News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fisher Center at Bard’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground is a celebration of the artists, audiences, students, faculty, and communities that have written the Fisher Center’s story for its first two decades and will imagine it into the future. This milestone season for the organization that incubates vanguard artists’ boldest ideas unfolds with unbounded and genre-defying visions for dance, theater, opera, and public discourse. The season will culminate in a groundbreaking ceremony for The Fisher Center’s new 25,000-square-foot performing arts studio building, designed by Maya Lin, which will offer artists at all stages of their careers vastly expanded room to explore as they build works from the ground up.

Illinois Schedule and Information

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

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

Sosnoff Theater
Tickets start at $25

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

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

Pre-Performance Talk
Sunday, June 25 at 1 pm

Post-Performance Conversation with the Artists
Friday, June 30

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

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

About Sufjan Stevens

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

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

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

About Justin Peck

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Jackie Sibblies Drury

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

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

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

Credits

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

The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season is dedicated to the founders of the Fisher Center who have cultivated extraordinary artistic experiences—past, present, and future. We honor the memory of Richard B. Fisher, a true champion of the arts and Bard College, and his visionary leadership.

The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.

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

About the Fisher Center at Bard

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tschabalala Self ’12, visiting artist in residence in Studio Arts, is the subject of her first solo European museum exhibition Tschabalala Self: Inside Out, on view at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland through June 18. Curated by Gianni Jetzer, the show centers the Black body, especially the female Black body, through the conceptual and compositional lens of the artist in what Self has termed as a “pantheon of invented characters.” Featuring the show in its weekly spotlight, Artnet News writes: “Though clearly deeply rooted in the tradition of painting, the compound of materials and techniques within Self’s two-dimensional compositions defy easy categorization . . . The figures are singular and specific, yet they are far from traditional portraiture.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Gibson, visiting artist in residence at Bard College and a celebrated member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, is showcasing his work in an exhibition titled Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric, on view at the Nashville Frist Art Museum through April 23. The exhibition is “a clarion call for Indigenous power, queer recognition, and environmental resistance to the carnage of profit-mad commercial and industrial development,” writes Albert Bender for People’s World. His work in The Body Electric features a variety of paintings, sculptures, videos, and a mural, and draws deeply on his Indigenous heritage along with modernist explorations of color. “His art takes the viewer through a dazzling panoply of paintings, sculptures, films, and installations,” Bender continues. “Gibson is not only an accomplished artist but also a profound, insightful philosopher whose thoughts abundantly filter into his renderings.”

Bard Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies has won two new awards in support of her professional work. Hennies is one of 14 American composers to receive a 2022 commission from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. Her commissioning award provides $12,000 to support the creation of new musical works as well as access to a subsidy of up to $4,000 for an ensemble to perform the premiere of the commissioned work. More than 500 composers have received this Fromm Music Foundation commission since 1952. 

Hennies has also received a 2023 USArtists International Second Round Award by the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, which provides grants of up to $18,000, in support of her participation at the international 2023 Archipel Festival in Geneva, Switzerland. At the Archipel Festival, Sarah will perform two of her own pieces, Falsetto (2016) for percussion and pre-recorded percussion, and Fleas (2017) for vibraphone and multiple handbells played by the public. She will also perform a concert of music by the American composer and percussionist, Michael Ranta.

Bard alumna Juliana Maitenaz ’22 has received an independent study–research Fulbright Scholarship to Brazil for the 2023–24 academic year. Her project, “Rhythm and Statecraft,” seeks to identify Brazilian percussion and rhythms as a method of cultural communication. Maitenaz, a former Conservatory student, graduated from Bard last May with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance. 

Her project, which she aims to conduct in São Paulo, will focus on how percussional elements in the Brazilian traditions of Carnival and Samba School performances are instrumental to the country’s statecraft and national identity. The goal of her research is to examine international communication and collaboration through cultural and musical diplomacy. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to learn more about the role Brazilian percussion plays as an inspiring means of cultural communication,” Maitenaz said. 

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. During their grants, Fulbrighters will meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences to facilitate cultural exchange.

Bard College Studio Arts Program presents the Class of 2023 Senior Thesis Spring Exhibitions.

UBS Bard Exhibition Center
45 O'Callaghan Lane
Red Hook, New York

USB Group Show 1
Oscar Haas, Catherine Lyu, Luca McCarthy, Olivia McLeod, Brandon Vanbach, Samaira Wilson, Bennett Wood, Cora Quinlan
Opening reception Saturday, April 8, 3–6 pm
On View April 8–22

UBS Group Show 2
McKinlay Daggatt, Aislinn Feldberg, Hannah French, Jacob Judelson, Georgia Lenz, Samantha Schwartz, Una Winn, Jackie Weddell, Jamie Toomey
Opening reception Saturday, May 6, 3–6 pm
On View May 6–20


Fisher Studio Arts Exhibitions
60 N Ravine Road
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Oga Li
Opening reception Saturday, April 8, 5–8 pm

Whitney Hagen
Opening reception Saturday, April 22, 5–8 pm

Chloe Raizner
Opening reception Saturday, April 29, 5–8 pm

Cam Goldberg
Opening reception Saturday, May 6, 5–8 pm

Odette Zhou
Opening reception Saturday, May 13, 5–8 pm

Bard Farm
Maya Miggins
Opening Saturday, May 13, 5 pm

Bard Chapel
Jackie Weddell
Performance Saturday, April 15, 7:30 pm

Avery Film Center, Integrated Arts Room
55 Blithewood Ave
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Rose Reiner
Performance Saturday, May 6

Nail Biter Opens the Organization’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground

The Fisher Center at Bard begins its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground with the world premiere of Bessie Award-winning choreographer Beth Gill’s Nail Biter, a dance work that moves the viewer through portals of myth, memoir, psychodrama, and horror. Performances take place March 31 – April 2 in the LUMA Theater. Gill has been acclaimed for “appl[ying] her discerning eye to… dark, chaotic, psychologically tangled worlds” (New York Times). In Nail Biter, characters emerge as a collection of representations of our collective unconscious, as the work pierces through the existential weight of our time and channels our contemporary angst and anxiety.

Nail Biter is Gill’s second commission from the Fisher Center LAB, following her 2016 performance Catacomb. Carrying out its mission to provide custom-made, meaningful support to artists over an extended time, The Fisher Center LAB  provided Gill with a “dreaming” commission in 2020. This allowed Gill to have financial support during the Pandemic lockdown and the opportunity to reimagine how she works. The initial ideas explored in Nail Biter emerged from that time, and in 2021 the piece was formally commissioned, with a developmental residency at the Fisher Center in May 2022. 

The choreographer dedicates Nail Biter to Rose-Marie Menes, her first dance teacher, who passed away in 2011, as Gill was, as she describes, “in the early stages of dreaming” this work. Gill says of her late mentor, “What I think about now as a professional choreographer and teacher is how unwavering Rose’s dedication to dance was. This field is not easy, and yet she always found ways to do more. She ran a company as well as the school and made multiple productions with hand-painted sets and costumes that she hand-sewed. She created epic worlds and romantic storylines for us to inhabit… She gave me dance and so much more: tradition, discipline, professionalism, obsession, creativity, romanticism, grace, power, and self-determination. She set the course of my career and my life. This piece is in honor of her.” 

Nail Biter brings together a team including Beth Gill (Choreographer), with her long-time collaborators Jon Moniaci (Composer), Baille Younkman (Costume Designer), Thomas Dunn (Lighting and Scenic Designer), Angela F. Kiessel (Production Stage Manager), and Michelle Fletcher (Manager, Beth Gill Works). Performers include Maggie Cloud, Jennifer Lafferty, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Marilyn Maywald Yahel, and Beth Gill. 

Gill’s new work kicks off a celebratory opening weekend for a milestone season that reflects the Fisher Center’s role as one of the country’s foremost cross-disciplinary producing institutions, and culminates with the groundbreaking for a new performing arts studio building designed by Maya Lin. On April 1, from 5:30–7:30pm, the Fisher Center will toast two decades of innovation with a 20th Anniversary Launch Party. On April 1 at 7pm and April 2 at 3pm, The Orchestra Now will perform Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, conducted by Maestro Leon Botstein with choral director James Bagwell. Missa solemnis is one of only three sacred works written by Beethoven, and a favorite piece of the late Richard B. Fisher, an influential champion of the arts and the Fisher Center’s namesake. 

Schedule and Ticketing Information

Performances take place in the Fisher Center at Bard’s LUMA Theater, March 31 at 7:30pm, and April 1 & 2 at 5pm. Running time is approximately 50 minutes with no intermission. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased here.

About Beth Gill

Beth Gill is an award-winning choreographer based in New York City since 2005. Her multidisciplinary works are captivating, cinematic timescapes, the product of long-term collaborations with celebrated artists. Gill is the proud recipient of the Herb Alpert, Doris Duke Impact, Foundation for Contemporary Art, and two “Bessie” awards. She has produced eight commissioned evening-length works met with critical acclaim. She has toured nationally and internationally and has been honored with (among others): Guggenheim Fellowship, NEFA’s National Dance Project grant, Princeton’s Hodder Fellowship, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Artist in Residence.
Gill’s dances are serious, slow-moving, and chiseled, meditative experiences poised between performance and visual art. They feel like pressurized objects sustaining tension and seeking release. Paradoxically her work is both intimate and alienated, sensual and ascetic. She dreams and visualizes her dances, transforming her unconscious into iconographic choreography. The imagery and symbolism resonate, inviting audiences into associative thought. In this way, her work is in dialogue with contemporary psychology and folk traditions.

Credits

Nail Biter is co-commissioned by the Fisher Center at Bard, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Walker Art Center. The development of Nail Biter was supported by funding from the King’s Fountain and by CPR – Center for Performance Research’s Artist-in-Residence Program, which is made possible, in part, through Dance/NYC’s Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Beth Gill is fiscally sponsored by the Foundation for Independent Artists, Inc., a non-profit organization administered by Pentacle (DanceWorks, Inc). Pentacle is a non-profit management support organization for the performing arts.

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, and 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. The 23-24 season of 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.

Visiting Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick spoke with Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino about the manifold ways Hollywood employs artificial intelligence including de-aging star characters, creating synthetic voices, generating digital faces and imagery of crowds, and even using deepfake technology in documentaries to protect vulnerable onscreen subjects. AI’s entree into filmmaking spurs anxiety that it could supplant human creative labor like screenwriting, designing, and directing. “New tools and new technologies have always sustained a productive tension or creative tension with the status quo of the industry. But I’d say that the idea of complete replacement is not something I foresee happening, at least in the near future. Some of the most promising or interesting areas is how these tools have become part of the toolbox,” Glick said. He also discusses what is at stake in Hollywood’s business side using AI analytics to maximize profits by informing filmmakers and studios “what films might make the most money depending on what happens in the plot and depending on who is cast. It leads to this attempt to slow down and challenge risk, which I think is a problem,” notes Glick.

Photographer Emily Allen ’22 talks with F-Stop magazine about her inspirations, creative practice, and current project “Sit Tibi Terra Levis,” which originated as her Senior Project and was recently featured in the magazine. “With this portfolio, I hope to draw attention to photography as a process and an object and its humanity–its connection to death, to life, and to memory,” said Allen, who studied photography, classics, and medieval studies at Bard. “I used the techniques we use to attempt to preserve ourselves throughout history to preserve my images.” The photographic prints in her book were created using processes humans have historically used on our bodies after death. Some were brushed with oil according to ancient Greek rites, others soaked in honey as the Babylonians did, some were processed in simulation of modern American chemical embalming, and others incompletely fixed so they continue to degrade and decompose over time. In this project, Allen was fascinated by the kinds of similarities and subversions these processes had when used on photographs versus on our bodies.
 
When looking at images, Allen doesn’t have one strict definition of what a photograph can be, rather she looks for resonance. “Literally the word photograph means ‘light drawing’–to me anything made using light sensitive materials and light is a photograph whether it is representative of our physical world or not . . . A good photograph convinces me of the reality in the world within the boundaries of the paper–I have to believe in it. I love when photographs feel like bubbles, each containing their own little universe,” she says.

Nowhere Apparent, a new film by Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Jack Ferver, is “a poetic meditation on queer isolation and feelings of abandonment by a generation of potential parental figures as a result of a failed response to the AIDS epidemic,” writes Matt Moen for Paper magazine. “I am told by the majority that being queer is unnatural, that it doesn’t exist in the ‘natural world,’” Ferver said, when asked what queer isolation means to them. “I am also told by the majority that I chose it. Using this logic means: I have chosen not to exist.” Nowhere Apparent interrogates “what isn’t said, what is left out, what is abandoned,” bringing those things to light—a lens Ferver also uses in their teaching at Bard. “I teach at Bard College and start every semester talking about AIDS and the culture wars. That gap we will never heal,” they say. What can be done to address such silences and erasures? “Make work about it,” Ferver says to their students.

American theater and opera director and cofounder of SITI Company Anne Bogart ’74, who studied drama and dance at Bard and received an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the College in 2014, has won a 2023 Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement. The Obie Awards honor the highest caliber of off-Broadway and off-off Broadway theater to recognize brave work, champion new material, and advance careers in theater. Bogart accepted her honor at the 66th Obie Awards ceremony in New York City. 

“In 1974, fresh out of college, I moved to New York City. There was nowhere else in the world that made sense to me. I wanted to be where theater was happening. And I wanted to direct plays,” she said in her acceptance speech. In 1992, Bogart, along with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki and a group of like-minded artists interested in revitalizing and redefining contemporary theater in the United States, founded SITI Company. Bogart was honored by the Obie judges for her 30 years of work with SITI Company, an artistic ensemble company, which created more than 50 productions presented at venues around the world, and pushed the boundaries of contemporary theater through innovative approaches to actor training, collaboration, and cultural exchange. 

In December 2022, Bard’s Fisher Center presented the world premiere of SITI Company’s reimagining of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, codirected by Anne Bogart and Tony Award winner Darron L West. The work, commissioned by the Fisher Center, was the final production in SITI Company’s 30th anniversary “Finale Season.” 

Bhavesh Patel, Visiting Artist in Residence in Theater and Performance at Bard College, stars in Elyria, a new play by Deepa Purohit which was reviewed by the New York Times. Set in 1982 Ohio, it is a story of the Indian diaspora and centers around the tangled relationships between two women, Dhatta and Vasanta, and Charu, a doctor played by Patel who is husband to Dhatta and former lover of Vasanta. “Watching an actor steal a show is one of the absolute thrills of live performance,” writes Laura Collins-Hughes for the Times about Patel. Exploring motifs of family history, marriages, and parent-child relationships, the play crisscrosses continents from Africa to Europe and North America and weaves a complex tale from many converging narrative threads. “Patel’s Charu is perfect,” Collins-Hughes continues. “Charu is comic and reckless, selfish and decent, myopic and real. It’s an exhilarating performance, a work of actorly alchemy.”

Tania El Khoury, distinguished artist in residence in Theater and Performance at Bard College, and director at the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, received an honorable mention at Sharjah Biennial 15, for presenting two projects, The Search for Power and Cultural Exchange Rate. 

El Khoury is a live artist whose work engages the audience in close encounters with narratives drawn from the political realities of border, displacement, and state violence. She 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.

Her work has also been translated into multiple languages and shown in 33 countries across six continents, in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of a 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, who holds a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London, is associated with Forest Fringe, a collective of artists in the United Kingdom, and is a cofounder of Dictaphone Group in Lebanon, a live art and urban research collective.

The Sharjah Biennial is an international platform for exhibition and experimentation for artists, which takes place in the city of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Since 1993, the Biennial has commissioned, produced and presented large-scale public installations, performances and films by artists around the world, bringing a broad range of contemporary art, cultural programmes and producers to the communities of Sharjah, the UAE and the region. 

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the 16 recipients of this year’s awards in music. Among the winners, Bard College Conservatory and Bard Film and Electronic Arts alumnus Luke Haaksma BA/BM ’21 was awarded a Charles Ives Scholarship. Charles Ives Scholarships are $7,500 each and awarded to composers for continued study in composition, either at institutions of their choice or privately with distinguished composers. Harmony Ives, the widow of Charles Ives, bequeathed to the Academy the royalties of Charles Ives’s music, which has enabled the Academy to give awards in composition since 1970. The award winners were selected by a committee of Academy members: Julia Wolfe (chair), Annea Lockwood, David Sanford, Christopher Theofanidis, Augusta Read Thomas, Chinary Ung, and Melinda Wagner. The awards will be presented at the Academy’s Ceremonial on May 24, 2023. Candidates for music awards are nominated by the 300 members of the Academy.

Luke Haaksma is a composer and filmmaker currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. His work has been performed at various festivals, universities, and venues throughout the United States and abroad. Haaksma is a past winner of both the Diana Wortham Emerging Artist Scholarship and the Ione M. Allen scholarship for the performing arts. His piano etude “Crystal Murk” was selected by Jihye Chang to be toured internationally as part of her multi-year solo recital project, “Continuum 88.” While an undergraduate at Bard College and the Conservatory, Haaksma studied composition with Joan Tower, George Tsontakis, and Lera Auerbach, piano with Blair McMillen, and Hammered Dulcimer with David Degge. He was the Conservatory’s  Joan Tower Composition Scholar. He was awarded the Sidney Peterson prize in experimental film, “Best Original Score” by the Dreamachine international film festival, and Official Selections from other Montreal and Los Angeles based festivals. Luke was honored as a 2021 National Hammered Dulcimer Championship finalist at the Walnut Valley music festival in Winfield, Kansas. His most recent string quartet, “talking” piece, was premiered in New York by The Rhythm Method as part of the Lake George Composers Institute. This past summer he was a fellow at the Brandeis Composers Conference. Luke began graduate studies at the Yale School of Music this past fall.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898 as an honor society of the country’s leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. Early members include William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Julia Ward Howe, Henry James, Edward MacDowell, Theodore Roosevelt, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton. The Academy’s 300 members are elected for life and pay no dues. In addition to electing new members as vacancies occur, the Academy seeks to foster and sustain an interest in Literature, Music, and the Fine Arts by administering over 70 awards and prizes totaling more than $1 million, exhibiting art and manuscripts, funding performances of new works of musical theater, purchasing artwork for donation to museums across the country, and presenting talks and concerts.

Bard College students in Michael Cohen’s architecture course Designing Potential Histories of El Bohio Off Anarchy Row took a trip to the East Village on Friday, February 24. Over pizza at Two Boots, they met with activists Carlos “Chino” Garcia and Joseph “Slima” Williams, two members of the CHARAS collective, to discuss their community and cultural work on the Lower East Side (Loisaida). The group also visited the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space and the architecture gallery a83. Professor Cohen and alumnus Phil Hartman ’79 led the trip. Phil’s daughter and fellow Bard alumna Odetta Hartman ’11 joined, as well.

Between 1978 to 2001, CHARAS organized educational, arts, and social programming that primarily served the growing Puerto Rican community, operating mainly out of the vacated Public School 64 building which they renamed “El Bohio,” or the hut. Today, PS 64 sits vacant and is directly adjacent to “Anarchy Row,” an encampment of unhoused people that has resisted multiple efforts to clear the settlement. In support of this unhoused population and the broader community of the East Village, students in Designing Potential Histories are imagining the adaptive reuse of the vacant school building and the appropriation of other sites on the block. 

As part of the 2023 Interviews Issue, the New Yorker published an interview with Stephen Shore conducted in 2021 by the late Peter Schjeldah. Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts and director of the Photography Program, spoke about his artistic practice and how it has changed during the course of his career. “While I may have questions or intentions that guide what I’m interested in photographing at a particular moment, and even guide exactly where I place my camera,” Shore says, “the core decision still comes from recognizing a feeling of deep connection, a psychological or emotional or physical resonance with the picture’s content.” Speaking to the difference between photography mediated by a viewfinder versus digital photography viewed through a screen, Shore sees more similarities than differences. “You don’t look through the camera but at a ground glass,” he says. “There is an awareness of looking not at the world but at an image of the world.” For his own practice, Shore says he values experimentation and newness. “I’ve gone through many phases over the years,” he says. “If I find myself repeating myself or if a visual strategy has devolved into a convention of my own making, I know it’s time to move on.”

Opus 40 has reached an agreement to purchase the historic home of Bard professor, alumnus, and artist Harvey Fite ’30. Bard College was a partner in the process, and will provide programming support in the house going forward, to include educational programs, workshops, and faculty residencies. Harvey Fite created Opus 40, the 6.5-acre bluestone sculpture park in Saugerties, New York, and built the house. The purchase was made possible in part by major support from the Thompson Family Foundation, the New York State Assembly, and the town of Saugerties.

Bard College President Leon Botstein said, “It’s an honor to participate in the preservation of this unique sculpture and land art made by an alumnus and long-time faculty member of Bard and our neighbor in the Hudson Valley. We look forward to expanding joint programming with Opus 40 in the future and are thankful to the Richards family for their efforts preserving Harvey Fite’s legacy.”

Harvey Fite was a member of the faculty at Bard College for 36 years and founded the College’s art department before his retirement in 1969.