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In Seismic Belt, “Boshnack writes with purpose and passion, with an uncanny way of expressing a narrative. She is a musician, a composer, a feminist, an activist, and most certainly, a storyteller.”

The exhibition of more than 65 works includes abstract geometric paintings, punching bags, sculptures, and video.

Several Bardians are among the 75 artists whose work was chosen for this year’s Whitney Biennial. Congratulations to Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence, and Tiona McClodden, Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism, as well as Bard College alumni/ae Adam Khalil ’14, Zack Khalil ’11, Carolyn Lazard ’10, and Lucas Blalock ’02; and Bard MFA alumni/ae Kyle Thurman ‘16, Christine Sun Kim ‘13, Martine Syms ‘18 and Madeline Hollander ‘19.

The two-day conference, “Tradition and Discovery: Teaching Chinese Music in the West,” includes guest speakers and concerts featuring performances by celebrated pipa virtuoso Wu Man and the Chinese instrument majors of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Bard College: The Montgomery Place Campus announces three spring series of events celebrating the history and arts of one of the Hudson Valley’s esteemed historic estates. Toward an Ethical Imagination: Gilsonfest, Spring Salon Series on Music of the Gilded Age, and The Gilded Garden: Historic Ornament in the Landscape at Montgomery Place are presented at Montgomery Place and locations in Red Hook, New York, beginning on Sunday, March 10 and culminating on Memorial Day weekend, May 24–27. Most of the events are free and open to the public. For reservations and more information go to bard.edu/montgomeryplace.

Toward an Ethical Imagination: Gilsonfest

Toward an Ethical Imagination: Gilsonfest is a collaboration between Bard College, Historic Red Hook, Dutchess County Historical Society, and Red Hook Quilters focusing on the life of Montgomery Place gardener Alexander Gilson, an African American slave, who after being freed stayed on as head gardener and eventually opened his own nursery business.

The program kicks off on Sunday, March 10 at 3 p.m. with a lecture, “A People’s History: Oral Histories and Inclusion,” by Susan Merriam, Associate Professor of Art History at Bard College, at the Elmendorph Inn, Red Hook, New York.

On Friday, May 24 at 11:30 am the program continues with the opening of an exhibition, Alexander Gilson: From Property to Property Owner, at the Historic Red Hook Annex, Cherry Street, Red Hook. It includes an exhibition by students in a Bard College class about Alexander Gilson, a quilting presentation by the Red Hook Quilters, and a presentation on historic garden artifacts and plants.

There will be a public signage dedication in honor of the life of Alexander Gilson on Friday, May 24 at 1 pm at the Montgomery Place Visitor Center. Following the dedication, there will be a gathering at the Montgomery Place Greenhouse tool room to celebrate an adjunct exhibition on Alexander Gilson.

The program concludes on Sunday, May 26, at 2 pm with the lecture “History of Memorial Day” by Myra Young Armstead, Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies at Bard College. This will be presented at the Montgomery Place Coach House, followed by refreshments on the Mansion House north porch.

Events are free and open to the public and no registration is required. For more information, go to bard.edu/montgomeryplace.

Funding for Toward an Ethical Imagination: Gilsonfest is provided by The Lumina Foundation.

Spring Salon Series on Music of the Gilded Age

Hosted in partnership with Hudson River Heritage and coproduced and curated by Christopher Brellochs.

Saturday, May 11, 3 pm
Concert: “The Musical Life of Cora Livingston Barton and Her Husband Thomas Barton at Montgomery Place,” a recital with Christopher Brellochs, saxophone and Rita Costanzi, harp

Montgomery Place Mansion House Parlor. Admission: $25, limited to 40 seats. For more information and to purchase tickets for this event, please go to hudsonriverheritage.org.

Cora Livingston Barton and her husband Thomas Barton expanded the Montgomery Place estate to better capture the Romantic sensibilities of the time; music filled the house and the farming operations become more separated from the “pleasure gardens.” It was 1860 and the beginning of the Gilded Age; relatives such as Major General Richard Delafield, who was stationed at West Point, inspired the dedication of musical compositions such as “Florida March” and “Manassas March.” This performance will be a unique opportunity to hear these forgotten gems and experience music at Montgomery Place like Cora and Thomas did more than 150 years ago.

PROGRAM
Florida March
Manassas March
Berceuse, Op. 16 (1879)         Gabriel FAURÉ (1845–1924)
The Carnival of the Animals: The Swan (1886)        Camille SAINT-SAËNS (1835–1921)
Hommage a Bellini     Antonio PASCULLI (1842–1924)
Meditation, Op.18 (1898)       Gabriel VERDALLE (1845–1915)
Introduction, Theme, and Variations (1879)  Caryl FLORIO (1843–1920)

Saturday, May 18, 3 pm
Lecture: “Music of the Gilded Age in the Hudson Valley”
Montgomery Place Mansion House Parlor; tickets are $25. The concert is limited to 40 seats. For more information and to purchase tickets for this event, please go to hudsonriverheritage.org.

Dutchess Community College Associate Professor Christopher Brellochs, who has been presenting this beautiful music in authentic historical settings, will discuss the role and importance of music during the Hudson Valley Gilded Age.

Sunday, May 26 at 4 pm
“The Gardener of Montgomery Place and the Composer of Newburgh, New York,” an outdoor saxophone quartet performance
Montgomery Place North Porch; free and open to the public. Attendees are requested to bring their own lawn chairs and/or blankets. In the event of rain, the concert will take place in the historic Montgomery Place Coach House, and be limited to the first 50 attendees.

During the early 19th century, the gardener at Montgomery Place was an African American slave named Alexander Gilson, who, after being freed, stayed on to continue as head gardener. He eventually opened his own nursery business. Downriver in Newburgh, New York, composer Ulysses J. Alsdorf, whose grandfather was freed by the Manumission Act of New York State on July 4, 1827, had a similar life journey. The Alsdorfs were entrepreneurs, involved in everything from catering to dance schools, and became prominent citizens of the thriving Hudson Valley City of Newburgh. Ulysses J. Alsdorf’s music was used to celebrate the Newburgh portion of the 1909 Henry Hudson–Robert Fulton Celebration, when a steamboat traveled from Manhattan to Albany, stopping in Newburgh. His music will do the same for this event, 110 years later.

Christopher Brellochs, soprano saxophone
Eric Aweh, alto saxophone
Joe North, tenor saxophone
Wayne Tice, baritone saxophone

PROGRAM
Selections by Ulysses J. Alsdorf (1872-1952) will include:
Ramsdell Park March (1897)
In College Colors (1900)
Dear Hudson-Fulton Days (1908)
Boom, Boom, Boom It Up! (1908)

Additional selections by:
Quatuor pour saxophones (1861)       Jean-Baptiste MOHR (1823–1891)
Quatuor pour saxophones (1863)       Léon KREUTZER (1817–1868)
Premier Quatuor (published 1888)     Louis MAYEUR (1837–1894)
Quartette (Allegro de Concert) (1879)           Caryl FLORIO (1843–1920)

Funding for the Montgomery Place 2019 Spring Salon Series on Music of the Gilded Age is provided by Charles and Valerie Jacob.

The Gilded Garden: Historic Ornament in the Landscape at Montgomery Place

A Garden Party Exhibition Opening

Produced in partnership with and curated by Barbara Israel and her staff from Barbara Israel Garden Antiques.

Friday, May 24, 4 pm
Opening will take place in the Ellipse Garden, located in front of the Greenhouse
The gardens at Montgomery Place once featured decorative garden ornaments and furniture alongside the living plants. During the mid-1800s, renowned architect Alexander Jackson Davis was hired to redesign the mansion as well as consult on the surrounding grounds. He introduced the property owners, Louise Livingston and her daughter Cora and son-in-law Thomas Barton, to landscape designer and writer Andrew Jackson Downing, who designed the gardens surrounding the jewel box–like conservatory directly across from the mansion. It was the style of the time to adorn the grounds with a lavish display of garden ornaments, including cast iron, terra-cotta, and marble objects. Displaying a wide-ranging mix of styles, these pieces were acquired from European and American manufacturers. Elaborate arbors and columnar supports of wirework held up climbing vines. Urns as large as 15 feet wide served as centerpieces for flower beds edged by elaborate rococo revival border tiles of terra-cotta. Many of the garden ornaments pictured in early photographs of the conservatory survive in the museum’s collection. The garden was considered a domestic space, allowing the confines of the home to extend into the landscape. The interior decoration of conservatories followed suit. Designed to be beautiful inside as well as outside, these glasshouses typically featured statuary, furniture, urns, potted plants, and hanging baskets. Program is free and open to the public.

Funding provided by the A. C. Israel Foundation and Plymouth Hill Foundation.

In conjunction with the above programs and Commencement activities, the Montgomery Place Mansion House will be open for viewing on Saturday, May 25 from 10:30 am to 1 pm and on Sunday, May 26 from 1:30 to 4 pm. For more information go to: bard.edu/montgomeryplace.
 

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Bard College: The Montgomery Place Campus, a 380-acre estate adjacent to the main Bard College campus and overlooking the Hudson River, is a designated National Historic Landmark set amid rolling lawns, woodlands, and gardens, against the spectacular backdrop of the Catskill Mountains. Renowned architects, landscape designers, and horticulturists worked to create an elegant and inspiring country estate consisting of a mansion, farm, orchards, farmhouse, and other smaller buildings. The Montgomery Place estate was owned by members of the Livingston family from 1802 until the 1980s. In 1986, Livingston heir John Dennis Delafield transferred the estate to Historic Hudson Valley, in whose hands it remained until 2016, when Bard College acquired the property.
 

The Bard College Conservatory Orchestra performs at The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts’s Sosnoff Theater on Saturday, March 9. The performance features  Mark Russell Smith, guest conductor, and five-time Grammy Award–winner soprano Dawn Upshaw in a program that includes Samuel Barber’s Symphony in One Movement, Op. 9; Oliver Knussen’s Requiem—Songs for Sue; and Mussorgsky/Ravel’s Pictures at an Exhibition. The Conservatory Orchestra performs Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 at the Fisher Center on May 10 and May 12, conducted by Leon Botstein, music director, with Eve Gigliotti, mezzo-soprano, the Bard College Chamber Singers, and the Bard Festival Chorale.

BGC is one of 10 NYC institutions hosting the event, in which attendees create Wikipedia entries for female and nonbinary artists.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold—a Viennese prodigy who fled the Nazis and moved to Hollywood, where his lush film scores provided the soundtracks for Errol Flynn’s finest swashbuckling—will be the focus of the 2019 Bard Music Festival.

Artist Pfaff discusses the importance of iconography, the inspiration she draws from New York’s Chinatown, and the role of being a woman in a “macho” space.

Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, and one of America’s most significant living composers, will receive the award at the League’s 74th National Conference in Nashville, June 3–5, 2019.

The Times interviews Damon Daunno and Amber Gray, stars of the original Bard SummerScape production. Daunno is reprising his role as Curly for the play’s Broadway run.

Includes Bard Music Festival’s 30th anniversary season, “Korngold and His World,” American premiere of Korngold’s grand opera The Miracle of Heliane, Daniel Fish’s lauded staging of Michael Gordon’s Acquanetta, and the world premiere of Grace and Mercy by choreographer Ronald K. Brown, with live music from Meshell Ndegeocello and others

This summer’s 16th annual Bard SummerScape festival comprises more than seven weeks of music, opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, centered around the 30th anniversary season of the Bard Music Festival, “Korngold and His World.” This intensive examination of the life and times of Erich Wolfgang Korngold – the Viennese prodigy whose lush Romanticism would come to define the quintessential Hollywood sound – features themed concerts and panel discussions, together with a film series exploring “Korngold and the Poetry of Cinema,” and the long overdue American premiere of the grand opera that the composer considered his masterpiece, The Miracle of Heliane (“Das Wunder der Heliane”), in a fully staged new production by German director Christian Räth. To complement these offerings, Daniel Fish’s acclaimed staging of Michael Gordon’s Acquanetta provides an alternative look at Hollywood’s Golden Age, and Evidence, A Dance Company makes its festival debut with the world premiere of Grace and Mercy, a new SummerScape commission from choreographer and company founder Ronald K. Brown, with live music from Meshell Ndegeocello, Peven Everett, and Gordon Chambers. Cabaret and jazz highlight a generous program of events in Bard’s authentic and sensationally popular Belgian Spiegeltent. Taking place between June 29 and August 18 in the Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s picturesque Hudson Valley campus, SummerScape 2019 once again makes for a full “seven weeks of cultural delight” (International Herald Tribune). London’s Times Literary Supplement lauds Bard SummerScape as “the most intellectually ambitious of America’s summer music festivals,” while Bloomberg News calls it “the smartest mix of events within driving distance of New York.” Travel and Leisure reports, “Gehry’s acclaimed concert hall provides a spectacular venue for innovative fare.” The New York Times calls SummerScape “a hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure,” Newsday finds it “brave and brainy,” Musical America judges it “awesomely intensive,” and the New York Post observes, “It’s hard not to find something to like, and it’s even harder to beat the setting.” Time Out New York, naming the festival one of “New York’s 20 coolest out-of-town spots,” declares: “The experience of entering the Fisher Center and encountering something totally new is unforgettable and enriching.”

The exhibition, on view through July 7, features materials collected by designer Jan Tschichold and created by the movement’s many members, including El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, and László Moholy-Nagy.

“I believe it is important for all students—of all instruments and from all countries—to open their ears and minds to the sounds and traditions and musical ideas of other cultures.”

CCS Bard presents 14 exhibitions with more than 40 artists, offering a wide-ranging museum presentation organized by the graduating class of the Masters of Arts Curatorial Program. On view April 7–May 26.

The Lab for Teen Thinkers is a public humanities program that prepares rising juniors and seniors for future academic and professional success through civic development, mentoring, and internships.

Bard Graduate Center’s Lab for Teen Thinkers, which launched in the summer of 2017, is a public humanities program that prepares rising juniors and seniors for future academic and professional success through civic development, mentoring, and internship opportunities. During the five-week summer course, participants have access to the BGC study collection and its library with over 55,000 volumes. Offering a behind-the-scenes look at how New York City museums function, the program gives teens the unique opportunity to study objects and artifacts with a variety of scholars, curators, and graduate students working in the fields of material culture, decorative arts, and design history. The teens’ research culminates with an object biography, oral presentations, and dynamic digital projects created in the Media Lab, that are shared with the BGC community. 

In the summer of 2018, Teen Thinkers conducted independent research projects on the theme, Votive Objects and the Everyday. Their research was informed by the exhibition Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place, which explored the things that humans choose to offer in their votive transactions. 

BGC talked with two of this year’s participants, Alex Szyperek, a junior at Bard High School Early College Queens, and Sergio Maldonado, a senior at DreamYard Preparatory High School, who offered their thoughts on the program.

Read the full story on the BGC website
 

The Oklahoma! revival that began at Bard SummerScape in 2015 will head to Broadway in March. For every visible gun onstage, a donation will be made to a nonprofit working to end gun violence.

“Despite the uncertainty that rising seas and coastal erosion bring to the region,” Hanusik writes, “hope persists.”