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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.”

Bard College professor, acclaimed photographer Stephen Shore “has made an indelible impact on photography, teaching his viewers—and generations of students at Bard College—a different way to see.” Artsy highlights four fundamental aspects of his work that have influenced the field.

Swartz, who was awarded a grant in the field of music/sound, creates immersive, site-specific installations that synthesize sound and light into ephemeral, participatory social experiences. Her recent permanent commission for the City of New York, Four Directions from Hunters Point (2019), embedded four optical portals in the walls and roof of the new Steven Holl–designed Queens Public Library, and received the NYC Public Design Commission’s Annual Award for Excellence in Design.

Acclaimed filmmaker, Bard Visiting Artist Charles Burnett talks about filmmaking for social change with WAMC News. Mr. Burnett will be in conversation with filmmakers Julie Dash and Bradford Young tonight, February 4, at 6pm in Olin Hall for “Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today.”
 

In 2019, the eminent composer and Bard professor Joan Tower was named Composer of the Year by Musical America, was recognized for her lifetime of work by Chamber Music of America, received the League of American Orchestras’ Gold Baton, and became one of the first women composers to have her collected works archived in the Library of Congress. Tower joined the faculty at Bard College in 1972, at the age of 33, where she now serves as Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts. Today, she teaches a variety of composition courses, coaches players, and puts on concerts of contemporary composers. “I always learn something every day,” she says. “I always learn from my students.”

Bard alumni, filmmakers, and brothers Adam and Zack Khalil (’11 and ’14) are among the artists selected to manage Performance Space New York in 2020 under a new restructuring plan for the organization.

On Tuesday, February 4, esteemed filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Bradford Young will take part in a discussion at Bard College exploring their career trajectories, works, creative processes, and commitments to the humanities. The event is part of a series, “Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today,” which seeks to diversify perspectives on the arts disciplines and to offer models for collective and inclusive community dialogues. The discussion is made possible through a 2019 FilmCraft Grant from the Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is cosponsored by Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program, Center for Civic Engagement, Art History Program, American Studies Program, and Africana Studies Program. The conversation will be moderated by Tabetha Ewing ’89, Social Studies Division chair and associate professor of Historical Studies, and Dariel Vasquez ’17, director of program design and management at Brothers@Bard (BAB). It takes place from 6–8 p.m. in Olin Auditorium (Olin Hall) and is free and open to the public. Registration is required. For more information or to register, click click here.
 
“Through this public dialogue, we hope to highlight the rich forms of black filmmaking that unfold on university campuses and celebrate the extraordinary work of these marvelous and generous practitioners who have not only changed which actors and stories appear on screen but also the ways audiences interpret and use films in their daily lives,” said Director of Africana Studies at Bard and Assistant Professor of Africana and Historical Studies Drew Thompson, organizer of the discussion series. “Ultimately, these conversations between artists aim to inspire underrepresented groups to pursue careers in the visual and performing art and to highlight the productive and impactful ways in which visual and performing artists engage communities.”
 

Patrick Vaill ’07 took his final Broadway bow as Jud Fry, after performing in Daniel Fish’s production of the musical Oklahoma! since he was a student at Bard. The Tony Award–winning Broadway production closed last weekend after an immensely successful run. Daniel Fish’s reimagining of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic began as a 2007 staging with Bard students in the Theater Program. Fish then adapted the production for Bard SummerScape 2015, took it to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, and then to Broadway. Patrick Vaill played Jud Fry in every iteration of the production. In this interview with the New York Times, Vaill reflects on embodying the iconic role and pays tribute to his alma mater.

John Duke Kisch ’76’s Separate Cinema Archive, the most prominent African American film history repository, is being acquired by George Lucas for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. The archive encompasses more than 37,000 rare items, including original film posters, film stills, publicity material, scripts, lobby cards, an extensive reference library, and more dating from 1904 to 2019.

“One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy.” —Salon.com

The Fisher Center at Bard, in association with Oblong Books & Music, presents a public conversation between two leading writers of fantasy and science fiction: Neil Gaiman, Bard professor in the arts, and Hugo Award–winning author N. K. Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy), whose new work The City We Became will be published in March. 

The program takes place on Saturday, May 2, at 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Tickets are $25 and can be ordered online at fishercenter.bard.edu or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900. $5 student tickets available to Bard undergraduate students through the Passloff Pass.

The conversation is part of an ongoing series in which author Gaiman discusses the creative process with another artist. Following the program, N. K. Jemisin will sign books in the lobby, which will be available for purchase, courtesy of Oblong Books. Signed titles by Neil Gaiman will also be available for purchase.

N. K. Jemisin is the first author in history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has also won the Nebula, Locus, and Goodreads Choice Awards. Her most recent work is the acclaimed short fiction collection How Long ’Til Black Future Month?, and her next novel will be The City we Became in March 2020. Jemisin has been a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops. In her spare time she is a gamer and gardener, and she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his phenomenally destructive sidekick Magpie.

Neil Gaiman is a New York Times bestselling author of novels, poetry, short stories, graphic novels, comics, journalism, and screenplays, who is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top 10 living postmodern writers. Works include The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neverwhere, Stardust, Anansi Boys, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), the award-winning Sandman series of graphic novels, and the short story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. Novels for younger readers include Fortunately, the Milk; Coraline, also an Academy Award–nominated film; and The Graveyard Book, winner of the Newbery (U.S.) and Carnegie (U.K.) Medals. He has written and directed for film and television, including a 2011 episode of Doctor Who that won the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Make Good Art, the text of a commencement speech he delivered at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, was published in a volume designed by graphic artist Chip Kidd. At Bard since 2014.
About the Fisher Center
The Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present, as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 159-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.

Artist and author Jibade-Khalil Huffman talks about his multimedia works and his interdisciplinary experience at Bard as he prepares for You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, his upcoming solo exhibition at the Anat Ebgi gallery in Los Angeles. “At his essence, Huffman is a collector of digital and tangible objects, giving birth to different representation of collage in video, photography, and installation,” writes Marcel Alcalá.

Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard College, has been given a $50,000 Film Independent Spirit Awards Filmmaker Grant designed to recognize a midcareer female director. Reichardt won the third annual Bonnie Award, named for Bonnie Tiburzi Caputo, who became the first woman to pilot a major U.S. airline when she joined the award’s sponsor, American Airlines, in 1973.

Kelly Reichardt is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose most recent work, First Cow, was screened at the 2019 New York Film Festival. Other films include Certain Women, starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone; Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy ( 2006), and River of Grass (1994). Honors received include a United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at major international film festivals, with retrospectives at several leading institutions devoted to the cinematic arts.

Reichardt has been teaching in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College since 2006.