All Bard News by Date
September 2020
09-22-2020
“I got through to Svetlana Alexievich . . . around two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, in Minsk. It was noisy in her apartment. ‘There are about fifteen people here,’ she said. They had gathered to bear witness to whatever might happen to Alexievich, who is the last original member of the opposition Coordinating Council—formed last month after mass protests began in Belarus—who has been neither imprisoned nor forced into exile,” writes Gessen. “Strange men, who she assumed worked for President Alexander Lukashenka’s security services, had been ringing her doorbell the previous evening. ‘People have been gathering since nine in the morning. Ambassadors and others. It’s a kind of resistance through presence,’ she said.”
09-22-2020
“I refuse to foreground art-world or film-industry politics in my art in order to gain acceptance. I made the film politically, embedding MOVE, radical politics, the input of my cast, crew, and my elders into not only the story of the film but the form and structure of the work,” says Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard College. “The Inheritance is not about the expression of rage or disgust; it’s about what happens the morning after, when we go back home after the protest. That’s where the work begins.” The Inheritance will screen virtually at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14 and 17, and at the New York Film Festival September 18–23.
09-22-2020
Contemporary choreographer Pam Tanowitz, a 2020 Doris Duke Artist in the dance category, is known for her unflinchingly postmodern treatment of classical dance vocabulary. Her 2018 creation of Four Quartets, inspired by T. S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece and set to music by Kaija Saariaho, was produced by and premiered at Bard Fisher Center—a production the New York Times called “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”
09-16-2020
Bard alumna Tschabalala Self ’12 interviews emerging British artist Somaya Critchlow, whose practice “draws a line of triangulation between the observer, the observed, and the larger social context imposed upon Black women and the expression of their bodies.” “I’m very aware of the terms that I operate within being Black and female and wanting to be a painter,” says Critchlow. “I love British culture and I think there is so much to it, and that has all come from the mixture of history and tradition and the influx of people migrating in and out of the UK and the new culture developing out of that. I feel like I’m a reflection of this, and while being a Black British artist is a complex position to hold, I find that like all things that invoke further observation and not just acceptance it can be a powerful place to operate from.”
09-15-2020
“Right now, there is a tremendous loss of faith among people who gave everything to museums,” Eccles tells Artnet. “The furloughs and the layoffs had a terrible psychic effect on people in our industry.”
09-15-2020
“Tuttle lets the installation stand as the answer to its own questions, even if it can feel that much is left unsaid,” writes Louis Bury. “Better to acknowledge that part of every object’s reality remains unavailable—incommunicable—to others, what object-oriented philosophers call an object’s ‘withdrawal.’ Tuttle’s work turns that withdrawal into an art.”
09-09-2020
“My practice, for the most part, centers around the convergence of information, fiction, and history,” says Aronson, who photographed his friends Aurora and Henry near Bard’s campus, crediting the lush landscape and rich history as a source of inspiration. “I believe that pictures don’t depict history or a moment in time, but rather challenge it. They act as a road map for the future. They are tarot cards in a sense, informing how we subsequently see the world and the next [set of] pictures.”
09-02-2020
“I am asking myself constantly: What comes after representation? What comes once we have a seat at the table — what do we do? What do we say?” Tucker tells Medium. “I knew that once I had representation, what I would do is make art about my life and the things that I was dealing with as a way to heal myself, and to experiment in a way that was safe. I got that through painting. I created this character of a white man, like an American business guy. The cartoon figure just became a way to explore myself in my paintings.”
09-01-2020
Bard at Brooklyn Public Library microcollege student and artist Russell Craig ’22 has installed a mural honoring the Black Lives Matter movement at the entrance of the Philadelphia Municipal Services building. The mural, called Crown, is just steps from where the statue of controversial former Mayor Frank Rizzo once stood, and the site of large protests in late spring demanding the city remove the statue, which it did in June.
August 2020
08-25-2020
“Whether on reclaimed ledger paper or vintage picture postcards, the images he constructs are something like found details themselves—singular and mysterious, if occasionally a little on the nose,” writes Will Heinrich.
08-25-2020
“I want to be realistic about the way I see the world, but I've always felt that Bojack is actually an optimistic show,” says Bard alum Raphael Bob-Waksberg ’06. “Not everyone agrees, but I see it as a story about how people can change, and change each other. How you can make a difference in somebody else's life, which might be small, or might be profound. I like to believe that those differences can add up.”
08-18-2020
“This past February, an exhibition on the work of French furniture designer, architect, and overall Renaissance woman Eileen Gray opened on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A tour de force of an immersive yet jewel-box exhibition, the show was unfortunately cut short. However, for those looking to learn more about Gray’s body of work, from her screens to her use of steel tubing to her architectural models, Eileen Gray”—coedited by curator Cloé Pitiot and BGC gallery director Nina Stritzler-Levine—“would be a welcome addition to any bookshelf.”
08-18-2020
“The spaces Black people inhabit are at once physical, immaterial and carried thru our bones, thru time and back out into the world,” says Azikiwe Mohammed ’05. “Thru drawing, collage, sculpture and a variety of works that swing between those spaces, Devin N. Morris provides us with a look at the entirety of a language at once gay, Black and deeply personal, while maintaining a familiarity that makes his grandmother’s house in Baltimore feel like my grandmother’s house in Westbury, Long Island.”
08-18-2020
Gibson draws upon his Native American heritage as well as postwar abstractionism in this large-scale work, which measures 44 feet square by 21 feet high. Entitled Because Once You Enter My House It Becomes Our House, the multitiered structure refers to the earth-based architecture of the ancient metropolis of Cahokia, which was the largest city of the North American Indigenous Mississippian people at its height in the 13th century. “Even though it’s where my people are from, I had never heard of these structures being in Mississippi,” says Gibson. “That this history existed there is amazing and moving.” On view at New York’s Socrates Sculpture Park until March 2021.
08-12-2020
“I have been grappling a lot with what art means in times of crisis and change,” says Bard alumna Ruba Katrib MA ’07 in this interview with Hyperallergic’s Dessane Lopez Cassell. “Despite everything that is going on, so many people I talk to are still craving IRL experiences with art—even while a pandemic rages and even while protesting in the streets and fighting to change this system and its rotten power structures. This makes me feel that art still does so
08-12-2020
As part of its series 15 Creative Women for Our Time, the New York Times profiles Bard alumna Juliana Huxtable ’10—DJ, artist, poet, performer, and now novelist. “The common thread running through Huxtable’s work,” writes the Times’s Aisha Harris, “is a provocative if often cheeky exploration of layered identity and how it is and isn’t moldable: What stories are told about us—or are written on our bodies—and which do we tell ourselves?”
08-12-2020
Bard MFA alumna Suzanne Kite is one of the first class of 11 Women at Sundance | Adobe Fellows, announced this week by the Sundance Institute. The new program is designed to meaningfully support women artists creating bold new work in film and media, with a priority on filmmakers from historically underrepresented communities. Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer. Her scholarship and practice highlights contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research creation, computational media, and performance.
08-06-2020
“During the past few years of Donald Trump’s deranged presidency, if there is one writer I turn to it is Masha Gessen, whose piercing clarity is gemlike and refusal to equivocate precious,” writes Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore. “As a journalist, Gessen has covered Russia, Hungary and Israel, so is not experiencing illiberalism for the first time. Instead of a weariness however, what is present in the book is a stunning capacity to connect the dots in a way that few can.”
08-06-2020
Bard College faculty and alumni have once again appeared on the list of the year’s Emmy nominees. Emma Briant, visiting research associate in human rights, was a senior researcher for The Great Hack, which was nominated in the Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special category. Dead to Me, the Netflix show produced by alumnus Buddy Enright ’84, was nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series. Bojack Horseman, cocreated by Raphael Bob-Waksberg ’06, was nominated for Outstanding Animated Program. Beastie Boys Story, about Adam Yauch ’86 and his bandmates, was nominated for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special.
July 2020
07-28-2020
“What will become of public art and space in New York in the months and years ahead?” writes Kitnick in Artforum. “More baubles and police barricades? Some claim that the truly public art of our time is not that which demands people come to it (the puppy in the plaza) but that which disperses outward to meet its audience—the magazine, the hit single, the post. I guess that’s true to a certain extent, but now, more and more, that seems like our experience of so much art, especially during quarantine.”
07-28-2020
“This is what dreaming sounds like”: In the 1980s and ’90s Bard Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman first showed us what dreaming looks like, with his mythical, world-bending comic book series The Sandman. Now Audible and DC Comics give voice to Gaiman’s dreams — and nightmares—in “a vibrant audio adaptation,” writes Maya Phillips in the New York Times.
07-28-2020
“The ragged end of his Presidency, if it comes, will be full of conflict and resentment. There will be no orderly handover, no constructive transition—a disastrous prospect during a pandemic and a deep recession, and yet another blow to our perceptions of how elections and government operate,” writes Gessen in the New Yorker. “This is the best-case scenario. The worst case, as Douglas’s three catastrophes illustrate, is a close or contested result of the vote, which leads to a constitutional implosion and an explosion of violence.”
07-28-2020
“By eviscerating a Republican’s excuse for his foul-mouthed abuse the congresswoman showed the power of rhetoric,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose in the Guardian. Ocasio-Cortez, who addressed the House of Representatives in response to Republican Congressman Ted Yoho’s verbal assault on the Capitol steps, provided “a masterpiece of heartfelt, unadorned plain speech that (consciously or instinctively) employed the tools of the orator, the rhetorician and preacher. What carries us is repetition, rhythm, emphasis, cadence, pronunciation (the congresswoman leans into her Bronx vowels) and a seamless transition from each event or idea to its larger implications.”
07-12-2020
Jack Ferver—New York–based writer, choreographer, director, and Bard artist in residence—talks with Vogue about choreographing Jeremy O. Harris’s play A Boy’s Company Presents: “Tell Me If I’m Hurting You.” This “intensely ambitious” work is styled after a Jacobean revenge tragedy. Written in verse, the play is set “Before, During, and Hopefully After Heartbreak.” It follows the meeting of two young, Black men, Vinnie and Baby Boy, which prompts “an erotic dream-journey that begins with a rush of passion—and ends, inevitably, soaked in blood.”
07-10-2020
First Cow, directed by Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard College, “may be the finest of Reichardt’s films to date.” The film is set in the wilds of an early 19th-century Columbia River settlement, in what is now Oregon, and focuses on the business partnership and friendship of an Anglo cook and an entrepreneurial Chinese immigrant.
Kelly Reichardt's First Cow is available in virtual cinemas, which support the movie theaters that are still closed, including this week at Film at Lincoln Center, and on iTunes or anywhere else you rent movies online—you can see the full list here.
Kelly Reichardt's First Cow is available in virtual cinemas, which support the movie theaters that are still closed, including this week at Film at Lincoln Center, and on iTunes or anywhere else you rent movies online—you can see the full list here.
07-08-2020
Bard College announced today the appointment of Tania El Khoury as Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater and Performance and Ziad Abu-Rish as Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights. Together they will lead a pioneering Master of Arts program in Human Rights and the Arts, planned to commence in Fall 2021. Designed by Bard’s Human Rights Program, the Fisher Center at Bard, and the Central European University, and launched through the Open Society University Network (OSUN), the interdisciplinary program will bring together scholars, artists, and activists from around the world to explore the highly-charged relation between artistic practices and struggles for truth and justice.
The appointments deepen Bard’s relationship with El Khoury and Abu-Rish, both of whom were visiting faculty at the college in 2019. Abu-Rish taught in the Human Rights Program, while El Khoury co-curated the 2019 edition of the Live Arts Bard Biennial at the Fisher Center at Bard. Where No Wall Remains: an international festival about borders included nine newly commissioned projects by artists from the Middle East and the Americas. In addition to their work with the new graduate program, they will also teach in the undergraduate college: El Khoury is joining the faculty of the Theatre & Performance Program; Abu-Rish is affiliated with the Human Rights Program.
The proposed M.A. program in Human Rights and The Arts links the study of advocacy, law, and politics to critical theoretical-historical reflection, and focuses on the power of aesthetic, performative, and curatorial forms in the fight for rights. Anchored in the intersection of art, research, activism and social change, it will offer students the opportunity to explore interdisciplinary training, creative knowledge production, and practice-based research. At its heart is a perspective that looks beyond the U.S.-based art and NGO industries to identify, assess, and engage with the ethical, intellectual, and political potential of this emerging hybrid form. Students in the program will pursue a core of interdisciplinary courses in human rights theory and practice, supplemented with electives across the arts and humanities, including, in particular, the study and practice of live arts and performance, and curatorial practices.
“The international and cross-disciplinary dimensions of this new program make it groundbreaking and timely,” said Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of the Fisher Center and Director of Bard’s Theater & Performance Program. “Students will work with artists, faculty, and curators across OSUN's international network and beyond. Artists and human rights experts will inform each other’s practices, offering a fully integrated pedagogy. At a time when the ideals of open society and liberal education are threatened, this program will offer unique and fertile opportunities to study and share best practices across the world.”
El Khoury is internationally recognized for her installations, performances, and video projects. A Soros Arts Fellow for 2019, El Khoury's work explores political histories and contemporary issues through richly-researched and aesthetically-precise events focused on audience interactivity and concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. In as Far As My Fingertips Take Me, a one-on-one performance, a refugee artist painstakingly inscribes a drawing on the arm of a guest while narrating the story of his sisters' escape from Damascus. In Gardens Speak, an interactive sound installation, the audience is asked to dig in the dirt to exhume stories of the Syrian uprising. El Khoury holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is affiliated with Forest Fringe in the United Kingdom and is the co-founder of the urban research and performance collective Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.
Abu-Rish was previously Assistant Professor of History and Founding Director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Certificate Program at Ohio University. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal. He has a highly successfully track-record of institution building, public scholarship initiatives, and graduate student training. He co-edited Jadaliyya, organized summer institutes for graduate students, and contributed to various research centers and academic associations. Abu-Rish has published widely on politics, economics, and popular mobilizations in Lebanon and Jordan, and is a co-editor, with Bassam Haddad and Rosie Bsheer, of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Old Order? (2012). He is currently completing a book entitled The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and the Institution Building in the Wake of Independence.
“Almost 20 years ago Bard was the first U.S. institution to offer a full, free-standing, interdisciplinary B.A. in Human Rights,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Program. “Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish will expand this to the graduate level and explore the forces that emerge at the intersection between human rights and the arts. The program will underscore the importance of the arts and humanities in confronting pressing social issues, and serve as an incubator of new ideas and strategies within the human rights movement at a time when it is widely understood to be under assault.”
The program is supported by the newly-founded Open Society University Network, a global project of Bard College, the Central European University, and the Open Society Foundations, with university and research partners stretching from Germany and Kyrgyzstan to Ghana and Colombia.
The appointments deepen Bard’s relationship with El Khoury and Abu-Rish, both of whom were visiting faculty at the college in 2019. Abu-Rish taught in the Human Rights Program, while El Khoury co-curated the 2019 edition of the Live Arts Bard Biennial at the Fisher Center at Bard. Where No Wall Remains: an international festival about borders included nine newly commissioned projects by artists from the Middle East and the Americas. In addition to their work with the new graduate program, they will also teach in the undergraduate college: El Khoury is joining the faculty of the Theatre & Performance Program; Abu-Rish is affiliated with the Human Rights Program.
The proposed M.A. program in Human Rights and The Arts links the study of advocacy, law, and politics to critical theoretical-historical reflection, and focuses on the power of aesthetic, performative, and curatorial forms in the fight for rights. Anchored in the intersection of art, research, activism and social change, it will offer students the opportunity to explore interdisciplinary training, creative knowledge production, and practice-based research. At its heart is a perspective that looks beyond the U.S.-based art and NGO industries to identify, assess, and engage with the ethical, intellectual, and political potential of this emerging hybrid form. Students in the program will pursue a core of interdisciplinary courses in human rights theory and practice, supplemented with electives across the arts and humanities, including, in particular, the study and practice of live arts and performance, and curatorial practices.
“The international and cross-disciplinary dimensions of this new program make it groundbreaking and timely,” said Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of the Fisher Center and Director of Bard’s Theater & Performance Program. “Students will work with artists, faculty, and curators across OSUN's international network and beyond. Artists and human rights experts will inform each other’s practices, offering a fully integrated pedagogy. At a time when the ideals of open society and liberal education are threatened, this program will offer unique and fertile opportunities to study and share best practices across the world.”
El Khoury is internationally recognized for her installations, performances, and video projects. A Soros Arts Fellow for 2019, El Khoury's work explores political histories and contemporary issues through richly-researched and aesthetically-precise events focused on audience interactivity and concerned with the ethical and political potential of such encounters. In as Far As My Fingertips Take Me, a one-on-one performance, a refugee artist painstakingly inscribes a drawing on the arm of a guest while narrating the story of his sisters' escape from Damascus. In Gardens Speak, an interactive sound installation, the audience is asked to dig in the dirt to exhume stories of the Syrian uprising. El Khoury holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is affiliated with Forest Fringe in the United Kingdom and is the co-founder of the urban research and performance collective Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.
Abu-Rish was previously Assistant Professor of History and Founding Director of the Middle East and North Africa Studies Certificate Program at Ohio University. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, and serves as Co-Editor of Arab Studies Journal. He has a highly successfully track-record of institution building, public scholarship initiatives, and graduate student training. He co-edited Jadaliyya, organized summer institutes for graduate students, and contributed to various research centers and academic associations. Abu-Rish has published widely on politics, economics, and popular mobilizations in Lebanon and Jordan, and is a co-editor, with Bassam Haddad and Rosie Bsheer, of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Old Order? (2012). He is currently completing a book entitled The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and the Institution Building in the Wake of Independence.
“Almost 20 years ago Bard was the first U.S. institution to offer a full, free-standing, interdisciplinary B.A. in Human Rights,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Program. “Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish will expand this to the graduate level and explore the forces that emerge at the intersection between human rights and the arts. The program will underscore the importance of the arts and humanities in confronting pressing social issues, and serve as an incubator of new ideas and strategies within the human rights movement at a time when it is widely understood to be under assault.”
The program is supported by the newly-founded Open Society University Network, a global project of Bard College, the Central European University, and the Open Society Foundations, with university and research partners stretching from Germany and Kyrgyzstan to Ghana and Colombia.
# # #
7/8/2007-03-2020
“When I’m dancing, I can be a man, I can be a woman. I can be gay or straight.” says Mee Ae Caughey ’00. Drag is a cornerstone of Caughey’s shape-shifting practice of Butoh—an avant-garde movement, born in Japan after World War II—that she discovered while studying at Bard College.
June 2020
06-22-2020
Young Asians and Latinx in the United States are taking the conversation about racism in America home by tackling difficult conversations with their families. Bard alumnus Charlie Mai and his brother, Henry, caused a family row when they told their father, a retired FBI agent, that they were attending a Black Lives Matter protest in D.C. Since then, conversations about race in their house have progressed, with Glenn Mai admitting, “I’ve been wrong.” Charlie is a Class of 2018 graduate in the Theater and Performance Program, who now works as an artist in New York City.
06-21-2020
The Moroccan actor has been nominated for a Bafta for his role as Syrian refugee Sami Ibrahim in the British comedy series Home. “I’d like our stories to be told in a more authentic, humane way,” he says. The entertainment industry “is literally your country's flag that travels all around the ether and plants itself in somebody else's brain” he says. “Who tells your story when you're Arab? It should be us.”
06-21-2020
Chicago public television profiles acclaimed photographer Steve Schapiro ’55, who took iconic photos during the Civil Rights Movement. He reflects on his time embedded with James Baldwin in the South and meeting leaders of the movement in the 1960s. The photos he took of James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement illustrate a recent trade edition of Baldwin’s book The Fire Next Time. Renewed interest has brought this edition back to the bestseller charts. Even into his eighties, Schapiro has been taking photographs, including covering Black Lives Matter protests. “We are on the cusp of something which can be an enormous movement and can change this country in a very, very positive way,” he says, “but it’s still a big question as to whether that will happen or whether it will just pass by again.”
06-13-2020
Mmuseumm, cofounded and curated by Alex Kalman ’06, is New York City's tiniest museum. Instead of moving their 2020 exhibitions online, they have just released the 300-page Jumbo Catalog showcasing the exhibitions that were supposed to take place this year. The Mmuseumm’s 15 exhibitions planned for 2020 are centered on the theme of power. One series, Last Meal Receipts, collects 14 receipts for death row inmates’ specially requested last suppers, eaten a few hours before their scheduled executions in the state of Georgia.
06-12-2020
“A lot of the time I start with a new phrase, movement, or idea, but I’ll also bring along old material that feels interesting, that could be worked on more, or failed in another piece but I want to bring it forward,” says Tanowitz. “We come up with a list of what we’re interested in doing, and then they work on it by themselves. Then we FaceTime; I’m manipulating, and we’re working on timing and rhythm, or I’ll rearrange the order. It’s good, but hard—you’re not in the room together; the screen is an extra layer of buffer.”
06-09-2020
Ed Halter, critic in residence in the Film and Electronic Arts Program, revisits the early days of internet art: “Two decades ago, when the World Wide Web was just beginning to become commercialized, online artists concerned themselves more with the new formal properties of the internet than its meager content, then only fitfully user-generated and as-yet unorganized by the dominance of Google’s search algorithms,” Halter writes. “The audacious early work of Netherlands-based collective JODI exemplifies this moment. Their quasi-anonymous moniker derives from the identities of its two members, Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, who began collaborating in 1995; by the decade’s end, JODI would become one of the most recognizable names of the first generation of internet art.”
06-08-2020
Professor An-My Lê’s ongoing series of photographs Silent General speaks to the current political and cultural moment: packed protests, fallen monuments, and anti-Trump graffiti echo the images filling TV screens and social media. “It’s eerie to see how some of the issues that unfolded when I started Silent General [in 2016] are now back at the forefront in an even more urgent way,” says Lê. “History doesn’t move through time in a straight line.”
06-04-2020
“I have repeatedly stated that I think the four-way love-drugged lovers’ fight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream will never work on a Zoom format with socially distanced actors. I may have been wrong,” writes Gemma Allred. “New-York-based Bard College and Theatre for a New Audience (TFANA) streamed live performance of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest: A Play from Romania, directed by Ashley Tata, pushed the edges of what is possible in Live Online Performance.”
May 2020
05-29-2020
Bard College announces the appointment of Hannah Barrett as director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Prior to this appointment, Barrett, an award-winning artist and educator who has taught, lectured, and exhibited widely, was the international program coordinator at Bard College Berlin. Barrett succeeds Arthur Gibbons, who served as director of the Bard MFA program since 1990. Gibbons will continue teaching at Bard as professor of sculpture in the College’s Division of the Arts.
“I am delighted that Hannah Barrett has accepted the appointment as the new Director of the MFA program, one of Bard’s most distinguished graduate programs and one of the finest MFA programs in the country,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “She has been a terrific colleague and is uniquely suited to take this vital task on. She follows the remarkable, long, and distinguished tenure of Arthur Gibbons, who led the MFA to achieve its international renown. I thank Hannah and the faculty in the MFA program for their cooperation in finding a path to continue the excellent and innovative work of the MFA in this challenging time.”
Hannah Barrett is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based artist. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven her painting for over a decade, which has led to the current exploration of dandy monsters in domestic space. Recent exhibitions include a 2020 retrospective at Childs Gallery, Boston, a two-person invitational in 2019 at La MaMa Galleria, and a solo at Yours Mine and Ours Gallery in 2018. Selected group shows include Spring Break 2020, Platform Project Space, Dumbo NY, Kate Werble and Calicoon galleries in NYC, Mother Gallery, Beacon NY, and September Gallery in Hudson NY. Museum Shows include the Decordova Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Time Out New York, and Modern Painters. Barrett is on the curatorial staff of Soloway Gallery in Williamsburg. Barrett is also the illustrator of a vegan and lesbian themed children’s book “Nuts in Nutland”. Prior to coming to Bard, Barrett taught painting and drawing for 18 years and was on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Pratt Institute Brooklyn. Barrett holds a BA in studio art and German literature from Wellesley College and an MFA in painting from Boston University.
Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student—serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist students engage with accomplished faculty members, while developing their individual studio practices. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography, and music/sound.
“I am delighted that Hannah Barrett has accepted the appointment as the new Director of the MFA program, one of Bard’s most distinguished graduate programs and one of the finest MFA programs in the country,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “She has been a terrific colleague and is uniquely suited to take this vital task on. She follows the remarkable, long, and distinguished tenure of Arthur Gibbons, who led the MFA to achieve its international renown. I thank Hannah and the faculty in the MFA program for their cooperation in finding a path to continue the excellent and innovative work of the MFA in this challenging time.”
Hannah Barrett is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based artist. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven her painting for over a decade, which has led to the current exploration of dandy monsters in domestic space. Recent exhibitions include a 2020 retrospective at Childs Gallery, Boston, a two-person invitational in 2019 at La MaMa Galleria, and a solo at Yours Mine and Ours Gallery in 2018. Selected group shows include Spring Break 2020, Platform Project Space, Dumbo NY, Kate Werble and Calicoon galleries in NYC, Mother Gallery, Beacon NY, and September Gallery in Hudson NY. Museum Shows include the Decordova Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Time Out New York, and Modern Painters. Barrett is on the curatorial staff of Soloway Gallery in Williamsburg. Barrett is also the illustrator of a vegan and lesbian themed children’s book “Nuts in Nutland”. Prior to coming to Bard, Barrett taught painting and drawing for 18 years and was on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Pratt Institute Brooklyn. Barrett holds a BA in studio art and German literature from Wellesley College and an MFA in painting from Boston University.
Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student—serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist students engage with accomplished faculty members, while developing their individual studio practices. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography, and music/sound.
05-24-2020
New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley calls the Bard Theater and Performance Program production of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest “deeply moving” and “fervently inventive.”
05-23-2020
“I used to think that most art is kind of stingy. There is a demand in much of art to read the text panel to understand what you are experiencing. Generosity and openness are important to me, so that the viewer is not intimidated, threatened, or belittled. There’s no coming to school and feeling like you didn’t get the homework done. You can enjoy it, even if you don’t know everything about it.”
05-21-2020
A Zoom production by Bard College students gets a second life as a copresentation with Bard's Fisher Center and the off-Broadway Theatre for a New Audience, with sets, lights, props, and live editing.
The New York Times also highlighted Mad Forest at Theatre for a New Audience as one of its top "theater performances to stream this week."
The New York Times also highlighted Mad Forest at Theatre for a New Audience as one of its top "theater performances to stream this week."
05-20-2020
New York–based collective FOREIGN OBJECTS has been selected as Bard Graduate Center’s (BGC) inaugural Digital Artist in Residence. Inspired by the BGC Gallery exhibition Eileen Gray, the group is working to create an interactive project that explores how smart cooking technologies have reimagined the role of the kitchen in the contemporary home.
05-20-2020
In this two-hour conversation with Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian, art critic and poet John Yau ’72 talks about his life, how he got into art writing, stories from his childhood, and other influences on his work.
05-20-2020
Bard alumnae Carolyn Lazard ’10 and Tschabalala Self ’12 are among the 20 artists selected by the Tiffany Foundation to receive the unrestricted $20,000 grants. Established in 1980, the foundation’s grants program has awarded more than $9.5 million to 500 contemporary artists working throughout the United States.
05-20-2020
With theaters and nightclubs closed, magicians have pivoted to remote performance. New York Times media critic Alexis Soloski takes in Bard alumnus Noah Levine’s “nifty sleights of hand” courtesy of Zoom.
05-20-2020
Pianist and composer Ran Blake ’60 is the 2020 recipient of the Boston Jazz Hero award from the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA). Blake is one of 27 jazz heroes in 23 cities across the country chosen as “activists, advocates, altruists, aiders and abettors of jazz.”
05-20-2020
Christine Sun Kim and Xaviera Simmons are among the 35 artists and designers who are making works to display across digital screens throughout New York City, Boston, and Chicago in recognition of the continued service of essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Organized by Times Square Arts, For Freedoms, and Poster House, the public art campaign aims to “encourage a sense of community and pride among New Yorkers, and give artists the opportunity to express their gratitude and optimism through the power of art.”
05-15-2020
The Bard College Theater and Performance Program has been invited by Theatre for a New Audience, in Brooklyn, to give three more live online performances of Mad Forest, as a coproduction with the Fisher Center. Bard students will be performing (virtually) off-Broadway. Performances on May 22, 24, and 27.
Mad Forest premiered on April 10 as the Theater and Performance Program's first-ever virtual production. Originally slated for the Fisher Center stage, the creative team transformed the work for live webcast. Ashley Tata directs this reimagining of Caryl Churchill's sly, funny, and surreal account of the Romanian Revolution, performed live by actors in isolation from 14 remote locations using a specially modified version of Zoom.
The live webcast of Mad Forest was a project of UPSTREAMING: the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage. Learn more about the production and watch UPSTREAMING performances on the Fisher Center's website.
Mad Forest premiered on April 10 as the Theater and Performance Program's first-ever virtual production. Originally slated for the Fisher Center stage, the creative team transformed the work for live webcast. Ashley Tata directs this reimagining of Caryl Churchill's sly, funny, and surreal account of the Romanian Revolution, performed live by actors in isolation from 14 remote locations using a specially modified version of Zoom.
The live webcast of Mad Forest was a project of UPSTREAMING: the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage. Learn more about the production and watch UPSTREAMING performances on the Fisher Center's website.
05-12-2020
“I am always pushing and pulling against aspects of the political inside my practice, with politics as clearly foundational,” says Simmons. “I think it’s really important to consider new ways of seeing and new ways of living, new ways that can become politically tangible should we act as a group with compassion and creativity.”
05-04-2020
Bard Artist in Residence Jack Ferver and ballet/contemporary dancer Reid Bartelme, the odd couple of the dance world, provide essential stay-at-home relief with their weekly podcast, writes New York Times dance critic Gia Kourlas. “Listening to ‘What’s Going On With Dance and Stuff,’ their chatty and illuminating podcast, feels like being with good friends—and that’s a rare sort of lifeline in these days of social isolation.”
05-01-2020
Bard alumna Diya Vij ’08, associate curator of public programs for New York City’s High Line, talks to Hyperallergic about her interest in nurturing “the health and well-being of individuals, the city, and the planet through art-centered and civically oriented happenings, on and off the High Line.”
April 2020
04-29-2020
Join Bard Professor in the Arts Neil Gaiman for a remote, livestreamed conversation with Hugo Award–winning author N. K. Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy), whose new work The City We Became was released in March to great acclaim. Presented in association with Oblong Books & Music, the conversation is part of an ongoing Fisher Center series in which Gaiman discusses the creative process with another artist. The live webcast of this event is a project of UPSTREAMING: the Fisher Center’s Virtual Stage.