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Bard College announced today the appointment of Tania El Khoury as Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater and Performance and Ziad Abu-Rish as Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights. Together they will lead a pioneering Master of Arts program in Human Rights and the Arts, planned to commence in Fall 2021. Designed by Bard’s Human Rights Program, the Fisher Center at Bard, and the Central European University, and launched through the Open Society University Network (OSUN), the interdisciplinary program will bring together scholars, artists, and activists from around the world to explore the highly-charged relation between artistic practices and struggles for truth and justice.

The appointments deepen Bard’s relationship with El Khoury and Abu-Rish, both of whom were visiting faculty at the college in 2019. Abu-Rish taught in the Human Rights Program, while El Khoury co-curated the 2019 edition of the Live Arts Bard Biennial at the Fisher Center at Bard.  Where No Wall Remains: an international festival about borders included nine newly commissioned projects by artists from the Middle East and the Americas. In addition to their work with the new graduate program, they will also teach in the undergraduate college: El Khoury is joining the faculty of the Theatre & Performance Program; Abu-Rish is affiliated with the Human Rights Program.

The proposed M.A. program in Human Rights and The Arts links the study of advocacy, law, and politics to critical theoretical-historical reflection, and focuses on the power of aesthetic, performative, and curatorial forms in the fight for rights. Anchored in the intersection of art, research, activism and social change, it will offer students the opportunity to explore interdisciplinary training, creative knowledge production, and practice-based research. At its heart is a perspective that looks beyond the U.S.-based art and NGO industries to identify, assess, and engage with the ethical, intellectual, and political potential of this emerging hybrid form. Students in the program will pursue a core of interdisciplinary courses in human rights theory and practice, supplemented with electives across the arts and humanities, including, in particular, the study and practice of live arts and performance, and curatorial practices.

“The international and cross-disciplinary dimensions of this new program make it groundbreaking and timely,” said Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of the Fisher Center and Director of Bard’s Theater & Performance Program. “Students will work with artists, faculty, and curators across OSUN's international network and beyond. Artists and human rights experts will inform each other’s practices, offering a fully integrated pedagogy. At a time when the ideals of open society and liberal education are threatened, this program will offer unique and fertile opportunities to study and share best practices across the world.”

El Khoury is internationally recognized for her installations, performances, and video projects. A Soros Arts Fellow for 2019, El Khoury's work explores political histories and contemporary issues through richly-researched and aesthetically-precise events focused on audience interactivity and concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. In as Far As My Fingertips Take Me, a one-on-one performance, a refugee artist painstakingly inscribes a drawing on the arm of a guest while narrating the story of his sisters' escape from Damascus.  In Gardens Speak, an interactive sound installation, the audience is asked to dig in the dirt to exhume stories of the Syrian uprising. El Khoury holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is affiliated with Forest Fringe in the United Kingdom and is the co-founder of the urban research and performance collective Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.

Abu-Rish was previously Assistant Professor of History and Founding Director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Certificate Program at Ohio University. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal. He has a highly successfully track-record of institution building, public scholarship initiatives, and graduate student training. He co-edited Jadaliyya, organized summer institutes for graduate students, and contributed to various research centers and academic associations. Abu-Rish has published widely on politics, economics, and popular mobilizations in Lebanon and Jordan, and is a co-editor, with Bassam Haddad and Rosie Bsheer, of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Old Order? (2012). He is currently completing a book entitled The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and the Institution Building in the Wake of Independence.

“Almost 20 years ago Bard was the first U.S. institution to offer a full, free-standing, interdisciplinary B.A. in Human Rights,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Program. “Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish will expand this to the graduate level and explore the forces that emerge at the intersection between human rights and the arts. The program will underscore the importance of the arts and humanities in confronting pressing social issues, and serve as an incubator of new ideas and strategies within the human rights movement at a time when it is widely understood to be under assault.”

The program is supported by the newly-founded Open Society University Network, a global project of Bard College, the Central European University, and the Open Society Foundations, with university and research partners stretching from Germany and Kyrgyzstan to Ghana and Colombia.7/8/20
 

“When I’m dancing, I can be a man, I can be a woman. I can be gay or straight.” says Mee Ae Caughey ’00. Drag is a cornerstone of Caughey’s shape-shifting practice of Butoh—an avant-garde movement, born in Japan after World War II—that she discovered while studying at Bard College. 
 

Young Asians and Latinx in the United States are taking the conversation about racism in America home by tackling difficult conversations with their families. Bard alumnus Charlie Mai and his brother, Henry, caused a family row when they told their father, a retired FBI agent, that they were attending a Black Lives Matter protest in D.C. Since then, conversations about race in their house have progressed, with Glenn Mai admitting, “I’ve been wrong.” Charlie is a Class of 2018 graduate in the Theater and Performance Program, who now works as an artist in New York City.

The Moroccan actor has been nominated for a Bafta for his role as Syrian refugee Sami Ibrahim in the British comedy series Home. “I’d like our stories to be told in a more authentic, humane way,” he says. The entertainment industry “is literally your country's flag that travels all around the ether and plants itself in somebody else's brain” he says. “Who tells your story when you're Arab? It should be us.”

Chicago public television profiles acclaimed photographer Steve Schapiro ’55, who took iconic photos during the Civil Rights Movement. He reflects on his time embedded with James Baldwin in the South and meeting leaders of the movement in the 1960s. The photos he took of James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement illustrate a recent trade edition of Baldwin’s book The Fire Next Time. Renewed interest has brought this edition back to the bestseller charts. Even into his eighties, Schapiro has been taking photographs, including covering Black Lives Matter protests. “We are on the cusp of something which can be an enormous movement and can change this country in a very, very positive way,” he says, “but it’s still a big question as to whether that will happen or whether it will just pass by again.”

Mmuseumm, cofounded and curated by Alex Kalman ’06, is New York City's tiniest museum. Instead of moving their 2020 exhibitions online, they have just released the 300-page Jumbo Catalog showcasing the exhibitions that were supposed to take place this year. The Mmuseumm’s 15 exhibitions planned for 2020 are centered on the theme of power. One series, Last Meal Receipts, collects 14 receipts for death row inmates’ specially requested last suppers, eaten a few hours before their scheduled executions in the state of Georgia.
 

“A lot of the time I start with a new phrase, movement, or idea, but I’ll also bring along old material that feels interesting, that could be worked on more, or failed in another piece but I want to bring it forward,” says Tanowitz. “We come up with a list of what we’re interested in doing, and then they work on it by themselves. Then we FaceTime; I’m manipulating, and we’re working on timing and rhythm, or I’ll rearrange the order. It’s good, but hard—you’re not in the room together; the screen is an extra layer of buffer.”

 

Ed Halter, critic in residence in the Film and Electronic Arts Program, revisits the early days of internet art: “Two decades ago, when the World Wide Web was just beginning to become commercialized, online artists concerned themselves more with the new formal properties of the internet than its meager content, then only fitfully user-generated and as-yet unorganized by the dominance of Google’s search algorithms,” Halter writes. “The audacious early work of Netherlands-based collective JODI exemplifies this moment. Their quasi-anonymous moniker derives from the identities of its two members, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, who began collaborating in 1995; by the decade’s end, JODI would become one of the most recognizable names of the first generation of internet art.”

Professor An-My Lê’s ongoing series of photographs Silent General speaks to the current political and cultural moment: packed protests, fallen monuments, and anti-Trump graffiti echo the images filling TV screens and social media. “It’s eerie to see how some of the issues that unfolded when I started Silent General [in 2016] are now back at the forefront in an even more urgent way,” says Lê. “History doesn’t move through time in a straight line.”

“I have repeatedly stated that I think the four-way love-drugged lovers’ fight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream will never work on a Zoom format with socially distanced actors. I may have been wrong,” writes Gemma Allred. “New-York-based Bard College and Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) streamed live performance of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest: A Play from Romania, directed by Ashley Tata, pushed the edges of what is possible in Live Online Performance.”

Bard College announces the appointment of Hannah Barrett as director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Prior to this appointment, Barrett, an award-winning artist and educator who has taught, lectured, and exhibited widely, was the international program coordinator at Bard College Berlin. Barrett succeeds Arthur Gibbons, who served as director of the Bard MFA program since 1990. Gibbons will continue teaching at Bard as professor of sculpture in the College’s Division of the Arts.

“I am delighted that Hannah Barrett has accepted the appointment as the new Director of the MFA program, one of Bard’s most distinguished graduate programs and one of the finest MFA programs in the country,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “She has been a terrific colleague and is uniquely suited to take this vital task on. She follows the remarkable, long, and distinguished tenure of Arthur Gibbons, who led the MFA to achieve its international renown. I thank Hannah and the faculty in the MFA program for their cooperation in finding a path to continue the excellent and innovative work of the MFA in this challenging time.”

Hannah Barrett is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based artist. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven her painting for over a decade, which has led to the current exploration of dandy monsters in domestic space. Recent exhibitions include a 2020 retrospective at Childs Gallery, Boston, a two-person invitational in 2019 at La MaMa Galleria, and a solo at Yours Mine and Ours Gallery in 2018. Selected group shows include Spring Break 2020, Platform Project Space, Dumbo NY, Kate Werble and Calicoon galleries in NYC, Mother Gallery, Beacon NY, and September Gallery in Hudson NY. Museum Shows include the Decordova Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Time Out New York, and Modern Painters. Barrett is on the curatorial staff of Soloway Gallery in Williamsburg. Barrett is also the illustrator of a vegan and lesbian themed children’s book “Nuts in Nutland”. Prior to coming to Bard, Barrett taught painting and drawing for 18 years and was on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Pratt Institute Brooklyn. Barrett holds a BA in studio art and German literature from Wellesley College and an MFA in painting from Boston University.

Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student—serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist students engage with accomplished faculty members, while developing their individual studio practices. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography, and music/sound.

New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley calls the Bard Theater and Performance Program production of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest “deeply moving” and “fervently inventive.”

“I used to think that most art is kind of stingy. There is a demand in much of art to read the text panel to understand what you are experiencing. Generosity and openness are important to me, so that the viewer is not intimidated, threatened, or belittled. There’s no coming to school and feeling like you didn’t get the homework done. You can enjoy it, even if you don’t know everything about it.”
 

A Zoom production by Bard College students gets a second life as a copresentation with Bard's Fisher Center and the off-Broadway Theatre for a New Audience, with sets, lights, props, and live editing.

The New York Times also highlighted Mad Forest at Theatre for a New Audience as one of its top "theater performances to stream this week."

New York–based collective FOREIGN OBJECTS has been selected as Bard Graduate Center’s (BGC) inaugural Digital Artist in Residence. Inspired by the BGC Gallery exhibition Eileen Gray, the group is working to create an interactive project that explores how smart cooking technologies have reimagined the role of the kitchen in the contemporary home.

In this two-hour conversation with Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian, art critic and poet John Yau ’72 talks about his life, how he got into art writing, stories from his childhood, and other influences on his work.

Bard alumnae Carolyn Lazard ’10 and Tschabalala Self ’12 are among the 20 artists selected by the Tiffany Foundation to receive the unrestricted $20,000 grants. Established in 1980, the foundation’s grants program has awarded more than $9.5 million to 500 contemporary artists working throughout the United States.

With theaters and nightclubs closed, magicians have pivoted to remote performance. New York Times media critic Alexis Soloski takes in Bard alumnus Noah Levine’s “nifty sleights of hand” courtesy of Zoom.

Pianist and composer Ran Blake ’60 is the 2020 recipient of the Boston Jazz Hero award from the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA). Blake is one of 27 jazz heroes in 23 cities across the country chosen as “activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz.”

Christine Sun Kim and Xaviera Simmons are among the 35 artists and designers who are making works to display across digital screens throughout New York City, Boston, and Chicago in recognition of the continued service of essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Organized by Times Square Arts, For Freedoms, and Poster House, the public art campaign aims to “encourage a sense of community and pride among New Yorkers, and give artists the opportunity to express their gratitude and optimism through the power of art.”