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New York Times cochief art critic Holland Cotter names CCS Bard’s exhibition Indian Theater and An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers among his picks for the best art of 2023. “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art and Self-Determination Since 1969 at the Hessel Museum, Bard College, was, hands down, the most stimulatingly inventive contemporary group show I saw this year,” writes Cotter about the large-scale exhibition curated by CCS Bard Fellow in Indigenous Curatorial Studies Candice Hopkins. Cotter calls the work of photographer An-My Lê, who is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard, “lucid,” and notes that the main subject of Lê’s Museum of Modern Art survey, on view through March 9, is “war as a perpetual reality, nascent or active.”

See the Best Art of 2023 from the New York Times

Read the New York Times Review of Indian Theater

Read the New York Times Review of An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers
 

Professor Emeritus of Photography Larry Fink—who joined the faculty in 1988 and taught at Bard for three decades—has died at the age of 82. Professor Fink is known for his frank photographs of New York high society and Hollywood stars, as well as his intimate images of rural America. “He treated the classroom like it was the Village Vanguard,” Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91 tells the New York Times. “It was completely improvisatory. A critique would involve mouth trumpet sounds, his own poetic raps and scat singing; maybe at some point he’d pull out his harmonica. On the one hand, it kneecapped the whole idea of art education, and on the other, if you were listening, it was completely profound.” 

“He adjusted the emotional temperature in any room,” writes Lucy Sante, who taught writing and photography at Bard for nearly 25 years, for Vanity Fair. “He was countrified, with his suspenders, his work boots, his wild grin and honking laugh, his utter disregard for decorum, but he had the chutzpah of a city boy and was so sophisticated he had no need to prove it. It further enhances any of his pictures to imagine Larry in the act of taking them.”

Mr. Fink was the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships, in 1976 and 1979. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many other institutions in the United States and abroad. He worked on assignment for numerous publications, including Manhattan, Inc., Vanity Fair, and the New York Times, and was the author of 12 books.

Further Reading

Larry Fink, Whose Photographs Were ‘Political, Not Polemical,’ Dies at 82 (New York Times)

A Fond Farewell to Photographer Larry Fink, 82 (Professor Sante for Vanity Fair)

In Memoriam: Bard Remembers the Life of Professor Larry Fink (from President Botstein)
 

Isabel Ahlam Ahmed ’25, a Bard College student majoring jointly in film production and human rights, has received a scholarship from Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) for the spring 2024 semester. Ahmed is one of 66 undergraduates from around the country selected by 88 volunteer reviewers who scored 1,466 applications over three review phases, and with FEA's American University in Cairo (AUC) Access Partner Scholarship, she will attend AUC via the longstanding tuition exchange between AUC and Bard.

“As a first generation college student, I feel extremely proud and honored to be one of 66 people receiving an FEA scholarship,” Ahmed said. “For many students like me, the financial burden is a huge reason we are afraid to even consider going abroad, so receiving the FEA allows me to fully experience my excitement and plans. In addition to this, it also provides an FEA community of scholars and alumni to connect with, which has already made this process feel better supported, and I know it will feel even better to have access to this community while studying in Cairo.”

The Fund for Education Abroad supports US students with financial need who are traditionally underrepresented in study abroad. FEA aims to make life-changing, international experiences accessible to all by supporting students of color, community college, and first-generation college students. Of the 66 scholars awarded this application cycle, 90% identify as students of color and 39% identify as LGBTQ+. Males make up 32% of Spring 2024 Scholars; female, 64%; and non-binary, 4.5%. Additionally, 88% are first-generation college students, 30% are current or former community college students, and 67% have never left the US.

Since its inception in 2010, FEA has awarded more than $3.4 million in scholarships to more than 1,090 scholars, and supports students before, during, and after their study abroad experience with scholarships and programming.

“We are grateful to all of FEA’s supporters, donors, and partners who make study abroad scholarships possible,” said Angela Schaffer, the FEA executive director. “FEA is excited to be a part of the Spring 2024 Scholars’ international education journeys.”

For W magazine, Camille Okhio interviewed Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson about representing the United States in a solo exhibition at the upcoming Venice Biennale in 2024, his global journey as an Indigenous artist of Cherokee and Choctaw lineage, and his work. “Our motto in the Choctaw is self-determination,” says Gibson. “After college, my chief said to me, ‘You would be more effective out in the world; you don’t need to come back here. You are fulfilling what I have said our tribe will do one day if you go out and you are successful.’ I hope, through my practice, that I’m letting Indigenous people know they can move around the world freely.” Asked what has been left out of his narrative, Gibson answers: “The work is not beautiful for beauty’s sake. The beauty is a strategy.” 

Samantha Simon ’26, a Bard student majoring in art history and visual culture, has been named as one of the members of the National Humanities Center’s 2023–24 Leadership Council. As a member of the council, which was established to help prepare a select group of students with humanities-based leadership skills, Simon will join 31 other students from around the US in a unique series of interactive experiences with humanities scholars and leaders.

Nominated by faculty from colleges and universities across the country, the student council members will receive professional development and mentoring from leading scholars and other humanities professionals as well as research support, opportunities for networking, and access to National Humanities Center programming and expertise. In round tables and discussion sessions, they will explore the essential importance of humanistic perspectives in addressing the concerns of contemporary society, and may focus on specific projects and engagement with the communities at their institutions.

“The exceptional students selected for the council this year are pursuing an assortment of majors, from art history to biochemistry to Middle Eastern studies, but they all share a deep interest and passion for the humanities,” said Jacqueline Kellish, the National Humanities Center’s director of public engagement. “We are looking forward to working with these brilliant young people in the coming months and exploring with them the ways that their humanities knowledge and training can help them forge successful careers and make a difference in their communities and beyond.”

The National Humanities Center is a private, nonprofit organization, and the only independent institute dedicated exclusively to advanced study in all areas of the humanities. Through public engagement intimately linked to its scholarly and educational programs, the center promotes understanding of the humanities and advocates for their foundational role in a democratic society.

Since its original publication in Mexico in 1955, Juan Rulfo’s sparse and haunting novel Pedro Páramo “has cast an uncanny spell on writers,” famously inspiring Gabriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude—yet for English-speaking readers it “remains something of a best-kept secret, a book that people either cherish or have never heard of,” writes Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. “The book shows its readers how to read all over again, the same way The Waste Land or Ulysses does, by bending the rules of literature so skillfully, so freely, that the rules must change thereafter.” Rulfo once suggested that Pedro Páramo, the only book Rulfo ever published, was meant to be read three times before understood. “Maybe the novel was also meant to be translated three times before it seeped more broadly and indelibly into the Anglophone consciousness. Maybe its time has finally come,” writes Luiselli, who deems the Mexican novel’s newly published and third English language translation by Douglas J. Weatherford “by far, the best of Rulfo in English.”

Angelica Sanchez, assistant professor of music, was inspired by “the sounds of the pitch-dark woods at night” while composing her newest album, Nighttime Creatures. Reviewing the album for NPR’s Fresh Air, music critic Kevin Whitehead says that pastoral inspiration is felt throughout the record. “You get a sense of sonic depth, foreground versus background. That sort of spatial awareness is another thing one might cultivate in the woods at night, where the same animal cry can be charming or alarming, depending on distance,” Whitehead says. “For open-eared composer Angelica Sanchez, such encounters set the mind buzzing. On Nighttime Creatures, she bottles that open-air feeling and brings it into the studio.”

Five Bard Conservatory of Music and Music Program faculty members and alumni/ae have been nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY Awards. Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe is featured on the album Champion, nominated for Best Opera Recording. Bard Composers in Residence Jessie Montgomery and Missy Mazzoli are both nominees for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Mazzoli’s concerto Dark With Excessive Bright and Montgomery’s “Rounds” for piano and string orchestra (featured in pianist Awadagin Pratt’s Stillpoint) have been nominated for the GRAMMY. Julia Bullock MM ’11 has been nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her album Walking In The Dark. In the category of Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, music program alumnus Max Zbiral-Teller ’06, along with his House of Waters bandmates, has been nominated for On Becoming. The 2024 GRAMMYs, officially known as the 66th GRAMMY Awards, will take place Sunday, February 4 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

This fall, Bard College is launching the Bard Community Arts Collective, a collaboration between the Fisher Center at Bard, Bard Center for Civic Engagement (CCE), Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard), the Bard Conservatory, and The Orchestra Now (TŌN). The aim of the collective is to inspire connection and community through arts-based educational programming, coordinated in partnership with local organizations and schools.

Bard has long partnered with Hudson Valley artists, organizations, and schools, including the school systems of Kingston, Rhinebeck and Red Hook, as well as organizations such as Kite’s Nest, and the Boys & Girls Club of Ulster County. The Community Arts Collective will make Bard’s resources more accessible to these and other community partners, assisting with the development of new programs and connections within the region. It will partner with schools and community organizations to link the College’s educational resources with community interests.

The Arts Collective’s programs include a wide variety of arts events that are open to the public. Weekly rehearsals by the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra, including community engagement activities with the musicians and conductor, will be open to local school groups, and the Conservatory will perform at local events, such as its recent concert at the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston as part of the “Burning of Kingston” festival, a historical reenactment that commemorates the events that occurred in the city during the Revolutionary War.

The Orchestra Now has opened several dress rehearsals to children from local daycare and school programs, while CCS Bard will host tours for young visitors at its current exhibition, Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, the first large-scale exhibition of its kind to center performance and theater as an origin point for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Alaska Native artists.

The College sponsors a variety of student-led initiatives through its CCE Trustee Leader Scholars (TLS) program, run by Paul Marienthal. Sister2Sister, a student-led mentorship program run by Bard alumni Skylar Walker, provides guidance and opportunities for young women of color in Kingston with an arts focus, and will start its 6th consecutive year providing regular after school activities and annual conferences.

“It's been an honor watching our program grow from what was once a student-led TLS project to an institutionally supported entity,” said Walker. “The most touching part about this experience has been being able to genuinely connect, empower, and inspire young women who look like me. I am incredibly grateful that Bard has provided a platform and a space for programs like ours, it is truly what our youth need.”

Another TLS program, the Musical Mentorship Initiative, which is led by Bard Conservatory students, has offered free music lessons to children of all ages since the pandemic began in 2020. “The students constantly create and run new projects. The key is student ownership. We are good cheerleaders, but students with their imaginations blazing do the heavy lifting,” explains Marienthal.

The Collective will make coordination and innovation easier for community partners, acting as a transparent entity for interested organizations and schools to approach with ideas for collaboration. “The concept of a collective is powerful—we already see a shift in how we collaborate with communities making the College’s resources easier to access and better reflect shared interests. Here, interdisciplinary approaches to learning can evolve to respond to the community’s needs and desires for arts programming,” observed CCE’s Vice President for Civic Engagement Erin Cannan. “The Hudson Valley has always been an incubator for art and art making, and Bard has played a key role. This approach allows us to reach new organizations, schools, communities, and helps our students learn the power of community art building.”

For more information, contact [email protected].

“Like so many documentary photographers, I often pick a post or set up a frame and wait for something to happen within it,” Sam Youkilis ’16 said to i-D. “I truly believe in the camera’s ability to will things happening within its frame.” After publishing his debut monograph, Somewhere, Youkilis spoke with i-D and Interview magazine about capturing the mundane, his use of vertical video, and finding a following on Instagram. “I’m lucky that I’ve been able to find success in what I do on Instagram in a really organic way,” Youkilis said to Quinn Moreland ’15 for Interview. “And I am lucky that I’m able to share my work in a diaristic way where it’s very much an insight into my life from morning to the end of the day.” Somewhere, which totals more than 500 pages in length, represents this diaristic practice in a physical format, with the size of the monograph somewhere between the size of a postcard and an iPhone, with a purposeful intermixture of the commonplace and the grandiose. “The point of the book, in a way, is to level any hierarchy across this imagery and present my work democratically so no moment is given more value than others,” Youkilis said.

The Bard Prison Initiative hosted its long-running orchestral concert program at Eastern Correctional Facility last week. Conducted by Leon Botstein, the program included Beethoven, Bartók, and Duke Ellington’s New World A-Comin’ performed by Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music Marcus Roberts, accompanied by Jason Marsalis and others from Roberts’ band The Modern Jazz Generation. 

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra, an 80-student ensemble comprised primarily of undergraduates, performed on the stage of the prison’s auditorium for an audience of almost 150 incarcerated men. Yuchen Zhao, a second-year graduate student and violinist with the Conservatory Orchestra, told Andrew Checchia, who covered the concert for the Red Hook Daily Catch, that the men at Eastern were “the most focused audience in the world.” 

“This is a great opportunity to come together and enjoy a unique experience,” said Daniel F. Martuscello III, acting commissioner of New York State’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, before the performance. “People go to prison as punishment, but they shouldn’t be defined by the worst moments of their life.”

At MoMA, Professor ​​An-My Lê’s images of Vietnam, the American South, and the California desert “are tour-de-force beautiful.” Holland Cotter reviews Between Two Rivers, Lê’s MoMA exhibition, as a Critic’s Pick for the New York Times. “​​In Lê’s photographs we find the line between boot camp and theater, battle-prepping and playacting, almost comically blurred,” writes Cotter. An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1998.

Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music Marcus Roberts will receive this year’s Dorothy and David Dushkin Award at the Music Institute of Chicago gala, where he will also perform, in May 2024. Established more than 30 years ago and named for the Music Institute’s visionary founders, the award recognizes international luminaries in the world of music for their contributions to the art form and youth education.
 
Marcus Roberts is a highly acclaimed modern jazz pianist, composer, and educator who has graced the Music Institute of Chicago’s Nichols Concert Hall stage for many years. He is known for his ability to blend jazz and classical idioms into something wholly new and for his unique approach to jazz trio performance, which relies on all musicians sharing equally in shaping the direction of the music by using a system of musical cues and flexible forms to change its tempo, mood, texture, or form. He is the founder of the Modern Jazz Generation, a multigenerational ensemble that is the realization of his long-standing dedication to training and mentoring younger jazz musicians. 

Lexi Parra ’18 is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based between Caracas and New York. Parra will be on campus on Wednesday, November 1. A Conversations and Lunch event will take place in the George Ball Lounge of the Campus Center from noon to 1:30 that day.

By Lauren Rodgers ’27

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
A: I am a Venezuelan-American photographer, community educator, and a Bard alum. After graduating in 2018 with my degree in Photography and Human Rights, I began to focus my work on youth culture, migration, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. I’m the founder of Project MiRA, an arts education initiative based in Caracas, and also a community manager at Women Photograph. I’m bilingual (Spanish and English), and am currently working between Caracas and New York.

Q: What inspired you to pursue photography?
A: I grew up going to my dad’s sets—he is a director of photography in the commercial world—and, even though I didn’t realize it at the time, it set me up to want to be a photographer. I was the kid with a big DSLR camera on my shoulder wherever I went, taking mediocre travel pictures. When I got accepted to Bard, I realized the Photography Program was renowned and thought it was something I should pursue. What has inspired me to make images and tell stories is my obsessive curiosity and want to connect with people. My camera is one of the ways that I do that.

Q: Your photography focuses on youth culture, migration, inequality, and resilience. What inspired you to incorporate activism into your artistic work?
A: Honestly, I don’t know if my work as a photographer / journalist would be considered ‘activism.’ During my time at Bard, I was a community organizer and my senior thesis work had a lot to do with representation and healing, which was my response to our world at the time. That ethos continues to guide me; to make beautiful and dignified images, particularly because I work in places and with people who are going through crises. While I don’t know if an image can have any tangible impact on the world, I do think it matters how we show up and engage. I hope that
in the way I work that it is an interaction, rather than something that is extractive.

Q: Why did you choose to attend Bard?
A:  When it came time to make a decision, Bard seemed to be the right fit for me. I had visited the campus and, coming from Minneapolis, was new to the landscape of Northeast private colleges. Bard had a flexibility in its programming that intrigued me. The financial aid package was substantial, too, which I needed to go to a college like Bard. I didn’t have crazy high expectations when I got to campus because I was so out of my element—but the teachers/mentors and friends I made, the experiences I had, absolutely shaped me into the person I am today.

Q: How do you feel your roots in Venezuela and Hispanic culture have influenced your work and photographic perspective?
A: I think living in Venezuela since graduating Bard has shaped my work more so than being Venezuelan. It took going back to my dad’s home country to actually feel those roots. Growing up, I didn’t have strong connections beyond making arepas or visiting my dad’s few Venezuelan friends, who also somehow landed in Minneapolis. In college, I embraced my latinidad but, still, it didn’t have roots yet. Going back to Caracas, though, as an adult shaped my work immensely.

As an insider-outsider, I learned to listen first. Having lived in Venezuela during a part of its years-long crisis, I now feel a deep sense of responsibility to cover the ongoing effects on communities with the focus being on the strength and resilience that people have to create something as everything is on the brink of collapse. That duality, that complexity, has informed how I see the world. My connection to Venezuela has translated into an intimacy with stories of migration, too, which has been both heartbreaking and fulfilling.

Q: Could you tell us about Project MiRA, the arts education initiative you founded?
A: Project MiRA brought me to Caracas after graduating from Bard in 2018. Through the Davis Peace Prize, I went to Venezuela with a bag of old digital cameras to host workshops through the Tiuna el Fuerte cultural park. The idea was to give cameras to people who are living the crisis, to see the reality through their eyes and change the dynamic of photographer-subject during a time of turmoil. After a year of traveling the country teaching groups of kids and adults, I formalized the initiative into Project MiRA (“look” in Spanish). Our methodology brings photography workshops to informal community spaces in remote areas of the barrios of Caracas, collaborating with local community leaders, to work with teen girls. The programming focuses on issues of representation, storytelling and visual literacy. In five years, we have taught over 600 young people, exhibited their work in both Caracas and New York and have been a part of a children’s photography book. The work I do with Project MiRA has been so informative to my person, as well as my work as a photographer, and I am beyond grateful for the community support that makes it possible.

Q: For you, what does it mean to be an active community member?
A: Being an active community member really comes down to being human: someone who has empathy, who shows up. It is so easy, especially in the US, to isolate and think of ourselves in terms of our individual self. When we come together in community and actually understand that we are a part of something bigger, it can be both empowering and reassuring. We just have to show up and offer what we can.

Q: When do you feel your work is most challenging, and when do you feel your work is most rewarding?
A: My work is most challenging when I feel helpless. Hearing someone talk about their journey through the Darien Gap, or holding their hand as they tell me about losing their brother in a police raid ... I can’t do anything tangible to help. My work isn’t going to take their pain away, or make it better. I can be there, and be present with them, but the feeling of not being able to do more is always the worst part of my job. The most rewarding thing is when people see their picture in a newspaper or an article, or hold a print I brought for them. It’s the most rewarding because they feel seen, acknowledged. Similarly, when I’m teaching, I get so excited when a student learns to claim her space, her opinion—when she trusts us enough to really flex. There’s nothing better than that.

Q: You've only been out of college for five years. What are your tips to cultivating a successful career post-grad?
A: I would definitely take advantage of the opportunities that are available at Bard. Go to every conference you can, have coffee with a professor whose work you admire, scour for internships or jobs that can give you some experience and insight while you are still in school. Photojournalism found me after college, and I’m grateful to have had mentors who guided me into this career. While I didn’t study photojournalism, my varied experiences through Bard did set me up with skills that are vital to what I do now. So, I would say be open to any opportunities and use the network to your advantage.
 

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More about Lexi Parra ’18:

• lexiparra.com
• As gang, police violence rages, a neighborhood tries to connect (Washington Post)
• Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
• Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects for Peace Prize

The Hunt, a new Kate Soper opera directed by Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Ashley Tata, was named a Critic’s Pick by the New York Times. This “darkly funny fairy tale,” writes Joshua Barone, “makes the medieval modern.” “Think Waiting for Godot, but with the female rebelliousness of a Sofia Coppola film,” he writes. Complementing the biting text set in “medieval and/or contemporary times,” Barone praises the production as much as the text: “Tata’s direction slowly dissolves pristine, satirized virginal presentation into something wilder, and free.” The opera premiered October 12, 2023, at the Miller Theatre in New York City.

Bard alum Carolyn Lazard ’10 has been named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Lazard, an interdisciplinary artist who uses the experience of chronic illness to examine concepts of intimacy and social and political dimensions of care, is one of this year’s 20 recipients of the prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In a statement about their work, the MacArthur Foundation says, “Lazard is an artist exploring the limits of aesthetic perception and using accessibility as a creative tool for collective practices of care. With a practice that spans the mediums of video, installation, sculpture, and performance, their work challenges ableist expectations of solo productivity and efficiency. They approach these subjects using the minimalist language of conceptual art and avant-garde cinema.”

The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award for extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selection of MacArthur Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.

MacArthur Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee, recipients learn of their selection only when they receive a call from the MacArthur Foundation just before the public announcement.

Carolyn Lazard received a BA (2010) from Bard College and an MFA (2019) from the University of Pennsylvania. Their work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; MoMA PS1; Museum für Moderne Kunst; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Venice Biennale.

Lazard often repurposes ready-made objects—such as a HEPA air purifier, a noise machine, and a power-lifter recliner chair—calling attention to the dependencies and infrastructures of care that sustain social life. CRIP TIME (2018) is a video-based meditation on the time Lazard devotes to organizing a week’s worth of different medications into brightly colored, plastic pill containers. Through documenting this care-based task, Lazard makes visible the often-obscured care and labor of staying alive. Lazard’s work also addresses complex histories of institutional harm and racialized violence. The video piece Pre-Existing Condition (2019) focuses on medical experiments that a University of Pennsylvania professor conducted on incarcerated people at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia between 1951 and 1974. Lazard displays archival documents that list each experiment and the sponsoring institutions overlayed with the voice of Yusef Anthony, a Holmesburg Prison experiment survivor and advocate, who discusses his mistrust of medical and legal systems. As in much of their practice, access is both a theme and a material of their work.

In addition to their work as an artist, Lazard writes about their experience of chronic illness and the limitations of biomedical understandings of health. They authored the guidebook Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice (2019), which details specific ways that museums and other cultural spaces can meet the needs of disabled communities.

Raven Chacon, a former visiting Bard MFA faculty member and composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, has also been named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. “Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among sound, space, and people,” stated the MacArthur Foundation. “In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.”

Learn more and meet the 2023 MacArthur Fellows here.

The sixth season of the China Now Music Festival, a joint endeavor by Bard College's U.S.-China Music Institute and the Central Conservatory of Music in China, was featured and reviewed in multiple news outlets. The annual festival is dedicated to promoting an understanding and appreciation of music from contemporary China through an annual series of concerts and academic activities. Its theme this year, “The Bridge of Music,” focused on connecting people through music, and featured an unprecedented series of uniquely curated events tracing how generations of musicians and music organizations from the US and China have worked together and inspired each other. "Academic exchange is an important way to promote academic development and cultural exchange between the two countries,” Yu Hongmei, professor and director of the Chinese Music Department at the Central Conservatory of Music, told China News. “Its implications are abroad and far-reaching. Civilization is more colorful through communication, and culture is enriched through mutual understanding and learning."

Further Reading: 
U.S.-China forum calls for revitalizing relations through music (China News)

China Now Music Festival ends with tribute to three generations of composers bridging U.S., China (Xinhua)

“What they share, beyond mutual admiration, is their status among America’s foremost orchestral composers,” writes Daniel Stephen Johnson of Bard faculty members Joan Tower and Jessie Montgomery for Symphony. In a wide-ranging interview, Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, and Montgomery, composer in residence, spoke about their compositional practices, their experiences as living composers, and what equity means in their profession. On the latter point, Montgomery said it’s not simply a question of access, but of the breadth of artistry. “Music doesn’t have a gender, but music does have cultural influences and folkloric origins,” Montgomery said. “Bringing in people who have had other influences makes the music richer.”

In a field dominated by “mostly dead white European males,” Tower said it was difficult, especially early on, to be taken seriously by audiences. Early in her career, she would poll the audience about how many of them expected to dislike her compositions, and a majority of the audience would raise their hands. Still, she’s always introduced herself as a “woman composer” as a point of pride. “I always introduced myself as a woman composer, and I’d get giggles in the audience,” Tower told Symphony. “Now, I’m getting cheers! I say I’m an older woman, and I get even more!”

Why does your brain look different on Bach than it does on Beethoven? It’s a question that’s stuck with Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music, since she watched the PBS documentary Musical Minds with Oliver Sacks, where an MRI showed his beloved Bach engaged more portions of his brain than Beethoven. “One of my questions always has been like, well, what is that?” Hennies said on Science Friday. “Why would his brain respond so much to one piece of music and then not at all to some really similar thing? And so that’s part of what inspired this piece.” Hennies discusses Rodolfo Llinás’s “motor tapes” neurological theory, which “theorizes that the brain is a giant mass of constantly-running tape loop,” and how it connects to her compositional practice. Hennies’s new work, “Motor Tapes,” takes its inspiration—and name—from the repetitive rhythmic theory.

“Give it back.” These are the first words seen by visitors to The World’s UnFair, the newest multimedia work by New Red Order (NRO), a “public secret society” cofounded by brothers and Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14. World’s Fairs “have historically presented a theory of progress, technological advancement, imperial advancement,” Jackson Polys, who cocreated NRO with the Khalil brothers, told the New York Times. The World’s UnFair, by contrast, subverts expectations with an animatronic beaver who speaks about private land ownership and satirical real estate ads featuring “comically small” portions of land given back to Native groups. The exhibition, curated by Bard alumna Diya Vij ’08, is meant to be provocative, asking questions about not only Native sovereignty, but also performances of Indigeneity and art’s place (or lack thereof) in the pursuit of decolonization. The World’s UnFair is on view now through October 15 in Long Island City, Queens.

Read More in the New York Times

Further Reading:

• NPR: “An 'anti-World's Fair' makes its case: give land back to Native Americans”
• Smithosian magazine: "‘The World’s UnFair,’ a New Exhibition Calling for the Return of Indigenous Land, Comes to Queens."
• Artnet: “A New Kind of World’s Fair Is Coming to Queens. Its Message? Give Back All Indigenous Land”
• Hyperallergic: “The World’s UnFair in Queens Echoes Calls to Give Native Land Back”