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Day’s End (2014–21), located in Hudson River Park opposite the Whitney Museum of American Art, “is Hammons’s first permanent public artwork in more than three decades, located in tantalizing proximity to one of the many major institutions that the artist has spent a career impishly frustrating, critiquing, and flirting with,” writes Professor L’Official in Artforum. “Engaging with the nearby institution while evading it, it is a space of possibility that encloses no space at all. Its form is rigid, yet time and tide and air and light flow beneath, above, and through it, and the structure continually reframes the world as we move around it. It is infinitely propositional, an architectural frame to house unhoused improvisation.”

“Built on the gnawed bones of its predecessor, and reset in the modern-day South among members of a Black family that runs a barbecue restaurant, ‘Fat Ham’ refuses the tropes of Black suffering even as it engages the seriousness of the Shakespeare. It is the rare takeoff that actually takes off—and then flies in its own smart direction.” The world digital premiere of Fat Ham is streaming through May 23 as part of the Wilma Theater’s virtual spring season.

Azikiwe Mohammed celebrates everyday heroes and small acts of care in his work. Through different media—painting, textiles, performative installations—he constructs spaces of safety and welcome for people of color and for immigrants whose space is often threatened.

Olga Touloumi, assistant professor of architectural history at Bard College, has been awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend to support her scholarly book project The Global Interior: Modern Architecture and the Ordering of the World. Professor Touloumi joins other NEH Summer Stipends awardees in pursuing advanced, new research recognized to be of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both.

Crip Time—a meditation on the task of organizing weekly medications and pills—explores cinematic time and the essential work of care. “It is a durational work, and duration plays a large part in my practice,” says Lazard. “My own interests in terms of the medium of video have a lot to do with video’s capacity to represent real time, a kind of duration that matches with our lived experience. I think it is really different from how we normally relate to video or cinema, in which we’re often put into a temporal pace that is accelerated and manipulated. And I think slowness has a lot to do with the mundane in some ways because our lives are made up of myriad slow experiences that are the foundation of keeping us alive.”

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded five Bard faculty and Bard MFA faculty and graduates 2021 Guggenheim Fellowships. Bard Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, Bard MFA faculty Roberto Tejada and A.K. Burns MFA ’10, and MFA graduates Luba Drozd MFA ’15 and Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 were named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows. Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 3,000 applicants, Asili, Tejada, Burns, Drozd, and Lusztig were among a diverse group of 184 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2021 Fellowship.

“We are delighted and impressed that so many Bard MFA alums and faculty have been named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows,” said Hannah Barrett, director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. “The Milton Avery School for the Arts wishes to congratulate these faculty and alumni on their 2021 Guggenheim awards. Their recognition is richly deserved and we will follow their careers with pride and admiration.”

“As an experimental filmmaker, our colleague Ephraim Asili has won critical acclaim for The Diaspora Suite (2017), an ambitious cycle of 16 mm short films, and most recently his feature-length The Inheritance (2020), a poetic meditation on history, politics, art, and Black liberation,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre d’Albertis. “Asili's presence on the faculty of Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program represents for our students both deep continuity with Bard's storied past as a haven for artistic experimentation and a stunningly contemporary approach to documentary and narrative with full awareness of the urgency of our present moment.”

“I am thrilled to announce this new group of Guggenheim Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, “especially since this has been a devastating year in so many ways. A Guggenheim Fellowship has always been meaningful, but this year we know it will be a lifeline for many of the new Fellows at a time of great hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. The work supported by the Fellowship will help us understand more deeply what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do what they were meant to do.”

Created in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Foundation has offered fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions. The great range of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. In all, 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 73 different academic institutions, 28 states and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. For more information on the 2021 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 is a filmmaker, artist, educator and DJ whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His award-winning films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA PS1, LAMOCA, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Whitney Museum, and The Barbican Center in London. Asili's 2020 feature debut, The Inheritance, premiered at the 2020 Toronto International film festival and was recently acquired for distribution by Grasshopper Films. As a DJ, Asili has been a regular program host on WGXC, and done guest sets for NTS Radio, Afropop Worldwide, and WFMU. He also hosts a monthly dance party Botanica. Asili currently resides in Hudson, NY, and is a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard.

Roberto Tejada, Bard MFA writing faculty, is the author of poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold  (Krupskaya, 2006), Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish translation, and a LatinX poetics of the Americas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019). He is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and with Michelle White and others the co-author of Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021) He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.

A.K. Burns MFA ’10, Bard MFA film & video faculty, is an interdisciplinary artist who views the body as a contentious domain wherein issues of gender, labor, ecology and sexuality are negotiated. Burns is currently producing Negative Space, a cycle of video-installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The opening episode, A Smeary Spot (2015) debuted at Participant Inc., NY, followed by an exhibition at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR, in 2016. The second in this series, titled Living Room (2017) debut at the New Museum, and was subsequently exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2018. Additionally in 2018 Burns exhibited a new video work titled Survivors Remorse (2018) at the Harvard Museum and a public sculpture The Dispossessed (2018) at the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial. As a frequent collaborator and advocate for labor issues in the Arts, Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Great Economy) in 2008. Burns’ works can be found in public collations including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was also a 2018 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts, a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University as well as a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award.

Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 is a filmmaker, visual artist, and archival researcher. She is a professor, Film & Digital Media, and director, Center for Documentary Arts & Research (CDAR), at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Her film and video work mines old images, technologies, and objects for new meanings in order to reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of her work is centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001), the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011), and her newest performative documentary feature Yours in Sisterhood (2018). Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and RIDM Montréal, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She was the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal.

Luba Drozd MFA ’15 is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist. She earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Her films and installations articulate the absurd in the established exploitative social structures and demonstrate how the systems of control are manifested and echoed in restrictive architectural environments. Luba’s works screened at Smack Mellon, Apexart, Anthology Film Archives, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and Art in General. She is a 2015 Media Arts fellow at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY. In 2020, Drozd was featured by the New York Post as “hero of the day” and highlighted in the New York Times for her work making and distributing face shields for hospital workers in the early weeks of the pandemic. Drozd is a recipient of the 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Arts. Her two-room site specific sound, sculpture, and 3D animation installation piece, “The Aesthetic Limits of Water,” was commissioned and exhibited by the Hessel Museum in 2020.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(4/09/21)
 

Huntt is among five recipients of the inaugural Sustainable Artist Grant, awarded by Brown Girls Doc Mafia in support of women and nonbinary people of color working in documentary film. These unrestricted grants support BGDM members whose filmmaking talents dovetail with their “clarity of purpose as an artist, engagement and dedication to community building, and strong potential to make a meaningful contribution to an evolving and expanding documentary field.” Filmmaker, curator, and fellow Bard alum Farihah Zaman ’05 was a member of the BGDM jury.

On Saturday, April 24, the Bard College Dance Program presents A Celebration of Aileen Passloff (1931–2020). For over 40 years, Aileen Passloff was the L. May Hawver and Wallace Benjamin Flint Professor of Dance at Bard, in addition to her numerous contributions to the field of dance. In celebration of her life and work, Passloff’s former students Arthur Aviles ’87, Charlotte Hendrickson ’07, and EmmaGrace Skove-Epes ’08 will give tribute performances.

“I was strong and tireless and full of passion and loved dancing as deeply as one could ever love anything.”—Aileen Passloff

The free, live-streamed event takes place at 4 p.m. and will feature guest speakers, as well as pre-recorded messages and video archives of Aileen’s work. The celebration is presented in collaboration with the Fisher Center at Bard, the President’s Office, the Dean’s Office, and the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs. For more information and to watch, please visit the Fisher Center’s virtual stage, UPSTREAMING, by clicking here.

“I am thrilled to help to create an event to celebrate my mentor and inspiration, Aileen Passloff,” said Bard Professor of Dance Jean Churchil. “All of my work in the dance studio, as a teacher and as a choreographer, is informed by her passion for the arts, and I know that I am only one of so very many people. By her example, she taught us to understand that the arts are essential to our lives. She taught many aspiring artists to understand that to try to make art is to try to make a profound difference in the world. For Aileen, and for many of us whose lives were enriched by her, to try to make art is to discover, to uncover, and to cultivate the courage to be fully alive.”

Aileen Passloff, Professor of Dance at Bard College for over four decades, was born in New York City in 1931. She began performing professionally at the age of 14 for the renowned modern dance choreographer James Waring, and was passionately committed to the art of the dance for 67 more years. Whether it was ballet, experimental dance, or “dance theater,” Aileen was devoted to learning more about the art of the body moving through space; she continued to dance and to choreograph until her death in November, 2020.

Passloff studied dance at Bennington College; she then led her own company for ten years in New York City. During her performing career she danced with, amongst others, Katherine Litz, Toby Armour and Remy Charlip. She also developed a passion for the art of Flamenco, which prompted her to travel annually to Spain to study. Recently, she appeared in two films by Marta Renzi: “Her Magnum Opus” (2017), in which Passloff portrays the beloved teacher of a group of artists, and a short documentary, “Arthur & Aileen” (2012).

As a beloved teacher of many generations of Bard students and professional dancers, she continued to choreograph until the very last weeks of her life. The Celebration of Aileen Passloff will feature several recordings of her dances as well as live performances by three of her former students, Charlotte Hendrickson, EmmaGrace Skove-Epes, and Arthur Aviles. Other students of Aileen Passloff have included the choreographers Joanna Haigood, David Parker, Dusan Tynek, costume designer Liz Prince, and the director Ann Bogart.

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College has announced the launch of a pioneering master of arts program in human rights and the arts, and looks forward to welcoming the inaugural class in fall 2021. Designed by the Center’s core faculty team of Tania El Khoury, Thomas Keenan, Gideon Lester, and Ziad Abu-Rish, the interdisciplinary program will bring together scholars, artists, and activists from around the world to explore the productive and contentious relation between the arts and struggles for truth and justice. The program expands the curricular and extracurricular elements of the OSUN Center, directed by El Khoury.
 
The Center has set a May 1 priority application deadline and a June 15 final deadline. Ample need-based financial aid is available to cover tuition and other expenses. The following information sessions will be open to the public and prospective applicants (please register by emailing [email protected] with full name and intended session to receive a Zoom link).

• Tuesday, April 6, at 8:30am NYC Time (2:30pm Vienna / 6:30pm Dhaka)
• Wednesday, April 7, at 4:00pm NYC Time (10pm Vienna / 2:00am Dhaka)
• Monday, April 12, at 8:00am NYC Time (2:00pm Vienna / 6:00pm Dhaka)
• Friday, April 15, at 4:00pm NYC Time (10pm Vienna / 2:00am Dhaka)

“Akie was one of my favorite singers, before he joined the band,” singer Rachael Price tells Variety. “I was literally starstruck when he joined. I was like, I cannot believe somebody of this caliber of voice is sitting behind me playing piano.” Bassist Bridget Kearney adds, “(Akie) has many talents that he brings to the table and contributed a lot to the writing on this record and also of course to the character of the recordings, not only with his keyboard playing, but with his singing.”

Bard College Conservatory student Sophia Kathryn Jackson ’25 has been selected as a 2021 Frederick Douglass Global Fellow, an honor awarding her a full scholarship to represent Bard in a summer study abroad program focused on leadership, intercultural communication, and social justice. Jackson is one of just 14 high-achieving student leaders from diverse backgrounds selected for this prestigious award. The Council for International Educational Exchange (CIEE) announced the 2021 cohort of Frederick Douglass Global Fellows in an online St. Patrick’s Day roundtable where the fellows were congratulated by Vice President Kamala Harris, Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, and Nettie Washington Douglass, the great-great-granddaughter of Frederick Douglass.

 “You will create friendships around the globe as an extension of the work we do as a country to inspire and to work on and to build on the friendships we have around the world,” said Vice President Harris. “Many of you know that I attended Howard University, a school that was founded at a time when few recognized the potential of Black students to be leaders. At HBCUs, and at fellowship programs like this, students of color are prepared to lead. Like Frederick Douglass in Ireland, you can come as you are, and you can leave who you aspire to be.”

A double major in biology and music performance, Jackson was selected as a Frederick Douglass Global Fellow because of her academic excellence, communication skills, and commitment to social justice. A highlight of Sophia’s service to her community is the Music Mentorship Initiative, a program she cofounded, through which she and other undergraduate musicians provide free private music instruction over Zoom for students who could not otherwise afford lessons. Jackson anticipates her time in Dublin will be transformative. “Growth is a byproduct of being exposed to new and uncertain experiences,” she said in her application video. “Being confronted with the challenges of being in a new place and being able to work through them with the perspectives of my cohort will lead to the start of a growth that I envision will continue to bloom throughout my collegiate years and influence my service-based path.”

Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs will co-sponsor the 2021 Frederick Douglass Global Fellows in Dublin, Ireland, to honor the 175^th anniversary of the meeting between 27-year-old abolitionist Frederick Douglass and the Irish reformer Daniel O’Connell in Dublin in 1845.

“I was delighted to join Vice President Harris this morning in meeting these exceptional young people,” said Prime Minister Martin. “Frederick Douglass has a vital and valued legacy on either side of the Atlantic and my Government is delighted to mark the 175th anniversary of his historic tour of Ireland by welcoming 20 brilliant American students from minority backgrounds to follow in the great abolitionist’s footsteps and learn of the influential relationship between Daniel O’Connell and Frederick Douglass.”

In Ireland, Frederick Douglass Global Fellows will study leadership, effective communication, and strategies to affect positive social change as they explore the life stories and legacies of Frederick Douglass and Daniel O’Connell.

“It’s fitting that this diverse group of young people will have the opportunity to develop their leadership skills in a place so special to Frederick Douglass,” said Nettie Washington Douglass, chairwoman and co-founder of Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives, and the great-great-granddaughter of Frederick Douglass and great-granddaughter of Booker T. Washington. “The welcome and respect with which Frederick was greeted across his tour of Ireland affected him profoundly. I can think of no better place for future American leaders to gain a global perspective and prepare to be agents of change.”

The Frederick Douglass Global Fellowship was launched in 2017 by CIEE to expand access to international education to underrepresented students. In addition to funding the Frederick Douglass Global Fellows, CIEE provides all students who complete the fellowship application a $1,500 grant to attend a CIEE summer study abroad program. Known as the Frederick Douglass Summer Scholars Grant, this award is matched by many colleges and universities, making an international education experience financially attainable for many more students from diverse backgrounds. To learn more about the Frederick Douglass Global Fellowship, visit ciee.org/FDGF.

About the Council on International Educational Exchange
CIEE, the country's oldest and largest nonprofit study abroad and intercultural exchange organization, transforms lives and builds bridges by promoting the exchange of ideas and experiences. To help people develop skills for living in a globally interdependent and culturally diverse world, CIEE sponsors a wide variety of opportunities for cultural exchange, including work exchange programs, teach abroad programs, and a worldwide portfolio of study abroad and internship programs for college and high school students. www.ciee.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(3/17/21)
 

Double Edge Theatre presents a conversation between Artistic Director Stacy Klein and renowned Surrealist scholar Susan L. Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College. Aberth consulted with Double Edge Theatre in its development of the world premiere this month of Leonora, la maga y la maestra, a play inspired by the visual art, writings, and life of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington and her mentorship of a long line of male artists. Aberth's books Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries) and the recently published The Tarot of Leonora Carrington (Fulgur Press) were influential in the process. This conversation streamed live on March 7.
 
Double Edge Theatre is located in Ashfield, Massachusetts. Learn more about their work on Leonora Carrington on their website.
 
Read more in Artnet about the recent discovery by the curator Tere Arcq of a suite of tarot designs Carrington created for the Major Arcana. The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, by Arcq and Professor Aberth, is the first book examining these newly discovered works. 

“I think that there’s a correlation to American culture’s fascination with celebrity and the nation’s youth as a country,” says Self in this interview for the Brooklyn Rail. “Not having a unified or a deep-rooted spirituality, or a cultural core—because the nation is so young, individuals get elevated to the level of icons—celebrities become the idols, they are our ‘extra-ordinary people.’ But then if you look at a group that's been marginalized within a fragile system, America itself already being a somewhat fragile system, I think this tendency is exaggerated. Celebrity culture takes up even more psychological space in the collective mind of Black America, because of Black America’s history and positionality within this nation. To see an individual that looks like you be exalted and seemingly lifted above the muck of racism and disenfranchisement is a phenomenon.”

“When a book of Lê’s work was published in 2005, I wrote about one particular photograph in which she herself appears, playing the part of a Viet Cong guerrilla about to ambush American soldiers. That photograph gestures at wartime images and Hollywood fantasies about the deadly natives, which, when I was growing up as a Vietnamese refugee, were the only depictions I ever saw of people who looked like me. Its humor and self-awareness really drew me in,” writes Nguyen in the New York Review of Books. An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

“Since working with and as NRO, the artists routinely publicly acknowledge their complicity as informants, leveraging their status to broker power and effect institutional change that goes beyond symbolic platitude,” writes Emily Kaplan in Cultured Magazine. “NRO utilizes their position as informants to push institutions to broaden their land acknowledgments to include commitments to support Indigenous communities materially and to work to dismantle the ongoing effects of settler colonialism.”

“Ess was most widely known for her large-scale photographs made using a pinhole camera, a rarity in the art world but a device she used to great effect, producing blurred, haunting images that evoked variously dreamy anxiety, shattered romanticism, and the stuttering disquiet of the late twentieth century,” writes Artforum. “‘I think of my work as an investigation and it’s always concerned with the same question,” she told the LA Times. “Exactly what is the true nature of reality?’”

READ MORE
Barbara Ess, 76, Dies; Artist Blurred Lines Between Life and Art (New York Times)
Barbara Ess (1948–2021), Artforum
Barbara Ess: A Remembrance from the Magenta Plains Gallery
 

Bard College alumnus Buddy Enright ’84 was the executive producer of the Golden Globe Award–winning feature comedy hit, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, which was released in October 2020 on Amazon Prime. The film won at the Golden Globes for Best Picture – Musical/Comedy, Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical/Comedy (Sacha Baron Cohen), and Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical/Comedy (Maria Bakalov).

Enright was also nominated for the 2020 Emmy Award for best comedy series, Dead to Me (Netflix). He produced seasons 1 and 2, and is preparing season 3 for release this year.

The organization Diverse Representation has launched an annual program that seeks to augment the number of Black executives in Hollywood. The group’s Black Entertainment Executives Pipeline initiative, a four-month program sponsored by civil rights nonprofit Color of Change, pairs six participants with industry mentors as well as a project in development with a studio, production company, or network. Sheppard-Quince, a graduate of Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program, earned a master’s in communication management from the University of Southern California and currently works as a coordinator for CBS Television.

“For more than four decades—across painting, drawing, animation, zines, and an increasing corpus of writing—Sillman has combined a dialectics of intimacy and awkwardness, self-deprecation and prowess, figuration and abstraction. She has developed a pragmatic philosophy of painting that mobilizes doubt, treating mark-making not as a grand testament to an artist’s skill but as an invitation for us to follow and think alongside her.” 

Featuring Exhibitions of Emerging Artists and Underexplored Movements, Major New Publications, and Conversations Examining Pressing Issues in Contemporary Art, Season Includes: 
 

• The first comprehensive catalog of CCS Bard co-founder Marieluise Hessel’s expansive and eclectic collection of contemporary art, featuring essays from nearly fifty CCS Bard alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Zeynep Öz, and Serubiri Moses.

 

• A sweeping exhibition of drawings and works on paper spanning more than four decades of collecting by Hessel and encompassing works from a diverse range of artists including Nicole Eisenman, Rashid Johnson, Arnulf Rainer, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, and Nancy Spero.

 

• A conference on Black exhibition histories, gathering leading curators, critics, museum directors, and artists from around the world to explore pioneering exhibitions that have shaped contemporary understanding of Black art.

 

• A major survey of the groundbreaking yet understudied Pattern and Decoration movement, investigating its defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine or ornamental through work from more than 45 artists, including major works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection.

 

• Thirteen individual thesis exhibitions from CCS Bard’s 2021 graduating class, ranging from the first-ever solo exhibition of young Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro; an exhibition on the intersection of education and technology that provides a prehistory to our current moment of Zoom education; and a group show of performances by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Steffani Jemison.

 

• A celebration of CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year honoring co-founder Marieluise Hessel through roundtable discussions exploring the future of private collecting for the public good.

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) today announced its 30th anniversary season of programming, including new scholarship and significant exhibitions drawn from the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, solo and group exhibitions of emerging artists and underexplored art movements, and gatherings investigating critical topics in contemporary curatorial practice including the future of collecting and Black exhibition histories. Running from spring through fall 2021, CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year of programming reflects the multifaced work of a pioneering institution dedicated to transforming the curatorial field.

Established in 1990, CCS Bard is an incubator for experimentation in exhibition-making and the leading institution dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies—a discipline exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform curatorial practice and exhibition-making. Throughout its 30-year history, CCS Bard has actively recruited perspectives underrepresented in contemporary art discourse and cultivated a student body representing a diverse spectrum of backgrounds in an effort to transform the curatorial field. CCS Bard provides unparalleled resources to its student body to support their studies, including the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, comprised of more than 3,000 objects collected contemporaneously from the 1960s to the present day; CCS Bard’s exceptional archive of exhibition histories, curatorial papers, and rare catalogues; and the Hessel Museum of Art, a 17,000-square-foot facility that is home to the Hessel Collection as well as exhibitions curated by CCS Bard faculty, students, and guest curators from around the world. CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year of programming builds on these resources and history to examine the latest ideas in contemporary art and curatorial practice.

A highlight of the year will be a series of celebratory events, currently planned for June 2021, that will honor Marieluise Hessel by bringing together CCS Bard alumni, artists, and other leading practitioners from across the field to explore the most urgent ideas in contemporary art.

“CCS Bard formed at a crucial time in the development of curatorial studies as a field and our program has striven throughout this time to anticipate and embrace cutting-edge ideas through its exhibitions, collections, programs, and curriculum,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “Our position as a critical platform in the contemporary arts dialogue is due in no small part to the original vision and continued support of Marieluise Hessel, who remains an integral force in our community through her generosity and commitment to our program. It is only fitting that we mark CCS Bard’s 30^th anniversary with exhibitions, programs, and a catalogue that honor Marieluise’s incomparable impact.”

“Our 30^th anniversary has inspired us to reflect upon the incredible resources Marieluise has provided to CCS Bard,” added Lauren Cornell, Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. “Marieluise’s incredible generosity and vision has allowed for the creation of a learning environment for curators like no other. Working with the Collection, Library and Archives, and with a luminary faculty, our graduate students are encouraged to rethink the curatorial field and to advance it through critical research and inventive exhibitions that chart new narratives in art and culture.”

More information on CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year of programming follows below.

2021 Graduate Student Exhibitions and Projects
CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art
April 3 – May 30, 2021

As a core component of CCS Bard’s program, second-year students explore the Hessel Collection and conduct original research into emerging artists’ practices to mount individual exhibitions, while the first-year class works collaboratively to develop a single exhibition mining new aspects of the Hessel Collection. Often a platform for significant artists in the earliest stages of their careers, second-year thesis exhibitions in spring 2021 include the first-ever solo exhibition of young Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro; an exhibition exploring the intersection of education and technology that provides a prehistory to our current moment of Zoom education; and a group show of performances by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Steffani Jemison. The range of artists, movements, and themes explored in these thirteen individual exhibitions reflect the diverse backgrounds and perspectives represented by CCS Bard’s student body, and continue CCS Bard’s commitment to providing a platform for underrepresented voices to transform the curatorial field.

The Marieluise Hessel Collection Volumes I & II
Publication date: April 2021

The first comprehensive catalog of CCS Bard co-founder Marieluise Hessel’s expansive and eclectic collection, this two-volume publication chronicles Hessel’s work collecting from artists and galleries from the 1960s through the present day while simultaneously charting the development of CCS Bard with the Hessel Collection at its core. The Marieluise Hessel Collection Volumes I & II examines the impact of Hessel’s collection—singular for both the range and eclecticism of its holdings as well as its position at the core of a curatorial studies graduate program—through essays by nearly fifty CCS Bard alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Zeynep Öz, and Serubiri Moses, among others, in a fully illustrated, two-volume publication designed by Zak Group.

Advance press copies may be requested by contacting Daniel Rechtschaffen ([email protected] / 212-671-5188).

Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection
CCS Bard Galleries
June 26 – October 17, 2021

Closer to Life is an exhibition of over 75 drawings and works on paper that span more than four decades of collecting by philanthropist Marieluise Hessel, who co-founded the Center for Curatorial Studies in 1990. As a reflection of Hessel’s expansive collection and the geographic trajectory of her life, from early years in post-war Germany to residence in Mexico City and on to New York City and the United States in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the exhibition is organized around these three spheres of influence that characterize the collection from origins to the present day, with works from a diverse range of artists including Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Rashid Johnson, Arnulf Rainer, Nancy Spero, Rosemarie Trockel, Germán Venegas and Kara Walker. In addition to drawings and works on paper, the exhibition also includes a large selection of archival materials and ephemera such as rare artist books, prints, editions, and correspondence drawn from CCS Bard’s extensive archives. Revisiting different artistic periods and contexts, the exhibition draws out contrasts and comparisons between artists, modes of representation, and the continuing vitality of drawing and paper as an artistic medium.

Closer to Life is curated by Tom Eccles and Amy Zion. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 380-page catalogue of the Marieluise Hessel collection of works on paper, edited by Tom Eccles and Amy Zion with contributions by Paul Chan, Lynne Cooke, Gabriela Jauregui, and Michael Newman. The catalogue is published by Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and designed by Zak Group.

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985
Hessel Museum of Art
June 26 – November 28, 2021

The first full-scale scholarly North American survey of the groundbreaking yet understudied Pattern and Decoration art movement, the exhibition spans the years 1972 to 1985 and features forty-five artists from across the United States working in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, textiles, installation art, and performance documentation. Originally on view at MOCA Grand Avenue from October 2019 through May 2020, With Pleasure examines the movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and their significant influence on post-war American art.

Often described as the first contemporary art movement comprised of majority female artists, Pattern and Decoration defied the dominance of modernist art by embracing the much-maligned category of the decorative. Working across mediums that evoke a pluralistic array of sources—from Islamic architectural ornamentation to American quilts, wallpaper design, Persian carpets, and Japanese Imari ware ceramics—artists consciously rejected the aesthetics of minimalism, modernist ambitions to purity and self-reflexivity, and conceptual art’s demotion of the handmade. Artists featured in the exhibition include Sam Gilliam, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Ree Morton, Judy Pfaff, Faith Ringgold, and Miriam Schapiro, among others.

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is organized by MOCA Curator Anna Katz with Assistant Curator Rebecca Lowery. The accompanying 328-page exhibition catalogue is edited by Anna Katz and features seven newly commissioned essays by Katz, Elissa Auther, Alex Kitnick, Rebecca Skafsgaard Lowery, Kayleigh Perkov, Sarah-Neel Smith, and Hamza Walker, as well as artist biographies, a bibliography, an exhibition history, and reprints of historically significant writings. Designed by Green Dragon Office, the catalogue is published by MOCA, in association with Yale University Press.

Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display
Conference to be held November 2021 at CCS Bard

The latest milestone in CCS Bard’s Black Exhibition Histories initiative—which was launched in 2019 to collect understudied archives of influential Black scholars, curators, gallerists, and artists—this scholarly conference aims to expand the field of exhibition histories by exploring a selection of pioneering exhibitions that have shaped contemporary understanding of Black art. Curated by CCS Bard Senior Academic Advisor and Luma Foundation Fellow Nana Adusei-Poku, Reshaping the Field is the first of its kind to focus exclusively on exhibitions of African diasporic art presented in the United States and the U.K., and features panelists including Bridget Cooks, Richard Powell, Cheryl Finley, Jamaal B. Sheats, Lucy Steeds, and Languid Hands (Imani Robinson and Rabz Lansiquot), among many others. Bringing together these and other art historians, curators, and artists who have researched or borne witness to these historic events, CCS Bard’s convening will be an opportunity to gather knowledge that bridges art historical research and oral history while also generating new primary sources.


About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art at its core, alongside extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice since its founding in 1990. Through its rigorous, interdisciplinary program and unmatched resources, CCS Bard provides unparalleled opportunities for students to research and organize museum exhibitions on an independent basis, and in so doing acts as a key platform for the next generation of curators, artists, and art world leaders in the earliest stages of their careers. CCS Bard receives support from a range of public and private foundations and individuals, including major support from the Luma Foundation.

Media Contacts
Resnicow and Associates
Juliet Sorce / Sarah Morris / Daniel Rechtschaffen
[email protected]/ [email protected]/ [email protected]
212-671-5158 / 212-671-5165 / 212-671-5188