News

The Spike Jonze documentary retells the band’s story from young NYC punks to hip-hop groundbreakers in a series of “raucous, poignant performances” (Rolling Stone). Jonze and Beastie Boys Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond talk to Esquire’s Johnny Davis about the making of the film, which premieres on Apple TV+ April 24.

The Bard College Dance Program and GIBNEY, a New York City–based dance and social justice organization led by Founder, Artistic Director, and CEO Gina Gibney, are creating a new partnership to begin in fall 2020. This will be the fourth professional partnership launched by the Dance Program, which began in 2009 with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.

The Bard Dance Program/Gibney Partnership will provide unique opportunities for Bard students to work closely with Gibney’s resident dance troupe, Gibney Company, a commission-based, repertory company that works with renowned and rising international choreographers representing a broad range of aesthetics and techniques.

Gibney Company artists and directors Amy Miller and Nigel Campbell, and Bard faculty member and Partnership Coordinator Tara Lorenzen* and Director of Dance Maria Simpson will spearhead the partnership.

Each semester, artists selected by Gibney’s leadership will teach courses embedded in Bard’s dance curriculum, including studio courses for all levels of dancers, as well as seminar courses that address discipline-specific topics, such as Dance Writing as Activism. A special feature of this partnership will be the opportunity to perform Bard Dance Senior Projects at Gibney Center in Manhattan in the spring. Gibney will also offer yearlong artistic advising of student choreographers. Extracurricular workshops and master classes will further enhance the educational field of study. Gibney Company’s residency at the College will include open rehearsals and a public showing. This partnership represents a wide-ranging vision of what dance can be in a liberal arts curriculum at a time when artist engagement in both local and global communities is essential.

*Tara Lorenzen has danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Stephen Petronio, Beth Gill, and Maria Hassabi, has worked for the American Dance Festival and Kaatsbaan|cultural park for dance on their education initiatives, and has been teaching in the Dance Program at Bard College since 2016.

“Life in the era of COVID-19, as in all times of crisis, amplifies our basic instincts. Do we become anxious or confident, selfish or generous, rigid or adaptable? The same applies to institutions. And right now, at this moment of national and global crisis, Bard College is demonstrating who we are: student-focused, innovative, entrepreneurial, and civically engaged.” —Jonathan Becker, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College

A broad network of Bard faculty and staff—including Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams in the Bard Architecture and Design Program; Maggie Hazen and Melinda Solis in Studio Arts; IT’s Doug O’Connor, Hayden Sartoris, and Christopher Ahmed; and the Philosophy Program’s Katie Tabb—has come together to produce face shields for frontline health-care workers who are grappling with a nationwide shortage of protective gear.

With two 3D printers loaned by Bard physicist Paul Cadden-Zimansky, Exo Adams and Santoyo-Orozco set up a makeshift lab in Tivoli to fabricate reusable face shields for health-care workers. When the lab is fully operational, they expect to produce up to 50 shields per week. Hazen and Solis have begun a production line as well, using 3D printers purchased with proceeds from a GoFundMe campaign established by MFA alumna Luba Drozd ’15 that has raised more than $20,000. A small batch of shields has already been distributed to Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson, New York, and the group is now looking for more distribution options in the Hudson Valley. Deliveries of face shields are also scheduled for Albany Medical Center and, in Dover, New Jersey, Saint Clare’s Hospital, where a Bard student’s relative works and on whose behalf the student made a request. Anyone interested in distribution or in assisting with the project should contact Doug O’Connor ([email protected]), who is centralizing the distribution efforts with the help of CCS Bard students.

And in Annandale, members of the Fisher Center’s Costume Shop—together with Audrey Smith from Buildings and Grounds, Rosalia Reifler from Environmental Services, and Saidee Brown from the President’s Office—have sewn nearly 200 face masks for the essential College employees who remain on campus.
 
To learn more about virtual engagement opportunities at Bard, visit Bard Connects.

Halter, who helped spearhead the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund to support out-of-work movie theater employees, talks to Film Comment’s Nellie Killian and Nicolas Rapold about the effects of the crisis on how we watch movies, what we’ve been watching, and the interesting overlaps between our ultramediated existence and experimental cinema.

How do you memorialize someone you’ve never met and whose name you may never know? In the audio piece Only Remains Remain, artist Freya Powell ’06 uses the structure of a Sophoclean chorus to create an elegy for the thousands of unidentified migrants who have died crossing the US southern border, and whose bodies are buried in unmarked graves across the border states. In  excerpts from a live performance developed as part of her residency at MoMA PS1, Powell utilizes pitch, intonation, breath, movement, and silence to embody a contemporary tragedy told through the story of Antigone.

Bard alumna Tschabalala Self ’12 talks to Vogue about celebrity culture, the uninhibited physicality of her work, and the use of fabric in her paintings. “I’m drawing with the sewing machine,” says Self. “I love this machine as an extension of my hand.”

Bard Photography Program faculty members Tim Davis and Stephen Shore, and other great photographers, are turning to Instagram to cure “corona claustrophobia” or to show how life has changed. “Pictures remind us that life does go on, and that there are spring snow storms,” says Shore, “for better or for worse. 

From war enactors to America’s southern border, An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, blurs the boundaries between photojournalism and fiction. Her work is currently featured in the “revelatory” career survey On Contested Terrain, at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art through July 26. (While the museum is temporarily closed because of the coronavirus, a video tour and selected images are available online at cmoa.org.)

The Bard College Theater and Performance Program presents a live-stream of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest on April 10 at 7 pm.

Romania. December 25, 1989. A dictator is executed. A totalitarian regime topples. What happens next? Caryl Churchill’s 1990 play depicts life during and after a repressive dictatorship. Reimagined as a digital presentation by a professional creative team and student performers, this 30-year old work approached from a 2020 point of view powerfully resonates with our current global state. ⠀
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YouTube Livestream ➡️ bit.ly/MadForestYT
Facebook Live ➡️ bit.ly/MadForestFB

#UPSTREAMINGFC #MADFORESTFC

 

Bard MFA alumna Luba Drozd has been working around the clock to make face shields for New York City hospitals in dire need of protective equipment during the COVID-19 emergency. With the help of a team of volunteers for distribution, she has been able to get nearly 200 masks to health care professionals in the city.

More great news for Bard first-year student Sonita Alizadeh this week: she has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia List in the Entertainment and Sports category. Alizadeh is an Afghan rapper and human rights activist. She escaped being sold into child marriage and is now a global advocate for women and girls, recently addressing the UN on child marriage.
 

Bard College student and photography major Peace Okoko ’21 won a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant. This grant offered her the opportunity to spend the summer in Kenya, where she would work to increase homeless women’s access to proper sanitary supplies and facilities. In its 14th year, the Davis Projects for Peace program invited undergraduates to design grassroots peace-building projects to be implemented during the summer of 2020 and selected the most promising and feasible projects to be funded. Although all 2020 Projects for Peace have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the foundation’s hope that circumstances will permit them to roll these grants forward to 2021.

Okoko’s project proposed providing reusable sanitary products (either cloth pads or menstrual cups) to homeless women in Nairobi’s slums. She plans to work with an organization ‘Bank on Me’ that distributes pads to girls and help extend their demographic reach. Her project would educate women on how to create their own clothing pads in hopes to foster future sustainability. Through Bank on Me’s network of local tailors, they would provide a one-day training on how to create the clothing pads. “Lack of access to menstrual hygiene products or sanitation facilities is dehumanizing, strips a person of their dignity and robs them the opportunity to have a peaceful existence with themselves and the community around them,” writes Okoko. “In 2020, access to sanitary products should not be a privilege but rather commonplace.”

Projects for Peace was created in 2007 through the generosity of Kathryn W. Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who believed that today’s youth—tomorrow’s leaders—ought to be challenged to formulate and test their own ideas.

In a look back at the work’s West Coast premiere at UCLA in February, Forbes contributor Tom Teicholz writes, “At the time I saw the performance, I had no idea it would resonate with greater relevance during the current crisis. Now, I can’t stop thinking about it.” Adapted from the poems of T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets is a meditation on time and the search for the divine. “Eliot’s words inspire stillness and thought—which is a hard concept to choreograph,” writes Teicholz. “Yet Tanowitz has delivered a work that stands out as a peerless modern work for the ages.”

Two Bard College students have won prestigious Fulbright Awards for individually designed study/research projects and one student has been selected as an alternate. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.

Madison Emond ’18, a photography major from Barrington, Rhode Island, has won a Fulbright Scholarship to New Zealand, where she will pursue a photography project, initially developed as her Bard College Senior Project, Nature as Artist: Visualizing the Personhood of the New Zealand Landscape. “My photographic practice sets out to question traditional landscape imagery and how it affects the viewer’s relationship to the environment. Still images of nature can estrange us from knowing the Earth as a living, shifting, unruly being, locked in a process of steady, often violent, transformation. No matter how moving or dramatic a photograph of nature is, it often speaks only to the vantage point of its maker standing outside of it. Rather than making images of the landscape I make images with the landscape. What I mean is this: all my works are made through the interaction of photosensitive materials, the natural world, and moonlight – and nothing else,” says Emond. Emond has chosen New Zealand because it was one of the first nations in the world to grant legal personhood to landforms. In 2014, Te Urewera, a national park, was granted legal personhood. Three years later, the Whanganui River was granted this same status. Emond’s project has a cross-cultural component. “The United States has a passion for the natural beauty of its land and I believe its people have the capability to recognize a similar alternative relationship between its human and “natural” citizens. With that belief in mind, I plan to explore how legal personhood could benefit landforms in the United States.”

Michelle Jackson-Beckett, a Ph.D. student in the Bard Graduate Center, won a Fulbright Scholarship to Austria to conduct research on “Vienna’s Other Modernism: Design and Dwelling 1918-1968.” Jackson-Beckett has accepted a faculty position at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in lieu of the Fulbright scholarship.

Medora Jones ’18, who graduated from Simons Rock in 2016, has been named an alternate for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Morocco.

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the largest U.S. exchange program offering opportunities for students and young professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and primary and secondary school teaching worldwide. The program currently awards approximately 2,000 grants annually in all fields of study, and operates in more than 140 countries worldwide. Fulbright U.S. Student alumni populate a range of professions and include ambassadors, members of Congress, judges, heads of corporations, university presidents, journalists, artists, professors, and teachers. Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose, actor John Lithgow, composer Philip Glass, opera singer Renee Fleming and economist Joseph Stiglitz are among notable former grantees.

 

“Set in the mid-19th-century Oregon Territory, Kelly Reichardt’s latest film is a fable, a western, a buddy picture, and a masterpiece,” writes A. O. Scott in the Times. “A parable of economics and politics, with shrewd insights into the workings of supply and demand, scarcity and scale and other puzzles of the marketplace, the movie is also keenly attuned to details of history, both human and natural.”

It’s been 40 years since any American museum devoted an exhibition to the work of Eileen Gray, who is considered by many to be a pioneer in the worlds of modern design and architecture. “This past weekend, that situation was rectified with the debut of ‘Eileen Gray: Crossing Borders,’ a show of furniture and architecture models as well as more rarely seen photographs and drawings at New York’s Bard Graduate Center Gallery,” writes Architectural Digest. “Unlike previous exhibitions dedicated to Gray's oeuvre, this one is presented in a very different setting: three floors of a Beaux Arts townhouse that was once a single-family home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The house quite intimately sets visitors in a domestic space and in the realm of Gray. It's also an apt backdrop for her extraordinary breadth of talent and entrepreneurial spirit.”

The show, making its Southern California debut, features the on-stage construction of a two-story house, but no dialogue. Geoffrey Sobelle, visiting artist in residence in Bard’s Theater and Performance Program, is the creator and also one of the performers in Home.

In her latest film, First Cow, independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt pushes against the romantic myths of the Western, and of the West. “It’s such a masculine genre,” she says, “and it’s mostly been told from a masculine point of view. So trying to find a different perspective, to find a different frame, for the Western is challenging and interesting for me. It’s a tricky thing, because the road has been paved before you, you know? But I’m trying to make the camera be inclusive of different points of view, something other than just the strong man point of view.”

On Monday, March 2, 2020, Berlin Prize–winning author Carole Maso will read from her work at Bard College. Known for her experimental, poetic, and fragmentary narratives, “Maso is a writer of such power and originality that the reader is carried away with her, far beyond the usual limits of the novel,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. Maso will be introduced by Bard literature professor and novelist Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented by Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required. 
 

The critically acclaimed Four Quartets, which was produced by and premiered at Bard Fisher Center last summer, was performed by Pam Tanowitz Dance at UCLA’s Royce Hall February 15–16, with actress Kathleen Chalfant reading Eliot’s four poems. “Throughout the 75-minute performance, Tanowitz’s outstanding company serves to add to Eliot, not interpret. Complexity grows upon complexity,” writes the LA Times’s Mark Swed. “This exceptional response to ‘Four Quartets’ achieves genuine universality and profound nowness.”