complexity of life in a frontier city, spanning from 300 BCE to the 250s CE.

Since 1920, European excavations involving multiple institutional partners and well-intentioned efforts to share-out access to physical objects from this important site have led to the dispersal of Dura’s artifacts into collections across the world, largely residing in European and American collections catalogued exclusively in Western languages (primarily English, and some in French). Using the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD), IDEA endeavors to create a comprehensive and extensible digital archive whose data points can be freely reused, and to develop a web application that provides multilinguistic access to the integrated Dura-Europos archival resources in a single interface, together with geo-located visualizations to enhance data intelligibility at a glance.

Ultimately, one of IDEA’s long-term aims is to help democratize processes of knowledge-creation relevant to Dura-Europos. With a great number of Dura-Europos artifacts housed in Western collections and historically only searchable in English (or, less often, French), the number of Middle Eastern scholars that have been able to engage in scholarship related to this important site has been unsurprisingly limited. Establishing multilingual (especially Arabic) accessibility for the site’s archaeological data via the IDEA web application is intended to serve as a steppingstone to the creation of international data-shaping collaborations in the post-grant period. 

At Bard, Chen plans to collaborate with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) and Bard College Berlin on this project. The project will support a CCS Bard fellow each year. The CCS Bard fellows’ participation in the project will expose them to the range of applications of LOD for collections cataloging and information discoverability. Further, in collaboration with the Middle Eastern Studies Program and Bard College Berlin, IDEA will establish remote linked data training workshops for native Arabic-speakers. These remote workshops will in part supply Arabic-language translations for artifact records and further the project goal of increasing Arabic-language searchability of content related to the archaeological site.

IDEA’s core team members also include Co-Principal Investigator Holly Rushmeier, Katherine Thornton, Kenneth Seals-Knutt, Adnan Al Mohamad, and Scott DiGiulio. To learn more, visit duraeuroposarchive.org.

Originally published in LitHub’s “The Craft of Writing” newsletter, Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante’s article explores her writing process and how her most recent book, Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (illustrated by Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91), “stemmed from a strong initial emotion” about the place she’s lived for the past 22 years, and took shape intuitively, without a predetermined structure or result in mind. “Going into the writing I like to cultivate a particular juncture between knowing and not knowing—having all the facts but remaining uncertain how they fit together. It’s a delicate balance, because if you know too little what you write will be halting and opaque, and if you know too much it will be dead on the page, a mere transcription after the fact,” writes Sante. “In any case, whatever ideas and speculations may occupy the writer’s head, writing does not begin with an idea; it begins with a sentence.”

Christine Shoshannah ’06 (formerly known by her surname Dominguez), who majored in music, returned to her hometown of Newburgh, New York, to host a benefit concert and album release event. A portion of the proceeds raised from the event will be donated to Safe Harbors of the Hudson, a nonprofit supporting homeless and low-income families in Newburgh. Shoshannah is a Grammy-nominated songwriter and award-winning singer with a new album Faithful For Free. She graduated one year early from Newburgh Free Academy to jump-start her music career before enrolling at Bard.

The video artist Isaac Julien and the cultural theorist and Bard professor Kobena Mercer explore the legacy of Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Locke, his relationship with so-called “primitive” African sculpture, and the “queering of the New Negro.” Professor Mercer’s new book Alain Locke and the Visual Arts (Yale University Press, 2022) is discussed in the New Yorker in tandem with Julien's new multiscreen commission, “Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die),” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. Kobena Mercer is the Charles P. Stevenson Chair in Art History and the Humanities, a joint appointment between the Art History and Visual Culture Program in the undergraduate College, and the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS).

Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 says his photographs of fireflies can range from “a spa for the eyes” to “almost pure chaos.” For NPR, Lara Pellegrinelli spoke with Mauney, who has spent almost a decade photographing fireflies in the Hudson Valley, using Photoshop to painstakingly compile hundreds of timed exposures into a single image. The images, Pellegrinelli writes, are catching the eye of artists and scientists alike, sparking the interest of researchers pursuing “new evidence that firefly swarms can synchronize their flashes.” Mauney is now a part of a group of volunteers helping collect data for computer scientist and biophysicist Dr. Orit Peleg of the BioFrontiers Institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Still, for Mauney, the images, and the process of composing them, are the primary thing. “I never get tired of it,” Mauney says. “And I never get tired of the challenge and the puzzle of trying to construct the images — and trying to construct a good image, because it’s not enough for me to let the bugs do the heavy lifting.”

Lexi Parra ’18, who majored in human rights and photography at Bard, has been selected as one of eight photojournalists from around the world to be collectively awarded $40,000 in grants from Getty Images, a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace. Parra is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based in Caracas, Venezuela. Her work focuses on youth culture, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. 
 
The annual Getty Images Inclusion Grants aim to support emerging editorial talent within underrepresented groups, offering aspiring photojournalists the creative means and solutions to pursue education that will enable careers within the industry. Eight grants of $5,000 each were awarded to editorial photographers and videographers from different professional specialties, including News, Sport, Arts & Entertainment, and Multimedia. Parra was selected for her work in news photography. Recipients were selected by an esteemed panel of judges comprising accomplished professionals from the fields of photography and journalism and convened by Women Photograph, a non-profit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists; Diversify Photo, a community of photographers, editors, and visual producers working to diversify how people interact with media; and Getty Images. 

Asleep on the job? Dr. Sara Mednick ’95, Bard alumna and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, says that could be a good thing for productivity. Speaking with Discover magazine, Mednick shared insights into the cognitive benefits of naps, which “benefit everything that nighttime sleep helps, including emotional regulation, attention, alertness, motor function and memory.” The length and timing of a nap also impacts its effects on our well-being, with higher benefits from naps before 1 pm, leading many companies and universities to create “designated sleeping pods to allow students and employees to nap whenever they need to.” Building off of findings from a 2018 paper coauthored by Mednick, Discover outlines that while “the benefits of napping may vary across different individuals,” given their many cognitive benefits, it might be time to reconsider how naps fit into our personal and professional lives.

For her “lyrical and haunting” Senior Project, I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, Alice Fall ’22 won second place in Lenscratch’s 2022 Student Prize Awards. “In Alice Falls’s I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, images are alive, the still photographs aren’t still,” writes Alexa Dilworth. Fall will receive $750 as well as a mini exhibition on the Curated Fridge as part of the prize package. In an interview with Lenscratch, Fall described her process and artistic philosophy. “When I am in tune with my body and emotion and the way I physically respond to an image—whether I am making work or engaging with images I’ve already made, my vision is sharpest,” she said.

Bard College’s Division of the Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Anne Hunnell Chen as Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year.

Anne Hunnell Chen specializes in the art and archaeology of the globally connected Late Roman world. She is the founder and director of the NEH-funded International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), aimed at virtual reassembly and recontextualization of archaeological information from a uniquely preserved archaeological site of cross-disciplinary significance. Dr. Chen has published on Roman, Persian, and Digital Humanities topics, and taught equally wide-ranging coursework.

In addition, she is currently at work on a monograph, Tetrarchic Art, Architecture, and Ideology Between East and West (284-325 CE). Taking a transculturally-sensitive, multimedia, and contextual approach, hers is the first book to treat the imperial art of this critical transitional era in its own right, rather than as an accessory in a longue durée narrative. She argues that emperors of this era sensitively adjusted their ideological messaging to address ever-evolving internal and external political pressures—including inordinate pressure from the Persian Sassanid East—and that the stylistic abstraction most commonly associated with the imperial art of the period was not as all-pervasive as generally assumed.

She has excavated at the Roman Baths in Iesso (Spain), and at the Roman imperial palace at Felix Romuliana (Serbia), a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2013–14, she spent a year as a fellow in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she worked on the international loan exhibition Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. Dr. Chen also serves as co-chair of the international Pelagios Network, and an historical consultant for the Virtual Center for Late Antiquity (VCLA).

She earned her B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fields of Art History and Classical Studies, and her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Bard community, she taught at Brown, Hofstra, and Yale Universities.

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of painter Andy Robert as Visiting Artist in Residence in the Studio Arts Program for the fall 2022 semester.

Andy Robert (b. 1984, Les Cayes, Haiti) is a painter who conceptually negotiates abstraction with recognizable imagery; his paintings wrestle between the lyrical and the concrete. In a play of content and form, Robert’s paintings draw from a breadth of historical and personal references, which enjoys the tinkering that comes with painting pictures. Andy Robert lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

“I want my paintings to feel like sketches—quick with the immediacy and intimacy of a rough draft, haptic but thought out in terms of their scale, detail and consideration. As with a thumbnail, my intuitive, beginning impulses, gestural marks of dry-brushing and scraping; of adding and removing of paint and line considered and preserved and valued throughout the painting as it approaches its finish, its resolve.”

Through experimentation he has arrived at a deeply personal and an inventive, deconstructive approach to painting that relies on the premise that images are to be bent and folded, taken apart and put back together again; and a belief that art is a philosophical means to look at and examine things—to question, test ideas, and engage with the world. And that in painting a picture something is being taken apart to put back together; there is an inherent risk in breaking it. 

A diasporic Haitian-American immigrant and painter, Andy Robert views the world critically as a contradiction of mass-communication and increased voicelessness. Interior and contemplative —like the telling of memory or that of a song, his topographical abstractions favor a wandering, poetic ambiguity, and a breaking free that is a strategic opacity abetted by his deconstructive application of paint, mosaic-like accumulations in assemblage, exhaust and come to.  

Recent solo exhibitions include Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Significant group shows include MoMA PS1: Greater New York Exhibition (2021); Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Curated by Duro Olowu, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2020); Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe & Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); and We Go as They: Artists in Residence 2016-17, Studio Museum in Harlem (2016 – 2017). 

Robert was a special gift recipient from The Estate of Pierre Guyotat (2021); the recipient of the Benny Andrews Fellowship for the MacDowell Residency in Peterborough, NH (2020); a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient (2019); and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award Recipient (2019). 

He was in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Skowhegan, ME (2016); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016) and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2015). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The AstrupFearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL.

Andy Robert was recently named on the artist list for the 2022 edition of the Carnegie International, the United States’ oldest biennial-style show.

Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts and Director of Film and Electronic Arts Ephraim Asili directed the Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2023 Men’s fashion show in Paris. A tribute to Victor Abloh, fashion designer and creative director for Louis Vuitton who passed away in November 2021, the show opened with a cinematic prelude conceived and directed by Asili. Asili’s film, titled Strange Math, explores the relationship between imagination and reality, which are central themes to the collection. The show’s soundtrack was a combination of the score for the film, “Enlightenment” by the Sun Ra Arkestra, Florida A&M University in Tallahassee's a live performing marching band The Marching 100, and featured live performance by Kendrick Lamar. 

The detective, as a figure, looms large in the “American mythology,” says Theo Wenner ’09, speaking to Interview about his new book of photography, Homicide. “It’s like a Western, or baseball,” Wenner says. “I wanted to see what it looks like now. Does it actually exist like you think it does? The way they dress, the way they talk?” In creating Homicide, which visually documents a year spent alongside the NYPD’s North Brooklyn Homicide squad, Wenner says his studies with Stephen Shore at Bard informed his approach to this work of photojournalism. “It’s not one single thing that Shore imparts on you. You start to realize the importance of objects,” Wenner says. Objects, Wenner says, can be more true than a portrait, which captures a projection of how someone wishes to be seen. Objects, by contrast, are “unbiased,” especially when it comes to the grim subject matter of Homicide. “You’re staring at the person’s face and it’s like they got caught mid-sentence, the eyes open and looking off into wherever, there’s like a yellow M&Ms wrapper next to the victim,” Wenner says. “Those little details take on so much significance.”

Best known for Opus 40, “a massive hand-built sculpture, with ramps, walls, and pedestals, covering 6.5 acres in Saugerties” and “one of the first American ‘earthworks,’” the life and work of Harvey Fite ’30 will be presented in a retrospective running June 3–July 10, 2022, at the at Emerge Gallery and Lamb Center. Ahead of the exhibition, Chronogram covered the span of Fite’s life, including the influence dyslexia had on his life and his “fierce passion” and “geniality.” “Every life is a journey, but some people voyage farther than others,” writes Sparrow, noting Fite’s ultimate goal of “[reducing] the human body to its essential form, almost the way driftwood is smoothed by the action of water.” Let the Stone Tell the Story: An Inside Look at Sculptor Harvey Fite’s Studio Work runs June 3–July 10, 2022, at Emerge Gallery and the Lamb Center in Saugerties, New York.

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Lucas Blalock ’02 as assistant professor of photography. His tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year. 

Lucas Blalock ’02 is a photographer and writer whose work explores the potentials of mannerism in photography. He has been included in exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Malmo Kunsthall. He has also staged solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum Kurhaus in Kleve, Germany as well as in galleries in the US and in Europe, including Ramiken Crucible, White Cube, Eva Presenhuber, and Rodolphe Janssen.
 
Blalock’s books include, Towards a Warm Math (Hassla, 2011), Windows Mirrors Tabletops (Morel, 2013), Making Memeries (SPBH, 2016), A Grocer’s Orgy (Primary Information, 2018), Figures (Zolo Press, 2022), and Why Must the Mounted Messenger Be Mounted? (Objectiv, 2022). Oar Or Ore, an expansive survey of the artist’s work since 2013 as seen through the lens of recent exhibitions will be published by Museum Kurhaus later this year.
 
Blalock, originally from Asheville, North Carolina, holds a BA from Bard College (Class of ’02), attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received his MFA from UCLA. He is represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich and New York and by Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels.

Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence, received the Carrosse d’Or (or the Golden Coach), presented annually by France’s Society of Film Directors at the Cannes Film Festival. The honor pays tribute to “directors of innovative works with an uncompromising and daring spirit in directing and production.” Reichardt’s eighth feature, the “exquisite” art-scene comedy-drama Showing Up, is screening in competition at Cannes—one of only three of the 18 competition selections that are directed by women. The film finds Reichardt collaborating again with the actor Michelle Williams, with whom she began working more than a decade ago.

The platinum-selling rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with Bardian Nick Zinner ’98 on guitar, has released their first new music in nine years. Writing for the Guardian, Hermione Hoby observes a “sense of revelation thrums through their triumphant fifth album, Cool It Down,” due out in September. In an interview with the three musicians, Zinner says simply, “Performing with this band is the greatest thing in the world.”

Zinner majored in photography at Bard College and is also an accomplished photographer.