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“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.”

Bard at Brooklyn Public Library microcollege student and artist Russell Craig ’22 has installed a mural honoring the Black Lives Matter movement at the entrance of the Philadelphia Municipal Services building. The mural, called Crown, is just steps from where the statue of controversial former Mayor Frank Rizzo once stood, and the site of large protests in late spring demanding the city remove the statue, which it did in June.
 

“Whether on reclaimed ledger paper or vintage picture postcards, the images he constructs are something like found details themselves—singular and mysterious, if occasionally a little on the nose,” writes Will Heinrich.

“I want to be realistic about the way I see the world, but I've always felt that Bojack is actually an optimistic show,” says Bard alum Raphael Bob-Waksberg ’06. “Not everyone agrees, but I see it as a story about how people can change, and change each other. How you can make a difference in somebody else's life, which might be small, or might be profound. I like to believe that those differences can add up.”

“This past February, an exhibition on the work of French furniture designer, architect, and overall Renaissance woman Eileen Gray opened on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A tour de force of an immersive yet jewel-box exhibition, the show was unfortunately cut short. However, for those looking to learn more about Gray’s body of work, from her screens to her use of steel tubing to her architectural models, Eileen Gray”—coedited by curator Cloé Pitiot and BGC gallery director Nina Stritzler-Levine—“would be a welcome addition to any bookshelf.”

“The spaces Black people inhabit are at once physical, immaterial and carried thru our bones, thru time and back out into the world,” says Azikiwe Mohammed ’05. “Thru drawing, collage, sculpture and a variety of works that swing between those spaces, Devin N. Morris provides us with a look at the entirety of a language at once gay, Black and deeply personal, while maintaining a familiarity that makes his grandmother’s house in Baltimore feel like my grandmother’s house in Westbury, Long Island.”

Gibson draws upon his Native American heritage as well as postwar abstractionism in this large-scale work, which measures 44 feet square by 21 feet high. Entitled Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House, the multitiered structure refers to the earth-based architecture of the ancient metropolis of Cahokia, which was the largest city of the North American Indigenous Mississippian people at its height in the 13th century. “Even though it’s where my people are from, I had never heard of these structures being in Mississippi,” says Gibson. “That this history existed there is amazing and moving.” On view at New York’s Socrates Sculpture Park until March 2021.

“I have been grappling a lot with what art means in times of crisis and change,” says Bard alumna Ruba Katrib MA ’07 in this interview with Hyperallergic’s Dessane Lopez Cassell. “Despite everything that is going on, so many people I talk to are still craving IRL experiences with art—even while a pandemic rages and even while protesting in the streets and fighting to change this system and its rotten power structures. This makes me feel that art still does so

As part of its series 15 Creative Women for Our Time, the New York Times profiles Bard alumna Juliana Huxtable ’10—DJ, artist, poet, performer, and now novelist. “The common thread running through Huxtable’s work,” writes the Times’s Aisha Harris, “is a provocative if often cheeky exploration of layered identity and how it is and isn’t moldable: What stories are told about us—or are written on our bodies—and which do we tell ourselves?”

Bard MFA alumna Suzanne Kite is one of the first class of 11 Women at Sundance | Adobe Fellows, announced this week by the Sundance Institute. The new program is designed to meaningfully support women artists creating bold new work in film and media, with a priority on filmmakers from historically underrepresented communities. Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer. Her scholarship and practice highlights contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research creation, computational media, and performance.

“During the past few years of Donald Trump’s deranged presidency, if there is one writer I turn to it is Masha Gessen, whose piercing clarity is gemlike and refusal to equivocate precious,” writes Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore. “As a journalist, Gessen has covered Russia, Hungary and Israel, so is not experiencing illiberalism for the first time. Instead of a weariness however, what is present in the book is a stunning capacity to connect the dots in a way that few can.”

Bard College faculty and alumni have once again appeared on the list of the year’s Emmy nominees. Emma Briant, visiting research associate in human rights, was a senior researcher for The Great Hack, which was nominated in the Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special category. Dead to Me, the Netflix show produced by alumnus Buddy Enright ’84, was nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series. Bojack Horseman, cocreated by Raphael Bob-Waksberg ’06, was nominated for Outstanding Animated Program. Beastie Boys Story, about Adam Yauch ’86 and his bandmates, was nominated for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special.

“What will become of public art and space in New York in the months and years ahead?” writes Kitnick in Artforum. “More baubles and police barricades? Some claim that the truly public art of our time is not that which demands people come to it (the puppy in the plaza) but that which disperses outward to meet its audience—the magazine, the hit single, the post. I guess that’s true to a certain extent, but now, more and more, that seems like our experience of so much art, especially during quarantine.”

“This is what dreaming sounds like”: In the 1980s and ’90s Bard Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman first showed us what dreaming looks like, with his mythical, world-bending comic book series The Sandman. Now Audible and DC Comics give voice to Gaiman’s dreams — and nightmares—in “a vibrant audio adaptation,” writes Maya Phillips in the New York Times.

“The ragged end of his Presidency, if it comes, will be full of conflict and resentment. There will be no orderly handover, no constructive transition—a disastrous prospect during a pandemic and a deep recession, and yet another blow to our perceptions of how elections and government operate,” writes Gessen in the New Yorker. “This is the best-case scenario. The worst case, as Douglas’s three catastrophes illustrate, is a close or contested result of the vote, which leads to a constitutional implosion and an explosion of violence.”

“By eviscerating a Republican’s excuse for his foul-mouthed abuse the congresswoman showed the power of rhetoric,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose in the Guardian. Ocasio-Cortez, who addressed the House of Representatives in response to Republican Congressman Ted Yoho’s verbal assault on the Capitol steps, provided “a masterpiece of heartfelt, unadorned plain speech that (consciously or instinctively) employed the tools of the orator, the rhetorician and preacher. What carries us is repetition, rhythm, emphasis, cadence, pronunciation (the congresswoman leans into her Bronx vowels) and a seamless transition from each event or idea to its larger implications.”

Jack Ferver—New York–based writer, choreographer, director, and Bard artist in residence—talks with Vogue about choreographing Jeremy O. Harris’s play A Boy’s Company Presents: “Tell Me If I’m Hurting You.” This “intensely ambitious” work is styled after a Jacobean revenge tragedy. Written in verse, the play is set “Before, During, and Hopefully After Heartbreak.” It follows the meeting of two young, Black men, Vinnie and Baby Boy, which prompts “an erotic dream-journey that begins with a rush of passion—and ends, inevitably, soaked in blood.”

First Cow, directed by Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard College, “may be the finest of Reichardt’s films to date.” The film is set in the wilds of an early 19th-century Columbia River settlement, in what is now Oregon, and focuses on the business partnership and friendship of an Anglo cook and an entrepreneurial Chinese immigrant.
 
Kelly Reichardt's First Cow is available in virtual cinemas, which support the movie theaters that are still closed, including this week at Film at Lincoln Center, and on iTunes or anywhere else you rent movies online—you can see the full list here.