News

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.”

“In the middle of June, a trio of Christmas trees hang upside down above a dimly lit stage at Bard College’s Fisher Center, north of New York City,” writes Bard alumna Quinn Moreland ’15 for Pitchfork. Reporting back from a dress rehearsal of Illinois, a stage adaptation of the acclaimed Sufjan Stevens album of the same name, Moreland spoke with Justin Peck, director, choreographer, and cowriter of the production, an “unusual project that the acclaimed ballet dancer and choreographer can’t quite define himself.”

“I couldn’t tell you if it’s a concert or dance-theater piece or musical,” Peck told Pitchfork. “It’s somewhere amidst all that but feels like its own thing.” Adapting the acclaimed album had long been an ambition of Peck’s, whose admiration for Stevens’s work stretches back to his teenage years, before the two became frequent collaborators. With the Fisher Center production, Peck and his cocreators sought to create something that would capture the spirit of Stevens’s Illinois, a 22-track epic that weaves personal experience with state history. Nostalgia for the album was also in Peck’s mind as he adapted it. “Not only does everyone love this album, they can tell me where they were when they first heard it, what they were going through, and how the album helped them understand themselves,” Peck says. “It’s an album that touched an entire generation.”

Artist Nayland Blake ’82, professor of studio arts and codirector of the Studio Arts Program at Bard, has collaborated with fashion label JCRT to launch the inaugural capsule collection of ATDM (“Artist, Title, Date, Medium”), a new clothing line of limited-run collections created with contemporary artists. Blake’s designs include a shirt printed with the phrase “This is clothing of the opposite gender”—a commentary on Arizona’s anti-LGBTQ+ Senate Bill 1026, which targets drag performances. “Blake, who is nonbinary, intends these pieces to function as wearable messages of resistance and support for trans people and anyone caught wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes,” writes Hyperallergic. In honor of Pride Month, all the profits from this ATDM x Nayland Blake collection will be donated to the Transgender Law Center, the largest trans-led organization for trans advocacy in the US, with $30,000 raised once all 400 of the limited-edition shirts are sold.

Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard College, spoke with the New Yorker about her life and process as a filmmaker and faculty member at Bard. “Reichardt is this country’s finest observer of ordinary grit, an American neorealist to place among the likes of Robert Bresson, Yasujirō Ozu, and Vittorio De Sica,” writes Doreen St. Félix for the New Yorker. “The regard for her takes on a hero aspect. It can often feel dazed because of the deep reserve of Reichardt’s stamina, which has carried her through her singular three-decade career.” Her eighth and latest feature film Showing Up, set in Portland about a sculptor named Lizzy, is a rejoinder to the trope of the artist at work and “projects the air of an encompassing thesis, an artist’s statement” by Reichardt.
 

Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music at Bard College, wrote about the alternative country band Souled American for NPR. The band, in Hennies’s view, arguably invented the genre—but since the release of its album Notes Campfire in 1996, the band has dwindled to near nonexistence, with its albums out of print and only a small number of performances in the last 27 years. But the group’s diehard fans have long made a concerted effort to revive interest, and now the full discography is available on Bandcamp for the first time. Souled American’s music renders “atmospheric, languid, and strange evocations of country living,” writes Hennies. “It’s a wonder that these songs work at all. The music is slow and loose with little regard for a consistent beat; the lyrics are poetic and frequently profound, but often cryptic and stunted. What ties it all together is the sound: Guitars twinkle and Adducci’s bass slides and glides in and out of chord progressions in support of drawling, yearning, and ultimately shockingly powerful voices.”

The curtain rises next week on Bard SummerScape’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground. Presented in New York’s Hudson Valley by the Fisher Center at Bard, also celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, the seven-week annual arts festival opens next Friday with the world premiere of Illinois (June 23–July 2). A new SummerScape commission, Illinois is a full-length music-theater work based on the 2005 concept album of the same name by Grammy- and Oscar-nominated singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens. Directed and choreographed by Tony Award winner and frequent Stevens collaborator Justin Peck (Carousel on Broadway, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, New York City Ballet), with music and lyrics by Stevens and a story by Peck and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview, Marys Seacole), Illinois is an ecstatic pageant of storytelling, theater, dance, and live music that takes audiences on a wild ride through the American heartland. Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available on June 25, June 29, and July 2; more information is available here. There will also be a pre-performance, opening-night members’ toast (June 23), an exclusive opening-night after-party in the Spiegeltent with the cast and creative team (June 23), a pre-performance talk with Justin Peck (June 25), and a post-performance conversation with the performers (June 30).

SummerScape’s next mainstage event is the first major American production of Camille Saint-Saëns’s grand opera Henri VIII, featuring bass-baritone Alfred Walker and the American Symphony Orchestra in an original new staging by visionary French director Jean-Romain Vesperini (July 21–30).

Finally, over the last two weekends of SummerScape, the 33rd Bard Music Festival presents “Vaughan Williams and His World”: eleven themed concerts, plus panel discussions and special events, providing an in-depth re-examination of the great but frequently misunderstood British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (Aug 4–6; Aug 10–13). Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for Henri VIII (July 23 & 30) and the final program of the Bard Music Festival (Aug 13); more information is available here. Henri VIII and six concerts will also stream live to home audiences worldwide on Upstreaming, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage.

As in previous seasons, SummerScape’s one-of-a-kind Belgian Spiegeltent (June 22–Aug 12) provides a sumptuous environment for cutting-edge live music and dancing on Fridays, Saturdays, and some Sundays throughout the festival, with a new “Bluegrass on Hudson” series on Thursdays. Highlights of the Spiegeltent season include John Cameron Mitchell and Amber Martin, Nona Hendryx’s tribute to Betty Davis, Ari Shapiro with Matteo Lane, Alicia Hall Moran, Erin Markey, Jasmine Rice LaBeija, Britton and the Sting, Nicholas Galanin and Ya Tseen, Susanne Bartsch, Martha Redbone, The Hot Sardines, Lola Kirke ’12, and more. Members of the local community are also invited to a free, day-long 20th anniversary Community Celebration with a special performance from Latin Grammy-winning band Flor de Toloache at the Fisher Center (July 15).

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

What critics are saying about Bard SummerScape…

“Seven weeks of cultural delight.” (International Herald Tribune)
“A track record of reliable transcendence.” (New York Times)
“One of the major upstate festivals.” (New Yorker)
“A highbrow hotbed of culture.” (Huffington Post)
“The smartest mix of events within driving distance of New York.” (Bloomberg News)
“Leon Botstein’s Bard SummerScape and Bard Music Festival always unearth piles of buried treasure.” (New Yorker)
“One of the best lineups of the summer for fans of any arts discipline.” (New York Sun)
“One of the great artistic treasure chests of the tri-state area and the country.” (GALO magazine)
“One of the New York area’s great seasonal escapes.” (American Record Guide)
“A haven for important operas.” (New York Times)
“An indispensable part of the summer operatic landscape.” (Musical America)
“Essential summertime fare for the serious American opera-goer” (Financial Times, UK)
“Botstein and Bard SummerScape show courage, foresight and great imagination, honoring operas that larger institutions are content to ignore.” (Time Out New York)
“A spectacular venue for innovative fare.” (Travel and Leisure magazine)
“It’s hard not to find something to like, and it’s even harder to beat the setting.” (New York Post)
“The experience of entering the Fisher Center and encountering something totally new is unforgettable and enriching.” (Time Out New York)

…and about the Bard Music Festival

“The summer’s most stimulating music festival.” (Los Angeles Times)
“It has long been one of the most intellectually stimulating of all American summer festivals and frequently is one of the most musically satisfying.” (Wall Street Journal)
“Part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit.” (New York Times)
“A highlight of the musical year.” (Wall Street Journal)
“The most intellectually ambitious of America’s summer music festivals.” (Times Literary Supplement, London)
“One of the ‘Ten Can’t-Miss Classical Music Festivals.’” (NPR Music)
“A two-weekend musicological intensive doubling as a sumptuous smorgasbord of concerts.” (New York Times)
“An always intrepid New York event.” (Time Out New York)
“One of New York’s premier summer destinations for adventurous music lovers.” (New York Times)SummerScape 2023: key dates

June 22–Aug 12
Spiegeltent: live music and dancing

June 23–July 2
Music-theater: Illinois by Justin Peck, Sufjan Stevens and Jackie Sibblies Drury
(world premiere of new SummerScape commission)

July 15
20th Anniversary Community Celebration (free)

July 21–30
Opera: Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII (new production)

Aug 4–6
Bard Music Festival: Vaughan Williams and His World
   Weekend One: Victorians, Edwardians, and Moderns

Aug 10–13
Bard Music Festival: Vaughan Williams and His World
   Weekend Two: A New Elizabethan Age?

All programs subject to change


The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, 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.
                                                                                                           
                                                     
Illinois is a co-commission of the Fisher Center, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Southbank Center, and TO Live, and has been made possible with a commissioning grant from The O’Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation, residency support from Project Springboard: Developing Dance Musicals, and The Ted & Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund. The production is generously supported by Emily Blavatnik and the Blavatnik Family Foundation. Additional funding has been received from the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ‘06 through the March Forth Foundation.

Henri VIII has received support from Villa Albertine.
The 2023 Bard Music Festival has received support from the Vaughan Williams Foundation.

Bard College has been awarded two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for the Fisher Center’s presentation of Henri VIII by composer Camille Saint-Saëns, and the Sistema Side-by-Side Program at the Longy School of Music. The awards, both for $30,000, will support both the new production of the 1883 opera for Bard’s 2023 SummerScape festival, and the 2023–24 program of Sistema Side-by-Side, a musical and social mentoring program that pairs children ages 6–18 from neighborhood music programs and local schools with Longy conservatory student mentors for lessons, rehearsals, and performances.

The NEA, established in Congress in 1965, is an independent federal agency that is the largest funder of the arts and arts education in communities nationwide and a catalyst of public and private support for the arts. By advancing equitable opportunities for arts participation and practice, the NEA aims to foster and sustain an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States. Henri VIII and Sistema Side-by-Side are among 1,130 projects across the country that were selected for this second round of funding from the NEA’s Grants for Arts Projects, its largest grants program for organizations that provides comprehensive and expansive funding opportunities for communities.

“The National Endowment for the Arts is pleased to support a wide range of projects, including Bard College’s Henri VIII and Sistema Side-by-Side Program, demonstrating the many ways the arts enrich our lives and contribute to healthy and thriving communities,” said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. “These organizations play an important role in advancing the creative vitality of our nation and helping to ensure that all people can benefit from arts, culture, and design.”

Conducted by Leon Botstein and performed by the American Symphony Orchestra along with a cast of eleven principals plus the Bard Festival Chorale and dancers, the Fisher Center’s production of Henri VIII is directed by an all-French creative team. The stateliness and grandeur of French grand opera represent a fitting choice for the 20th-anniversary celebration of the Fisher Center while the tradition of political commentary of this genre offers an urgent and cautionary tale for contemporary times.
 

      

Gabriel Kilongo ’15, Bard alumnus and founder of the art gallery Jupiter Contemporary in Miami, was interviewed by Artnet News about the founding of Jupiter and its upcoming exhibitions. “With the help of Martin Peretz and Leon Botstein, I went to Bard College on a full scholarship to study art history,” Kilongo told Artnet. “While there, I was introduced to many facets of the art world, and it immediately clicked.” In March 2022, he founded the gallery with the intention of highlighting and fostering emerging artists. “Our focus is to identify, exhibit, and develop artists who are off-the-beaten-path, and offer a breath of fresh air to the discourse of the art industry.” The next exhibition planned for Jupiter Contemporary will be a solo show featuring new work by Yongqi Tang, showcasing the broad scope of her practice in paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

The exhibition Leonora Carrington: Revelación, which was held at Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, was the first retrospective devoted to the artist in Spain and offered a fresh presentation of Carrington’s influences, thematic concerns, and technical and intellectual development, writes Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, for Artforum. The exhibition, coproduced with the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen and organized by Tere Arcq, Carlos Martín, and Stefan van Raay, highlighted previously unshown works from different stages in Carrington’s life and “marks a triumphant return to a country that was the site of one of the most transformative junctures of Carrington’s life: her traumatic incarceration in 1940 in the Santander asylum, where she experienced sexual violence and the enduring stigma of mental illness,” Aberth writes. “Carrington was curious about all avenues providing insight into the self,” she continues, “Including Jungian psychology, kabbalah, astrology, peyote, Tibetan Buddhism, and tarot, to name just a few.”

Further reading:

Bard College Professor Susan Aberth Awarded a Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency

Bard Professor Susan Aberth and Curator Tere Arcq Publish First Book Dedicated to Newly Discovered Tarot Set Created by Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington and the Theatre: A Conversation with Professor Susan Aberth and Double Edge Theatre’s Stacy Klein
 

The New York Times profiled the “singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic opera” Stranger Love and its collaborators, composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. The Times also reviewed the opera, naming it a Critic's Pick, calling it “an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small.”

Stranger Love premiered on Saturday, May 20, 2023—its only planned performance at the time of writing. Writer Zachary Woolfe tracked the project from its envisioning 11 years ago to its final incarnation: a six-hour, three-act production to be staged at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Contemporaneous, which Mattingly cofounded with David Bloom ’13 as an undergraduate at Bard, will play, with Bloom conducting. Whether Stranger Love will have a future performance after this weekend is unclear, though “Mattingly has dreamed of doing it at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.” Regardless, Mattingly and Bartscherer are at work on their next collaboration, the ambitiously titled “History of Life.”

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Walid Raad as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Photography in the Division of the Arts for the 2023–24 academic year. Raad is an artist whose works include photography, video, mixed media installations, and performances. His works include the creation of The Atlas Group, a fifteen-year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon, as well as the ongoing projects Scratching on Things I Could Disavow and Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut). His books include Walkthrough, The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead, My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair, and Let’s Be Honest The Weather Helped.

Raad’s solo exhibitions have been featured at institutions including the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza (Madrid), Louvre (Paris), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), ICA (Boston, USA), Museo Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico), Kunsthalle Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland), The Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, UK), Festival d’Automne (Paris, France), Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels, Belgium), The Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, Germany). 

His works have also been shown in Documenta 11 and 13 (Kassel, Germany), The Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), Whitney Bienniale 2000 and 2002 (New York, USA), Sao Paulo Bienale (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Istanbul Biennal (Istanbul, Turkey), Homeworks I and IV (Beirut, Lebanon) and other institutions across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. In addition, Raad is the recipient multiple grants, prizes, and awards, including the Aachener Kunstpreis (2018), ICP Infinity Award (2016), the Hasselblad Award (2011), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2007), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2007), the Camera Austria Award (2005), and a Rockefeller Fellowship (2003).

Choreographer Joanna Haigood ’79 is the recipient of a 2023 Rainin Fellowship for her work in dance. Now in its third year, this fellowship annually awards four visionary Bay Area artists working across the disciplines of dance, film, public space, and theater with unrestricted grants of $100,000. An initiative of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and administered by United States Artists, the fellowship funds artists who push the boundaries of creative expression, anchor local communities, and advance the field. Fellows also receive supplemental support tailored to address each fellow’s specific needs and goals, including financial planning, communications, and marketing help and legal services. The 2023 Fellows were nominated by Bay Area artists and cultural leaders and selected through a two-part review process with the help of national reviewers and a panel of four local jurors. Haigood is the artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre and was a recipient of a Bard Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters.

Haigood is a choreographer and site artist who has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative since 1980. Haigood’s stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by arts institutions including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d’Avignon. Haigood has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary young artists internationally at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque in France, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in England, Spelman College, and many more, including members of her company Zaccho Dance Theatre. Her honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship, USA Fellowship, New York Bessie Award, and the Doris Duke Artist Award.

Filmmaker Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, who is associate professor and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, has been selected as a member of the 2023–2024 cohort of Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellows for his work in the arts. During their fellowship year, this international cohort will work on projects that “contend with the urgent, the beautiful, and the vast: from reckoning with the challenges of climate change to creating digital models of iconic Italian violins to detecting distant galaxies.” Asili has been named a Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow, an honor which includes a stipend of $78,000 plus an additional $5,000 to cover project expenses. Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellows are provided studio or office space, use of the Film Study Center’s equipment and facilities, and access to libraries and other Harvard University resources during the fellowship year.

The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program annually selects and supports artists, scholars, and practitioners who bring both a record of achievement and exceptional promise to the institute. A Radcliffe fellowship offers scholars in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts—as well as writers, journalists, and other distinguished professionals—a rare chance to pursue ambitious projects for a full year in a vibrant interdisciplinary setting amid the resources of Harvard. The 2023–2024 fellows represent only 3.3 percent of the many applications that Radcliffe received.

Tania El Khoury, distinguished artist in residence in the Theater and Performance Program at Bard and director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, has won a 2023 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for theater. The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts is an unrestricted prize of $75,000 given annually to risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theater, and the visual arts. The theater award panel honored El Khoury for “her serious and playful, and complex work, her breadth of imagination, and powerful sense of ethical responsibility. Studying the political potential of live art, treating audiences as fellow investigators and researchers, inventing new forms and new ways of engagement with each project, she is opening new paths of meaning and creation.” El Khoury says, “I create work that actively resists borders. The internal and external borders, the visible and invisible, borders within our bodies, colonial borders, cities as borders, the art industry as a border, and national borders as a way to make people disappear.”

The Herb Alpert Award honors and supports artists respected for their creativity, ingenuity, and bodies of work, at a moment in their lives when they are poised to propel their art in new and unpredictable directions. The Herb Alpert Award recognizes experimenters who are making something that matters within and beyond their field. El Koury is among 11 recipients of the prize, the most ever awarded in a year. Nominated by artists and arts professionals, finalists were invited to submit work samples, and two winners were selected in each field. This year, Gideon Lester, artistic director of the Fisher Center, professor of theater and performance, and senior curator at the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard, was among the theater panelists. 

Previous Bard recipients of the Herb Alpert Award include:
Martine Syms  MFA ’17, Visual Arts 2022
Adam Khalil ’11, Film/Video 2021
Sky Hopinka, Sherri Burt Hennessey Artist in Residence and assistant professor of film and electronic arts, Film/Video 2020
Pam Tanowitz, Bard’s first choreographer in residence at the Fisher Center, Dance 2019 
Jacqueline Goss, professor of film and electronic arts, Film/Video 2007
Peggy Ahwesh, professor emeritus of film and electronic art, Film/Video 2000
George Lewis, music/sound faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard, Music 1999

Music Director Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now (TŌN) in Before and After Soviet Communism, a program examining seldom-heard masterpieces of Eastern European music by Karol Szymanowski, Boris Tishchenko, and György Kurtág during the rise and fall of Soviet communism. The performance is a preview of the same program to be given at Carnegie Hall on May 4.

Tickets: $25–$35 are available online at fishercenter.bard.edu, or by calling the Fisher Center at 845.758.7900. Ticket holders will need to comply with the venue’s health and safety requirements, which can be found here. 

Before and After Soviet Communism: A Carnegie Hall Preview
Fisher Center at Bard College, Sosnoff Theater
This program will also be performed at Carnegie Hall on May 4.
Saturday, April 29, 2023 at 7 PM
Sunday, April 30 at 2 PM
Leon Botstein, conductor
Sun-Ly Pierce, mezzo-soprano
Hiromi Kikuchi, violin (April 29)
Ken Hakii, viola (April 29)
Luosha Fang, violin (April 30)
Rosemary Nelis, viola (April 30)
Karol Szymanowski: Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin
György Kurtág: ...concertante...
Boris Tishchenko: Symphony No. 5
Szymanowski’s 1918 Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin was written during a time when the composer’s interests turned towards exoticism. Chinese-American mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, a Marilyn Horne Song Competition award-winner with frequent leading roles at Houston Grand Opera, is featured in this song cycle based on texts from the Polish poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz. The work evokes the improvisational cry of the men who call Muslims to prayer. Russian composer Boris Tishchenko’s Fifth Symphony is dedicated to Shostakovich in response to the death of his teacher, colleague, and friend. Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s early-21st-century ...concertante… consists of a single movement and a coda scored for large orchestra and two string soloists with a wide range of tonal color. Premiered in 2003 by the Danish National Symphony Radio Orchestra, the work won the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. The soloists in the April 29 performance are violinist Hiromi Kikuchi, and Ken Hakii, for whom Kurtág wrote this piece. The April 30 concert will feature violinist/violist Luosha Fang, 1st Prize-winner of the Tokyo International Viola Competition; and violist Rosemary Nelis, Brooklyn native, recording artist, violist for the Cassatt String Quartet, and faculty member of Kinhaven Music School.

The Orchestra Now
The Orchestra Now (TŌN) is a group of 54 vibrant young musicians from 13 different countries across the globe: Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Peru, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States. All share a mission to make orchestral music relevant to 21st-century audiences by sharing their unique personal insights in a welcoming environment. Hand-picked from the world’s leading conservatories—including the Yale School of Music, Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Royal Academy of Music, and the New England Conservatory of Music—the members of TŌN are enlightening curious minds by giving on-stage introductions and demonstrations, writing concert notes from the musicians’ perspective, and having one-on-one discussions with patrons during intermissions.

Conductor, educator, and music historian Leon Botstein, whom The New York Times said “draws rich, expressive playing from the orchestra,” founded TŌN in 2015 as a graduate program at Bard College, where he is also president. TŌN offers both a three-year master’s degree in Curatorial, Critical, and Performance Studies and a two-year advanced certificate in Orchestra Studies. The Orchestra’s home base is the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center at Bard, where it performs multiple concerts each season and takes part in the annual Bard Music Festival. It also performs regularly at the finest venues in New York, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others across NYC and beyond. HuffPost, who has called TŌN’s performances “dramatic and intense,” praises these concerts as “an opportunity to see talented musicians early in their careers.”

The Orchestra has performed with many distinguished guest conductors and soloists, including Leonard Slatkin, Neeme Järvi, Gil Shaham, Fabio Luisi, Vadim Repin, Hans Graf, Peter Serkin, Gerard Schwarz, Tan Dun, and JoAnn Falletta. Recordings featuring The Orchestra Now include two albums of piano concertos with Piers Lane on Hyperion Records, and a Sorel Classics concert recording of pianist Anna Shelest performing works by Anton Rubinstein with TŌN and conductor Neeme Järvi. Buried Alive with baritone Michael Nagy, released on Bridge Records in August 2020, includes the first recording in almost 60 years—and only the second recording ever—of Othmar Schoeck’s song-cycle Lebendig begraben. Recent releases include an album of piano concertos with Orion Weiss on Bridge Records, and the soundtrack to the motion picture Forte. Recordings of TŌN’s live concerts from the Fisher Center can be heard on Classical WMHT-FM and WWFM The Classical Network, and are featured regularly on Performance Today, broadcast nationwide.

For upcoming activities and more detailed information about the musicians, visit ton.bard.edu.

Leon Botstein
Leon Botstein is founder and music director of The Orchestra Now (TŌN), music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO), artistic codirector of Bard SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival, and conductor laureate and principal guest conductor of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (JSO), where he served as music director from 2003 to 2011. He has been guest conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Mariinsky Theatre, Russian National Orchestra in Moscow, Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden, Taipei Symphony, Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra, and Sinfónica Juvenil de Caracas in Venezuela, among others. In 2018, he assumed artistic directorship of Campus Grafenegg and Grafenegg Academy in Austria.

Recordings include acclaimed recordings of Othmar Schoeck’s Lebendig begraben with TŌN, Hindemith’s The Long Christmas Dinner with the ASO, a Grammy-nominated recording of Popov’s First Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra, and other various recordings with TŌN, ASO, the London Philharmonic, NDR Orchestra Hamburg, and JSO, among others. He is editor of The Musical Quarterly and author of numerous articles and books, including The Compleat Brahms (Norton), Jefferson’s Children (Doubleday), Judentum und Modernität (Bölau), and Von Beethoven zu Berg (Zsolnay). Honors include Harvard University’s prestigious Centennial Award; the American Academy of Arts and Letters award; and Cross of Honor, First Class, from the government of Austria, for his contributions to music. Other distinctions include the Bruckner Society’s Julio Kilenyi Medal of Honor for his interpretations of that composer’s music, the Leonard Bernstein Award for the Elevation of Music in Society, and Carnegie Foundation’s Academic Leadership Award. In 2011, he was inducted into the American Philosophical Society.

The Fisher Center at Bard presents Illinois, a world premiere music-theater work based on Sufjan Stevens’ acclaimed album of the same name, June 23 – July 2. Directed and choreographed by Tony Award winner and frequent Stevens collaborator Justin Peck (Carousel on Broadway, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, New York City Ballet), with music and lyrics by Stevens and a story by Peck and Pulitzer Prize winner Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview, Marys Seacole), this union of visionary artists is an ecstatic pageant of storytelling, theater, dance, and live music. Frequent Stevens collaborator Timo Andres has created new arrangements of Stevens’ songs—which stretch from DIY folk and indie rock to marching band and ambient electronics—to be performed by a live band (led by Nathan Koci, music director of the Fisher Center’s Tony Award-winning production of Oklahoma!) and three vocalists (including Illinois album backing vocalist Shara Nova), with twelve dancers embodying and propelling their ambitious storytelling. Illinois leads audiences on a journey through the American heartland, from campfire storytelling to the edges of the cosmos.

Part of the Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, Illinois kicks off SummerScape 2023 (June–August, 2023), the Fisher Center’s annual summer festival, “a hotbed of intellectual and aesthetic adventure,” (The New York Times). The production exemplifies the Fisher Center’s role as an internationally influential hub of artistic innovation and incubation, following works such as Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma! and Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets.   

Stevens’ 2005 concept album Illinois enjoys cult status for its lush orchestrations and wildly inventive portrayal of the state’s people, landscapes, and history, complete with UFOs, zombies, and predatory wasps. Peck transforms Stevens’ giddily melodic Americana collage into a full-length theatrical performance, working with Sibblies-Drury to thread together a narrative that honors the album’s structure—and draws movement from its moments of rhapsody, sweetness, anxiety, and anguish. As Pitchfork wrote of Illinois in a rare “9.2”-rated review, “Stevens has a remarkable habit of being rousing and distressing at the same time, prodding disparate emotional centers until it’s unclear whether it’s best to grab your party shoes or a box of tissues.”

Like many fellow millennials to whom Illinois bears an enduringly immediate emotional resonance, Peck encountered the album as a teenager. He says, “I remember hearing this album for the first time and just being blown away by the whole world that it opened up: the way it fluidly could move between such a variety of styles and compositions. One moment, it’s a folk murder ballad; the next, it’s abstract instrumental music; the next, it’s a group singalong. This was before I realized I wanted to make dances, but I thought, ‘this is someone who really has an innate ability to write music for dance and music for storytelling.’”

In the early 2010s, Peck contacted Stevens, asking for permission to choreograph a ballet to a portion of his electronic album Enjoy Your Rabbit. Though Stevens professed having little interest in ballet at the time, he gave the go-ahead. The full-length work that emerged, Peck’s Year of the Rabbit, and their resulting friendship and ongoing artistic partnership, completely changed the musician’s relationship with the form. As Stevens described to The New York Times, “[Justin] persuaded me to have an education and kind of curated my experience [of ballet].” Stevens became captivated by how ballet “is all about absence of self—there is no ego in it, even though there is extreme self-consciousness. Ballet is like proof of the existence of God.” Peck and Stevens went on to collaborate on arresting dance works including Everywhere We Go, In the Countenance of Kings, The Decalogue, and Principia. With Illinois, they harness the mutual inspiration they've developed throughout their collaboration to, for the first time, explore the form of music-theater.

The music-theater adaptation of Illinois had been percolating as an idea since Peck first articulated it on a whim at a dinner with Stevens in 2014; it finally takes exuberant form nearly a decade later, and with the collective imagination of a dynamic team, in its world premiere at the Fisher Center. Peck sought dancers who were not only technically extraordinary, but whose manner of gesture and expression made them exceptional storytellers. They include Kara Chan (Four Quartets), Ben Cook (Spielberg’s West Side Story), Jeanette Delgado (Spielberg’s West Side Story), Gaby Diaz (winner of Season 12, So You Think You Can Dance?), Tilly Evans-Krueger (Moulin Rouge! The Musical), Jonathan Fahoury (New York City Ballet), Jennifer Florentino (Spielberg’s West Side Story), Brandt Martinez (Moulin Rouge! The Musical), Craig Salstein (American Ballet Theatre, Spielberg’s West Side Story), Ahmad Simmons (Fosse/Verdon), Byron Tittle (In the Heights film), and Ricky Ubeda (winner of Season 11, So You Think You Can Dance?), with swings Jada German, Matthew Johnson, Zachary Gonder, and Dario Natarelli.

Shara Nova (the acclaimed musician who has sung on many Stevens albums and tours, and is celebrated for her work as My Brightest Diamond), Tasha (the Chicago musician who, per Pitchfork, “writes minimal, unpredictable songs that explore the in-between states of relationships with subtlety and grace”), and Tariq al-Sabir (a composer, vocalist, and music director called a “rising musical mastermind” by The Baltimore Examiner) perform vocals and on guitar and synths. The band comprises Christina Courtin (violin/viola), Domenica Fossati (flute), Daniel Freedman (drums), Sean Forte (piano and keys), Kathy Halvorson (oboe), Nathan Koci (banjo), Eleonore Oppenheim (bass), Brandon Ridenour (trumpet), Kyra Sims (horn), Jess Tsang (vibraphone).

The creative team includes Sufjan Stevens (Music and Lyrics, based on the album Illinois), Justin Peck (Director/Choreographer/Story), Jackie Sibblies Drury (Story), Olivier Award nominee Nathan Koci (Music Direction and Supervision), Timo Andres (Music Arrangements and Orchestrations), Tony Award nominee Adam Rigg (Scenic Design), Brandon Stirling-Baker (Lighting Design), Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung  (Costume Design), Garth MacAleavey (Sound Design), Andrew Diaz (Props Design), Julian Crouch (Masks), Adriana Pierce (Associate Direction & Choreography), Sean Forte (Associate Music Direction), and Natalie Hratko (Production Stage Manager).

Peck describes, “The proof of this album’s importance to a generation has come into play within the team that’s working on it. So many of us can pinpoint exactly where we were, what we were going through in our lives, what we connected to when we first heard this album. It’s both universal and incredibly specific, and personal. There’s so much inside of it. It’s this compressed thing, and it feels like if you decompressed it and laid it all out, it would be able to circle the globe eight times over.”

The Fisher Center at Bard’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground is a celebration of the artists, audiences, students, faculty, and communities that have written the Fisher Center’s story for its first two decades and will imagine it into the future. This milestone season for the organization that incubates vanguard artists’ boldest ideas unfolds with unbounded and genre-defying visions for dance, theater, opera, and public discourse. The season will culminate in a groundbreaking ceremony 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.

Illinois Schedule and Information

Illinois will have its world premiere at the Fisher Center June 23 – July 2, with the press opening taking place at a Chicago theater to be announced soon.

Performances:
Friday, June 23 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, June 24 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, June 25 at 2 pm
Friday, June 30 at 7:30 pm
Saturday, July 1 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, July 2 at 2 pm

Sosnoff Theater
Tickets start at $25

Pre-Performance Toast for Members
Friday, June 23 at 6:30 pm

Opening Night Cast Party
Friday, June 23 at 9pm
Spiegeltent
Ticket price $150
Meet the artists and creative team at an exclusive after-party hosted at the fabulous SummerScape Spiegeltent.

Pre-Performance Talk
Sunday, June 25 at 1 pm

Post-Performance Conversation with the Artists
Friday, June 30

SummerScape Coach from New York City
Sunday, June 25 and Sunday, July 2

For complete information regarding tickets, special packages, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call 845-758-7900.

About Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens is a singer, songwriter, and composer living in New York. His preoccupation with epic concepts has motivated two state records (Michigan and Illinois), a collection of sacred and biblical songs (Seven Swans), an electronic album for the animals of the Chinese zodiac (Enjoy Your Rabbit), a full length partly inspired by the outsider artist Royal Robertson (The Age of Adz), a masterwork memorializing and investigating his relationship with his late mother (Carrie & Lowell), and two Christmas box sets (Songs for Christmas, vol. 1-5 and Silver & Gold, vol. 6-10).

BAM has commissioned two works from Stevens, a programmatic tone poem for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (The BQE) and an instrumental accompaniment to slow-motion rodeo footage (Round-Up). He has collaborated extensively with the New York City Ballet choreographer Justin Peck (Year of the Rabbit, Everywhere We Go, Countenance of Kings, Principia, The Decalogue, and Reflections). Stevens’ Planetarium, a collaborative album with Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, and James McAlister imbued with themes of the cosmos, was released in 2017 to widespread critical praise. Stevens also contributed three much-lauded songs to Luca Guadagnino’s critically acclaimed film Call Me By Your Name, including the Oscar and Grammy-nominated song “Mystery of Love.”

In 2020 he shared Aporia, a collaborative new age album made with his stepfather Lowell Brams, and his eighth studio album, The Ascension, a reflection on the state of humanity in freefall and a call for a total transformation of consciousness. In early 2021, he released Convocations, a five-volume, two-and-a-half-hour requiem mass for present times. The most recent studio album by Stevens—A Beginner’s Mind—features songs inspired in part by popular films. It was released in the fall of 2021 and is a collaboration with singer-songwriter Angelo DeAugustine.

About Justin Peck

Justin Peck is a Tony Award-winning choreographer, director, filmmaker, and dancer based in New York City. He is currently the acting Resident Choreographer of the New York City Ballet. Peck began choreographing in 2009 at the New York Choreographic Institute. In 2014, after the creation of his acclaimed ballet Everywhere We Go, he was appointed as Resident Choreographer of the New York City Ballet. He is the second person in the institution’s history to hold this title.

After attending the School of American Ballet at Lincoln Center from 2003-2006, Peck was invited to join the New York City Ballet as a dancer in 2006.  In 2013, Peck was promoted to the rank of Soloist, performing full-time through 2019 with the company.

Peck has created over 50 dance works—more than 20 for New York City Ballet. Working on a wide array of projects, Peck’s collaborators include composers Sufjan Stevens, The National, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, Dan Deacon, Caroline Shaw, Chris Thile, Stephen Sondheim, M83, Dolly Parton; visual artists Shepard Fairey, Marcel Dzama, Shantell Martin, John Baldessari, Jeffrey Gibson, George Condo, Steve Powers, Jules de Balincourt; fashion designers Raf Simons, Mary Katrantzou, Humberto Leon (Kenzo, Opening Ceremony), Tsumori Chisato, Dries Van Noten; and filmmakers Steven Spielberg, Sofia Coppola, Damien Chazelle, Elisabeth Moss, Frances Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Jody Lee Lipes.

In 2014, Peck was the subject of the documentary Ballet 422, which presents Peck’s craft and creative process as a choreographer in great detail as he creates New York City Ballet’s 422nd commissioned dance.Peck has worked extensively as a filmmaker. In particular, his focus has been exploring new innovative ways of presenting dance on film. Peck choreographed the feature films Red Sparrow (2016), West Side Story (2021) in collaboration with director Steven Spielberg, and Maestro (2022) in collaboration with director/actor/writer Bradley Cooper. Peck’s work as a director-choreographer for music videos includes: “The Dark Side of the Gym” (2017) for The National; “Thank You, New York” (2020) for Chris Thile; and “The Times Are Racing” (2017) for Dan Deacon. In 2018, Peck directed the New York Times’ Great Performers Series.

Peck choreographed the 2018 Broadway revival of Carousel. The production was directed by Jack O’Brien and starred Jessie Meuller, Joshua Henry, & Renée Fleming.

Peck’s honors include the National Arts Award (2018), the Golden Plate Honor from the Academy of Achievement (2019), the Bessie Award for his ballet Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes (2015), the Gross Family Prize for his ballet Everywhere We Go (2014), the World Choreography Award for West Side Story (2022), and the Tony Award for his work on Broadway’s Carousel (2018).

About Jackie Sibblies Drury

Plays include Marys Seacole (OBIE Award), Fairview (2019 Pulitzer Prize), Really, Social Creatures, and We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915.

The presenters of her plays include Young Vic, Lincoln Center Theatre, Soho Rep., Berkeley Rep, New York City Players & Abrons Arts Center, Victory Gardens, Trinity Rep, Woolly Mammoth, Undermain Theatre, InterAct Theatre, Actors Theater of Louisville, Company One, and Bush Theatre. Drury has developed her work at Sundance, Bellagio Center, Ground Floor at Berkeley Rep, Soho Rep. Writer/Director Lab, New York Theatre Workshop, Bushwick Starr, LARK, and MacDowell Colony, among others.

She has received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a Jerome Fellowship at The LARK, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, and a Windham-Campbell Literary Prize in Drama.

Credits

Illinois is a co-commission of the Fisher Center, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Southbank Centre, TO Live, and the Perelman Performing Arts Center, and has been made possible with a commissioning grant from The O’Donnell-Green Music and Dance Foundation, residency support from Project Springboard: Developing Dance Musicals, and The Ted & Mary Jo Shen Charitable Gift Fund. The production is generously supported by Emily Blavatnik and the Blavatnik Family Foundation.

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.

A special thank you to all who have made this special season possible. Thank you for your contribution to our artistic home.

About the Fisher Center at Bard

The Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 163-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.
The Center presents more than 200 world-class events and welcomes 50,000 visitors each year. The Fisher Center supports artists at all stages of their careers and employs more than 300 professional artists annually. The Fisher Center is a powerful catalyst for art-making regionally, nationally, and worldwide. Every year it produces 8 to 10 major new works in various disciplines. Over the past five years, its commissioned productions have been seen in more than 100 communities around the world. During the 2018–2019 season, six Fisher Center productions toured nationally and internationally. In 2019, the Fisher Center won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical for Daniel Fish’s production of Oklahoma!, which began its life in 2007 as an undergraduate production at Bard and was produced professionally in the Fisher Center’s SummerScape Festival in 2015 before transferring to New York City.

 
 

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents Marcus Roberts’ Modern Jazz Generation and the Bard Jazz Innovators, a concert led by award-winning pianist and composer Marcus Roberts. Roberts, who is also a professor of music at Bard, will perform with his eight-piece professional ensemble, Modern Jazz Generation, in a variety of player combinations throughout the evening with the Bard Jazz Innovators, a nine-piece student ensemble. The performance will take place at Olin Hall, Bard College, on April 20 at 8 pm. Admission is free, with a suggested donation of $15.

Pianist Marcus Roberts has been hailed as a “genius of the modern piano.” He is known throughout the world for his many contributions to jazz music, as well as his commitment to integrating the jazz and classical idioms to create something wholly new. Roberts’ rhythmic and melodic group improvisational style is the hallmark of his modern approach to the jazz trio.

“Mr. Roberts has dedicated himself to learning not only the jazz tradition but also the lilting music of the 19th century, and he brings an astonishing richness to his playing,” wrote Peter Watrous for the New York Times. 

About Marcus Roberts
Roberts grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, where his mother's gospel singing and the music of the local church left a lasting impact on his music. He began teaching himself to play piano at age five after losing his sight, but did not have his first formal lesson until age 12 while attending the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind. At age 18, he went on to study classical piano at Florida State University with Leonidas Lipovetsky, the world-renowned classical concert pianist. 

Currently, Roberts is a Professor of Music at the Florida State University College of Music, where he received his B.A degree and a Professor of Music at Bard College. He also holds honorary doctoral degrees from The Juilliard School, Brigham Young University, and Bard College, and has won numerous awards and competitions over the years, including the Helen Keller Award for Personal Achievement. Roberts is known for his generosity, providing support and mentoring to a large network of younger musicians, and he continues to strive to find ways to serve the blind and other disabled communities. In 2021, he served as the Artistic Director for the centennial gala, The Art of Inclusion, for the American Foundation for the Blind. He was also a featured speaker/performer at the 2021 Disability:IN annual conference.

His critically-acclaimed legacy of recorded music reflects his tremendous artistic versatility, as well as his unique approach to jazz performance, and his recordings include solo piano, duets, and trio arrangements of jazz standards along with original suites of music for trio, large ensembles, and symphony orchestra. In addition to his renown as a performer, Roberts is also an accomplished composer. He has been commissioned by Chamber Music America, Jazz at Lincoln Center, ASCAP, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Savannah Music Festival. 

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships to three Bard faculty members and four Bard alumnae. Felicia Keesing, David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, Laura Larson, cochair of photography at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Jordan Weber, visiting artist in residence at Studio Arts, artist Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20, photographer Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10, artist Jessica Segall ’00, and artist Martine Syms MFA ’17 have been named 2023 Guggenheim Fellows. 

Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 2,500 applicants, Keesing, Larson, Weber, Nguyen, Phyars-Burgess, Segall and Syms were among a diverse group of 171 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2023 Fellowship. Keesing was awarded a Fellowship for her research on the ecology of infectious diseases, Larson for her work in photography, Weber for his work in the arts, Nguyen for her work in the arts, Phyars-Burgess for her work in photography, Segall for her work in the arts, and Syms for her work in the arts. 

“Like Emerson, I believe that fullness in life comes from following our calling,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The new class of Fellows has followed their calling to enhance all of our lives, to provide greater human knowledge and deeper understanding. We’re lucky to look to them to bring us into the future.”

In all, 48 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 72 different academic institutions, 24 states and the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 50 Fellows have no current full-time college or university affiliation. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like the lasting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, democracy and policing, scientific innovation, climate change, and identity.

Created and initially funded in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought since its inception to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The great range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2023 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Felicia Keesing’s research focuses on the ecology of infectious diseases in New York's Hudson Valley and in the savannas of central Kenya. She holds a Bachelor of Science from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Keesing was awarded the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2000), and has been the recipient of grants from National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, among others. She was coeditor of Infectious Disease Ecology: Effects of Ecosystems on Disease and of Disease on Ecosystems (Princeton University Press, 2008), and has also contributed to articles such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecology Letters, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Ecology, BioScience, Conservation Biology, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, and Canadian Journal of Zoology. 

Laura Larson’s work looks to the history of photography as a documentary practice to tell personal and sociocultural narratives. From 2002-2019, she was represented by Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York, where she presented four one-person exhibitions, including Complimentary (2002), Apparition (2005), and Electric Girls and the Invisible World (2009). Larson’s work has been featured at a variety of institutions, including Art in General, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and TimeOut New York. Larson is also the author of two books, Hidden Mother (2017), and City of Incurable Women (2022), both of which feature her research into 19th century photography. 

Jordan Weber is a New York- and Midwest-based regenerative land sculptor and activist who works at the crossroads of social justice and environmental racism. He has been an inaugural Harvard LOEB/ArtLab Fellow, a Blade of Grass Fellow, and an Iowa Arts Council Fellow, and has held residencies at Yale University’s inaugural Environmental Humanities, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and Washington University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE2) in St. Louis. He has been the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2022 United States Artists Award, Creative Capital Award, Joan Mitchell Award, Tanne Arts Foundation award, and African American Leadership Forum Grant. Weber is also working with Bard College on plans for a public art project, details of which will be announced later this year.

Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20 is an artist who works with photography and time-based media. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS at SculptureCenter, New York, and The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Between Two Solitudes at Stereo, Warsaw; Tyrant Star at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Minor twin worlds, with Brandon Ndife, at Bureau, New York; Reoccurring Afterlife, at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; and Flesh Before Body at Bad Reputation, Los Angeles. Nguyen has also been featured in multiple group exhibitions, including Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York; Metabolic Rift at Berlin Atonal, Berlin; Made in L.A. 2020: a version at Hammer Museum and The Huntington, Los Angeles; and Bodies of Water: 13th Shanghai Biennale, at Power Station of Art, in Shanghai. Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, and The Escalette Collection of Art at Chapman University.

Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10 was born in Brooklyn, New York to Trinidadian parents and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is interested in using photography education as community empowerment, and her first monograph, Untitled, explores the African diaspora around the world. 

Jessica Segall ’00 is an artist who uses hostile and threatened landscapes as the sites for her work. While embedded in these sites, she plays with both the risk of engaging with the environment and the vulnerability of the environment itself. Segall's work is built on a foundation of research that often includes cross-disciplinary collaboration and collaboration with scientists, activists and non-human beings. Her work has been featured internationally, including at COP 26, The Fries Museum, the Coreana Museum of Art, the Havana Bienal, the Queens Museum of Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the National Museum of Jewish American History, the Inside Out Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, the National Gallery of Indonesia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Croatia, the Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery and the National Symposium for Electronic Art. Segall has also received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the Harpo Foundation, the Virginia A Groot Foundation, the FST Studioprojects Fund, the Puffin Foundation, the Arts Envoy Program and Art Matters. Her work has been featured in Cabinet Magazine, the New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Mousse Magazine and Art in America. Her work is in the collections of the Museum de Domijnen and the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. 

Martine Syms MFA ’17 is an artist who has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Her work has been shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and ICA London. She has also done commissioned work for brands such as Prada, Nike, and Celine, among others. She is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a United States Artists fellowship, the Tiffany Foundation award, and the Future Fields Art Prize. She is in a band called Aunt Sister and hosts Double Penetration, a monthly radio show on NTS. Syms also runs Dominica Publishing.