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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.”

“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).

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

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.