News

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra will present a performance from one of the most enduring films in cinema history with A Symphonic Night at The Movies: The Wizard of Oz, which will merge the 1939 cinematography produced by MGM Studios with a live symphony. The event, taking place in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater on Saturday, September 23, and Sunday, September 24, “marks the first time many of the student musicians will perform a so-called film concert, an experience that conservatory educators say will teach the popular side of the symphonic tradition,” writes Andrew Checchia for the Daily Catch. Conducted by James Bagwell, the orchestra’s rendition will accompany a screening of the film, replacing the film’s original songs and keeping precise timing with the original studio voice recordings. “This score was written for studio orchestras, and those scores sound good from the very beginning,” Bagwell told Checchia.

 

The Fisher Center at Bard continues its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground with the world premiere of Ulysses, from Elevator Repair Service, which the New York Times has called “one of New York City’s few truly essential theater companies,” September 21 – October 1 (opening Sunday, September 24). 

James Joyce’s Ulysses has fascinated, perplexed, scandalized, and/or defeated readers for over a century. ERS takes on this Mount Everest of twentieth-century literature having staged modernist works including Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—all with highly acclaimed results.

In the world premiere at the Fisher Center, seven ERS ensemble members—Dee Beasnael (7 Daughters of Eve), OBIE Award-winner Kate Benson (Fondly, Collette Richland), Maggie Hoffman (founding member, Radiohole), Vin Knight (Gatz, The Select (The Sun Also Rises), The Sound and the Fury, and more with ERS), OBIE Award-winner Scott Shepherd (Gatz, The Wooster Group), Christopher-Rashee Stevenson (Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge), and Stephanie Weeks (The Whitney Album)—sit down for a sober reading but soon find themselves guzzling pints, getting in brawls, and committing debaucheries as they careen on a fast-forward tour through Joyce’s funhouse of styles. With madcap antics and a densely layered sound design, ERS presents an eclectic sampling from Joyce’s life-affirming masterpiece.

Ulysses is directed by ERS Artistic Director John Collins, with co-direction and dramaturgy by Scott Shepherd and text by James Joyce. The production features set design by dots (The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Public Obscenities), costume design by Enver Chakartash (A Doll's House, Is This A Room on Broadway) and Assistant Costume Designer Caleb Krieg, lighting design by Marika Kent (ERS’s Seagull) and Assistant Lighting Designer Matt Lazarus, sound design by OBIE Award-winner Ben Williams (The Whitney Album), sound engineering by Gavin Price, projections by Matthew Deinhart (El Amor Brujo, ANIMUS ANIMA//ANIMA ANIMUS) and Assistant Projections Designer Alessandra Cronin, and props by Patrícia Marjorie (Wolf Play, Flex) and Assistant Properties Designer Ned Gaynor. Maurina Lioce (Fondly, Collette Richland; Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge) is the Assistant Director and Stage Manager, and Jack Ganguly is the Assistant Stage Manager. Hanna Novak of ERS is the producer.  

Ulysses is a Fisher Center LAB commission and is co-commissioned by Symphony Space, where the work was partly developed. Daphne Gaines, April Matthis, and Mark Barton contributed to the development of the work.

Performance Schedule and Ticketing

Performances of Ulysses take place in the LUMA Theater at the Fisher Center:
Thursday, September 21, at 8pm
Friday, September 22, at 8pm
Saturday, September 23, at 8pm
Sunday, September 24, at 3pm
Thursday, September 28, at 8pm
Friday, September 29, at 8pm
Saturday, September 30, at 2pm
Saturday, September 30, at 8pm
Sunday, October 1, at 3pm

Critics are welcome as of Saturday, September 23, at 8 pm for an official opening on Sunday, September 24, at 3 pm.

Tickets start at $25 ($5 for Bard students through the Passloff Pass) and can be purchased here. 

Credits
The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season is dedicated to the founders of the Fisher Center who have cultivated extraordinary artistic experiences—past, present, and future. We honor the memory of Richard B. Fisher, a true champion of the arts and Bard College, and his visionary leadership. 
The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.
 

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra presents a live symphony performance of the music from one of the most enduring films in cinema history with A Symphonic Night at The Movies: The Wizard of Oz. Conducted by James Bagwell, the orchestra’s rendition will accompany a recently remastered screening of the film, performing the film’s original songs by composer Harold Arlen and Academy Award-winning score by Herbert Stothart, accompanied by Judy Garland’s original 1939 studio recordings.

The event will take place in two viewings on Saturday, September 23, at 7 pm, and on Sunday, September 24, at 2 pm, in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Tickets start at $25 and sales benefit the Bard Conservatory Scholarship Fund. 

To reserve tickets, please visit here. 

Beginning in fall 2023, the Bard College Dance Program is launching a two-year partnership with Villa Albertine, a cultural institution that supports exchanges in arts and ideas between the United States, France, and beyond. Each semester, artists selected by Tara Lorenzen, director of Bard’s Dance Program, and Nicole Birmann Bloom, Villa Albertine’s program officer for the performing arts, in collaboration with Centre National de la Danse (CN D, Pantin, France) and other French choreographic centers, will teach technique and repertory courses in Bard’s dance curriculum.

“The Bard Dance Program is thrilled to partner with Villa Albertine,” said Lorenzen. “There has always been a robust exchange of innovative dance ideas between French-supported artists and the US and I look forward to continuing this tradition with the next generation of dance students here in Annandale.”

During the spring semester, a choreographer will conduct a one week creative residency in the Luma Theater/Fisher Center with a public showing for the Bard community and masterclasses for the student body.  A unique component of this partnership allows Bard dance students to participate in the international dance platform CAMPING at the CN D in Pantin, France, each June. CN D is a public institution created in 1998, devoted to the preservation of choreographic and dance culture. Its distinctive CAMPING dance festival gives students the opportunity to work with choreographers from around the globe, perform their own choreographic projects, and develop teaching practices by conducting morning classes with their peers.

The partnership is launching during Albertine Dance Season, the year-long exploration of dance from inception to performance that includes multi-city tours by French, France-based, African, and Caribbean companies, artistic residencies for up-and-coming choreographers, a dance-themed symposium featuring global leaders in the field, and more. 

“The team at Villa Albertine shares with Bard College the deepest appreciation of the true value of educational exchange and the enduring cultural benefits of arts in education,” said Gaëtan Bruel, cultural counselor and director of Villa Albertine. ” We have the greatest confidence that this two-year partnership will uniquely support and sustain Bard students in the enrichment of their arts experience while at Bard and shape their future artistry.”

Since 2009, the Bard Dance Program has hosted an in-residence dance company or performing arts organization bringing professional technique and composition to the academic program in the form of teaching, educational licensing projects, master classes, full-Company production residencies, and public performances.

This fall, choreographers and performers Marcela Santander (Chile/France) and Volmir Cordeiro (Brazil/France) will join the Dance faculty in Annandale-on-Hudson. Wanjiru Kamuyu (Kenya/France/USA) will have a discussion on September 18, 2023, based on her current touring project “An Immigrant’s Story” and her unique creative process.

Maria Q. Simpson, professor of dance at Bard College, has launched Three Ballet Teachers... (3BT) in collaboration with Zvi Gotheiner and Hannah Wiley. 3BT is an online resource featuring video documentation of original ballet class choreography by the three contemporary ballet teachers. “The website provides teachers of all levels of experience with choreographed center-floor sequences that can be used in full or in part, or as inspiration for their own classes,” Simpson said. The project came out of the mutual belief among Simpson, Gotheiner, and Wiley that ballet class choreography represents a huge body of unrecognized creative work, and that this work should be accessible. “3BT is looking to both highlight and exalt the training space and the choreography that occurs there as representative of the living history of the art form,” Simpson said.

Joining a growing list of fellows from Bard College, Bard faculty members Jessie Montgomery and Angelica Sanchez both received 2023 Civitella Ranieri Fellowships, spending their time in Umbria, Italy, working on individual projects and collaborating. Since 1995, Civitella Ranieri has hosted more than 1,000 fellows and director’s guests, including Bard faculty members Mary Caponegro and Jenny Xie, as well as Simon’s Rock alumna Alison Bechdel SR ’77, among others. Fellows are chosen through a nomination and jury process by a rotating group of distinguished artists, academics, and critics. They then spend four to six weeks living and working at the 15th-century castle the fellowship calls home.

“It has been great to have the time and space to work on these big projects surrounded by the beauty of the countryside, without the usual distractions that I face in the city,” said Montgomery, composer in residence at Bard College. “It has been especially nice to get to know my colleague, Angelica Sanchez, more as a person and artist. We are looking forward to a short upcoming presentation of a piece she wrote for violin and piano.” During her time at Civitella, Montgomery completed a new work for percussion quartet to be premiered at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in November in Indianapolis. She is also at work on a new percussion concerto for Cynthia Yeh, principal percussionist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Montgomery said she is looking forward to returning to Bard after this productive summer: “It will feel good to return to the academic year with new perspectives on my work and stronger connection to and understanding of our work.”

“My time at Civitella Ranieri has been wonderful,” said Sanchez, assistant professor of music. “Many Bard faculty have been fellows, and I’m happy to add my name to the list.” While at Civitella, Sanchez worked on a commission from the Jazz Gallery, to premiere this September. She is also at work on a piece for solo piano to debut in 2024. To have a Bard connection so far from home was not something she’d expected. “It was a nice surprise to meet Jesse Montgomery,” Sanchez said. “Her artistry inspired me to compose a piece for her that we will premiere at Civitella Ranieri.” Like Montgomery, Sanchez is excited about the prospect of translating her experience as a fellow back to Bard: “Having this uninterrupted time to work and develop my ideas has been invaluable to me, and I’m looking forward to sharing my experience at Civitella with Bard students.”

Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music at Bard College, has been awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Hennies, who is a composer, received an emergency grant to support her premiere of two major compositions at the Darmstadt Summer Festival in Darmstadt, Germany, with performances in August. Hennies participated in the Darmstadt Summer Course, where her two new hour-long works were each premiered. French ensemble Dedalus performed Hennies’ Motor Tapes, a work inspired by findings of neuroscientists Oliver Sacks and Rodolfo Llinás, the latter who “speaks of ‘motor tapes’ in connection with our motoric memory and compares it with neuronal processes underlying human creativity.” Hennies’ other new work, Borrowed Light, written for and performed by New York string ensemble Mivos String Quartet, “derives from a technique developed by American Shakers to install windows in interior walls of buildings to let in light from adjacent rooms with exterior windows.” 

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) was founded by John Cage, Jasper Johns, and other artists in 1963 with a mission to encourage, sponsor, and promote innovative work in the arts created and presented by individuals, groups, and organizations working in dance, music/sound, performance art/theater, poetry, and the visual arts. FCA’s Emergency Grants provide urgent funding for visual and performing artists who have sudden, unanticipated opportunities to present their work to the public when there is insufficient time to seek other sources of funding, or who are set to incur unexpected or unbudgeted expenses for projects close to completion with committed exhibition or performance dates. Emergency Grants is the only active, multidisciplinary program that offers immediate, project-based assistance of this kind to artists living and working anywhere in the United States, for projects occurring in the US and abroad.

Inheritance, a new installation inspired by the 2020 film of the same name by Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, program director and associate professor of film and electronic arts at Bard, is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In paintings, sculptures, videos, photos, and time-based media installations spanning from the 1970s to present day, the show is a meditation on the impacts of the past and legacies across the interwoven contexts of family, history, and aesthetics. “Inheritance reflects on multiple meanings of the word, whether celebratory or painful, from one era, person, or idea to the next,” reads the exhibit text. “The exhibition takes a layered approach to storytelling by interweaving narrative with documentary and personal experiences with historical and generational events.” The show, on view through February 2024, includes works by 43 leading artists, including Asili; An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard; Kevin Jerome Everson, former MFA visiting artist 2011; Kevin Beasley, former MFA visiting artist 2017; former MFA faculty in photography David Hartt and Emily Jacir, and WangShui, MFA ’19.

“I met Laura Steele while studying photography at Bard College,” writes Alice Fall ’22. “Her steadiness, intelligence, wit, and engagement with the world is grounding and immediately magnetic. Laura’s constant reminder to me, both inside and out of school, has been to trust my vision and intuition. I’m thankful for her for bringing me back to myself, again and again.” In this conversation for Lenscratch, the Bard alumna and Bard faculty member talk about the contours of collaboration, the tension between creative work and the imperative to market that work, and how a given tool or artistic process can limit or liberate the art.

Read the Conversation in Lenscratch

Further Reading
Alice Fall ’22 Wins Second Place in Lenscratch Student Awards

Bard alumnus Dan Whitener ’09 MM ’12 plays banjo for Gangstagrass, a hip-hop and bluegrass group that Farah Stockman called “a band that is making music that actually unites us” in a New York Times opinion piece. At a time when American culture is especially polarized, Gangstagrass makes music that seeks to invite social cohesion rather than division, and hopes to alleviate people’s fear of one another. “Those who are lucky enough to stumble on their live shows are likely to get sucked in by the oddball energy. They have die-hard fans who came for the bluegrass and stayed for the rap, and vice versa. Instead of pitting rural America against urban America,” Stockman writes, “Gangstagrass tries to appeal to both at the same time.”

Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts Joan Tower discusses more than 60 years of composing music, her inspirations (including visitations from dead composers), the changing landscape for women in composition, and her long tenure of teaching music at Bard with NPR’s music producer Tom Huizenga. When asked to describe her music, Tower confesses that it is hard to know one’s music but she can describe what she cares about. “My music is about rhythm, predominantly, the rhythm of ideas. And it's also organic, and it has a large-scale narrative. Usually, I only write in one movement, so I try to create an overall architecture for that one moment. It's also very important for me to be clear: I don't think my music ever gets complicated enough that you don't hear everything,” she says.

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, will represent the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte in 2024. Gibson, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is one of the first Indigenous artists to represent the country at the Biennale. The Biennale Arte 2024 is being curated by Adriano Pedrosa, who received this year’s CCS Bard Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. Gibson told the New York Times: “The last 15 years of my career have been about turning inward and trying to make something I really wanted to see in the world. Now I want to expand the way people think about Indigeneity.” According to the Times, the artist’s Hudson Valley studio is working on a multimedia installation and performances that will open in April 2024 and be titled “the space in which to place me,” referring to a poem by Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation.

“[W]ell staged and excitingly sung, Henri VIII revealed itself as a grand and compelling, often thrilling work that deserves a more frequent spot on stages,” writes Zachary Woolfe in his critic’s pick review for the New York Times. “The piece has been treated lovingly at Bard, in a vibrant but restrained staging by Jean-Romain Vesperini.” Popular in its day but rarely performed now, Saint-Saëns’s 1883 opera focuses on Henry’s break with the Catholic Church, the end of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and his love for Anne Boleyn. The production opened last Friday at the Fisher Center as part of the 20th anniversary SummerScape season. Performances run through Sunday, July 30. 
 

On Friday, August 4, the Bard Music Festival returns with an intensive two-week exploration of “Vaughan Williams and His World.” In 11 themed concert programs, the festival’s 33rd season examines the great but frequently misunderstood English and Welsh composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of the 20th century’s preeminent symphonists, contextualizing the composer among his fellow Victorians, Edwardians, and Moderns (Weekend One: August 4–6), and exploring his role in creating what may be considered A New Elizabethan Age? (Weekend Two: August 10–13). Complemented by two special events in nearby Rhinebeck, these concerts take place in the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Bard College’s idyllic Hudson River campus. New Yorkers can take round-trip bus transportation to the final concert (see details below), and home audiences around the world can enjoy livestreams of Programs 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, and 11 on Upstreaming, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage. A centerpiece of the 20th Bard SummerScape festival, the Bard Music Festival also represents a highlight of the Fisher Center’s landmark 20th anniversary season, “Breaking Ground.”

“One of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture” (NYC Arts, THIRTEEN/WNET), festival founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein is music director of both the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra, The Orchestra Now (TŌN). For his first, livestreamed ASO appearance, Botstein leads two late Vaughan Williams symphonies – the darkly atmospheric Seventh (“Sinfonia Antartica”), a work scored for vast forces, and the award-winning, vividly orchestrated Eighth – as well as music by Jean Sibelius, William Walton and Vaughan Williams’s woefully underrated student Elizabeth Maconchy [Program 9]. Botstein and the ASO also give a livestreamed performance of Vaughan Williams’s Shakespearean comic opera, Sir John in Love, starring bass-baritone Craig Colclough as Falstaff alongside sopranos Brandie Sutton and Ann Toomey, mezzo-sopranos Lucy Schaufer and Sarah Saturnino, tenor Joshua Blue, and the Bard Festival Chorale in a rare, semi-staged production by Alison Moritz [Program 11]. The director explains:

“In creating a concert staging of this bucolic comedy for Bard, I wanted to lean into the festival atmosphere of Bard in the summertime. … The gentle humor in this lyric comedy of manners comes from misunderstandings between the sexes and between classes, and I wanted to make sure that these themes would be immediately enjoyable by today’s audiences. So, instead of setting the story in Elizabethan Windsor, we have created a summer holiday inspired by English humorist P.G. Wodehouse’s classic Blandings countryside – filled with tea and crumpets, lawn games, cocktail parties, savvy servants, and plus-fours.”

Botstein conducts TŌN in performances of Vaughan Williams’s famed Tallis Fantasia and neo-classical D-minor Violin Concerto, featuring Naumburg Competition winner Grace Park [Program 1], as well as three of the composer’s mature orchestral works: Job, A Masque for Dancing; the seldom-programmed, blisteringly uncompromisingly Fourth Symphony; and the C-major Piano Concerto, in a two-piano arrangement showcasing festival favorites Danny Driver, a Gramophone Award nominee, and Piers Lane, for whom “no praise could be high enough” (Gramophone) [Program 3]. Led by James Bagwell and Zachary Schwartzman, TŌN also gives livestreamed accounts of music by British composers Frederick Delius, Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Peter Warlock, and Grace Williams, together with Vaughan Williams’s Five Variants of “Dives and Lazarus” for harp and strings; The Lark Ascending, featuring violinist Bella Hristova, “a player of impressive power and control” (Washington Post); and the seldom programmed Flos Campi, the composer’s sensuous, wordless setting of erotic verses from the biblical Song of Solomon, with Tokyo Competition winner Luosha Fang as viola soloist [Program 7].

The festival’s chamber highlights include accounts of both Vaughan Williams’s Second String Quartet [Program 8], and Samuel Barber’s Serenade [Program 10] by the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet. The Horszowski Trio – “the most compelling American group to come on the scene” (New Yorker) – performs “Per aspera ad astra,” the tightly constructed Third Piano Trio by Vaughan Williams’s teacher Charles Villiers Stanford, and the Cleveland Quartet Award-winning Ariel Quartet joins Grammy-nominated clarinetist Todd Palmer for the Clarinet Quintet by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whom Stanford considered his most gifted pupil [Program 2]. With Danny Driver, members of the group also undertake Herbert Howells’s Piano Quartet, one of the great masterworks of British impressionism [Program 5]. “One of New York’s finest organists” (New York Times), Renée Anne Louprette plays the newly renovated organ of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in nearby Rhinebeck, where the festival makes its first foray off-campus with two special programs of “Music for School, Parish, and Home.”

As in previous seasons, all choral works showcase the Bard Festival Chorale and James Bagwell. Hailed as “one of the high points of every Bard Festival” (New York Arts), this season’s annual choral program also represents the second special event at Rhinebeck’s Episcopal Church of the Messiah. Surveying 350 years of English choral music in the ecclesiastical environment for which it was written, “The Anglican Choral Tradition” features composers ranging from William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons to Howells and Benjamin Britten, interspersed with organ works by Vaughan Williams and Ethel Smyth.

Soprano Katherine Lerner Lee, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy, tenor Maximillian Jansen, and baritone Tyler Duncan trace the evolution of a uniquely British sound in “Heirs and Rebels: British Art Songs,” a concert with commentary by Scholar-in-Residence Byron Adams [Program 4]. Similarly, soprano Ann Toomey, mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, tenor Martin Luther Clark, and baritone Theo Hoffman offer an entertaining and wholly original tour through half a century of British light music, in a concert with commentary by award-winning author Christina Baade [Program 6]. Other vocal highlights include a rendition of Vaughan Williams’s beloved song cycle On Wenlock Edge by three-time Grammy-nominated tenor Nicholas Phan, “one of the world’s most remarkable singers” (Boston Globe) [Program 5].

Supplementary events and companion book
Besides the eleven concert programs and two special events, there will be two free panel discussions – “Composer and Nation” and “The Artist in Time of War” – and a series of informative pre-concert talks, all free to ticket-holders, by scholars including Christina Bashford, Michael Beckerman, Daniel M. Grimley, Imani Danielle Mosley, Philip Rupprecht, Eric Saylor, Tiffany Stern, and Richard Wilson. SummerScape and ASO also present the first major American production of Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII, a French grand opera set in Tudor England (July 21–30). Edited by Bard’s 2023 Scholars-in-Residence Byron Adams, a contributor to both the Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams and Vaughan Williams Studies, and Daniel M. Grimley, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, the companion book Vaughan Williams and His World is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Round-trip bus transportation from New York City
Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for the festival finale, Program Eleven (August 13). This may be ordered online or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900, and the meeting point for pick-up and drop-off is at Lincoln Center on Amsterdam Avenue, between 64th and 65th Streets. More information is available here.

SummerScape tickets
Tickets for mainstage events start at $25 and livestreams are $20. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.

Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Ashley Tata’s production of “Farming,” a choral work by composer and Pulitzer finalist Ted Hearnes, was featured in NPR and reviewed in the New York Times as a Critic’s Pick. The nine-part song cycle, performed by the vocalists of the Crossing chamber choir, explores issues of colonialism, marketing, and consumption, and addresses food supply in the US, the business of big agriculture today, and the country’s Indigenous farmers. “The libretto pulls not only from Jeff Bezos and William Penn, but also the social media feed of Uber Eats and the FAQ page for a startup called Farmer's Fridge,” says Nate Chinen for NPR. “The direction, by Ashley Tata, really leaned into the surreal—the singers wore bright neon costumes and the lighting cues and choreography all played up this idea of a complex machine gone totally haywire.”

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) is pleased to present Stage Presence, the thesis exhibition of the Class of 2024. The exhibition brings together 23 distinct practices from candidates in the disciplines of film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. Stage Presence will be on view from July 15 through July 23 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook, New York, and evening presentations of time-based works—such as performances, readings and screenings—will be held at several locations on Bard’s campus. An opening reception will also be held on July 15, from 1 pm to 4 pm. For more information about exhibition hours, presentation locations, and accessibility, please visit bard.edu/mfa/thesis.

In its standard usage, the phrase “stage presence” refers to a performer’s capacity to command the attention of a room. The phrase was also used by art critic Michael Fried in 1967 to condemn minimalist artists’ rejection of modernist artistic values of autonomy and absorption. In Fried’s account the minimalists instead embraced “the situation” in which an art object and viewer existed together, reflexively confronting an audience with their relationship to viewing. Following Fried’s essay, the phrase has had many more lives within artistic contexts, from a postmodern reclamation to a contemporary embrace of its more commonplace associations.
 
When taken together, the distinct artistic practices of the Bard MFA Class of 2024 resonate with issues of stage presence. Experimentation with display structures; activations of text in space; investigations into mapping and absence; disruption of voice and conventional notions of authorship; emphasis on the scale of the body; and integration of theatrical techniques such as props or backdrops are just a few of the strategies by which these artists explore modes of presence, viewership, and relationality.

The Bard MFA thesis exhibition features works by MFA candidates Kaur Alia Ahmed, June Canedo de Souza, Francesse Dolbrice, Camonghne Felix, Christina Graham, Tallulah Haddon, Lara Carmen Hidalgo, Sam Lasko, Khan Lee, Lotte Leerschool, Eli Benjamin Neuman-Hammond, Mira Putnam, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, Natalia Rolón Sotelo, Francie Seidl Chodosh, Sydney Spann, Allie Taylor, Lauren Tosswill, Nora Treatbaby, Marty Two Bulls Jr., Sam Wenc, Alexa West, and Drew Zeiba.

Stage Presence is coordinated by Marina Caron (MA ’23), a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Caron is a curator, writer and researcher based in New York City. Her thesis exhibition, Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass, focused on the work of the prolific and under-recognized artist Bettina Grossman (b. New York, 1927; d. New York, 2021).

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, is showcasing works in several exhibitions this summer, including solo shows at the Aspen Art Museum and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. He is also featured in Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, a standout group show at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. His exhibitions are among a number of shows highlighting Indigenous American artists this summer. “These shows, as well as several thematic group exhibitions, create a moment of recognition for contemporary Indigenous art, providing historical context for the work being made today,” writes Annabel Keenan for Artsy. “I am glad to see a greater recognition that all Indigenous artists are unique and come from different cultural perspectives,” said Gibson, who is Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee. “I see an increase in the understanding of Indigenous makers, their intentions and their cultural perspectives, but there is so far to go. I’d like to think that these artists are being treated more as individuals rather than representative of a large and more general Indigenous community.”

The Fisher Center at Bard (Gideon Lester, artistic director and chief executive; Aaron Mattocks, chief operating officer) today announces that, in partnership with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA), it has received a $2,000,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work and livelihood of Tania El Khoury, a commissioned artist and guest cocurator at the Fisher Center, founding director of CHRA, and a distinguished artist in residence at Bard’s Theater & Performance Program. El Khoury’s live art engages the audience in close encounters with narratives drawn from the political realities of borders, displacement, and state violence. The grant will support her live art production and touring, her scholarly and artistic research, and her curatorial work at the Fisher Center and CHRA.

Over the next three years, the Fisher Center and El Khoury will re-imagine the collaboration between an institution and an artist and will develop ways in which an institution becomes a holistic home for an artist. El Khoury’s relationship with Bard began in 2017, when Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive, invited her to co-curate Where No Wall Remains, the 2019 edition of the institution’s biennial festival, which focused that year on the subject of borders and comprised eight new interdisciplinary artworks commissioned by El Khoury and Lester. El Khoury created a new work of her own for the festival, Cultural Exchange Rate, a multi-sensory performance installation that invites the audience to follow her own family’s relationship to borders and migration across a century of time. Cultural Exchange Rate continues to tour internationally in various languages, as do several other works by El Khoury.
                                                                                               
While developing Where No Wall Remains, El Khoury and Lester began to imagine a longer collaboration. Their work on the biennial led them, along with Tom Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Program at Bard, to envision a center that explores art practices that intersect with human rights advocacy through public programming and an international low-cost MA Program in Human Rights & the Arts. In 2021, the three of them, along with scholar Ziad Abu-Rish, founded the Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA), which is funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN). El Khoury directs CHRA while continuing to pursue her artistic practice and teaching.  
             
Lester and El Khoury have continued their curatorial work together with a second joint edition of the biennial, Common Ground: an international festival on the politics of land and food, produced by the Fisher Center in two installments: October 2022 and May 2023. In this festival, El Khoury premiered her work Memory of Birds, an interactive sound installation in the trees around the Fisher Center that evoked the imprint of political violence on contested lands. Common Ground also included three international editions, curated by artists in Palestine, Colombia, and South Africa, all of which were funded by CHRA.

Tania El Khoury said, “This generous grant from Mellon Foundation comes at a time when the live performance industry is experiencing a fundamental restructuring due to the recent pandemic and major shifts in public and private funding streams. The grant will allow me to further pursue my artistic and curatorial practices, deepen my experimentation with new models of collaboration and institution-building, and reflect on my trajectory as an artist working at the intersection of politics and research.”

The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant makes it possible for the Fisher Center and CHRA to offer El Khoury tangible resources to develop and disseminate ambitious, forward-thinking work, of her own and by other artists. This new model of artist-institution engagement follows the Fisher Center awarding Pam Tanowitz an ongoing residency in which the institution has taken over touring (of work including Four Quartets and Song of Songs, which the Fisher Center commissioned and premiered to immense acclaim) and other administrative support for her company, including a salary for Tanowitz. The Mellon grant helps the Fisher Center become an artistic home for El Khoury, providing resources in three key areas:

• Practice
• Infrastructure
• Livelihood

Gideon Lester says, “We are delighted to be partnering with Mellon to develop a new, comprehensive model of support for Tania that will allow her not only to create and disseminate her work, but to live an artist’s life with dignity. Tania is a visionary artist, curator, and thought leader, and it’s an honor for us to be able to help steward her creative practice and research. Institutions of higher learning have an essential role to play in the country’s artistic infrastructure. Mellon’s visionary philanthropy will help deepen and extend the Fisher Center’s commitment to long-term, holistic support for artists’ practice, infrastructure, and livelihood.” 

The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant comes amid a banner 20th anniversary year for the Fisher Center. The institution is currently producing its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, including the 2023 Bard SummerScape festival, which also celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The season culminates in a groundbreaking ceremony, on October 21, for The Fisher Center’s new 25,000-square-foot performing arts studio building, designed by Maya Lin, which will offer artists at all stages of their careers vastly expanded room to explore as they build works from the ground up. 

About Tania El Khoury
Tania El Khoury creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction.

El Khoury’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 33 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.

El Khoury is a Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Theater and Performance Program and Founding Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College. She holds a PhD in Theater Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. El Khoury is a co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a research and live art collective in Lebanon, and is associated with the Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK.
taniaelkhoury.com
instagram.com/taniaelk

The Fisher Center at Bard has become an incubator for commercially promising new work like Justin Peck’s Illinois, while holding tight to its experimental roots.
For the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler visits Bard’s Fisher Center in its 20th anniversary season, on the heels of a sold-out, extended run of Illinois, to talk with Fisher Center Artistic Director Gideon Lester, Illinois director Justin Peck, choreographer Pam Tanowitz, President Leon Botstein, and others about the Fisher Center’s past and future. “Since opening 20 years ago,” she writes, “the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary, and sometimes hard to describe hits.”

Artist Sara J. Winston, Bard’s Photography Program coordinator, writes about her experience living with multiple sclerosis in an opinion piece for the New York Times. Through her photographs and essay, Winston exposes the realities of life with a chronic condition managed by regular medical treatment. “Rather than orient myself to the cycle of the moon, I orient myself to the cycle of infusion. And it has become a system in my creative work. My body is a clock,” she writes. “Every 28 days, I point the camera toward myself to document my illness and care. I have used my time as a patient in the infusion suite, a place where I sometimes feel powerless, to reclaim my autonomy as an artist and photographer.”