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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to Give Commencement Address

Bard College will hold its one hundred sixty-second commencement on Saturday, May 28, 2022. Bard President Leon Botstein will confer 425 undergraduate degrees on the Class of 2022 and 161 graduate degrees, including master of fine arts; doctor and master of philosophy and master of arts in decorative arts, design history, and material culture; master of science and master of arts in economic theory and policy; master of business administration in sustainability; master of arts in teaching; master of arts in curatorial studies; master of science in environmental policy and in climate science and policy; master of music in vocal arts and in conducting; master of music in curatorial, critical, and performance studies; and master of education in environmental education. The program will begin at 2:30 p.m. in the commencement tent on the Seth Goldfine Memorial Rugby Field.

The Commencement address will be given by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland. Honorary degrees will be awarded to Haaland, Fordham University President Joseph M. McShane S.J., composer Zeena Parkins ’79, computer scientist Jennifer Tour Chayes, writer Alaa Al Aswany, scholar Jerome Kohn, musician Marcus Roberts, and Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Art Eric Motley.

Other events taking place during Commencement Weekend include Bard College award ceremonies. The Bard Medal will be presented to George F. Hamel, Jr; the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science to Chidi Chike Achebe ’92; the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters to R.H. Quaytman ’83; the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service to Michael Zack Koryk MAT ’07; the Mary McCarthy Award to Mei-mei Berssenbrugge; and Bardian Awards to Jean Churchill, Daniel Berthold, Norton Batkin, Thurman Barker, Richard Davis, Ken Buhler, Randy Clum, Marcia Acita, Joseph Santore, and Ellen Driscoll. The inaugural Laszlo Bitó Award for Humanitarian Service will be awarded to Bryan Billings, Omar Waraich, and Aselia Umetalieva. 

ABOUT THE COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER
Secretary Deb Haaland made history when she became the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary. She is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and a 35th generation New Mexican. 

Secretary Haaland grew up in a military family; her father was a 30-year combat Marine who was awarded the Silver Star Medal for saving six lives in Vietnam, and her mother is a Navy veteran who served as a federal employee for 25 years at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As a military child, she attended 13 public schools before graduating from Highland High School in Albuquerque.

As a single mother, Secretary Haaland volunteered at her child’s pre-school to afford early childhood education. Like many parents, she had to rely on food stamps at times as a single parent, lived paycheck-to-paycheck, and struggled to put herself through college. At the age of 28, Haaland enrolled at the University of New Mexico (UNM) where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in English and later earned her J.D. from UNM Law School. Secretary Haaland and her child, who also graduated from the University of New Mexico, are still paying off student loans.

Secretary Haaland ran her own small business producing and canning Pueblo Salsa, served as a tribal administrator at San Felipe Pueblo, and became the first woman elected to the Laguna Development Corporation Board of Directors, overseeing business operations of the second largest tribal gaming enterprise in New Mexico. She successfully advocated for the Laguna Development Corporation to create policies and commitments to environmentally friendly business practices. 

Throughout her career in public service, Secretary Haaland has broken barriers and opened the doors of opportunity for future generations. 

After running for New Mexico Lieutenant Governor in 2014, Secretary Haaland became the first Native American woman to be elected to lead a State Party. She is one of the first Native American women to serve in Congress. In Congress, she focused on environmental justice, climate change, missing and murdered indigenous women, and family-friendly policies.  

Teaching without an agenda is not something that concerns Kate Belin BA ’04, MAT ’05. “I do have an agenda. I want to see a national shift in how we teach math, what math is, and who has access to it,” Belin said in an interview with Chalkbeat. In their role at the Bronx’s Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, they continue to teach the mathematics of gerrymandering, “an especially relevant topic” today, and one that “will likely continue to be.” A winner of the 2021 Math for America (MƒA) Muller Award for Professional Influence in Education, Belin says their belief in the power of education was developed while at Bard, both as an undergraduate and graduate student. “I learned in college that mathematics was about creativity, patterns, problem-solving, and many more things that aren’t necessarily taught in K-12 school,” they said. “The master’s program at Bard College gave me hope that it was possible to bring more real mathematics into schools and that more students might fall in love with it, too.”
 
Read More on Chalkbeat

In 2021, Maya Whalen-Kipp MS ’20 was awarded a John A. Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship by the New York Sea Grant. One of 74 chosen for the 42nd class of Knauss Fellows, Whalen-Kipp began her one-year fellowship in February 2021, working as the marine and energy interagency coordinator for the DOE Wind Energy Technology Office and Water Power Technology Office. “Through the Knauss Fellowship, I have gained hands-on experience in understanding how innovative technology gets funded by the federal government and am working with phenomenal people who are thinking very critically on how we can support a just renewable energy transition,” said Whalen-Kipp. “My experience here is valuable for my professional career transition from environmental academia to real applications of ocean renewable energy development. I hope to now continue in the field for the foreseeable future.” 
 
Learn More

What Is the Object? defies conventional exhibition etiquette, in that viewers are expected to ignore the old adage and instead touch, don’t look. Richard Tuttle, “a collector of miscellaneous objects that catch his fancy,” has created in What Is the Object? something that is “an expansion of Tuttle’s long-standing practice of juxtaposing incongruous elements in a way that highlights the precariousness of beauty and meaning,” writes Will Heinrich for the New York Times. Presented alongside these curios are several of Tuttle’s collages, as well as the work of other artists and artisans. The central experience of the exhibition is disarming, writes Heinrich, perhaps even radically so. “I had become so used to meeting art through my eyes alone that I had forgotten what an impoverished way that is to experience the world,” he writes.

Read More in the New York Times

Last week, as Bard College students gathered with faculty and staff to talk about climate solutions, they joined tens of thousands of students worldwide doing the same. The Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice brought together climate-concerned educators and students at universities and high schools from Liberia to Colombia, Taiwan to Vienna, and Florida to Alaska, for bottom-up conversations about changing the future.

Bard alum Karianne Canfield ’20 helped facilitate a teach-in session on “Dealing with Climate Depression.” Following the discussion, a student said that this was the first time they had felt empowered to address their deep anxiety about the planet heating up, and what it meant for their future.

Dr. Eban Goodstein at Bard, one of the directors of the global teach-in, said, “We are living at a moment of extraordinary agency, with the tools at hand to solve the energy half of climate change by 2030. The teach-in is moving young people from despair about climate change to engagement.” He added: “As voters, volunteers, interns and in their career choices as artists, activists, scientists, or business people, young people are working to stop climate change.”

The Bard College headline event began with a “low-carbon” dinner and a dance performance. Over the next three hours, 25 faculty from multiple disciplines joined students in discussions including “Climate and Justice,” “Climate Stories and Songs,” “Climate Science: What You Need to Know,” and “Food Systems and Climate Solutions.” Students also learned about New York State’s ambitious climate law, and were invited to provide public comment.

In the Philippines, there were teach-ins at eight different locations. Adrienne Hangad, who helped organize an event at the Open University in Manila, was most engaged with the discussion about women and climate solutions. Prompted by a pre-teach-in discussion noting the absence of a climate change “anthem,” a team of Filipino organizers composed a powerful song, “Change Climate Change,” that was played at the event. 

In Kyrgyzstan, climate workshops were held at 15 sites across the capital city of Bishkek. And from April 20 to 21, there will be an Africa-wide teach-in based in dozens of cities and towns, organized by the African Network of Young Leaders for Peace and Sustainable Development.

Commenting on her teach-in experience, Sofía Gómez, a student from Bogotá, Colombia, said, “I'm a strong believer in a mandatory class on climate change in schools and universities. This information allows us to open our eyes to how close we are to the climate crisis.” Khadija Ghanizada, a Bard student, added, “The teach-in was a window of hope for students. Most students I interact with are scared of climate change but also skeptical of the authorities and the work they are doing to mitigate it. We talked about how to push those in power to do their job in combating climate change.”

Building on a foundation of more than 300 participating organizations this year, the teach-in organizers hope to engage 1,000 colleges, universities, and other institutions next year, targeting at least 100,000 participants. “There are tens of thousands of climate-concerned educators around the world,” said Project Director Goodstein. “The teach-in provides a global platform for us to work together, to equip the rising generation with the tools and mindset to solve the climate crisis.”

The Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice, and Bard’s flagship event, is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability (GPS) at Bard College, with support from the Open Society University Network. GPS degree programs include MS degrees in Environmental Policy and Climate Science and Policy; the MEd in Environmental Education, and the MBA in Sustainability, ranked the #1 Green MBA for 2021 and 2022, and among the top 10 MBAs nationwide for Nonprofit Management for both years by the Princeton Review. 

Opening this April at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, Interference brings together fourteen new exhibitions and curatorial projects that probe the hybrid conditions, change, and adaptation that have defined life and, in turn, contemporary art and curatorial practice, since the start of the pandemic. Each exhibition is independently curated by a member of CCS Bard’s graduating class and draws upon the Marieluise Hessel Collection and CCS Bard’s Library and Archives as a launch pad to put forward original research on emerging and overlooked contemporary art and artists.  

Containing a myriad of inquiries, Interference collectively explores new approaches to histories, archives, notions of embodiment, artistic production, and the gallery space itself. Featuring the work of over 40 artists, the exhibitions on view include major site-specific commissions by Rita Ponce De León, Alan Ruiz, and chukwumaa; surveys exploring how cultural histories and identity are expressed in contemporary Latinx photography and the multifaceted impacts of cryptocurrency on contemporary life and culture; and an exhibition juxtaposing the cultural and carceral histories of the Hudson Valley, among many others. 

“The themes of adaptability and fluidity that bind the fourteen exhibitions can also be found in the curatorial dispositions of the graduate students, who stepped up to a challenging moment with a passion for artists and for the social and political issues shaping our lives,” said Lauren Cornell, Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum of Art and Director of the Graduate Program at CCS Bard. “In Interference, the mission of the CCS Bard graduate program—to critically question and advance the curatorial field—finds new form and purpose.”

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. 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. 

CCS BARD GRADUATE STUDENT CURATORIAL STATEMENTS
Following is an overview of the fourteen exhibitions that comprise Interference, organized by CCS Bard’s graduating class of 2022: Isabella Achenbach, Eduardo Alfonso, Angelica Arbelaez, Eugenia Braniff, Junni Chen, Sofia D’Amico, Laura Hakel, Hana Halilaj, Min Sun Jeon, May Makki, Claire Sammut, Danni Shen, Dominika Tylcz, and Guy Weltchek. Exhibition descriptions follow below in alphabetical order by curator’s last name. Full curatorial statements are linked in the exhibition titles. 

Operational Excellence
Featured artists: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Ignacio Gatica, and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer
Curated by Isabella Achenbach
In a moment when cryptocurrency has swiftly become a global phenomenon, Operational Excellence brings together newly commissioned works by Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Ignacio Gatica, and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer to consider the ways in which dematerialized currency and the ostensible abstraction of value have fundamentally changed infrastructure, ecology, and culture. 

Frame (traced)
Featured artist: Alan Ruiz, Louise Lawler, and Liam Gillick
Curated by Eduardo Alfonso
A newly commissioned project by artist Alan Ruiz, Frame (traced) analyzes the formal and logistical limits of the Hessel Museum of Art’s display, architecture, and organization. Ruiz examines how boundaries are consciously and subliminally experienced and enforced by recalibrating how the edges of institutional systems are perceived.

Entre fotos y cuadernos, entre cosas y recuerdos
Featured artists: William Camargo, Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez, groana melendez, Irene Antonia Diane Reece, andKyle Richardson
Curated by Angelica Arbelaez
Entre fotos y cuadernos, entre cosas y recuerdos features photo-based works by contemporary Latinx artists—William Camargo, Jezabeth Roca Gonzalez, groana melendez, Irene Antonia Diane Reece, and Kyle Richardson—who use vernacular photographs and personal memorabilia to reflect on the relationship between their identities and cultural histories.

Emaús
Featured artists: Armando Salas Portugal, Feliciano Béjar, Mathias Goeritz, Wilfredo Prieto and Christodoulos Panayiotou 
Curated by Eugenia Braniff
Emaús explores the pervasive influence that monks and the workshops they participated had on the development of abstract art and modern architecture in Mexico in the 1960s.

Lustrous like plastic
Featured artists: Heman Chong, Christopher K. Ho, Bo Wang, and WangShui
Curated by Junni Chen
Fueled by a speculative global economy that values land primarily as a financial asset, the rate of urban redevelopment in dense urban cities has dramatically increased over the past ten years. This group exhibition brings together works by artists Heman Chong, Christopher K. Ho, Bo Wang, and WangShui to offer a meditation on how the ever-changing nature of cityscapes affect how we form collective cultural memories, anxieties, and desires. 

Up River Studies: Carcerality and the American Sublime
Featured artists: Frederic Edwin Church and Zoe Scruggs
Curated by Sofia Thieu D’Amico
Bringing together prison records from the New York State Archives, oil sketches by Hudson
River School painter Frederic Edwin Church, and new landscape paintings by artist and farmer Zoe Scruggs, Up River Studies seeks to complicate the American sublime by gesturing toward what it leaves out: the violent state prison system, whose convict labor projects were foundational to the cultural development of Upstate New York. Following an “up river” movement of two systems historically central to the Hudson Valley’s development––its cultural and carceral institutions––the exhibition juxtaposes various landscape studies, visualizes absented presences through artistic interventions, and gestures to the prison system’s all-pervasive nature.

Archives of the Tympanum
Featured artists Rita Ponce de León and Raquel Rabinovich
Curated by Laura Hakel
As an intergenerational conversation about distance, migration, and artistic practice, this exhibition presents a mural of newly commissioned drawings by artist Rita Ponce de León alongside earlier paintings and an oral recording by Raquel Rabinovich, an artist who has been living in New York since 1967, having emigrated from Argentina after a military strike. 

Informator 
Featured artists: Doruntina Kastrati and Dardan Zhegrova
Curated by Hana Halilaj
Informator is a research-based initiative structured around the previously inaccessible archives of the National Gallery of Kosovo. Addressing gaps in art historical writing on Kosovo, as well as Eastern Europe more broadly, the exhibition urges a reconfiguration of current canonical narratives. In addition to commissioning new works, Informator invites artists Doruntina Kastrati and Dardan Zhegrova and art historians from Eastern Europe to discuss what has been omitted from selected publications on art from this region and to explore the central role of archives in conceiving and supporting historicization processes. 

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: audience distant relative
Featured artist: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Curated by Min Sun Jeon
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: audience distant relative presents works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), an artist and writer whose multifaceted conceptual practice has left an important legacy that has yet to be fully recognized. Presenting a range of Cha’s works—spanning mail art, video and audio works, unfinished films, Super 8 films, a multichannel installation, performance documentation, and works on paper—from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, audience distant relative highlights the ways in which Cha invokes personal and collective reminiscing that transcends time, space, and identity. 

Friends of Elliptical Orbits
Featured artists: Saeed Abu-Jaber, Elias Anastas, Yousef Anastas, Mothanna Hussein, Yazan Khalili, Maha Maamoun, Ibrahim Owais, and Ala Younis
Curated by May Makki
Friends of Elliptical Orbits is an expanded presentation of Kayfa ta and Radio Alhara, two ongoing projects that offer new models for artistic production and building community. Kayfa ta is an Arabic publishing initiative, led by Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis, that adopts the form of the “how-to” manual in its publications; Radio Alhara is an online community radio platform started in Palestine by Saeed Abu-Jaber, Elias Anastas, Yousef Anastas, Mothanna Hussein, Yazan Khalili, and Ibrahim Owais. Unfolding across the Hessel Museum, a Bard College shuttle stop, and radioalhara.net, Friends of Elliptical Orbits explores how each project’s design and structure embody its values.


DISTRESS TOLERANCE
Featured artists: Brittni Ann Harvey, Mona Hatoum, Bryce Kroll, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Rodney McMillian, andBri Williams
Curated by Claire Sammut
DISTRESS TOLERANCE features the work of seven contemporary artists—Bri Williams, Shannon Cartier Lucy, Rodney McMillian, Brittni Ann Harvey, Mona Hatoum, and Bryce Kroll—who reflect the psychological and embodied effects of stress in their practices.  

Beast, Chimera, Kin
Featured artists: Anne Chu, Jia Sung, Yi Xin Tong, and Frank WANG Yefeng
Curated by Danni Shen
Beast, Chimera, Kin explores animality as a generative framework for the formation of human subjectivity. The exhibition follows a series of works by artists Anne Chu, Jia Sung, Yi Xin Tong, and Frank WANG Yefeng, which undermine the assumptive logic of “otherness” and dehumanization via animalization, to ultimately transform “the animal” as a locus of possibility. Each builds upon transcultural, cross-species worldviews that rethink changing questions around what it means to be human with others. 

whereabouts
Featured artists: Cudelice Brazelton IV, K.R.M Mooney, and Bat-Ami Rivlin
Curated by Dominika Tylcz
Presenting recent sculptures by Cudelice Brazelton IV, K.R.M Mooney, and Bat-Ami Rivlin, whereabouts investigates spatial and material strategies of signification in contemporary art that resist the production of subject matter. The exhibiting artists instead use the potentials of found materials to implicate the works’ environment as part of the sculptures themselves, redistributing their content to their direct surroundings. 

Back to Back
Featured artists: Ngu Asongwed, RP Boo, and chukwumaa
Curated by Guy Weltchek
Exploring the practice of artists who straddle the fields of DJing and contemporary art production, Back to Back features newly commissioned works by Ngu Asongwed, RP Boo, and chukwumaa that each respond to the physical, formal, and discursive space within Jersey club and footwork music. The exhibition is complemented by a printed zine containing interviews with footwork and club producers in which they discuss the history of these forms, particularly focusing on the evolution of the drum programming techniques that define each genre's signature style. 

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 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 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. With support from the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard for select exhibitions.

Bard Vocal Arts alum Aiden K. Feltkamp ’16 wants to help transgender and nonbinary people have their voices heard. Anthology of New Music: Trans & Nonbinary Voices, curated by Feltkamp, is thought to be the first compiled volume of songs written for and/or by transgender and nonbinary people. “It’s been in my brain for a long time,” said Feltkamp of the collection. “I really, really love art song, but so much of it was so gendered and I found that it was really hard to connect to it for that reason. Because it was either you had to sing this very feminine music about being a woman or it was this music that . . . was still very much about being a man in the world in the 18th century or whatever.” The compositions featured in the anthology are from 2007 to 2019. “It's really a starting place as a singer to find repertoire, and as a teacher it’s also a place to find things to suggest to students, to teach to students,” says Feltkamp.
https://www.app.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/02/23/nj-singer-aiden-feltkamp-curates-music-transgender-nonbinary-voices/6829699001/

In a New York Times article, Kathy Hipple, finance professor in the Bard MBA in Sustainability program, says the current crisis in Ukraine has given the U.S. oil industry a great talking point to promote domestic drilling. But, she warns, it misses the point that we are overly dependent on fossil fuels. “Does anyone want to continue to be dependent on oligarchs in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Canada’s oil, a handful of private companies in the United States? To my mind, that’s not resilient,” said Hipple.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/26/climate/ukraine-oil-lobby-biden-drilling.html

Never one to follow a trend, Jennie C. Jones, Bard MFA faculty member, is both ahead of, and separate from, the curve. In the leadup to Dynamics, her upcoming solo show at the Guggenheim Museum, the New York Times profiled Jones, detailing her career and minimalist aesthetic, both visual and sonic. Musicians and scholars admire Jones’ vision for her work, which includes both physical art and sonic landscapes, seeing in her body of work “prescience and persistence.” “She asserts her right to abstraction,” says George Lewis, scholar, composer, and author. “I take Jennie as a model for saying, well, you can fight that, and you can win.” Dynamics, like her other works, will include paintings that incorporate acoustic panels, not for broadcasting sound, but for reorienting it in the exhibition space, changing the viewer and listener’s experience, depending on their location. Jones sees her work as progressing toward a more courageous place, though still not in the mainstream—but that’s by design. “It’s not like I’m working at the margin because I’ve been placed there,” she says. “As much as I’ve always been the weirdo on the periphery, I’m happy here.”
 
Read More in the New York Times