News

The Longy School kicks off a year of centennial festivities on the weekend of September 25-27 with the annual SeptemberFest concert series.

Beginning in fall 2015, the Dance Program at Bard College will partner with the Trisha Brown Dance Company (TBDC) to offer undergraduate dance classes, as well as college-wide forums, workshops, and performances. Allowing for deep integration in Bard’s dance program curriculum as well as the campus community as a whole, the partnership with TBDC will include undergraduate courses in dance technique (for advanced dancers as well as beginning and non-dancers); the licensing of select Trisha Brown works on dance students to be performed annually; master classes; campus-wide events; and the full company in residence for one to three weeks each year. Bard’s collaboration with TBDC will reach across disciplines and programs to involve artists in other College programs and initiatives.

Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and the Art History Program are pleased to announce a major grant from The Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Connecticut. The College has been awarded a $1 million grant from The Brant Foundation, Inc., to support curatorial studies and art history. Alex Kitnick, noted art historian and writer, has been appointed the new Brant Foundation Fellow in Contemporary Arts. This fellowship enables Kitnick to join the College as a full-time faculty member teaching jointly in CCS Bard’s graduate and Bard’s art history undergraduate programs. This joint appointment is the first of its kind in the visual arts at Bard.

The Orchestra Now welcomed its first 37 musicians this month and will perform concerts this season at Bard, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and elsewhere.

Emmy-winning actress Blythe Danner '65 has built a remarkable resume of stage and screen roles, but Brett Haley's I'll See You in My Dreams will be her first lead part in a film.

Benjamin Barron '15, who cofounded the new fashion and culture publication ALL-IN with fellow alum Allison Littrell '14, tells us why he's not crazy and why print is more important than ever.

The films of Bard professor Peggy Ahwesh and Jennifer Montgomery will be exhibited at the Murray Guy gallery in New York City from September 12 to October 24.

Eccles and Katrib's selection of works by eight artists uses smartphones, billboards, and sculpture to challenge the meaning of public space.

Performer and choreographer Miguel Gutierrez, “one of our most provocative and necessary artistic voices” (Dance Magazine), meets middle age head-on in this wild and ebullient triptych that celebrates queerness, art making, and mortality. Age & Beauty will be performed in locations at the Fisher Center at Bard College from Thursday, September 10 through Sunday, September 13. Tickets are $25 ($10 for students) for individual performances and $45 ($20 for students) for marathon performances of the complete trilogy. For tickets and program information go to fishercenter.bard.edu or call the box office at 845-758-7900.

Jeanne van Heeswijk will give a lecture titled "Acts of Political Uncertainty: Towards a Daily Practice of Resistance," on September 8 at 6:00 pm in the László Z. Bitó '60 Conservatory Building. Van Heeswijk, 2014-15 Keith Haring Fellow, will demonstrate how active forms of citizenship can engage constituencies and communities in critical public issues. Van Heeswijk will describe how the complexities of our cities can be employed as the performative basis for the production of new forms of sociability, collective ownership, and self-organization.

"A growing influencer in wood work, Sam Horowitz, showcases his intimate relationship with natural materials to reconstruct and influence our environments," writes Meg Busacca.

This fall, The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College presents an extraordinary series of music, dance, performance art, and theater programs. Highlights of the fall season include the 75th anniversary season of American Ballet Theatre; the inaugural season of The Orchestra Now, Leon Botstein, music director; singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant and the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra; Trisha Brown Dance Company’s Trisha Brown: In Plain Site, a unique event developed specifically for the Bard campus; the world premiere of choreographer Miguel Gutierrez’s Age & Beauty Part 3 and the premiere performances of the full trilogy; the U.S. premiere screening of Life and Times Episodes 7-9 by avant-garde theater ensemble Nature Theater of Oklahoma; Neil Gaiman in conversation with Armistead Maupin; Conservatory Sunday Series; a special holiday production of Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson; and a variety of student performances.

Spahr's new collection of verse and prose asks, "what it means to remain a disillusioned opponent of capitalism, a not-quite-despondent environmental observer and an anxious parent today."

Basel Yazouri's photo essay of last summer's Israeli military action in Gaza "announces a prodigious new talent in the field of documentary photography."

"The Brink is so funny, so inventive—and so fearless in what it has to say about geopolitics," writes Bard writer in residence Francine Prose.

Ellen Driscoll's fall 2015 residency explores, in drawing and sculpture, the poetics and economics of wood in Siena's history and in the present context of globalization.

"There are certain photographs that seem to have been pulled out of the world of dreams." Teju Cole goes to São Paulo in search of René Burri's "Men on a Rooftop."

"There are invariably delightful surprises among the densely packed programs at Bard," writes Times music critic Vivien Schweitzer.

Bard has been awarded a $2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the launch of an innovative Master of Music Degree Program in Curatorial, Critical, and Performance Studies and its resultant ensemble, The Orchestra Now (TON). This unique training orchestra and master’s degree program provides musicians with professional-level orchestral training that is integrated into the interdisciplinary graduate study of music’s place in culture and history. The program is designed to prepare select conservatory graduates for the challenges facing the modern symphony orchestra and to produce scholars and advocates of classical and contemporary music as well as practiced members of a top grade orchestra. Musicians receive three years of advanced orchestral training and take graduate-level courses in orchestral and curatorial studies, leading to a Master of Music degree. Funding from the Mellon grant will help to support student stipends, curriculum development, and salary and honoraria for visiting faculty and lecturers.

Bard Alumnus Ian Samuels was named in Filmmaker magazine's annual survey of new talent.