News

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)
 

“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.”

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. 

“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.

“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.” 

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.

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

 

As Far as Isolation Goes “has no political agenda, only an emotional and physical one, built on the idea that you are the canvas—and now, to some extent, the artist,” writes Jesse Green. “Even if your line is wobbly and your figures feeble in comparison to Zaraa’s—his own artwork has the boldly graphic quality of graffiti—drawing them yourself inscribes them in some small way on your conscience. Indeed, days later, though pandemic hand washing had nearly erased my refugees, I kept checking my arm to see who was left.” Tania El Khoury is a distinguished artist in residence in the Theater and Performance Program and director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA). Visit the CHRA website to learn more about their ongoing event series.

“Crow somehow makes a lived world out of the back pages of defunct art magazines, and the book shares the forensic depth of other titles that look at the art/music crossover of this moment,” writes Kitnick, assistant professor of art history and visual culture. “But Crow’s is not a book of arcana; rather, it’s a careful report that builds its argument about artmaking and world making slowly and surely, stitch by stitch, button by button.”
 

Bard alumna, historian Erin Maglaque ’10 talks to Thomas Jones of the London Review of Books about abortion in early modern Italy, the stories of women who experienced it, how it was investigated, and why attitudes to pregnancy 400 years ago were in some ways preferable to those now.

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Kobena Mercer as 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). Mercer, who comes to Bard from Yale University, will assume his faculty position in fall 2021.

“We are delighted that Kobena Mercer has chosen to accept the Stevenson professorship,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “It is an honor to have as distinguished a scholar and teacher as Professor Mercer, whose wide-ranging work spanning the arts and humanities feels crucial to Bard’s mission, as a member of our undergraduate and graduate faculties.”

“I am honored beyond words to be coming to Bard, which is renowned worldwide for its interdisciplinary excellence,” said Mercer. “Not only have I found the best home for my scholarship, which cuts across Art History, Black Studies, and Cultural Studies, but I am also looking forward to collaborating with Bard’s innovative arts and humanities programs to further grow a liberal arts education that is critically responsive to the urgent questions we face today.”

“Mercer joining the faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, is momentous for the graduate program. His luminary scholarship has fundamentally shaped our fields of focus and his writing is already essential to our curriculum,” said Lauren Cornell, director of the graduate program at CCS Bard. “He is one of the leading figures of Cultural Studies, Art History, and Black Studies, and it is an enormous privilege that his perspective will be available firsthand to CCS graduate students.”

Kobena Mercer teaches modern and contemporary art in the Black Atlantic, examining African American, Caribbean and Black British artists with critical methods from cultural studies. His work has significantly transformed current thinking about art and identity. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994), his first book, was a groundbreaking contribution to multiple fields, bringing a Black British perspective to wide-ranging cultural forms that arose from the volatile transformations of the 1980s. This collection of essays was followed by influential studies on artists including Romare Bearden, Keith Piper, Isaac Julien, and James VanDerZee.  Throughout his career, Mercer’s research has illuminated the art of our time through evolving frameworks and subjects. His recent essay collection, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (2016), examined artists such as John Akomfrah, Renée Green, and Kerry James Marshall, showing how Black artists contributed to art’s transformation in an age of globalization. He edited and introduced Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (2017), and prior to that he conceived and edited the Annotating Art’s Histories series, published by MIT, whose titles are Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Culture (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008). Over the last few years his exhibition catalogue contributions include Wilfredo Lam at Centre Pompidou, Frank Bowling at Haus der Kunst, Adrian Piper at Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Theaster Gates at Tate Liverpool. His forthcoming book is Alain Locke and the Visual Arts, published by Yale University Press in 2022.

A prolific and dedicated teacher, Mercer has taught at Yale University, New York University, University of California Santa Cruz and Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he earned his PhD. Educated in Ghana and England, he is an inaugural recipient of the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, awarded by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2006.2/17/21
 

Radical listening, electricity blackouts in Lebanon, participatory art and political art—Tania El Khoury talks with DRAFF about her artistic practice in this mini-documentary. Tania El Khoury is a distinguished artist in residence in the Theater and Performance Program and director of the new OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard.

Video and installation artist Carolyn Lazard ’10 is the recipient of a 2021 United States Artists (USA) fellowship. The Chicago-based arts nonprofit announced 60 winners of its 2021 fellowships, marking the largest fellowship class in its 15-year history. Each of the selected artists, working across 10 creative disciplines, will receive an unrestricted $50,000 cash award.

“Sasha Phyars-Burgess’s Untitled features essays, poems and stunning photographs that delve into the black experience and the true meaning of ‘home,’” writes Elena Goodinson in the Guardian. Phyars-Burgess explains: “I am trying to make sense of a place that is not responsible for my upbringing but is wholly responsible for my existence. The place that leaks into my daily references and confuses me about what I call home. I do not always understand this place, though I long to be a part of it.” The volume includes a conversation between Phyars-Burgess and fellow artists Juliana Huxtable ’10 and Carolyn Lazard ’10.

Bard College announced today that artist George Condo has made a significant gift supporting the arts on campus, including a new online concert series and a dedicated $400,000 fund underwriting scholarships, musical events, and exhibitions at Bard’s Conservatory of Music, The Orchestra Now, the Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Masters in Fine Art programs. Among those scholarships is the new Inclusive Excellence in Music Scholarship Program that addresses inequities in access to higher education in music.

“The Condo Concerts,” presented by the Bard College Conservatory of Music and CCS Bard, begins February 19 with a performance by violinist Leila Josefowicz, winner of the Avery Fisher Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, and continues with recitals by The Fred Sherry Quartet on March 14 and April 18, and clarinetist Anthony McGill on May 2. Full details on upcoming performances follow below.

“During one of the most challenging times for colleges in the United States, I wanted to provide both funding and inspirational programming for students,” says Condo, whose daughter, Raphaelle, graduated from Bard in 2018. “Bard College is a place where my daughter thrived and one where the arts are central to the student experience.”

“We are grateful to George Condo for his support not only of the students at Bard, but also for underwriting these concerts and supporting the great musicians on this series, whose opportunities to perform have been so limited by the pandemic,” said Bard Conservatory Director Franks Corliss.

In establishing this fund, Condo created a special edition etching being sold through Hauser & Wirth, with all proceeds dedicated to supporting the arts at Bard. For more information on purchasing Condo’s etching, contact Cristopher Canizares at Hauser & Wirth.

About the Condo Concert Series
The first concert in the series, streaming February 19 at 8 pm, is a solo performance by the internationally renowned violinist Leila Josefowicz, winner of the Avery Fisher Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her program combines a Partita by J. S. Bach with a new work by the noted conductor and composer Matthias Pintscher, La Linea Evocativa, that was composed for her in 2020 and inspired by Condo’s artwork.

For the next two concerts, streaming on March 14 and April 18, Josefowicz will perform as part of the Fred Sherry String Quartet with her renowned colleagues, violinist Jesse Mills, violist Hsin-Yun Huang, and cellist Fred Sherry, to perform string quartets by Schoenberg and Schubert, and other works to be announced.

The final concert in the series will be a recital by clarinetist Anthony McGill, who is the principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic and a recipient of the 2020 Avery Fisher Career Prize.

The Condo Concerts Spring 2021 programs

Friday, February 19, at 8 pm
Matthias Pintscher La Linea Evocativa (2020)
Bach Partita No. 2 BWV 1004
Leila Josefowicz, violin

Sunday, March 14, at 3 pm
Schoenberg String Quartet #1, Opus 7
Fred Sherry String Quartet, with Leila Josefowicz and Jesse Mills, violins, Hsin-Yun Huang, viola, and Fred Sherry, cello.

Sunday, April 18, at 7 pm
Schubert String Quartet No. 15 in G Major
Fred Sherry String Quartet, with Leila Josefowicz and Jesse Mills, violins, Hsin-Yun Huang, viola, and Fred Sherry, cello.

Sunday, May 2, at 3 pm 
Anthony McGill, clarinet

Please click here for reservations and additional program details.


About the Artists
Leila Josefowicz’s passionate advocacy of contemporary music for the violin is reflected in her diverse programs and enthusiasm for performing new works. In recognition of her outstanding achievement and excellence in music, she won the 2018 Avery Fisher Prize and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, joining prominent scientists, writers and musicians who have made unique contributions to contemporary life.
 
Highlights of Josefowicz’s 2019/20 season include opening the London Symphony Orchestra’s season with Sir Simon Rattle and returning to San Francisco Symphony with the incoming Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen to perform his Violin Concerto. Other engagements include concerts with Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, where she will be working with conductors at the highest level, including Susanna Mälkki, Matthias Pintscher and John Adams.
 
A favourite of living composers, Josefowicz has premiered many concertos, including those by Colin Matthews, Steven Mackey and Esa-Pekka Salonen, all written specially for her. This season, she will perform the UK premiere of Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Dalia Stasevska. Other recent premieres include John Adams’ Scheherazade.2 (Dramatic Symphony for Violin and Orchestra) in 2015 with the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert, and Luca Francesconi’s Duende – The Dark Notes in 2014 with Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Susanna Mälkki. Josefowicz enjoyed a close working relationship with the late Oliver Knussen, performing various concerti, including his violin concerto, together over 30 times.
 
Alongside pianist John Novacek, with whom she has enjoyed a close collaboration since 1985, Josefowicz has performed recitals at world-renowned venues such as New York’s Zankel Hall, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center and London’s Wigmore Hall, as well as in Reykjavik, Chicago, San Francisco and Santa Barbara. This season, they appear together at Washington DC’s Library of Congress, New York’s Park Avenue Armory and Amherst College. She will also join Thomas Adès in recital to perform the world premiere of his new violin and piano work at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Japanese premiere at the Tokyo Opera City Cultural Foundation.
 
Recent highlights include engagements with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and Boston and Finnish Radio symphony orchestras. In summer 2019, Josefowicz took part in a special collaboration between Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Royal Ballet, and Company Wayne McGregor featuring the music of composer-conductor Thomas Adès.
 
Josefowicz has released several recordings, notably for Deutsche Grammophon, Philips/Universal and Warner Classics and was featured on Touch Press’s acclaimed iPadapp, The Orchestra. Her latest recording, released in 2019, features Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Violin Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted byHannu Lintu. She has previously received nominations for Grammy Awards for her recordings of Scheherazade.2 with the St Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson, and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.Violist Hsin-Yun Huang has forged a career by performing on international concert stages, commissioning and recording new works, and nurturing young musicians. Highlights of her 2017–2018 season included performances as soloist under the batons of David Robertson, Osmo Vänskä, Xian Zhang, and Max Valdés in Beijing, Taipei, and Bogota. She is also the first solo violist to be presented in the National Performance Center of the Arts in Beijing and was featured as a faculty member with Yo-Yo Ma and his new initiative in Guangzhou. She has commissioned compositions from Steven Mackey, Shih-Hui Chen, and Poul Ruders. Her 2012 recording for Bridge Records, titled Viola Viola, won accolades from Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine. Her next recording will be the complete unaccompanied sonatas and partitas of J. S. Bach, in partnership her husband, violist Misha Amory.

Ms. Huang regularly appears at festivals, including Marlboro, Spoleto, Ravinia, Santa Fe, and Music@Menlo, among many others. Huang first came to international attention as the gold medalist in the 1988 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition. In 1993, she was the top-prize winner in the ARD International Competition in Munich and was awarded the highly prestigious Bunkamura Orchard Hall Award. A native of Taiwan, she received degrees from the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Curtis Institute of Music, and The Juilliard School. She now serves on the faculties of Juilliard and Curtis and lives in New York City.Two-time Grammy nominated violinist Jesse Mills performins music of many genres, from classical to contemporary, as well as composed and improvised music of his own. Since his concerto debut at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, Mr. Mills has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada. He has been a soloist with the Phoenix Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the New Jersey Symphony, the Green Bay Symphony, Juilliard Chamber Orchestra, the Denver Philharmonic, the Teatro Argentino Orchestra (in Buenos Aires, Argentina), and the Aspen Music Festival's Sinfonia Orchestra.

As a chamber musician Jesse Mills has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada, including concerts at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street Y, the Metropolitan Museum, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Boston's Gardener Museum, Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, and the Marlboro Music Festival. He has also appeared at prestigious venues in Europe, such as the Barbican Centre of London, La Cité de la Musique in Paris, Amsterdam’s Royal Carré Theatre, Teatro Arcimboldi in Milan, and the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Mills is co-founder of Horszowski Trio and Duo Prism, a violin-piano duo with Rieko Aizawa, which earned 1st Prize at the Zinetti International Competition in Italy in 2006.

Mills is also known as a pioneer of contemporary works, a renowned improvisational artist, as well as a composer. He earned Grammy nominations for his performances of Arnold Schoenberg's music, released by NAXOS in 2005 and 2010. He can also be heard on the Koch, Centaur, Tzadik, Max Jazz and Verve labels for various compositions of Webern, Schoenberg, Zorn, Wuorinen, and others. As a member of the FLUX Quartet from 2001-2003, Mills performed music composed during the last 50 years, in addition to frequent world premieres. As a composer and arranger, Mills has been commissioned by venues including Columbia University’s Miller Theater, the Chamber Music Northwest festival in Portland, OR and the Bargemusic in NYC.

Jesse Mills began violin studies at the age of three. He graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School in 2001. He studied with Dorothy DeLay, Robert Mann and Itzhak Perlman. Mr. Mills lives in New York City, and he is on the faculty at Longy School of Music of Bard College and at Brooklyn College.Fred Sherry has introduced audiences on five continents and all fifty United States to the music of our time for over five decades. He was a founding member of TASHI and Speculum Musicae, Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and has been a member of the Group for Contemporary Music, Berio's Juilliard Ensemble and the Galimir String Quartet. He has also enjoyed a close collaboration with jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea.
Elliott Carter, Mario Davidovsky, Steve Mackey, David Rakowski, Somei Satoh, Charles Wuorinen and John Zorn have written concertos for Sherry, and he has premiered solo and chamber works dedicated to him by Milton Babbitt, Derek Bermel, Jason Eckardt, Lukas Foss, Oliver Knussen, Peter Lieberson, Donald Martino and Toru Takemitsu among others.

Fred Sherry’s vast discography encompasses a wide range of classic and modern repertoire; he has been soloist and “sideman” on hundreds of commercial and esoteric recordings. Mr. Sherry was the organizer for Robert Craft’s New York recording sessions from 1995-2012. Their longstanding collaboration produced celebrated performances of the Schoenberg Cello Concerto, all four String Quartets and the String Quartet Concerto as well as major works by Stravinsky and Webern.

Mr. Sherry's book 25 Bach Duets from the Cantatas was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 2011, the revised edition was released in 2019. C.F. Peters unveiled his treatise on contemporary string playing, A Grand Tour of Cello Technique in 2018. He is a member of the cello faculty of The Juilliard School, The Mannes School of Music and The Manhattan School of Music.Clarinetist Anthony McGill is one of classical music’s most recognizable and brilliantly multifaceted figures. He serves as the principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic — that orchestra’s first African-American principal player — and maintains a dynamic international solo and chamber music career. Hailed for his “trademark brilliance, penetrating sound and rich character” (The New York Times), as well as for his “exquisite combination of technical refinement and expressive radiance” (The Baltimore Sun), McGill also serves as an ardent advocate for helping music education reach underserved communities and for addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in classical music. He was honored to take part in the inauguration of President Barack Obama, premiering a piece written for the occasion by John Williams and performing alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Gabriela Montero.

McGill’s 2019-20 season includes the premiere of a new work by Tyshawn Sorey at the 92Y, and a special collaboration with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato at Carnegie Hall. He will be a featured soloist at the Kennedy Center performing the Copland concerto at the SHIFT Festival of American Orchestras with the Jacksonville Symphony, and will also perform concertos by Copland, Mozart, and Danielpour with the Richmond, Delaware, Alabama, Reno, and San Antonio Symphonies. Additional collaborations include programs with Gloria Chien, Demarre McGill, Michael McHale, Anna Polonsky, Arnaud Sussman, and the Pacifica Quartet.

McGill appears regularly as a soloist with top orchestras around North America including the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, Baltimore Symphony, San Diego Symphony, and Kansas City Symphony. As a chamber musician, McGill is a favorite collaborator of the Brentano, Daedalus, Guarneri, JACK, Miró, Pacifica, Shanghai, Takacs, and Tokyo Quartets, as well as Emanuel Ax, Inon Barnatan, Gloria Chien, Yefim Bronfman, Gil Shaham, Midori, Mitsuko Uchida, and Lang Lang. He has led tours with Musicians from Marlboro and regularly performs for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Festival appearances include Tanglewood, Marlboro, Mainly Mozart, Music@Menlo, and the Santa Fe, Seattle, and Skaneateles Chamber Music Festivals.

In January 2015, McGill recorded the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto together with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic, which was released on DaCapo Records. He also recorded an album together with his brother Demarre McGill, principal flute of the Seattle Symphony, and pianist Michael McHale; and one featuring the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintet with the Pacifica Quartet that were both released by Cedille Records.

A dedicated champion of new music, in 2014, McGill premiered a new piece written for him by Richard Danielpour entitled “From the Mountaintop” that was commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, and Orchestra 2001. McGill served as the 2015-16 Artist-in-Residence for WQXR and has appeared on Performance Today, MPR’s St. Paul Sunday Morning, and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. In 2013, McGill appeared on the NBC Nightly News and on MSNBC, in stories highlighting the McGill brothers’ inspirational story.

A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, McGill previously served as the principal clarinet of the Metropolitan Opera and associate principal clarinet of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. In-demand as a teacher, he serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Bard College’s Conservatory of Music. He also serves as the Artistic Advisor for the Music Advancement Program at the Juilliard School, on the Board of Directors for both the League of American Orchestra and the Harmony Program, and the advisory council for the InterSchool Orchestras of New York.2/11/21

“The collection offers a rich variety of solo pieces, chamber works and concertos by Beethoven, Berio, Chopin, Mozart, Takemitsu, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and more — in probing, lucid, often exhilarating performances. Some of these recordings I didn’t know; others I’d not listened to in years. The set has rekindled strong memories of Peter — as I came to know him — and his great artistry, and the intersection of our lives and professions,” writes Tommasini.

The US-China Music Institute presents its second annual concert of symphonic music to celebrate the Lunar New Year in collaboration with musicians both here in New York and abroad.

The Sound of Spring will be offered free online in a livestream from the Fisher Center at Bard at 8 p.m. on Saturday, February 13. The program will feature a new performance by The Orchestra Now, conducted by Jindong Cai, along with performances from special guests including the Central Conservatory of Music Chinese Chamber Orchestra, the China NCPA Orchestra, the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, and the Contemporary Legend Theater from Taiwan. For information and reservations, click here.

The evening will be hosted by acclaimed pipa performer Wu Man and conductor Jindong Cai, who is the director of the US-China Music Institute. Musical selections include works by Tan Dun, Bao Yuankai, Wu Man, Julian Yu, Li Shaosheng, and more, plus a very special excerpt of a Chinese opera style adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Soloists include Wu Man performing a world premiere of her own composition for the pipa responding to this special time we are all experiencing; pianist and Bard faculty member Blair McMillan in the US-premiere of Li Shaosheng’s Spring China Capriccio; and Bard College Conservatory of Music undergraduate erhu major Beitong Liu performing with The Orchestra Now in two arrangements of traditional Chinese folk tunes. Kunqu opera masters Wu Hsing-kuo and Wei Han-min are the lead performers in the Contemporary Legend Theater adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The beginning of the concert will feature Tan Dun’s Internet ‘Eroica’ symphony to honor the many heroes worldwide who are working to combat the pandemic. The symphony will first be performed by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tan Dun, and then followed by a rearrangement of the same piece for the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra using all Chinese instruments.

The program also offers a sampling of traditional and contemporary Chinese symphonic, chamber, solo, and theatrical music, showcasing different regional folk traditions, as well as blending Chinese and Western instruments and musical forms. Musical selections will send a message of hope, gratitude, renewal, and new beginnings, in the spirit of the Chinese New Year tradition of the Spring Festival.

“The Lunar New Year is celebrated by people all around the world. This is the year of the Ox, which symbolizes strength and determination. We created this year’s program to give people some feelings of hope and looking forward to the future. We hope through music we can give you inspiration.” - Jindong Cai


Saturday, February 13, at 8 p.m.
Free tickets may be reserved in advance at
fishercenter.bard.edu/events/the-sound-of-spring-2021
Donations may be added to your reservation and are gratefully accepted.

More detailed program information please visit
barduschinamusic.org/events/sound-of-spring-2021

Contact information:
[email protected]


Selected Artists’ Biographies

Conductor Jindong Cai is director of the US-China Music Institute, professor of music and arts at Bard College, and associate conductor of The Orchestra Now. Over his 30-year career in the United States, Cai has established himself as an active and dynamic conductor, scholar of Western classical music in China, and leading advocate of music from across Asia. Born in Beijing, Cai received his early musical training in China, where he learned to play violin and piano. He came to the United States for his graduate studies at the New England Conservatory and the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. In 1989, he was selected to study with famed conductor Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Center, and won the Conducting Fellowship Award at the Aspen Music Festival in 1990 and 1992.

Cai started his professional conducting career with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and has worked with numerous orchestras throughout North America and Asia. He maintains strong ties to his homeland and has conducted most of the top orchestras in China. Cai has served as the principal guest conductor of the China Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra since 2012. He is a three-time recipient of the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music. Cai serves as the principal guest conductor of the Mongolia State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Ulaanbaatar. In 2004 he joined Stanford University faculty as director of orchestral studies and conducted the Stanford Symphony Orchestra for 11 years. He is also the founder of the Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival. Cai founded the US-China Music Institute at the Bard Conservatory in 2017 and created the Institute’s the annual China Now Music Festival in the following year. In its first two seasons, China Now presented new works by some of the most important Chinese composers of our time, with concerts performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Bard’s Fisher Center, and Stanford University.

Together with his wife Sheila Melvin, Cai has coauthored many articles on the performing arts in China and the book Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese. Their latest book, Beethoven in China: How the Great Composer Became an Icon in the People’s Republic, was published by Penguin in September 2015.


Recognized as the world’s premier pipa virtuoso, Wu Man is a soloist, educator and composer who gives her lute-like instrument—which has a history of more than 2,000 years in China—a new role in both traditional and contemporary music. Wu Man has premiered hundreds of new works for the pipa, while spearheading multimedia projects to both preserve and create global awareness of China’s ancient musical traditions. Projects she has initiated have resulted in the pipa finding a place in new solo and quartet works, concertos, opera, chamber, electronic, and jazz music as well as in theater productions, film, dance, and collaborations with visual artists. She has performed in recital and with major orchestras around the world, is a frequent collaborator with ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet and Shanghai Quartets and The Knights, and is a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble. Wu Man has appeared in more than 40 recordings throughout her career, including seven Nominee Awards and the Silkroad Ensemble’s Grammy Award-winning recording Sing Me Home, featuring her own composition. She is also a featured artist in the 2015 documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Wu Man studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master's degree in pipa.  At age 13, she was hailed as a child prodigy and became a nationally recognized role model for young pipa players. She subsequently received first prize in the First National Music Performance Competition, among other awards, and participated in many premieres of works by Chinese composers. She moved to the U.S. in 1990 and was awarded the Bunting Fellowship at Harvard University in 1998. Wu Man was the first Chinese traditional musician to receive the United States Artist Fellowship (2008) and the first artist from China to perform at the White House. In 2013, she was named Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year. Now she is a distinguished Professor at both the Zhejiang and the Xi'an Conservatory, China. Wu Man serves as artistic advisor and teaches master classes for the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.


Pianist Blair McMillan is a member of the faculty of the Bard College Department of Music. He studied at Oberlin College, The Juilliard School, and the Manhattan School of Music. A pianist, chamber musician, improviser, concert series curator, his appearances as soloist include Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, le Poisson Rouge, Moscow Conservatory, Casals Hall (Tokyo), Miller Theatre. He has performed with American Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Albany Symphony, Juilliard Orchestra (Lincoln Center and tour of Japan). He is a member of the Da Capo Chamber Players, American Modern Ensemble, and the Avian Orchestra. His solo recordings include Soundings (Midnight Productions), Concert Music of Fred Hersch (Naxos), and Multiplicities '38 (Centaur). He has been at Bard since 2006.


About the Presenters

The US-China Music Institute was founded in 2018 by conductor Jindong Cai and Robert Martin, founding director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, with the mission to promote the study, performance, and appreciation of music from contemporary China and to support musical exchange between the United States and China. In partnership with the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the Institute has embarked on several groundbreaking projects including the first degree-granting program in Chinese instrument performance in a U.S. conservatory. barduschinamusic.org

Recognized as one of the finest conservatories in the United States, Bard College Conservatory of Music is guided by the principle that young musicians should be broadly educated in the liberal arts and sciences to achieve their greatest potential. The mission of the Conservatory is to provide the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music. The five-year, double-degree program combines rigorous conservatory training with a challenging and comprehensive liberal arts program. All Conservatory students pursue a double degree in a thoroughly integrated program and supportive educational community. Graduating students receive a bachelor of music and a bachelor of arts in a field other than music. At the Bard Conservatory the serious study of music goes hand in hand with the education of the whole person. Founded in 2005 by cellist and philosopher Robert Martin, the Conservatory welcomed the composer Tan Dun as its new dean in the summer of 2019. bard.edu/conservatory

The Orchestra Now (TŌN) is a group of vibrant young musicians from across the globe who are making orchestral music relevant to 21st-century audiences. They are lifting the curtain on the musicians’ experience and sharing their unique personal insights in a welcoming environment. Conductor, educator, and music historian Leon Botstein founded TŌN in 2015 as a master’s degree program at Bard College, where he also serves as president. The orchestra is in residence at Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, presenting multiple concerts there each season as well as taking part in the annual Bard Music Festival. It also performs regularly at the finest venues in New York and beyond, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere. The orchestra has performed with many distinguished conductors, including Fabio Luisi, Neeme Järvi, Gerard Schwarz, and JoAnn Falletta. theorchestranow.org

The Fisher Center at Bard develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present, as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 160-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. fishercenter.bard.edu(2.5.21)