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Bard College seniors Ashley Eugley ’22 and Andy Garcia ’22 have been awarded prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowships, which provide for a year of travel and exploration outside the United States. Continuing its tradition of expanding the vision and developing the potential of remarkable young leaders, the Watson Foundation selected Eugley and Garcia as two of 42 students to receive this award for 2022-23. The Watson fellowship offers college graduates of unusual promise a year of independent, purposeful exploration and travel—in international settings new to them—to enhance their capacity for resourcefulness, imagination, openness, and leadership and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community. Each Watson Fellow receives a grant of $36,000 for 12 months of travel and independent study. Over the past several years, 24 Bard seniors have received Watson fellowships. 

Ashley Eugley ’22, from South Bristol, Maine, will challenge the hegemony of conventional, top-down scientific approaches by exploring community science initiatives in across four continents. She will work directly with communities and nonprofit organizations, seeking to learn how participatory science efforts diverge from the paradigmatic model and how they are leveraged to monitor change, combat environmental injustice, enhance resilience, and bolster agency. An Environmental and Urban Studies major with a focus on economics, policy, and global development, Eugley says: “Environment is everything: it is a determinant of health, happiness, and agency. Unfortunately, communities across the world lack access to clean air, potable water, and uncontaminated soil, factors that are essential to environmental security and justice. Rather than passively enabling environmental inequality to persist, communities can use participatory science to monitor hazards and leverage their findings to advocate for justice. This approach diverges from the mainstream paradigm of institutionalized science by empowering non-experts to use accessible scientific approaches to enhance their knowledge, resilience, and agency.” She will spend her Watson year in South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and Ireland

Andy Garcia ’22, from New York City, will visually theorize, through a photographic lens, what the present and future of the African diaspora would be if colonization and slavery had not occurred. Using using their 23andMe results as an itinerary, Garcia will confront the sinister colonial history that has caused fractures and gaps in the understanding of identity in African diasporic descendants. A photography major, Garcia says: “African diasporic people have ended up in these places as a result of immigration, expatriation, and slavery. In creating a visual Afro-futurist media grounded in my lens as a person whose identity has been fractured by colonialism and slavery, I will materialize theories on the future of the African diaspora. This engagement with my ancestral history will enable me to rethink notions of identity beyond just connections to land in a global history marked by forced and coerced immigration.” They will spend their Watson year in Spain, France, Nigeria, Senegal, Egypt and, hopefully Pakistan.

A Watson Year provides fellows with an opportunity to test their aspirations and abilities through a personal project cultivated on an international scale. Watson Fellows have gone on to become leaders in their fields including CEOs of major corporations, college presidents, Emmy, Grammy and Oscar Award winners, Pulitzer Prize awardees, artists, diplomats, doctors, entrepreneurs, faculty, journalists, lawyers, politicians, researchers and inspiring influencers around the world. Following the year, they join a community of peers who provide a lifetime of support and inspiration. More than 3000 Watson Fellows have been named since the inaugural class in 1969. For more information about the Watson Fellowship, visit: https://watson.foundation.

Architecture at Bard, a new undergraduate program codirected by Assistant Professors of Architectural Studies Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams, is now in its fourth semester. The program, featured on Bloomberg CityLab, approaches the discipline and practice of architecture as a matter of public concern—an aesthetic spatial practice whose propositions aim to reconfigure our collective present toward more just futures. “Essentially, says Adams, the program seeks to untangle the social and economic forces that produce buildings and cities: ‘How does that all operate within the background [of architecture] and why are we not talking about it more?’ ”

In an interview with Coda Story, Maria Sonevytsky, associate professor of anthropology and music, spoke to the history and future of Ukrainian music—a category which is itself under political dispute. In Sonevytsky’s work studying Ukrainian music and its relation to national identity, she has written widely about hybrid works that imagine futures, “even if just a wish for the survival of a past.” In addition to her scholarship on groups such as the Dakh Daughters and Vopli Vidopliassova, Sonevytsky is equally interested in street musicians, who even now play in the streets of Kyiv. “I’m thinking about very ordinary musicians, noncelebrities, who are playing music on the streets of Odesa or on the streets of Kyiv in defiance of this unjust war,” Sonevytsky says. “I think these ordinary acts of defiance, these people playing music on the streets as they’re surrounded by barricades and sandbags, have been incredibly moving to watch.”
 
Read More in Coda Story

Patrick Vaill ’07 returns as Jud Fry for the London run of Daniel Fish’s Tony Award–winning, re-imagined, and re-orchestrated revival of Oklahoma! Vaill originated and humanized the role of Jud Fry, the play’s villain, while still a theater and performance student at Bard in Fish’s 2007 staging (commissioned by the then Director of Bard’s Theater Program JoAnne Akalaitis). When Fish then adapted the production for Bard’s 2015 SummerScape season, Vaill was cast again as Jud Fry and stayed with the production until 2020 as it went from off-Broadway to Broadway. Now, he will reprise the role in the U.K. premiere of Fish’s production at the West End's Young Vic Theatre in London. Previews start April 26, and opening night is set for May 5 with the run scheduled to continue through June 25.

It might seem natural that visual artists look to the visual for inspiration, but what about the written word? Mieke Marple, writing for LitHub, spoke with 14 contemporary artists about how reading influences their work, including Jibade-Khalil Huffman ’03 and Azikiwe Mohammed ’05. Huffman, whose work incorporates “subtitles, titles, and more abstract juxtapositions of text,” and who has published several books of poetry, says he’s currently reading Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib. In his work, “there is typically lots of veering back and forth between a clear sort of description/essay and the more indeterminate shifts of thought that poetry allows.” Mohammed, meanwhile, cites Todd McFarlane’s Spawn as an inspiration. “It is drawn out in a way that feels luxurious, for me, as a Black man, rarely able to have time exist as such,” he says. “The character Spawn is a Black man who has died, and in death found the time that I lack here while among the living.”
 
Read More on LitHub
 

Bard College student Elisabeth Sundberg ’22 has won a Davis Projects for Peace prize for her proposal, “Tracing The Turnrow Web: Appalachian Rising.” Human rights and studio arts major Sundberg will receive $10,000 to facilitate a series of collaborative art projects across the Turnrow network in West Virginia. Turnrow Appalachian Farm collective is a food hub connecting 100+ farms across West Virginia and providing fresh vegetables to their local communities. Working with farmers, artists, activists, and students, her work will “strengthen connections between the organizations within Turnrow and those between food producers and customers and celebrate the work that the different parts of the Turnrow food hub are doing, including education, food access, and strengthening local food landscapes.”

Sundberg’s project proposes to engage West Virginian residents with each other and their food systems through a series of community art events. Over the summer, she will facilitate a two week-long art project that includes the creation of a participatory mural painting, patchwork table cloth, and celebratory communal meal in each of four larger regions that Turnrow serves. This project is a continuation of a grant-funded community project Sundberg facilitated last summer. Like a traditional quilting bee, the community will gather to create these artworks together. The murals serve as a lasting visual representation of community work and the table cloths as an artifact which will be used by the network for potlucks, yearly business meetings, fundraising, and other events that Turnrow organizes. “Peace is not possible without food security and food justice. Many small towns in West Virginia don’t have a grocery store and rely on the Dollar General chain for their groceries. It is important to acknowledge that poor eating habits are not due to ignorance about healthy food choices, but due to lack of access. Peace is promoted when everyone has the right to local, sustainable, and nutritious produce, which is why organizations connecting farming and food access are so important,” says Sundberg.

Projects for Peace was created in 2007 through the generosity of Kathryn W. Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who believed that today’s youth—tomorrow’s leaders—ought to be challenged to formulate and test their own ideas. To learn more, visit: middlebury.edu/office/projects-for-peace.

Sydney Oshuna-Williams ’24, who is majoring in film and electronic arts and philosophy, has been recognized for her commitment to solving public problems. Campus Compact, a national coalition of colleges and universities working to advance the public purposes of higher education, has named Oshuna-Williams one of 173 student civic leaders who will make up the organization’s 2022–2023 cohort of Newman Civic Fellows. The Newman Civic Fellowship recognizes students who stand out for their commitment to creating positive change in communities locally and around the world. 
 
As the founder of the Me In Foundation, Oshuna-Williams seeks to increase artistic education opportunities for underrepresented youth through social and cultural awareness year-round programming. In her first semester at Bard College, Oshuna-Williams created the Me In Foundation as a Trustee Leader Scholar project. The Foundation allows youth scholars to share their stories through a variety of different art forms and currently works with over one-hundred and fifty K-12 students in Upstate New York and Atlanta. Oshuna-Williams is also a Mogul in Training at Usher Raymond’s non-profit organization, Usher’s New Look, where she facilitates conversations centered around college and career readiness as well as financial literacy. Oshuna-Williams continues to use her passion for storytelling to bring untold truths to the surface because, as she says, “Every story deserves to be heard by the characters who live it."
 
Through the fellowship, Campus Compact will provide these students with a year of learning and networking opportunities that emphasize personal, professional, and civic growth. Each year, fellows participate in numerous virtual training and networking opportunities to help provide them with the skills and connections they need to create large-scale positive change. The cornerstone of the fellowship is the Annual Convening of Fellows, which offers intensive skill-building and networking over the course of two days. The fellowship also provides fellows with pathways to apply for exclusive scholarship and post-graduate opportunities.
 
The fellowship is named for the late Frank Newman, one of Campus Compact’s founders, who was a tireless advocate for civic engagement in higher education. In the spirit of Dr. Newman’s leadership, fellows are nominated by Campus Compact member presidents and chancellors, who are invited to select one outstanding student from their campus each year.
 
“Sydney Oshuna-Williams, a second year Posse scholar at Bard College, is a very active student addressing mental health healing in our student body (as a peer health educator specializing in the healing of BIPOC students) and securing pathways to creative careers for kids in our neighboring communities. Sydney is currently serving as a peer counselor (Bard's version of residential advisor) to support students in their living environments and a Sister2Sister mentor (a student-led mentorship program providing guidance and opportunity to young women of color). Sydney also partners Bard's neighboring school districts with schools in her home state of Georgia to bridge opportunity across geographical limitations,” said Bard President Botstein.

After leaving his job at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Gabriel Kilongo ’15 wanted not only to open a gallery, but to start a scene. His new gallery, Jupiter, which opened on March 5 in the North Beach community of Miami Beach, Florida, is meant to challenge not only where art galleries are supposed to open, but what they are designed to do. “I wanted to find a space that was not in a place that is already too trendy, already overdeveloped,” Kilongo said to the New York Times. The gallery, currently showing works by Marcus Leslie Singleton, will emphasize “emerging artists who are adding new perspectives to canonized art historical conversation,” Kilongo says.
 
Read More in the New York Times

Song of Songs Is Commissioned by the Fisher Center at Bard, Where Tanowitz Is Choreographer-in-Residence, and Which Also Commissioned and Premiered Her Renowned Four Quartets

The Fisher Center at Bard, which has become one of the world’s preeminent sources of major multidisciplinary performance works, presents a project that exemplifies its place on the cultural landscape: a new dance setting of the biblical Song of Songs created by the Fisher Center’s internationally celebrated choreographer-in-residence, Pam Tanowitz, with new music from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, making its world premiere July 1-3 as part of the 2022 edition of the Bard SummerScape festival.

Spiritual and erotic, playful and mysterious, Song of Songs (also known as The Song of Solomon) is perhaps the greatest of all love poems—a hymn of yearning, steeped in images from the natural world. It has inspired artists and lovers for millennia; some scholars argue that the entire tradition of Western love poetry springs from its glorious verses. Based on this radiantly beautiful text, Tanowitz’s collaboration with Lang, in which she explores her Jewish identity, is a collage of movement, sound, and song that reimagines ancient rituals of love and courtship and holds the sacred and profane threads of the Song in perfect balance.

In addition to choreography by Tanowitz and music by Lang, Song of Songs features production design by Tanowitz and her longtime collaborators Reid Bartelme, Harriet Jung, and Clifton Taylor; sound design by Garth MacAleavey; music supervision by Caleb Burhans; and dramaturgy by Mary Gossy. Betsy Ayer is the production stage manager. 

The performers include Pam Tanowitz Dance company members Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, Lindsey Jones, Brian Lawson, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura, and Melissa Toogood (rehearsal director); and musicians Emily Brausa (cello), Caleb Burhans (viola), Martha Cluver (soprano), Katie Geissinger (alto), Rebecca Hargrove(soprano), and Yuri Yamashita (percussion). 

Song of Songs follows the resounding success of Tanowitz’s two previous Fisher Center commissions: I was waiting for the echo of a better day, chosen as one of The New York Times’s “Best of 2021,” and Four Quartets, which recently played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was, after its Fisher Center premiere, named “Best Dance Production of 2018” by the Times. The paper pronounced it “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”

Pam Tanowitz, who is entering her fourth year as the Fisher Center’s choreographer-in-residence, says of the work, “I feel a deep personal connection with this work—an intimate, small-scale love story. In 2018, after my dad died, I started thinking about lineage, and Jewish identity, and wanted to make a piece that honors my father and my heritage, something I’ve never done. For me, the use of this text provides a framework to push myself artistically. I want to find a way to mirror the structure without being literal. I plan to deconstruct the duet form as I investigate how to give shape or feeling to a figure.”

David Lang explains, “It was Pam’s idea to make a big project that would be based on the biblical text Song of Songs.I responded to her suggestion by mapping out four different paths through the text, resulting in a new text for the music that I would write myself. Each of these paths applies a different literary filter to the original text, and each path tries to concentrate on the paradox that, for Judeo- Christian believers, the text is both a sensual description of the experiences of two lovers and, at the same time, a deeply spiritual exploration of a relationship with god. My hope is that, by examining this deep and powerful text from such different angles, these movements, taken together, may begin to reveal more of the original text’s emotional and spiritual powers.”

Bard SummerScape, described by The New York Times as “a hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure” and as a producer of dance works that provide “reliable transcendence,” returns this year June 23 - August 14 and comprises eight weeks of live music, opera, dance, and theater. Additional highlights include the 32nd Bard Music Festival, Rachmaninoff and His World; a new production of Strauss’s The Silent Woman, directed by Christian Räth; and a new adaptation of Molière’s Dom Juan, directed by Ashley Tata; and more. More information about the 2022 festival is here. 
                                                            
Performance Schedule and Ticketing
Performances of Song of Songs take place July 1 at 8pm, July 2 at 5pm, and July 3 at 2pm in the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center (Manor Ave, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504). Tickets, starting at $25 ($5 for Bard students), can be purchased at fishercenter.bard.edu or 845-758-7900.

About Pam Tanowitz
Pam Tanowitz is a celebrated New York-based choreographer and collaborator known for her unflinchingly post-modern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance to explore dance- making with a consistent community of dancers. Tanowitz is currently the Fisher Center’s Choreographer in Residence.

Her 2017 dance New Work for Goldberg Variations, created in collaboration with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, was called a “rare achievement” (The New York Times). Four Quartets (2018), inspired by T.S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece and set to music by Kaija Saariaho, was called "the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” (The New York Times).

In 2016, Tanowitz was presented with the Juried Bessie Award for “using form and structure as a vehicle for challenging audiences to think, to feel, to experience movement; for pursuing her uniquely poetic and theatrical vision with astounding rigor and focus.” She has been commissioned by New York City Ballet, The Royal Ballet, The Joyce Theater, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Bard SummerScape, Vail International Dance Festival, New York Live Arts, The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, Danspace Project, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Chicago Dancing Festival, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Duke Performances, Peak Performances, FSU's Opening Nights Series, and the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston. 

About David Lang
David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention as a passionate, prolific, and complicated composer. Lang is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms. 

Lang is one of America's most performed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalog is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike.

Lang's “Simple Song #3,” written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino's acclaimed film Youth, received many award nominations in 2016, including the Academy Award and Golden Globe. Recent works include his opera Prisoner of the State, co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam's de Doelen Concert Hall, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, and Bruges Concertgebouw; his opera The Loser, which opened the 2016 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the Public Domain for 1000 singers at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival; and his chamber opera Anatomy Theater at Los Angeles Opera and at the PROTOTYPE Festival in New York. His 2008 composition The Little Match Girl Passion won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Lang's works are performed around the globe by prominent orchestras, ensembles, festivals, and venues. His music is used regularly for ballet and modern dance including works with such choreographers and companies as Twyla Tharp, the Paris Opera Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and Benjamin Millepied. Lang is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe nomination, Musical America's Composer of the Year, the Rome Prize, a Bessie Award, Obie Award, and a Grammy Award. Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York's legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His work has been recorded on the Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Teldec, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, and Cantaloupe labels, among others. 

Funding Credits
The 2022 SummerScape season is made possible in part by the generous support of 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 2022 Bard Music Festival has received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Commissioning funds for Song of Songs are provided by Jay Franke and David Herro, with additional support received from the O’Donnell Green Music and Dance Foundation. The Fisher Center on behalf of Pam Tanowitz Dance received a 2020 NDP Finalist Grant Award for Song of Songs, made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to address sustainability needs during COVID-19.

Steven Sapp ’89 and Mildred Ruiz-Sapp ’92 met at Bard, fell in love, and went on to create Universes, a groundbreaking national theater company of color founded in 1995, whose members include William Ruiz ’03 (a.k.a. Ninja) and Gamal Chasten. They are currently working on a piece, titled Maria, commissioned by Long Wharf Theatre, that explores the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, as seen through the eyes of a woman who has experienced a trauma similar to that of West Side Story’s heroine Maria. “With Maria, Universes intends to reclaim the way stories about specific communities are made without their consent, not to mention stories that white culture specifically tells them they have no right to have an opinion on,” writes Jose Solís for American Theatre.

Bard alumna and visiting artist in residence Tschabalala Self ’12, known for her figurative collage paintings of Black female bodies, has just launched a new brand collaboration. Her Ugg x Tschabalala Self capsule collection is made up of colorful twists on Ugg’s boots, slippers, outerwear, and accessories, which combine form, function, and Self’s exuberant creative vision. “It was kind of a natural fit,” she says. “Ugg is a brand that deals a lot with materiality and texture, and I deal with that stuff in my painting as well.” With this project, she notes, “I’m using a lot of the same aesthetic tropes and types of patterning and design and geometry that I would generally use in my practice, but the figure is not present.”

Ahead of their first solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Carolyn Lazard ’10 spoke with Frieze about their work and how they incorporate Blackness, queerness, disability, and collectivity into their aesthetic. A cofounder of the art collective Canaries, “a network of women and gender non-conforming people living and working with autoimmune conditions and other chronic illnesses,” Lazard sometimes feels uncomfortable with the idea of individuation, of focusing on one artist over another. “The truth is that my work comes out of a long lineage of Black, disabled, and queer people making art,” they say. “My practice doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it is made in relation to the work of other artists who have come before me, and those whose work I learn about day to day.” 
 
Lazard’s work, which spans different mediums, progressed from a love of avant-garde cinema, which they first came into contact with at Bard. Recently, Lazard has experimented with providing multiple ways of presenting a single artwork, both visual and non-visual. “Access has this capacity to break through the boundaries of medium, because of the way it makes art necessarily iterative,” they say. “Through access, a single artwork might exist as a description, as a notation, as sign language, as a transcript or as a tactile object—depending on what people need.” Still, though these categories inform their work, they are resistant to the market trends which seek to define artists, especially Black artists, by a singular trait or identity. “Most museums seem committed to receiving Black art, Black aesthetics, and Black politics—provided it’s on the museum’s terms,” they say. “It’s a complex time to be a Black artist, but when has it not been?”
 
Read More in Frieze
 
Learn More about Carolyn Lazard: Long Take

Translating Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices” for the stage, Justin Peck collaborated with Shaw and Eva LeWitt ’07 to create Partita, a new ballet for the New York City Ballet. While developing Partita, Peck discovered Sol LeWitt, Eva’s father, was an inspiration for the original score, which led him to her work, which he described as having “a dimensionality and theatricality” integral to this new adaptation. For LeWitt, the ballet spoke to her sense of her own work, especially her use of gravity. “That’s so linked to dance, to humans moving through space, and to the voice too,” LeWitt says. “Those gravitational universes are important to all our art forms.” Partita, performed by eight dancers in sneakers, featured set design by LeWitt, whose “vibrantly colored hanging fabric sets” served as the backdrop for the ballet when it premiered January 27, 2022.
 
Full Story in the New York Times

“Photographer Tim Davis’s latest book, I’m Looking Through You, (Aperture, 2021) is a welcome respite from all the chaos and clamor unleashed in the world right now. It’s a book about the unbridled joys of ‘seeing’ with a camera. It’s also a love poem to the crazy, freewheeling streets of Los Angeles,” writes Kenneth Dickerman for the Washington Post. Tim Davis ’91 is associate professor of photography at Bard College. He has been a member of the Bard faculty since 2003.

 

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Joshua Glick as Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts for a three-year period from 2022 to 2025. Professor Glick’s research and teaching focus is the comparative histories of film, television, and radio; nonfiction media; race and representation; and the civic uses of emerging technology. He will also be teaching in Experimental Humanities.

Joshua Glick is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History (University of California Press, 2018). Josh’s current book explores the rising interest in nonfiction on both the left and right of the political spectrum. It examines, in particular, the way documentary’s proliferation across new platforms has transformed the relationship between Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C. Josh is also actively involved in public humanities projects, collaborating with archives, museums, and community organizations. As a Fellow at the Open Documentary Lab at MIT, he recently designed the interactive online curriculum: Media Literacy in the Age of Deepfakes. He also co-curated the exhibition currently up at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York: Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen. The show investigates the history of media manipulation, the rise of “deepfake” videos, and how synthetic media can be used for the public good. Josh holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Prior to coming to Bard, he was the Isabelle Peregrin Assistant Professor of English, Film & Media Studies at Hendrix College.

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Masha Shpolberg as Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts for a tenure-track position beginning in the 2022-2023 academic year. Professor Shpolberg’s research and teaching explore world cinema, with special attention to Russia and Eastern Europe, ecocinema, women’s cinema, and global documentary.

Masha Shpolberg’s first book project focuses on the aesthetics of labor in Polish cinema of the late socialist period, examining how filmmakers sought out new ways of representing the laboring body at a time of massive workers' strikes—and how they co-opted, confronted, or otherwise challenged the representational legacy of socialist realism. She is also currently working on two edited volumes: Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe, forthcoming from Berghahn Books, and Contemporary Russian Documentary, under contract at Edinburgh University Press. Masha has contributed film criticism to Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Tablet, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a Ph.D. in Film & Media Studies and Comparative Literature from Yale University. Prior to coming to Bard, Masha taught at Wellesley College and the University of North Carolina Wilmington.

Multiple Bard faculty members, both former and present, as well as several alumni/ae will be featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Works by Rindon Johnson MFA ’18, Duane Linklater MFA ’13, and Jon Wang MFA ’19 will be featured alongside those by current and former faculty Nayland Blake ’82, Raven Chacon, Dave McKenzie, Adam Pendleton, and Lucy Raven MFA ’08. David Breslin, co-organizer of this edition of the Biennial, spoke with the New York Times about the curation of work that spoke to the social and political conflict that has taken place since the last Biennial in 2019. “Our hope is that this show permits a taking stock, a way of seeing what we’re maybe not at the end of, but in the middle of,” Breslin says, “and how art can help make sense of our times.” Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept will open on April 6, 2022 and will run through September 5, 2022. This year marks the 80th edition of the exhibition, the longest-running of its kind.

Full Story in the New York Times
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Lucy Sante—writer, critic, and Bard faculty member—pens an intimate personal essay for Vanity Fair tracing her journey as a trans woman, from the carefully repressed feelings of her adolescence to finally coming out last year. “Now I am aware that I live, as we all do, in a cloud of unknowing, where certainties break down and categories become liquid,” she writes. “None of us really knows anything except provisionally. Now, as Lou Reed put it, ‘I’m set free/ to find a new illusion.’” Lucy Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1999.
 

The Posse Arts Program celebrated its inaugural class of scholars, including a cohort from Puerto Rico that will attend Bard College this coming fall, at a virtual awards ceremony on January 24. Yadier Perez, one of 10 Posse Arts Scholars who will attend Bard, reflected on the significance of the award for his family. “I am thankful to Bard. You have given me the opportunity to show my brothers, my siblings, that pushing and fighting for your dreams can make them a reality. … We've all gone through hardships, but we're here to succeed. We've earned this. So thank you, Bard, for giving me the opportunity to make my mom proud.”

The program included remarks from songwriter, actor, and director Lin-Manuel Miranda, his father and political strategist Luis A. Miranda Jr., and U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona. President of the College Leon Botstein greeted the incoming Bardians with a message underscoring the importance of community. “To succeed, you can’t do it alone—you’re only as good as the people who help you and collaborate and share and support you,” President Botstein said. “It’s terribly important, the Posse idea.”

Addressing the new Posse Arts cohorts at the recent awards ceremony, Lin-Manuel Miranda said, “This really is an extraordinary moment. We are believers in the Posse process. Your time in school is a time for you to find your voice, find what you are passionate about. You’re going in with a squad and with a group of like-minded artists and you’re going to be able to lean on each other for support. You’re going to have an instant set of potential collaborators. Take advantage of your time and sink your teeth into the school. Get to know your Posse cohorts. And we are excited to be a step in your journey and to be able to say, ‘We knew you when.’”

Representing Bard, the first institution to partner with Posse to recruit students from Puerto Rico, President Botstein spoke about the outsized role the arts play in society. “We believe that the arts are not a separate way of life,” he said. “The arts are not decoration; they're not ornament. They're essential to any notion of freedom or autonomy or community, especially in a democracy. They are on the same level as physics, or mathematics, or economics or history and literature. And it's a wonderful addition to our student body, to have students from Puerto Rico.”

Twenty-seven high school seniors will attend college on full-tuition art scholarships totaling $5.2 million as participants in the new Posse Arts Program, an initiative of the Posse Foundation—a leading college success and youth leadership development organization. Selected from public high schools in Puerto Rico, New York, and cities across the country, the program’s inaugural class will matriculate this fall at Bard College, California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), and University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), respectively.

The Posse Arts initiative was conceived in collaboration with Lin-Manuel and the Miranda Family Fund. The program seeks to create a diverse pipeline of leaders in the creative arts by connecting promising art students from diverse backgrounds to top colleges and universities, where they attend as members of a cohort. Last spring, former First Lady Michelle Obama joined Lin-Manuel and Posse in announcing the launch of the program.

BARD COLLEGE POSSE ARTS SCHOLARSHIPS AWARDEES

Ariana Sofia Diaz
Naobie Angeline Garcia
Jadiel Omar Gómez Marín
Dashely Valeria Juliá Ramírez
Dyann Malpica Santiago
Gabriel Antonio Medina Maldonado
Kiara Arlene Peña González 
Yadier M. Pérez Pagán
Diego Andrés Santos
Pedro Emiliano Vázquez Colón

 
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Opus 40, the 57-acre sculpture park created by the late Harvey Fite ’30, former Bard professor and alumnus, will begin 2022 with a combined $650,000 in grant awards. With these new grants, Caroline Crumpacker, executive director of Opus 40, has prioritized preserving the park and ensuring its success. The upkeep of Opus 40 would not be possible without this grant money, says Jonathan Becker, Opus 40 board president and Bard executive vice president, vice president for academic affairs, and director of the Center for Civic Engagement. "The (Mellon) Foundation’s grant, combined with the National Parks Service/Save America’s Treasures grant announced in September, will allow for a truly historic conservation effort and will secure the preservation of Fite’s sculpture for generations to come,” Becker said in a statement.

Full Story in the Times Herald-Record