News

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents close alternative, the class of 2022 thesis presentation, which brings together works by MFA candidates in the disciplines film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. The exhibition will be on view from July 17 through July 25, 2021 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery, 29 O’Callaghan Lane, Red Hook, New York. An opening day takes place on Saturday, July 17, from 12 to 6 p.m. with timed entry for visitors by appointment using this link. Evening presentations of time-based works, including performances, readings, and screenings, will be held at several locations on the Bard College campus during the week of July 19. For more information about the exhibition, please visit bard.edu/mfa/thesis.

The Bard MFA thesis presentations feature works by Lorenzo Bueno, Edythe Woolley, Ben Bennett, William Bradley, Andrew Lee, Rahul Nair, Geneva Skeen, Wibke Tiarks, Harry Davies, Corbin Furguson, Samuel Hindolo, Beaux Mendes, Christopher Baliwas, Sophie Byerley, Dani Lessnau, John Pike, Andrea Sisson, Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta, MJ Daines, Claudette Gacuti, Mindy Solis, Katz Tepper, Riel Bellow, Samuel Breslin, Valerie Hsiung, Aristilde Kirby, Sarah Passino, and Shaheen Qureshi.

The title of this year’s thesis exhibition was conceived from the graduating class’s shared hopes, desires, vulnerabilities, and anxieties. The hope to share space with one another again; the desire to prioritize accessibility, vulnerability, and compromise; and the eagerness to unlearn and redefine what (un)productivity for an artist can mean, look, or sound like. In a way, this loose thread also points to the various adaptive shifts artists must often (un)make in their practice. The exhibition is coordinated by Shehab Awad MA’17, a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Shehab Awad is a writer and curator from Cairo living in New York City. He/she operates as Executive Care*, an all-encompassing self-as-agency at the service of artists.

The Bard College Exhibition Center will be open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m., and Saturday/Sunday, 1–5 p.m. For the opening reception, a return shuttle service will be offered from Rhinecliff Amtrak station. Schedules and more information are available here. Parking is available in the Saint Christopher’s Church lot at 7411 South Broadway or on Garden Road. Accessibility: Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery is located by an unpaved gravel road, and the building is accessible by a 19-foot-wide roll gate entrance positioned at the west side of the building. There are three accessible parking spots adjacent to the entrance. We encourage guests who do not require accessible parking to park at the Saint Christopher’s Church lot, located at 7411 South Broadway, or on Garden Road. Please note that the shuttle return service from Rhinecliff station is not wheelchair accessible. The building has a wheelchair-accessible, all-gender restroom. We provide scent-free soaps and encourage guests to consider attending our events scent-free. Please contact the MFA Administrative Office at T 845-758-7481 or mfa@bard.edu for any questions or requests regarding accessibility, including audio or film descriptions.

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 students engage with accomplished faculty members, while developing their individual studio practices. 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, with students on campus during three consecutive eight-week summer sessions and two independent study sessions off campus completed during the intervening winters. For more information please contact Lawre Stone, associate director, Bard MFA, at stone@bard.edu or 845-758-7481, or visit bard.edu/mfa.

 (7/13/21)
https://www.bard.edu/mfa/

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA) announced today that Nadine Fattaleh and Oscar Humberto Pedraza Vargas have been selected as the first recipients of the Center’s fellowship in human rights and the arts. 

The goal of the fellowship program is to support outstanding engagement in human rights and the arts by scholars, artists, and activists. Fellows are appointed for a one-year period to pursue their own research projects while contributing to the curriculum of the new MA program in Human Rights and the Arts. Both Fattaleh and Pedraza Vargas will be in residence at Bard during the 2021-22 academic year. In addition to teaching, they will offer lectures and organize workshops at Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, campus as part of the Open Society University Network (OSUN). Their presence at Bard and within OSUN will further CHRA’s mission of supporting multidisciplinary and collaborative knowledge production on the intersection of human rights and the arts.

“The fellowship program allows our MA Program to complement the course offerings of our permanent faculty,” said Ziad M. Abu-Rish, the program’s director. “Nadine and Oscar are talented young researchers with daring intellectual, political, and aesthetic practices. They will explore with our students a range of investigative and documentary strategies, theoretical frameworks, and case-studies that will bring the front-lines of the struggle for rights into our classrooms.”

Nadine Fattaleh is a writer and researcher from Amman, Jordan. Her work focuses on spatial practices through cartography and film. She received a BA in Middle East, South Asian and African Studies from Columbia University, and a MS in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP. She previously worked on projects at Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research and Studio-X Amman, as well as the MMAG Foundation, Amman. Fattaleh describes her practice as “using the map to render visible structures of oppression in flagrant contradiction with human rights,” while also “remaining attentive to the realities of everyday life and the need to listen to the voices of activists and advocates that are inevitably silenced by the abstractions of data and visual representation.” Her research at Bard will concern issues of food sovereignty and agrarian rights in the Arab World.

Oscar Humberto Pedraza Vargas is a historian and anthropologist with a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from CUNY Graduate Center and a BA in Anthropology and an MA in Social Anthropology from Universidad de Los Andes. He has worked extensively with grassroots movements associated with indigenous, farmer, labor, and victim communities in Colombia and Latin America. Pedraza Vargas specializes in the analysis of transnational human rights institutions, discourses, and practices that define the value of life and death in cases of coal-related violence in Colombia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. He has also served as a main researcher for a collaboration between Forensic Architecture and the Colombian Truth Commission. During his fellowship at Bard, Pedraza Vargas will produce work for a book and an exhibition on the Truth Commission, and write on what he describes as “the subjects of earthly memory and the methodologies to address black boxes as evidentiary possibilities.” His courses will be informed by his experience mediating between a justice institution and an academic/artistic research group.

“Nadine and Oscar embody the scholar-activist-artist nexus. Their research and praxis on spatial justice, truth and reconciliation, and food justice are of particular relevance to CHRA’s programming. We are pleased to support their research while they inspire our students, faculty, and the public,” said Tania El Khoury, Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and The Arts at Bard College.

Details on the MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts and other CHRA activities can be found at chra.bard.edu.

About the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College
The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA) researches, inspires, and extends the intersection of art and human rights. Through robust public programming, an arts biennial, publications, and a series of digital commissions, CHRA brings critical attention to innovative forms of art and activism that investigate human rights violations and develop creative tools of resistance. Designed by Bard’s Human Rights Program, the Fisher Center at Bard, and the Central European University, and launched through the Open Society University Network (OSUN), its interdisciplinary MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts brings together an international cadre of scholars, artists, and activists to explore the highly charged relation between artistic practices and struggles for truth and justice. CHRA also collaborates with partners across the OSUN network and provides fellowship and grant opportunities for students, scholars, artists, and activists at Bard College and around the world.

About the Open Society University Network
The Open Society University Network (OSUN) is a new global network of educational institutions that integrates learning in the social sciences, humanities, sciences, and arts. Advancing a new model of global higher education, it promotes the advancement of knowledge on undergraduate and graduate levels and across both geographic and demographic boundaries. It is dedicated to promoting civic engagement on behalf of open societies, and works to expand access to higher education for underserved communities. opensocietyuniversitynetwork.org
https://chra.bard.edu/

Michael Sadowski’s memoir, Men I’ve Never Been, recounts his shunning of his queer identity and sexuality as a boy in order to become the man society wants him to be—“bringing to light the kinds of lies we tell ourselves about our identities, and the price of maintaining them.” Sadowski is interim dean of graduate studies, director of inclusive pedagogy and curriculum, and associate professor in the Bard MAT Program. James Romm “has written a tale of the greatest military corps during the last decades of ancient Greek freedom—The Sacred Band, a unit 300 strong composed of 150 pairs of male lovers.” Romm is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics and director of the Classical Studies Program. 
https://www.chronogram.com/hudsonvalley/reading-list-6-books-to-read-in-july-2021/Content?oid=13289075

Tyler Williams ’19 MAT ’21 has completed his third Bard College degree. Williams is a graduate of Bard High School Early College Baltimore, the Bard College undergraduate program, and now the Bard MAT program. He graduated from Bard High School Early College in Baltimore, Maryland in 2017 with his associate’s degree. He then enrolled as an undergraduate at Bard College, graduating in 2019 with his BA in religion. In 2020 he joined the Bard MAT program in literature and graduated on May 29, 2021 with his Master of Arts in Teaching degree in literature and a New York State secondary English Language Arts teacher certification.

Text of commencement address by former Open Society Foundations president Patrick Gaspard:
Chairman Chambers; Board of Trustees; august faculty and staff; fellow distinguished honorees; the Annandale community; and the graduating class of 2021!

What an overwhelming honor to join you in celebration—and to join you in person!

President Botstein. Thank you, President Botstein, for that too generous an introduction. Thank you for the gifts of your scholarship and the gifts of your friendship. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of knowing President Botstein and spending meaningful time with him, but never in his sanctum sanctorum. Even away from campus and without the trappings of ceremony, President Botstein always seems to be wrapped in the garbs of ritual. That effect is greatly enhanced in academic regalia, which you wear quite well, sir. Hannah Arendt, whose grave lies near to us here on this campus, described friendship as “one of the most active modes of living.” Maestro, you embody that in the personal and in the political, and I see that ethos extends throughout this community.

Please be forewarned, Mr. President, that I have this belief that one should never waste the privilege of a public platform, and my inclination is to provoke and interrogate even at a tea party. Furthermore, while one might look for some practical directives from a commencement speaker, I’m oriented toward the impracticalities of the unapprehended poetry in our midst. I hope I won’t give you occasion to regret your generous introduction and welcome.

Graduates, I have yet one more confession that I want to make here at the start. The address I’m delivering now was crafted late last night, after I completely rejected the arc of my original draft. Commencement addresses are bracketed by such traditional expectations of exhortative language that one tends to bury the desire to express any sincere sentiments that don’t fit neatly in that rubric. There’s a liturgical order to these things. I’m supposed to look out upon you, ordain your absolute greatness, acknowledge your brilliance, lift up the example of a great alumnus, and command you to go forth amidst the uncivilized herd to shine your light. If I were following the traditional pattern, I would pull down some appropriate quotation from the classics—something like Pindar from the Pythian Chronicles. I’d say, “O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible,” and I would tell you then to exhaust the limits of the possible. All of this would all have the expectation being punctuated by raucous applause from all of you all. There wouldn’t be much room left for any nagging doubts about your accomplishments or your destinies.

While your parents and loved ones, who paid dearly for the privilege, can trust that I’ll do some version of all of the above, there’s a different sensation and focus that quickens my reflections this afternoon. I want to interrogate the very notion of your exceptionalism and the broader question of our national exceptionalism at this moment when history is balanced on a knife’s edge.

Let me start, though, with a note about the ground that we stand on. Contrary to my wariness about praising exceptionalism, we can all say an amen to the notion that Bard is a special place! Might I get an “Amen!” for that? It is indeed one of the essential spaces for those of us who care about the promotion and the protection of our open society. Graduates, please know this and hold on to that essentiality as you move on from this hamlet. It has been a year of acute struggle and profound isolation as you’ve attempted to endeavor to complete your studies during this pandemic season. I know that the siren song of early summer and the confidence that we all have now because we have vaccines in our arms—all of that compels us to get back to the excitement of worshipping the combustion of matter in motion that comprises contemporary civilization. But graduates, be still, and know that not all movement is toward meaning. Sit in this place. In the beatitude of it. Be present and imbibe the hard-won lessons of this traumatic year, but also take stock in the permanent ownership of the armature that you’ve acquired in this special place. Bard is an institution that we all should defend—fiercely! When I was asked to take up this honor, I didn’t hesitate for one second—first of all, it was because it would give me the opportunity to feel fabulous in a flowing robe. But mostly, because this is a nexus of thought and action that speaks to my core sense of democracy, justice, inclusion.

There are scholars who are joining us today who are graduating through the Bard Prison Initiative, which is one of our great Redemption Songs in higher education, in a society that imprisons people who look like me at disproportionate astronomical rates. As someone who grew up in financial hardship, I will praise-sing a college that opens its doors to a student population that’s 26 percent Pell eligible. And I’m awed by students who managed to not only be resourceful enough to conduct scientific research, artistic performances, and scholarly work under the strain of COVID but also participated in a yearlong President's Commission on Racial Equity and Justice. You asked the hard questions. You didn't accept the usual answers. You demanded positive change, and, critically, you took up the responsibility for the work that comes with change. This college, that has survived on the hustle and audacity of creative administrators, has far outpaced universities with deep endowments on the investments that you all have made on social justice and the building of a more perfect union. And that is deserving of self-applause.

Bard is also essential as an idea because the humanities and not only STEM are vital to remake the world in its broken places. We must learn how to understand, and not only how to have impact, to invest in meaning and not only in harnessing resources. We must be guided by the compass of our soul’s curiosity aligned with the ballast of our reflective moral equilibrium. These are the bricks and mortar of a Bard education, and the tent poles for a society that promotes the rights of the most vulnerable. This is clearly why George Soros, the great champion of open societies, saw fit to place an unprecedented big bet on the ideal of Bard. We should all do the same.

And now, graduates, can we talk a little bit about you?

I have to admit to being slightly intimidated by the notion that I’ve been asked to frame and define your triumph and to impart some vision as you take the next brash steps in your journeys. I feel poorly equipped to do that, mostly owing to the enormous wall that stands between our generations. I like to think of myself as somebody who is still relatively young. Clearly, I have an active imagination. But, in truth, I’m three decades older than you all, and share the same follicle challenge as your much-esteemed president. And, I’m on the verge of being fatigued by experiences that you don’t even have names for yet.

But as I considered what I might have to say to you today I realized that there is some strength and advantage in my infirmities. Now, I’ve always been one to advise that one should be profoundly suspicious of the agendas and the generosities of the previous generation. But please know that, while I might not have an intimacy with your music, your fashion, or with your tech, I do have the ability to look back on the arc of my own journey, which I’ve traveled from the seats you currently occupy right now to this perch at this podium, with this embarrassing notion that titles I’ve worn uneasily or the marbled halls that I’ve accessed somehow grant me some bizarre exceptionalism that compels you to have to suffer through my poor musings. But oddly, my confidence in our kinship grows as I realize—with apologies to your loved ones and these extraordinary educators—how spectacularly ordinary we all are. Yes, I said ordinary. I know it’s customary to extoll your genius on a day like today. But ultimately, the diploma that you’re going to receive on this stage does little to distinguish you from the nearly 117 billion homo sapiens who have devoured oxygen before you. Heck, there are four million students who are receiving some form of college diplomas in the United States this year alone! 

All of our beauty, brilliance, essentialness, all of our genius, was all greatly exaggerated. This is true of us all, perhaps with the exception of your honorary recipient Audra McDonald, who is as brilliant and as genius as advertised. There are ways though that you may yet elevate your soul’s highest song and the greatness that your families aspire to for you. But I’ll get there momentarily.

In many ways, I’m still very much the person that I was when I reached your mark. But there are ways that life alters you far beyond your ability to even recognize yourself. I had an Odyssean greed for experience that was set against the very real limitations of economic degradations and the lived challenges of institutionalized racial animus. Those impositions stirred in me an anger that could have been dangerously self-destructive. My salvation came in the form of involvement in movements far greater than myself that pulled down my vanities and channeled whatever few gifts I had. I learned, in my wilderness journey, what President Barack Obama articulated with such precision, that “thinking about only yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition.”

This poverty of ambition and all-consuming certitude about the significance of one’s own navel extends from the individual to the nation-state—to this nation-state. I’ve been involved in the work of politics my entire life. From solidarity work in my Haitian American diaspora community, to my true awakening in the anti-apartheid era, to my work as an organizer for low-wage workers, to my efforts in electoral politics which culminated in my service in the White House and my foray into diplomacy and international advocacy through philanthropy. You might say that I’ve been in the business of history. And I’ve done it with a religiosity, a faith in functional cooperative behaviors and structures that enable us all to impose our will on history for progressive outcomes. The central notion in my unpacking of it is that history is in all of what we keep. What we choose to preserve. What is in the service of a coherent humanitarianism. And in what advances justice. As an immigrant who had to carve out his own sense of Americanness, I can appreciate the words of Vaclav Havel, who wrote that “he tried to hold in a single thought ‘reality’ and ‘justice.’”

There’s a struggle in that for those of us who are not part of the orthodoxy, who sit outside the traditions of power in this nation. This sense that justice is a transcendent thing that is ever elusive.

Justice has been historically elusive in our nation. And so has truly inclusive representative democracy. I won’t here recite our innumerable challenges and our most recent traumas, though the recent insurrections in our nation’s Capitol and the ensuing lack of national examination remind us that violence and authoritarianism have more enablers than instigators. I raise this here to extend my interrogation of exceptionalism—in this case, American exceptionalism—and to wonder aloud what a recasting of America’s place in the world might mean for this graduating class and your generation, both those who are U.S.-born and based and the 10 percent of your cohort who are international students.

We are emerging from a devastating health and economic crisis greatly exacerbated by the ignorance of ill-equipped leaders who insisted on our exceptionalism in the face of the shocking death tolls, the stunning job loss and resulting hunger and deprivations. The essential nation, essential America, was exposed as a fragile state, despite the resilience of our truly essential workers and the deep pockets of wealth. We suffered from that poverty of ambition—an inability to see ourselves in the world and a failure to count up the cost of isolation and America Firstism.

What might a different ambition look like now? How might we look beyond our own navels?

The great writer Ralph Ellison was an instructor here at Bard in the late 1950s, a time when, surely, he must have been one of the few Black people on this campus. Ellison wrote that “Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience.”

We waste experience. How do we advantage ourselves from the great toll of experiences that we’ve just had? We must begin with a deexceptionalization of the self and the nation. America is of course an overwhelming planetary force. But we need to help repair the world and protect against future calamities by being one of many players in it. We can and we must tackle the great challenges cooperatively, not through a winner-takes-all race to the bottom. Any diplomat will tell you that confrontation alone mostly fails. For instance, we can appreciate that in order to reinvigorate the global human rights movement while also solving for our climate crisis we need to be able to hold the reality of the injustice endured by the Uighur community and confront China, whilst recognizing the enormity of the scale of carbon emissions while we work in partnership with China. We have to appreciate the singularity of the American experience of systemic racism while reaching for the lessons that we might draw from the resistance to police abuse in the favelas in Rio, where there are countless George Floyds every day.

What America does best is lead with the capacity for reinvention. Right now, the world needs the spark of that and not the poverty of an ambitious hegemony.

I’ll conclude by returning to the individual. To you all. And to your exceptional opportunity to be great. Now coming out of our long quarantine, it’s easy to slide into a lazy decade of youthful waste, where the health of your generation will be judged by all of what you consume. That would be a poverty of ambition. We need to look up from our navels and look up from our phones and realize at last that service to others is the only leadership that has legacy.

In my pocket and now placed on this podium, I have this treasured photograph of my father from the 1950s. My later father. He’s resplendent in a graduation gown replete with satin flourishes. He matches you in style, President Botstein. In his hand he’s clutching, seemingly for dear life, his law diploma, which he had just received from the finest university in Haiti. The world was very much in front of him, with his exceptionalism assured, but even in that moment this diploma was losing all value as a brutal dictatorship, supported by the United States, was taking hold in that proud island nation and dismantling the very concept of justice. He never got to practice his profession. Our ideals of peace and justice are ephemeral, fragile things without sustainable institutions like Bard and without servant leadership. My father’s degree was printed on stock equal to yours, but what he learned is what you need to learn, that you need to prove the value of that degree every single day. Every day. And you do it with service to others.

That’s a lesson that I’ve had to learn and to take up over and over because sometimes your ego can kind of get in the way. I learned this lesson a few years ago when I was down in Atlanta, Georgia. I had to give an address, not dissimilar to this one, at a conference in Georgia, and I was feeling pretty good about myself. My ego was walking into the door before I arrived, and I was feeling rather exceptional. As I’m wont to do whenever I’m in Atlanta, I went off and visited Dr. King’s old church. And, as I went in there, as I sat in the pews and I looked at the podium that he used to command, there was a loop tape that was playing, and his oceanic voice swept over the room:

He who is greatest among you shall be a servant. Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.

You don’t have to have a college degree to serve.
You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve.
You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve.
You don’t have to know the second theory of thermonuclear dynamics to serve.
All you need is a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.
You can be that servant.

My ego was put in check.

Yes, you can be that servant. Service begins with the recognition of the greatness of others and the desire to lift it up. Look at the student that’s sitting next to you. Exalt in their greatness. Forget your accomplishments for a moment. Think about what’s been sacrificed by others to get you to this moment. There’s exceptionalism in those who washed floors to pay for your brilliance. Be present in that goodness. Revel in that greatness. Elevate it. Celebrate it. Be in the service of it and your own brilliance will shine on through. You can be that servant. 

Here I’m reminded of the hymn by the Indian poet Tagore:

I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.

Take up the joy of your exceptional service, Class of 2021. We await your greatness!

About the Commencement Speaker
Patrick Gaspard is former president of the Open Society Foundations (OSF). During his three-year tenure, he confronted significant threats to open societies around the globe, including the rise of authoritarian regimes and the spread of the COVID-19 virus worldwide. Gaspard conceptualized and stewarded Open Society’s contribution of $220 million in grants to build power in Black communities, and $200 million in global investments that included support for essential workers and other communities hit hard by COVID-19. Prior to leading OSF from 2018 through 2020, Gaspard was a key figure in President Barack Obama’s administration and held a number of prominent positions during Obama’s two terms in office.

Gaspard was born in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1967 to Haitian parents. He grew up in New York City and had a long career there in electoral and campaign politics. After attending Columbia University, he joined Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, then worked on David Dinkins’s successful bid to become the first African American mayor of New York City. Gaspard served as national deputy field director for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2003–4 before returning to labor organizing, where he rose to become executive vice president and political director of the 1199 branch of the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest unions in the United States.

In 2008, Gaspard joined Obama’s presidential campaign, serving as national political director. Following the inauguration, Gaspard transitioned to direct the White House Office of Political Affairs from 2009 to 2011. Thereafter, he served as executive director of the Democratic National Committee from 2011 to 2013, overseeing efforts to reelect Obama. Gaspard was subsequently appointed U.S. ambassador to South Africa, and served in this capacity from 2013 to 2016.(5/29/21)
 
https://www.bard.edu/commencement/

The National Endowment for the Arts has approved a $30,000 Grants for Arts Projects award for “Freedom on the Move: Songs in Flight,” a project envisioned and led by art song organization Sparks & Wiry Cries for the commission of two world premieres and a subsequent performance tour in 2023. This ambitious musical project is a direct response to Cornell University’s Freedom on the Move (FOTM) database, housing digitized, searchable fugitive slave advertisements, resulting in a co-commission by Sparks & Wiry Cries and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. The grant was written by Sparks cofounders Martha Guth, Ithaca College, and Erika Switzer, Bard artist in residence; director, Postgraduate Collaborative Piano Fellowship; and faculty in Bard’s undergraduate Music Program, Graduate Vocal Arts Program, and Conservatory of Music, with Sparks Managing Editor Lucy Fitz Gibbon, faculty in Bard College's Conservatory of Music and Graduate Vocal Arts Program.

The first commission is a song cycle by composer Shawn Okpebholo featuring four prominent classical musicians—soprano Karen Slack, countertenor Reginald Mobley, baritone Will Liverman, and pianist and Bard Conservatory faculty Howard Watkins—interlaced with material curated and performed by the singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Okpebholo’s cycle sets poetry curated by Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Duke University, whose work along with that of poet Crystal Simone Smith, Duke University, contextualizes and responds to documents in the FOTM database. This interdisciplinary song cycle will be accompanied by a choral work by Joel Thompson, drawing on the Spiritual tradition as well as the FOTM database. After a New York City premiere in early 2023, the project will travel to Philadelphia, Durham, and the Finger Lakes region of New York, in performances co-presented by the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Lincoln University, Duke University, Cornell University, Ithaca College, the Harriet Tubman Home, Inc., in partnership with Sparks & Wiry Cries.

This project is among the more than 1,100 projects across America totaling nearly $27 million that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2021 funding.

“As the country and the arts sector begin to imagine returning to a post-pandemic world, the National
Endowment for the Arts is proud to announce funding that will help arts organizations such as Cornell’s Music Department reengage fully with partners and audiences,” said NEA Acting Chairman Ann Eilers. “Although the arts have sustained many during the pandemic, the chance to gather with one another and share arts experiences is its own necessity and pleasure.”

For more information on the projects included in the Arts Endowment grant announcement, visit
arts.gov/news.

# # #

About Sparks & Wiry Cries
Sparks & Wiry Cries curates opportunities for art song creators, performers, and scholars through innovative initiatives that capture the stories of our diverse communities. For more information, visit sparksandwirycries.org.


About Freedom on the Move
Due to the breaking of family bonds and the illegality of literacy amongst enslaved people, there
remains a paucity of written records to track individual lives during the period of slavery. The Freedom on the Move database notes that it compiles “thousands of stories of resistance that have never been accessible in one place. Created to control the movement of enslaved people, the ads ultimately preserved the details of individual lives—their personality, appearance, and life story. Taken collectively, the ads constitute a detailed, concise, and rare source of information about the experiences of enslaved people.” Cornell Department of History’s Dr. Ed Baptist and William Block, director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER), are the principal investigators for FOTM, a joint project of the Department of History, CISER and Cornell University Library. Songs in Flight seeks to bring awareness to these individuals and to the creative possibilities made possible through FOTM, building a living monument to this erased history by highlighting stories of strength rather than stories of oppression. For more information, visit freedomonthemove.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/27/21)

Bard College students Jourdan Perez ’23 and Tallulah Woitach ’23 have been awarded highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships from the U.S. Department of State to study abroad. Perez was awarded $4,500 toward his studies at Bard College Berlin in fall 2021, and Woitach was awarded $4,000 toward her studies at the University of Sydney in Spring 2022.

“It is an unbelievable honor to be selected for such a prestigious award,” said Woitach, a written arts major. “I am so beyond excited to go to Australia to study indigenous culture, with a focus on oral tradition. All too often in western culture, the written word becomes distanced from the deeper ancient energy language is borne out of. I want to learn from those who know how to make words come alive, by connecting to something much greater than ourselves.”

“I'm very excited to explore Berlin and continue studying German language and culture,” said Perez, a sociology major with a concentration in gender and sexuality studies. “I would like to thank Trish Fleming (Bard’s Study Abroad Adviser) for informing me about the Gilman Scholarship, as well as reviewing my application one last time before I submitted.”

Perez and Woitach were among more than 1,500 U.S. undergraduate students selected to receive Gilman scholarship awards from the March 2021 application deadline. The recipients of this prestigious scholarship are American undergraduate students attending 467 U.S. colleges and represent all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. These Gilman Scholars will study or intern in 96 countries through the end of 2022.

The U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program enables students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad, providing them with skills critical to our national security and economic prosperity. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s establishment in 2001, over 1,300 U.S. institutions have sent over 33,000 Gilman Scholars of diverse backgrounds to 151 countries around the globe. The program has successfully broadened U.S. participation in study abroad, while emphasizing countries and regions where fewer Americans traditionally study. As Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said, “People-to-people exchanges bring our world closer together and convey the best of America to the world, especially to its young people.” The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). For more information, visit gilmanscholarship.org.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/24/21)
 

The American Academy in Berlin has awarded Christopher H. Gibbs, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College, a 2021-22 Berlin Prize. The Berlin Prize is awarded annually to American or US-based scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields, from the humanities and social sciences to journalism, public policy, fiction, the visual arts, and music composition. Gibbs, who is also artistic codirector of the Bard Music Festival and a professor at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, was named a spring 2022 Berlin Prize fellow. Fellows spend a semester at the Academy’s lakeside Hans Arnhold Center, a historic nineteenth-century villa located in Berlin’s Wannsee district.

“Gibbs has long been committed to so-called public musicology, especially to forging links between music scholarship and general audiences through curated concerts and festivals,” writes the American Academy in Berlin in its award citation. “In Berlin, he will explore the past, present, and future of concert life in the city.”

“I am thrilled by the opportunity to think intensely about curation, something familiar with museums but much less so with music,” said Gibbs. “Berlin’s rich musical history and its innovative scene today provide abundant material to help reimage the future, especially in the wake of the pandemic and amid struggles for social justice.”

About the 2021-22 Berlin Prize
Chosen by an independent selection committee, the 2021-22 class of Berlin Prize fellows will pursue a wide array of scholarly and artistic projects, including histories of the legalities of small wars among European empires, the Visigothic political order, competing conceptions of self-government in English and American political thought, Algerian Jewish life, and the Greek Revolution; two new novels and a graphic memoir; investigations into lithium extraction in the US, Chile, and Argentina; EU-China-US relations in the context of global supply chains; the relationship between declining coal-use and the rise of populism; European attitudes toward global democratic decline; and new works by a composer, translator, and two visual artists.

The Berlin Prize provides recipients the time and resources to advance important scholarly and artistic projects, free from the constraints of other professional obligations. Fellows work throughout the semester with Berlin peers and institutions in the Academy’s well-established network, forging meaningful connections that lead to lasting transatlantic relationships. During their stays, fellows engage German audiences through lectures, readings, and performances, which form the core of the American Academy’s public program. For more information, click here.

About Christopher H. Gibbs
Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College; faculty, Bard College Conservatory of Music; and artistic codirector, Bard Music Festival. He is the executive editor of The Musical Quarterly; editor of The Cambridge Companion to Schubert (1997); author of The Life of Schubert (2000), which has been translated into five languages; coeditor of Franz Liszt and His World (2006) and Franz Schubert and His World (2014); and coauthor of The Oxford History of Western Music, College Edition (2013; 2nd ed., 2018). He is a contributor to New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 19th-Century Music, Schubert durch die Brille, Current Musicology, Opera Quarterly, and Chronicle of Higher Education. Additionally, he has served as program annotator and musicological consultant to the Philadelphia Orchestra (2000– ); musicological director of the Schubertiade at the 92nd Street Y in New York City; musicological adviser for the Schubert Festival at Carnegie Hall (1997); and artistic codirector of the Bard Music Festival (2003– ). Among Gibbs’s previous honors were the Dissertation Prize of the Austrian Cultural Institute, ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award, and American Council of Learned Societies fellowship. He previously taught at SUNY Buffalo (1993–2003). BA, Haverford College; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. At Bard since 2002.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(5/13/21)

https://www.bard.edu/commencement/

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded five Bard faculty and Bard MFA faculty and graduates 2021 Guggenheim Fellowships. Bard Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, Bard MFA faculty Roberto Tejada and A.K. Burns MFA ’10, and MFA graduates Luba Drozd MFA ’15 and Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 were named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows. Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 3,000 applicants, Asili, Tejada, Burns, Drozd, and Lusztig were among a diverse group of 184 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2021 Fellowship.

“We are delighted and impressed that so many Bard MFA alums and faculty have been named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows,” said Hannah Barrett, director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. “The Milton Avery School for the Arts wishes to congratulate these faculty and alumni on their 2021 Guggenheim awards. Their recognition is richly deserved and we will follow their careers with pride and admiration.”

“As an experimental filmmaker, our colleague Ephraim Asili has won critical acclaim for The Diaspora Suite (2017), an ambitious cycle of 16 mm short films, and most recently his feature-length The Inheritance (2020), a poetic meditation on history, politics, art, and Black liberation,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre d’Albertis. “Asili's presence on the faculty of Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program represents for our students both deep continuity with Bard's storied past as a haven for artistic experimentation and a stunningly contemporary approach to documentary and narrative with full awareness of the urgency of our present moment.”

“I am thrilled to announce this new group of Guggenheim Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, “especially since this has been a devastating year in so many ways. A Guggenheim Fellowship has always been meaningful, but this year we know it will be a lifeline for many of the new Fellows at a time of great hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. The work supported by the Fellowship will help us understand more deeply what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do what they were meant to do.”

Created in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Foundation has offered fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions. The great range of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. In all, 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 73 different academic institutions, 28 states and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. For more information on the 2021 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 is a filmmaker, artist, educator and DJ whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His award-winning films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA PS1, LAMOCA, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Whitney Museum, and The Barbican Center in London. Asili's 2020 feature debut, The Inheritance, premiered at the 2020 Toronto International film festival and was recently acquired for distribution by Grasshopper Films. As a DJ, Asili has been a regular program host on WGXC, and done guest sets for NTS Radio, Afropop Worldwide, and WFMU. He also hosts a monthly dance party Botanica. Asili currently resides in Hudson, NY, and is a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard.

Roberto Tejada, Bard MFA writing faculty, is the author of poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold  (Krupskaya, 2006), Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish translation, and a LatinX poetics of the Americas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019). He is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and with Michelle White and others the co-author of Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021) He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.

A.K. Burns MFA ’10, Bard MFA film & video faculty, is an interdisciplinary artist who views the body as a contentious domain wherein issues of gender, labor, ecology and sexuality are negotiated. Burns is currently producing Negative Space, a cycle of video-installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The opening episode, A Smeary Spot (2015) debuted at Participant Inc., NY, followed by an exhibition at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR, in 2016. The second in this series, titled Living Room (2017) debut at the New Museum, and was subsequently exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2018. Additionally in 2018 Burns exhibited a new video work titled Survivors Remorse (2018) at the Harvard Museum and a public sculpture The Dispossessed (2018) at the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial. As a frequent collaborator and advocate for labor issues in the Arts, Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Great Economy) in 2008. Burns’ works can be found in public collations including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was also a 2018 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts, a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University as well as a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award.

Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 is a filmmaker, visual artist, and archival researcher. She is a professor, Film & Digital Media, and director, Center for Documentary Arts & Research (CDAR), at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Her film and video work mines old images, technologies, and objects for new meanings in order to reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of her work is centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001), the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011), and her newest performative documentary feature Yours in Sisterhood (2018). Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and RIDM Montréal, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She was the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal.

Luba Drozd MFA ’15 is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist. She earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Her films and installations articulate the absurd in the established exploitative social structures and demonstrate how the systems of control are manifested and echoed in restrictive architectural environments. Luba’s works screened at Smack Mellon, Apexart, Anthology Film Archives, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and Art in General. She is a 2015 Media Arts fellow at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY. In 2020, Drozd was featured by the New York Post as “hero of the day” and highlighted in the New York Times for her work making and distributing face shields for hospital workers in the early weeks of the pandemic. Drozd is a recipient of the 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Arts. Her two-room site specific sound, sculpture, and 3D animation installation piece, “The Aesthetic Limits of Water,” was commissioned and exhibited by the Hessel Museum in 2020.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(4/09/21)
 

Preliminary conference program:

29th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the U.S. and World Economies

Prospects and Challenges for the US and Europe in an Emerging Post-Pandemic Recovery
 

Wednesday, April 17

 

9:15–9:30 a.m.	Welcome and Introduction
	Dimitri Papadimitriou, President, Levy Institute
9:30–10:30 a.m.	Speaker
	Charles Evans, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
	MODERATOR: Binyamin Appelbaum, Editorial Board Member, New York Times
10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m.	Session 1. PROSPECTS FOR REFORMING THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM
	MODERATOR: TBA
	SPEAKERS: Charles Goodhart, Emeritus Professor of Banking and Finance, London School of Economics
	Paolo Savona, Chairman, CONSOB
	Jan Kregel, Director of Research, Levy Institute
12:00–1:00 p.m.	Speaker
	Robert Barbera, Director, J.H.U. Center for Financial Economics; Economics Department Fellow, The Johns Hopkins University
1:00–2:30 p.m.	Session 2. WHAT'S AHEAD FOR THE US ECONOMY
	MODERATOR: Robert Huebscher, Advisor Perspectives
	SPEAKERS: Lakshman Achuthan, Cofounder and Chief Operations Officer, Economic Cycle Research Institute
	Michalis Nikiforos, Research Scholar, Levy Institute; Professor University of Geneva
	Frank Veneroso, President, Veneroso Associates, LLC
2:30–4:00 p.m.	Session 3. ECONOMIC POLICY FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION
	MODERATOR: David P. Henry, Reuters
	SPEAKERS: Jason Furman, Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and the Department of Economics at Harvard University
	Bruce Greenwald, Professor, Columbia Business School
	L. Randall Wray, Senior Scholar, Levy Institute; Professor, Bard College
Thursday, May 6, 2021
10:00–11:00 a.m.	Speaker
	Robert Kaplan, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
	MODERATOR: Deborah Solomon, Economics Editor, New York Times
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.	Session 4. FINANCIAL GOVERNANCE AND REGULATION
	MODERATOR: Peter Coy, Bloomberg
	SPEAKERS: Michael Greenberger, Professor, University of Maryland Law School
	Kathryn Judge, Harvey J. Goldschmid Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
	Patricia McCoy, Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor, Boston College Law School
12:30–2:30 p.m.	Session 5. US FINANCIAL MARKET INSTABILITY
	MODERATOR: Jeanna Smialek, New York Times
	SPEAKERS: Jan Hatzius, Chief Economist, Goldman Sachs
	Bruce Kasman, Managing Director and Head of Economic Research, JP Morgan
	James Paulsen, Chief Investment Strategist, The Leuthold Group, LLC
2:30–3:30 p.m.	Session 6. WHAT'S AHEAD FOR EUROPE
	MODERATOR: Dimitri Papadimitriou, Levy Institute
	Lex Hoogduin, Professor, Groningen University, the Netherlands; Founder, GloComNet
	Denis MacShane, Former UK Europe Minister; Senior Advisor, Avisa Partners
	Gennaro Zezza, Research Scholar, Levy Institute; Professor, University of Cassino

Press registrations should be made by calling Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or BY sending an email to primoff@bard.edu.(4.12.21)

 
http://www.levyinstitute.org/news/hyman-p-minsky-conference-2021

Antonopoulos, director of the Gender Equality and the Economy program at the Levy Institute, and other speakers will explore what role job guarantee programs could play as Europe emerges from the historic economic turbulence of the pandemic. “The pandemic has brought into even sharper relief issues of labour market and social inequality which will have to be addressed if a new and sustainable socio-economic contract is to be agreed and lead the necessary economic and societal transformations,” writes ETUI.
https://www.etui.org/events/job-guarantee-programmes-europe-tool-recovery-resilience-and-just-transition

On Thursday, April 29, the Bard Written Arts Program and Oblong Books present award-winning author Michael Sadowski, Bard faculty member and Interim Dean of Graduate Studies, talking about his new book, Men I’ve Never Been: A Memoir, in a virtual conversation with New York Times bestselling author Domenica Ruta. The event is free and takes place at 7 p.m. For more information and to register for the event, please click here.

Released in spring 2021 as part of the Living Out series by the University of Wisconsin Press, Men I’ve Never Been was shortlisted pre-publication for the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Award for Nonfiction. According to the publisher:

Men I’ve Never Been recounts Sadowski’s odyssey as a boy who shuns his own identity—and, ultimately, his sexual orientation—in order to become who he thinks he’s supposed to be. Beginning with the memory of a four-year-old sitting in a dingy dive bar, sounding out newspaper headlines while his father wins free drinks from onlookers, each chapter highlights a different image of manhood that Sadowski saw at home, at school, or on television—from sports heroes, hunters, and game show hosts to his charismatic but hard-drinking father. As he learns not to talk, laugh, cry, or love, he retreats further behind a stoic mask of silence—outwardly well-functioning but emotionally isolated, sinking under the weight of the past.

Domenica Ruta is the author of the celebrated New York Times bestselling memoir With or Without You and the novel Last Day.

Michael Sadowski is the author of the acclaimed books In a Queer Voice, Safe Is Not Enough, and Adolescents at School. He is Bard Interim Dean of Graduate Studies and also serves as Director of Inclusive Pedagogy and Curriculum in the Dean’s Office and Associate Professor in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program. He teaches courses in youth identity development in the MAT program and LGBTQ+ issues in U.S. education in the Human Rights Program. In addition to Bard, Michael has been an instructor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he completed his doctorate, and was a visiting professor at Stanford University in 2016-17.

Sadowski has published extensively on the issues affecting LGBTQ+ students, immigrant students, and adolescents more broadly. His 2016 book Safe Is Not Enough was featured by NPR and was cited by GLSEN founder Kevin Jennings as “the most important book written on LGBTQ issues in education in my lifetime.” His other books include In a Queer Voice: Journeys of Resilience from Adolescence to Adulthood (Temple University Press, 2013), based on a seven-year longitudinal interview study, Portraits of Promise: Voices of Successful Immigrant Students (Harvard Education Press, 2013), and the edited volume Adolescents at School (Harvard Education Press, 2020), now in its third edition and used in teacher education programs around the country and abroad. He also is the editor of the Youth Development and Education book series for Harvard Education Press and was editor of the Harvard Education Letter, for which he won a National Press Club Award. He is currently at work on his first novel.(3/29/21)
 

The OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College has announced the launch of a pioneering master of arts program in human rights and the arts, and looks forward to welcoming the inaugural class in fall 2021. Designed by the Center’s core faculty team of Tania El Khoury, Thomas Keenan, Gideon Lester, and Ziad Abu-Rish, the interdisciplinary program will bring together scholars, artists, and activists from around the world to explore the productive and contentious relation between the arts and struggles for truth and justice. The program expands the curricular and extracurricular elements of the OSUN Center, directed by El Khoury.
 
The Center has set a May 1 priority application deadline and a June 15 final deadline. Ample need-based financial aid is available to cover tuition and other expenses. The following information sessions will be open to the public and prospective applicants (please register by emailing hra@bard.edu with full name and intended session to receive a Zoom link).

• Tuesday, April 6, at 8:30am NYC Time (2:30pm Vienna / 6:30pm Dhaka)
• Wednesday, April 7, at 4:00pm NYC Time (10pm Vienna / 2:00am Dhaka)
• Monday, April 12, at 8:00am NYC Time (2:00pm Vienna / 6:00pm Dhaka)
• Friday, April 15, at 4:00pm NYC Time (10pm Vienna / 2:00am Dhaka)

https://chra.bard.edu/ma_launch_2021/

“Flatwing represents years of research, producing an examination of the adaptive choreography of survival in a poetic environment of light, color, sound, and space. Investigating the tensions between art and science, this multi-sensory installation, immersing us in the hidden world of the rainforest, speaks to the ethical imperatives innate in Madeline’s practice,” said Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, who co-organized the exhibition, which is on view through August 8.
https://artdaily.com/news/134227/Whitney-opens-first-U-S--solo-exhibition-of-Madeline-Hollander#.YGN8DWgpCCe

This spring, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) presents thirteen exhibitions and projects featuring more than forty emerging and established contemporary artists and art movements organized by the graduating class of the master of arts curatorial studies program. On view at the Center for Curatorial Studies from April 3 through May 30, 2021, each project was developed over a period of study that was splintered by the events of the past year, and implicitly bear some trace of this moment. Comprising solo and group exhibitions, digital initiatives, and performance, the projects range in methods and subject matter, from mourning, environmental precarity, isolation, and decentralized learning, to accessibility and healing.

The thesis exhibition is a core component of CCS Bard’s graduate program, which grants each graduating student the opportunity to mine the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, CCS Bard’s foundational collection of more than 3,000 objects; conduct original research into emerging artists’ practices, guided by research in CCS Bard’s extensive archives; and mount individual exhibitions and projects within the Hessel Museum of Art and CCS Bard Galleries. Past student-curated exhibitions have served as springboards for artists in the earliest stages of their careers and as the basis for ongoing curatorial investigations by CCS Bard graduates at other leading museums, galleries, and arts organizations around the world.

“The ingenuity and intellectual rigor that suffuses each of these projects is reflected in the range of issues, ideas and methodologies that each curator has explored,” said Lauren Cornell, Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. Added Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art, “Viewed together, the thesis exhibitions provide the public with a rich opportunity to explore the trends and new research being chartered by the next generation of leading voices in the field.”

Currently closed to the general public, the Hessel Museum will be re-opening with the thesis exhibitions on April 3, 2021, and will be available to visit Thursday through Sunday, 12pm – 5pm, by advance reservation only. For a full overview of our health and safety protocols, please click here; to reserve and confirm your timed tickets please click here. All other campus facilities are closed to the public, so please restrict your visit to CCS Bard.

CCS BARD GRADUATE STUDENT CURATORIAL STATEMENTS
Following is an overview of the 2021 Graduate Student Exhibitions and Projects, organized alphabetically by curator’s last name. Full curatorial statements are linked in the exhibition names below.

Tammie Rubin: Tell them I won’t be long
Curated by Krista Alba
Investigating the subject of grief on both personal and collective levels, this solo exhibition brings together sculptural works by Tammie Rubin made over a decade ago with a newly commissioned installation.

While the Underground Flickers
Curated by Caitlin Chaisson
This group exhibition featuring moving image and sculpture by Bonnie Devine, Wally Dion, and Sandra Lahire addresses the social, environmental, and technopolitical consequences of radioactive uranium mining in North America.

Haze — Hong Kong’s Water Revolution in Contemporary Art and Culture
Curated by Yihsuan Chiu
Conceived as a single-issue online publication, Haze explores the representation of Hong Kong’s Water Revolution in art and culture over the past three years. With a focus on the methods and ethics of representation, the publication invites activists, artists, curators, and researchers to share their experiences as protesters and, through their creative practices, to expand the meanings of resistance.

Kate Millett: Terminal Piece
Curated by Jenni Crain
Restaging Kate Millett’s installation Terminal Piece for the first time since its initial exhibition at the Women’s Interart Center, New York, in 1972, this exhibition examines the importance of this work within her practice as both an artist and a writer, as it dramatizes Millett’s contestation of oppressive cultural structures that punish those who deviate from norms.

Uxmal-on-Hudson
Curated by Paulina Ascencio Fuentes
Uxmal-on-Hudson follows the travels of a collection of Mayan sculptures and stelae from Mexico to the United States in the nineteenth century, focusing on the period that these objects spent on Cruger Island, adjacent to Bard College. The exhibition features newly commissioned work by artist Claudia Peña Salinas which renders visible what exists on the margins of the accounts of the explorers, the guardian-collector, and the ethnographic museum.

Criteria
Curated by Natasha Matteson
Drawn from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, and accompanied by a pair of public programs, Criteria considers curatorial decision-making through the framework of algorithmic selection, artificial intelligence, and novel applications of emergent digital technologies in the museum sphere.

Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro: Eclipse
Curated by Bernardo Mosqueira
The first work by Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro to be exhibited in the US, this newly commissioned immersive installation uses spiritually active materials—such as soil, salt, charcoal, cloth, stone, water, and light—to form a mandala whose shape references the spiral movement of time and the artist’s own original approach to matters of healing and decoloniality.

washed up
Curated by Christine Nyce
Artists Lauren Burrow, Allison Janae Hamilton, and Kate Newby each address environmental precarity by transforming accumulations of salvaged debris into site-specific sculptural works of art. This group exhibition reveals how these found-object sculptures visualize the larger flows of extraction, production, and pollution that otherwise go unnoticed.

C21OWO
Curated by Camila Palomino
In this immersive solo exhibition, artist Rose Salane presents intercepted materials scraped from the liquidation sale of the iconic and now defunct department store Century 21 to stage a meditation on how vision and memory are technologically mediated and registered.

Yacht Metaphor: The Collected Works of @CoryInTheAbyss
Curated by Georgie Payne
This browser-based exhibition explores the work of American artist, poet, and meme creator Jenson Leonard, showcasing a selection of internet memes created between 2015 and 2021 under the artist’s online alias @CoryInTheAbyss. Through a custom-made website, the exhibition invites viewers to engage with these memes both as a form of contemporary net art and as an alternative educational tool.

Cripping Curatorial Studies
Curated by Allie/A.L. Rickard
Engaging members of the community at CCS Bard in practicing accessibility in a way that supports justice, interdependence, liberation, and intimacy, Cripping Curatorial Studies (CCS) unfolds as ongoing interventions and interferences into the graduate program, the Hessel Museum of Art, and the culture and community of CCS Bard.

Classroom Arsenal
Curated by Candice Strongwater
Classroom Arsenal explores how the relationship between educational and technological structures in our own vexed moment emerged from the Cold War anxieties of the postwar period. Through historical archives, an immersive video installation by artist Shawn Maximo (b. 1975), and a series of photographs by Erich Hartmann (1922-1999), the exhibition aims to question what is at stake in our reliance on corporate enterprises that mediate learning and pedagogical efficacy.

of things not seen
Curated by Gee Wesley
Through a set of installations and workshops by artists Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Steffani Jemison, of things not seen explores the relationship between Blackness, bodily practice, and the limits of the archive. The project addresses the capacity for embodied knowledge—including movement, spoken language, and memory—to archive and restore otherwise absent accounts of Black life.

EXHIBITION CREDITS
The student-curated exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard are part of the requirements for the master of arts degree, and are made possible with the support from the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation; the Lucky One Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; the CCS Bard Arts Council; and by the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends. Additional Support was given to select exhibitions by the Open Society University Network (OSUN) and its Center for Human Rights and the Arts.

ABOUT THE CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES, BARD COLLEGE
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art at its core, alongside extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice since its founding in 1990. Through its rigorous, interdisciplinary program and unmatched resources, CCS Bard provides unparalleled opportunities for students to research and organize museum exhibitions on an independent basis, and in so doing acts as a key platform for the next generation of curators, artists, and art world leaders in the earliest stages of their careers.

MEDIA CONTACTS
Resnicow and Associates
Juliet Sorce / Sarah Morris / Daniel Rechtschaffen
jsorce@resnicow.com / smorris@resnicow.com / drechtschaffen@resnicow.com
212-671-5158 / 212-671-5165 / 212-671-5188(3.11.21)
https://ccs.bard.edu/museum/exhibitions/622-2021-graduate-student-exhibitions-and-projects

Featuring Exhibitions of Emerging Artists and Underexplored Movements, Major New Publications, and Conversations Examining Pressing Issues in Contemporary Art, Season Includes: 
 

• The first comprehensive catalog of CCS Bard co-founder Marieluise Hessel’s expansive and eclectic collection of contemporary art, featuring essays from nearly fifty CCS Bard alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Zeynep Öz, and Serubiri Moses.

 

• A sweeping exhibition of drawings and works on paper spanning more than four decades of collecting by Hessel and encompassing works from a diverse range of artists including Nicole Eisenman, Rashid Johnson, Arnulf Rainer, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, and Nancy Spero.

 

• A conference on Black exhibition histories, gathering leading curators, critics, museum directors, and artists from around the world to explore pioneering exhibitions that have shaped contemporary understanding of Black art.

 

• A major survey of the groundbreaking yet understudied Pattern and Decoration movement, investigating its defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine or ornamental through work from more than 45 artists, including major works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection.

 

• Thirteen individual thesis exhibitions from CCS Bard’s 2021 graduating class, ranging from the first-ever solo exhibition of young Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro; an exhibition on the intersection of education and technology that provides a prehistory to our current moment of Zoom education; and a group show of performances by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Steffani Jemison.

 

• A celebration of CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year honoring co-founder Marieluise Hessel through roundtable discussions exploring the future of private collecting for the public good.

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) today announced its 30th anniversary season of programming, including new scholarship and significant exhibitions drawn from the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, solo and group exhibitions of emerging artists and underexplored art movements, and gatherings investigating critical topics in contemporary curatorial practice including the future of collecting and Black exhibition histories. Running from spring through fall 2021, CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year of programming reflects the multifaced work of a pioneering institution dedicated to transforming the curatorial field.

Established in 1990, CCS Bard is an incubator for experimentation in exhibition-making and the leading institution dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies—a discipline exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform curatorial practice and exhibition-making. Throughout its 30-year history, CCS Bard has actively recruited perspectives underrepresented in contemporary art discourse and cultivated a student body representing a diverse spectrum of backgrounds in an effort to transform the curatorial field. CCS Bard provides unparalleled resources to its student body to support their studies, including the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art, comprised of more than 3,000 objects collected contemporaneously from the 1960s to the present day; CCS Bard’s exceptional archive of exhibition histories, curatorial papers, and rare catalogues; and the Hessel Museum of Art, a 17,000-square-foot facility that is home to the Hessel Collection as well as exhibitions curated by CCS Bard faculty, students, and guest curators from around the world. CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year of programming builds on these resources and history to examine the latest ideas in contemporary art and curatorial practice.

A highlight of the year will be a series of celebratory events, currently planned for June 2021, that will honor Marieluise Hessel by bringing together CCS Bard alumni, artists, and other leading practitioners from across the field to explore the most urgent ideas in contemporary art.

“CCS Bard formed at a crucial time in the development of curatorial studies as a field and our program has striven throughout this time to anticipate and embrace cutting-edge ideas through its exhibitions, collections, programs, and curriculum,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “Our position as a critical platform in the contemporary arts dialogue is due in no small part to the original vision and continued support of Marieluise Hessel, who remains an integral force in our community through her generosity and commitment to our program. It is only fitting that we mark CCS Bard’s 30^th anniversary with exhibitions, programs, and a catalogue that honor Marieluise’s incomparable impact.”

“Our 30^th anniversary has inspired us to reflect upon the incredible resources Marieluise has provided to CCS Bard,” added Lauren Cornell, Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. “Marieluise’s incredible generosity and vision has allowed for the creation of a learning environment for curators like no other. Working with the Collection, Library and Archives, and with a luminary faculty, our graduate students are encouraged to rethink the curatorial field and to advance it through critical research and inventive exhibitions that chart new narratives in art and culture.”

More information on CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary year of programming follows below.

2021 Graduate Student Exhibitions and Projects
CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art
April 3 – May 30, 2021

As a core component of CCS Bard’s program, second-year students explore the Hessel Collection and conduct original research into emerging artists’ practices to mount individual exhibitions, while the first-year class works collaboratively to develop a single exhibition mining new aspects of the Hessel Collection. Often a platform for significant artists in the earliest stages of their careers, second-year thesis exhibitions in spring 2021 include the first-ever solo exhibition of young Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro; an exhibition exploring the intersection of education and technology that provides a prehistory to our current moment of Zoom education; and a group show of performances by Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Steffani Jemison. The range of artists, movements, and themes explored in these thirteen individual exhibitions reflect the diverse backgrounds and perspectives represented by CCS Bard’s student body, and continue CCS Bard’s commitment to providing a platform for underrepresented voices to transform the curatorial field.

The Marieluise Hessel Collection Volumes I & II
Publication date: April 2021

The first comprehensive catalog of CCS Bard co-founder Marieluise Hessel’s expansive and eclectic collection, this two-volume publication chronicles Hessel’s work collecting from artists and galleries from the 1960s through the present day while simultaneously charting the development of CCS Bard with the Hessel Collection at its core. The Marieluise Hessel Collection Volumes I & II examines the impact of Hessel’s collection—singular for both the range and eclecticism of its holdings as well as its position at the core of a curatorial studies graduate program—through essays by nearly fifty CCS Bard alumni including Cecilia Alemani, Ruba Katrib, Sohrab Mohebbi, Zeynep Öz, and Serubiri Moses, among others, in a fully illustrated, two-volume publication designed by Zak Group.

Advance press copies may be requested by contacting Daniel Rechtschaffen (drechtschaffen@resnicow.com / 212-671-5188).

Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection
CCS Bard Galleries
June 26 – October 17, 2021

Closer to Life is an exhibition of over 75 drawings and works on paper that span more than four decades of collecting by philanthropist Marieluise Hessel, who co-founded the Center for Curatorial Studies in 1990. As a reflection of Hessel’s expansive collection and the geographic trajectory of her life, from early years in post-war Germany to residence in Mexico City and on to New York City and the United States in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the exhibition is organized around these three spheres of influence that characterize the collection from origins to the present day, with works from a diverse range of artists including Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Rashid Johnson, Arnulf Rainer, Nancy Spero, Rosemarie Trockel, Germán Venegas and Kara Walker. In addition to drawings and works on paper, the exhibition also includes a large selection of archival materials and ephemera such as rare artist books, prints, editions, and correspondence drawn from CCS Bard’s extensive archives. Revisiting different artistic periods and contexts, the exhibition draws out contrasts and comparisons between artists, modes of representation, and the continuing vitality of drawing and paper as an artistic medium.

Closer to Life is curated by Tom Eccles and Amy Zion. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 380-page catalogue of the Marieluise Hessel collection of works on paper, edited by Tom Eccles and Amy Zion with contributions by Paul Chan, Lynne Cooke, Gabriela Jauregui, and Michael Newman. The catalogue is published by Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and designed by Zak Group.

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985
Hessel Museum of Art
June 26 – November 28, 2021

The first full-scale scholarly North American survey of the groundbreaking yet understudied Pattern and Decoration art movement, the exhibition spans the years 1972 to 1985 and features forty-five artists from across the United States working in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, textiles, installation art, and performance documentation. Originally on view at MOCA Grand Avenue from October 2019 through May 2020, With Pleasure examines the movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and their significant influence on post-war American art.

Often described as the first contemporary art movement comprised of majority female artists, Pattern and Decoration defied the dominance of modernist art by embracing the much-maligned category of the decorative. Working across mediums that evoke a pluralistic array of sources—from Islamic architectural ornamentation to American quilts, wallpaper design, Persian carpets, and Japanese Imari ware ceramics—artists consciously rejected the aesthetics of minimalism, modernist ambitions to purity and self-reflexivity, and conceptual art’s demotion of the handmade. Artists featured in the exhibition include Sam Gilliam, Joyce Kozloff, Robert Kushner, Ree Morton, Judy Pfaff, Faith Ringgold, and Miriam Schapiro, among others.

With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 is organized by MOCA Curator Anna Katz with Assistant Curator Rebecca Lowery. The accompanying 328-page exhibition catalogue is edited by Anna Katz and features seven newly commissioned essays by Katz, Elissa Auther, Alex Kitnick, Rebecca Skafsgaard Lowery, Kayleigh Perkov, Sarah-Neel Smith, and Hamza Walker, as well as artist biographies, a bibliography, an exhibition history, and reprints of historically significant writings. Designed by Green Dragon Office, the catalogue is published by MOCA, in association with Yale University Press.

Reshaping the Field: Arts of the African Diasporas on Display
Conference to be held November 2021 at CCS Bard

The latest milestone in CCS Bard’s Black Exhibition Histories initiative—which was launched in 2019 to collect understudied archives of influential Black scholars, curators, gallerists, and artists—this scholarly conference aims to expand the field of exhibition histories by exploring a selection of pioneering exhibitions that have shaped contemporary understanding of Black art. Curated by CCS Bard Senior Academic Advisor and Luma Foundation Fellow Nana Adusei-Poku, Reshaping the Field is the first of its kind to focus exclusively on exhibitions of African diasporic art presented in the United States and the U.K., and features panelists including Bridget Cooks, Richard Powell, Cheryl Finley, Jamaal B. Sheats, Lucy Steeds, and Languid Hands (Imani Robinson and Rabz Lansiquot), among many others. Bringing together these and other art historians, curators, and artists who have researched or borne witness to these historic events, CCS Bard’s convening will be an opportunity to gather knowledge that bridges art historical research and oral history while also generating new primary sources.


About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art at its core, alongside extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice since its founding in 1990. Through its rigorous, interdisciplinary program and unmatched resources, CCS Bard provides unparalleled opportunities for students to research and organize museum exhibitions on an independent basis, and in so doing acts as a key platform for the next generation of curators, artists, and art world leaders in the earliest stages of their careers. CCS Bard receives support from a range of public and private foundations and individuals, including major support from the Luma Foundation.

Media Contacts
Resnicow and Associates
Juliet Sorce / Sarah Morris / Daniel Rechtschaffen
jsorce@resnicow.com/ smorris@resnicow.com/ drechtschaffen@resnicow.com
212-671-5158 / 212-671-5165 / 212-671-5188

 
https://ccs.bard.edu/

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Kobena Mercer as the Charles P. Stevenson Chair in Art History and the Humanities, a joint appointment between the Art History and Visual Culture Program in the undergraduate College, and the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS). Mercer, who comes to Bard from Yale University, will assume his faculty position in fall 2021.

“We are delighted that Kobena Mercer has chosen to accept the Stevenson professorship,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “It is an honor to have as distinguished a scholar and teacher as Professor Mercer, whose wide-ranging work spanning the arts and humanities feels crucial to Bard’s mission, as a member of our undergraduate and graduate faculties.”

“I am honored beyond words to be coming to Bard, which is renowned worldwide for its interdisciplinary excellence,” said Mercer. “Not only have I found the best home for my scholarship, which cuts across Art History, Black Studies, and Cultural Studies, but I am also looking forward to collaborating with Bard’s innovative arts and humanities programs to further grow a liberal arts education that is critically responsive to the urgent questions we face today.”

“Mercer joining the faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, is momentous for the graduate program. His luminary scholarship has fundamentally shaped our fields of focus and his writing is already essential to our curriculum,” said Lauren Cornell, director of the graduate program at CCS Bard. “He is one of the leading figures of Cultural Studies, Art History, and Black Studies, and it is an enormous privilege that his perspective will be available firsthand to CCS graduate students.”

Kobena Mercer teaches modern and contemporary art in the Black Atlantic, examining African American, Caribbean and Black British artists with critical methods from cultural studies. His work has significantly transformed current thinking about art and identity. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994), his first book, was a groundbreaking contribution to multiple fields, bringing a Black British perspective to wide-ranging cultural forms that arose from the volatile transformations of the 1980s. This collection of essays was followed by influential studies on artists including Romare Bearden, Keith Piper, Isaac Julien, and James VanDerZee.  Throughout his career, Mercer’s research has illuminated the art of our time through evolving frameworks and subjects. His recent essay collection, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (2016), examined artists such as John Akomfrah, Renée Green, and Kerry James Marshall, showing how Black artists contributed to art’s transformation in an age of globalization. He edited and introduced Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (2017), and prior to that he conceived and edited the Annotating Art’s Histories series, published by MIT, whose titles are Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Culture (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008). Over the last few years his exhibition catalogue contributions include Wilfredo Lam at Centre Pompidou, Frank Bowling at Haus der Kunst, Adrian Piper at Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Theaster Gates at Tate Liverpool. His forthcoming book is Alain Locke and the Visual Arts, published by Yale University Press in 2022.

A prolific and dedicated teacher, Mercer has taught at Yale University, New York University, University of California Santa Cruz and Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he earned his PhD. Educated in Ghana and England, he is an inaugural recipient of the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, awarded by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2006.2/17/21
 

Bard College announced today that artist George Condo has made a significant gift supporting the arts on campus, including a new online concert series and a dedicated $400,000 fund underwriting scholarships, musical events, and exhibitions at Bard’s Conservatory of Music, The Orchestra Now, the Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Masters in Fine Art programs. Among those scholarships is the new Inclusive Excellence in Music Scholarship Program that addresses inequities in access to higher education in music.

“The Condo Concerts,” presented by the Bard College Conservatory of Music and CCS Bard, begins February 19 with a performance by violinist Leila Josefowicz, winner of the Avery Fisher Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, and continues with recitals by The Fred Sherry Quartet on March 14 and April 18, and clarinetist Anthony McGill on May 2. Full details on upcoming performances follow below.

“During one of the most challenging times for colleges in the United States, I wanted to provide both funding and inspirational programming for students,” says Condo, whose daughter, Raphaelle, graduated from Bard in 2018. “Bard College is a place where my daughter thrived and one where the arts are central to the student experience.”

“We are grateful to George Condo for his support not only of the students at Bard, but also for underwriting these concerts and supporting the great musicians on this series, whose opportunities to perform have been so limited by the pandemic,” said Bard Conservatory Director Franks Corliss.

In establishing this fund, Condo created a special edition etching being sold through Hauser & Wirth, with all proceeds dedicated to supporting the arts at Bard. For more information on purchasing Condo’s etching, contact Cristopher Canizares at Hauser & Wirth.

About the Condo Concert Series
The first concert in the series, streaming February 19 at 8 pm, is a solo performance by the internationally renowned violinist Leila Josefowicz, winner of the Avery Fisher Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her program combines a Partita by J. S. Bach with a new work by the noted conductor and composer Matthias Pintscher, La Linea Evocativa, that was composed for her in 2020 and inspired by Condo’s artwork.

For the next two concerts, streaming on March 14 and April 18, Josefowicz will perform as part of the Fred Sherry String Quartet with her renowned colleagues, violinist Jesse Mills, violist Hsin-Yun Huang, and cellist Fred Sherry, to perform string quartets by Schoenberg and Schubert, and other works to be announced.

The final concert in the series will be a recital by clarinetist Anthony McGill, who is the principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic and a recipient of the 2020 Avery Fisher Career Prize.

The Condo Concerts Spring 2021 programs

Friday, February 19, at 8 pm
Matthias Pintscher La Linea Evocativa (2020)
Bach Partita No. 2 BWV 1004
Leila Josefowicz, violin

Sunday, March 14, at 3 pm
Schoenberg String Quartet #1, Opus 7
Fred Sherry String Quartet, with Leila Josefowicz and Jesse Mills, violins, Hsin-Yun Huang, viola, and Fred Sherry, cello.

Sunday, April 18, at 7 pm
Schubert String Quartet No. 15 in G Major
Fred Sherry String Quartet, with Leila Josefowicz and Jesse Mills, violins, Hsin-Yun Huang, viola, and Fred Sherry, cello.

Sunday, May 2, at 3 pm 
Anthony McGill, clarinet

Please click here for reservations and additional program details.


About the Artists
Leila Josefowicz’s passionate advocacy of contemporary music for the violin is reflected in her diverse programs and enthusiasm for performing new works. In recognition of her outstanding achievement and excellence in music, she won the 2018 Avery Fisher Prize and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, joining prominent scientists, writers and musicians who have made unique contributions to contemporary life.
 
Highlights of Josefowicz’s 2019/20 season include opening the London Symphony Orchestra’s season with Sir Simon Rattle and returning to San Francisco Symphony with the incoming Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen to perform his Violin Concerto. Other engagements include concerts with Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, where she will be working with conductors at the highest level, including Susanna Mälkki, Matthias Pintscher and John Adams.
 
A favourite of living composers, Josefowicz has premiered many concertos, including those by Colin Matthews, Steven Mackey and Esa-Pekka Salonen, all written specially for her. This season, she will perform the UK premiere of Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Dalia Stasevska. Other recent premieres include John Adams’ Scheherazade.2 (Dramatic Symphony for Violin and Orchestra) in 2015 with the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert, and Luca Francesconi’s Duende – The Dark Notes in 2014 with Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Susanna Mälkki. Josefowicz enjoyed a close working relationship with the late Oliver Knussen, performing various concerti, including his violin concerto, together over 30 times.
 
Alongside pianist John Novacek, with whom she has enjoyed a close collaboration since 1985, Josefowicz has performed recitals at world-renowned venues such as New York’s Zankel Hall, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center and London’s Wigmore Hall, as well as in Reykjavik, Chicago, San Francisco and Santa Barbara. This season, they appear together at Washington DC’s Library of Congress, New York’s Park Avenue Armory and Amherst College. She will also join Thomas Adès in recital to perform the world premiere of his new violin and piano work at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Japanese premiere at the Tokyo Opera City Cultural Foundation.
 
Recent highlights include engagements with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and Boston and Finnish Radio symphony orchestras. In summer 2019, Josefowicz took part in a special collaboration between Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Royal Ballet, and Company Wayne McGregor featuring the music of composer-conductor Thomas Adès.
 
Josefowicz has released several recordings, notably for Deutsche Grammophon, Philips/Universal and Warner Classics and was featured on Touch Press’s acclaimed iPadapp, The Orchestra. Her latest recording, released in 2019, features Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Violin Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted byHannu Lintu. She has previously received nominations for Grammy Awards for her recordings of Scheherazade.2 with the St Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson, and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.Violist Hsin-Yun Huang has forged a career by performing on international concert stages, commissioning and recording new works, and nurturing young musicians. Highlights of her 2017–2018 season included performances as soloist under the batons of David Robertson, Osmo Vänskä, Xian Zhang, and Max Valdés in Beijing, Taipei, and Bogota. She is also the first solo violist to be presented in the National Performance Center of the Arts in Beijing and was featured as a faculty member with Yo-Yo Ma and his new initiative in Guangzhou. She has commissioned compositions from Steven Mackey, Shih-Hui Chen, and Poul Ruders. Her 2012 recording for Bridge Records, titled Viola Viola, won accolades from Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine. Her next recording will be the complete unaccompanied sonatas and partitas of J. S. Bach, in partnership her husband, violist Misha Amory.

Ms. Huang regularly appears at festivals, including Marlboro, Spoleto, Ravinia, Santa Fe, and Music@Menlo, among many others. Huang first came to international attention as the gold medalist in the 1988 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition. In 1993, she was the top-prize winner in the ARD International Competition in Munich and was awarded the highly prestigious Bunkamura Orchard Hall Award. A native of Taiwan, she received degrees from the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Curtis Institute of Music, and The Juilliard School. She now serves on the faculties of Juilliard and Curtis and lives in New York City.Two-time Grammy nominated violinist Jesse Mills performins music of many genres, from classical to contemporary, as well as composed and improvised music of his own. Since his concerto debut at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, Mr. Mills has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada. He has been a soloist with the Phoenix Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the New Jersey Symphony, the Green Bay Symphony, Juilliard Chamber Orchestra, the Denver Philharmonic, the Teatro Argentino Orchestra (in Buenos Aires, Argentina), and the Aspen Music Festival's Sinfonia Orchestra.

As a chamber musician Jesse Mills has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada, including concerts at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street Y, the Metropolitan Museum, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Boston's Gardener Museum, Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, and the Marlboro Music Festival. He has also appeared at prestigious venues in Europe, such as the Barbican Centre of London, La Cité de la Musique in Paris, Amsterdam’s Royal Carré Theatre, Teatro Arcimboldi in Milan, and the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Mills is co-founder of Horszowski Trio and Duo Prism, a violin-piano duo with Rieko Aizawa, which earned 1st Prize at the Zinetti International Competition in Italy in 2006.

Mills is also known as a pioneer of contemporary works, a renowned improvisational artist, as well as a composer. He earned Grammy nominations for his performances of Arnold Schoenberg's music, released by NAXOS in 2005 and 2010. He can also be heard on the Koch, Centaur, Tzadik, Max Jazz and Verve labels for various compositions of Webern, Schoenberg, Zorn, Wuorinen, and others. As a member of the FLUX Quartet from 2001-2003, Mills performed music composed during the last 50 years, in addition to frequent world premieres. As a composer and arranger, Mills has been commissioned by venues including Columbia University’s Miller Theater, the Chamber Music Northwest festival in Portland, OR and the Bargemusic in NYC.

Jesse Mills began violin studies at the age of three. He graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School in 2001. He studied with Dorothy DeLay, Robert Mann and Itzhak Perlman. Mr. Mills lives in New York City, and he is on the faculty at Longy School of Music of Bard College and at Brooklyn College.Fred Sherry has introduced audiences on five continents and all fifty United States to the music of our time for over five decades. He was a founding member of TASHI and Speculum Musicae, Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and has been a member of the Group for Contemporary Music, Berio's Juilliard Ensemble and the Galimir String Quartet. He has also enjoyed a close collaboration with jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea.
Elliott Carter, Mario Davidovsky, Steve Mackey, David Rakowski, Somei Satoh, Charles Wuorinen and John Zorn have written concertos for Sherry, and he has premiered solo and chamber works dedicated to him by Milton Babbitt, Derek Bermel, Jason Eckardt, Lukas Foss, Oliver Knussen, Peter Lieberson, Donald Martino and Toru Takemitsu among others.

Fred Sherry’s vast discography encompasses a wide range of classic and modern repertoire; he has been soloist and “sideman” on hundreds of commercial and esoteric recordings. Mr. Sherry was the organizer for Robert Craft’s New York recording sessions from 1995-2012. Their longstanding collaboration produced celebrated performances of the Schoenberg Cello Concerto, all four String Quartets and the String Quartet Concerto as well as major works by Stravinsky and Webern.

Mr. Sherry's book 25 Bach Duets from the Cantatas was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 2011, the revised edition was released in 2019. C.F. Peters unveiled his treatise on contemporary string playing, A Grand Tour of Cello Technique in 2018. He is a member of the cello faculty of The Juilliard School, The Mannes School of Music and The Manhattan School of Music.Clarinetist Anthony McGill is one of classical music’s most recognizable and brilliantly multifaceted figures. He serves as the principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic — that orchestra’s first African-American principal player — and maintains a dynamic international solo and chamber music career. Hailed for his “trademark brilliance, penetrating sound and rich character” (The New York Times), as well as for his “exquisite combination of technical refinement and expressive radiance” (The Baltimore Sun), McGill also serves as an ardent advocate for helping music education reach underserved communities and for addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in classical music. He was honored to take part in the inauguration of President Barack Obama, premiering a piece written for the occasion by John Williams and performing alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Gabriela Montero.

McGill’s 2019-20 season includes the premiere of a new work by Tyshawn Sorey at the 92Y, and a special collaboration with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato at Carnegie Hall. He will be a featured soloist at the Kennedy Center performing the Copland concerto at the SHIFT Festival of American Orchestras with the Jacksonville Symphony, and will also perform concertos by Copland, Mozart, and Danielpour with the Richmond, Delaware, Alabama, Reno, and San Antonio Symphonies. Additional collaborations include programs with Gloria Chien, Demarre McGill, Michael McHale, Anna Polonsky, Arnaud Sussman, and the Pacifica Quartet.

McGill appears regularly as a soloist with top orchestras around North America including the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, Baltimore Symphony, San Diego Symphony, and Kansas City Symphony. As a chamber musician, McGill is a favorite collaborator of the Brentano, Daedalus, Guarneri, JACK, Miró, Pacifica, Shanghai, Takacs, and Tokyo Quartets, as well as Emanuel Ax, Inon Barnatan, Gloria Chien, Yefim Bronfman, Gil Shaham, Midori, Mitsuko Uchida, and Lang Lang. He has led tours with Musicians from Marlboro and regularly performs for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Festival appearances include Tanglewood, Marlboro, Mainly Mozart, Music@Menlo, and the Santa Fe, Seattle, and Skaneateles Chamber Music Festivals.

In January 2015, McGill recorded the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto together with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic, which was released on DaCapo Records. He also recorded an album together with his brother Demarre McGill, principal flute of the Seattle Symphony, and pianist Michael McHale; and one featuring the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintet with the Pacifica Quartet that were both released by Cedille Records.

A dedicated champion of new music, in 2014, McGill premiered a new piece written for him by Richard Danielpour entitled “From the Mountaintop” that was commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, and Orchestra 2001. McGill served as the 2015-16 Artist-in-Residence for WQXR and has appeared on Performance Today, MPR’s St. Paul Sunday Morning, and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. In 2013, McGill appeared on the NBC Nightly News and on MSNBC, in stories highlighting the McGill brothers’ inspirational story.

A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, McGill previously served as the principal clarinet of the Metropolitan Opera and associate principal clarinet of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. In-demand as a teacher, he serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Bard College’s Conservatory of Music. He also serves as the Artistic Advisor for the Music Advancement Program at the Juilliard School, on the Board of Directors for both the League of American Orchestra and the Harmony Program, and the advisory council for the InterSchool Orchestras of New York.2/11/21