Institutional Support

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Bard College Receives Grant from the Teagle Foundation

Under the Teagle Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative, Bard College has received a 12-month, $50,000 implementation grant to support faculty-led development of a new core cluster of second year Common Courses. These second-year courses will make more explicit the bridge between first-year learning and increasing specialization on the part of our students in years three and four. The Common Courses Second Year Offering is being developed to meet the desire of students to find their way into a field of study and to complete distribution requirements while extending and testing skills acquired in year one.

Read more about the Teagle award HERE

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Fisher Center Awarded Shuttered Venue Operators Grant 

The Fisher Center at Bard was recently awarded $803,000 through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program administered through the U.S. Small Business Administration. These funds will be used for general operating support as well as purchasing the personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies needed to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Funds provided through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant Program will play a key role in the Fisher Center's safe return to live performance this summer.

The Shuttered Venue Operators (SVO) Grant program was established by the Economic Aid to Hard-Hit Small Businesses, Nonprofits, and Venues Act, signed into law on December 27, 2020. The program includes $15 billion in grants to shuttered venues, to be administered by the SBA’s Office of Disaster Assistance.

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Program Update: Girls Write Kingston

Girls Write Kingston Program Hosts First Celebratory Reading and Launches New Youth-Led Journal

On Friday, June 18, Girls Write Kingston– a writing workshop for girls and young women in the Kingston, NY, area– hosted a celebratory reading for the program’s first cohort of 16 students. Girls Write Kingston, a program for young women, ages 13-18, interested in developing their writing, launched in February and was developed collaboratively by Bard and local community partners. The program offered young women the chance to practice and refine their modes and strategies for communication with a broad public audience while also helping them develop skills necessary for college and the workforce.

After several months of virtual workshops on Zoom, Girls Write Kingston celebrated with a culminating event–held at the Hudson River Maritime Museum– that brought students and their families together with the program’s faculty and staff in-person for the first time. After brief opening statements from Erica Kaufman, Director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking, Ethan Barnett from the A.J. Williams-Meyers African Roots Center, and Rashida Tyler from the YMCA of Kingston & Ulster Counties, students presented a piece they worked on over the course of the program–a variety of fiction, non-fiction, and poetic works. The Girls Write Kingston Celebratory Reading closed with the launch of a youth-led literary space where students published their individual and collaborative works (LINK). This online journal will serve as a space for each cohort to publish their work as the program develops.

Girls Write Kingston is an ongoing program designed to empower young women to see themselves as writers, develop confidence in their writing, and encourage them to see writing as an essential tool for self-expression, advocacy, and action. The program is unique, as the course itself is tailored to the needs and interests of the young women who participate. This project prioritizes supporting adolescent girls so that, as they mature, they are given the space and mentoring they need to develop their voices and confidence in their ideas. In addition, participants can share their writing, focus on self-expression, and exchange constructive feedback.

This year’s workshops were designed and developed by Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) and The Master of Arts in Teaching Program in partnership with the YMCA of Kingston and Ulster County and the AJ Williams-Myers African Roots Center. Funding from the Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation and Ulster Savings Bank helped to support this program.
 

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Bard Awarded 2021–22 Big Read Grant from National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), in partnership with Arts Midwest, has awarded Bard College a $19,985 NEA Big Read grant to support the Big Read Hudson Valley: Spanning the Hudson River with Words, a dynamic community-wide reading program offering reading groups, performances, workshops, and events in Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Kingston. 

Read the full story HERE

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Bard College Awarded Library of Congress Grant

Bard College was recently awarded a $19,810 grant through the Library of Congress' Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Regional Grant Program. This award will support the Institute for Writing and Thinking's new series of micro-history professional development workshops "If Woman Upset the World: Reading and Writing Women Activists of the Hudson Valley."

This project will focus on ways to teach Hudson Valley women activists in the classroom using LOC archives. Bard IWT will develop online and in-person workshops that explore The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and selected radio talks by Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as her columns. Workshops will be designed for in-service teachers on campus and for teachers-in-training under the auspices of the Bard College Masters in the Art of Teaching Program. Trainees will then use the skills gained in these MAT workshops to replicate them as online mini-workshops for 100 public middle school students in Lake Katrine, NY. 

About the Library of Congress' TPS Regional Grant Program
The TPS Regional program promotes the widespread, sustained and effective use of primary sources from the Library of Congress in K-12 classrooms by increasing access to the TPS program. Through this effort, hundreds of organizations from all 50 states, and the District of Columbia have enhanced their programming for educators. Learn more here.

About the Institute for Writing and Thinking
The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking offers pedagogical support to faculty and students at institutions across North America and around the world. In public workshops at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and in workshops specifically designed for high schools,
colleges, and universities, IWT's interdisciplinary classroom activities foster students’ capacities for thinking critically. In an average year, 1100 teachers participate in IWT programs.

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National Endowment for the Arts 2021 Awardees

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) recently announced that Bard College will receive three grant awards for the 2021 calendar year. The College received a total of $45,000 in grant funding from the NEA, which will support a conference hosted by the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), the Fisher Center's 2021 SummerScape opera, and Bard’s literary journal Conjunctions.

The Fisher Center at Bard received a $15,000 award from the NEA to support the production of the 2021 SummerScape opera, "Le roi Arthus (King Arthur)." This summer, Bard SummerScape returns to live performance after COVID-19 required the postponement or cancellation of shows over a year ago. The 31st annual Bard Music Festival features a wide array of performances staged for limited in-person audiences. Included in the lineup is the first fully staged American production of "Le roi Arthus (King Arthur)." More about the Bard Music Festival and SummerScape can be found here. 

CCS received $20,000 for a conference scheduled to take place this year titled “Exhibiting Blackness Revisited: Arts of the African Diasporas and Continent on Display.” The conference will mark the 10 th anniversary of Bridget Cooks’ landmark book “Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum.” Within the present context in which institutions are confronting diversity, inclusion, and representation with renewed vigor, the conference will build on Cooks’ work to engage the recent history of exhibitions that focus on artists of African descent in the US and internationally. “Exhibiting Blackness Revisited” will focus on exhibitions of artists of African descent with an emphasis on research produced after the 2011 publication of “Exhibiting Blackness.”

CCS Bard Senior Faculty Nana Adusei-Poku, conceived of the idea for the conference and was chosen to organize this project for her expertise in art history, particularly with art of the African Diaspora. Adusei-Poku is Senior Academic Advisor and Luma Foundation Fellow at CCS Bard. She was previously Visiting Professor in Art History of the African Diaspora at The Cooper Union in New York City. She was Research Professor for Visual Cultures (2013- 2017) at the Willem de Kooning Academy, as well as Guest Lecturer at the University of the Arts, Zurich from 2012-2018. Her work has been published in Nka- Journal of Contemporary African Art, reflux, Kunstforum International, Flashart!, L’Internationale, and Darkmatter. She curated the event “Performances of No-thingness” at the Academy of Arts Berlin in 2018 and the program “Longing on a Large Scale” in conjunction with Todd Gray’s “Exhibition Eucledian Gris Gris” at Pomona College Museum of Art 2019-2020.

Bard’s literary journal Conjunctions also received a $10,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts. This grant will support the publication and promotion of two print and e-book volumes as well as a weekly online magazine in 2021. Each print issue typically centers on a provocative theme and includes groundbreaking fiction, poetry, narrative nonfiction, interviews, translations, and multimedia from 35+ authors. This spring, Conjunctions will celebrate its 40 th Anniversary–a rare achievement for a literary journal– and plans to release a special print issue.

A cornerstone of contemporary literature, Conjunctions has represented the best innovative writing since 1981. Conjunctions serves those who read dangerously and write fearlessly, publishing fiction, poetry, criticism, drama, art, interviews, and multimedia that challenge accepted modes of expression, experiment with language and thought, and marry visionary imagination with rigorous execution. The Journal is dedicated to supporting the careers of unknown authors while providing a space for seasoned writers to work outside audience expectations. Conjunctions bring writers and readers together in several event series, including biannual NYC launch readings and the Innovative Contemporary Fiction Reading Series at Bard College, in which notable authors meet with students and give a free public reading. To serve authors beyond New York, Conjunctions offers a Cities Series and now holds events nationwide in Boulder, Iowa City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle.

About the NEA
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent federal agency that funds, promotes, and strengthens the creative capacity of communities by providing all Americans with diverse opportunities for arts participation. The NEA supports exemplary arts projects in communities nationwide through grantmaking, initiatives, partnerships, and events. Grants are awarded to nonprofit organizations, creative writers and translators, state arts agencies, and regional arts organizations in support of arts projects across the country.

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Bard College Awarded Grant through NYSERDA’s FlexTech Program

Bard College was recently awarded a $162,561 grant by New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s (NYSERDA) Flexible Technical Assistance Program. This award will cover 60% of the cost of three projects integral to moving Bard’s Climate and Energy Master Plan forward. The grant will cover a detailed lighting audit of 56 buildings on Bard’s main campus, a feasibility study investigating converting the Library to geothermal heating and cooling, and the creation of a focused infrastructure improvement plan for 20 campus buildings totaling 431,000 square feet. Bard College will work with LaBella Associates and McKinstry Essention, LLC on these projects.

As part of the Climate and Energy Master Plan, Bard has developed a long-term road map for energy upgrades to move toward a net-zero campus and to phase out the use of fossil fuels. Bard is committed to expanding the use of geothermal systems and updating lighting fixtures to help achieve this goal. The consultants for the projects supported by this grant will audit various buildings on campus to recommend upgrades to lighting, heating and cooling systems, and other infrastructure improvements. These upgrades will help lay the foundation to transform Annandale into a net-zero energy and carbon-neutral campus ready to face the challenges presented by climate change. The College currently has a goal of the main campus reaching net-zero energy and carbon neutrality by 2035.

NYSERDA has supported several past projects including, the development of an Energy Master Plan, a project evaluating the feasibility of a small hydropower system on campus, and a website documenting the process of exploring sustainable micro hydropower using the Saw Kill, among others. More information can be found in Bard’s News and Notes at the link here.

For more information about sustainability initiatives at Bard, visit bos.bard.edu/energy-facilities-and-climate.

More about NYSERDA FlexTech
The NYSERDA Flexible Technical Assistance (FlexTech) Program Offers cost-shared technical services to help businesses operating in New York State make smart energy decisions. A dedicated team of engineers, technology experts, and energy consultants work with customers to create a customized assessment that identifies specific opportunities for reducing energy consumption and costs. For more information, visit https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/Programs/FlexTech-Program.

 

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Bard College Awarded NYS Higher Education Capital Matching Grant (HECap)
 

Through a recent application to the New York State Higher Education Capital Match Program (HECap), Bard College was awarded a $146,000 grant for video communication technology equipment acquisition and upgrades across campus. This award was part of $57.2 million in funding designated to support critical infrastructure improvements at Ney York’s private not-for-profit colleges and universities. A total of 35 colleges and universities across the state received an award through HECap.

The rapid move to connected learning in March 2020 stressed the need for the College to have a robust digital infrastructure and appropriate classroom equipment in place. This grant will provide vital support for purchasing new video conferencing and live-streaming equipment and classroom upgrades that will enhance student and faculty learning and teaching experiences for years to come. Additionally, it will support upgrades to Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center, replacing outdated audio-visual equipment and improving a central meeting space on campus.

In addition to the current need for online learning and social distancing due to the pandemic, Bard’s pioneering use of connected-learning approaches in virtual international exchanges through network classes has necessitated video conferencing and live-streaming equipment upgrades. This new classroom equipment will help to ensure students are able to engage with their professors and each other in seminar-style discussions as seamlessly as possible. Upgrades to the digital infrastructure across campus will also enable Bard to offer more virtual and hybrid events and learning opportunities to students and the public.

This project will have a significant impact on Bard’s students, faculty, staff, and visitors and will allow the College to more effectively serve its students and protect the continuity of instruction through extraordinary events. Digital infrastructure upgrades will have an immediate effect on faculty course design, student projects, collaborative efforts, academic exchange, and public events. In the long-term, this grant will help support Bard in fulfilling its mission to provide a challenging academic program; a supportive environment that fosters a collaborative exchange of ideas in the classroom, studio, and laboratory as well as the ambition to achieve excellence; and access to world-class scholarship and research.

More about HECap Awards
The New York State Higher Education Capital Match Program (HECap) provides matching grants to private, not-for-profit colleges and universities for projects that enhance educational opportunities for New Yorkers, create construction jobs, and drive investment in communities across the state. Under the Governor's leadership, the Higher Education Capital Matching Grant Program has enabled campuses across the state to make critical investments in their infrastructure and equipment while creating construction jobs.