News and Events

“I’m very interested in how truth and belief are created,” Kite, aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, told the Times Union. In a profile of Kite, published in conjunction with her inclusion in the 81st Whitney Biennial, Times reporter Michelle Falkenstein asked Kite about her artistic practice and pedagogy, including her embrace of AI in the creation of art. “We’re making art with dreams and AI,” Kite said. “I move and the computer translates that movement into sound.” Kite also spoke about her life in the Hudson Valley, including her teaching at Bard and her involvement with the Forge Project. “It’s made it wonderful to live here,” Kite said.

To celebrate the 81st edition of the Whitney Biennial, the New York Times sent three critics to report “on the highs and lows of the exhibition everyone will have an opinion about.” Their consensus? Bard faculty and alumni/ae are ones to watch. Jason Fargo called Lotus L. Kang MFA ’15 “an artist of rare precision,” calling her work, In Cascades, a “richly sedimented, beautifully vulnerable installation in a perpetual state of becoming.” Fargo went on to praise the film In Her Time by Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’19, calling it “a vibrant case study of digital-political bafflement and the hazards of projecting the present onto the past.” Travis Diehl, meanwhile, asks, “Should art comfort?” Reviewing Toilette by Bard alum Carolyn Lazard ’10, “a small maze of chrome medicine cabinets standing on the floor,” the answer, for Diehl, is a resounding no. “The piece addresses you, the viewer, as someone with a body,” Diehl writes. “These works ask, ‘Are you comfortable?’ and don’t expect you to say yes.” Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly by Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12, a “block of shifting, pre-fossilized amber, embedded with plants and even typewritten documents,” was named one of the best works in the show by Martha Schwendener. The 81st edition of the Whitney Biennial is now open to the public and runs through August 11, 2024.