News

The Fisher Center at Bard, long known for its memorable productions of rarely performed operatic works programmed and conducted by Maestro Leon Botstein, commemorates World Opera Day on October 25 with two special releases, adding to an already robust selection of archival HD opera recordings and contextual materials available free of charge on UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage.

World Opera Day is an international campaign to raise awareness of the positive impact and value of opera for society. As part of World Opera Day, the Fisher Center will present a lively and wide-ranging virtual conversation about opera today between Maestro Botstein and the acclaimed mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, who recently assumed the directorship of the Vocal Arts Program at Bard College. Their conversation will be available for streaming here, beginning October 25. Bard Music Festival members will receive early access to the conversation on October 20.

“Opera is immune to technological reproduction and is a unique amalgam of the visual language and sound,” says Botstein. “It is perhaps the most resilient, alluring, and enduring genre of the human imagination.”

Offering one of the most unique opera programs in the country, Bard presents a new, fully staged production of a rarely performed opera each year as part of the renowned SummerScape Festival. The operas are programmed in conjunction with Bard Music Festival, a summer series led by Botstein, which focuses on one composer each summer for an intensive series of concerts, lectures, and panel discussions. “Some of the most important summer opera experiences in the U.S. are … at Bard SummerScape.” —Financial Times

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fisher Center has been streaming selections from its rich archive of HD video recordings over UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage. On October 19, Bard SummerScape’s 2016 production of Pietro Mascagni’s Iris joins a robust selection of Bard SummerScape productions of rarely-performed operatic treasures available for viewing. Operas produced in recent years at Bard SummerScape (all currently streaming on UPSTREAMING) include the U.S. premieres of such neglected treasures as Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Das Wunder der Heliane (2019); Richard Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae (2012); Carl Maria von Weber’s Euryanthe (2014) and Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers (2015). These perfromances have been made available at no charge to ensure wider access to these rarely seen works. All of these programs can be viewed here.

About UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage. Archival Discoveries and New Commissions for the Digital Sphere.
UPSTREAMING broadens the Fisher Center’s commitment to reaching audiences far beyond the physical walls of our building, and offers new ways for us to engage with artists. Launched in April 2020, UPSTREAMING has released new content, including digital commissions, virtual events, and beloved performances and rich contextual materials from the archives of the SummerScape Opera and Bard Music Festival’s 30-year history. UPSTREAMING highlights different aspects of the breadth of programming the Fisher Center offers. New releases are announced via the Fisher Center’s weekly newsletter. To receive those updates and stay connected to UPSTREAMING, join the mailing list here.
#UPSTREAMINGFC

ABOUT THE FISHER CENTER
The Fisher Center 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 159-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.(10.19.20)
 

Ohio-based artist Julia Christensen ’00 talks to Gabrielle Schwarz about how a visit to an e-waste processing center in India sparked an obsession with our throwaway culture, and how that has fed into a book and an exhibition titled Upgrade Available: “The concept that I’m working with, what I call ‘upgrade culture,’ is this sort of relentless notion that we constantly have to upgrade our electronics and media to remain relevant. I became interested in this, how this was culturally happening, because I visited, by a crazy chain of events, an e-waste processing centre in India several years ago. It was the first time I was faced with this global aggregate of e-waste, mountains of old computers and printers, etc. As a member of the consumer public I just had never thought about what happens when I take my computer to the recycling centre to be recycled. And of course I’m a media artist. I use a camera, I have a phone. I am part of this whole thing, so I began to think critically about what it means [to participate in upgrade culture]. It’s hard to connect the little phones in our pockets to this larger global issue, which is what it is. We are enacting a planetary crisis right now with electronics.”

Hess, who’s majoring in music at Bard, joined other local Gen Z-ers to share their views on racial inequity, social isolation, climate change, and higher education in the time of COVID-19. A voting rights advocate and proponent of the Green New Deal, Hess became involved in the climate movement in his native California. Last fall, he founded a chapter of the Sunrise Movement at Bard, a youth-led political movement that addresses the need for comprehensive climate change reform. Hess is not alone in his determination to save the planet: a survey of Generation Z from Amnesty International found that climate change was a vital issue for 41 percent of respondents.

“I’m in my second year of teaching history of electronic music, and it’s been really fun to develop a syllabus for that that encompasses all of these things that I just never, ever would have encountered in a class at either of the schools I went to, even though one of them was a very progressive experimental school. But nobody was telling me about Kool Herc or Coil or Tangerine Dream or any of these more DIY underground, nonacademic things that, to me, are just as important as the West German Radio Studio [for Electronic Music]. I really like it quite a lot, despite being a very hesitant academic. Bard is a very peculiar place with a really diverse array of students. So the program that we’re in is not at all like a typical music school program. I feel really at home there.”

Bard College announces the appointment of award-winning pianist and composer Marcus Roberts as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music for the 2020–21 academic year. A highly acclaimed modern jazz pianist, composer, and educator, Roberts is known throughout the world for his development of an entirely new approach to jazz trio performance as well as for his remarkable ability to blend the jazz and classical idioms. Hailed as “the genius of modern piano,” Roberts’s life and career were featured by the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes in a 2014 episode, “The Virtuoso,” in which he was interviewed by Wynton Marsalis. In addition to his renown as a performer and composer, Roberts is the founder of The Modern Jazz Generation, a multigenerational ensemble that is the realization of his long-standing dedication to training and mentoring younger jazz musicians. Roberts will teach a series of master classes to Bard music students this fall and spring.

Pianist/composer Marcus Roberts has been hailed “the genius of the modern piano”. His life and career have been featured on an episode of the CBS News television show, 60 Minutes, called “The Virtuoso.” The show traced his life from his early roots in Jacksonville and at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind to his remarkable career as a modern jazz pianist, composer, and educator. Roberts grew up in Jacksonville, FL where his mother's gospel singing and the music of the local church left a lasting impact on his own musical style. While he began playing piano at age five after losing his sight, he did not have his first formal lesson until age 12. Despite that late start, he progressed quickly and at age 18, went on to study classical piano at Florida State University with the great Leonidas Lipovetsky. Roberts has won numerous awards and competitions over the years, but the one that is most personally meaningful to him is the Helen Keller Award for Personal Achievement.

Roberts is known throughout the world for his development of an entirely new approach to jazz trio performance as well as for his remarkable ability to blend the jazz and classical idioms to create something wholly new. His critically acclaimed legacy of recorded music reflects this tremendous artistic versatility with recordings ranging from solo piano, duets, and trio to large ensembles and symphony orchestra. His popular DVD recording with the Berlin Philharmonic showcases his groundbreaking arrangement of Gershwin's “Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra”. One of Roberts’ more recent musical projects is the founding of a new band called The Modern Jazz Generation. This multigenerational ensemble is the realization of Roberts’ long-standing dedication to training and mentoring younger jazz musicians. Roberts is also an associate professor of music at the School of Music at Florida State University and he holds an honorary Doctor of Music degree from The Juilliard School.

In addition to his renown as a performer, Roberts is also an accomplished composer who has received numerous commissioning awards from such places as Chamber Music America, Jazz at Lincoln Center, ASCAP, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Savannah Music Festival, Seiji Ozawa and the Saito Kinen Orchestra (who commissioned him to write his second piano concerto, “Rhapsody in D for Piano and Orchestra”), and most recently, the American Symphony Orchestra.(10.13.20)
 

Concerts will Feature the World Premiere of Artist in Residence Erica Lindsay’s Adagio for String Orchestra (2020) and Works by Casals, Vivaldi, Mozart, Mahler, and Elgar

October 24 Event Will Honor Cellist and Faculty Member Luis Garcia-Renart (1936–2020)

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents a student and faculty showcase weekend, October 24–25, two free, live-streamed concerts featuring the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra, Leon Botstein, conductor, showcasing performances by celebrated violinists and new Conservatory faculty Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony, as well as students and other faculty from the Bard Music Program, Conservatory, and The Orchestra Now. The October 24 concert, at 7:30 p.m., is in honor of cellist and faculty member Luis Garcia-Renart (1936–2020), and features the world premiere of Artist in Residence Erica Lindsay’s Adagio for String Orchestra (2020), as well as works by Casals and Vivaldi. Garcia-Renart, who taught at Bard from 1962 until his death earlier this year, was a former student of Casals. The October 25 concert, at 3 p.m., includes performances of works by Mozart, Mahler, and Elgar. Both concerts are free and will be live streamed from the Fisher Center at Bard’s Sosnoff Theater. Reservations are required. Proceeds support the Conservatory Scholarship Fund. For more information, visit fishercenter.bard.edu.

October 24 at 7:30 p.m.
Bard College Conservatory Orchestra Leon Botstein, Music Director
Concert in honor of cellist and faculty member Luis Garcia-Renart (1936–2020)

Pablo Casals
“The Song of the Birds” (El cant dels Ocells)

La Sardana, Cello choir with faculty members Peter Wiley and Raman Ramakrishnan and cellists from the Conservatory, The Orchestra Now, and the Music Program

Erica Lindsay
Adagio World Premiere
Conservatory Orchestra with Erica Kiesewetter, conductor

Antonio Vivaldi
The Four Seasons
Conservatory Orchestra
with faculty soloists Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony, violinsOctober 25 at 3 p.m.
Bard College Conservatory Orchestra Leon Botstein, Music Director

W. A. Mozart
Serenade No. 6 in D Major, KV 239 “Serenata notturna”

Gustav Mahler
Adagietto from Symphony No. 5

Edward Elgar (1857–1934)
Introduction and Allegro, for string quartet and string orchestra in G Major, Op.47


BARD COLLEGE CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC

Tan Dun, Dean

Frank Corliss, Director

Marka Gustavsson, Associate Director

The Bard College Conservatory of Music expands Bard’s spirit of innovation in arts and education. The Conservatory, which opened in 2005, offers a five-year, double-degree program at the undergraduate level and, at the graduate level, programs in vocal arts and conducting. At the graduate level the Conservatory also offers an Advanced Performance Studies program and a two-year Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship. The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, established in 2017, offers a unique degree program in Chinese instruments.

For more information, see bard.edu/conservatory.
 
(10.08.20)

 

“Over the last four weekends, the Fisher Center at Bard College presented four live-streamed concerts of The Orchestra Now, which comprises young postgraduate players and is led by Leon Botstein, who is also the college president. The series was titled Out of the Silence, a name that speaks to our times on at least two levels. First, the concerts were a valiant effort at offering live music amidst the Covid pandemic and with all of the necessary safety strictures. Second, the programming focused on music by Black composers, a group whose talents and voices have been muffled if not squelched for centuries.”

“But what if, once New Yorkers had made it through the grief and despair of the spring, we had seen in the pandemic an urgent call for creative problem-solving—for new, inventive thinking? What if we’d refused to settle for less in every area of our lives? Imagine what this September might look like then,” Gessen writes in the New Yorker. “Hannah Arendt once wrote that all that separates us from the ever-real threat of totalitarianism is ‘the great capacity of men to start something new.’ Little is new in this city now. Its office towers stand empty, its streets are once again full of cars, its schools are struggling (and struggling unequally), its unhoused citizens are getting kicked out of the Upper West Side hotels where they had been temporarily sheltered, the rich are getting richer, the wind is getting colder, and there is but one coronavirus-era invention that the city has decided to adopt: expanded outdoor dining.”

“Whether paying tribute to the young Patti Smith or imagining the subsequent lives of the original owners of 45s in his collection or recalling the long-gone businesses and denizens of the Lower East Side, he puts the reader right there, seeing what he saw, thinking what he thought,” writes Dmitry Samarov in Vol. 1 Brooklyn. “This new collection, which follows the equally essential Kill All Your Darlings, is a must for anyone curious about art and culture made in this country during the last era when what’s new was gleaned firsthand, in the flesh, rather than passively received by screen.” Read an excerpt from Sante’s new collection in the Paris Review.

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) presents Sky Hopinka: Centers of Somewhere opening October 17, 2020, a focused look at key ideas, preoccupations, and methods in the work of artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka (born 1984 in Ferndale, Washington). In order to limit capacity in the museum guests must register in advance - see below for details on how to visit.

A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin and the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka has become recognized for video work that centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and that explores language as a container of culture. Within the trajectory of experimental cinema, Hopinka contributes to the development of Indigenous aesthetics, insisting on a profoundly subjective position that destabilizes entrenched colonial perspectives and related descriptions of land, sky, sea, myth, place, and personhood. Significant to his work is the study and teaching of the near extinct Indigenous language chinuk wawa. His films are sometimes subtitled in English and chinuk wawa or the language Hočąk, and move between concepts in each linguistic system to subvert and question them.

Centers of Somewhere will present a newly commissioned, multi-channel work Here you are before the trees (2020), alongside a selection of recent videos and photography. The newly commissioned work will explore Indigenous histories of the Hudson Valley as they are connected to other regions in the U.S. Each channel of the new installation will focus on a different aspect of these landscapes, including the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohican Indians who were relocated from the Hudson Valley region to Wisconsin near Hopinka’s tribal homeland. The installation also incorporates research on Henry Roe Cloud, a Ho-Chunk tribal member from Wisconsin who was a contributor to the Merriam Report of 1928 as well as the prolific and influential writer Vine Deloria Jr. and his father, Vine Deloria Sr. who was a graduate of St. Stephen’s College, Bard’s first incarnation. Centers of Somewhere will also present a new series of sixteen photographs entitled Breathings (2020) that were shot throughout the U.S. in 2020. While the photographs within the Breathings series range in locations and subject matter, a text binds them, with its handwritten lines encircling the borders of each image. For instance, a line around a cold Chicago intersection devoid of people reads:  “I think of my home tonight. I don't have any resolutions, but I've felt so much through these streets, these neighborhoods. This land and this Land hold so much, and this pain and this Pain call for salves we already have, still needing to be wrapped and poulticed.”

Centers of Somewhere also includes several short video works by Hopinka including Dislocation Blues (2017), an experimental documentary of the Standing Rock protests, offering what the artist calls an “incomplete and imperfect portrait of reflections” around the historic event and its potential; Jáaji Approx (2015), which layers recordings of Hopinka’s father over landscapes that the two (father and son) have separately traveled; and, I’ll Remember You as You Were, not as What You’ll Become (2016), an elegy to poet Diane Burns (Chemehuevi/ Anishinabe) that meditates on mortality, afterlife and reincarnation.

Sky Hopinka: Centers of Somewhere is curated by Lauren Cornell, Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator, CCS Bard. A series of on-line public programs for Centers of Somewhere will be organized by Cornell and Dr. Christian Ayne Crouch, Associate Professor of History, Bard College. The first virtual event was on October 19th at 5 p.m. In this special presentation, Heather Bruegl, Director of Cultural Affairs for the Stockbridge Munsee Community, gave an overview of local history with an aim to restore Indigenous presence at Bard College. This activation, issued from the community's current home in Wisconsin, acknowledges the continuing Mohican and Munsee relationship to their homelands. Registration for this virtual event and others (to be announced) will be available on the CCS Bard website (https://ccs.bard.edu/).

Alongside Centers of Somewhere, CCS Bard has co-published Perfidia a book of Hopinka’s writings with Wendy’s Subway, a non-profit reading room, writing space, and independent publisher located in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The book features an essay by Julie Niemi, independent curator and CCS Bard Alum 2017.

Exhibitions at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies, the CCS Bard Arts Council, and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.

Major support for Centers of Somewhere is provided by Lonti Ebers.

###
How To Visit
The CCS Bard Galleries are open Thursday through Sunday from 12:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is by advance reservation only - reserve and confirm your timed tickets here. We have instituted new attendance protocols to ensure the health and safety of our patrons, community, and staff. To read more about all the safety precautions we have in place and to prepare for your museum visit, please read more here.  Reserved tickets are free to the public. We cannot admit walk-up visitors, so please confirm your reservation before visiting.

Access Policy for Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Bard Galleries
CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum are located in a single-level facility. Parking is available outside of the building in an ADA-compliant parking lot which has four accessible parking spaces at the end of the paved entrance way. If you have specific questions or requests about access, please write to [email protected] at least two weeks before your visit or the event you plan to attend and we will make every effort to accommodate you. During your visit, you may seek the assistance of Security and Visitor Service staff members who are present at the CCS Bard reception desk and throughout the exhibitions. Please don’t hesitate to contact [email protected] with feedback about your visit. To read our full access policy, please see our website here.

MEDIA CONTACTS:    
For further information, for images, or to arrange interviews, please contact:

BARD COLLEGE CONTACT:
Mark Primoff
Director of Communications
Tel: +1 845.758.7412      
Email: [email protected]        

PRESS ADVISOR:
Gabriel (Gabe) Einsohn
M: 202.415.8095
Email: [email protected]

CCS BARD CONTACT:                                    
Ramona Rosenberg                                        
Director of External Affairs                                          
Tel: +1 (845) 758-7574                                               
Email: [email protected]
 

“I began to see objects as vessels and people as fortune-tellers,” Aronson says of his photographs, mostly taken in and around Yonkers, upper Manhattan, and the Upper West Side. “Photographing in a world so divided and isolated, it was important to remind myself that we are, in many ways, still connected.”

Relief from Zoom sometimes comes in a box. “I was tickled when the box arrived in the mail from Baltimore’s sharp little experimental company the Acme Corporation,” writes the Washington Post’s Peter Marks. “The group, led by Artistic Director Lola B. Pierson, sent me—and you can get one, too—a literal play in a box: a do-it-in-your-own-time delight titled The Institute for Counterfeit Memory. All it requires is a performance space (the top of a kitchen table), about 25 minutes and a longing for the days, now zooming rapidly into the past, when you could sit in a packed little theater and let some smart new entertainment wash over you. … The Institute for Counterfeit Memory cannily employs the devices it provides to bring you back to the feeling of being in a room with other spectators, even as it reminds you that you are alone. Its ministrations so impressed me that when I turned over the final cue card instructing me to applaud, I actually did.”

 

Contemporary choreographer Pam Tanowitz, a 2020 Doris Duke Artist in the dance category, is known for her unflinchingly postmodern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. Her 2018 creation of Four Quartets, inspired by T. S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece and set to music by Kaija Saariaho, was produced by and premiered at Bard Fisher Center—a production the New York Times called “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”

“I got through to Svetlana Alexievich . . . around two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, in Minsk. It was noisy in her apartment. ‘There are about fifteen people here,’ she said. They had gathered to bear witness to whatever might happen to Alexievich, who is the last original member of the opposition Coordinating Council—formed last month after mass protests began in Belarus—who has been neither imprisoned nor forced into exile,” writes Gessen. “Strange men, who she assumed worked for President Alexander Lukashenka’s security services, had been ringing her doorbell the previous evening. ‘People have been gathering since nine in the morning. Ambassadors and others. It’s a kind of resistance through presence,’ she said.”

“I refuse to foreground art-world or film-industry politics in my art in order to gain acceptance. I made the film politically, embedding MOVE, radical politics, the input of my cast, crew, and my elders into not only the story of the film but the form and structure of the work,” says Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard College. “The Inheritance is not about the expression of rage or disgust; it’s about what happens the morning after, when we go back home after the protest. That’s where the work begins.” The Inheritance will screen virtually at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14 and 17, and at the New York Film Festival September 18–23.

Bard alumna Tschabalala Self ’12 interviews emerging British artist Somaya Critchlow, whose practice “draws a line of triangulation between the observer, the observed, and the larger social context imposed upon Black women and the expression of their bodies.” “I’m very aware of the terms that I operate within being Black and female and wanting to be a painter,” says Critchlow. “I love British culture and I think there is so much to it, and that has all come from the mixture of history and tradition and the influx of people migrating in and out of the UK and the new culture developing out of that. I feel like I’m a reflection of this, and while being a Black British artist is a complex position to hold, I find that like all things that invoke further observation and not just acceptance it can be a powerful place to operate from.”

“Right now, there is a tremendous loss of faith among people who gave everything to museums,” Eccles tells Artnet. “The furloughs and the layoffs had a terrible psychic effect on people in our industry.”

“Tuttle lets the installation stand as the answer to its own questions, even if it can feel that much is left unsaid,” writes Louis Bury. “Better to acknowledge that part of every object’s reality remains unavailable—incommunicable—to others, what object-oriented philosophers call an object’s ‘withdrawal.’ Tuttle’s work turns that withdrawal into an art.”

“My practice, for the most part, centers around the convergence of information, fiction, and history,” says Aronson, who photographed his friends Aurora and Henry near Bard’s campus, crediting the lush landscape and rich history as a source of inspiration. “I believe that pictures don’t depict history or a moment in time, but rather challenge it. They act as a road map for the future. They are tarot cards in a sense, informing how we subsequently see the world and the next [set of] pictures.”

“I am asking myself constantly: What comes after representation? What comes once we have a seat at the table — what do we do? What do we say?” Tucker tells Medium. “I knew that once I had representation, what I would do is make art about my life and the things that I was dealing with as a way to heal myself, and to experiment in a way that was safe. I got that through painting. I created this character of a white man, like an American business guy. The cartoon figure just became a way to explore myself in my paintings.”