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The growing field of sports sustainability is only about 15 years old, writes Bret McCormick for Sports Business Journal, and professionals find their way into those jobs from dozens of entry points. Aly Criscuolo, who graduated from Bard’s MBA in Sustainability program in 2019, is currently sustainability and corporate social responsibility director for New York Road Runners (NYRR), a running nonprofit that organizes several activities and races, including the New York City marathon since 1970. Criscuolo’s capstone project for Bard focused on making triathlons more sustainable, and now she leads NYRR’s efforts to make their races, as well as its internal functioning, more environmentally sustainable. “If I had walked into my role at New York Road Runners without that MBA experience, I would not have known what to do on my first day,” she said. “The education, the hands-on experience, walking in on Day One, I knew exactly where to begin, what my first six months would look like. I had the confidence as well, which I would not have had without the MBA.” As sustainability becomes more of a priority in the business world, higher education will need to meet the demand for more graduates with training and expertise in the field. 

“Everybody loves a Toni Morrison, an Audre Lorde, a James Baldwin,” Bard alumna Xaviera Simmons ’05 said to the New York Times. “Books are fabulous, but you can’t stay in a book club or a reading circle or a listening stance and expect things to miraculously change.” Simmons’s new exhibition, Crisis Makes a Book Club, puts the question of the efficacy of reading groups as a means of accomplishing systemic change at the fore. At the center of the exhibition is “Align” (2022), a “40-foot-long wooden shedlike structure with phrases gradually coming into focus: ‘unlearning and undoing,’ ‘white-structured disasters,’ ‘commitment to transformation.’” The work, “both humorous and wholly serious,” was created in response to “a group of very wealthy, very influential and very seasoned white women in the arts, philanthropy, and academia” whom Simmons knew. Presented alongside “Align” are other works by Simmons, as well as the first solo museum show by Charisse Pearlina Weston, whose work also engages in themes of racial justice. Crisis Makes a Book Club is on display now through March 5, 2023, at Queens Museum.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/arts/design/queens-museum-racial-justice.html

Artist, publisher, and Bard College alumnus Paul Chan MFA ’03 has been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. "He draws on a wealth of cultural touchstones—from classical philosophy to modern literature, critical theory, and hip-hop culture—to produce works that respond to our current political and social realities,” the MacArthur Foundation says, “making those realities more immediately available to the mind for contemplation and critical reflection.” Chan’s work, which “[strives] to express humanity’s complexities and contradictions through an artistic practice that moves across media,” has been exhibited in the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Guggenheim Museum, and others. Chan received the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters in 2021.

The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selection of MacArthur Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.

MacArthur Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee, recipients learn of their selection only when they receive a call from the MacArthur Foundation just before the public announcement.

Paul Chan received a BFA (1996) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA (2003) from Bard College. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Drawing Center, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Schaulager, Basel. He is also the founder and publisher of Badlands Unlimited (established 2010). He received the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters in 2021.

Further Reading

Bard Professor Sky Hopinka Named 2022 MacArthur Fellow
More about Paul Chan's Award from the MacArthur Foundation

Countertenor Chuanyuan Liu, who graduated from the Bard Conservatory of Music’s Vocal Arts Program in 2021, has been named a grantee of the Met’s Education Fund. Education Fund grants are available to semifinalists, finalists, and Grand Finals winners of the Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition, following an audition with the Met artistic staff. The grants are intended to support the development of these young artists and are made possible by the generosity of donors. Since the 2021 Laffont semifinals, Chuanyuan Liu has been involved in three world premiere projects: Pittsburgh Opera’s production of In a Grove, with music by Christopher Cerrone and libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann; Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert version of Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s The Hours; and Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang's highly anticipated new opera M. Butterfly 蝴蝶君 at Santa Fe Opera. Liu has committed himself to an Asian-focused project each year stating, “as someone who grew up in China and spent all of my adulthood in the US, I have seen firsthand the differences but also the common ground. I want to use as much power as I have to build a bridge.”

Pianist Jong Sun Woo, who graduated from the Bard Conservatory of Music’s Advanced Performance Studies Program in 2018, is the recipient of the 2022 Gerald Moore Award for outstanding piano accompanists. With this award, she will receive a prize of £5,000 and the opportunity to play at London’s prestigious Wigmore Hall. The Gerald Moore Award is presented biennially to exceptional piano accompanists, usually in the early stages of very promising careers. Now in its 30th year, the Gerald Moore Award has been its own registered charity but from 2022 has made its new home at the UK’s Royal Philharmonic Society. “My favourite activity as a child was to play pretend with a friend. Playing the song repertoire is not far from that . . . Being a song pianist means that I have the limitless possibilities of parallel universes under my fingers,” said Woo.
https://royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/performers/instrumentalists/gerald-moore-award/recipients/jong-sun-woo

Lace, though widely used in depicting religious and cultural leaders throughout the centuries, is still relatively uncelebrated in the art world, especially with respect to the artisans behind it. “Despite the intricate textile’s ubiquitous presence in artworks to connote wealth, prestige, and beauty, little is known about the actual makers behind lace,” writes Stephanie Sporn for Architectural Digest. Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen, an exhibition cocurated by Michele Majer, assistant professor of fashion at the Bard Graduate Center, aims to address the deficiency in representation of these talented artisans. “Lace in the gallery is shown alongside portraits of named men and women painted wearing pieces of lace, but it’s very rare—if not impossible—to find paintings of named lacemakers,” Majer says. “These highly skilled women and girls were underpaid, overworked, and socially invisible. They toiled in difficult working conditions for countless hours to create accessories that only wealthy patrons could afford.” Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen opens on September 16, 2022, at the Bard Graduate Center and runs through January 1, 2023.

Read More in Architectural Digest

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Profiled in the New York Times, the artist Martine Syms MFA ’17 “is the sort of ‘new media’ artist who antiquates the term. Since her days as a film programmer at clubs like the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, she has turned the various lenses of media around to interrogate what society expects of Black women, and Black artists in particular,” writes Travis Diehl. This fall, Syms has an independent feature film showing in theaters with worldwide distribution, as well as exihibtions on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and CCS Bard. "Grio College," the title of Syms’ retrospective show at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum, is also the fictional school in Syms’s feature film The African Desperate (2022). “The curriculum that she presents is larger than what a college typically covers,” said Lauren Cornell, the chief curator at the Hessel. “It encompasses one’s whole life, friends, thinkers, culture.”

Martine Syms: Grio College, curated by Lauren Cornell, Chief Curator and Director of the Graduate Program, is on view at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art through November 27, 2022.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/arts/design/the-many-lives-of-martine-syms.html

Bard Graduate Center Associate Professor Aaron Glass has been awarded a $150,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to support his collaborative project to create a critical, annotated, digitized edition of anthropologist Franz Boas's landmark 1897 monograph on the Kwakwaka’wakw culture of the Pacific Northwest Coast. NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants support the implementation of innovative digital humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field. This NEH grant will support the development of additional features and extensions for a multimedia platform specifically designed to support Indigenous cultural and linguistic content.

Glass’s project, “The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’s Pioneering Ethnography,” is codirected with Judith Berman (University of Victoria). Boas’s The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897) is one of the first holistic ethnographies based on field work. The text brought together data on Kwakwaka’wakw social structure with art and material culture, detailed narratives in the Kwak’wala language, photographs taken in situ in British Columbia and at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, transcribed songs, eye-witness description of ceremonial performances, and extensive contributions from Boas’s Indigenous collaborator George Hunt. The goal of this project is to reunite the scattered archival material with the original text and with the Indigenous families whose cultural heritage is represented. It promises new ways of using digital media to link together disparate archives, museums, textual repositories, and contemporary Native communities.
https://www.neh.gov/news/neh-announces-315-million-226-humanities-projects-nationwide

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) has been awarded a $50,000 Frankenthaler Climate Initiative Grant to advance its energy efficiency and clean energy projects. Launched by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in partnership with RMI and Environment and Culture Partners, the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative is the first grant-making program of its kind in the U.S. to address climate change with a $10 million commitment to climate action in the visual arts through funding energy efficiency and clean energy generation in visual arts museums, schools, and cultural institutions. CCS Bard is a recipient of a 2022 technical assistance grant, which supports the specification and budgeting of an identified efficiency project to allow for procurement and financing. In the face of global climate change, more frequent and extreme weather events, and uncertain energy market forecasts, CCS Bard strives for a low-carbon, high-efficiency, and high-resiliency future.
http://www.frankenthalerclimateinitiative.org

Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 says his photographs of fireflies can range from “a spa for the eyes” to “almost pure chaos.” For NPR, Lara Pellegrinelli spoke with Mauney, who has spent almost a decade photographing fireflies in the Hudson Valley, using Photoshop to painstakingly compile hundreds of timed exposures into a single image. The images, Pellegrinelli writes, are catching the eye of artists and scientists alike, sparking the interest of researchers pursuing “new evidence that firefly swarms can synchronize their flashes.” Mauney is now a part of a group of volunteers helping collect data for computer scientist and biophysicist Dr. Orit Peleg of the BioFrontiers Institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Still, for Mauney, the images, and the process of composing them, are the primary thing. “I never get tired of it,” Mauney says. “And I never get tired of the challenge and the puzzle of trying to construct the images — and trying to construct a good image, because it’s not enough for me to let the bugs do the heavy lifting.”
https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2022/08/12/1114236533/pete-mauney-photographs-fireflies

This summer, Lobsang Sonam, who received an M.Ed in Environmental Education from Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability in 2021, led Bard’s first environmental education summer camp in China. Fifteen students in grades 9–11 participated in the immersive two-week sleepover camp hosted at the Old Creek Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province. Students experienced firsthand a naturally rich environment; worked closely with local researchers, community members, and natural resource management professionals; and completed their own research projects. Activities included visits to different villages, learning the history of the reserve, hiking with local patrollers to study the region’s conservation work and challenges, identifying wild animals, weeding invasive plants, designing tree taps, and helping local beekeepers with their work on bee farms.

With Bard College at Simon’s Rock Geography and Asian Studies Professor Chris Coggins as adviser, the camp was developed to encourage students in thinking critically about local environmental issues, nurturing a strong sense of environmental protection and stewardship, and conducting their own service-learning projects.

Micah Gleason GCP ’21, VAP ’22 is currently the music director and conductor on a project in residency at the cell theatre in Manhattan. The Final Veil is a new movement chamber opera based on the true story of Franceska Mann, a Polish-Jewish ballet and burlesque dancer who was captured by the Nazis and used her skills as a dancer to attempt to escape. It was composed by JL Marlor and co-conceived with dancer/director Cassandra Rosebeetle. The show also includes two current VAP students, Abby Cheng and Katherine Lerner-Lee.

Performances are July 14–31, on Thursday Friday, Saturday at 8pm, and Sunday at 5pm at the cell theatre. Book tickets and learn more here.
 
https://www.thefinalveilopera.com

Vincenzo de Bellis CCS ’08 is leaving his position as Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to take on the new role of director of fairs and exhibition platforms at Art Basel, which now stages four major fairs in Hong Kong, Basel, Paris, and Miami Beach. Speaking to Artnet, de Bellis reflects, “When I was a student at Bard College, the Walker was one of the top museums in the world I could imagine working at.” He adds the pandemic proved that, while digital programming is important, “the physical experience cannot be replaced. Visual art is called that for a reason. It needs to be experienced in person.”
https://news.artnet.com/market/art-basel-vincenzo-de-bellis-2145320

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents the Class of 2023 thesis presentation. Bringing together works by candidates in the disciplines film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing, the exhibition will be on view from July 16–24 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook, New York. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11am–5pm; Saturday and Sunday, 1pm–5pm.

Evening presentations, including performances, readings, and screenings will be held throughout the week at several locations on the Bard College campus. All presentations are free and open to the public. 
https://www.bard.edu/mfa/thesis/

“I’m finally at the point where I can do whatever I want, and I am going for it,” says Christine Sun Kim MFA ’13, who is a recent music/sound faculty member in Bard’s MFA program, where experimental approaches to the medium are encouraged. Born deaf, Kim is acutely aware of the opportunities afforded to the hearing that she was denied as a child and later as an aspiring artist. Now, Kim’s work is sought after by museums and collectors around the world, and she has become a role model for deaf children. “Over the past decade, working in wry drawings (charts, text and musical notation), video, audio, performance and the odd airplane banner, Ms. Kim, 42, has made work that is poetic and political, charismatic and candid, and that upends the conventions of language and sound,” writes Andrew Russeth in the New York Times profile. 
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/09/world/europe/christine-sun-kim-profile.html

“Bard College's Graduate Vocal Arts Program produced a lively, delightful and musically assured staging of Leoš Janáček's nonpareil Cunning Little Vixen,” writes David Shengold for Opera News. “Doug Fitch's handsome, inventive production and James Bagwell's assured musical direction demonstrated their understanding of this very particular—even peculiar—piece. [...] Bagwell led the youthful Orchestra Now with considerable grace.”
https://www.operanews.com/Opera_News_Magazine/2022/5/Reviews/ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON,_NY__The_Cunning_Little_Vixen.html

A team of graduate students from the Bard MBA in Sustainability program won this year’s Total Impact Portfolio Challenge (TIPC). Now in its fourth year, TIPC is a yearlong, graduate student impact investing competition produced in collaboration with Wharton Social Impact Initiative and SOCAP Global. Students gain knowledge and experience in designing investment portfolios that embed impact into overall strategic asset allocation. Of the four finalist teams, two were from Bard’s MBA program. Bard graduate students Michael Amoroso MBA ’22, Emma Chandler MBA ’23, and Ashbel Soto MBA ’24 won the competition with a portfolio that aimed to achieve “maximum returns and maximum measurable impact in alignment with our client’s goals and values and our mission to lead the change towards shared well-being on a healthy planet.”
 
“Our approach was to seek out broad diversification across asset classes and objectives that would allow us to advance the client’s goal to help mitigate climate change,” said the Bard team. This included investing in funds that advance solutions and the just transition to a low-carbon economy. Since our client is a mission-driven educational institution, we also felt it was important to consider how the community could participate from an active ownership perspective, and for students, how this could aid learning and career advancement opportunities.”
 
They added, “To achieve the greatest impact, we took into consideration that environmental and social equity issues are inextricably linked, focused on measurable impact that can be transparently shared and reported, and leveraged engagement as a tool for driving change.”
https://socialimpact.wharton.upenn.edu/news/investing-in-change-at-the-2022-total-impact-portfolio-challenge/

“My relationship with Morrison lasted a third of my life and was not wholly intimate and not fully professional,” writes A.J. Verdelle MFA ’93 in Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison. The Los Angeles Review of Books says Verdelle’s new book “creates an echo chamber that deftly evokes the voice of Toni Morrison,” and, for the reviewer, it served as an introduction to Verdelle’s work more broadly. “The book had grabbed me from the first page,” writes Wayne Catan. “Not only because Verdelle pulls back the curtain to display the duo’s intimate life together, but because of Verdelle’s engaging prose.” Miss Chloe not only chronicles Verdelle’s friendship with Morrison, whose birth name, Chloe A. Wofford, gives the book its title, but is threaded with reflections on Verdelle’s own childhood, her racist experiences in Catholic school, and “discussions of craft as seen through Morrison’s eyes.” Verdelle draws lessons, both personal and professional, from Morrison, including how to live in the world as a Black author. “Rather than succumb to the distraction of responding to what others thought she, or we, could not be, Toni Morrison refused to race-splain,” Verdelle writes.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/flares-and-embers-on-a-j-verdelles-miss-chloe-a-memoir-of-a-literary-friendship-with-toni-morrison/