News

Alhassan Susso, Bard MAT alumnus and 2019 New York State Teacher of the Year, has been selected by the NEA Foundation as the recipient of the 2020 Member Benefits Award for Teaching Excellence, which carries a cash prize of $25,000. In making their selection, the Foundation pointed to Susso’s powerful work to educate and inspire immigrant students and the diverse community he serves: “By sharing his own experience as an immigrant and his passion for motivating young people, he has helped his students to see the potential for excellence within themselves. He is living proof that every child in this country deserves a quality education and an opportunity to thrive.” Susso, a West African émigré, teaches at the International Community High School in the Bronx and was nominated for the Members Benefits Award by New York State United Teachers.
https://www.neafoundation.org/ideas-voices/bronx-educator-honored-for-cultivating-community-of-learners-and-inspiring-immigrant-students/

Sun-Ly Pierce MM '19 has won the first prize of $10,000 in the Houston Grand Opera's prestigious competition for young singers. The 32nd annual Eleanor McCollum Competition culminated in the Concert of Arias on Friday, February 7, in which eight finalists performed in the Cullen Theater of the Wortham Theater Center in Houston. The concert was the final event in a process that began with initial auditions in November. This year's competition received over 650 applications from singers around the world.  

Concert of Arias supporters raised more than $600,000, with proceeds benefiting the Eleanor McCollum Competition for Young Singers and Houston Grand Opera Studio’s ongoing outreach efforts to identify, attract, and nurture young artists who have the potential for major careers in opera.

Originally from Clinton, New York, Chinese American mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce recently completed the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at the Bard College Conservatory of Music and holds a bachelor’s degree in vocal performance from the Eastman School of Music. As a winner of the Marilyn Horne Song Competition, Pierce will perform on an international recital tour with pianist Chien-Lin Lu. The tour includes appearances in Santa Barbara, Chicago, New York City, and London and will feature the premiere of a new song cycle written by two-time Grammy Award winning composer, Jennifer Higdon. This past fall, Pierce joined the Broad Street Orchestra as Dorinda in Handel’s Acis and Galatea. She returns to the Music Academy of the West this summer as a 2020 Vocal Fellow, performing the role of L’enfant in Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and covering Hänsel in Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel.
https://www.houstongrandopera.org/globalassets/publications-media--news-items/press-releases/coa-winners-release_final_2.7.20.pdf

Cecilia Alemani MA ’05, director and chief curator of New York’s High Line, has been named curator of the 59th Venice Biennale. She will be only the fifth woman to curate the biennale in its century-long history, and the first Italian woman to do so.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/arts/design/venice-biennale-cecilia-alemani.html

The Anonymous Was A Woman grant program champions women artists over 40 who are at a significant juncture in their lives or careers. Each artist in the 2019 cohort, who range in age from 45 to 84, will receive an unrestricted grant of $25,000 to support the continued development of their practice.
 
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/10-female-artists-40-won-years-25000-anonymous-woman-grants-1711071

In film after film, including his latest, Dark Waters, the director Todd Haynes asks viewers to contend with ambiguity, writes John Lahr in the New Yorker: “Dark Waters subverts by taking the legal thriller—a form that traditionally concludes with the triumph of good over evil—into areas of psychological complexity and ambiguity. All investigative stories, he told me, when we met in Los Angeles in June, have the burden of revealing a truth. ‘What I love so much about the genre,’ he explained, ‘is the cost of revealing the truth. The drama of that, and what it does to people. That is the part that kills you.’
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/11/todd-haynes-rewrites-the-hollywood-playbook

Eban Goodstein, director of Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability, says putting the planet and its inhabitants before profits “is an incredible paradigm shift” for business schools that have long trained their students to maximize shareholder value. Bard’s MBA in Sustainability bakes sustainability principles into every class rather than simply offering sustainability electives as many business schools do. “In theory, you don’t want to have a sustainability department. The goal should be to make sustainability part of the business model,” says 34-year-old Nour Shaikh MBA ’16, a vice president at ING Financial Services.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-04/more-mba-students-want-sustainability-programs

Mueller, who teaches painting at Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, talks to Art in America’s Steel Stillman about the evolution of her work in video, audio, performance, and alternative ways of painting. “I came to understand that the trajectory for my work was to move deeper into the studio and toward painting as a receding horizon,” says Mueller. “At the same time, I was beginning to feel overly safe and in control. I’d become fairly good at negotiating the processes and decisions involved in making the drawings that became enamel paintings and rugs. What would happen if I removed some of that mediation and started to use a brush? I wanted to challenge myself, to operate across a fuller spectrum.”
https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/ulrike-muller-interview-enamel-painting-humiliation/

The soprano and Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna Julia Bullock is on the verge of an unconventional career.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/arts/music/julia-bullock-zauberland-lincoln-center.html

Sillman’s The Shape of Shape at the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art in New York City is “among the most valuable of the inaugural shows.” Sillman “ranges throughout the collection, across media, generations and styles, seeking out overlooked or excluded artists and unfamiliar works. Her effort parallels the approaches at work in the permanent collection galleries, but reflects a relatively robust visual appetite — the artist’s unfettered eye — that the museum needs more of.  The show’s dense installation encourages surprising connections …”
 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/arts/design/moma-reopening.html