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Press Release
The Keith Haring Foundation donates $400,000 to establish Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism at Bard College
The Fellowship will bring a distinguished leader in the field to Bard to investigate the role of art as a catalyst for social change, linking the two programs and presenting original research in an annual lecture. The Keith Haring Lecture in Art and Activism will be delivered annually at Bard College and will be published and widely distributed among universities and colleges internationally.
“This joint program,” says CCS Bard graduate program director Paul O’Neill, “expands our commitment to investigating the political dimensions of artistic practice and how art can be a productive force for social change.”
Thomas Keenan, director of Bard's Human Rights Project, noted that the fellowship offered "an innovative platform to explore a question basic to Keith Haring’s legacy: how can art and artists play a real role in creating a more just society?“
Julia Gruen, Executive Director of the Keith Haring Foundation states, “We are honored to establish this dynamic fellowship at Bard College in Keith Haring’s name. The artist as activist was a role integral to Haring’s own vision, identity and practice, and we are confident that a fellowship dedicated to this approach can produce illuminating opportunities for discourse and scholarship.”
The Fellowship
The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism is an appropriate tribute to the life and work of Keith Haring, whose contributions to the visual arts and to human rights activism cannot be separated. Just as his playful and sometimes controversial work injected political questions about HIV/AIDS and gay identity into a generally complacent art world, so his activism helped mainstream advocacy organizations understand the AIDS crisis as a broad human rights issue rather than the problem of a specific community. It is this complicated engagement between human rights and the arts that the two Bard programs seek to honor—and to emulate—in the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism.
The Fellowship will bring one prominent scholar, activist, or artist to Bard per year. The Fellow will spend one semester in residence at Bard, teaching in the CCS Bard and Human Rights Program, and pursuing his or her own research project.
Selection Process
The Keith Haring Fellow will be selected through a nomination and review process that will be overseen by Tom Eccles, Executive Director of CCS Bard; Paul O’Neill, the Director of the CCS Bard graduate program; and Thomas Keenan, the Director of the Bard College Human Rights Project.
Bard College will begin seeking nominations and accepting applications for the Keith Haring Fellowship beginning in February, and the first Fellow will be announced in Spring 2014.
About the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project
Bard College seeks to realize the best features of American liberal arts education, enabling individuals to think critically and act creatively based on a knowledge and understanding of human history, society, and the arts. Two pioneering programs developed under this mission are the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Human Rights Project. The Human Rights Project, founded in 1999, developed the first interdisciplinary undergraduate degree program in Human Rights in the United States. HRP maintains a special interest in freedom of expression and the public sphere, and explores the too-often neglected cultural, aesthetic, and representational dimensions of humans rights discourse.
CCS Bard was founded in 1990 as an exhibition and research center for the study of late twentieth-century and contemporary art and culture and to explore experimental approaches to the presentation of these topics and their impact on our world. Since 1994, the Center for Curatorial Studies and its graduate program have provided one of the world’s most forward thinking teaching and learning environments for the research and practice of contemporary art and curatorship. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty and researchers to question the critical and political dimension of art, its mediation and its social significance. CCS Bard cultivates innovative thinking, radical research and new ways to challenge our understanding of the social and civic values of the visual arts. CCS Bard provides an intensive educational program alongside its public events, exhibitions, and publications, which collectively explore the critical potential of the institutions and practices of exhibition-making. It is uniquely positioned within the larger Center's tripartite resources, which include the internationally renowned CCS Bard Library and Archives and the Hessel Museum of Art, with its rich permanent collection.
Since 2009, CCS Bard and HRP have collaborated on a series of seminars, workshops, research projects, and symposia aimed at exploring the intersections between human rights and the arts, and doing so in a manner that takes neither term for granted but in fact uses their conjunction to raise critical, foundational questions about each. While academic in nature, this research and teaching nevertheless draws heavily on the realm of practice, involving human rights advocates, artists, and curators.
About the Keith Haring Foundation
Keith Haring (1958-1990) generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and disadvantaged communities. In 1989, Keith established a foundation to ensure that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.
The Keith Haring Foundation makes grants to not-for-profit groups that engage in charitable and educational activities. In accordance with Keith’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: The support of organizations which provide educational opportunities to underprivileged children and the support of organizations which engage in education, prevention and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection.
Keith Haring additionally charged the Foundation with maintaining and protecting his artistic legacy after his death. The Foundation maintains a collection of art along with archives that facilitate historical research about the artist and the times and places in which he lived and worked. The Foundation supports arts and educational institutions by funding exhibitions, educational programs, acquisitions and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate the artist’s work and philosophy.
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BARD COLLEGE CONTACT:
Mark Primoff, Director of Communications
Tel: +1 845.758.7412
Email: primoff@bard.edu
CCS BARD CONTACT:
Ramona Rosenberg, External Affairs Manager
Tel: +1 (845) 758-7574
Email: rrosenberg@bard.edu
This event was last updated on 01-28-2014