News

The Dallas Opera recently announced that Micah Gleason GCP ’21 VAP ’22, who graduated from the Bard College Conservatory's Graduate Conducting Program in 2021 and Vocal Arts Program in 2022, is one of four talented musicians selected to participate in the 2023–24 Hart Institute for Women Conductors Showcase. Gleason (US), Maria Benyumova (Germany), Shira Samuels-Shragg (US), and Jingqi Zhu (China) were chosen from a worldwide applicant pool of more than 75 conductors hailing from 27 countries on five continents.

Launched in 2015, the Hart Institute for Women Conductors Showcase is the only program of its kind in the world and seeks to address the extreme gender imbalance of leadership on the podium as well as in administration in opera companies. Now in its 7th year, more than 500 women conductors from 40 nations have applied to be trained, advised, and supported by this extraordinary initiative.

The annual Institute begins in November (November 13-17) with a week of daily virtual sessions, many of which are livestreamed and open for the public to view at no cost on The Dallas Opera’s You Tube channel. During an intensive ten-day residency in Dallas (January 19-28, 2024), participants will work with esteemed faculty and mentors in group and one-on-one sessions, as well as in rehearsals for the annual Showcase Concert on Sunday, January 28, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. The performance will feature each Institute conductor leading the Dallas Opera Orchestra and guest singers in selections of opera excerpts featuring overtures, solo arias, and ensemble pieces from across the centuries of the canon.
 
https://dallasopera.org/community/artist-development/hart-institute/

Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts Joan Tower discusses more than 60 years of composing music, her inspirations (including visitations from dead composers), the changing landscape for women in composition, and her long tenure of teaching music at Bard with NPR’s music producer Tom Huizenga. When asked to describe her music, Tower confesses that it is hard to know one’s music but she can describe what she cares about. “My music is about rhythm, predominantly, the rhythm of ideas. And it's also organic, and it has a large-scale narrative. Usually, I only write in one movement, so I try to create an overall architecture for that one moment. It's also very important for me to be clear: I don't think my music ever gets complicated enough that you don't hear everything,” she says.
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/08/1191257294/composer-joan-tower-is-finally-going-easy-on-herself

Executive Director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Hannah Barrett’s current exhibition at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, features paintings of “dandy monsters”—sartorial nongendered creatures from the artist’s imagination set in both bureaucratic and fantastical scenery. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven Barrett’s painting for over a decade, leading to their current portraits of these whimsical monsters. “Barrett’s monsters subvert the gender binary by combining masculine dandy finery with high femme elements; the paintings serve up a new representation of the nonbinary (as in both ‘not subscribing to binaries’ and ‘my gender is none of your business’),” writes Shelley Marlow for Hyperallergic.  
https://hyperallergic.com/836340/hannah-barretts-monsters-envision-a-world-without-gender/

Stephanie Harris ’08 CCS ’13 is a special agent with the US Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) currently serving as a liaison at the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Harris is embedded with the US Women’s National Team and is responsible for ensuring the safety of players as they travel across the region to compete with teams from around the world. Along with her fellow DSS agents, she collaborates with US Soccer, FIFA, host-nation counterparts, and colleagues across the United States Government to identify and address potential threats to players and their staff.

At Bard, Harris majored in film and human rights as an undergraduate then went on to study curating at the Center for Curatorial Studies. She credits her experiences at Bard for inspiring a love of analysis and problem solving and writes: “Bard taught me to love learning and left me with an intellectual curiosity that is at the core of everything I do—whether it is art, diplomacy, or global security.” In her first year with DSS, Harris has traveled to more than 10 countries and empowers US and foreign dignitaries to conduct diplomacy safely around the world.

Art historian and curator Darienne Turner BGC ’17, an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe of California, speaks with Terence Trouillot, senior editor of Frieze, about her curatorial practice, what it means to “Indigenize” museums, her studies of material culture at the Bard Graduate Center, and her upcoming role at the Brooklyn Museum of Art as its first full-time curator of Indigenous art. Turner, who is currently assistant curator of Indigenous art of the Americas at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), grapples with the term “decolonization” in the context of museums because of what that language centers. “But what really works against the colonial armature that encyclopaedic museums rest upon? For me that work happens through Indigenizing, through bringing in Indigenous artists and actually listening to what they have to say,” she says. 

Her first show at the BMA in 2020, Stripes and Stars: Reclaiming Lakota Independence, was inspired by objects she found in the museum’s vault—children’s clothing with American flags in their Lakota beadwork designs. “These objects were conundrums for me. I asked myself, ‘Why would the Lakota people, at this moment of intense conflict with the US government, use the symbol of their oppressor on these objects?’ The question catapulted me into deep research into the history of the Lakota people, and the moment of their transition to the reservation in the late 19th century.” What she found was that the Lakota people leveraged patriotic images like the flag in order to make space for themselves to enact cultural practices that had been banned, such as giveaways and puberty ceremonies, all taking place under the cover of the American flag during “patriotic” celebrations like the Fourth of July. “Listening to the stories of the objects is a big part of my practice, as is engaging with community,” says Turner.
https://www.frieze.com/article/darienne-turner-interview-2023

Pavlina Tcherneva, associate professor of economics at Bard College and director of the OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative, provided expert opinion during the preparation of the new United Nations report on the job guarantee, “The Employment Guarantee as a Tool in the Fight Against Poverty.” Professor Tcherneva collaborated with UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Olivier De Schutter on the project. 

“The UN report is a significant recognition of the job guarantee as a key strategy for addressing unemployment, poverty, and inequality,” says Professor Tcherneva. “Nation states concerned with these issues will have the opportunity to respond and, if so willing, adopt the technical recommendations outlined in the report.”

Tcherneva will participate in the official launch of the report on June 30, in a side event held on the occasion of the 53rd session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The event is jointly organized by the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and ATD Fourth World, and cosponsored by the Permanent Mission of Belgium and the Permanent Mission of Luxembourg to the United Nations in Geneva. 

Tcherneva will speak remotely on a panel moderated by Olivier De Schutter, and will be joined by Aye Aye Win, president of the International Committee for October 17th; Kate Philip, programme lead on the Presidential Employment Stimulus, South Africa; and Mito Tsukamoto, chief of the Development and Investment Branch (DEVINVEST) of the Employment Policy Department at the International Labour Office (ILO).

For more information about the event, including the concept note and list of speakers, visit srpoverty.org.

Pavlina Tcherneva is an associate professor of economics at Bard College, the director of the OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative, and a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. She is the author of The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity, 2020) which has been published in eight languages.

The inaugural class of master’s graduates in Human Rights and the Arts through the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA) were profiled in ARTnews. “The program, meant to support mature activists and artists who live in ongoing crisis zones, and who have experienced persecution, war, surveillance, and poverty, has just matriculated its first graduating class in this impressive and unique program,” writes Shanti Escalante-De Mattei. Tania El Khoury, director of CHRA, spoke to the importance of “[creating] an institution that really practices its politics.” “The idea was to create a space in which both the artists and activists could be together and co-create,” she said. “How can we build a space that puts people’s well-being first? How can we be in solidarity with people from around the world and understand inequality together?”

ARTnews also spoke with Carol Montealgre HRA ’23 and Adam HajYahia HRA ’23, who are among this year’s cohort of graduates, about their master’s theses. Montealgre returned to Colombia and reconnected with a union of Indigenous survivors of the country’s civil war. “I asked them what they needed, and they said they needed healing,” she said. HajYahia, meanwhile, researched the history of gender and sexuality in Palestine, finding “documentation of individuals who lived beyond the traditional boundaries of the gender binary and the patriarchy, focusing on sex workers, same sex relationships, and other activities and behavior that were found to be deviant by English colonizers.”

El Khoury told ARTnews she was proud of the inaugural class—and excited for what was to come. “I think so far, we’re managing to practice what we preach,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like this is too good to be true, like someone is going to find out and stop it. But so far, it’s happening.”
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/bard-human-rights-and-arts-masters-tania-el-khoury-1234670264/

Featuring over 100 works from the 1960s through today,
Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 centers performance as origin point for
the practice of artists from across Turtle Island


Exhibition features commissions and performances by
Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂),
Jeffrey Gibson (The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee),
Maria Hupfield (Anishinaabe, Wasauksing First Nation / Canada),
and Eric-Paul Riege (Diné)

The first major exhibition to center performance as an origin point for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Inuit, and Alaska Native artists opens this June at the Center for Curatorial Studies’ (CCS Bard) Hessel Museum of Art. Curated by leading scholar and curator Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 traces the history of experimentation that emerged from the Institute of American Indian Arts’ Department for New Native Theater in the late 1960s and continues to inform the practice of Native artists today. The exhibition brings together over 100 works by over 40 artists and collectives, including new commissions and performances by Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), Jeffrey Gibson (The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee), Maria Hupfield (Anishnaabek, Wasauksing First Nation / Canada), and Eric-Paul Riege (Diné).

On view from June 24 through November 26, 2023, Indian Theater is part of a sweep of initiatives at Bard College to place Indigenous Studies at the heart of curricular innovation and development, including the appointment of Hopkins as CCS Bard’s inaugural Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies.

“This exhibition marks a critical contribution to contextualizing contemporary Indigenous art as part of a larger artistic movement whose history has been understudied and overlooked,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “This groundbreaking presentation at the Hessel Museum provides a new framework for the interpretation of Indigenous contemporary art, a field of study that we look forward to continuing to advance with new research and curatorial innovation.”

“This exhibition takes its impetus from a modest, yet significant document: Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process, published by the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 1969. The treatise was the first to attempt to define ‘New Native’ theater, ushering in a new way of framing the long practice of performance in Indigenous societies across Turtle Island; they were also creating a template for its future,” stated Hopkins. “Inspired by this document, the exhibition, Indian Theater is attuned to the intersections between objects, performance—in its expanded forms—film and video, and visual sovereignty in Native North American contemporary art.”

Taking a broad scope to examining the history of Native contemporary art through the lens of performance, the exhibition engages notions of object and agency, sound and instrumentation, dress and adornment, and the body and its absence. The presentation begins chronologically and cites the 1969 document, Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process, published by the IAIA. Featured is early documentation of IAIA theater performances, along with recently digitized footage of Spiderwoman Theater’s evocatively titled 1979 play Cabaret: An Evening of Disgusting Songs and Pukey Images, available for viewing for the first time since its original debut. The longest running theater group in the United States, Spiderwoman Theater emerged from the feminist movement of the 1970s and the disillusionment with the treatment of women in radical political movements of the time. Cabaret reflects the group’s contribution to the national dialogue on gender in its critique and satirization of how women are often made to swallow male platitudes about love and its challenges to homogenizing images of women.

The exhibition progresses with a survey of film, video, performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, and beadwork that at once pay homage to the legacy of innovative Native aesthetic traditions and this continuing tradition of experimentation and performativity. Jeffrey Gibson’s commission responds directly to the 1969 treatise, Indian Theatre, with a new performance, an arced choreography that centers music and oration. White Carver, an installation and performance by Nicholas Galanin features a non-Native carver engaged in carving a surprising object, one that might initially seem like a customary item in the vein of Northwest Coast Native American art. Galanin reconceives traditional carving practices, including the ways in which many Native carvers on the Northwest coast publicly perform their craft to a non-Native public, to confront the history of colonial fetishization of Indigenous cultures and objects. Another performance features artist Eric-Paul Riege as he engages with a series of soft sculptures of oversized pairs of Diné earrings. Over his day-long durational performance, his suspended sculptures are activated and sounded, becoming an extension of the artist’s body and Diné cosmology.

Both the Galanin and Riege performances will take place in the galleries during opening weekend (June 24-25, 2023), joined by Rebecca Belmore, who will activate her large-scale commission, Familia, with a seven-hour durational performance, and participate in an artist talk. Installed on the exterior of the Hessel Museum of Art, Familia is a monumental new work (17 x 30 ft) that will blanket the Museum’s façade. Using worker’s coveralls as raw material, the piece mirrors the dimension of a flag, but instead of symbolizing nationhood or sovereignty, this work questions the colonial impulses behind these gestures and their histories of labor exploitation. Belmore’s related performance will call attention to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit, and Trans People (MMIWG2ST+) through a collective performance of care that will center objects on the grounds of the Hessel Museum that are often overlooked.

Also on view are works by artists including KC Adams (Métis); asinnajaq (Inuk); Sonny Assu (Ligwiłda'xw Kwakwaka'wakw from Wei Wai Kum Nation); Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc); Rick Bartow (Wiyot); Bob Boyer (Métis); Dana Claxton (Lakota); Theo Jean Cuthand (Plains Cree, Scottish, Irish); Ruth Cuthand (Plains Cree, Scottish, Irish, Canadian); Beau Dick (Kwakwaka’wakw, Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation); Demian DinéYahzi’ (Diné); Rosalie Favell (Métis (Cree/ British); Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin, Czech and Dutch); Ishi Glinsky (Tohono O'odham); Raven Halfmoon (Caddo); Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill (Métis); Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians); Matthew Kirk (Navajo/Diné); Kite (Oglala Sioux Tribe); Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota); Tanya Lukin Linklater (Alutiiq/Sugpiaq); James Luna (Payómkawichum, Ipai, and Mexican); Rachel Martin (Tlingit/Tsaagweidei, Killer Whale Clan, of the Yellow Cedar House (Xaai Hit’) Eagle Moiety); Kent Monkman (Cree member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory, Manitoba); Audie Murray (Métis); Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee); New Red Order, Adam Khalil (Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians); Zack Khalil (Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians); Jackson Polys (Tlingit); Jessie Oonark (Inuit); Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish member of the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Nation); Walter Scott (Kahnawá:ke); Spiderwoman Theater, Charlene Vickers (Anishinaabe); Kay WalkingStick (Citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and Anglo); Marie Watt (Seneca and German-Scot); Dyani White Hawk (Sičangu Lakota); and Nico Williams (Anishinaabe). A full list of artists is available online here.

Additional performances by Ya Tseen and Emily Johnson/Catalyst as well as a series of artists talks will be curated by the Center for Indigenous Studies in complement with Indian Theater throughout the duration of the show.

Exhibition Publication
Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 will be accompanied by a major publication, Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance, edited by Candice Hopkins and co-produced with Forge Project and charting the evolution of Indigenous North American performance in contemporary art over the past 60 years. The reader, which will be available in fall 2023, comprises newly commissioned essays, poetry, and oral history interviews, alongside reprints of critical texts by leading Indigenous scholars and artists.

Exhibition Organization, Credits & Sponsorship
The exhibition and associated reader are made possible by Lonti Ebers, the Marieluise Hessel Foundation, the Gochman Family Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Center’s patrons, supporters, and friends.

Additional support for Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 has been provided by Forge Project, Teiger Foundation, and The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation.

Support for public programs has been provided through the Bard College’s Forge Endowment for American and Indigenous Studies and the Center for Indigenous Studies, generously supported by the Gochman Family Foundation with matching commitments from George Soros and the Open Society Foundation Endowment challenge.

The new commission by Rebecca Belmore for Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 has been generously supported by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times project.

The Bard Graduate Center’s (BGC) exhibition catalogue Threads of Power has received an award of excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC). The exhibition, organized by lead curators Michele Majer, professor emerita at BGC, and Emma Cormack MA ’18, associate curator at BGC, was one of 11 projects that were chosen from nearly 175 nominations vetted by curator jurors from around the world. The exhibition “gives New York its first in-depth look in nearly 40 years at the history of this intricate, fragile, and costly textile,” wrote Roberta Smith for the New York Times. Threads of Power traces the development of European lace from its sixteenth-century origins to the present day, and features more than 150 examples of lace from the renowned collection of Switzerland’s Textilmuseum St. Gallen, including some of the world’s finest examples of handmade needle and bobbin lace that were favored in Bourbon France and Habsburg Spain.

Filmmaker Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, who is associate professor and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, has been selected as a member of the 2023–2024 cohort of Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellows for his work in the arts. During their fellowship year, this international cohort will work on projects that “contend with the urgent, the beautiful, and the vast: from reckoning with the challenges of climate change to creating digital models of iconic Italian violins to detecting distant galaxies.” Asili has been named a Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow, an honor which includes a stipend of $78,000 plus an additional $5,000 to cover project expenses. Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellows are provided studio or office space, use of the Film Study Center’s equipment and facilities, and access to libraries and other Harvard University resources during the fellowship year.

The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program annually selects and supports artists, scholars, and practitioners who bring both a record of achievement and exceptional promise to the institute. A Radcliffe fellowship offers scholars in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts—as well as writers, journalists, and other distinguished professionals—a rare chance to pursue ambitious projects for a full year in a vibrant interdisciplinary setting amid the resources of Harvard. The 2023–2024 fellows represent only 3.3 percent of the many applications that Radcliffe received.
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/harvard-radcliffe-institute-announces-2023-2024-fellowship-class