Disciplines

The Film/Video discipline welcomes artists working within various strains of contemporary moving image art, including experimental cinema (fiction, nonfiction and hybrid), video art, installation, web art, animation, and performance. Offering a critical approach to media practice, we encourage interdisciplinary exploration of audiovisual production, exhibition, and circulation.

Students develop projects, including their theses, over the course of three sessions on-site, as well as during independent study. Faculty work with them to develop their individual practices within the unique rhythm of the Bard program, through one-on-one meetings, group critiques and collective activities. They are encouraged to support each other’s projects and can find in the department a community of dialogue and skill-sharing. The discipline has a rich history of artists pushing the boundaries of the moving image, through innovative practices informed by the students’ and faculty's diverse backgrounds as artists, performers, filmmakers, theory thinkers, media anthropologists and cultural workers. It fosters a collaborative, ongoing dialog rooted in urgent questions about art, language, technology, and their relationships to local and global politics and culture.
 
The discipline is housed in the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Center, which offers access to Ottaway Theater for theatrical projection; an Integrated Arts Room for installation and performance; Studio X, a black box theater and shooting studio; a fully stocked equipment room; and personal editing rooms / studio spaces.

The Music/Sound discipline has been committed to rethinking and expanding the notion of "experimental" music and sound practice for decades. The discipline welcomes emerging artists in composition, improvisation, performance, sound installation, sound sculpture, audio activism, and other forms of sonic engagement. Offering a “left of Cage” approach to sound practice (as described by former Music/Sound co-chair Marina Rosenfeld), 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. Through 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.

Buoyed in its early days by founding member of the Bard MFA Benjamin Boretz and long-term faculty member and erstwhile discipline co-chair Richard Teitelbaum, the Music/Sound discipline cultivated a unique relationship with and commitment to post-Cagean lineages, hosting such seminal figures as Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Christian Wolff, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley. More recent co-chairs such as Rosenfeld, Matana Roberts, and current co-chairs Kabir Carter and Bill Dietz have cultivated an expansive roster of faculty and visiting artists including Raven Chacon, Diamanda Galás, Jlin, Christine Sun Kim, Okkyung Lee, Moor Mother, Hong-Kai Wang, and many others. The work and thought of Maryanne Amacher, a long time member of the faculty until her passing in 2009, remains exemplary of the engagement with sound which the program strives to encourage: complexly, provocatively, and meticulously navigating the boundaries of genre and classification. 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 expanding parameters of contemporary painting through a deeply structured, historically informed practice. The program is rooted in the balance of conceptual and affective modes of art-making and is committed to exploring contexts and histories beyond the Western canon. The department encompasses other predominantly two-dimensional forms such as drawing and printmaking, while supporting expanded approaches that involve installation and multimedia.

Over the course of three summers, students develop their individual practices through rigorous one-on-one meetings, group critiques, and caucus discussions. The independent study period provides focused time for studio creation and reflection on the rich conversations with faculty and peers. Throughout the program students work closely with painting faculty to formulate the language and skills necessary for a robust and lasting artistic practice.

During summer sessions students are assigned individual studios in the Richard B. Fisher and Emily H. Fisher Studio Arts building. Facilities for printmaking and silk-screening are offered. While close mentorship and painting specific dialogues center the program, students also meet with faculty in the other disciplines and have access to facilities of those departments. A final thesis exhibition is mounted in the third summer with students presenting their work to the larger artistic community.

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 that 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 MFA 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.