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In the spring of 2023, Julia Rosenbaum, associate professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, will teach at the Freie Universität in Berlin via the Terra Foundation Visiting Professorship. Terra Foundation Visiting Professorships at Freie Universität Berlin are integrated into the curriculum and research programs of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies. “The particular setting of the John F. Kennedy Institute offers rich opportunities to students to situate their study of American art in dialogue with disciplines such as cultural studies, cultural history, literature, and sociology,” writes the Terra Foundation. “I am very grateful to have been chosen for the Terra professorship and am excited for the research and teaching opportunities of this transatlantic cultural collaboration,” Rosenbaum said.

Susan L. Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, has been awarded a 2023 Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency. The program, which she will attend at the Dora Maar House in Provence, France, during September 2023, has been internationally recognized as one of the most respected residencies for those working in the arts and humanities. Aberth, working alongside her longtime collaborator Tere Arcq—the leading scholar on Spanish-born Mexican artist Remedios Varo—will complete Cauldrons & Curanderas: The Magical Relationship of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, an illustrated historical account of the magical and artistic works produced by the two artists working together. “I am particularly grateful for this residency at the Dora Maar House because it is at the home of a great surrealist woman photographer whom I have long admired and taught in my classes at Bard College,” Aberth said. “It seems particularly appropriate then for me and my colleague, Tere Arcq, to be there in France working on Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, especially since they also spent meaningful periods of time in France.” 

The residency will allow Aberth and Arcq a dedicated period of time to work side by side, and they believe that the insights they document about the shared projects of the two artists can serve as a blueprint for how women creators can join together in creating ventures that are greater than the sum of their parts. “Carrington and Varo forged a new path for women artists by exploring together certain esoteric arenas that had long been neglected and even disdained by the art world,” Aberth continued. “In rediscovering women’s mysteries and spiritual involvements in ways that directly impacted their artistic practice, they introduced to the art world the importance and necessity of female creative collaborations, in juxtaposition to centuries of celebrating male collaborations exclusively.”

Further reading:

Professor Susan Aberth and Alumnus Gilbert Vicario CCS ’96 Granted Curatorial Research Fellowship by Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts   

Bard Professor Susan Aberth and Curator Tere Arcq Publish First Book Dedicated to Newly Discovered Tarot Set Created by Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington and the Theatre: A Conversation with Professor Susan Aberth and Double Edge Theatre’s Stacy Klein

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded a Curatorial Research Fellowship to Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture, and Bard alumnus Gilbert Vicario CCS ’96, chief curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM). The fellowship of $50,000 will fund their research for a new exhibition planned for 2024 at PAMM, which will examine metaphysical and esoteric impulses that influenced a cohort of artistic and academic individuals in the Americas in the 20th century, with a prominent focus on women, queer, and marginalized artists. “The Spring 2022 grantees are notable for their resilience, ingenuity, and dedication to supporting artists at every stage of their careers,” said Rachel Bers, the program director at the foundation. “As the culture shifts, they work side by side with artists to find ways to critically and creatively engage the forces that shape our world.”

Further reading:

Bard College Professor Susan Aberth Awarded a Nancy B. Negley Artists Residency

The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz is the recipient of a $71,000 exhibitions grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art, which will support a spring 2024 exhibition, guest curated by Bard College Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Tom Wolf, focusing on four diverse, early-twentieth-century artists: Miguel Covarrubias, Isami Doi, Aaron Douglas, and Winold Reiss.

The Dorsky Museum exhibition, tentatively titled “Global Connections: Four Artists in New York in the 1920s,” is one of 57 projects supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art through its latest round of grant funding. 

The exhibition is a temporary loan exhibition based on extensive original research into histories of cross-cultural inspiration and influence among the diverse artists Covarrubias, Doi, Douglas and Reiss (Mexican, Japanese Hawaiian, African American and German American, respectively).

Unpacking the connections between these four artists and focusing on artwork they produced that relates to the United States, Europe, Asia, and Mexico, this exhibition will further the discourse on multiculturalism in American art. Together, these four artists from different backgrounds illustrate a thus-far untold story of American art that raises challenging questions about histories of race, representation and multiculturalism that are relevant and necessary today. 

The concept stems from the research of guest curator Wolf, a specialist in twentieth century American art, Asian American artists, and art colonies. Wolf previously received an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant in support of his research and writing for this project.

“When the initial proposal for this project was shared with the Museum Exhibitions Committee, our group of expert advisors expressed unequivocal support and great eagerness for the project,” said Anna Conlan, the Neil C. Trager Director of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. “From the beginning, I personally have been captivated by this story and have encouraged Professor Wolf to pursue it.” 

“Global Connections” is planned to open on Feb. 3, 2024 and will occupy 3,500 feet of gallery space in The Dorsky Museum, centering paintings, prints, drawings and books. It will include a self-portrait by each artist, as well as works that reflect each of their ethnic heritage and enthusiasm for multiculturalism. 

Tom Wolf is a frequent collaborator with The Dorsky who serves as a member of the Museum’s Exhibitions Committee and has previously guest curated exhibitions including “Eva Watson-Schütze: Photographer” in 2009 and “Carl Walters and Woodstock Ceramic Arts” in 2017. 

About the Terra Foundation for American Art
The Terra Foundation for American Art, established in 1978 and having offices in Chicago and Paris, supports organizations and individuals locally and globally with the aim of fostering intercultural dialogues and encouraging transformative practices that expand narratives of American art, through the foundation’s grant program, collection and initiatives. More information about the Terra Foundation for American Art’s history and mission is available here.

Filmmakers Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 and Sky Hopinka have been awarded JustFilms grants through the Ford Foundation in support of their documentary film projects. Asili, associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, received a grant for his new project Don & Moki: Organic Music Society. Hopinka, assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard and 2022 MacArthur Fellow, received a grant for his continuing project Powwow People. 

One of the largest documentary funds in the world and a part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program, JustFilms provided over $4 million to support 68 innovative film projects in the United States and around the world that are centered on social justice issues.

Don & Moki: Organic Music Society, directed by Ephraim Asili and produced by Asili and Naima Karlsson, is a feature-length documentary exploring the collaborative and communal art practice developed and practiced by jazz multi-instrumentalist, theorist, and educator Don Cherry and his wife and primary collaborator, visual artist Moki Cherry.

Powwow People, directed by Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) and produced by John Cardellino and Adam Piron (Kiowa/Mohawk), is a film told through Hopinka's distinct artistic style and lens of personal lived experience. It is a meditation on the nebulous places of community and survivance that are powwows, poetically depicting Native American singers and dancers as they live their lives, maintain their cultural traditions, and prepare for an upcoming powwow, one organized, hosted, and documented through the production of this film. 

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Music Maria Sonevytsky, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, reflects on how a Ukrainian phrase has transformed into a viral wartime slogan. “Good evening, we are from Ukraine,” a seemingly casual statement, has accumulated multiple meanings and layers throughout its evolution into an inclusive rallying cry for those who call the country home. “This phrase, which began as a musician’s offhand stage banter sampled into an EDM anthem, became a slogan invoked by Ukrainian politicians, soldiers, intellectuals, keyboard warriors, and their supporters around the globe,” she writes. For Sonevytsky, the brilliance of the statement is how its innocuous phrasing, at first glance a simple greeting, masks its inherent radicalism and defiance of the Russian’s state’s attempts to deny Ukraine’s existence. “The slogan works precisely because it does not traffic in the essentializing rhetoric of being Ukrainian,” she continues. “It is not for an individual declaring an identity: ‘I am Ukrainian.’ It is instead a collective, matter-of-fact statement: ‘We are from Ukraine.’ This also implies—and I still resent that this must be said, but here we are—that Ukraine exists, is a legitimate place, and contains people who claim it as home.”

This January, the American Academy of Arts and Letters announced the winners of the 2023 Charles Ives Opera Prize and the Marc Blitzstein Memorial Awards. Bard Composer in Residence Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek will each receive a Marc Blitzstein Memorial Award of $10,000, which are given in the memory of Marc Blitzstein to composers, lyricists, or librettists to encourage the creation of works of merit for musical theater and opera. Mazzoli and Vavrek have collaborated on the operas Breaking the Waves, Proving Up, Songs from the Uproar, and The Listeners. In 1965 the friends of Academy member Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) set up a fund in his memory for an award, now $10,000, to be given periodically to a composer, lyricist, or librettist, to encourage the creation of works of merit for musical theater and opera. The awards, to be given at the annual Ceremonial in May, “reflect the essential mission of the Academy to recognize, identify, and reward works of highest aspiration and superior craft by contemporary artists in our culture,” said Yehudi Wyner, a composer member and former president of the Academy.

In 1965, Life hired photojournalist and Bard alumnus Steven Schaprio ’55 to photograph the then-ascendant Andy Warhol for the magazine. Life never published the photo series, and only now are they being published posthumously after Schapiro’s death in 2022. Rolling Stone featured a series of photos from Andy Warhol and Friends: 1965–1966, which “includes many never-before-seen documents of a pivotal time in Warhol’s life as he helped shape popular culture for decades to come.”

ARTnews highlighted individuals and institutions that had a significant impact on public engagement with Indigenous art in 2022, including Bard College on the short list. In September, the College announced a transformational $25 million endowment gift from the Gochman Family Foundation to support a renamed American and Indigenous Studies Program. A matching commitment by the Open Society Foundations will create a $50 million endowment for Native American and Indigenous Studies in undergraduate and graduate academics and the arts in Annandale, to include a center for Indigenous Studies and the appointment of an Indigenous Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard).

Filmmaker and Bard professor Ephraim Asili spoke with Metal magazine about navigating his various roles as artist and teacher. “I can't see a situation in the future, no matter how well things go commercially, where I would not want to teach. I get too much out of it in terms of being able to relate to people of a certain age, with a fresh mindset around the medium and the world in general. It's something that I get endless inspiration from. I've also been able to hire former students to work with me on my projects, and that has gone well for me, and for students that I've worked with. Is that something that I anticipated? I think so.” Ephraim Asili is associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program. He is an alumnus of Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Class of 2011. Asili has taught on the faculty at Bard since 2015.
 

“Jon Batiste is not afraid of a jazzy suit,” writes André-Naquian Wheeler for Vogue. Photography by Visiting Artist in Residence Jasmine Clarke ’18 accompanies Wheeler’s article, showing Batiste preparing for his first performance at the White House. Batiste, who performed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and France’s national anthem “La Marseillaise,” requested that his family be in attendance, and especially his wife, the writer Suleika Jaouad, who has written about her diagnosis of an aggressive form of leukemia. “Seeing Suleika step out for her first public outing in a year after her cancer treatment meant a lot,” Batiste said. Batiste’s 89-year-old grandfather, an activist, also in attendance, commented on the symbolism of Batiste’s inclusion in the state dinner. “Discussing with [him] how the original builders of the White House were enslaved Americans whilst walking into the State Dinner as honored guests was quite a moment,” Batiste said. Clarke’s photography captures Batiste and guests preparing for the event, the musician’s excitement clear from Clarke’s vulnerable candids and striking portraits.

Five Bard College students have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. The recipients of this cycle’s Gilman scholarships are American undergraduate students attending 452 U.S. colleges and represent 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These Gilman Scholars will study or intern in 81 countries through October 2023.
 
Written Arts major Havvah Keller ’24, from Montpelier, Vermont, has been awarded a $4,000 Gilman scholarship to study in Valparaíso, Chile, on CEA’s Spanish Language and Latin American Studies program at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, for spring 2023. “Receiving this scholarship means that I will be able to fulfill my dream of studying Spanish in total immersion, living with a local family in an art-filled, exuberant city, and studying Latin American and Chilean poetry and literature, as well as many other subjects such as Latin American history, Indigenous dances and arts of the Mapuche people, and making international friends of all backgrounds. I am eternally grateful to Gilman for helping me plant the seeds which will open many incredible doors for me in my life this spring, and beyond,” said Keller.
 
Philosophy and German Studies joint major Bella Bergen ’24, from Broomfield, Colorado, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman Scholarship allows me to pursue studying abroad in Berlin, Germany. I have never left the country despite a deep desire to do so, and the Gilman Scholarship helps me finally accomplish this goal. As a joint major in Philosophy and German Studies, my studies and language proficiency will both benefit greatly from my time in Germany. Ich freue mich auf Berlin,” said Bergen.
 
Art History and Visual Culture major Elsa Joiner ’24, from Dunwoody, Georgia, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “The Gilman scholarship will enable me to study the subject of my dreams, sound art, in the city of my greatest fantasies, Berlin, Germany. With the scholarship, I plan to explore the role of sound in identity formation and develop my skills as a deep listener, eventually returning to America with the strongest ears in the world and, perhaps, the sharpest mind,” said Joiner.
 
Art History and Visual Culture and Film Studies joint major Sasha Alcocer ’24, from New York, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship to study at Bard College Berlin for spring 2023. “As a first-generation American, I am incredibly honored and humbled by the support from the Gilman scholarship to pursue this unique opportunity to learn from and connect with like-minded international students and Berlin-based creatives. Having grown up in New York City, I’ve always been interested in artistic communities and cultural history, therefore Berlin could not be a better place to be immersed in for my studies abroad,” said Alcocer.
 
Asian Studies and GIS joint major Kelany De La Cruz ’24, from Bronx, New York, has been awarded a $5,000 Gilman scholarship, in addition to a $5,000 Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) scholarship and a $5,000 Freeman ASIA scholarship, to study in Taipei, Taiwan, on the CET Taiwan program for spring 2023. “To me these scholarships mean encouragement to follow my academic and professional dreams because I would not have been able to study abroad without them,” said De La Cruz.
 
Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,350 U.S. institutions have sent more than 36,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 155 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. 
 
As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.”
 
The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but 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.”
 
The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org

At the 66th Evening Standard Theatre Awards celebration in London, Daniel Fish’s UK iteration of his Tony Award–winning re-orchestrated revival of Oklahoma! was named Best Musical, and Patrick Vaill ’07 took home the Best Musical Performance Award for his role as Jud Fry in the play. Vaill originated the role 15 years ago as a theater and performance senior in Fish’s 2007 Bard staging, which had been commissioned by the then Director of Bard’s Theater Program JoAnne Akalaitis. When Fish adapted the production for Bard’s 2015 SummerScape season, Vaill was cast again as Jud Fry and stayed in this role as the production went from off-Broadway to Broadway. The only remaining original cast member, Vaill joins a mixed British and American cast for the London production. “To be received by the audience and the city in this way is beyond anybody’s reasonable expectation of life,” Vaill said.

In November 2023, the Museum of Modern Art will present the first exhibition of Professor An-My Lê’s powerful photographs alongside her forays into film, video, textiles, and sculpture. “For 30 years, the photographs of artist An-My Lê have engaged the complex fictions that inform how we justify, represent, and mythologize warfare and other forms of conflict,” reads MoMA’s announcement of the exhibition. “Lê does not take a straightforward photojournalistic approach to depicting combat. Rather, with poetic attention to politics and landscape, she meditates on the meaning of perpetual violence, war’s environmental impact, and the significance of diaspora.” 

An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers will include ever-before-seen embroideries and rarely shown photographs from her Delta and Gabinetto series, which explore the relationship between mass media, gender, labor, and violence. And an immersive installation created especially for the exhibition attests to the artist’s long-standing consideration of the cinematic dimensions of photography and war.

An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. She is a recipient the MacArthur Fellowship (2012), New York State Foundation for the Arts grant (1996), and Guggenheim Fellowship (1997). She has been a member of the faculty since 1998. 

This exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography; with Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.

After the liberation of Kherson in November 2022, residents could be heard in the streets singing the Ukrainian national anthem. Alongside it, however, another song was being sung. “‘Oi u luzi chervona kalyna,’ or ‘Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow,’ has become a symbol of resistance against Russian aggression,” writes Daniel Ofman for The World. Maria Sonevystky, associate professor of anthropology and music, told Ofman the song “is closely identified with Ukrainian poetry and music,” and that Ukrainian folk songs often employ naturalistic imagery. “Oi u luzi chervona kalyna” is no different, using the “red viburnum” from which the song takes its name as a grounding metaphor for liberation. “From that kind of opening image, you unspool a kind of metaphor, or a story about politics, or the complexity of life, and that’s the case here, too,” said Sonevystky.

On the podcast A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers, Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts and director of the Photography Program at Bard, discusses his recently published book, a memoir, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, with the host, fellow photographer, Ben Smith. In the interview, Shore talks about the nature of the visual medium of photographs, the flow state of capturing images with a camera, his teaching practice, and the three stages of mastering the discipline of photography, among many other topics. “Photography does something else that words can’t do. It’s not a limitation. It is what the medium is,” he says about the adage: a photograph is worth a thousand words.

This year, various media outlets are selecting works by Bard faculty members for their Best of 2022 lists. Some notable mentions include: 

Assistant Professor of Music Angelica Sanchez’s album Sparkle Beings is named one of the Best Jazz Albums of 2022 by the New York Times.

Professor of Literature Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True is named one of the 10 Best Books of 2022 by the New York Times Book Review and The Best Books of 2022 by the New Yorker.

Professor of Comparative Literature Joseph Luzzi’s Botticelli’s Secret is named one of the Best Books of 2022 So Far in nonfiction by the New Yorker. 

James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People is named among 100 Notable Books of 2022 by the New York Times Book Review. 

Bard Graduate Center's Threads of Power: Lace From the Textilmuseum St. Gallen featured in the New York Times Best Art Books of 2022.
 

Renée Anne Louprette, assistant professor of music, director of the Bard Baroque Ensemble, and College organist, is spending her fall semester sabbatical conducting research supported by a Fulbright US Scholar Award in Brașov, Romania. Hosted by Transylvania University, Louprette’s project focuses on the rich cultural heritage of historic pipe organs in the Transylvanian region and the efforts of local artisans to rescue, preserve, and restore these instruments. She has given recital performances in the urban centers of Brașov and Sibiu, completed audio and video recordings of 18th-century instruments in fortified churches of Mediaș, Saschiz, and Hărman, and of the 1930 Wegenstein organ in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Bucharest. She is also conducting interviews and collecting critical documentation related to notable 18th-century organ builders and recent restorations. She hopes that these efforts will help cast new light on this precious musical heritage unique to Romania as a cross-cultural center of Eastern Europe.

On January 7, 2021, Venezuela’s Special Action Forces raided the La Vega neighborhood of Caracas, leaving 23 people dead in what the community calls the “La Vega massacre.” The special police unit has been accused of targeting working-class neighborhoods, criminalizing young men for where they live as it attempts to root out gang activity. As part of an ongoing project supported by the Pulitzer Center and a Getty Images Inclusion Grant, Bard alumna Lexi Parra ’18 gets to know the women of La Vega who are maintaining their community and pushing back against state and gang violence. 

Lexi Parra majored in human rights and photography at Bard College.

Further Reading

• As gang, police violence rages, a neighborhood tries to connect (Washington Post)
• Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
• Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects for Peace Prize

Jessie Montgomery, composer in residence at Bard, has been named Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year. “Jessie Montgomery grew up surrounded by jazz and activism. A  Juilliard-trained violinist, she gravitated towards composition in her 20s, and later learned to associate her own Black identity with her music. The resulting body of work has been embraced all around the world for its freshness and energy,” writes Musical America. The 62nd annual Musical America awards will be presented at an awards ceremony in New York City on December 4.

Bard composer in residence Missy Mazzoli (2022) and Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts Joan Tower (2020) were recent recipients of this award.