Disciplines

The Film/Video discipline welcomes emerging artists in electronic and time-based arts including fiction and nonfiction cinema, video art, web art, animation and performance. Offering a critical approach to media practice, the department encourages interdisciplinary explorations of moving images in diverse sites, from single-channel “black box” theater to “white cube” gallery exhibition, and contexts beyond.

The Film/Video department has a rich history of developing artists whose work pushes the boundaries of the moving image, interrogating the uses of media in cultural production and everyday life, from capture to display. Students interested in legacies of expanded cinema, experimental film, multi-channel installation, new genres, DIY production and appropriation meet with a diverse faculty of instructors who are accomplished in fields of film, video art, performance art and cultural criticism.  F/V students are active participants in the shaping of a collaborative, ongoing dialog rooted in urgent questions about politics and aesthetics.

The Film/Video discipline is housed in the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center, which offers access to Ottoway Theater for large-screen single-channel projection, an Integrated Arts Room for multi-media exhibition, and Studio X, used for both film shoots and theatrical performances.   Students develop projects, including their theses, over the course of three sessions on-site, as well as during independent study, using the summer months for post-production. Research and development of projects is supported through one-on-one meetings with faculty, group critique, technical instruction, access to equipment and facilities for shooting, and a personal editing room/studio space.

The Music/Sound discipline welcomes emerging artists in composition, improvisation, performance, sound installation, sound sculpture, audio activism, and other forms of sonic engagement. Offering a critical approach to experimental sound practice, the department seeks to move away from an exclusively technical/formal conversation and toward consideration of the full gamut of contextual and historical forces at work in the production and reception of the sonic arts. Buoyed by one-on-one conversation, hands-on instruction, group critique, and caucus meetings, students are challenged to formulate and develop rigorous, idiosyncratic methodologies for both producing and framing their own work.

The department's long-term commitment to the post-Cagean lineage is unique, having been host to such seminal figures as Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Richard Teitelbaum, Christian Wolff, La Monte Young, and many others. The work and thought of Maryanne Amacher, a long time member of the faculty until her passing in 2009, is exemplary of the engagement with sound which the program strives to encourage: complexly, provocatively, and meticulously navigating the boundaries of genre and classification. Dialogue with such lineages as well as with other vernaculars is understood as an opening into a rich, interdisciplinary understanding of the sonic in the broadest and yet most specific sense. Emphasizing hybrid practices, the program offers an approach which neither reduces sound to a sub-category of contemporary art production nor enforces any institutional idea of a “contemporary” music.

Music/Sound is based in the Edith C. Blum Institute and the Milton and Sally Avery Center for the Arts, which together provide individual studios, performance and exhibition spaces, a recording studio, and an electronic music studio, which features vintage analog synthesizers such as the Serge Modular Synthesizer and Arp 2600, as well as digital audio environments including Pro Tools and Logic. An electronic music workshop allows for the design and construction of electronics in many forms, from basic circuitry to the programming of microcontrollers and sensors. Professional performers may be hired as resources for Master's Thesis presentations.

The painting discipline encourages students to engage with the shifting and expanding parameters of "painting culture," a deeply structured, historically informed aesthetic practice that embraces and extends beyond the contexts of the Western painting tradition. It encompasses other predominantly two-dimensional forms such as drawing and printmaking, and encourages students who work in installation and multimedia forms. Facilities for printmaking and silk-screening are offered.

The photography department encourages an expansive, interdisciplinary view of the medium emphasizing experimentation with analogue, digital, still and moving images, and installation. The program centers conceptual approaches and perspectives that engage with the world and the histories and contemporary practices of photography. Content, form, and materials are considered equally in an on-going dialogue about how the photographic image makes meaning. We seek students who want to develop their critical thinking alongside their voices as artists. The program is designed for students who have a practical command of photographic technique and a foundation in the history and criticism of the medium.

The photography facility, located in Woods Studio, contains individual and group darkrooms equipped for black and white processing and printing, a fully equipped shooting studio, and a state-of-the-art digital lab for editing and large-format printing. Medium and large-format cameras and other photographic equipment is available for student use during the summer session. Bard’s library includes an extensive collection of historical, contemporary, and rare books on photography and art as well as portfolios of original prints.

The sculpture discipline  is shaped and reshaped by a set of ideas: form, space, surface, material, location, gesture, narrative. Some students come into this program from art schools; others have no formal art training. What they have in common is a serious commitment to their practice and a readiness to challenge the assumptions that inform it. Students engage in object making, installation, video, and performance.

The limited time frame of the summer session requires students to create work than can be realized rapidly; more time-intensive projects can be completed during the 10-month independent study period. Students are assigned individual studios in the Richard B. Fisher and Emily H. Fisher Studio Arts building. Large common areas for welding, woodworking, and printmaking are also available.

The interdisciplinary context of the M.F.A. program is ideal for writers, as it allows them to explore issues common to the other arts while they address those specific to writing. The program puts an emphasis on developing awareness of a variety of verbal, aural, and textual structures. Students are encouraged to find and develop an individual process of composition, as well as a critical understanding of their field. The structure and nature of the program make it most suitable for writers working with innovative forms of poetry, short fiction, sound, digital and mixed-media writing.

Faculty members are drawn from writers with a wide range of media, styles, and concerns, many of whom are known for addressing difficult social and cultural subjects through exploratory approaches to writing. Students work with this faculty and with faculty in the other disciplines on a one-to-one basis; these Conferences permit students and faculty within the discipline to meet and discuss works in progress as well as readings by authors outside the program.

When on campus, students are provided with individual studios and a communal photocopier. Computers, printing and audio and video facilities are available in several campus media labs.