News

Bard alumna Micah Gleason GCP ’21 VAP ’22 was profiled in the New York Times for a piece which for a year followed five students attending the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Gleason is “an easygoing yet fiercely skilled conductor and singer,” writes Joshua Barone for the Times. “On the eve of graduation, Gleason presented a workshop performance of a chamber opera she was developing with Joanne Evans, a former classmate from Bard College and her duo partner.” The Curtis Institute of Music educates and trains exceptionally gifted young musicians to engage a local and global community through the highest level of artistry. Students at Curtis hone their craft through more than 200 orchestra, opera, and solo and chamber music offerings and programs, bringing arts access and education to the community.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/04/arts/music/curtis-institute-music-philadelphia.html

For the fourth year in a row, the MBA in Sustainability Program at Bard College has been ranked as the Best Green MBA in the Princeton Review’s 2024 Business School rankings. This year, Bard's program also ranked no. 1 in the Review‘s Best MBA for Nonprofits, surpassing the MBA programs at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Stanford. The Review’s rankings follow on the Bard program’s recent no. 4 worldwide position in the Better World MBA global assessment.

The NYC-based Bard MBA has seen strong growth in demand for its unique educational program. Graduates are pursuing careers in both leading for-profit and nonprofit companies, where they are working to solve critical social and environmental challenges. 

“The Bard MBA’s overall focus on steering mission-driven organizations provides a powerful foundation for aspiring nonprofit leaders and managers,” said Unique Brathwaite, who anchors the nonprofit concentration at Bard. “Our graduates emerge with a profound understanding of prioritizing mission, while also ensuring the long-term financial viability of their organizations.”
 
The Review’s honors were based primarily on a survey of more than 20,300 students enrolled at 244 US MBA programs during the past several academic years. The student survey asked students more than 90 questions about their school's academics, student body, and campus life, as well as their career plans. Only 28% the 244 On-Campus MBA Programs appeared in one or more of The Review’s 18 ranking lists: Bard and Stanford were the only MBAs to receive two no. 1 rankings in 2024.
https://leadthechange.bard.edu/blog/bards-mba-in-sustainability-ranked-1-green-mba-for-fourth-straight-year

Jacquelyn Stucker ’13, an alumna of Bard’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, was reviewed in the New York Times for her role as Delilah in the opera Samson at the Aix-en-Provence festival. Samson, a never-performed opera by Voltaire and Rameau, two of Enlightenment France’s most important cultural figures, was performed as an updated production with pieces drawn from other Rameau works to replace the original score, which was lost some 250 years ago. The Aix production “retains the hypnotic continuity of Rameau’s complete operas, their steadiness and also their variety, veering from festive to soulful, from raucous dances to hushed, hovering arias and radiant choruses,” writes Zachary Woolfe for the New York Times.  “The mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre (Timna) and the soprano Jacquelyn Stucker (Dalila) are both exquisitely sensitive in their floating music.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/arts/music/samson-pichon-guth-aix-festival-rameau-voltaire.html

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College has appointed Pavlina R. Tcherneva as its next president, succeeding Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, who has held the role since its founding in 1986.

“After 38 years as president of the Levy Institute, the time has come to pass the baton to the new generation,” Papadimitriou announced. “I can think of no one better than Pavlina to lead the Levy Institute into its next phase of development in exploring solutions to the economic challenges that lie ahead.” Papadimitriou will remain at the Institute as president emeritus and senior scholar.

Tcherneva, who first joined the Levy Institute in 1997 as a forecasting fellow, has been a scholar at the Institute since 2007, specializing in modern money and public policy. She is a professor of economics at Bard College and founding director of the Bard-OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative. Her book The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity 2020), one of the Financial Times economics books of 2020 and published in nine languages, is a timely guide to the benefits of one of the most transformative public policies being discussed today.

“I am honored and energized to take this new role and am grateful to Dimitri Papadimitriou for building a world-class institution that has influenced economic policy in the US and abroad. I am especially excited to support the work of my colleagues whose research has placed the Levy Institute among the most-cited non-profits in the world,” stated Tcherneva. “My mission is clear: to continue to curate cutting-edge research, grow our graduate programs, and amplify the Institute's impact on policy. We have produced some of the most influential work on financial instability, money, inequality, gender, and employment policy and we will continue to make these impacts and expand the Institute's reach.”

She added, “Our work matters. Financial markets crash. Mainstream theories fail. At the Levy Economics Institute, we will continue to do what we do best: make sense of the senseless, find patterns in the chaos of global economics, and produce actionable policies for a safe, sustainable, and stable economy.”

Since 1986, the Levy Institute and its scholars have reinvigorated heterodox economics, with contributions to macroeconomic theory, modeling, and policy targeting financial and economic stability for the US economy and the rest of the world. The Levy Institute has also developed a distinct research program on the distribution of income and wealth featuring two measures of economic well-being (LIMEW) and time and income poverty (LIMTIP) that will help shift official measures of living standards in the years ahead; is one of few institutions with a focus on gender equality and the economy; and has graduated scholars from its MA and MS degree programs in Economic Theory and Policy, who go on to play significant roles in economic think tanks, international organizations, governments, and the world of finance.

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents Off Site, the Class of 2025 thesis performances and exhibition, which brings together the culminating work of third-year MFA candidates in the disciplines of moving image, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. This year, the exhibition will be split between two galleries in Hudson, New York: Basilica Hudson and Time & Space Limited (TSL). The show is curated by Mary Fellios. The opening weekend of events will begin with a catered reception from 7–8 pm to open the Music/Sound student performances at Basilica Hudson on Thursday, July 11, 8–11 pm, as part of Basilica’s Jupiter Nights, a series of summer performances. Thesis projects in various disciplines will be on view in the galleries at Basilica Hudson and Time & Space Limited, opening on Friday, July 12 with opening receptions from 5–8 pm held concurrently at both locations. Film screenings and readings will be presented at TSL on Saturday, July 13, 1–4 pm, followed by a reception from 4–6 pm. The TSL galleries will be open during the reception. The gallery exhibitions will be on view through Sunday, July 21.

Off Site presents the work of Bard’s MFA Class of 2025. The title references the nature of this year’s exhibition as both a logistical reality and resilient methodology in which art activates pathways between malleable pasts and potential futures. Off Site marks a new era of openness for the program as this is the first Thesis Exhibition to occur off campus. It is staged across two venues in Hudson, New York, Time & Space Limited and Basilica Hudson.

Disruptions around the source of the authorial voice; the destabilization of boundaries separating real and artificial space; and forms of perceptual mapping are among the concerns that spark connections between the works on view. Off Site showcases 19 artists working across a variety of mediums—from painting to sound installation—alongside two nights of performances.

The Class of 2025
Jasmine Amussen (Writing)
Michaela Bathrick (Sculpture)
Erin Hoffstetter (Photography)
Jenny Jisun Kim (Painting)
Kinlaw (Music/Sound)
Alima Lee (Moving Image)
Matthew Li (Sculpture)
Tyler Little (Writing)
Carolyne Loreé Teston (Photography)
A. Mac (Sculpture)
Alina Maldonado (Music/Sound)
Chantal Michelle (Music/Sound)
Cherry Nin (Moving Image)
lucia reissig (Sculpture)
Will Stovall (Painting)
geetha thurairajah (Painting)
Taryn Tomasello (Sculpture)
Aynsley Vandenbroucke (Writing)
Grace Villamil (Music/Sound)

Mary Fellios is a curator who received their MA in Curatorial Studies from CCS Bard. They have completed research and worked on programs with Textile Arts Center (New York, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (San Diego, CA), Brooklyn Museum (New York, NY), Performa (New York, NY), and Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy, NY).

Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student — serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist-student engages with accomplished faculty members while developing their individual studio practice. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography and music/sound. Bard MFA is a low-residency program that takes place over two years and two months. Students are on campus for three consecutive eight-week summer sessions and off campus for two independent study sessions completed during the intervening winters.

For more information, please contact the Bard MFA Office at (845) 758-7481 or [email protected].

Off Site
Class of 2025 Bard MFA Thesis Exhibition
July 14–21, 2024

Basilica Hudson: Student Performances
Thursday, July 11, 2024: Reception 7–8 pm, Performances 8–11 pm

Opening Receptions at Basilica Hudson and Time & Space Limited
Friday, July 12, 2024: Reception 5–8 PM at both locations

Time & Space Limited: Student Performances and Screenings
Saturday, July 13, 2024: Performances 1–4 pm, Reception 4–6 pm

Basilica Hudson and Time & Space Limited Gallery Hours:
Monday–Friday, 11 am–5 pm | Saturday & Sunday, 1–5 pm
Basilica Hudson will be closed on Saturday, July 13

Basilica Hudson
110 Front Street, Hudson, NY 12534

Time & Space Limited
434 Columbia Street, Hudson, NY 12534

Hudson, New York is a 30-minute drive from the Bard College campus. Amtrak trains from New York City and points north stop at the Hudson Amtrak station. Please check Amtrak for schedules. The train station is a short walk to Basilica Hudson and about a 20-minute walk to Time & Space Limited.

Both Basilica Hudson and Time & Space Limited will be open during Upstate Art Weekend on Friday, July 21, 11 AM–5 PM, and Saturday & Sunday, 1–5 PM.

Please contact the Bard MFA Office at (845) 758-7481 or [email protected] for any questions or requests regarding accessibility, including audio or film descriptions.

Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, visiting faculty in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, has been awarded a 2024 fellowship from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust (BBT) in support of her professional projects. The BBT Fellowship Program rewards musical excellence demonstrated by outstanding young musicians—for individuals and ensembles that have been selected from over 32 countries—with fellowships in 2024 being given to seven artists, including Fitz Gibbon. BBT winners are awarded between £20,000 and £30,000. There are no set criteria for how artists spend their budget. Winners are encouraged to be creative and to use their awards in a way that will help to establish and build their careers. Over the next three years, BBT’s fellowship funding will support Fitz Gibbon in the commissioning of new works, performances, and recordings. BBT also will provide advice, guidance, contacts, and public relations exposure. BBT artists join a supportive family that helps to advance their careers.

“I am overwhelmed with gratitude to have received one of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust’s 2024 Artist Fellowships. The nomination process asked me to dream about what I could accomplish with the kind of latitude that this funding and administrative support would represent, but I found the range of possibilities almost too tantalizing to imagine, as if I could permit myself only an oblique gaze at what might be,” wrote Fitz Gibbon upon receiving the fellowship.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon is noted for her “dazzling virtuoso singing” (Boston Globe) and believes that creating new works and recreating those lost in centuries past makes room for the diversity of voices integral to classical music’s future. Spotlighted as a Rising Star of Classical Music for 2024 in the February 20, 2024, edition of the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) Music Magazine, Fitz Gibbon is one of 15 young classical musicians that the BBC has identified worldwide who are making a prominent stamp on the industry, whether with concert performances, opera roles, or dazzling new recordings.
https://www.bbtrust.com/artist/lucy-fitz-gibbon/biography/

The exhibition Sonia Delaunay: Living Art at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery was featured as a Critic’s Pick in the New York Times. “Some very strong moments of exhibition design (no easy feat with so many oddly shaped, fragile and iterative objects) pay off in a wall of crepe silk swatches from Sonia’s workshop,” writes Walker Mimms for the Times. Mimms continues, “Only in Bard’s dense wardrobe of a show do the sources of Sonia’s painterly voice become obvious: the bunchable, joinable, repeatable textures of cloth.” The exhibition reflects Delaunay’s kaleidoscopic output through all periods of her career, tracing lifetime of creative expression and presenting an innovator who transcended conventional artistic boundaries and devotedly lived her art.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/arts/design/sonia-delaunay-artist-bard-textiles.html

Renowned Earth Scientist Naomi Oreskes to Give Commencement Address

Bard College will hold its one hundred sixty-fourth commencement on Saturday, May 25, 2024. Bard President Leon Botstein will confer 395 undergraduate degrees on the Class of 2024 and 229 graduate degrees, including master of fine arts; doctor and master of philosophy and master of arts in decorative arts, design history, and material culture; master of science and master of arts in economic theory and policy; master of business administration in sustainability; master of arts in teaching; master of arts in curatorial studies; master of science in environmental policy and in climate science and policy; master of music in vocal arts and in conducting; master of music in curatorial, critical, and performance studies; and master of education in environmental education. Bard will also confer 40 associate degrees from its microcolleges. The program will begin at 2:30 pm in the commencement tent on the Seth Goldfine Memorial Rugby Field.
 
The Commencement address will be given by internationally renowned earth scientist, science historian, and author Naomi Oreskes, who is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Honorary degrees will be awarded to Naomi Oreskes, President of Al Quds University Imad Abu Kishek, sculptor El Anatsui, Chancellor of New York City Public Schools David C. Banks, scholar R. Howard Bloch, health economist Richard Frank ’74, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, and actor Rachel Weisz. 

Other events taking place during Commencement Weekend include Bard College award ceremonies. The Bard Medal will be presented to Sandy Zane ’80 and The Right Reverend Andrew M.L. Dietsche; the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science to Daniel Fulham O’Neill ’79 and Andrew Zwicker ’86; the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters to Adam Conover ’04 and James Fuentes ’98; the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service to Paul J. Thompson ’93 and Erin J. Law ’93; the Mary McCarthy Award to Karen Russell; the László Z. Bitó ’60 Award for Humanitarian Service to Golden McCarthy ’05, Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14; and Bardian Awards to Myra Young Armstead, Patricia Eichenbaum Karetzky, Joel Perlmann, and Tom Wolf.

ABOUT THE COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER
Naomi Oreskes is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. She is an internationally renowned earth scientist, science historian, and author of both scholarly and popular books and articles on the history of earth and environmental science. Her authored or coauthored books include The Rejection of Continental Drift (1999), Plate Tectonics: An Insider’s History of the Modern Theory of the Earth (2001), Merchants of Doubt (2010), The Collapse of Western Civilization (2014), Discerning Experts (2019), Why Trust Science? (2019), and Science on a Mission: How Military Funding Shaped What We Do and Don’t Know about the Ocean (2021).

Oreskes has been a leading voice on the science and politics of anthropogenic climate change. Her 2004 essay “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” (Science 306: 1686)—the first peer-reviewed paper to document the scientific consensus on this crucial issue—has been cited more than 2,500 times. It was featured in the landmark Royal Society publication, “A Guide to Facts and Fictions about Climate Change,” and in the Academy Award–winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. Her 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt (coauthored with Erik M. Conway), has been translated into nine languages and was made into a documentary film produced by Participant Media and distributed by SONY Pictures Classics. Her 2014 TED Talk, “Why We Should Trust Scientists,” has over 1.6 million views.

In 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow for a book project with Erik M. Conway, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. It was released by Bloomsbury Press in February 2023, and has been widely reviewed, including in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New Yorker. 

Nona Faustine: White Shoes, a series of 43 self-portraits shot throughout New York City over the course of decades, explores the city’s central but often obscured role in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as examining questions about representation and perception of the Black body—and, more specifically, the Black female body—in art and other spaces. Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum through July 7, this first solo exhibition of Nona Faustine MFA ’13 was selected as a New York Times Critic’s Pick when it opened in March and was recently reviewed on CNN. The body of work, including many striking photographs of the artist posing fully nude apart from a pair of crisp white pumps, began while Faustine was a graduate student at the International Center of Photography (ICP) program at Bard College. “All my knowledge, everything I know about photography, and everything I know about history and life is part of the work. My heart and soul is in that series,” Faustine told CNN in an email. 
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/02/style/nona-faustine-nude-photos-white-shoes-black-history/index.html

Thousands of high school students across the United States have been studying the work of Bard Professor of Economics and Research Scholar of the Levy Economics Institute Pavlina Tcherneva in preparation for their national debate tournaments. The official resolution for the 2023–24 High School Policy Debate Topic reads: “The United States federal government should substantially increase fiscal redistribution in the United States by adopting a federal jobs guarantee, expanding Social Security, and/or providing a basic income.” Tcherneva’s book The Case for a Job Guarantee was included in the compilation of research, which the Library of Congress prepares each year, pertinent to the annually selected national debate topic. As this year’s debate season progressed, the federal jobs guarantee policy has emerged as the overwhelming favorite policy for student debate teams on the affirmative. As a result, there are at least a few thousand students across the United States who have gotten very well acquainted with Tcherneva’s work over the past three months. 

According to Chris Gentry, program manager of the Policy Debate League for Chicago Public Schools, “Almost every affirmative team across the country is running a jobs guarantee case, and to do so they are pulling heavily on Tcherneva’s publications.” During one weekend tournament, Gentry realized that essentially every debate relied on Tcherneva’s work. In just one round that he was judging, 10 different articles or books that she wrote had been quoted. “At least twice this last weekend, I heard ‘well that’s not what Tcherneva is trying to get at here,’” he added. Another high school debate coach in Los Angeles confirmed that Tcherneva has likely been the most cited author in high school debate this year, and as a result the student debaters are quite familiar with her work.

“Personally, I can’t think of a greater impact of my work than seeing young people engage with it, study it, and defend its principles,” says Tcherneva. After meeting with a group of high school student debaters this month, she adds, "The questions the students asked about the job guarantee were probing, well-informed, thoughtful, and inspired—with a keen focus on social justice. I hope that some of them will become policy makers.”

Inspired by this nationwide student engagement, Tcherneva has also opened up spots in her summer workshop “Public Finance and Economic Policy” to select high-school debate students interested in going deeper into Modern Monetary Theory and the job guarantee. Organized and hosted by Bard College and the OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative (EDI), this five-day workshop taking place online June 17–21 is for undergraduate students interested in public policy to tackle economic instability and insecurity, and in understanding the financing capacity and policy space available to governments to pursue these aims. Applications from high school debate students will be reviewed in April and early May. Students can apply here.

Tcherneva also recently developed a resource tool jobguarantee.org, created and maintained by Bard College students and alumni, with the support of OSUN, for anyone interested in learning more about the job guarantee policy innovation.

Centered on the well-being of some of the most vulnerable parts of the US population, the 2023–24 national debate topic of “Economic Inequality” prevailed over “Climate Change” and represents a pressing issue at the forefront of our collective societal consciousness.

Ariella Budick of the Financial Times penned a glowing review of Sonia Delaunay: Living Art at Bard Graduate Center Gallery. The “spectacular new survey … is at once exuberant and weighty,” Budick writes. “Delaunay spent most of the 20th century producing furniture, playing cards, textiles, theatre costumes, fashion, paintings, mosaics and her own persona, all of them saturated in kaleidoscopic hues.” The show follows Delaunay’s radical artistic vision through a dramatic life, across Europe and two world wars, to later recognition as a national treasure in France.
https://www.ft.com/content/283495fc-52e7-470e-856b-0256ec08071f