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11-12-2019: Bard College received a gold seal, the highest honor, at the 2019 ALL IN Challenge Awards Ceremony held to recognize colleges and universities committed to increasing college student voting rates. Bard achieved a student voting rate between 40 percent and 49 percent.

“Bard students truly appreciate the importance of voting as one of the first rites of passage into participatory American democracy. Their engagement is key to our future and exemplifies the spirit of the 26th Amendment where young adult voices are equal and encouraged. It’s part of what drives Election@Bard to inspire a student voter culture,” said Erin Cannan, vice president for student affairs. 

Student participation in elections has increased from the 2014 midterm election to the recent 2018 midterm election. According to the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, an initiative of Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education, voter turnout at the more than 1,000 institutions participating in the study increased by 21 points, from 19 percent to 40 percent. The voter registration rates for Bard College demonstrate that 47.2 percent of students voted in the 2018 elections and 82.5 percent of students were registered and eligible to vote.  

“Working in partnership with the Center for Civic Engagement and the Andrew Goodman Foundation, we saw a huge rise in students voting in the 2018 midterm election,” said Ava Mazzye ’20, student director of Election@Bard. “We hope this is the beginning of a lifelong commitment to democratic engagement.” 

“We are excited to honor Bard College with an ALL IN Challenge gold seal in recognition of their intentional efforts to increase democratic engagement and full voter participation,” said Jennifer Domagal-Goldman, executive director of the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. “More institutions like Bard are changing the culture on campus by institutionalizing nonpartisan democratic engagement efforts that are resulting in the incredible student voter turnout rates that we’ve seen across the country.”

The ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge is a nonpartisan, national initiative recognizing and supporting campuses as they work to increase nonpartisan democratic engagement and full student voter participation. The Challenge encourages higher education institutions to help students form the habits of active and informed citizenship, and make democratic participation a core value on their campus. More than 560 campuses, enrolling more than 6.2 million students, have joined the Challenge since its launch in summer 2016.

11-09-2019: In film after film, including his latest, Dark Waters, the director Todd Haynes asks viewers to contend with ambiguity, writes John Lahr in the New Yorker: “Dark Waters subverts by taking the legal thriller—a form that traditionally concludes with the triumph of good over evil—into areas of psychological complexity and ambiguity. All investigative stories, he told me, when we met in Los Angeles in June, have the burden of revealing a truth. ‘What I love so much about the genre,’ he explained, ‘is the cost of revealing the truth. The drama of that, and what it does to people. That is the part that kills you.’
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11-06-2019: The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is pleased to announce that Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, has been selected as the recipient of the 2020 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of CCS Bard. For the past 21 years, the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence has celebrated and awarded the individual achievements of a distinguished curator whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive of exhibition-making today. The award reflects CCS Bard’s commitment to recognizing individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice. This year the award will be presented to Butler by artist Andrea Fraser at a gala celebration and dinner co-chaired by CCS Bard Board of Governors member Lonti Ebers and Chairman of the CCS Bard Board Martin Eisenberg, and will take place on April 7, 2020, at One Manhattan West, 395 9th Avenue, in New York City. Event location provided by Brookfield Properties with additional generous support from Lonti Ebers.

“Connie Butler represents the best of curating; independently minded, always curious, dedicated to artists and consistently bold in the scope of her exhibitions and choices of subject.  Her exhibitions are touchstones of curating in the United States—helping to redefine subjects and the institutions where she works.” —Tom Eccles, Executive Director, CCS Bard

The awardee is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. Past recipients include Harald Szeemann (1998), Marcia Tucker (1999), Kasper König (2000), Paul Schimmel (2001), Susanne Ghez (2002), Kynaston McShine (2003), Walter Hopps (2004), Kathy Halbreich and Mari Carmen Ramírez (2005), Lynne Cooke and Vasif Kortun (2006), Alanna Heiss (2007), Catherine David (2008), Okwui Enwezor (2009), Lucy Lippard (2010), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2011), Ann Goldstein (2012), Elisabeth Sussman (2013), Charles Esche (2014), Christine Tohme and Martha Wilson (2015), Thelma Golden (2016), Nicholas Serota (2017), Lia Gangitano (2018), and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2019).

“I am thrilled to receive the Audrey Irmas prize for curatorial excellence. The history of this award is truly a distinguished one and it is an honor to be among such incredible colleagues at this critical time in our field. Now more than ever our work matters and I continue to follow and support the work of artists and believe in the future of museums.” —Connie Butler

The 2020 award will once again be given under the name of patron Audrey Irmas, who has bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize of $25,000. Irmas is an emeritus board member of CCS Bard and an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award has been designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, and is based on his 2006 commission Bard Enter, conceived for the entrance to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.

Connie Butler is the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, where she has organized numerous exhibitions including the biennial of Los Angeles artists Made in L.A. (2014), Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth (2015) and Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space (2017). She also co-curated Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions which opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in April of 2018 and at the Hammer in October 2018; Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line, 2019 and Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence a retrospective exhibition which opened at the Hammer September 2019. From 2006 to 2013 she was The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she co-curated the first major Lygia Clark retrospective in the United States, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (2014); and co-curated On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010) and mounted Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, the first US retrospective of the artist’s career. Butler also organized the groundbreaking survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles where she was curator from 1996 to 2006.
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11-06-2019: Eban Goodstein, director of Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability, says putting the planet and its inhabitants before profits “is an incredible paradigm shift” for business schools that have long trained their students to maximize shareholder value. Bard’s MBA in Sustainability bakes sustainability principles into every class rather than simply offering sustainability electives as many business schools do. “In theory, you don’t want to have a sustainability department. The goal should be to make sustainability part of the business model,” says 34-year-old Nour Shaikh MBA ’16, a vice president at ING Financial Services.
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11-05-2019: The winners of the 2019 Concerto Competition were announced on Saturday, November 2, after the final round of performances at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Twenty-one students in the Bard College Conservatory of Music competed for the honor over a three-day period. This year’s winners are two undergraduates—Gitta Markó ’20, violin, who performed Concerto funebre by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and Yixin Wang ’23, guzheng, who performed Fragrance of Jasmine Blossoms by Zhanhao He—and a second-year student in the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy, who performed Shéhérazade by Maurice Ravel. The three winners will perform as soloists with the Conservatory Orchestra, The Orchestra Now, or the American Symphony Orchestra during the 2020–21 season.