News

Allegra Chapman ’10 and Laura Gaynon are “succeeding against the odds and enriching the [Bay] area with an ambitious new arts event”—Bard Music West.

BGC’s Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place demonstrates that “art is alive and interactive.” The exhibition catalogue is among the best art books of the year.

Julia Bullock MM ’11, one of opera’s fastest-rising stars and 2018–19 MetLiveArts artist in residence, is using her artistic platform for social activism, to glorious effect.

Multimedia artist Julia Christensen took video cameras to Lake Erie to document the ice that keeps the lake healthy—and what its absence could mean in the future.

The New York Times named Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets at Bard the best dance production of 2018, calling it “the most sublime new work of dance theater this year.”

Multiple Grammy Award–winning vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant returns to the Fisher Center for a special winter concert on December 22, accompanied by Franco-American pianist Dan Tepfer.

An intimately staged and darkly revisionist revival of Oklahoma! that enjoyed a critically acclaimed and sold-out Off Broadway run will transfer to Broadway this season.

The production, which originated in 2015 at Bard College’s SummerScape festival and then was staged this fall at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, will begin previews on March 19 and open on April 7 at Circle in the Square, which is the only theater-in-the-round on Broadway. Read the full story in the New York Times.

Bard's Oklahoma! has been lauded as one of the top theater productions of 2018. Time magazine calls Oklahoma! the best play of the year—a “provocative” new take on the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic. The production also made best theater lists from the New York Times and Vulture. Time writes, “The painfully relevant production lands at the exact right moment in a country where demonization of immigrants and outsiders is on the rise and mass shootings are an everyday occurrence.”
 

In this interview, Distinguished Professor of Literature Nuruddin Farah discusses his new novel about a Somali exile living in Norway whose son turns to Islamic extremism.

Bard SummerScape's production of Oklahoma!, widely acclaimed as one of the year's best, heads to the Circle in the Square Theatre following a highly touted run at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co. (1983-2004) at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College is lauded as one of the best exhibitions of the year.

Artforum’s Year in Review highlights The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co. (1983–2004) at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College. Art in America publishes a review and an editor’s letter lauding the exhibition. Bookforum lists the exhibition catalogue among the best art books of the season.

Curated by Jeannine Tang, Ann E. Butler, and Lia Gangitano, The Conditions of Being Art is the first exhibition in the United States to examine the shared histories, art, and programming activities of Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co., Colin de Land Fine Art. The exhibition features works of art shown at or associated with these New York galleries by over 40 artists. The show opened in June and closes this Friday, December 14.

David Rimanelli writes on the Bard exhibition in Artforum’s Year in Review issue, listing it among the Best of 2018. Hearn and de Land were “explorers,” he observes, not professionals, “cosmonauts of the art world and the world of art.” Their influential gallery practices were more focused on bringing important artists to light rather than making a commercial success. Rimanelli concludes, “The two of them were both too much of their time and too singular in themselves for us to ever expect to see their likes again.” View selections from Artforum here (PDF).

In the Artforum Best of 2018 Artists’ Artists section, Alex Carver chooses The Conditions of Being Art for his pick of the year. “In staging this inspiring show,” he observes, “the curators ... have presented a poetic constellation of concept-rich artworks.”

“The shifting sands of the 1980s and ’90s thus make ‘The Conditions of Being Art’ ... an intriguing object of study,” writes Domenick Ammirati in his review for the December issue of Art in America, “with the milieux of the Hearn/de Land scenes unfolding at a peculiar, significant moment of transition in perceptions of the past, present, and future.... The curators, Jeannine Tang, Ann E. Butler, and Lia Gangitano, have let the diversity of works in their subjects’ histories live, even as they tailor the installation to present clear points.”

In the editor’s letter for this month’s Art in America, William S. Smith notes that Hearn’s and de Land’s galleries exhibited work that was “prescient in its critique of American power.”

Bookforum also listed the exhibition catalogue for The Conditions of Being Art among the most outstanding art books of the season in a section called Artful Volumes, in which Bookforum contributors selected their favorite works.
 

These days—despite longstanding clichés about art and excess—the creative impulse can actually be more closely tied to asceticism, Mason writes.

Gaines was awarded the grant for his book Future Ruins: The Art of Abstractive Democracy, which examines the unmooring of representation in early 21st-century America.

Inspired by bodybuilders posing, the video features “a set of four dancers flexing and strutting together” along the garden’s colonnade.

New Annandale House, the two-story multipurpose media studio that houses the Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College, has won a 2018 New York Design Gold Award from DRIVENxDESIGN, which represents 75,000 members, 5,000 brands, and 1,500 studios, and celebrates the role of design in enriching the human experience.

Located at the intersection of Woods Avenue and Annandale Road near the center of Bard’s main campus, New Annandale House is a 945-square-foot building made of four 40-by-8-foot Corten steel shipping containers, originally manufactured in Hong Kong in 2003. The building, installed in 2017, was designed by Maziar Behrooz of MB Architecture in Manhattan and fabricated by SnapSpace Solutions in Brewer, Maine. The ends of the containers were transformed into 8-by-8-foot glass walls. The main floor is a double-height space with an adjoining 20-by-8-foot space. Designed with versatility and flow in mind, the main classroom becomes an indoor/outdoor space with a 16-foot garage door opening onto an adjacent outdoor gathering space on the south side.

“This beautiful building has been an inspirational home for the work we do at the Center for Experimental Humanities,” says Maria Sachiko Cecire, assistant professor of literature and coordinator of experimental humanities at Bard. “It echoes our own values in its flexibility, foundations in social consciousness, and balance of the classic and cutting-edge. We have loved experimenting with its many possibilities as we’ve used it for digital workshops, interdisciplinary student presentations, VR demos, musical performances, art installations, miniconferences, a space for public-facing local history research, and more.”

An advisory panel praised New Annandale House as an exemplary project in DRIVENxDESIGN’s Public and Institutional category, which celebrates the process of planning, designing, and constructing form and space that reflect functional, technical, social, and aesthetic considerations.

Center for Experimental Humanities at Bard College
How does technology mediate what it means to be human? The Experimental Humanities (EH) concentration is Bard’s liberal arts–driven answer to the digital humanities. Digital humanities is an evolving field that typically employs digital tools and research methods to investigate humanities subjects. In addition, EH engages with media and technology forms from across historical periods, combining experimental research methods with critical thinking about how such forms function as a part of cultural, social, and political inquiry. We encourage the reconsideration of older media in light of today’s technologies and look ahead to the developments on the horizon. The Center for Experimental Humanities at New Annandale House hosts regular EH events, workshops, and meetings for EH projects and courses. Members of the Bard community can also apply to reserve the downstairs space for other activities, especially those that share EH’s interests in how technology and media intersect with the arts, humanities, and culture. eh.bard.edu

For more information: drivenxdesign.com/NYC18/project.asp?ID=17813

New Annandale House, the two-story multipurpose media studio that houses the Bard College Center for Experimental Humanities, has won a New York Design Gold Award from DRIVENxDESIGN.

One of New York City’s most exciting young theater companies, New Saloon, founded by three Bard alumni, returns to Bard with their kaleidoscopic adaptation of Uncle Vanya.

The Bard College Conservatory Orchestra performs at the Fisher Center on Saturday, December 1, at 8:00 p.m. with guest conductor Xian Zhang.

Interdisciplinary artist Alisha Wormsley MFA ‘19, whose work is inspired by the collective memory of African American culture, will receive a $15,000 prize with the award.

Eva LeWitt ‘07 talks about studying sculpture with Judy Pfaff at Bard, founding an artists’ residency in Italy, and how art is in her DNA.