News

The Bard Graduate Center in New York City now offers live-streaming and archival video of their popular seminar series and symposia. Their events explore the decorative arts, design history, and material culture in depth, featuring thought leaders in the field. Click below to find this season's schedule, and to view video of past events.

The roots of Austro-German Romanticism will be explored at the 2014 annual Bard SummerScape festival, which once again offers a sensational summer of music, opera, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, keyed to the theme of the 25th anniversary season of the world-renowned Bard Music Festival, Schubert and His World. Highlights include the first American revival in 100 years of Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Euryanthe and the world premiere theater production Love in the Wars, an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea by the Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville. The festival runs June 27 – August 17.

Bard's Frank Gehry–designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts is "eccentric and delightful to behold" and "an incredible place to watch a performance."

The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts presents “An Evening with Anna Deavere Smith” on Saturday, February 15. Widely acclaimed as one of the most provocative writers and performers of our time, Anna Deavere Smith is as celebrated for her investigative “documentary style” theater (Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles 1992) as for her starring roles on The West Wing and Nurse Jackie. Join her for an intimate evening in which she shares portraits of real people she has embodied over the past two decades.

The Fisher Center and Live Arts Bard present Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Romeo & Juliet, February 21–23. “Tell us the plot of Romeo and Juliet.” Thus began a series of phone calls to friends, the exact transcripts of which are performed with vigor and charm by Nature Theater of Oklahoma. As the respondents fumble through the characters and plot points, we realize that when memory lets us down, a necessary creativity takes over. The result is an irreverent and daring romp through Shakespeare’s best-loved play, where our fallible recollections take center stage.

If you are a Delta Air Lines passenger at New York's John F. Kennedy airport, you may find yourself captivated by a striking series of images in the new international terminal. Paper airplanes whizzing over a field of dandelion seed heads, a tiny airplane and cotton clouds in the palm of a hand, an azure sky and a map of the world—students, staff, and faculty in the Bard Photography Program created these pieces, and they will be on display in the new Sky Club through August.

If you are a Delta Air Lines passenger at New York's John F. Kennedy airport, you may find yourself captivated by a striking series of images in the new international terminal. Paper airplanes whizzing over a field of dandelion seed heads, a tiny airplane and cotton clouds in the palm of a hand, an azure sky and a map of the world—students, staff, and faculty in the Bard Photography Program created these pieces, and they will be on display in the new Sky Club through August.

L-R: Tal Yaron '13, Image du Present; Rory Hamovit '13, The Globetrotter

The exhibit is the first in the Delta Photography Initiative. Photography programs at 10 leading New York State colleges and universities will be profiled in the space—one per year over the course of a decade. Delta art consultant Susan Nicole Gibbs spearheaded the project and had only a few months to organize the first exhibition, which opened last May. Gibbs reached out to several colleges, including Bard. Her son, Grayson Gibbs '15, is a Bard student majoring in American Literature.

Photography Program director Stephen Shore was the first college representative to respond to Gibbs, and invited her to campus. "The students I met with were extremely engaged, professional, and asked terrific questions," Gibbs said. As Bard students completed portfolios for finals and graduation, they also worked on their submissions to Delta, excited for the opportunity to show their photography in such a highly trafficked venue for a year. Gibbs stipulated that they focus on three themes: wind, international, and paper airplanes. The selected artists were compensated with a $1,000 honorarium, and the pieces will become part of Delta's collection.

L-R: David Bush, faculty, Untitled Series; Richard Max Gravich '14, A small sojourn; Cassidy Turner '14, Memento

"We hit a home run," says Gibbs. "Bard students set a standard that will now be followed by schools across the state." The display occupies an 80-foot wall and comprises pieces that are quite large—44 inches wide and 30 inches tall—as well as panels describing the project, Bard College, and the Photography Program. "People at Delta walk through it and they love it. They sit there and study each piece," says Gibbs. She especially enjoys seeing parents with children. "In a quiet moment, I heard one dad encouraging his daughter to start taking pictures. That was great."

Bard students and alumni/ae participating in the Delta project are: Eve Alpert '13, Kye Ehrlich '13, Max Gavrich '14, Rory Hamovit '13, Jason Krinsky '14, Charlie Hawks '14, Max Paparella '13, Cassidy Turner '14, Alice Weston '14, Tal Yaron '14, and Mikhail Yusufov '14. Participating faculty and staff consist of Dave Bush, Laura Steele, and Malin McWalters.

For more information about the Delta Photography Initiative, please contact Susan Nicole Gibbs at Twinhouse Art Advisory, at [email protected].

The Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project at Bard College are pleased to announce the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Made possible through a five year-grant of $80,000 per year, the Keith Haring Fellowship is a cross-disciplinary, annual, visiting fellowship for a scholar, activist, or artist to teach and conduct research at both the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project at Bard College.

Installation artist Brad Tucker MFA '09 has created a new art book suitable for toddlers, called Dunes at Noons, and it's published by fellow alum Julia Klein MFA '09's Soberscove Press.

Artist and Bard alumna Gwynne Duncan '90 grew up in the historic Westbeth Complex in Manhattan, the first affordable housing complex for artists of its type in the United States. She moved back as an adult with her own family.

Ian Berry M.A. '98 directs Skidmore College’s Tang Museum, which he has transformed into an interdisciplinary teaching laboratory that stands out among peer institutions.

Artist Daniel Gordon '04 is creating disorienting still life photographs with multiple layers of imagery. He uses traditional still life elements (such as fruit and water jugs) and overlays them with printed images of themselves.

Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum, codirector of Afterall Publishing, and curator of the 2014 Sao Paulo Bienal, is the recipient of the 2014 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. The award, which includes a prize of $25,000, will be presented at a gala celebration and dinner on April 2 in New York City. Esche is the seventeenth recipient of the award.

La Loge in Brussels presents an exhibition of seven films by Peter Hutton, including early works and the debut of Hutton’s latest films, Three Landscapes (2013) and At Sea ( 2004-2007) in the form of an installation.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $500,000 grant to support residencies for six choreographers over four years as part of Live Arts Bard (LAB). LAB, a program of the Fisher Center, provides residencies for American artists and ensembles making work that spans and transcends the fields of theater, performance, dance, music, film, and live art. The Mellon Foundation grant significantly expands the program’s capacity to integrate choreographers into the life of the College, with opportunities for choreographers to work with students in a variety of arts and non-arts disciplines.

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard is offering $200,000 in scholarships and fellowships to be awarded in the 2014–2015 academic year. The application deadline for the program is February 1.

Susan Weber is "a director of uncommon expansiveness who has elevated the study of material culture, design, and curatorial practice to that of a fine art," writes Soohang Lee.

The Bard Graduate Center's new exhibition, William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, is an "engrossing show" that "should thrill Anglophiles," writes Karen Rosenberg.

Third-generation filmmaker Gia Coppola is making a name for herself with her forthcoming film Palo Alto. She both directed the film and adapted the script from James Franco's short story collection.