News

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."

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.”

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.”

The Bard College Theater and Performance Program has been invited by Theatre for a New Audience, in Brooklyn, to give three more live online performances of Mad Forest, as a coproduction with the Fisher Center. Bard students will be performing (virtually) off-Broadway. Performances on May 22, 24, and 27.

Mad Forest premiered on April 10 as the Theater and Performance Program's first-ever virtual production. Originally slated for the Fisher Center stage, the creative team transformed the work for live webcast. Ashley Tata directs this reimagining of Caryl Churchill's sly, funny, and surreal account of the Romanian Revolution, performed live by actors in isolation from 14 remote locations using a specially modified version of Zoom.

The live webcast of Mad Forest was a project of UPSTREAMING: the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage. Learn more about the production and watch UPSTREAMING performances on the Fisher Center's website.

“I am always pushing and pulling against aspects of the political inside my practice, with politics as clearly foundational,” says Simmons. “I think it’s really important to consider new ways of seeing and new ways of living, new ways that can become politically tangible should we act as a group with compassion and creativity.”

Bard Artist in Residence Jack Ferver and ballet/contemporary dancer Reid Bartelme, the odd couple of the dance world, provide essential stay-at-home relief with their weekly podcast, writes New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas. “Listening to ‘What’s Going On With Dance and Stuff,’ their chatty and illuminating podcast, feels like being with good friends—and that’s a rare sort of lifeline in these days of social isolation.”

Bard alumna Diya Vij ’08, associate curator of public programs for New York City’s High Line, talks to Hyperallergic about her interest in nurturing “the health and well-being of individuals, the city, and the planet through art-centered and civically oriented happenings, on and off the High Line.”
 

Join Bard Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman for a remote, livestreamed conversation with Hugo Award–winning author N. K. Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy), whose new work The City We Became was released in March to great acclaim. Presented in association with Oblong Books & Music, the conversation is part of an ongoing Fisher Center series in which Gaiman discusses the creative process with another artist. The live webcast of this event is a project of UPSTREAMING: the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage.

Galleries and museums are getting creative about presenting work online during the coronavirus crisis. The Bard Graduate Center’s retrospective of works by architect-designer Eileen Gray, which opened a few weeks before lockdown, has now moved online, and it is well worth viewing virtually, writes the Times’s Jason Farago. “This exhibition and its website, with copious documents of [Gray’s] geometric carpets and tubular steel furniture, makes clear how central she was to this era of architecture, and how she transcended the house as a ‘machine for living’ to design places where you might actually want to live.”

GRAMMY Award–winning composer and longtime Bard professor Joan Tower’s first composition was “a total disaster.” Sixty years later, Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard, is one of the most celebrated composers in the world. Here, she talks with Kai Talim for Skip the Repeat about her wonderful childhood in Bolivia, her drive to compose, and how she, reluctantly at first, began to teach. “I came up here [to Bard] and I fell in love with this campus.... I love to teach. I didn’t know about that at the time. You have to start teaching to know whether you like it or not.”

Julia Bullock, Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna, offers the New York Times Frederica von Stade’s stunning performance of Massenet’s “Cendrillon” as her five minutes that will make you love opera.

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.