News

John Kisch '76 has been collecting visual artifacts of African American cinema for decades. Now his collection is available to museums, as a coffee table book, and as an iPad app.

Elisabeth Sussman, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, will receive the 2013 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard.

Last fall, musician Amanda Palmer and her band The Grand Theft Orchestra were in residence at Bard, performing shows at the Fisher Center and filming the video for "The Bed Song," from their album Theater Is Evil. On Valentine's Day they released the much-anticipated video.

Highlights of this year's SummerScape at the Bard Fisher Center include the 24^th Bard Music Festival, “Stravinsky and His World,” Taneyev’s opera Oresteia, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, and Bill T. Jones/Anne Bogart’s new Rite. This year's festival will take place July 6 through August 18.

The Times features this year's SummerScape festival, which highlights Russia and examines the cultural impact of Igor Stravinsky.

Join us for two free events in February at the Fisher Center. On February 12, choreographer and director Bill T. Jones and longtime New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Weschler discuss art and its relationship to science, history, technology, and current events. On February 16, the Company performs a work-in-process showing of Story, a new work created during its week in residence at Bard.

Gilles Peress, Bard College visiting professor of human rights and photography and internationally renowned photojournalist, is exhibiting work in Art or Evidence: The Power of Photojournalism, on view from January 3 through March 10 at the Mandeville Gallery, Union College in Schenectady, New York.

The Bard Graduate Center has received one of 832 Art Works grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The $20,000 grant will support the BGC’s presentation of Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a remarkable but little-known collection of medieval and 18th-century French objects that was the foundation of The Met’s decorative arts collection. The exhibition will open on April 4, 2013.

"All those jokes about Bard students always talking about Hannah Arendt or Foucault or Derrida are pretty true," says junior Julia DeFabo. Read Julia's story and other student stories:

Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) was the country’s first-ever graduate program for those who conceive, organize, and mount museum and gallery shows. CCS Bard's 20th anniversary this year was cause for celebration and reflection for faculty and alumni/ae.

Mark your calendars! The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts has announced spring and summer programming. The Center marks 10 years in April with a monthlong celebration of the performing arts, with new, rediscovered, and reimagined works from special guest artists and Bard students and faculty. Beginning in June, Bard SummerScape 2013 presents eight weeks of opera, music, theater, dance, film, and cabaret, featuring the Bard Music Festival, "Stravinsky and His World," in August.

What place do the humanities have in a global economy increasingly focused on educating a work force for business, finance, and technology? Bard leaders weighed in with the New Indian Express. "Without humanities, social sciences and arts," says Bard IILE Director Susan Gillespie, "we won’t have just and liveable societies or even prosperous economies." Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz adds that teaching the humanities is about "transmitting a tradition of meaning and substance, texts and ideas that can inspire young people to care more for the common world they share than for their parochial or personal interests."