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“To call Stephen Shore the most precocious photographer in the history of the medium is almost correct,” writes Chris Wiley for the New Yorker. Reviewing Early Work, the newly released book by Stephen Shore, director of the Photography Program and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts, Wiley remarks on the photographs in this new collection, which represent a period of Shore’s work from 1960–65. “Shore seems to have barrelled into his adolescence as a fully formed artist,” Wiley writes. While the photos in Early Work bear more resemblance to the work of photographers like Garry Winograd, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, or Robert Frank than Shore’s most famous works would come to, he was very clearly developing his own aesthetic, Wiley argues. “Shore was not simply aping the styles of his predecessors; he was hard at work cutting his own path.”

For the New Yorker, Philip Gourevich remembers a photo taken by Bard Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress on September 11, 2001. Gourevich and Peress were colleagues at the time, and Peress’s photography ran in the New Yorker’s September 2001 issue. Gourevich describes the photo, which shows two firefighters standing on a destroyed street, as “the last survivors of a lost time” recorded only by Peress. “Rather than making you see, Gilles lets you see—admitting you, with each click of the shutter, to join him as he enters into an immediate and transparent intimacy with lives lived in the teeth of history.”

Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition of animal sculptures on the facade of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art was featured as a Critic’s Pick in the New York Times. The Met’s Facade Commission invites contemporary artists to display their work outside the museum, and Gibson’s four sculptures are its newest addition. His sculptures, which are all of animals that lived inside Central Park, were made from driftwood found in the Hudson Valley, which Gibson carved, scanned, and cast in bronze before coloring.

Gibson recently represented the US at the Venice Biennale and has taught at Bard since 2012. The Times calls his facade exhibit the latest in a “stellar group of artists” and the one that “best understands the assignment of public sculpture [to] engage as wide an audience as possible, without offending, and still register as trenchant artwork.”

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The upcoming dance performance My Town by Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Jack Ferver was included in a roundup by the New York Times. In “10 Things We’re Excited About This Fall,” the Times showcased theater and artistic performances happening throughout the country over the next few months. This included My Town, Ferver’s dance-theater piece which will be performed at the NYU Skirball Center on November 21–22.

My Town is a queer reimagining of Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town. The Times describes the performance as “Ferver’s surreal brand of dark humor” that presents “a raw and exacting piece of dance-theater that looks at small-town life, [exploring] a more haunting side of existence.” Ferver has taught at Bard since 2013 in the Theater and Performance Program and the graduate Vocal Arts Program.

A survey of art works by Nayland Blake ’82, professor of Studio Arts at Bard College, will be on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City, from September 12 through October 25. For decades, Blake has made vital contributions to contemporary art and queer culture as an artist, curator, writer, and educator, and the three-part exhibition will be the largest show of their work in New York in nearly 20 years. The first part, Nayland Blake: Sex in the 90s, surveys Blake’s landmark works created in the midst of the ongoing AIDS crisis and the culture wars of the 1990s, many of which are on view for the first time in nearly 30 years. The second part, Inside: curated by Nayland Blake, includes works by 14 artists whose works Blake has “wanted to be in the presence of, to wander inside of, to refresh my eyes and mind with.” The final part of the exhibition, Session, will be an installation of Blake’s new sculptures, which build upon their works of the late 1980s. 

The Studio Arts Program at Bard features broad offerings beyond the traditional categories of art, while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in basic techniques and principles.

Two members of the Bard College undergraduate faculty, Tanya Marcuse, associate professor of photography, and Sarah Hennies, assistant professor of music, have been awarded 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowships, a highly competitive program of the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Marcuse received a fellowship in the category of Photography for Portent, Part II of her larger project Book of Miracles, and Hennies received a fellowship in the category of Music/Sound for her ongoing work as a composer and percussionist exploring the intersections of sound, perception, and social identity. Marcuse is one of 24 Fellows in Photography, selected from 951 applicants; Hennies is one of 22 Fellows in Music/Sound, selected from 1,015 applicants.

In Portent, Marcuse visualizes phenomena that defy the laws of nature by staging fantastical scenes in swamps, rivers, and orchards near her home in the Hudson Valley. Conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic, her project reflects the instability of our world while expanding photography’s ability to navigate the ambiguous terrain between fact and fiction. She is currently preparing a book and several exhibitions of the project. In addition, Marcuse has been named one of five Joy of Giving Something (JGS) Fellows, which supports contributors to the photographic arts.

Throughout her fellowship, Hennies will continue to develop new pieces that challenge conventional boundaries between music, sound art, and lived experience. Her compositions often take the form of immersive, durational works that foreground subtle shifts in rhythm, resonance, and timbre. Her projects engage themes of queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the politics of listening, inviting audiences into heightened awareness of time and embodiment. In a separate honor, Hennies has been named the 2025 Composer in Residence for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, taking place in Huddersfield, England in November.

Each year, the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship provides a lens for contemporary artistic expression. The themes, ideas, and materials used by the 2025 Fellows reflect and respond to the larger social, political, and economic issues of today. Artists across categories are exploring topics including diasporic and immigrant identity; gender, race, and sexuality; environmental and disability justice; and civic engagement.

Sonita Alizada ’23, a rapper and human rights activist, will embark on a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford beginning this fall. She joins Ronan Farrow ’04 as the second Rhodes winner from Bard College in Annandale. (Nawara Alaboud ’23, originally from Syria, is the first Bard College Berlin student to receive a Rhodes Scholarship.)

Alizada, who double-majored in human rights and music, says Bard played a “crucial” part in her award. “The faculty here have been incredibly supportive, offering guidance, mentorship, and resources that helped me refine my academic and professional goals. They provided encouragement and constructive feedback throughout my application process and helped me navigate each step with confidence.”

She looks forward to continuing her work supporting Afghan women and children by combining “academic research with practical impact.” She looks forward to taking public policy classes at Oxford and focusing specifically on women and children's rights. “I’m deeply honored to receive the Rhodes scholarship, [and] I hope to bring back insights that can further support vulnerable communities,” she said.

Sara J. Winston, associate director of the Photography Program and artist in residence, has been awarded a 2025 Arts and Culture Project Grant by Arts Mid-Hudson, a nonprofit organization which aims to provide vital support to artists and organizations throughout Dutchess, Orange, and Ulster Counties. The grant will support Winston’s project, Too Visceral to be Intelligent, a special edition of her hybrid visual-textual artist book that chronicles her experience of living with Multiple Sclerosis. Diagnosed in 2015, Winston has developed a body of work centered on self-portrait photographs taken during her monthly and biannual intravenous infusion treatments. These images juxtapose the clinical starkness of the environment with her youthful, able-bodied appearance, producing a striking and deeply personal meditation on chronic illness, resilience, and self-representation. The book will be released in an edition of 250 copies in 2026, and as part of the public component of the grant, Winston will present the work at a talk and book launch event at the Center for Photography at Woodstock’s CPW Kingston on February 12, 2026.

The Photography Program at Bard College offers instruction in the medium while providing a historical and aesthetic framework for student development within the context of a broad-based liberal arts education.
 

Photography Program Director and Susan Weber Professor in the Arts Stephen Shore was profiled by the New York Times. Photographer and Bard alumnus Gus Aronson ’20 shot a video that accompanies the profile of Shore, who has headed the photography program at Bard for over 40 years. The profile celebrates the publication of his new collection Early Work, containing photography he took from the ages of 12 to 17. The photos show Shore’s early street photography in Manhattan, shaped by inspirations like Walker Evans and Bruce Davidson; “I was looking a lot and had a lot of influences,” Shore says. Several years later, at 24, Shore would have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Shore has had many exhibitions around the world since then, in Milan, Cologne, Chicago, and more. He has taught in Bard’s Photography Program since 1982. He says these early photos reflect concerns he’s addressed through his entire practice: “I see a formal awareness from the beginning. I’m framing, not pointing.”

Jazz pianist and Bard College alumnus Ran Blake ’60 was interviewed by the Boston Globe for an article covering the artist’s career, which has spanned more than 60 years, and how he at 90 is preparing to perform a solo concert in Brookline, MA, this September. Blake, whose career has yielded over 40 recording credits on jazz albums, has also spent over 40 years teaching jazz at the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC), where he cofounded and led the Department of Third Stream, now called the Department of Contemporary Improvisation. “Ran gave me the freedom to find myself in jazz standards,” said Portuguese singer Sara Serpa, who studied with Blake at NEC and collaborated on an album with him, adding that he “really gave me permission to find myself in the songs, to create my own stories.”Blake also spent years bringing music programming to the public as NEC’s community services director, telling the Globe, “It was very important to send music to where the people are and encourage them to play.”
 

Associate Professor of Photography Tanya Marcuse was interviewed by her former student Emma Ressel ’16 in Lenscratch. They discussed how Marcuse’s work is inspired by the ecology of the Hudson Valley, with her projects ranging from photographs of local apple trees to images of fantastical structures she built with natural material gathered in the region. They also discussed their individual approaches to photographing nature. In photography “sometimes things truly, fully come together,” Marcuse said. “You get a random reward, which isn’t so random, because it’s about continually showing up and paying attention.”

Ressel was a Lenscratch Student Prize winner in 2024. She attended Bard’s Photography Program and has held solo exhibits in New Mexico and is on the shortlist for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize. Marcuse has taught at Bard since 2012. She recently completed her 14-year, three-part project Fruitless | Fallen | Woven, inspired by the Biblical story of the fall from Eden.

Robert Kelly, Asher B. Edelman Professor Emeritus of Literature at Bard College, and Charlotte Mandell ’90, translator and Bard alumna, cowrote a remembrance of Pierre Joris ’69, Bard alumnus and poet who passed away earlier this year. Joris was a prolific poet who edited many collections of poetry and translated poems into French, German, and English. Kelly, who taught Joris at Bard, and Mandell, one of Joris’s former colleagues, discussed their friendship with Joris and his work throughout his career.

“He was never jealous of anybody,” said Mandell of Joris. “He was always happy for other people's success.” Speaking about his translations of Paul Celan, Kelly remembers “Pierre somehow intuited a movement [toward] the kind of free line, the importance of the line, long or short. I think Pierre felt that movement in Celan’s later work [and] made it evident in his translations.”

The Literature Program at Bard challenges national, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries that have often dictated the terms by which we understand the meaning and value of the written word, and has a long-standing commitment to fostering the work of writers and thinkers who expand the parameters of public discourse.

An article coauthored by Miriam Felton-Dansky, director of the Theater and Performance Program at Bard College, has won the 2024 Modern Drama Outstanding Article Award from the University of Toronto Press. “Interface Theatre: Watching Ourselves Disappear,” which Felton-Dansky wrote together with Jacob Gallagher-Ross of the University of Toronto, is a timely analysis and assessment of theatrical responses to and engagement with digital culture. The essay explores the concept of what they have termed “interface theatre,” illuminating a genre in which live performance lays bare the invisible architectures of digital life. This new conceptual framework explains how theatre can not only depict but also embody the logics of algorithmic life, revealing how interfaces shape identity, surveillance, and the perception of self. The essay also received an honorable mention for the 2025 Outstanding Article Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, one of the largest scholarly organizations in the field.

Bard’s Theater and Performance Program offers an interdisciplinary, liberal arts-based approach to the making and study of theater and performance, and embraces a wide range of performance practices, from live art and interactive installation to classical theater from around the globe.

Lucas Blalock ’02, assistant professor of photography at Bard College, was interviewed in To Be Magazine. In conversation with Jasime Penman, Blalock discusses the interplay between new technologies and photography, his thoughts on meme culture, and what it’s like to teach in the same program where he once studied as a student. “In 2009, when I started leaning into working with Photoshop in a more evident way, photography had really great boundaries,” Blalock told Penman. “It was clear what was a photograph and what wasn’t a photograph, and it just wasn’t nearly as porous as it has become. As the technology changed, the potentials of my practice changed along with it, all the way up to the present. The markers I can pinpoint are digital printing, Photoshop, the smartphone and Instagram, and now, AI.”

When asked about what it is like teaching at the school where he studied, Blalock said, “I was thrilled to get the position. Bard has an amazing photography program and there are so many great artists who teach there. I was happy about it, but I don’t think I was ready for the level of uncanniness of teaching in a room I used to study in or being in the darkroom that I’d spent so many hours in.”

Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis contributed photos to an essay in the New York Times Opinion section. “Finding Beauty at Maximum Discount” by Crispin Sartwell, part of a wider Times series about discovering joy in the unexpected, is about the allure of Walmart and its “choices beyond number.” Davis’s photos of shelves and shoppers show the abundance of the supermarket chain through the thousands of colors and forms that stretch throughout its spaces. “The beauty of Walmart is that it is a realistic beauty,” Sartwell writes. “A practical beauty, a real beauty.”

Davis has taught photography at Bard since 2004. His work often focuses on small towns and incorporates photos with music. His latest photobook Normaltown, which is about everyday life in Athens, Georgia, was published in 2024.

Visiting Associate Professor of Writing Susan Fox Rogers has been awarded the Harvard Review Chapbook Prize for 2025. The prize is awarded every two years to works of nonfiction, including travel, memoir, and reportage, that are between 15,000 and 30,000 words. Rogers’s essay, “Guivi,” is about family secrets, following the posthumous letters of a reserved mother and their consequences. Rogers is currently working on a mystery novel set at a birding club in the Hudson Valley.

This year’s judge was Jerald Walker, who is a professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College. Walker describes Rogers as “a master essayist who also happens to have a few secrets of her own” and the essay as “a spellbinding study in humankind’s complexity.” “I savored every page, and yet somehow I was still unprepared for the cumulative power those pages would yield,” he writes.

Beto O’Byrne, visiting artist in residence in theater and performance at Bard College, along with the collective he cofounded, Radical Evolution Performance Collective, has received a New York City Small Theatres Fund Award. The award, in the amount of $15,500, is bestowed by ART/New York, an arts service organization dedicated to supporting New York City’s community of nonprofit theaters, and the Howard Gilman Foundation, which provides funding and support to New York City–based performing arts organizations that are reflective of its vibrant cultural community. One of 17 recipients elected from 182 applications, O’Byrne and Radical Evolution will receive two years of flexible funds to support their theater operations. Since its founding in 2011, Radical Evolution has been committed to creating artistic events that seek to understand the complexities of mixed-identity existence in the 21st century. The collective collaborates with people from many different identities to break down barriers between cultures and creative practices, and aims to seed the field of experimental and collaboratively created theater with practitioners who celebrate the intersectionality of perspectives and aesthetics of New York City.

Walid Raad, professor of photography at Bard College, has been announced as a recipient of a 2025 Trellis Foundation Milestone Grant. As one of 12 recipients named by the Trellis Art Fund, Raad will receive an unrestricted grant in the amount of $100,000, which will be disbursed in two installments over a two-year period. The award aims to provide support to artists who reflect a consistent, engaged practice and who have demonstrated a trajectory of creative excellence over the course of their career. Grantees will also be supported with career-development assistance, including workshops, and in November Trellis will host a retreat in upstate New York for 2024 and 2025 Milestone grantees to foster community-building. The winners, chosen by an anonymous five-person panel, range in age from 38 to 82 and were selected based on their demonstrated commitment to their respective practices, their unique contributions to their fields, and the consistently high quality of their work.

Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture Anne Hunnell Chen has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Grant for the project “Archaeological Archives as Inclusive Learning Laboratories,” one of seven established projects to be awarded the 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Development Grant of up to $100,000. The project focuses on American excavations at iconic sites, like Dura-Europos in Syria, which have shaped Western scholarship, which hardly includes mention of local communities whose labor made these excavations possible. Through oral histories, an enriched dataset, improved browsing interface, and digital training, their work “aims to insert and amplify local Syrian voices, giving communities a platform to share their stories alongside traditional archaeological narratives” and “to rebalance a one-sided history and make digital archives more accessible to a wider range of users.”

The Archaeological Archives project is an expansion of Chen’s International Digital Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), the first project to use a multilingual Linked Open Data dataset to reassemble and recontextualize institutionally- and disciplinarily-fragmented information descendent of colonially-entangled excavation histories. IDEA, which was funded over three years by the National Endowment for the Humanities, aims to address the dispersal of archival materials across the world by improving access to information for those in different disciplinary and linguistic areas. Its iteration at the Bard Center for Experimental Humanities, called IDEA_Lab@EH, has provided public-facing research opportunities for nearly 50 Bard undergraduates over the past three years. Chen hopes to further extend the impact of IDEA_Lab@EH through virtual learning opportunities throughout the Bard network.

The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) recently announced recipients of the 2025 ACLS Digital Justice Grants, which fund digital projects across the humanities and social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

The Wiháŋble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard College has been announced as the recipient of a $93,000 grant from the Wagner Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Boston. The grant will support the project “Cosmologyscape,” a multi-platform, socially engaged public art initiative co-lead by Wiháŋble S’a Center Director Dr. Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence and assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies at Bard, and artist and producer Alisha B. Wormsley MFA ’19.

“Cosmologyscape” will launch its next chapter with an exhibition at Wagner in January 2026, and will include features such as Dream Mosaic tiles visualizing collective dreams installed along long gallery walls, a comfortable Dream Office space in which attendees can gather and rest, digital projections showcasing a localized “Boston Dreaming” webpage, and other installations. The project, which solicits dreams from the public that are translated into quilting patterns generated from 26 Black and Lakota symbols, aims to activate rest and dreaming as liberatory acts through sculpture, digital engagement, and community programming.

“This grant affirms that dreaming is a vital, collective act—and that rest, vision, and story are the seeds of real change,” said Dr. Suzanne Kite, director of the Wiháŋble S’a Center. “With support from the Wagner Foundation, ‘Cosmologyscape’ can continue unfolding as a cosmic quilt—each dream a thread, weaving together Black and Indigenous futures across time, land, and memory.”

Wagner Foundation is a Cambridge, MA-based foundation that invests in health equity, economic prosperity, and cultural transformation across the globe. Wagner Foundation prioritizes work that strengthens equitable systems and views artists as leaders and changemakers who are critical voices in interrogating the past, wrestling with the current moment, and envisioning alternative futures. Learn more at wfound.org.