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“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.”

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.”