All Bard News by Date
March 2022
03-21-2022
Bard College student Elisabeth Sundberg ’22 has won a Davis Projects for Peace prize for her proposal, “Tracing The Turnrow Web: Appalachian Rising.” Human rights and studio arts major Sundberg will receive $10,000 to facilitate a series of collaborative art projects across the Turnrow network in West Virginia. Turnrow Appalachian Farm collective is a food hub connecting 100+ farms across West Virginia and providing fresh vegetables to their local communities. Working with farmers, artists, activists, and students, her work will “strengthen connections between the organizations within Turnrow and those between food producers and customers and celebrate the work that the different parts of the Turnrow food hub are doing, including education, food access, and strengthening local food landscapes.”
Sundberg’s project proposes to engage West Virginian residents with each other and their food systems through a series of community art events. Over the summer, she will facilitate a two week-long art project that includes the creation of a participatory mural painting, patchwork table cloth, and celebratory communal meal in each of four larger regions that Turnrow serves. This project is a continuation of a grant-funded community project Sundberg facilitated last summer. Like a traditional quilting bee, the community will gather to create these artworks together. The murals serve as a lasting visual representation of community work and the table cloths as an artifact which will be used by the network for potlucks, yearly business meetings, fundraising, and other events that Turnrow organizes. “Peace is not possible without food security and food justice. Many small towns in West Virginia don’t have a grocery store and rely on the Dollar General chain for their groceries. It is important to acknowledge that poor eating habits are not due to ignorance about healthy food choices, but due to lack of access. Peace is promoted when everyone has the right to local, sustainable, and nutritious produce, which is why organizations connecting farming and food access are so important,” says Sundberg.
Projects for Peace was created in 2007 through the generosity of Kathryn W. Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who believed that today’s youth—tomorrow’s leaders—ought to be challenged to formulate and test their own ideas. To learn more, visit: middlebury.edu/office/projects-for-peace.
Sundberg’s project proposes to engage West Virginian residents with each other and their food systems through a series of community art events. Over the summer, she will facilitate a two week-long art project that includes the creation of a participatory mural painting, patchwork table cloth, and celebratory communal meal in each of four larger regions that Turnrow serves. This project is a continuation of a grant-funded community project Sundberg facilitated last summer. Like a traditional quilting bee, the community will gather to create these artworks together. The murals serve as a lasting visual representation of community work and the table cloths as an artifact which will be used by the network for potlucks, yearly business meetings, fundraising, and other events that Turnrow organizes. “Peace is not possible without food security and food justice. Many small towns in West Virginia don’t have a grocery store and rely on the Dollar General chain for their groceries. It is important to acknowledge that poor eating habits are not due to ignorance about healthy food choices, but due to lack of access. Peace is promoted when everyone has the right to local, sustainable, and nutritious produce, which is why organizations connecting farming and food access are so important,” says Sundberg.
Projects for Peace was created in 2007 through the generosity of Kathryn W. Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who believed that today’s youth—tomorrow’s leaders—ought to be challenged to formulate and test their own ideas. To learn more, visit: middlebury.edu/office/projects-for-peace.
03-21-2022
Sydney Oshuna-Williams ’24, who is majoring in film and electronic arts and philosophy, has been recognized for her commitment to solving public problems. Campus Compact, a national coalition of colleges and universities working to advance the public purposes of higher education, has named Oshuna-Williams one of 173 student civic leaders who will make up the organization’s 2022–2023 cohort of Newman Civic Fellows. The Newman Civic Fellowship recognizes students who stand out for their commitment to creating positive change in communities locally and around the world.
As the founder of the Me In Foundation, Oshuna-Williams seeks to increase artistic education opportunities for underrepresented youth through social and cultural awareness year-round programming. In her first semester at Bard College, Oshuna-Williams created the Me In Foundation as a Trustee Leader Scholar project. The Foundation allows youth scholars to share their stories through a variety of different art forms and currently works with over one-hundred and fifty K-12 students in Upstate New York and Atlanta. Oshuna-Williams is also a Mogul in Training at Usher Raymond’s non-profit organization, Usher’s New Look, where she facilitates conversations centered around college and career readiness as well as financial literacy. Oshuna-Williams continues to use her passion for storytelling to bring untold truths to the surface because, as she says, “Every story deserves to be heard by the characters who live it."
Through the fellowship, Campus Compact will provide these students with a year of learning and networking opportunities that emphasize personal, professional, and civic growth. Each year, fellows participate in numerous virtual training and networking opportunities to help provide them with the skills and connections they need to create large-scale positive change. The cornerstone of the fellowship is the Annual Convening of Fellows, which offers intensive skill-building and networking over the course of two days. The fellowship also provides fellows with pathways to apply for exclusive scholarship and post-graduate opportunities.
The fellowship is named for the late Frank Newman, one of Campus Compact’s founders, who was a tireless advocate for civic engagement in higher education. In the spirit of Dr. Newman’s leadership, fellows are nominated by Campus Compact member presidents and chancellors, who are invited to select one outstanding student from their campus each year.
“Sydney Oshuna-Williams, a second year Posse scholar at Bard College, is a very active student addressing mental health healing in our student body (as a peer health educator specializing in the healing of BIPOC students) and securing pathways to creative careers for kids in our neighboring communities. Sydney is currently serving as a peer counselor (Bard's version of residential advisor) to support students in their living environments and a Sister2Sister mentor (a student-led mentorship program providing guidance and opportunity to young women of color). Sydney also partners Bard's neighboring school districts with schools in her home state of Georgia to bridge opportunity across geographical limitations,” said Bard President Botstein.
As the founder of the Me In Foundation, Oshuna-Williams seeks to increase artistic education opportunities for underrepresented youth through social and cultural awareness year-round programming. In her first semester at Bard College, Oshuna-Williams created the Me In Foundation as a Trustee Leader Scholar project. The Foundation allows youth scholars to share their stories through a variety of different art forms and currently works with over one-hundred and fifty K-12 students in Upstate New York and Atlanta. Oshuna-Williams is also a Mogul in Training at Usher Raymond’s non-profit organization, Usher’s New Look, where she facilitates conversations centered around college and career readiness as well as financial literacy. Oshuna-Williams continues to use her passion for storytelling to bring untold truths to the surface because, as she says, “Every story deserves to be heard by the characters who live it."
Through the fellowship, Campus Compact will provide these students with a year of learning and networking opportunities that emphasize personal, professional, and civic growth. Each year, fellows participate in numerous virtual training and networking opportunities to help provide them with the skills and connections they need to create large-scale positive change. The cornerstone of the fellowship is the Annual Convening of Fellows, which offers intensive skill-building and networking over the course of two days. The fellowship also provides fellows with pathways to apply for exclusive scholarship and post-graduate opportunities.
The fellowship is named for the late Frank Newman, one of Campus Compact’s founders, who was a tireless advocate for civic engagement in higher education. In the spirit of Dr. Newman’s leadership, fellows are nominated by Campus Compact member presidents and chancellors, who are invited to select one outstanding student from their campus each year.
“Sydney Oshuna-Williams, a second year Posse scholar at Bard College, is a very active student addressing mental health healing in our student body (as a peer health educator specializing in the healing of BIPOC students) and securing pathways to creative careers for kids in our neighboring communities. Sydney is currently serving as a peer counselor (Bard's version of residential advisor) to support students in their living environments and a Sister2Sister mentor (a student-led mentorship program providing guidance and opportunity to young women of color). Sydney also partners Bard's neighboring school districts with schools in her home state of Georgia to bridge opportunity across geographical limitations,” said Bard President Botstein.
03-15-2022
After leaving his job at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Gabriel Kilongo ’15 wanted not only to open a gallery, but to start a scene. His new gallery, Jupiter, which opened on March 5 in the North Beach community of Miami Beach, Florida, is meant to challenge not only where art galleries are supposed to open, but what they are designed to do. “I wanted to find a space that was not in a place that is already too trendy, already overdeveloped,” Kilongo said to the New York Times. The gallery, currently showing works by Marcus Leslie Singleton, will emphasize “emerging artists who are adding new perspectives to canonized art historical conversation,” Kilongo says.
Read More in the New York Times
Read More in the New York Times
03-14-2022
Song of Songs Is Commissioned by the Fisher Center at Bard, Where Tanowitz Is Choreographer-in-Residence, and Which Also Commissioned and Premiered Her Renowned Four Quartets
The Fisher Center at Bard, which has become one of the world’s preeminent sources of major multidisciplinary performance works, presents a project that exemplifies its place on the cultural landscape: a new dance setting of the biblical Song of Songs created by the Fisher Center’s internationally celebrated choreographer-in-residence, Pam Tanowitz, with new music from Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, making its world premiere July 1-3 as part of the 2022 edition of the Bard SummerScape festival.Spiritual and erotic, playful and mysterious, Song of Songs (also known as The Song of Solomon) is perhaps the greatest of all love poems—a hymn of yearning, steeped in images from the natural world. It has inspired artists and lovers for millennia; some scholars argue that the entire tradition of Western love poetry springs from its glorious verses. Based on this radiantly beautiful text, Tanowitz’s collaboration with Lang, in which she explores her Jewish identity, is a collage of movement, sound, and song that reimagines ancient rituals of love and courtship and holds the sacred and profane threads of the Song in perfect balance.
In addition to choreography by Tanowitz and music by Lang, Song of Songs features production design by Tanowitz and her longtime collaborators Reid Bartelme, Harriet Jung, and Clifton Taylor; sound design by Garth MacAleavey; music supervision by Caleb Burhans; and dramaturgy by Mary Gossy. Betsy Ayer is the production stage manager.
The performers include Pam Tanowitz Dance company members Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, Lindsey Jones, Brian Lawson, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura, and Melissa Toogood (rehearsal director); and musicians Emily Brausa (cello), Caleb Burhans (viola), Martha Cluver (soprano), Katie Geissinger (alto), Rebecca Hargrove(soprano), and Yuri Yamashita (percussion).
Song of Songs follows the resounding success of Tanowitz’s two previous Fisher Center commissions: I was waiting for the echo of a better day, chosen as one of The New York Times’s “Best of 2021,” and Four Quartets, which recently played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and was, after its Fisher Center premiere, named “Best Dance Production of 2018” by the Times. The paper pronounced it “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”
Pam Tanowitz, who is entering her fourth year as the Fisher Center’s choreographer-in-residence, says of the work, “I feel a deep personal connection with this work—an intimate, small-scale love story. In 2018, after my dad died, I started thinking about lineage, and Jewish identity, and wanted to make a piece that honors my father and my heritage, something I’ve never done. For me, the use of this text provides a framework to push myself artistically. I want to find a way to mirror the structure without being literal. I plan to deconstruct the duet form as I investigate how to give shape or feeling to a figure.”
David Lang explains, “It was Pam’s idea to make a big project that would be based on the biblical text Song of Songs.I responded to her suggestion by mapping out four different paths through the text, resulting in a new text for the music that I would write myself. Each of these paths applies a different literary filter to the original text, and each path tries to concentrate on the paradox that, for Judeo- Christian believers, the text is both a sensual description of the experiences of two lovers and, at the same time, a deeply spiritual exploration of a relationship with god. My hope is that, by examining this deep and powerful text from such different angles, these movements, taken together, may begin to reveal more of the original text’s emotional and spiritual powers.”
Bard SummerScape, described by The New York Times as “a hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure” and as a producer of dance works that provide “reliable transcendence,” returns this year June 23 - August 14 and comprises eight weeks of live music, opera, dance, and theater. Additional highlights include the 32nd Bard Music Festival, Rachmaninoff and His World; a new production of Strauss’s The Silent Woman, directed by Christian Räth; and a new adaptation of Molière’s Dom Juan, directed by Ashley Tata; and more. More information about the 2022 festival is here.
Performance Schedule and Ticketing
Performances of Song of Songs take place July 1 at 8pm, July 2 at 5pm, and July 3 at 2pm in the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center (Manor Ave, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504). Tickets, starting at $25 ($5 for Bard students), can be purchased at fishercenter.bard.edu or 845-758-7900.
About Pam Tanowitz
Pam Tanowitz is a celebrated New York-based choreographer and collaborator known for her unflinchingly post-modern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance to explore dance- making with a consistent community of dancers. Tanowitz is currently the Fisher Center’s Choreographer in Residence.
Her 2017 dance New Work for Goldberg Variations, created in collaboration with pianist Simone Dinnerstein, was called a “rare achievement” (The New York Times). Four Quartets (2018), inspired by T.S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece and set to music by Kaija Saariaho, was called "the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” (The New York Times).
In 2016, Tanowitz was presented with the Juried Bessie Award for “using form and structure as a vehicle for challenging audiences to think, to feel, to experience movement; for pursuing her uniquely poetic and theatrical vision with astounding rigor and focus.” She has been commissioned by New York City Ballet, The Royal Ballet, The Joyce Theater, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Bard SummerScape, Vail International Dance Festival, New York Live Arts, The Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series, Danspace Project, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Chicago Dancing Festival, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Duke Performances, Peak Performances, FSU's Opening Nights Series, and the Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston.
About David Lang
David Lang embodies the restless spirit of invention as a passionate, prolific, and complicated composer. Lang is at the same time deeply versed in the classical tradition and committed to music that resists categorization, constantly creating new forms.
Lang is one of America's most performed composers. Many of his works resemble each other only in the fierce intelligence and clarity of vision that inform their structures. His catalog is extensive, and his opera, orchestra, chamber and solo works are by turns ominous, ethereal, urgent, hypnotic, unsettling and very emotionally direct. Much of his work seeks to expand the definition of virtuosity in music — even the deceptively simple pieces can be fiendishly difficult to play and require incredible concentration by musicians and audiences alike.
Lang's “Simple Song #3,” written as part of his score for Paolo Sorrentino's acclaimed film Youth, received many award nominations in 2016, including the Academy Award and Golden Globe. Recent works include his opera Prisoner of the State, co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Rotterdam's de Doelen Concert Hall, London’s Barbican Centre, Barcelona’s l’Auditori, Bochum Symphony Orchestra, and Bruges Concertgebouw; his opera The Loser, which opened the 2016 Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music; the Public Domain for 1000 singers at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival; and his chamber opera Anatomy Theater at Los Angeles Opera and at the PROTOTYPE Festival in New York. His 2008 composition The Little Match Girl Passion won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Lang's works are performed around the globe by prominent orchestras, ensembles, festivals, and venues. His music is used regularly for ballet and modern dance including works with such choreographers and companies as Twyla Tharp, the Paris Opera Ballet, the New York City Ballet, and Benjamin Millepied. Lang is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe nomination, Musical America's Composer of the Year, the Rome Prize, a Bessie Award, Obie Award, and a Grammy Award. Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York's legendary music collective Bang on a Can. His work has been recorded on the Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Teldec, BMG, Point, Chandos, Argo/Decca, and Cantaloupe labels, among others.
Funding Credits
The 2022 SummerScape season is made possible in part by the generous support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, and Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members. The 2022 Bard Music Festival has received funding from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
Commissioning funds for Song of Songs are provided by Jay Franke and David Herro, with additional support received from the O’Donnell Green Music and Dance Foundation. The Fisher Center on behalf of Pam Tanowitz Dance received a 2020 NDP Finalist Grant Award for Song of Songs, made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to address sustainability needs during COVID-19.
03-08-2022
Steven Sapp ’89 and Mildred Ruiz-Sapp ’92 met at Bard, fell in love, and went on to create Universes, a groundbreaking national theater company of color founded in 1995, whose members include William Ruiz ’03 (a.k.a. Ninja) and Gamal Chasten. They are currently working on a piece, titled Maria, commissioned by Long Wharf Theatre, that explores the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, as seen through the eyes of a woman who has experienced a trauma similar to that of West Side Story’s heroine Maria. “With Maria, Universes intends to reclaim the way stories about specific communities are made without their consent, not to mention stories that white culture specifically tells them they have no right to have an opinion on,” writes Jose Solís for American Theatre.
03-08-2022
Bard alumna and visiting artist in residence Tschabalala Self ’12, known for her figurative collage paintings of Black female bodies, has just launched a new brand collaboration. Her Ugg x Tschabalala Self capsule collection is made up of colorful twists on Ugg’s boots, slippers, outerwear, and accessories, which combine form, function, and Self’s exuberant creative vision. “It was kind of a natural fit,” she says. “Ugg is a brand that deals a lot with materiality and texture, and I deal with that stuff in my painting as well.” With this project, she notes, “I’m using a lot of the same aesthetic tropes and types of patterning and design and geometry that I would generally use in my practice, but the figure is not present.”
03-01-2022
Ahead of their first solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Carolyn Lazard ’10 spoke with Frieze about their work and how they incorporate Blackness, queerness, disability, and collectivity into their aesthetic. A cofounder of the art collective Canaries, “a network of women and gender non-conforming people living and working with autoimmune conditions and other chronic illnesses,” Lazard sometimes feels uncomfortable with the idea of individuation, of focusing on one artist over another. “The truth is that my work comes out of a long lineage of Black, disabled, and queer people making art,” they say. “My practice doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it is made in relation to the work of other artists who have come before me, and those whose work I learn about day to day.”
Lazard’s work, which spans different mediums, progressed from a love of avant-garde cinema, which they first came into contact with at Bard. Recently, Lazard has experimented with providing multiple ways of presenting a single artwork, both visual and non-visual. “Access has this capacity to break through the boundaries of medium, because of the way it makes art necessarily iterative,” they say. “Through access, a single artwork might exist as a description, as a notation, as sign language, as a transcript or as a tactile object—depending on what people need.” Still, though these categories inform their work, they are resistant to the market trends which seek to define artists, especially Black artists, by a singular trait or identity. “Most museums seem committed to receiving Black art, Black aesthetics, and Black politics—provided it’s on the museum’s terms,” they say. “It’s a complex time to be a Black artist, but when has it not been?”
Read More in Frieze
Learn More about Carolyn Lazard: Long Take
Lazard’s work, which spans different mediums, progressed from a love of avant-garde cinema, which they first came into contact with at Bard. Recently, Lazard has experimented with providing multiple ways of presenting a single artwork, both visual and non-visual. “Access has this capacity to break through the boundaries of medium, because of the way it makes art necessarily iterative,” they say. “Through access, a single artwork might exist as a description, as a notation, as sign language, as a transcript or as a tactile object—depending on what people need.” Still, though these categories inform their work, they are resistant to the market trends which seek to define artists, especially Black artists, by a singular trait or identity. “Most museums seem committed to receiving Black art, Black aesthetics, and Black politics—provided it’s on the museum’s terms,” they say. “It’s a complex time to be a Black artist, but when has it not been?”
Read More in Frieze
Learn More about Carolyn Lazard: Long Take
February 2022
02-08-2022
Translating Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices” for the stage, Justin Peck collaborated with Shaw and Eva LeWitt ’07 to create Partita, a new ballet for the New York City Ballet. While developing Partita, Peck discovered Sol LeWitt, Eva’s father, was an inspiration for the original score, which led him to her work, which he described as having “a dimensionality and theatricality” integral to this new adaptation. For LeWitt, the ballet spoke to her sense of her own work, especially her use of gravity. “That’s so linked to dance, to humans moving through space, and to the voice too,” LeWitt says. “Those gravitational universes are important to all our art forms.” Partita, performed by eight dancers in sneakers, featured set design by LeWitt, whose “vibrantly colored hanging fabric sets” served as the backdrop for the ballet when it premiered January 27, 2022.
Full Story in the New York Times
Full Story in the New York Times
02-06-2022
“Photographer Tim Davis’s latest book, I’m Looking Through You, (Aperture, 2021) is a welcome respite from all the chaos and clamor unleashed in the world right now. It’s a book about the unbridled joys of ‘seeing’ with a camera. It’s also a love poem to the crazy, freewheeling streets of Los Angeles,” writes Kenneth Dickerman for the Washington Post. Tim Davis ’91 is associate professor of photography at Bard College. He has been a member of the Bard faculty since 2003.
02-02-2022
Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Joshua Glick as Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts for a three-year period from 2022 to 2025. Professor Glick’s research and teaching focus is the comparative histories of film, television, and radio; nonfiction media; race and representation; and the civic uses of emerging technology. He will also be teaching in Experimental Humanities.
Joshua Glick is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History (University of California Press, 2018). Josh’s current book explores the rising interest in nonfiction on both the left and right of the political spectrum. It examines, in particular, the way documentary’s proliferation across new platforms has transformed the relationship between Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C. Josh is also actively involved in public humanities projects, collaborating with archives, museums, and community organizations. As a Fellow at the Open Documentary Lab at MIT, he recently designed the interactive online curriculum: Media Literacy in the Age of Deepfakes. He also co-curated the exhibition currently up at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York: Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen. The show investigates the history of media manipulation, the rise of “deepfake” videos, and how synthetic media can be used for the public good. Josh holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Prior to coming to Bard, he was the Isabelle Peregrin Assistant Professor of English, Film & Media Studies at Hendrix College.
Joshua Glick is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History (University of California Press, 2018). Josh’s current book explores the rising interest in nonfiction on both the left and right of the political spectrum. It examines, in particular, the way documentary’s proliferation across new platforms has transformed the relationship between Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington D.C. Josh is also actively involved in public humanities projects, collaborating with archives, museums, and community organizations. As a Fellow at the Open Documentary Lab at MIT, he recently designed the interactive online curriculum: Media Literacy in the Age of Deepfakes. He also co-curated the exhibition currently up at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York: Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen. The show investigates the history of media manipulation, the rise of “deepfake” videos, and how synthetic media can be used for the public good. Josh holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Prior to coming to Bard, he was the Isabelle Peregrin Assistant Professor of English, Film & Media Studies at Hendrix College.
02-02-2022
Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Masha Shpolberg as Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts for a tenure-track position beginning in the 2022-2023 academic year. Professor Shpolberg’s research and teaching explore world cinema, with special attention to Russia and Eastern Europe, ecocinema, women’s cinema, and global documentary.
Masha Shpolberg’s first book project focuses on the aesthetics of labor in Polish cinema of the late socialist period, examining how filmmakers sought out new ways of representing the laboring body at a time of massive workers' strikes—and how they co-opted, confronted, or otherwise challenged the representational legacy of socialist realism. She is also currently working on two edited volumes: Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe, forthcoming from Berghahn Books, and Contemporary Russian Documentary, under contract at Edinburgh University Press. Masha has contributed film criticism to Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Tablet, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a Ph.D. in Film & Media Studies and Comparative Literature from Yale University. Prior to coming to Bard, Masha taught at Wellesley College and the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
Masha Shpolberg’s first book project focuses on the aesthetics of labor in Polish cinema of the late socialist period, examining how filmmakers sought out new ways of representing the laboring body at a time of massive workers' strikes—and how they co-opted, confronted, or otherwise challenged the representational legacy of socialist realism. She is also currently working on two edited volumes: Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe, forthcoming from Berghahn Books, and Contemporary Russian Documentary, under contract at Edinburgh University Press. Masha has contributed film criticism to Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, Tablet, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She holds a Ph.D. in Film & Media Studies and Comparative Literature from Yale University. Prior to coming to Bard, Masha taught at Wellesley College and the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
02-01-2022
Multiple Bard faculty members, both former and present, as well as several alumni/ae will be featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Works by Rindon Johnson MFA ’18, Duane Linklater MFA ’13, and Jon Wang MFA ’19 will be featured alongside those by current and former faculty Nayland Blake ’82, Raven Chacon, Dave McKenzie, Adam Pendleton, and Lucy Raven MFA ’08. David Breslin, co-organizer of this edition of the Biennial, spoke with the New York Times about the curation of work that spoke to the social and political conflict that has taken place since the last Biennial in 2019. “Our hope is that this show permits a taking stock, a way of seeing what we’re maybe not at the end of, but in the middle of,” Breslin says, “and how art can help make sense of our times.” Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept will open on April 6, 2022 and will run through September 5, 2022. This year marks the 80th edition of the exhibition, the longest-running of its kind.
Full Story in the New York Times
Read More on whitney.org
Full Story in the New York Times
Read More on whitney.org
January 2022
01-26-2022
Lucy Sante—writer, critic, and Bard faculty member—pens an intimate personal essay for Vanity Fair tracing her journey as a trans woman, from the carefully repressed feelings of her adolescence to finally coming out last year. “Now I am aware that I live, as we all do, in a cloud of unknowing, where certainties break down and categories become liquid,” she writes. “None of us really knows anything except provisionally. Now, as Lou Reed put it, ‘I’m set free/ to find a new illusion.’” Lucy Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1999.
01-25-2022
The Posse Arts Program celebrated its inaugural class of scholars, including a cohort from Puerto Rico that will attend Bard College this coming fall, at a virtual awards ceremony on January 24. Yadier Perez, one of 10 Posse Arts Scholars who will attend Bard, reflected on the significance of the award for his family. “I am thankful to Bard. You have given me the opportunity to show my brothers, my siblings, that pushing and fighting for your dreams can make them a reality. … We've all gone through hardships, but we're here to succeed. We've earned this. So thank you, Bard, for giving me the opportunity to make my mom proud.”
The program included remarks from songwriter, actor, and director Lin-Manuel Miranda, his father and political strategist Luis A. Miranda Jr., and U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona. President of the College Leon Botstein greeted the incoming Bardians with a message underscoring the importance of community. “To succeed, you can’t do it alone—you’re only as good as the people who help you and collaborate and share and support you,” President Botstein said. “It’s terribly important, the Posse idea.”
Addressing the new Posse Arts cohorts at the recent awards ceremony, Lin-Manuel Miranda said, “This really is an extraordinary moment. We are believers in the Posse process. Your time in school is a time for you to find your voice, find what you are passionate about. You’re going in with a squad and with a group of like-minded artists and you’re going to be able to lean on each other for support. You’re going to have an instant set of potential collaborators. Take advantage of your time and sink your teeth into the school. Get to know your Posse cohorts. And we are excited to be a step in your journey and to be able to say, ‘We knew you when.’”
Representing Bard, the first institution to partner with Posse to recruit students from Puerto Rico, President Botstein spoke about the outsized role the arts play in society. “We believe that the arts are not a separate way of life,” he said. “The arts are not decoration; they're not ornament. They're essential to any notion of freedom or autonomy or community, especially in a democracy. They are on the same level as physics, or mathematics, or economics or history and literature. And it's a wonderful addition to our student body, to have students from Puerto Rico.”
Twenty-seven high school seniors will attend college on full-tuition art scholarships totaling $5.2 million as participants in the new Posse Arts Program, an initiative of the Posse Foundation—a leading college success and youth leadership development organization. Selected from public high schools in Puerto Rico, New York, and cities across the country, the program’s inaugural class will matriculate this fall at Bard College, California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), and University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), respectively.
The Posse Arts initiative was conceived in collaboration with Lin-Manuel and the Miranda Family Fund. The program seeks to create a diverse pipeline of leaders in the creative arts by connecting promising art students from diverse backgrounds to top colleges and universities, where they attend as members of a cohort. Last spring, former First Lady Michelle Obama joined Lin-Manuel and Posse in announcing the launch of the program.
BARD COLLEGE POSSE ARTS SCHOLARSHIPS AWARDEES
Ariana Sofia Diaz
Naobie Angeline Garcia
Jadiel Omar Gómez Marín
Dashely Valeria Juliá Ramírez
Dyann Malpica Santiago
Gabriel Antonio Medina Maldonado
Kiara Arlene Peña González
Yadier M. Pérez Pagán
Diego Andrés Santos
Pedro Emiliano Vázquez Colón
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The program included remarks from songwriter, actor, and director Lin-Manuel Miranda, his father and political strategist Luis A. Miranda Jr., and U.S. Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona. President of the College Leon Botstein greeted the incoming Bardians with a message underscoring the importance of community. “To succeed, you can’t do it alone—you’re only as good as the people who help you and collaborate and share and support you,” President Botstein said. “It’s terribly important, the Posse idea.”
Addressing the new Posse Arts cohorts at the recent awards ceremony, Lin-Manuel Miranda said, “This really is an extraordinary moment. We are believers in the Posse process. Your time in school is a time for you to find your voice, find what you are passionate about. You’re going in with a squad and with a group of like-minded artists and you’re going to be able to lean on each other for support. You’re going to have an instant set of potential collaborators. Take advantage of your time and sink your teeth into the school. Get to know your Posse cohorts. And we are excited to be a step in your journey and to be able to say, ‘We knew you when.’”
Representing Bard, the first institution to partner with Posse to recruit students from Puerto Rico, President Botstein spoke about the outsized role the arts play in society. “We believe that the arts are not a separate way of life,” he said. “The arts are not decoration; they're not ornament. They're essential to any notion of freedom or autonomy or community, especially in a democracy. They are on the same level as physics, or mathematics, or economics or history and literature. And it's a wonderful addition to our student body, to have students from Puerto Rico.”
Twenty-seven high school seniors will attend college on full-tuition art scholarships totaling $5.2 million as participants in the new Posse Arts Program, an initiative of the Posse Foundation—a leading college success and youth leadership development organization. Selected from public high schools in Puerto Rico, New York, and cities across the country, the program’s inaugural class will matriculate this fall at Bard College, California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), and University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), respectively.
The Posse Arts initiative was conceived in collaboration with Lin-Manuel and the Miranda Family Fund. The program seeks to create a diverse pipeline of leaders in the creative arts by connecting promising art students from diverse backgrounds to top colleges and universities, where they attend as members of a cohort. Last spring, former First Lady Michelle Obama joined Lin-Manuel and Posse in announcing the launch of the program.
BARD COLLEGE POSSE ARTS SCHOLARSHIPS AWARDEES
Ariana Sofia Diaz
Naobie Angeline Garcia
Jadiel Omar Gómez Marín
Dashely Valeria Juliá Ramírez
Dyann Malpica Santiago
Gabriel Antonio Medina Maldonado
Kiara Arlene Peña González
Yadier M. Pérez Pagán
Diego Andrés Santos
Pedro Emiliano Vázquez Colón
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01-11-2022
Opus 40, the 57-acre sculpture park created by the late Harvey Fite ’30, former Bard professor and alumnus, will begin 2022 with a combined $650,000 in grant awards. With these new grants, Caroline Crumpacker, executive director of Opus 40, has prioritized preserving the park and ensuring its success. The upkeep of Opus 40 would not be possible without this grant money, says Jonathan Becker, Opus 40 board president and Bard executive vice president, vice president for academic affairs, and director of the Center for Civic Engagement. "The (Mellon) Foundation’s grant, combined with the National Parks Service/Save America’s Treasures grant announced in September, will allow for a truly historic conservation effort and will secure the preservation of Fite’s sculpture for generations to come,” Becker said in a statement.
Full Story in the Times Herald-Record
Full Story in the Times Herald-Record
01-11-2022
Selected by actress Tilda Swinton, artist Cao Fei, and architect David Adjaye, Marie Schleef ’14 was named one of 10 recipients of the first Chanel Next Prize. The biennial prize awards Schleef with €100,000, devoted to a project of her choosing. Schleef’s work as a theater director and multimedia artist centers the female experience and challenges notions of the male gaze. Yana Peel, Chanel’s global head of arts and culture, said in a statement: “We extend Chanel’s deep history of cultural commitment—empowering big ideas and creating opportunities for an emerging generation of artists to imagine the next.” Also included with the prize is access to a network of mentors over the course of the next 20 months.
Full Story on ARTnews
Full Story on ARTnews
01-04-2022
“Dance has always been a radical act, even if it was covered in gauze and tulle.”
—Maria Simpson, Professor of Dance and Dance Program Director
Dance Magazine features Bard College in its January 2022 issue, highlighting the work of Sam Pratt ’14 in its “25 to Watch” cover story, and interviewing Bard senior Leslie Morales and Professor Maria Simpson in “Dance with a Purpose,” an article about blending art and activism in your practice, even before graduation.
—Maria Simpson, Professor of Dance and Dance Program Director
Dance Magazine features Bard College in its January 2022 issue, highlighting the work of Sam Pratt ’14 in its “25 to Watch” cover story, and interviewing Bard senior Leslie Morales and Professor Maria Simpson in “Dance with a Purpose,” an article about blending art and activism in your practice, even before graduation.
01-03-2022
Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence in the Studio Arts Program, spoke widely about his work in a talk hosted by Art Basel. Tracking his personal and artistic history, Gibson spoke at length about a period of his career during which he took a deliberate step back from the “traditional” studio space and worked in concert with Indigenous artisans and creators, some of whom didn’t explicitly define themselves as artists. Though his work is often seen through the lens of identity, Gibson spoke of an intertribal aesthetic he brings to his work, which often calls for Indigenous and queer liberation.
Full Video on Art Basel
Full Archive of Art Basel Live
Full Video on Art Basel
Full Archive of Art Basel Live
December 2021
12-20-2021
Two Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Art history and Italian studies major Francesca Houran ’23 has been awarded $5,000 towards her studies at the University of Trento in Italy, where she will be the first to participate in a newly established tuition exchange program with Bard. “Through studying abroad, I hope to further my knowledge of the hermaphrodite within the context of the Italian Renaissance and how it influences the gender binary in contemporary Italy. I am also excited to explore the ascending, vertically-oriented architecture of museums, churches, and monuments that prompts climbing and physical ascension as a symbol of conquest and hierarchy,” says Houran. “My overarching goal is to build a foundation for a career in ethical museum curation and nuanced communication of histories surrounding gender, race, and colonialism—a goal that traveling through the Gilman Scholarship will make possible for me as a low-income college student.”
Biology major and premed student Emma Tilley ’23 has been awarded $4,500 to study via Bard’s tuition exchange at the University College Roosevelt in the Netherlands. “I am grateful for the Gilman scholarship and excited for the opportunity to travel abroad and learn more about international healthcare systems and the ways that Covid has impacted nations differently. My additional focus is to continue working on promoting inclusion in STEM on a global scale,” says Tilley.
Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 34,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study.
As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”
The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org.
Biology major and premed student Emma Tilley ’23 has been awarded $4,500 to study via Bard’s tuition exchange at the University College Roosevelt in the Netherlands. “I am grateful for the Gilman scholarship and excited for the opportunity to travel abroad and learn more about international healthcare systems and the ways that Covid has impacted nations differently. My additional focus is to continue working on promoting inclusion in STEM on a global scale,” says Tilley.
Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 34,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study.
As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”
The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org.
12-07-2021
In a thorough exploration of recent photography books for the New York Times, Lucy Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, reviews works by Annie Leibovitz, Harry Gruyaert, Catherine Opie, and more, as well as a new book by Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. Sante calls the physical mass of Gilles’ new work “intimidating,” going on to say that the book is nothing less than “capacious.”
Documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, these “two enormous volumes of plates, the size of 19th-century ledgers, and an accompanying almanac” provide the reader with something unique, Sante writes, “not a timeline but a series of existential crises that recur like rituals, that also play out in headlines, TV news footage and, above all, graffiti, rises in waves and recedes into choppiness, as capacious as a 19th-century novel but as indeterminate as an ocean.” Gilles’ photos are “never at rest,” she writes, with violence “always imminent if not present.”
Sante goes on to review a bevy of books by other “masters of the form,” including new work by Annie Leibowitz and Catherine Opie. Calling Opie “a portraitist of unusual poise,” whose subjects are often “trans people, butch lesbians, [and] fetishists of diverse sorts,” Sante writes that Opie’s “stately presentations have done much to infuse dignity into their public perception.” Later, reviewing work by Mitch Epstein, who “works like a nonfiction writer,” Sante notes his skill as a sort of aesthetic documentarian. “His photographs are always lucid and eloquent,” she writes, “and often very beautiful despite their grim subjects.”
Full Story in the New York Times
Documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, these “two enormous volumes of plates, the size of 19th-century ledgers, and an accompanying almanac” provide the reader with something unique, Sante writes, “not a timeline but a series of existential crises that recur like rituals, that also play out in headlines, TV news footage and, above all, graffiti, rises in waves and recedes into choppiness, as capacious as a 19th-century novel but as indeterminate as an ocean.” Gilles’ photos are “never at rest,” she writes, with violence “always imminent if not present.”
Sante goes on to review a bevy of books by other “masters of the form,” including new work by Annie Leibowitz and Catherine Opie. Calling Opie “a portraitist of unusual poise,” whose subjects are often “trans people, butch lesbians, [and] fetishists of diverse sorts,” Sante writes that Opie’s “stately presentations have done much to infuse dignity into their public perception.” Later, reviewing work by Mitch Epstein, who “works like a nonfiction writer,” Sante notes his skill as a sort of aesthetic documentarian. “His photographs are always lucid and eloquent,” she writes, “and often very beautiful despite their grim subjects.”
Full Story in the New York Times
12-07-2021
A new 14-minute work by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, was reviewed in the New York Times. “Imaginative writing for percussion and bustling rhythmic activity — long traits of Tower’s music — course through this restless, episodic score,” writes Anthony Tommasini. Tower, “as inventive as ever,” debuted the piece with the New York Philharmonic as part of Project 19, which commissioned 19 female composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment. “1920/2019” represented the resumption of the series and a return of Tower’s “multilayered, meter-fracturing” style.
Read the Review in the New York Times
Read the Review in the New York Times
November 2021
11-30-2021
“Understood or not, McLuhan’s work was influential in its time, and with Distant Early Warning, Alex Kitnick shows how it spoke to numerous artists of the avant-garde,” writes Kelvin Browne in Literary Review Canada. “These artists may already have been aware, even if not consciously, that twentieth-century media consumption was leading to a significant cultural shift, but McLuhan’s analysis helped give shape to their intuitions. That’s why, Kitnick argues, McLuhan should be considered more relevant today than he is: not because of his role in nascent media studies but because he was a bona fide player in the art world.”
Kitnick describes his new book as an introduction to McLuhan’s theory of art. Each chapter positions McLuhan, who is most famous for the idea that “the medium is the message,” into context with individual contemporary artists through “concrete points of contact.” In doing so, Kitnick wants to “to reimagine the relationship between theory and practice, criticism and art.” Alex Kitnick is assistant professor of art history and visual culture and faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
Kitnick describes his new book as an introduction to McLuhan’s theory of art. Each chapter positions McLuhan, who is most famous for the idea that “the medium is the message,” into context with individual contemporary artists through “concrete points of contact.” In doing so, Kitnick wants to “to reimagine the relationship between theory and practice, criticism and art.” Alex Kitnick is assistant professor of art history and visual culture and faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.
11-09-2021
“Author Lucy Sante is at an interesting point in her life, looking backward and forward simultaneously,” writes Bob Krasner for the Villager. “With the release of her latest book, a collection of essays entitled Maybe the People Would Be the Times, she has gathered together pieces that form a kind of memoir—even in the fiction that weaves in and out of the examinations of music, art, tabloids, photography and her life in the East Village many years ago. Between the creation of this book and its actual publication, Sante has entered a new phase of her life [...] In her mid-60’s, Sante has recently come out as transgender, changed her name and is happily living her life with a new set of pronouns.” Lucy Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1999.
October 2021
10-25-2021
The French newspaper Le Monde reviews S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence Kelly Reichardt’s film First Cow as a “chef-d’œuvre” or “masterpiece” and calls her one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of American cinema. In French.
10-06-2021
Bard Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Yebel Gallegos joins Joanna Kotze in conversation for Long Distance Dance Dialogues Exchange #8. In the exchange, Gallegos talks about his journey as a musician in high school, to dancing, and now to being an educator. They also discuss borders, culture, and balancing all of one's passions, interests, and selves. The second part of the exchange is video of movement that has been relayed from Milka Djordjevich in Los Angeles to Yebel Gallegos in Annandale-on-Hudson. Djordjevich does her original movement and then both Djordjevich and Gallegos do Djordjevich's movement, which Gallegos learned. Gallegos will add onto this and that movement will be passed on to Sarah Beth Oppenheim in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Long Distance Dance Dialogues is a series of exchanges between Joanna Kotze and 12 dancers/choreographers around the world and throughout the United States between January–December 2021. Each exchange begins with a video interview that will be archived online and shared with the public once a month beginning in March 2021. The discussion is followed by sharing one minute or less of movement, as a relay, from one dancer to the next, linking us together through the making, learning, and documenting of dance. Each relay of movement will also be archived and shared online in its intentionally raw, unpolished form, once a month. At the end of the year, a film bringing together all parts of the relay will be shared as a record of the project.
Long Distance Dance Dialogues is a series of exchanges between Joanna Kotze and 12 dancers/choreographers around the world and throughout the United States between January–December 2021. Each exchange begins with a video interview that will be archived online and shared with the public once a month beginning in March 2021. The discussion is followed by sharing one minute or less of movement, as a relay, from one dancer to the next, linking us together through the making, learning, and documenting of dance. Each relay of movement will also be archived and shared online in its intentionally raw, unpolished form, once a month. At the end of the year, a film bringing together all parts of the relay will be shared as a record of the project.
10-05-2021
Aperture has announced the shortlists for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, which include Bard alumna Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10 and Photography Program faculty members Farah Al Qasimi and Gilles Peress. Phyars-Burgess is listed in the First Book category for Untitled (Capricious Publishing, 2021). On the Photobook of the Year list, Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography Farah Al Qasimi was selected for Hello Future (Capricious Publishing, 2021) and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress was chosen for Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Steidl, 2021). Initiated in 2012, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. The jury reviewed more than 800 submissions this year and selected only 35 books. A final jury will select winners next month.
September 2021
09-23-2021
An Immersive Experience of Harmony, Poetry and Gesture, Featuring 50 Singers
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY—The Fisher Center LAB (Fisher Center at Bard’s residency and commissioning program) and the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities have teamed up to develop and present a new iteration of The Gauntlet, an immersive, community-inclusive choral work from artists Sxip Shirey and Coco Karol. Performed on and around the lawn of the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, including on the Olafur Eliasson installation “the parliament of reality,” performances will take place on Friday, October 15 at 5:30 pm; Saturday, October 16 at 1 pm and 3 pm; and Sunday, October 17 at 5:30pm. Tickets are $25. Bard students may access tickets for $5 made possible by the Passloff Pass. To purchase or reserve tickets visit fishercenter.bard.edu, call 845-758-7900 (Mon–Fri 10am – 5pm), or email [email protected].An intimate, personal experience utilizing the exterior landscapes of the Fisher Center, audiences will be led through musical corridors of sonic architecture formed by the human voice. The Gauntlet is site-specific and bespoke. Each time it is performed, it takes on a new personality that reflects the performers, community, and location in which it is experienced. This iteration explores the theme “Spaces of Freedom,” in conjunction with the Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference “Revitalizing Democracy: Sortition, Citizen Power, and Spaces of Freedom.”
“Freedom in the sense of the power to act and speak in public spaces is at the heart of Hannah Arendt’s political thinking,” said Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center. “For Arendt, freedom happens in a public space. The Gauntlet is so exciting because it brings people together to experience thinking about freedom in a collective space. And the setting in Olafur Eliasson’s ‘parliament of reality’ provides a context of democratic spaces in which to experience thinking about freedom to act in the practice of self-government. I can’t think of a better way to conclude the Arendt Center’s conference on ‘Revitalizing Democracy and Spaces of Freedom.’”
The libretto, written by Shirey and Karol, is comprised of text generated from 20 “movement interviews” with local activists, organizers, artists, scholars, elected officials, and citizens, conducted by Karol as a way to explore individual and collective experiences on the theme of freedom. The Gauntlet will bathe audiences in waves of harmony, poetry and gesture, sung by a choir of 50 singers, assembled from all corners of the Bard College and Hudson Valley community. Audiences are led through the performance by four dancers (Karol, Miguel Angel Guzmán, Effy Grey, and Remi Harris).
Shirey composes the score utilizing melodies and harmonies that are passed from singer to singer in a chain of exchange, creating a “gauntlet” of sound and story, exchanged through the immersive performance as audience members flow through the pathways of sound. Says Shirey about the process, “I am constantly imagining how the audience will hear these stories as a rush of words flowing by, in exchange from singer to singer. The hope is to write grounded phrases and fractile melodies that bloom the minds of the listener.”
09-14-2021
“Jim Jarmusch’s small, eerie collages are all about faces,” writes Sante in the Paris Review. “And about the bodies attached to those faces. And about what happens when faces get switched off onto other bodies. You could say that Jarmusch, ever the director, is engaging in exploratory casting. He wants to see Stanley Kubrick in the role of a golfer, and Nico as a Vegas crooner, and Jane Austen winding up on the mound, and Albert Einstein as a rock star, and Bernie Sanders as a dog. Andy Warhol, meanwhile, just goes ahead and casts himself in every role, turning all of them into ‘Andy Warhol.’” Luc Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College.
09-14-2021
Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress, who has chronicled war and its aftershocks all over the world, was at home in Brooklyn on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he got a call from his studio manager, telling him to turn on the TV: a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. “I looked at it, and it was evident that it was not only a major incident but that it was not an accident; it was an attack,” Peress recalled in the New Yorker.
09-14-2021
The digitally remastered Arthur Avilés Collection includes video documentation spanning this groundbreaking dancer/choreographer’s decades-long career. To mark its publication, the Hemispheric Institute and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!) are cosponsoring Naked Vanguard: The Arthur Aviles Archive in Motion, a series of conversations and performances that are available for streaming through the Institute’s HemiTV portal.
09-07-2021
“For Pfaff, more is more,” writes Andre van der Wende for the Provincetown Independent. “Her work is characterized by an eyes-wide-open, constantly curious approach, finding new ways of seeing—fresh nooks and crannies relating to science, psychology, astronomy, or the body.” The show is on view through October 31 at the Gaa Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Judy Pfaff is the Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts at Bard College.
August 2021
08-26-2021
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) today announced the creation of a $50-million endowment, comprising a $25-million gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and a matching commitment of $25 million from George Soros as part of Bard College’s transformational $1-billion endowment drive. Established in 1990, CCS Bard is the first institution of its kind in the United States dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, an interdisciplinary field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform contemporary art exhibition-making and practice. This unprecedented donation, initiated by the Hessel Foundation in honor of CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year, enables CCS Bard to continue its pathbreaking work in perpetuity.
The Hessel Foundation gift builds on over three decades of visionary support from CCS Bard Co-Founder Marieluise Hessel. In the late 1980s, the Foundation entrusted its growing collection of contemporary art to Bard for the exclusive use of its students and faculty, laying the groundwork for the creation of CCS Bard in 1990. Since that time, the Foundation has been an enduring supporter of CCS Bard with transformational gifts including the construction of the Hessel Museum of Art in 2006 and the expansion of the library, special collections, and archives in 2015, alongside annual operating contributions that have inspired many others to support the institution. Its collection, which forms the cornerstone of CCS Bard’s master’s program and the basis for many of its exhibitions at the museum, has grown to encompass approximately 2,000 works of art and is today considered to be among the most important collections of contemporary art on a university campus. Support from the Foundation has also enabled CCS Bard to provide 90% of incoming students with financial aid.
“This gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation marks a milestone moment in the 30-year history of CCS Bard,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “The groundwork that Marieluise established in co-founding the institution has catalyzed a shift in the field and, by extension, has advanced bold new discourses in contemporary art. In sustaining CCS Bard for generations to come, Marieluise’s generosity will allow us to build on that legacy and continue to advance new ideas in curatorial practice and contemporary art. Above all, it is a gift to the future.”
“CCS Bard is an integral part of the Bard College community, and we are immensely grateful for Marieluise’s enduring leadership and support. Her generous gift ensures that the groundbreaking work at CCS continues to flourish as it further advances Bard’s overall mission of fostering rigorous programs of free inquiry and creativity,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein.
“For the past 30 years, CCS Bard has had an outsized impact within the art world,” said Marieluise Hessel, Co-Founder of CCS Bard. “It is a privilege to be able to celebrate three decades of sustained, transformational inquiry and experimentation into curatorial studies and exhibition-making with this gift. I know that this program will continue to lead the way in finding new stories to tell, artists to champion, and boundaries to push.”
In celebration of its 30th anniversary, CCS Bard is currently presenting two exhibitions that draw significantly from the Marieluise Hessel Collection: Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection comprises more than 75 works on paper and drawings collected by Hessel over the course of more than four decades to explore the artistic intimacy achieved by the medium; and With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, the first large-scale North American survey of the groundbreaking women-led Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s, showcasing major works from the Collection alongside significant loans to trace the movement's reach in postwar American art.
In addition, this fall CCS Bard will publish the first comprehensive publication on the Marieluise Hessel Collection, examining the impact of the collection on CCS Bard students through original writing from CCS alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Serubiri Moses, and Gabi Ngcobo, among many others.
About Marieluise Hessel and the Marieluise Hessel Foundation
Born in Munich in 1939, Marieluise Hessel began collecting contemporary art in the 1960s. From the first works purchased from Heiner Friedrich in Germany, the Hessel Collection, which is held in trust by the Foundation, has grown contemporaneously with artists working from the middle of the 20th century through the present. The Collection today is considered among the most important contemporary art collections on a university campus and is remarkable for its breadth, eclecticism, and embrace of undervalued and difficult works of art. Hessel co-founded CCS Bard in 1990, launching a groundbreaking new type of institution dedicated to nurturing the next generation of contemporary art curators and critics.
About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection at its core, alongside extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice since its founding in 1990. Through its rigorous, interdisciplinary program and unmatched resources, CCS Bard provides unparalleled opportunities for students to research and organize museum exhibitions on an independent basis, and in so doing acts as a key platform for the next generation of curators, artists, and art world leaders in the earliest stages of their careers. CCS Bard receives support from a range of public and private foundations and individuals, including major support from the Luma Foundation, The Laura-Lee Whittier Woods Foundation, the Keith Haring Foundation, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation among others.
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at its main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
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The Hessel Foundation gift builds on over three decades of visionary support from CCS Bard Co-Founder Marieluise Hessel. In the late 1980s, the Foundation entrusted its growing collection of contemporary art to Bard for the exclusive use of its students and faculty, laying the groundwork for the creation of CCS Bard in 1990. Since that time, the Foundation has been an enduring supporter of CCS Bard with transformational gifts including the construction of the Hessel Museum of Art in 2006 and the expansion of the library, special collections, and archives in 2015, alongside annual operating contributions that have inspired many others to support the institution. Its collection, which forms the cornerstone of CCS Bard’s master’s program and the basis for many of its exhibitions at the museum, has grown to encompass approximately 2,000 works of art and is today considered to be among the most important collections of contemporary art on a university campus. Support from the Foundation has also enabled CCS Bard to provide 90% of incoming students with financial aid.
“This gift from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation marks a milestone moment in the 30-year history of CCS Bard,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “The groundwork that Marieluise established in co-founding the institution has catalyzed a shift in the field and, by extension, has advanced bold new discourses in contemporary art. In sustaining CCS Bard for generations to come, Marieluise’s generosity will allow us to build on that legacy and continue to advance new ideas in curatorial practice and contemporary art. Above all, it is a gift to the future.”
“CCS Bard is an integral part of the Bard College community, and we are immensely grateful for Marieluise’s enduring leadership and support. Her generous gift ensures that the groundbreaking work at CCS continues to flourish as it further advances Bard’s overall mission of fostering rigorous programs of free inquiry and creativity,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein.
“For the past 30 years, CCS Bard has had an outsized impact within the art world,” said Marieluise Hessel, Co-Founder of CCS Bard. “It is a privilege to be able to celebrate three decades of sustained, transformational inquiry and experimentation into curatorial studies and exhibition-making with this gift. I know that this program will continue to lead the way in finding new stories to tell, artists to champion, and boundaries to push.”
In celebration of its 30th anniversary, CCS Bard is currently presenting two exhibitions that draw significantly from the Marieluise Hessel Collection: Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection comprises more than 75 works on paper and drawings collected by Hessel over the course of more than four decades to explore the artistic intimacy achieved by the medium; and With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, the first large-scale North American survey of the groundbreaking women-led Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s, showcasing major works from the Collection alongside significant loans to trace the movement's reach in postwar American art.
In addition, this fall CCS Bard will publish the first comprehensive publication on the Marieluise Hessel Collection, examining the impact of the collection on CCS Bard students through original writing from CCS alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Serubiri Moses, and Gabi Ngcobo, among many others.
About Marieluise Hessel and the Marieluise Hessel Foundation
Born in Munich in 1939, Marieluise Hessel began collecting contemporary art in the 1960s. From the first works purchased from Heiner Friedrich in Germany, the Hessel Collection, which is held in trust by the Foundation, has grown contemporaneously with artists working from the middle of the 20th century through the present. The Collection today is considered among the most important contemporary art collections on a university campus and is remarkable for its breadth, eclecticism, and embrace of undervalued and difficult works of art. Hessel co-founded CCS Bard in 1990, launching a groundbreaking new type of institution dedicated to nurturing the next generation of contemporary art curators and critics.
About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection at its core, alongside extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice since its founding in 1990. Through its rigorous, interdisciplinary program and unmatched resources, CCS Bard provides unparalleled opportunities for students to research and organize museum exhibitions on an independent basis, and in so doing acts as a key platform for the next generation of curators, artists, and art world leaders in the earliest stages of their careers. CCS Bard receives support from a range of public and private foundations and individuals, including major support from the Luma Foundation, The Laura-Lee Whittier Woods Foundation, the Keith Haring Foundation, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation among others.
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at its main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
Media Contacts
Resnicow and Associates
Juliet Sorce / Daniel Rechtschaffen
[email protected] / [email protected]
212-671-5158 / 212-671-5188
08-24-2021
Avilés, award-winning Bronx-based dancer/choreographer, will perform in two events and be celebrated by NYU's Hemispheric Institute. After graduating from Bard, Avilés joined the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. In 1998, he co-founded The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (BAAD!), a performance space that blazed a path for professional art and dance in the Bronx. Avilés received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bard in 2015, a Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) award, and multiple Bessie Awards including a 2020 Bessie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Dance.
08-23-2021
After 40 years in prison, Gregory Mingo was pardoned on the night of Monday, August 23, along with several other incarcerated people, in one of Andrew Cuomo’s last acts as governor of New York State. Bard College students in HR 321, Advocacy Video, worked together with students in the Defenders Clinic at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to create short video self-presentations by applicants for clemency in fall 2020, including one with Mr. Mingo. The Bard-CUNY team visited Mr. Mingo in prison in the midst of the pandemic to interview him.
To be granted clemency is a rare victory after an arduous process on the part of the incarcerated individual and their advocates. “There could not be a better person to leave prison and rejoin the rest of us,” wrote Thomas Keenan and Brent Green, who cotaught the class, in a message to the Bard community. Watching the video, they said, “you can easily see why the Governor's decision was long overdue. Advocating for basic human rights and decency, especially in apparently enlightened situations like ours, ought to be unnecessary. The reason we teach this at Bard, and attempt to put it into practice, is that it's not, and because sometimes—but who knows when—it works.”
Advocacy Video is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences class cotaught by Thomas Keenan, professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Program, and Brent Green, visiting artist in residence. This is a Human Rights course crosslisted with Film and Electronic Arts. The four videos produced by students in fall 2020 are available on the Human Rights Program website.
To be granted clemency is a rare victory after an arduous process on the part of the incarcerated individual and their advocates. “There could not be a better person to leave prison and rejoin the rest of us,” wrote Thomas Keenan and Brent Green, who cotaught the class, in a message to the Bard community. Watching the video, they said, “you can easily see why the Governor's decision was long overdue. Advocating for basic human rights and decency, especially in apparently enlightened situations like ours, ought to be unnecessary. The reason we teach this at Bard, and attempt to put it into practice, is that it's not, and because sometimes—but who knows when—it works.”
Advocacy Video is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences class cotaught by Thomas Keenan, professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Program, and Brent Green, visiting artist in residence. This is a Human Rights course crosslisted with Film and Electronic Arts. The four videos produced by students in fall 2020 are available on the Human Rights Program website.
08-10-2021
Ink showcases an unusual body of work by Tanya Marcuse that came about serendipitously after her young son insisted on trying nocturnal squid fishing one summer in Maine. Unlike the majority of the photographer’s large-scale, elaborate works, these images—of squid arrayed on newsprint—were made with an iPhone camera, a more spontaneous and versatile tool.
“I loved the interplay between the abstraction of the black ink leaking from an uncanny underwater creature and the pages of the NY Times, with its own collision of image and text, reportage, and advertising,” says Marcuse. “I was initially struck by the simple uncanny confluence of newspaper fact and primordial ooze, but as the work unfolded that relationship became more complex and less obvious. Over time, the squid became more and more lyrical to me, and less grotesque. I got more and more interested in the ink with and without the squid’s bodies, the way the bodies of the squid and their ink could ‘draw’ with a kind of intention and gesture, both obscuring and elucidating the newspaper images and text.”
“I loved the interplay between the abstraction of the black ink leaking from an uncanny underwater creature and the pages of the NY Times, with its own collision of image and text, reportage, and advertising,” says Marcuse. “I was initially struck by the simple uncanny confluence of newspaper fact and primordial ooze, but as the work unfolded that relationship became more complex and less obvious. Over time, the squid became more and more lyrical to me, and less grotesque. I got more and more interested in the ink with and without the squid’s bodies, the way the bodies of the squid and their ink could ‘draw’ with a kind of intention and gesture, both obscuring and elucidating the newspaper images and text.”
08-10-2021
Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s novel Septology “showcases a static protagonist who stares endlessly at a painting, seeking its meaning while ruminating on his past. The book sounds, in summary, terrible: pretentious, self-serious, unendurable. This makes it all the more remarkable how wonderful it is,” writes Bard Writer in Residence Wyatt Mason. “The book evades all those pitfalls to become something quite different from what it might seem, something that, like all great novels, somehow exceeds our prior idea of what a novel is.”
08-03-2021
“Having not lived in this area for most of my life, I’ve seen the visual narrative of New Orleans and South Louisiana being dominated by aerial imagery of the coast, demonstrating how much land is being lost, or of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Those are the iconic images that are used to communicate Louisiana's environmental challenges. It’s not to say that those images aren’t important and documentary photography isn’t needed. But I think that there’s so much more room to visually explore these issues in a way that engages people more rather than relying on the fear tactics to encourage people to act.”
08-03-2021
“This spring, the first year of classes came to a close at a new undergraduate program in architecture at Bard College, a 2,000-student liberal arts school in rural Annandale, New York. According to the co-directors, Professors Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams, designing Bard Architecture’s new curriculum has been an opportunity to rethink architectural education by asking: What is architecture in the first place?”
July 2021
07-27-2021
Hyperallergic profiles indigenous artists collective New Red Order—Adam Khalil '11, Zack Khalil '14, and Jackson Polys—which often uses a combination of satire and cryptic messaging to provide “a fresh lens through which viewers can question and even reframe their conflicted relationships with indigeneity.” Their latest installation, the culmination of a multiyear collaboration between NRO and Artists Space, “provides a thoughtful survey of the group’s history of productive antagonization both within and outside of the art world.” Through August 22 at Artists Space in Manhattan.
07-20-2021
Alex Kitnick reviews The Avant-Garde Museum, a recent anthology–cum–exhibition catalogue edited by Agnieszka Pindera and Jarosław Suchan and published by the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland. “[T]he avant-garde museum as a type has never been cogently theorized,” he writes. “This volume is a perfect place to start.” Alex Kitnick is assistant professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, and a faculty member at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies.
07-19-2021
Julia B. Rosenbaum, associate professor of art history, explores Frederic Church’s Olana for the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. In the late 1860s, following his success as a landscape painter, Church turned to architectural and interior design. He constructed a house at the center of Olana, his 250-acre property in New York’s Hudson Valley, that manipulated space and daylight as artistic materials. With house building, Church moved into an immersive, three-dimensional format, producing some of his most experimental work. Rosenbaum’s study treats his first-floor interiors as a deliberate composition, of a piece with his two-dimensional oeuvre, and specifically argues for Church’s design as an aesthetic culmination of his longstanding interest—across media—in issues of perception and proprioception. Julia B. Rosenbaum is a professor of art history and visual culture and chair of the Art History and Visual Culture Program at Bard College.
07-13-2021
Bard alum Hazel Gurland-Pooler’s film Storming Caesar’s Palace will receive a grant award of between $10,000 and $25,000 from Firelight Media’s Impact Campaign Fund. The Fund supports the creation of audience engagement and impact campaigns for nonfiction film projects by and for communities of color in the United States. Storming Caesar’s Palace is the untold story of Black women who took on presidents, the mob, and everyday Americans, challenging the pernicious myth of the “welfare queen.”
07-13-2021
Driven by a desire to “do everything differently,” in 2017 Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis dropped his ongoing projects and spent two years traveling to Los Angeles, resulting in I’m Looking Through You, an expansive monograph published by Aperture.
07-05-2021
Filmmaker and S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence Kelly Reichardt talks about adapting Jonathan Raymond’s novel The Half-Life into her critically acclaimed film First Cow. At Bard, where she teaches every fall, she showed her students the same films that went into her own research for First Cow; this includes Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy.
June 2021
06-29-2021
Since its founding, the New York–based arts nonprofit—established in 1985 by abstract artist Lee Krasner, the widow of Jackson Pollock—has awarded nearly 5,000 grants, totaling $82 million, to artists and nonprofit organizations around the world. McBride is one of six recipients of the foundation’s 2020–21 Lee Krasner Award, given to artists in recognition of their lifetime achievement.
06-29-2021
Best known as one-third of Palberta—the anarchic pop-rock group formed with fellow Bardians Ani Ivry-Block ’15 and Nina Ryser ’15—the 26-year-old songwriter steps out on her own with The Best of Lily Konigsberg Right Now, a solo compilation that brings together three of Konigsberg’s pop-leaning solo EPs and a handful of previously unreleased songs. “On first listen, the collection stands up as a debut album in its own right, showcasing Konigsberg’s breadth as a pop songwriter, from the rich a cappella harmonies of ‘Rock and Sin’ to the bubblegum throb of ‘It’s Just Like All the Clouds’ to the pretty, carefree-sounding folk of ‘Roses,’” writes Alex Robert Ross in Fader. “But the story of Konigsberg’s growth as a songwriter and a person is buried beneath the tracklist.”
06-29-2021
“The most intriguing artistic dialogue taking place this summer occurs at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where contemporary painter Tschabalala Self engages with Henri Matisse,” writes Chadd Scott in Forbes. “The exhibition (through September 19) presents 13 paintings by Self, completed from 2016 to the present, alongside two related sculptures, highlighting the artist’s ongoing consideration of the iconographic significance of the Black female form in contemporary culture.” Among the featured works is a new suite of three paintings of a female couple created in response to Matisse’s sculpture Two Women (1907–8) in the BMA’s collection. “Whenever you’re doing an institutional show it presents a unique opportunity, and the potential challenge, of contending with the history of the institution—the art within the institution’s collection,” says Self. “Now you’re involved in this larger conversation about art history.”
06-07-2021
Boston’s Greenway features artist and Bard alum Daniel Gordon’s first public art installation. Daniel Gordon on the Greenway is an exhibition that spans the length of the park and features photography, a mural, a soon-to-be installed sculpture, and canvases that will float high above park-goers heads.
May 2021
05-27-2021
The National Endowment for the Arts has approved a $30,000 Grants for Arts Projects award for “Freedom on the Move: Songs in Flight,” a project envisioned and led by art song organization Sparks & Wiry Cries for the commission of two world premieres and a subsequent performance tour in 2023. This ambitious musical project is a direct response to Cornell University’s Freedom on the Move (FOTM) database, housing digitized, searchable fugitive slave advertisements, resulting in a co-commission by Sparks & Wiry Cries and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. The grant was written by Sparks cofounders Martha Guth, Ithaca College, and Erika Switzer, Bard artist in residence; director, Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship; and faculty in Bard’s undergraduate Music Program, Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and Conservatory of Music, with Sparks Managing Editor Lucy Fitz Gibbon, faculty in Bard College's Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program.
The first commission is a song cycle by composer Shawn Okpebholo featuring four prominent classical musicians—soprano Karen Slack, countertenor Reginald Mobley, baritone Will Liverman, and pianist and Bard Conservatory faculty Howard Watkins—interlaced with material curated and performed by the singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Okpebholo’s cycle sets poetry curated by Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Duke University, whose work along with that of poet Crystal Simone Smith, Duke University, contextualizes and responds to documents in the FOTM database. This interdisciplinary song cycle will be accompanied by a choral work by Joel Thompson, drawing on the Spiritual tradition as well as the FOTM database. After a New York City premiere in early 2023, the project will travel to Philadelphia, Durham, and the Finger Lakes region of New York, in performances co-presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Lincoln University, Duke University, Cornell University, Ithaca College, the Harriet Tubman Home, Inc., in partnership with Sparks & Wiry Cries.
This project is among the more than 1,100 projects across America totaling nearly $27 million that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2021 funding.
“As the country and the arts sector begin to imagine returning to a post-pandemic world, the National
Endowment for the Arts is proud to announce funding that will help arts organizations such as Cornell’s Music Department reengage fully with partners and audiences,” said NEA Acting Chairman Ann Eilers. “Although the arts have sustained many during the pandemic, the chance to gather with one another and share arts experiences is its own necessity and pleasure.”
For more information on the projects included in the Arts Endowment grant announcement, visit
arts.gov/news.
# # #
About Sparks & Wiry Cries
Sparks & Wiry Cries curates opportunities for art song creators, performers, and scholars through innovative initiatives that capture the stories of our diverse communities. For more information, visit sparksandwirycries.org.
About Freedom on the Move
Due to the breaking of family bonds and the illegality of literacy amongst enslaved people, there
remains a paucity of written records to track individual lives during the period of slavery. The Freedom on the Move database notes that it compiles “thousands of stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place. Created to control the movement of enslaved people, the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives—their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.” Cornell Department of History’s Dr. Ed Baptist and William Block, director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), are the principal investigators for FOTM, a joint project of the Department of History, CISER and Cornell University Library. Songs in Flight seeks to bring awareness to these individuals and to the creative possibilities made possible through FOTM, building a living monument to this erased history by highlighting stories of strength rather than stories of oppression. For more information, visit freedomonthemove.org.
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
The first commission is a song cycle by composer Shawn Okpebholo featuring four prominent classical musicians—soprano Karen Slack, countertenor Reginald Mobley, baritone Will Liverman, and pianist and Bard Conservatory faculty Howard Watkins—interlaced with material curated and performed by the singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Okpebholo’s cycle sets poetry curated by Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Duke University, whose work along with that of poet Crystal Simone Smith, Duke University, contextualizes and responds to documents in the FOTM database. This interdisciplinary song cycle will be accompanied by a choral work by Joel Thompson, drawing on the Spiritual tradition as well as the FOTM database. After a New York City premiere in early 2023, the project will travel to Philadelphia, Durham, and the Finger Lakes region of New York, in performances co-presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Lincoln University, Duke University, Cornell University, Ithaca College, the Harriet Tubman Home, Inc., in partnership with Sparks & Wiry Cries.
This project is among the more than 1,100 projects across America totaling nearly $27 million that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2021 funding.
“As the country and the arts sector begin to imagine returning to a post-pandemic world, the National
Endowment for the Arts is proud to announce funding that will help arts organizations such as Cornell’s Music Department reengage fully with partners and audiences,” said NEA Acting Chairman Ann Eilers. “Although the arts have sustained many during the pandemic, the chance to gather with one another and share arts experiences is its own necessity and pleasure.”
For more information on the projects included in the Arts Endowment grant announcement, visit
arts.gov/news.
# # #
About Sparks & Wiry Cries
Sparks & Wiry Cries curates opportunities for art song creators, performers, and scholars through innovative initiatives that capture the stories of our diverse communities. For more information, visit sparksandwirycries.org.
About Freedom on the Move
Due to the breaking of family bonds and the illegality of literacy amongst enslaved people, there
remains a paucity of written records to track individual lives during the period of slavery. The Freedom on the Move database notes that it compiles “thousands of stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place. Created to control the movement of enslaved people, the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives—their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.” Cornell Department of History’s Dr. Ed Baptist and William Block, director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), are the principal investigators for FOTM, a joint project of the Department of History, CISER and Cornell University Library. Songs in Flight seeks to bring awareness to these individuals and to the creative possibilities made possible through FOTM, building a living monument to this erased history by highlighting stories of strength rather than stories of oppression. For more information, visit freedomonthemove.org.
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
# # #
(5/27/21)05-25-2021
Dancers' Group, a service and presenting organization in the San Francisco Bay Area, has awarded $105,000 in grants to 30 Bay Area dance artists and organizations during its spring 2021 round of CA$H Dance. The CA$H Dance program, which has been supporting dance makers since 1999, was designed by artists for artists, and seeks to support artists and organizations that represent the broad diversity of dance in the Bay Area.