News

The Washington Post reviews Live Dangerously, the current exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, whose "most deliberately unsettling single image" is a photograph by Xaviera Simmons '05. Frieze reviews Soft Power, an exhibition at SFMOMA that features Simmons's work. 

The exhibition catalogue Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich, by Soika and the Cambridge historian Bernhard Fulda, provides a new historical narrative for an artist who fashioned himself a martyr of the Nazi regime—a narrative that has had political reverberations for the current German government. 
 

Bard College is well represented in this year’s Grammy nominations. The Broadway production of Oklahoma!—which began at Bard and stars Patrick Vaill ’07—received a nomination for Best Musical Theater Album for the 2019 cast recording. The audio recording of Beastie Boys Book, containing stories about the late founding member Adam Yauch ’86, was nominated for Best Spoken Word Album. The Black Pumas, with Vince Chiarito ’08 on bass, received a nomination for Best New Artist. 

The collaborative work by Tanowitz and classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein—performed by Dinnerstein and Pam Tanowitz Dance—will have its New York premiere at the Joyce Theater on December 10.

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is pleased to announce that Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, has been selected as the recipient of the 2020 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of CCS Bard. For the past 21 years, the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence has celebrated and awarded the individual achievements of a distinguished curator whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive of exhibition-making today. The award reflects CCS Bard’s commitment to recognizing individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice. This year the award will be presented to Butler by artist Andrea Fraser at a gala celebration and dinner co-chaired by CCS Bard Board of Governors member Lonti Ebers and Chairman of the CCS Bard Board Martin Eisenberg, and will take place on April 7, 2020, at One Manhattan West, 395 9th Avenue, in New York City. Event location provided by Brookfield Properties with additional generous support from Lonti Ebers.

“Connie Butler represents the best of curating; independently minded, always curious, dedicated to artists and consistently bold in the scope of her exhibitions and choices of subject.  Her exhibitions are touchstones of curating in the United States—helping to redefine subjects and the institutions where she works.” —Tom Eccles, Executive Director, CCS Bard

The awardee is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. Past recipients include Harald Szeemann (1998), Marcia Tucker (1999), Kasper König (2000), Paul Schimmel (2001), Susanne Ghez (2002), Kynaston McShine (2003), Walter Hopps (2004), Kathy Halbreich and Mari Carmen Ramírez (2005), Lynne Cooke and Vasif Kortun (2006), Alanna Heiss (2007), Catherine David (2008), Okwui Enwezor (2009), Lucy Lippard (2010), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2011), Ann Goldstein (2012), Elisabeth Sussman (2013), Charles Esche (2014), Christine Tohme and Martha Wilson (2015), Thelma Golden (2016), Nicholas Serota (2017), Lia Gangitano (2018), and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2019).

“I am thrilled to receive the Audrey Irmas prize for curatorial excellence. The history of this award is truly a distinguished one and it is an honor to be among such incredible colleagues at this critical time in our field. Now more than ever our work matters and I continue to follow and support the work of artists and believe in the future of museums.” —Connie Butler

The 2020 award will once again be given under the name of patron Audrey Irmas, who has bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize of $25,000. Irmas is an emeritus board member of CCS Bard and an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award has been designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, and is based on his 2006 commission Bard Enter, conceived for the entrance to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.

Connie Butler is the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, where she has organized numerous exhibitions including the biennial of Los Angeles artists Made in L.A. (2014), Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth (2015) and Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space (2017). She also co-curated Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions which opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in April of 2018 and at the Hammer in October 2018; Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line, 2019 and Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence a retrospective exhibition which opened at the Hammer September 2019. From 2006 to 2013 she was The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she co-curated the first major Lygia Clark retrospective in the United States, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (2014); and co-curated On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010) and mounted Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, the first US retrospective of the artist’s career. Butler also organized the groundbreaking survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles where she was curator from 1996 to 2006.

The winners of the 2019 Concerto Competition were announced on Saturday, November 2, after the final round of performances at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Twenty-one students in the Bard College Conservatory of Music competed for the honor over a three-day period. This year’s winners are two undergraduates—Gitta Markó ’20, violin, who performed Concerto funebre by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and Yixin Wang ’23, guzheng, who performed Fragrance of Jasmine Blossoms by Zhanhao He—and a second-year student in the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy, who performed Shéhérazade by Maurice Ravel. The three winners will perform as soloists with the Conservatory Orchestra, The Orchestra Now, or the American Symphony Orchestra during the 2020–21 season.

You never know what you'll find in the Montgomery Place collection. The Curiosity Cabinet class, taught by Associate Professor of Art History Susan Merriam, meets regularly in the basement of the mansion at the Montgomery Place Campus to study some of the fascinating objects in the collection. Items include a mechanical cat, dueling pistols, and a chicken foot letter opener. The collection boasts well over 8,000 objects.

Students have been researching objects that illuminate the historical phenomenon of the curiosity cabinet. These collections of oddities, as small as a box or as large as a room, are precursors to the modern museum. In class on Tuesday, November 5, students gave presentations on their research, discussing such themes as shifting colonial structures in the era of the objects, the romanticism of nature and early American identity, and Victorian death culture.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, fabulous shells, valuable oil paintings, and exquisitely carved ivory pieces shared display space with oddly shaped vegetables, primitively taxidermied animals, and an array of other oddities in curiosity cabinets. Until relatively recently, scholars believed that the cabinets were merely eccentric exercises in the appreciation of peculiar or marvelous things. Recent research, however, has shown that the collections constitute a premodern system of classifying objects and an important step in the emergence of our modern taxonomic systems.

This course analyzes the emergence of the cabinets, the collecting practices that sustained them, the relationship between colonization and the cabinets, the curiosity aesthetic, and the role the cabinets played in the history of science. The main project for the course is to conceptualize and research a curiosity cabinet exhibition featuring objects from Montgomery Place. At least half of the classes during the semester meet at Montgomery Place, where students become familiar with the collections, learn about collections management, and do original research.

The exhibition of Montgomery Place objects and student research will take place at Stevenson Library over the winter, with an opening reception on December 10 from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
 

In “Evolution and Persistence: Bacewicz and Her Legacy,” Bard Music West “ensured that Bacewicz’s legacy continues to burn brightly.” Founded by Bard alumnae Allegra Chapman and Laura Gaynon, the organization presents an annual festival that endeavors to make 20th-century music relatable, in part by providing adequate context about the life and work of a single composer. This year’s festival presented three programs that illuminated the work of Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz.

The soprano and Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna Julia Bullock is on the verge of an unconventional career.

The Television Academy has honored Boris FX, the leading developer of visual effects plugins and applications, with three Engineering Emmy Awards. The Boris FX products Sapphire, Mocha Pro, and Silhouette have each been recognized for their technical achievements and contribution to the world of television. Bardian Ross Shain is the chief product officer for Mocha, and he accepted the award at the 71st Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening, October 23, 2019, at the JW Marriott Hotel Los Angeles. 

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and the Human Rights Project announced today that Turkish sociologist, activist, and architectural theorist Pelin Tan has been selected as the sixth recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Her appointment coincides with the generous renewal by the Keith Haring Foundation of the five year-grant supporting the Fellowship, an annual award for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at CCS Bard and the Human Rights Project at Bard College. Tan’s appointment marks the beginning of the Fellowship’s second phase, and reaffirms the shared commitment of the College and the Foundation both to exploring the interaction between political engagement and artistic practices and to bringing leading practitioners from around the world into Bard's classrooms.

“The Keith Haring Fellowship brings some of today's most incisive and engaged voices to Bard.  This innovative, cross-disciplinary, fellowship provides for research, teaching and production of new ideas among the undergraduate and graduate programs,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

Pelin Tan's current research concerns political movements that focus on climate justice, landscape, agriculture, and indigeneity, and particularly activist projects that put interactions with the non-human world at the forefront of their practice. She asks about how our concepts of justice and rights can be extended to landscape and territory, and about the role that critical artistic and architectural interventions can play in making these claims. She also continues to explore, and experiment with, alternative modes of pedagogy, new modes of teaching that work from the bottom up to challenge and transform the institutions of art and design education.   

Her practice combines scholarship, curating, and artistic and architectural creation. She was Associate Professor and Vice-Dean of the Architecture Faculty at Mardin Artuklu University in Turkey from 2013-2017, and has held visiting fellowship and research positions around the  world, from Hong Kong to Cyprus. Most recently she curated the Gardentopia: Cosmos of Ecologies project, in Matera, Italy, a program of European Cultural Capital 2019.

"Throughout her career, the work that Pelin Tan calls 'action research' has demonstrated that the borders between scholarship, activism, and creation can and must be transgressed if we want to pursue justice in this world. In this way, Pelin is an artist very much in the spirit of Keith Haring," said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Project.

Tan will take up her one-year appointment in September 2019, and spend the spring semester of 2020 teaching at the College. She succeeds the artist and curator Tiona Nekkia McClodden, curator Galit Eilat, architects Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, the artist and curator Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and the first recipient, artist Jeanne van Heeswijk.
 

Avallone’s 2019 Bettie Page Halloween Special is “a tribute to Bard,” he writes. The plot unfolds at “Annandale College” in upstate New York, where settings and characters are modeled on Avallone’s memories of Bard.

Sillman’s The Shape of Shape at the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art in New York City is “among the most valuable of the inaugural shows.” Sillman “ranges throughout the collection, across media, generations and styles, seeking out overlooked or excluded artists and unfamiliar works. Her effort parallels the approaches at work in the permanent collection galleries, but reflects a relatively robust visual appetite — the artist’s unfettered eye — that the museum needs more of.  The show’s dense installation encourages surprising connections …”
 

Anne Bogart—Obie Award–winning director, Bard alumna, and regular director of Bard SummerScape productions—answers five questions about her work.

Bard professor and acclaimed photographer Stephen Shore was honored with The 2019 Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art at the annual Gala Awards ceremony on Tuesday, October 22 at Carnegie Hall in New York. The awards are part of the Lucie Foundation’s mission to honor master photographers, discover and cultivate emerging talent, and promote the appreciation of photography worldwide. Since 2003, the foundation has paid tribute to more than 135 of the most important figures in contemporary photography through the Lucie Awards.

Professor Shore’s work has been widely published and exhibited for the past 45 years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, 40 years earlier. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. More than 25 books have been published of Professor Shore’s photographs. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.

Carolyn Lazard’s cross-disciplinary practice centers on the experiences of disability and accessibility, appropriating existing materials and, in the artist’s words, “the labor of others as a structural element of the work.” The annual Pew Fellowships provide awards of $75,000 to individual artists working in visual art, literature, dance, and theater.

In addition to a solo turn at London’s Pilar Corrias Gallery, Self is included in the group show Rock My Soul at Victoria Miro, which features works by renowned black women artists Sonia Boyce, Frida Orupabo, Howardena Pindell, and Betye Saar, among others. Through November 2.

In its review of the Freehand New York, Business Insider points to the hotel’s abundant art—commissioned from students and alumni/ae of Bard College for its public spaces, corridors, and all 395 guest rooms—as its not-to-be-missed feature. “Take time to explore,” their critic writes, “and appreciate the fact that you’re practically living in a gallery.”

New Faculty Chairs and Distinguished Professorships include Susan Aberth in Art History, Valeria Luiselli in Written Arts, Kelly Reichardt in Film and Electronic Arts, and An-My Lê in Photography

Bard College has appointed four new chairs and distinguished professorships across disciplines this fall. In the Division of the Arts’ Art History and Visual Culture Program, Susan Aberth has been named Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History. This chair was formerly held by Jean French. In the Division of Languages and Literature’s Written Arts Program, Valeria Luiselli has been named Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. In the Division of the Arts’ Film and Electronic Arts Program, Kelly Reichardt has been named S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence. In the Division of the Arts’ Photography Program, An-My Lê has been named Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts. This chair was formerly held by Peter Hutton.

Susan Aberth is an art historian whose area of specialization is surrealism in Latin America. Aberth’s teaching interests focus on Latin American art, African art, Islamic art, and other religious art and practices. Additional interests include African religious practices in the Americas, and the art and iconography of Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and the occult. In addition to her 2004 book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries), she has contributed to Seeking the Marvelous: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (Fulgur Press, 2020), Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos mágicos (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Black Mirror, and the Journal of Surrealism of the Americas. She received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles; MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Aberth has been at Bard since 2000.

Valeria Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. A 2019 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is the author of the novels Lost Children Archive (2019); The Story of My Teeth (2015), named Best Book in Fiction by the Los Angeles Times and one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and Faces in the Crowd (2014), for which she received a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” prize, among other honors. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Question, a nonfiction work published in 2017, won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle and Kirkus Prize finalist. Other nonfiction publications include “Maps of Harlem,” in Where You Are; and Sidewalks, a collection of essays that was named one of the 10 best books of 2014 by New York. Recent journal, newspaper, and radio work has appeared in the New York Times (“The Littlest Don Quixotes versus the World”), Guardian (“Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry”), Outlook Interview Series, BBC World Services (“Undocumented Central American Minors”), Harper’s Trump special (“Terrorist and Alien”), and NPR’s This American Life (“The Questionnaire”), among others. Honors also include an Art for Justice Fellowship (2018–19) and residencies at Under the Volcano, USA-Mexico; Poets House, New York City; and Castello di Fosdinovo, Italy. She previously taught at Hofstra University, City College, the New York University MFA Writing Program in Paris, and Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. Luiselli founded the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association at Hofstra in 2015, a program that offers continuous support to immigrant and refugee teens through one-on-one English classes, soccer games, and civil rights education. She is a member of PEN America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She received her BA from UNAM in Mexico, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. She has been at Bard since 2019.

Kelly Reichardt is a filmmaker whose latest film, Certain Women—starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone—premiered in 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival and won the top award at the London Film Festival. Her other films include: Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy (2006), and River of Grass (1994). Her film First Cow is currently in postproduction. Reichardt has received the United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at the Whitney Biennial (2012), Film Forum, Cannes Film Festival in “un certain regard,” Venice International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and BFI London Film Festival. She has had retrospectives at the Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the Moving Image, Walker Art Center, and American Cinematheque Los Angeles. Reichardt received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University. She has taught at Bard College since 2006.

An-My Lê is a photographer who was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960, but left that country during the final year of the war in 1975 and subsequently found a home as a political refugee in the United States. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1993. Her film and photography examine the effects and representation of war and have included the documentation of (and participation in) Vietnam War reenactments in South Carolina. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, and has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and MoMA PS1. An-My has been teaching at Bard since 1999.

Blake, whose work explores the fluidity of race and gender, has long been an accumulator as much as a creator. “There’s a particular way that culture is articulated in museums and galleries,” Blake says, “but then there’s another way that we all experience it through the stuff that we put in our houses.” It’s no surprise, then, that the artist’s one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where they have lived for the past 17 years, is crammed floor-to-ceiling with kitschy novelties and personal totems.