News

Bard College has received a $500,000 grant from New York State’s Higher Education Capital Matching Grant Program that will be used to support the renovation of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). CCS Bard and Hessel Museum of Art are expanding its facility to create a new Visible Collections Storage and Living Archive where work from its Contemporary Art Collection can be placed on permanent public view. New and repurposed classrooms, study, and meeting spaces will allow the rich resources of CCS Bard to be more accessible for students, researchers, and visitors, as well as increase its capability for hosting public receptions, lectures and screenings. This project will transform the way the public and visiting scholars can view the collection.

Cekala found beauty in the salt used to keep Boston roads safe. Her curiosity has led to an exhibition of photography and video, now on view for the second time in the city.

The How Institutions Think symposium will focus on different concepts of institution and forms of institutional practice. The event takes place February 24 – 27, 2016, in Arles, France. This symposium addresses the contemporary possibilities and limitations of institutional formats, practices, and imaginaries, but starts from a different place, namely from categories of knowledge, cognition, and the social. This symposium brings together an international and multidisciplinary group of speakers who are invited to reflect upon how institutional practices inform art, curatorial, educational, and research practices as much as they shape the world around us.

Caitlin Keogh is now being represented by Chelsea gallery Bortolami. Her work can be found in the well-received group exhibition “Flatlands” at the Whitney Museum of Art.

From her breakthrough as one of two female filmmakers at Sundance in 1994, Bard's Kelly Reichardt received Variety’s 2016 Indie Impact Award at this year's festival.

Partnering with Bard’s Dance Program is one way the Trisha Brown Dance Company continues the work of the renowned choreographer in performance and education.

Bard MFA alumna Robin Coste Lewis discusses her book Voyage of the Sable Venus, which won the National Book Award last year.

Victoria Campbell '98 MAT '16 came to Haiti in 2010 to provide earthquake relief, where she met the charismatic Gaston Jean Edy, the subject of her film Monsieur le President.

Two visiting artists teaching in the Theater & Performance Program, Jack Ferver and David Levine, have been awarded 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts grants in Performance Art/Theater in the amount of $40,000 each. Since only three awards were made in the category this year, this is a particularly remarkable achievement. The FCA was founded in 1963 by Jasper Johns and John Cage, and its awards are among the most prestigious in the field. Since the Foundation's inception, more than 2,500 grants awarded to artists and arts organizations—totaling over $11 million—have provided opportunities for creative exploration and development. 

"The facticity of a photograph can conceal the craftiness of its content and selection," writes Bard writer in residence and photographer Teju Cole.

To make the movies she wanted, Kelly Reichardt had to go it alone. She returns to Sundance this year with her sixth feature, Certain Women.

Eight Bard alumni/ae are involved in the production of Bieber Bathos Elegy, created by Felix Bernstein '13, which will premiere at the Whitney Museum in New York City on January 15. This hybrid work by New York–based artist, poet, and writer Bernstein combines musical performance, poetry, cabaret drag, and opera to explore the concept of bathos—the failure to achieve pathos—and illuminate issues of identity and persona through the character of Justin Bieber. The work is directed by Gabe Rubin '14 with assistant director Clara Lipfert MFA '18, composed by Rron Karahoda '13, with production design by George Dupont '14 and sound design by Cammisa Buerhaus MFA '18, and features musical performances by Leila Bordreuil '13 and Lazar Bozic '14.

Films by Film and Electronic Arts faculty members So Yong Kim and Kelly Reichardt as well as alumnus Miles Joris-Peyrafitte '14 will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, later this month. Reichardt's Certain Women features Kristen Stewart, Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, and James Le Gros. The film follows the intersecting lives of three women in small-town America, and is based on short stories by Maile Meloy. In Kim's Lovesong, with Jena Malone, Riley Keough, and Brooklyn Decker, the relationship between two friends deepens during an impromptu road trip. Joris-Peyrafitte's As You Are is the telling and retelling of a relationship between three teenagers through a construction of disparate memories prompted by a police investigation, with Owen Campbell, Charlie Heaton, Amandla Stenberg, John Scurti, Scott Cohen, and Mary Stuart Masterson.

"We should be grateful to Music Director/Conductor Leon Botstein for giving us the chance to hear this strong work, in director Thaddeus Strassberger's production," writes Richard Sasanow.

John Ashbery tells the story of his lifelong fascination with French culture, and how the arts, literature, and people of that country influenced his work as writer and translator.

"Multimedia and radical conventions make this Oklahoma! much more chilling than you might remember," writes Charles Quittner.

Writers and editors recall stage moments worth singing about from the past year, including Daniel Fish's "radically reimagined" Oklahoma! during Bard's SummerScape.

"Luc Sante’s fascinating guide to the squalid, disorderly, dank, thrilling, dangerous underside of the Paris of the past makes for a suitably sprawling book."

Stephen Shore is one of a number of artists who have been successful at conventional photography and now use Instagram as a sort of extra studio, writes Teju Cole.

Luc Sante's The Other Paris is Times Higher Education's Book of the Week. "Beneath a bourgeois veneer is a secret history of defunct jobs and fascinating lives."