All Bard News by Date
April 2020
04-24-2020
Galleries and museums are getting creative about presenting work online during the coronavirus crisis. The Bard Graduate Center’s retrospective of works by architect-designer Eileen Gray, which opened a few weeks before lockdown, has now moved online, and it is well worth viewing virtually, writes the Times’s Jason Farago. “This exhibition and its website, with copious documents of [Gray’s] geometric carpets and tubular steel furniture, makes clear how central she was to this era of architecture, and how she transcended the house as a ‘machine for living’ to design places where you might actually want to live.”
04-24-2020
GRAMMY Award–winning composer and longtime Bard professor Joan Tower’s first composition was “a total disaster.” Sixty years later, Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard, is one of the most celebrated composers in the world. Here, she talks with Kai Talim for Skip the Repeat about her wonderful childhood in Bolivia, her drive to compose, and how she, reluctantly at first, began to teach. “I came up here [to Bard] and I fell in love with this campus.... I love to teach. I didn’t know about that at the time. You have to start teaching to know whether you like it or not.”
04-23-2020
Julia Bullock, Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna, offers the New York Times Frederica von Stade’s stunning performance of Massenet’s “Cendrillon” as her five minutes that will make you love opera.
04-22-2020
The Spike Jonze documentary retells the band’s story from young NYC punks to hip-hop groundbreakers in a series of “raucous, poignant performances” (Rolling Stone). Jonze and Beastie Boys Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond talk to Esquire’s Johnny Davis about the making of the film, which premieres on Apple TV+ April 24.
04-13-2020
The Bard College Dance Program and GIBNEY, a New York City–based dance and social justice organization led by Founder, Artistic Director, and CEO Gina Gibney, are creating a new partnership to begin in fall 2020. This will be the fourth professional partnership launched by the Dance Program, which began in 2009 with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
The Bard Dance Program/Gibney Partnership will provide unique opportunities for Bard students to work closely with Gibney’s resident dance troupe, Gibney Company, a commission-based, repertory company that works with renowned and rising international choreographers representing a broad range of aesthetics and techniques.
Gibney Company artists and directors Amy Miller and Nigel Campbell, and Bard faculty member and Partnership Coordinator Tara Lorenzen* and Director of Dance Maria Simpson will spearhead the partnership.
Each semester, artists selected by Gibney’s leadership will teach courses embedded in Bard’s dance curriculum, including studio courses for all levels of dancers, as well as seminar courses that address discipline-specific topics, such as Dance Writing as Activism. A special feature of this partnership will be the opportunity to perform Bard Dance Senior Projects at Gibney Center in Manhattan in the spring. Gibney will also offer yearlong artistic advising of student choreographers. Extracurricular workshops and master classes will further enhance the educational field of study. Gibney Company’s residency at the College will include open rehearsals and a public showing. This partnership represents a wide-ranging vision of what dance can be in a liberal arts curriculum at a time when artist engagement in both local and global communities is essential.
*Tara Lorenzen has danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Stephen Petronio, Beth Gill, and Maria Hassabi, has worked for the American Dance Festival and Kaatsbaan|cultural park for dance on their education initiatives, and has been teaching in the Dance Program at Bard College since 2016.
The Bard Dance Program/Gibney Partnership will provide unique opportunities for Bard students to work closely with Gibney’s resident dance troupe, Gibney Company, a commission-based, repertory company that works with renowned and rising international choreographers representing a broad range of aesthetics and techniques.
Gibney Company artists and directors Amy Miller and Nigel Campbell, and Bard faculty member and Partnership Coordinator Tara Lorenzen* and Director of Dance Maria Simpson will spearhead the partnership.
Each semester, artists selected by Gibney’s leadership will teach courses embedded in Bard’s dance curriculum, including studio courses for all levels of dancers, as well as seminar courses that address discipline-specific topics, such as Dance Writing as Activism. A special feature of this partnership will be the opportunity to perform Bard Dance Senior Projects at Gibney Center in Manhattan in the spring. Gibney will also offer yearlong artistic advising of student choreographers. Extracurricular workshops and master classes will further enhance the educational field of study. Gibney Company’s residency at the College will include open rehearsals and a public showing. This partnership represents a wide-ranging vision of what dance can be in a liberal arts curriculum at a time when artist engagement in both local and global communities is essential.
*Tara Lorenzen has danced with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Stephen Petronio, Beth Gill, and Maria Hassabi, has worked for the American Dance Festival and Kaatsbaan|cultural park for dance on their education initiatives, and has been teaching in the Dance Program at Bard College since 2016.
04-12-2020
“Life in the era of COVID-19, as in all times of crisis, amplifies our basic instincts. Do we become anxious or confident, selfish or generous, rigid or adaptable? The same applies to institutions. And right now, at this moment of national and global crisis, Bard College is demonstrating who we are: student-focused, innovative, entrepreneurial, and civically engaged.” —Jonathan Becker, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Director of the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard College
A broad network of Bard faculty and staff—including Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco and Ross Exo Adams in the Bard Architecture and Design Program; Maggie Hazen and Melinda Solis in Studio Arts; IT’s Doug O’Connor, Hayden Sartoris, and Christopher Ahmed; and the Philosophy Program’s Katie Tabb—has come together to produce face shields for frontline health-care workers who are grappling with a nationwide shortage of protective gear.
With two 3D printers loaned by Bard physicist Paul Cadden-Zimansky, Exo Adams and Santoyo-Orozco set up a makeshift lab in Tivoli to fabricate reusable face shields for health-care workers. When the lab is fully operational, they expect to produce up to 50 shields per week. Hazen and Solis have begun a production line as well, using 3D printers purchased with proceeds from a GoFundMe campaign established by MFA alumna Luba Drozd ’15 that has raised more than $20,000. A small batch of shields has already been distributed to Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson, New York, and the group is now looking for more distribution options in the Hudson Valley. Deliveries of face shields are also scheduled for Albany Medical Center and, in Dover, New Jersey, Saint Clare’s Hospital, where a Bard student’s relative works and on whose behalf the student made a request. Anyone interested in distribution or in assisting with the project should contact Doug O’Connor ([email protected]), who is centralizing the distribution efforts with the help of CCS Bard students.
And in Annandale, members of the Fisher Center’s Costume Shop—together with Audrey Smith from Buildings and Grounds, Rosalia Reifler from Environmental Services, and Saidee Brown from the President’s Office—have sewn nearly 200 face masks for the essential College employees who remain on campus.
To learn more about virtual engagement opportunities at Bard, visit Bard Connects.
04-11-2020
Halter, who helped spearhead the Cinema Worker Solidarity Fund to support out-of-work movie theater employees, talks to Film Comment’s Nellie Killian and Nicolas Rapold about the effects of the crisis on how we watch movies, what we’ve been watching, and the interesting overlaps between our ultramediated existence and experimental cinema.
04-10-2020
How do you memorialize someone you’ve never met and whose name you may never know? In the audio piece Only Remains Remain, artist Freya Powell ’06 uses the structure of a Sophoclean chorus to create an elegy for the thousands of unidentified migrants who have died crossing the US southern border, and whose bodies are buried in unmarked graves across the border states. In excerpts from a live performance developed as part of her residency at MoMA PS1, Powell utilizes pitch, intonation, breath, movement, and silence to embody a contemporary tragedy told through the story of Antigone.
04-09-2020
Bard alumna Tschabalala Self ’12 talks to Vogue about celebrity culture, the uninhibited physicality of her work, and the use of fabric in her paintings. “I’m drawing with the sewing machine,” says Self. “I love this machine as an extension of my hand.”
04-08-2020
Bard Photography Program faculty members Tim Davis and Stephen Shore, and other great photographers, are turning to Instagram to cure “corona claustrophobia” or to show how life has changed. “Pictures remind us that life does go on, and that there are spring snow storms,” says Shore, “for better or for worse.
04-08-2020
From war enactors to America’s southern border, An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, blurs the boundaries between photojournalism and fiction. Her work is currently featured in the “revelatory” career survey On Contested Terrain, at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art through July 26. (While the museum is temporarily closed because of the coronavirus, a video tour and selected images are available online at cmoa.org.)
04-07-2020
The Bard College Theater and Performance Program presents a live-stream of Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest on April 10 at 7 pm.
Romania. December 25, 1989. A dictator is executed. A totalitarian regime topples. What happens next? Caryl Churchill’s 1990 play depicts life during and after a repressive dictatorship. Reimagined as a digital presentation by a professional creative team and student performers, this 30-year old work approached from a 2020 point of view powerfully resonates with our current global state. ⠀
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YouTube Livestream ➡️ bit.ly/MadForestYT
Facebook Live ➡️ bit.ly/MadForestFB
#UPSTREAMINGFC #MADFORESTFC
Romania. December 25, 1989. A dictator is executed. A totalitarian regime topples. What happens next? Caryl Churchill’s 1990 play depicts life during and after a repressive dictatorship. Reimagined as a digital presentation by a professional creative team and student performers, this 30-year old work approached from a 2020 point of view powerfully resonates with our current global state. ⠀
⠀
YouTube Livestream ➡️ bit.ly/MadForestYT
Facebook Live ➡️ bit.ly/MadForestFB
#UPSTREAMINGFC #MADFORESTFC
04-06-2020
Bard MFA alumna Luba Drozd has been working around the clock to make face shields for New York City hospitals in dire need of protective equipment during the COVID-19 emergency. With the help of a team of volunteers for distribution, she has been able to get nearly 200 masks to health care professionals in the city.
04-01-2020
More great news for Bard first-year student Sonita Alizadeh this week: she has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia List in the Entertainment and Sports category. Alizadeh is an Afghan rapper and human rights activist. She escaped being sold into child marriage and is now a global advocate for women and girls, recently addressing the UN on child marriage.
March 2020
03-31-2020
In a look back at the work’s West Coast premiere at UCLA in February, Forbes contributor Tom Teicholz writes, “At the time I saw the performance, I had no idea it would resonate with greater relevance during the current crisis. Now, I can’t stop thinking about it.” Adapted from the poems of T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets is a meditation on time and the search for the divine. “Eliot’s words inspire stillness and thought—which is a hard concept to choreograph,” writes Teicholz. “Yet Tanowitz has delivered a work that stands out as a peerless modern work for the ages.”
03-31-2020
Bard College student and photography major Peace Okoko ’21 won a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant. This grant offered her the opportunity to spend the summer in Kenya, where she would work to increase homeless women’s access to proper sanitary supplies and facilities. In its 14th year, the Davis Projects for Peace program invited undergraduates to design grassroots peace-building projects to be implemented during the summer of 2020 and selected the most promising and feasible projects to be funded. Although all 2020 Projects for Peace have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the foundation’s hope that circumstances will permit them to roll these grants forward to 2021.
Okoko’s project proposed providing reusable sanitary products (either cloth pads or menstrual cups) to homeless women in Nairobi’s slums. She plans to work with an organization ‘Bank on Me’ that distributes pads to girls and help extend their demographic reach. Her project would educate women on how to create their own clothing pads in hopes to foster future sustainability. Through Bank on Me’s network of local tailors, they would provide a one-day training on how to create the clothing pads. “Lack of access to menstrual hygiene products or sanitation facilities is dehumanizing, strips a person of their dignity and robs them the opportunity to have a peaceful existence with themselves and the community around them,” writes Okoko. “In 2020, access to sanitary products should not be a privilege but rather commonplace.”
Projects for Peace was created in 2007 through the generosity of Kathryn W. Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who believed that today’s youth—tomorrow’s leaders—ought to be challenged to formulate and test their own ideas.
Okoko’s project proposed providing reusable sanitary products (either cloth pads or menstrual cups) to homeless women in Nairobi’s slums. She plans to work with an organization ‘Bank on Me’ that distributes pads to girls and help extend their demographic reach. Her project would educate women on how to create their own clothing pads in hopes to foster future sustainability. Through Bank on Me’s network of local tailors, they would provide a one-day training on how to create the clothing pads. “Lack of access to menstrual hygiene products or sanitation facilities is dehumanizing, strips a person of their dignity and robs them the opportunity to have a peaceful existence with themselves and the community around them,” writes Okoko. “In 2020, access to sanitary products should not be a privilege but rather commonplace.”
Projects for Peace was created in 2007 through the generosity of Kathryn W. Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who believed that today’s youth—tomorrow’s leaders—ought to be challenged to formulate and test their own ideas.
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03-30-2020
Two Bard College students have won prestigious Fulbright Awards for individually designed study/research projects and one student has been selected as an alternate. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.
Madison Emond ’18, a photography major from Barrington, Rhode Island, has won a Fulbright Scholarship to New Zealand, where she will pursue a photography project, initially developed as her Bard College Senior Project, Nature as Artist: Visualizing the Personhood of the New Zealand Landscape. “My photographic practice sets out to question traditional landscape imagery and how it affects the viewer’s relationship to the environment. Still images of nature can estrange us from knowing the Earth as a living, shifting, unruly being, locked in a process of steady, often violent, transformation. No matter how moving or dramatic a photograph of nature is, it often speaks only to the vantage point of its maker standing outside of it. Rather than making images of the landscape I make images with the landscape. What I mean is this: all my works are made through the interaction of photosensitive materials, the natural world, and moonlight – and nothing else,” says Emond. Emond has chosen New Zealand because it was one of the first nations in the world to grant legal personhood to landforms. In 2014, Te Urewera, a national park, was granted legal personhood. Three years later, the Whanganui River was granted this same status. Emond’s project has a cross-cultural component. “The United States has a passion for the natural beauty of its land and I believe its people have the capability to recognize a similar alternative relationship between its human and “natural” citizens. With that belief in mind, I plan to explore how legal personhood could benefit landforms in the United States.”
Michelle Jackson-Beckett, a Ph.D. student in the Bard Graduate Center, won a Fulbright Scholarship to Austria to conduct research on “Vienna’s Other Modernism: Design and Dwelling 1918-1968.” Jackson-Beckett has accepted a faculty position at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in lieu of the Fulbright scholarship.
Medora Jones ’18, who graduated from Simons Rock in 2016, has been named an alternate for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Morocco.
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the largest U.S. exchange program offering opportunities for students and young professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and primary and secondary school teaching worldwide. The program currently awards approximately 2,000 grants annually in all fields of study, and operates in more than 140 countries worldwide. Fulbright U.S. Student alumni populate a range of professions and include ambassadors, members of Congress, judges, heads of corporations, university presidents, journalists, artists, professors, and teachers. Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose, actor John Lithgow, composer Philip Glass, opera singer Renee Fleming and economist Joseph Stiglitz are among notable former grantees.
Madison Emond ’18, a photography major from Barrington, Rhode Island, has won a Fulbright Scholarship to New Zealand, where she will pursue a photography project, initially developed as her Bard College Senior Project, Nature as Artist: Visualizing the Personhood of the New Zealand Landscape. “My photographic practice sets out to question traditional landscape imagery and how it affects the viewer’s relationship to the environment. Still images of nature can estrange us from knowing the Earth as a living, shifting, unruly being, locked in a process of steady, often violent, transformation. No matter how moving or dramatic a photograph of nature is, it often speaks only to the vantage point of its maker standing outside of it. Rather than making images of the landscape I make images with the landscape. What I mean is this: all my works are made through the interaction of photosensitive materials, the natural world, and moonlight – and nothing else,” says Emond. Emond has chosen New Zealand because it was one of the first nations in the world to grant legal personhood to landforms. In 2014, Te Urewera, a national park, was granted legal personhood. Three years later, the Whanganui River was granted this same status. Emond’s project has a cross-cultural component. “The United States has a passion for the natural beauty of its land and I believe its people have the capability to recognize a similar alternative relationship between its human and “natural” citizens. With that belief in mind, I plan to explore how legal personhood could benefit landforms in the United States.”
Michelle Jackson-Beckett, a Ph.D. student in the Bard Graduate Center, won a Fulbright Scholarship to Austria to conduct research on “Vienna’s Other Modernism: Design and Dwelling 1918-1968.” Jackson-Beckett has accepted a faculty position at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in lieu of the Fulbright scholarship.
Medora Jones ’18, who graduated from Simons Rock in 2016, has been named an alternate for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Morocco.
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the largest U.S. exchange program offering opportunities for students and young professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and primary and secondary school teaching worldwide. The program currently awards approximately 2,000 grants annually in all fields of study, and operates in more than 140 countries worldwide. Fulbright U.S. Student alumni populate a range of professions and include ambassadors, members of Congress, judges, heads of corporations, university presidents, journalists, artists, professors, and teachers. Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose, actor John Lithgow, composer Philip Glass, opera singer Renee Fleming and economist Joseph Stiglitz are among notable former grantees.
03-10-2020
“Set in the mid-19th-century Oregon Territory, Kelly Reichardt’s latest film is a fable, a western, a buddy picture, and a masterpiece,” writes A. O. Scott in the Times. “A parable of economics and politics, with shrewd insights into the workings of supply and demand, scarcity and scale and other puzzles of the marketplace, the movie is also keenly attuned to details of history, both human and natural.”
03-03-2020
It’s been 40 years since any American museum devoted an exhibition to the work of Eileen Gray, who is considered by many to be a pioneer in the worlds of modern design and architecture. “This past weekend, that situation was rectified with the debut of ‘Eileen Gray: Crossing Borders,’ a show of furniture and architecture models as well as more rarely seen photographs and drawings at New York’s Bard Graduate Center Gallery,” writes Architectural Digest. “Unlike previous exhibitions dedicated to Gray's oeuvre, this one is presented in a very different setting: three floors of a Beaux Arts townhouse that was once a single-family home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The house quite intimately sets visitors in a domestic space and in the realm of Gray. It's also an apt backdrop for her extraordinary breadth of talent and entrepreneurial spirit.”
03-02-2020
The show, making its Southern California debut, features the on-stage construction of a two-story house, but no dialogue. Geoffrey Sobelle, visiting artist in residence in Bard’s Theater and Performance Program, is the creator and also one of the performers in Home.
February 2020
02-26-2020
In her latest film, First Cow, independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt pushes against the romantic myths of the Western, and of the West. “It’s such a masculine genre,” she says, “and it’s mostly been told from a masculine point of view. So trying to find a different perspective, to find a different frame, for the Western is challenging and interesting for me. It’s a tricky thing, because the road has been paved before you, you know? But I’m trying to make the camera be inclusive of different points of view, something other than just the strong man point of view.”
02-24-2020
On Monday, March 2, 2020, Berlin Prize–winning author Carole Maso will read from her work at Bard College. Known for her experimental, poetic, and fragmentary narratives, “Maso is a writer of such power and originality that the reader is carried away with her, far beyond the usual limits of the novel,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle. Maso will be introduced by Bard literature professor and novelist Bradford Morrow. The reading, presented by Morrow’s Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series, takes place at 2:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.
02-18-2020
The critically acclaimed Four Quartets, which was produced by and premiered at Bard Fisher Center last summer, was performed by Pam Tanowitz Dance at UCLA’s Royce Hall February 15–16, with actress Kathleen Chalfant reading Eliot’s four poems. “Throughout the 75-minute performance, Tanowitz’s outstanding company serves to add to Eliot, not interpret. Complexity grows upon complexity,” writes the LA Times’s Mark Swed. “This exceptional response to ‘Four Quartets’ achieves genuine universality and profound nowness.”
02-10-2020
Bard College professor, acclaimed photographer Stephen Shore “has made an indelible impact on photography, teaching his viewers—and generations of students at Bard College—a different way to see.” Artsy highlights four fundamental aspects of his work that have influenced the field.
02-09-2020
Swartz, who was awarded a grant in the field of music/sound, creates immersive, site-specific installations that synthesize sound and light into ephemeral, participatory social experiences. Her recent permanent commission for the City of New York, Four Directions from Hunters Point (2019), embedded four optical portals in the walls and roof of the new Steven Holl–designed Queens Public Library, and received the NYC Public Design Commission’s Annual Award for Excellence in Design.
02-02-2020
Acclaimed filmmaker, Bard Visiting Artist Charles Burnett talks about filmmaking for social change with WAMC News. Mr. Burnett will be in conversation with filmmakers Julie Dash and Bradford Young tonight, February 4, at 6pm in Olin Hall for “Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today.”
January 2020
01-26-2020
In 2019, the eminent composer and Bard professor Joan Tower was named Composer of the Year by Musical America, was recognized for her lifetime of work by Chamber Music of America, received the League of American Orchestras’ Gold Baton, and became one of the first women composers to have her collected works archived in the Library of Congress. Tower joined the faculty at Bard College in 1972, at the age of 33, where she now serves as Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts. Today, she teaches a variety of composition courses, coaches players, and puts on concerts of contemporary composers. “I always learn something every day,” she says. “I always learn from my students.”
01-25-2020
Bard alumni, filmmakers, and brothers Adam and Zack Khalil (’11 and ’14) are among the artists selected to manage Performance Space New York in 2020 under a new restructuring plan for the organization.
01-23-2020
On Tuesday, February 4, esteemed filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Bradford Young will take part in a discussion at Bard College exploring their career trajectories, works, creative processes, and commitments to the humanities. The event is part of a series, “Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today,” which seeks to diversify perspectives on the arts disciplines and to offer models for collective and inclusive community dialogues. The discussion is made possible through a 2019 FilmCraft Grant from the Academy Foundation of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is cosponsored by Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program, Center for Civic Engagement, Art History Program, American Studies Program, and Africana Studies Program. The conversation will be moderated by Tabetha Ewing ’89, Social Studies Division chair and associate professor of Historical Studies, and Dariel Vasquez ’17, director of program design and management at Brothers@Bard (BAB). It takes place from 6–8 p.m. in Olin Auditorium (Olin Hall) and is free and open to the public. Registration is required. For more information or to register, click click here.
“Through this public dialogue, we hope to highlight the rich forms of black filmmaking that unfold on university campuses and celebrate the extraordinary work of these marvelous and generous practitioners who have not only changed which actors and stories appear on screen but also the ways audiences interpret and use films in their daily lives,” said Director of Africana Studies at Bard and Assistant Professor of Africana and Historical Studies Drew Thompson, organizer of the discussion series. “Ultimately, these conversations between artists aim to inspire underrepresented groups to pursue careers in the visual and performing art and to highlight the productive and impactful ways in which visual and performing artists engage communities.”
“Through this public dialogue, we hope to highlight the rich forms of black filmmaking that unfold on university campuses and celebrate the extraordinary work of these marvelous and generous practitioners who have not only changed which actors and stories appear on screen but also the ways audiences interpret and use films in their daily lives,” said Director of Africana Studies at Bard and Assistant Professor of Africana and Historical Studies Drew Thompson, organizer of the discussion series. “Ultimately, these conversations between artists aim to inspire underrepresented groups to pursue careers in the visual and performing art and to highlight the productive and impactful ways in which visual and performing artists engage communities.”
01-21-2020
Patrick Vaill ’07 took his final Broadway bow as Jud Fry, after performing in Daniel Fish’s production of the musical Oklahoma! since he was a student at Bard. The Tony Award–winning Broadway production closed last weekend after an immensely successful run. Daniel Fish’s reimagining of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic began as a 2007 staging with Bard students in the Theater Program. Fish then adapted the production for Bard SummerScape 2015, took it to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, and then to Broadway. Patrick Vaill played Jud Fry in every iteration of the production. In this interview with the New York Times, Vaill reflects on embodying the iconic role and pays tribute to his alma mater.
01-19-2020
John Duke Kisch ’76’s Separate Cinema Archive, the most prominent African American film history repository, is being acquired by George Lucas for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. The archive encompasses more than 37,000 rare items, including original film posters, film stills, publicity material, scripts, lobby cards, an extensive reference library, and more dating from 1904 to 2019.
01-17-2020
Artist and author Jibade-Khalil Huffman talks about his multimedia works and his interdisciplinary experience at Bard as he prepares for You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, his upcoming solo exhibition at the Anat Ebgi gallery in Los Angeles. “At his essence, Huffman is a collector of digital and tangible objects, giving birth to different representation of collage in video, photography, and installation,” writes Marcel Alcalá.
01-17-2020
“One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy.” —Salon.com
The Fisher Center at Bard, in association with Oblong Books & Music, presents a public conversation between two leading writers of fantasy and science fiction: Neil Gaiman, Bard professor in the arts, and Hugo Award–winning author N. K. Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy), whose new work The City We Became will be published in March.
The program takes place on Saturday, May 2, at 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Tickets are $25 and can be ordered online at fishercenter.bard.edu or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900. $5 student tickets available to Bard undergraduate students through the Passloff Pass.
The conversation is part of an ongoing series in which author Gaiman discusses the creative process with another artist. Following the program, N. K. Jemisin will sign books in the lobby, which will be available for purchase, courtesy of Oblong Books. Signed titles by Neil Gaiman will also be available for purchase.
N. K. Jemisin is the first author in history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has also won the Nebula, Locus, and Goodreads Choice Awards. Her most recent work is the acclaimed short fiction collection How Long ’Til Black Future Month?, and her next novel will be The City we Became in March 2020. Jemisin has been a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops. In her spare time she is a gamer and gardener, and she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his phenomenally destructive sidekick Magpie.
Neil Gaiman is a New York Times bestselling author of novels, poetry, short stories, graphic novels, comics, journalism, and screenplays, who is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top 10 living postmodern writers. Works include The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neverwhere, Stardust, Anansi Boys, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), the award-winning Sandman series of graphic novels, and the short story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. Novels for younger readers include Fortunately, the Milk; Coraline, also an Academy Award–nominated film; and The Graveyard Book, winner of the Newbery (U.S.) and Carnegie (U.K.) Medals. He has written and directed for film and television, including a 2011 episode of Doctor Who that won the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Make Good Art, the text of a commencement speech he delivered at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, was published in a volume designed by graphic artist Chip Kidd. At Bard since 2014.
About the Fisher Center
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 159-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 Fisher Center at Bard, in association with Oblong Books & Music, presents a public conversation between two leading writers of fantasy and science fiction: Neil Gaiman, Bard professor in the arts, and Hugo Award–winning author N. K. Jemisin (Broken Earth trilogy), whose new work The City We Became will be published in March.
The program takes place on Saturday, May 2, at 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater of The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Tickets are $25 and can be ordered online at fishercenter.bard.edu or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900. $5 student tickets available to Bard undergraduate students through the Passloff Pass.
The conversation is part of an ongoing series in which author Gaiman discusses the creative process with another artist. Following the program, N. K. Jemisin will sign books in the lobby, which will be available for purchase, courtesy of Oblong Books. Signed titles by Neil Gaiman will also be available for purchase.
N. K. Jemisin is the first author in history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, all for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has also won the Nebula, Locus, and Goodreads Choice Awards. Her most recent work is the acclaimed short fiction collection How Long ’Til Black Future Month?, and her next novel will be The City we Became in March 2020. Jemisin has been a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, and she has been an instructor for the Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops. In her spare time she is a gamer and gardener, and she is also single-handedly responsible for saving the world from King Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his phenomenally destructive sidekick Magpie.
Neil Gaiman is a New York Times bestselling author of novels, poetry, short stories, graphic novels, comics, journalism, and screenplays, who is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top 10 living postmodern writers. Works include The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neverwhere, Stardust, Anansi Boys, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), the award-winning Sandman series of graphic novels, and the short story collections Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things. Novels for younger readers include Fortunately, the Milk; Coraline, also an Academy Award–nominated film; and The Graveyard Book, winner of the Newbery (U.S.) and Carnegie (U.K.) Medals. He has written and directed for film and television, including a 2011 episode of Doctor Who that won the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation and the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. Make Good Art, the text of a commencement speech he delivered at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, was published in a volume designed by graphic artist Chip Kidd. At Bard since 2014.
About the Fisher Center
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 159-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.
01-15-2020
Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard College, has been given a $50,000 Film Independent Spirit Awards Filmmaker Grant designed to recognize a midcareer female director. Reichardt won the third annual Bonnie Award, named for Bonnie Tiburzi Caputo, who became the first woman to pilot a major U.S. airline when she joined the award’s sponsor, American Airlines, in 1973.
Kelly Reichardt is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose most recent work, First Cow, was screened at the 2019 New York Film Festival. Other films include Certain Women, starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone; Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy ( 2006), and River of Grass (1994). Honors received include a United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at major international film festivals, with retrospectives at several leading institutions devoted to the cinematic arts.
Reichardt has been teaching in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College since 2006.
Kelly Reichardt is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose most recent work, First Cow, was screened at the 2019 New York Film Festival. Other films include Certain Women, starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone; Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy ( 2006), and River of Grass (1994). Honors received include a United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at major international film festivals, with retrospectives at several leading institutions devoted to the cinematic arts.
Reichardt has been teaching in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College since 2006.
01-13-2020
Cecilia Alemani MA ’05, director and chief curator of New York’s High Line, has been named curator of the 59th Venice Biennale. She will be only the fifth woman to curate the biennale in its century-long history, and the first Italian woman to do so.
01-05-2020
Two Bard College students were awarded a highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship by the U.S. Department of State. Art history major Tatiana Alfaro ’21 has been awarded $5,000 towards her studies at Bard College Berlin. “I’m so happy to have received the Gilman award. It’s definitely an honor and was unexpected. My experience with Gilman will enhance my experience abroad. Studying in Berlin will help me have a more global view on the art world, and specifically, what I want my role within it to be. I believe it will be a good opportunity for me to see my personal and academic interests overlap, not only as an art historian but as a global learner.”
Biology major Mary Reid ’21 has been awarded $3,000 for her term at the Lorenzo di Medici Institute in Florence, Italy. “Studying abroad is an aspiration for many students but financial concerns are often an impossible barrier. I am incredibly privileged to reach for my own aspirations as a result of this scholarship, my supportive friends, and my wonderful family. While abroad, I hope to gain a greater knowledge of new cultures and ideas, as well as an increased sense of autonomy and introspection. I am eager to make my study abroad experience live up to my childhood ambitions. Thank you to everyone who has made this possible.”
Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000 to apply towards their study abroad or internship program costs with additional funding available for the study of a critical language overseas. The Gilman scholarship supports American undergraduate students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad and, since 2001, has enabled more than 31,000 outstanding Americans of diverse backgrounds to engage in a meaningful educational experience abroad. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. The late Congressman Gilman, who served in the House of Representatives for 30 years, chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee, and was honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, commented, “Study abroad is a special experience for every student who participates. Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views, but also adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
Biology major Mary Reid ’21 has been awarded $3,000 for her term at the Lorenzo di Medici Institute in Florence, Italy. “Studying abroad is an aspiration for many students but financial concerns are often an impossible barrier. I am incredibly privileged to reach for my own aspirations as a result of this scholarship, my supportive friends, and my wonderful family. While abroad, I hope to gain a greater knowledge of new cultures and ideas, as well as an increased sense of autonomy and introspection. I am eager to make my study abroad experience live up to my childhood ambitions. Thank you to everyone who has made this possible.”
Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000 to apply towards their study abroad or internship program costs with additional funding available for the study of a critical language overseas. The Gilman scholarship supports American undergraduate students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad and, since 2001, has enabled more than 31,000 outstanding Americans of diverse backgrounds to engage in a meaningful educational experience abroad. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. The late Congressman Gilman, who served in the House of Representatives for 30 years, chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee, and was honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, commented, “Study abroad is a special experience for every student who participates. Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views, but also adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”
01-02-2020
“Notwithstanding the conservatism of the opera business,” writes the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, “many top houses offer a world première every season or two.” Chaya Czernowin’s Heart Chamber, which premiered at the Berlin Deutsche Oper in December, is a case in point: “Heart Chamber, for which Czernowin wrote her own libretto, tells of a contemporary love affair infiltrated by anxieties and hesitations. In an early scene, the soprano sings, ‘Hey! Pick up your phone! Are you home? Later, the baritone sings, ‘You can’t just suddenly close up like that.’ The feeling is less of two souls being joined in eternal love than of two individuals negotiating the intersection of their separate lives.
“At first glance, Czernowin, an Israeli native who teaches at Harvard, is an unlikely composer for such a project. Much of her work has tended toward images of primordial upheaval and elemental change. Her previous operas, Pnima and Infinite Now, conjured scenes of 20th-century catastrophe: the Holocaust in the former, the First World War in the latter. She avoids familiar harmonic signposts and is inclined toward spectacularly vivid eruptions of instrumental and electronic sound. The wonder of Heart Chamber is how she uses her radical sonic palette to evoke the stream of consciousness beneath the surface of ordinary life.”
“At first glance, Czernowin, an Israeli native who teaches at Harvard, is an unlikely composer for such a project. Much of her work has tended toward images of primordial upheaval and elemental change. Her previous operas, Pnima and Infinite Now, conjured scenes of 20th-century catastrophe: the Holocaust in the former, the First World War in the latter. She avoids familiar harmonic signposts and is inclined toward spectacularly vivid eruptions of instrumental and electronic sound. The wonder of Heart Chamber is how she uses her radical sonic palette to evoke the stream of consciousness beneath the surface of ordinary life.”
December 2019
12-31-2019
“État remains a wonderfully twisted house of mirrors, where electronic gear and traditional instruments are treated as equals and often rendered indistinguishable from each other.”
12-18-2019
The world premiere of Bard alumna Chaya Czernowin’s new opera Heart Chamber at the Deutche Oper Berlin on December 6 is one of the year’s top 10 notable performances, says New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, and her “engulfing” war requiem Infinite Now (2016–17) is one of the reasons the it has been a “chaotically great decade for new music.” Czernowin, who studied with composers Elie Yarden and Joan Tower while at Bard, is currently Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Composition at Harvard University.
12-18-2019
The acclaimed Broadway production has its roots in a 2007 student production at Bard, and developed into the 2015 Bard SummerScape production at the Fisher Center before heading to New York City. Oklahoma! closes on January 19.
12-17-2019
Born in Harlem, Tschabalala Self ’12 studied studio art at Bard before attending the Yale School of Art for her MFA. Since her graduation she has enjoyed—and suffered—an astounding art world trajectory. Prices for her paintings have increased more than thirtyfold over the past five years, only sometimes to her benefit. She has gained international respect and recognition but she’s also lost significant control over where her artworks end up. The story of Self’s rapidly rising popularity is a case study in the pleasures and perils of early-career acclaim for young artists.
12-16-2019
Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse and Writer in Residence Francine Prose were in conversation at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library on the evening of Monday, December 16. The event celebrated Marcuse’s new book Fruitless, Fallen, and Woven, published by Radius Books. This stunning three-volume set traces the arc of 14 years of Marcuse’s work, from the iconic trees of Fruitless to the lush, immersive photographs of Fallen and Woven. Her work features elaborate tableaux of flora and fauna suggestive of the abstract, large-scale paintings of Jackson Pollock and the symbolism of medieval tapestries. She discussed the creative process with Francine Prose, award-winning writer and best-selling author of more than 20 works of fiction.
12-11-2019
Building a better community is a spiritual and artistic endeavor for Rev. Jack Perkins Davidson and Bard alumnus JaQuan Beachem, a Yale Divinity School student and ministerial intern.
12-03-2019
Wondering what to get for the designer, fashionista, or art historian on your holiday list? WSJ art critic Ann Landi suggests the BGC exhibition catalogue French Fashion, Women, and the First World War.
12-01-2019
Hollywood Reporter names BoJack Horseman, cocreated and produced by Raphael Bob-Waksberg '06, the #6 best TV show of the decade.
Full Story
TIME magazine calle the animated series Undone, created by Bob-Waksberg, one of the 10 best TV shows of the year.
Read the Story in TIME
Raphael Bob-Waksberg '06 will be competing against himself at the Gotham Awards this year: his shows Tuca & Bertie and Undone have both been nominated for Breakthrough Short-Form Series.
Read the Story in Variety
Full Story
TIME magazine calle the animated series Undone, created by Bob-Waksberg, one of the 10 best TV shows of the year.
Read the Story in TIME
Raphael Bob-Waksberg '06 will be competing against himself at the Gotham Awards this year: his shows Tuca & Bertie and Undone have both been nominated for Breakthrough Short-Form Series.
Read the Story in Variety
12-01-2019
The Washington Post reviews Live Dangerously, the current exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, whose "most deliberately unsettling single image" is a photograph by Xaviera Simmons '05. Frieze reviews Soft Power, an exhibition at SFMOMA that features Simmons's work.
November 2019
11-30-2019
The exhibition catalogue Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich, by Soika and the Cambridge historian Bernhard Fulda, provides a new historical narrative for an artist who fashioned himself a martyr of the Nazi regime—a narrative that has had political reverberations for the current German government.
11-26-2019
Bard College is well represented in this year’s Grammy nominations. The Broadway production of Oklahoma!—which began at Bard and stars Patrick Vaill ’07—received a nomination for Best Musical Theater Album for the 2019 cast recording. The audio recording of Beastie Boys Book, containing stories about the late founding member Adam Yauch ’86, was nominated for Best Spoken Word Album. The Black Pumas, with Vince Chiarito ’08 on bass, received a nomination for Best New Artist.
11-19-2019
The collaborative work by Tanowitz and classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein—performed by Dinnerstein and Pam Tanowitz Dance—will have its New York premiere at the Joyce Theater on December 10.
11-06-2019
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is pleased to announce that Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, has been selected as the recipient of the 2020 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of CCS Bard. For the past 21 years, the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence has celebrated and awarded the individual achievements of a distinguished curator whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive of exhibition-making today. The award reflects CCS Bard’s commitment to recognizing individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice. This year the award will be presented to Butler by artist Andrea Fraser at a gala celebration and dinner co-chaired by CCS Bard Board of Governors member Lonti Ebers and Chairman of the CCS Bard Board Martin Eisenberg, and will take place on April 7, 2020, at One Manhattan West, 395 9th Avenue, in New York City. Event location provided by Brookfield Properties with additional generous support from Lonti Ebers.
“Connie Butler represents the best of curating; independently minded, always curious, dedicated to artists and consistently bold in the scope of her exhibitions and choices of subject. Her exhibitions are touchstones of curating in the United States—helping to redefine subjects and the institutions where she works.” —Tom Eccles, Executive Director, CCS Bard
The awardee is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. Past recipients include Harald Szeemann (1998), Marcia Tucker (1999), Kasper König (2000), Paul Schimmel (2001), Susanne Ghez (2002), Kynaston McShine (2003), Walter Hopps (2004), Kathy Halbreich and Mari Carmen Ramírez (2005), Lynne Cooke and Vasif Kortun (2006), Alanna Heiss (2007), Catherine David (2008), Okwui Enwezor (2009), Lucy Lippard (2010), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2011), Ann Goldstein (2012), Elisabeth Sussman (2013), Charles Esche (2014), Christine Tohme and Martha Wilson (2015), Thelma Golden (2016), Nicholas Serota (2017), Lia Gangitano (2018), and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2019).
“I am thrilled to receive the Audrey Irmas prize for curatorial excellence. The history of this award is truly a distinguished one and it is an honor to be among such incredible colleagues at this critical time in our field. Now more than ever our work matters and I continue to follow and support the work of artists and believe in the future of museums.” —Connie Butler
The 2020 award will once again be given under the name of patron Audrey Irmas, who has bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize of $25,000. Irmas is an emeritus board member of CCS Bard and an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award has been designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, and is based on his 2006 commission Bard Enter, conceived for the entrance to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.
Connie Butler is the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, where she has organized numerous exhibitions including the biennial of Los Angeles artists Made in L.A. (2014), Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth (2015) and Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space (2017). She also co-curated Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions which opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in April of 2018 and at the Hammer in October 2018; Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line, 2019 and Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence a retrospective exhibition which opened at the Hammer September 2019. From 2006 to 2013 she was The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she co-curated the first major Lygia Clark retrospective in the United States, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (2014); and co-curated On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010) and mounted Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, the first US retrospective of the artist’s career. Butler also organized the groundbreaking survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles where she was curator from 1996 to 2006.
“Connie Butler represents the best of curating; independently minded, always curious, dedicated to artists and consistently bold in the scope of her exhibitions and choices of subject. Her exhibitions are touchstones of curating in the United States—helping to redefine subjects and the institutions where she works.” —Tom Eccles, Executive Director, CCS Bard
The awardee is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. Past recipients include Harald Szeemann (1998), Marcia Tucker (1999), Kasper König (2000), Paul Schimmel (2001), Susanne Ghez (2002), Kynaston McShine (2003), Walter Hopps (2004), Kathy Halbreich and Mari Carmen Ramírez (2005), Lynne Cooke and Vasif Kortun (2006), Alanna Heiss (2007), Catherine David (2008), Okwui Enwezor (2009), Lucy Lippard (2010), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2011), Ann Goldstein (2012), Elisabeth Sussman (2013), Charles Esche (2014), Christine Tohme and Martha Wilson (2015), Thelma Golden (2016), Nicholas Serota (2017), Lia Gangitano (2018), and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2019).
“I am thrilled to receive the Audrey Irmas prize for curatorial excellence. The history of this award is truly a distinguished one and it is an honor to be among such incredible colleagues at this critical time in our field. Now more than ever our work matters and I continue to follow and support the work of artists and believe in the future of museums.” —Connie Butler
The 2020 award will once again be given under the name of patron Audrey Irmas, who has bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize of $25,000. Irmas is an emeritus board member of CCS Bard and an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award has been designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, and is based on his 2006 commission Bard Enter, conceived for the entrance to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.
Connie Butler is the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, where she has organized numerous exhibitions including the biennial of Los Angeles artists Made in L.A. (2014), Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth (2015) and Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space (2017). She also co-curated Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions which opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in April of 2018 and at the Hammer in October 2018; Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line, 2019 and Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence a retrospective exhibition which opened at the Hammer September 2019. From 2006 to 2013 she was The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she co-curated the first major Lygia Clark retrospective in the United States, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (2014); and co-curated On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010) and mounted Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, the first US retrospective of the artist’s career. Butler also organized the groundbreaking survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles where she was curator from 1996 to 2006.