News and Events

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship to Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College. Chosen through a rigorous review process from 3,000 applicants, Shatz was among 188 scholars, photographers, novelists, historians, and data scientists to receive a 2024 Fellowship. Bard alumnae Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 and Ahndraya Parlato ’02 were also named Guggenheim Fellows for 2024.

“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”

In all, 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 84 academic institutions, 38 US states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in the 2024 class, who range in age from 28 to 89. More than 40 Fellows (roughly 1 out of 4) do not hold a full-time affiliation with a college or university. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to timely issues such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change and community.

Created and initially funded in 1925, by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2024 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Adam Shatz, who will be working on a book about jazz throughout his Fellowship, is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and The Nation, among other publications. He is the author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) and Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso, 2023). He is also host of the podcast Myself with Others, produced by the pianist Richard Sears. His political reporting and commentary have covered subjects such as Trump and the white supremacists in Charlottesville, mass incarceration, Israel’s Putinization, the deep state, and Egypt after Mubarak. Published profiles and portraits include Franz Fanon and Michel Houellebecq (London Review of Books), Nina Simone (New York Review of Books), saxophonist Kamasi Washington (New York Times Magazine); French cartoonist Riad Sattouf (New Yorker); and jazz great Charles Mingus (The Nation). Shatz previously taught at New York University and was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.

Katherine Hubbard ’10 uses photography, writing and performance to plumb photography’s continuing significance. Considering analog photography as a mimesis of the body, Hubbard asks how its procedures might be called upon to investigate social politics, history, and narrative. In her photographs, the physical positioning of one’s body has an essential relationship to how one processes images, exploring this encounter as a time based experience. Hubbard’s writing practice forms the core of her performances, culling the malleability of vision to frame a politics of looking, bridging the imaginary with the familiar. She is currently Associate Professor and MFA Director at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.

Ahndraya Parlato ’02 is an artist based in Rochester, New York. She has published three books, including Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), East of the Sun, West of the Moon, (a collaboration with Gregory Halpern, Études Books, 2014). Additionally, she has contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), and The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture, 2014). Parlato has exhibited work at Spazio Labo, Bologna, Italy; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Aperture Foundation, New York, New York; and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. She has been awarded residencies at Light Work and The Visual Studies Workshop and was a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Joy of Photography Grant recipient.

“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.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies; New Red Order, an Indigenous art collective whose core contributors are Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 (Ojibway) and Zack Khalil ’14 (Ojibway); and Trisha Baga MFA ’10 have received 2024 United States Artist (USA) Fellowships in the disciplines of Music and Visual Arts. Hennies, New Red Order, and Baga are among this year’s 50 awardees, encompassing artists and collectives spanning multiple generations, who are dedicated to their communities and committed to building upon shared legacies through artistic innovation, cultural stewardship, and multifaceted storytelling. USA Fellowships provide $50,000 in unrestricted money to artists across 10 creative disciplines. In addition to the award, current fellows have access to financial planning, career consulting, legal advice, and other professional services as requested. 

Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought.

New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) that collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. 

Trisha Baga is a Filipino-American artist working in stereoscopic 3D video installation, paint, clay, consumer grade electronics, and community performance. Compelled by an interest in what they call “the stuff that makes things stick together,” Baga recombines objects and images into scenarios that address issues related to the environment, technology, and identity.

Representing a broad diversity of regions and mediums, the USA Fellows are awarded through a peer-led selection process in the disciplines of Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing.

Bard College faculty members and alums will be among the 71 artists and collectives selected to participate in this year’s Whitney Biennial, the 81st installment of the landmark exhibition series. Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing opens on March 20. Works by Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies; Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies, Distinguished Artist in Residence in Studio Arts, and Bard MFA Faculty in Music/Sound Kite MFA ’18; and Bard MFA Faculty in Sculpture Lotus Laurie Kang MFA ’15 will be featured alongside those by alums Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20, Carolyn Lazard ’10, and Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12. The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College graduate Min Sun Jeon CCS ’22 helped to organize the exhibition.

The 2024 Whitney Biennial is organized by Chrissie Iles (Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator) and Meg Onli (Curator at Large), with Min Sun Jeon CCS ’22 and Beatriz Cifuentes. The performance program is organized by Iles and Onli, with guest curator Taja Cheek. The film program is organized by Iles and Onli, with guest curators Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker.

“After finalizing the list of artists last summer, we have built a thematic Biennial that focuses on the ideas of ‘the real,’” write the curators. “Society is at an inflection point around this notion, in part brought on by artificial intelligence challenging what we consider to be real, as well as critical discussions about identity. Many of the artists presenting works—including via robust performance and film programs—explore the fluidity of identity and form, historical and current land stewardship, and concepts of embodiment, among other urgent throughlines, and we are inspired by the work they are creating and sharing.”

Two Bard faculty members and two alumni/ae are recipients of MacDowell Fellowships. Carl Elsaesser, visiting artist in residence at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts, has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship to MacDowell's Residency Program in the Film/Video Artists category for fall/winter 2023. Elsaesser’s residency will support the completion of his project, Coastlines, a feature-length film that intertwines the ethnographic intricacies of Maine’s coastline with the intimate video diaries of a Portland family, inviting a reevaluation of evolving identities and artistic representation within the private and public spheres. Drawing from queer phenomenology and traditional historical narratives, the film challenges perceptions and redefines the boundaries of storytelling, revealing Maine’s dual role as a backdrop and active participant in shaping inhabitants’ sense of self.

Daaimah Mubashshir, playwright in residence at Bard, received a MacDowell Fellowship in MacDowell’s Artist Residency Program for fall 2023 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in support of their work on a new play about their great grandmother, Begonia Williams Tate, who defied all odds in Mobile, Alabama, in the late 19th century. Chaya Czernowin, a composer and Bard MFA ’88 in Music, and Bard alumna Hannah Beerman ’15, are also 2023 MacDowell Fellowship recipients. The MacDowell Fellowships are distributed by seven discipline-specific admissions panels who make their selections based on applicants’ vision and talent as reflected by work samples and a project description. Once at MacDowell, selected Fellows are provided a private studio, three meals a day, and accommodations for a period of up to six weeks. 

A posthumous album by Richard Teitelbaum, a member of Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) and former Bard College professor of music, has been included in Bandcamp’s 2023 list of Best Contemporary Classical Music. Symphony No. 107 — The Bard, a previously unreleased live recording, was performed in Olin Hall at Bard College in 2012, and was edited, mixed, and mastered by Matt Sargent, assistant professor of music at Bard, in October 2022. “The music builds from near-silence to unleash a spirited collage of texture and gesture, constantly mutating and blending, with live instrumental bits—on piano, shofar, or harmonica—seeping in, sometimes taking over, or blending within electronic soundscapes,” writes Peter Margasak for Bandcamp. Teitelbaum taught electronic and experimental music at Bard for over 30 years, and cochaired the music department of the Master of Fine Arts program. He was one of the founding members of the pioneering electronic music group MEV, created in Italy in 1966, together with Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski.

In the program’s second year, two Bard alumnae, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi MFA ’18 and Alisha B. Wormsley MFA ’19, were awarded Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants. The grants, given by the New York Foundation for the Arts, support environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists in the United States and US Territories that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi was awarded a grant for Oil Research Group (ORG), which “investigates two environments contiguously: oil, the world’s most important non-renewable resource, and data, the information environment that fertilizes the production of shared meaning.” Alisha B Wormsley was awarded a grant for Children of NAN: A Survival Guide, “a film for future Black femmes that spans Black womxn’s relationship to craft, land/space, and spirit.” Anonymous Was A Woman awarded $309,000 in total to 20 projects led by women-identifying artists this year.

Executive Director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Hannah Barrett’s current exhibition at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, features paintings of “dandy monsters”—sartorial nongendered creatures from the artist’s imagination set in both bureaucratic and fantastical scenery. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven Barrett’s painting for over a decade, leading to their current portraits of these whimsical monsters. “Barrett’s monsters subvert the gender binary by combining masculine dandy finery with high femme elements; the paintings serve up a new representation of the nonbinary (as in both ‘not subscribing to binaries’ and ‘my gender is none of your business’),” writes Shelley Marlow for Hyperallergic.  

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an experimental documentary by filmmaker and Bard MFA alumnus Todd Haynes, showcased a very different type of Barbie narrative from the Greta Gerwig film now topping the box office. “To a certain slice of the Gen X cognoscenti, ‘the Barbie movie’ will always and forever refer to a very different film, one both notorious and barely seen,” writes Jessica Winter for the New Yorker. Made in the summer of 1985 when he was still a student at Bard, Haynes used Barbie dolls to portray the life of musician Karen Carpenter, from her rise to fame as part of the successful duo the Carpenters and throughout her descent into anorexia and her death at age 32. The film “begins as a droll prank and then tilts, almost imperceptibly, into surreal domestic nightmare and, finally, authentic tragedy,” Winter continues. “It was sui generis in both its execution and, arguably, its reception.”
 

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) is pleased to present Stage Presence, the thesis exhibition of the Class of 2024. The exhibition brings together 23 distinct practices from candidates in the disciplines of film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. Stage Presence will be on view from July 15 through July 23 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook, New York, and evening presentations of time-based works—such as performances, readings and screenings—will be held at several locations on Bard’s campus. An opening reception will also be held on July 15, from 1 pm to 4 pm. For more information about exhibition hours, presentation locations, and accessibility, please visit bard.edu/mfa/thesis.

In its standard usage, the phrase “stage presence” refers to a performer’s capacity to command the attention of a room. The phrase was also used by art critic Michael Fried in 1967 to condemn minimalist artists’ rejection of modernist artistic values of autonomy and absorption. In Fried’s account the minimalists instead embraced “the situation” in which an art object and viewer existed together, reflexively confronting an audience with their relationship to viewing. Following Fried’s essay, the phrase has had many more lives within artistic contexts, from a postmodern reclamation to a contemporary embrace of its more commonplace associations.
 
When taken together, the distinct artistic practices of the Bard MFA Class of 2024 resonate with issues of stage presence. Experimentation with display structures; activations of text in space; investigations into mapping and absence; disruption of voice and conventional notions of authorship; emphasis on the scale of the body; and integration of theatrical techniques such as props or backdrops are just a few of the strategies by which these artists explore modes of presence, viewership, and relationality.

The Bard MFA thesis exhibition features works by MFA candidates Kaur Alia Ahmed, June Canedo de Souza, Francesse Dolbrice, Camonghne Felix, Christina Graham, Tallulah Haddon, Lara Carmen Hidalgo, Sam Lasko, Khan Lee, Lotte Leerschool, Eli Benjamin Neuman-Hammond, Mira Putnam, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, Natalia Rolón Sotelo, Francie Seidl Chodosh, Sydney Spann, Allie Taylor, Lauren Tosswill, Nora Treatbaby, Marty Two Bulls Jr., Sam Wenc, Alexa West, and Drew Zeiba.

Stage Presence is coordinated by Marina Caron (MA ’23), a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Caron is a curator, writer and researcher based in New York City. Her thesis exhibition, Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass, focused on the work of the prolific and under-recognized artist Bettina Grossman (b. New York, 1927; d. New York, 2021).

Marty Two Bulls Jr. MFA ’24 was chosen as one of 21 Indigenous leaders to receive a 2023–24 NDN Changemaker Fellowship. The fellowship comes with a flexible cash prize of $75,000 to invest in a project of the fellow’s choosing. “Each fellow was uplifted and selected by grassroots members of their region in a process which involved over 300 applicants from 21 different regions across the colonial nation-states of Canada, Mexico, and the US, including its surrounding Island nations,” said the NDN Collective.

“I’m extremely humbled to have received the NDN Collective Changemaker Fellowship,” Two Bulls said. “The fellowship will support my work as an artist and educator in my rural tribal community on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in western South Dakota. It means a great deal to me to receive such tremendous support and acknowledgment from an Indigenous-run organization like NDN Collective; I feel like I’m on the right path in the work that I am doing.”

Speaking with Mira Jacob on Thresholds, Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14 said she will sometimes watch cute animal videos on YouTube in order to get into a mental space conducive to creativity. The method is comical, but the effect is integral to Long Soldier’s practice. “I have to be empty of all of the daily concerns and societal concerns, to a certain degree,” she said. “Then there’s a deeper Layli that’s allowed to come.” Discussing the creative life at length, Long Soldier emphasized the need to accept one’s limitations and to work within them, achieving “creative liberation,” and the need for artists to free themselves from pervasive myths about creativity. “I think there is a false belief that it’s always there,” Long Soldier said. “It is, as they say, a practice. You have to learn the ways to access it, and to use it, and to keep it vibrant and keep it alive.” Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, Long Soldier will be awarded the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters this May at Bard College’s 163rd Commencement.

Bard MFA student Camonghne Felix writes about how childhood trauma affected her cognition, disrupting her education and her sense of self. After seeking treatment for ADHD and bipolar disorder as an adult, she finally found her way back to her love of mathematics. “Losing my ability to learn and understand math represented the frailty of the human mind,” she writes, “but my ability to relearn it represents the mind’s innate resiliency.” The essay is adapted from Felix’s new memoir, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation, published this month by Penguin Random House. 

Camonghne Felix is a poet, writer, and political strategist. She was the first Black woman and youngest person to hold the position of speechwriter for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. She also served as director of surrogates and strategic communications for Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign. Her debut poetry collection, Build Yourself a Boat, was longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry and shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award and for a Lambda Literary Award. Dyscalculia is her second book.

Bard College Assistant Professor of Dance Souleymane Badolo and MFA alum in Music/Sound and American and Indigenous Studies Program faculty member Kite (aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18) have won 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards, which will fund the creation of experimental, risk-taking projects that push boundaries formally and thematically, venturing into wild, out-there, never-before-seen concepts, and future universes real or imagined. 
 
Creative Capital awarded 50 groundbreaking projects—comprising 66 individual artists—focused on Technology, Performing Arts, and Literature, as well as Multidisciplinary and Socially Engaged forms. Souleymane Badolo (with Jacob Bamogo) won an award in Dance. Kite won an award in Technology. Awardees will receive varying amounts up to $50,000 in direct funding to help finance their projects and build thriving artistic careers. The award provides a range of grant services from industry connections and financial planning to peer mentorship and community-building opportunities. Grant funding is unrestricted and may be used for any purpose to advance the project, including, but not limited to, studio space, housing, groceries, staffing, childcare, equipment, computers, and travel. The combined value of the 2023 Creative Capital Awards totals more than $2.5 million in artist support. 
 
“The 2023 Creative Capital cohort reaffirms the unpredictable and radical range of ideas alive in the arts today—from artists working in Burkina Faso to Cambodia and across the United States. We continue to see our democratic, open-call grantmaking process catalyze visionary projects that will influence our communities, our culture, and our environment,” said Christine Kuan, Creative Capital President Executive Director. 
 
The Creative Capital grant is administered through a national open call, a democratic process involving external review of thousands of applications by international industry experts, arts administrators, curators, scholars, and artists. The 2023 grantee cohort comprises 75% BIPOC artists, representing Asian, Black or African American, Latinx, Native American or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern-identified artists; 10% of artists identify as having a disability; and 59% of artists identify as women, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. The cohort includes emerging, mid-career, and established artists between the ages of 25 and 69. The artists are affiliated with all regions of the United States and its territories, as well as artists based in Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Germany, and Japan. 
 
Kite also won a 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Media. The award honors her creative accomplishments and supports her ongoing artistic and professional development. Kite is one of 45 USA Fellows across 10 creative disciplines who will receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards. USA Fellowships are awarded to artists at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. Fellowships are awarded in the following disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. Learn more about USA Fellowships here.
 
Souleymane ‘Solo’ Badolo is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Burkina Faso–based troupe Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dance with Western contemporary dance. A native of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Badolo began his professional career with the African dance company DAMA. He has also performed with Salia nï Seydou and the National Ballet of Burkina Faso, and worked with French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier. Badolo and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa. He appeared in the 2015 BAM Next Wave Festival; has created solo projects for Danspace, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Harlem Stage, the 92nd Street Y, and New York’s River to River Festival; and was commissioned to create a dance for Philadanco as part of James Brown: Get on the Good Foot, which was produced by the Apollo Theater and toured nationally and internationally. He was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2011 as outstanding emerging choreographer, received the Juried Bessie Award in 2012, and a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for his piece Yimbégré, which “gloriously communicated the clash and reconciliation of the different traditions held within one’s life, one’s body.” The Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts has supported Badolo’s ongoing research in Africa. He graduated with an MFA from Bennington in June 2013. He has been on the Bard College faculty since 2017 and previously taught at the New School, Denison University, and Bennington College. 
 
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). Kite’s scholarship and practice explores contemporary Lakota ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Learning and compositional systems for body interface movement performances, interactive and static sculpture, immersive video and sound installations, poetry and experimental lectures, experimental video, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Her work has been featured in various publications, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines”, and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) (2019) was featured on the cover of Canadian Art.

Filmmaker and Bard professor Ephraim Asili spoke with Metal magazine about navigating his various roles as artist and teacher. “I can't see a situation in the future, no matter how well things go commercially, where I would not want to teach. I get too much out of it in terms of being able to relate to people of a certain age, with a fresh mindset around the medium and the world in general. It's something that I get endless inspiration from. I've also been able to hire former students to work with me on my projects, and that has gone well for me, and for students that I've worked with. Is that something that I anticipated? I think so.” Ephraim Asili is associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program. He is an alumnus of Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Class of 2011. Asili has taught on the faculty at Bard since 2015.
 

Artist, publisher, and Bard College alumnus Paul Chan MFA ’03 has been named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. "He draws on a wealth of cultural touchstones—from classical philosophy to modern literature, critical theory, and hip-hop culture—to produce works that respond to our current political and social realities,” the MacArthur Foundation says, “making those realities more immediately available to the mind for contemplation and critical reflection.” Chan’s work, which “[strives] to express humanity’s complexities and contradictions through an artistic practice that moves across media,” has been exhibited in the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Guggenheim Museum, and others. Chan received the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters in 2021.

The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selection of MacArthur Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.

MacArthur Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee, recipients learn of their selection only when they receive a call from the MacArthur Foundation just before the public announcement.

Paul Chan received a BFA (1996) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA (2003) from Bard College. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Drawing Center, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Schaulager, Basel. He is also the founder and publisher of Badlands Unlimited (established 2010). He received the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters in 2021.

Further Reading

Bard Professor Sky Hopinka Named 2022 MacArthur Fellow
More about Paul Chan's Award from the MacArthur Foundation

Profiled in the New York Times, the artist Martine Syms MFA ’17 “is the sort of ‘new media’ artist who antiquates the term. Since her days as a film programmer at clubs like the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, she has turned the various lenses of media around to interrogate what society expects of Black women, and Black artists in particular,” writes Travis Diehl. This fall, Syms has an independent feature film showing in theaters with worldwide distribution, as well as exihibtions on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and CCS Bard. "Grio College," the title of Syms’ retrospective show at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum, is also the fictional school in Syms’s feature film The African Desperate (2022). “The curriculum that she presents is larger than what a college typically covers,” said Lauren Cornell, the chief curator at the Hessel. “It encompasses one’s whole life, friends, thinkers, culture.”

Martine Syms: Grio College, curated by Lauren Cornell, Chief Curator and Director of the Graduate Program, is on view at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art through November 27, 2022.

Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 says his photographs of fireflies can range from “a spa for the eyes” to “almost pure chaos.” For NPR, Lara Pellegrinelli spoke with Mauney, who has spent almost a decade photographing fireflies in the Hudson Valley, using Photoshop to painstakingly compile hundreds of timed exposures into a single image. The images, Pellegrinelli writes, are catching the eye of artists and scientists alike, sparking the interest of researchers pursuing “new evidence that firefly swarms can synchronize their flashes.” Mauney is now a part of a group of volunteers helping collect data for computer scientist and biophysicist Dr. Orit Peleg of the BioFrontiers Institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Still, for Mauney, the images, and the process of composing them, are the primary thing. “I never get tired of it,” Mauney says. “And I never get tired of the challenge and the puzzle of trying to construct the images — and trying to construct a good image, because it’s not enough for me to let the bugs do the heavy lifting.”

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents the Class of 2023 thesis presentation. Bringing together works by candidates in the disciplines film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing, the exhibition will be on view from July 16–24 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook, New York. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11am–5pm; Saturday and Sunday, 1pm–5pm.

Evening presentations, including performances, readings, and screenings will be held throughout the week at several locations on the Bard College campus. All presentations are free and open to the public. 

“I’m finally at the point where I can do whatever I want, and I am going for it,” says Christine Sun Kim MFA ’13, who is a recent music/sound faculty member in Bard’s MFA program, where experimental approaches to the medium are encouraged. Born deaf, Kim is acutely aware of the opportunities afforded to the hearing that she was denied as a child and later as an aspiring artist. Now, Kim’s work is sought after by museums and collectors around the world, and she has become a role model for deaf children. “Over the past decade, working in wry drawings (charts, text and musical notation), video, audio, performance and the odd airplane banner, Ms. Kim, 42, has made work that is poetic and political, charismatic and candid, and that upends the conventions of language and sound,” writes Andrew Russeth in the New York Times profile. 

“My relationship with Morrison lasted a third of my life and was not wholly intimate and not fully professional,” writes A.J. Verdelle MFA ’93 in Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison. The Los Angeles Review of Books says Verdelle’s new book “creates an echo chamber that deftly evokes the voice of Toni Morrison,” and, for the reviewer, it served as an introduction to Verdelle’s work more broadly. “The book had grabbed me from the first page,” writes Wayne Catan. “Not only because Verdelle pulls back the curtain to display the duo’s intimate life together, but because of Verdelle’s engaging prose.” Miss Chloe not only chronicles Verdelle’s friendship with Morrison, whose birth name, Chloe A. Wofford, gives the book its title, but is threaded with reflections on Verdelle’s own childhood, her racist experiences in Catholic school, and “discussions of craft as seen through Morrison’s eyes.” Verdelle draws lessons, both personal and professional, from Morrison, including how to live in the world as a Black author. “Rather than succumb to the distraction of responding to what others thought she, or we, could not be, Toni Morrison refused to race-splain,” Verdelle writes.

“Rachel Careau’s meticulous and agile translation of this pair of novels [Chéri and its sequel, The End of Chéri] brings to Anglophone readers some of Colette’s finest writing, rich in the sensuality for which she is widely known — but also in the sharpness of her social observations, so ahead of her time that they come across as radical even by contemporary standards,” writes Tash Aw in the New York Times Book Review.

Never one to follow a trend, Jennie C. Jones, Bard MFA faculty member, is both ahead of, and separate from, the curve. In the leadup to Dynamics, her upcoming solo show at the Guggenheim Museum, the New York Times profiled Jones, detailing her career and minimalist aesthetic, both visual and sonic. Musicians and scholars admire Jones’ vision for her work, which includes both physical art and sonic landscapes, seeing in her body of work “prescience and persistence.” “She asserts her right to abstraction,” says George Lewis, scholar, composer, and author. “I take Jennie as a model for saying, well, you can fight that, and you can win.” Dynamics, like her other works, will include paintings that incorporate acoustic panels, not for broadcasting sound, but for reorienting it in the exhibition space, changing the viewer and listener’s experience, depending on their location. Jones sees her work as progressing toward a more courageous place, though still not in the mainstream—but that’s by design. “It’s not like I’m working at the margin because I’ve been placed there,” she says. “As much as I’ve always been the weirdo on the periphery, I’m happy here.”
 
Read More in the New York Times

Multiple Bard faculty members, both former and present, as well as several alumni/ae will be featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Works by Rindon Johnson MFA ’18, Duane Linklater MFA ’13, and Jon Wang MFA ’19 will be featured alongside those by current and former faculty Nayland Blake ’82, Raven Chacon, Dave McKenzie, Adam Pendleton, and Lucy Raven MFA ’08. David Breslin, co-organizer of this edition of the Biennial, spoke with the New York Times about the curation of work that spoke to the social and political conflict that has taken place since the last Biennial in 2019. “Our hope is that this show permits a taking stock, a way of seeing what we’re maybe not at the end of, but in the middle of,” Breslin says, “and how art can help make sense of our times.” Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept will open on April 6, 2022 and will run through September 5, 2022. This year marks the 80th edition of the exhibition, the longest-running of its kind.

Full Story in the New York Times
Read More on whitney.org

Bard MFA candidate Marty Two Bulls Jr. is one of 63 artists nationwide who has been chosen for the 2022 United States Artists class of fellows. The honor comes with a $50,000 prize for each recipient. “I’m still in disbelief,” Two Bulls said. “I’m really honored and looking forward to using this fellowship to continue my education and strengthen my tribal community as much as I can.” Two Bulls is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and teaches at Oglala Lakota College. He is a visual artist working in mediums as diverse as sculpture, drawing, and graphic design.

Artnet interviews Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20 about her paradoxical photographs and latest film in two shows, currently on view in New York at SculptureCenter and MoMA. “It doesn’t matter what it ‘is’ that’s being photographed,” Nguyen explains. “My compositions emphasize a moment in time…[Everything] is in perpetual motion. Nothing is stable.”

Before the coronavirus pandemic began, performance artist NIC Kay was bouncing around the country, producing work in cities such as Chicago, New York City, and Portland, Oregon. But when the virus arrived and most of the arts world moved online, Kay didn’t follow. It was unexpected for someone who’s explored Black and queer internet communities through movement, music, and documentation with the hashtag #blackpeopledancingontheinternet.

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents close alternative, the class of 2022 thesis presentation, which brings together works by MFA candidates in the disciplines film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. The exhibition will be on view from July 17 through July 25, 2021 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery, 29 O’Callaghan Lane, Red Hook, New York. An opening day takes place on Saturday, July 17, from 12 to 6 p.m. with timed entry for visitors by appointment using this link. Evening presentations of time-based works, including performances, readings, and screenings, will be held at several locations on the Bard College campus during the week of July 19. For more information about the exhibition, please visit bard.edu/mfa/thesis.

The Bard MFA thesis presentations feature works by Lorenzo Bueno, Edythe Woolley, Ben Bennett, William Bradley, Andrew Lee, Rahul Nair, Geneva Skeen, Wibke Tiarks, Harry Davies, Corbin Furguson, Samuel Hindolo, Beaux Mendes, Christopher Baliwas, Sophie Byerley, Dani Lessnau, John Pike, Andrea Sisson, Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta, MJ Daines, Claudette Gacuti, Mindy Solis, Katz Tepper, Riel Bellow, Samuel Breslin, Valerie Hsiung, Aristilde Kirby, Sarah Passino, and Shaheen Qureshi.

The title of this year’s thesis exhibition was conceived from the graduating class’s shared hopes, desires, vulnerabilities, and anxieties. The hope to share space with one another again; the desire to prioritize accessibility, vulnerability, and compromise; and the eagerness to unlearn and redefine what (un)productivity for an artist can mean, look, or sound like. In a way, this loose thread also points to the various adaptive shifts artists must often (un)make in their practice. The exhibition is coordinated by Shehab Awad MA’17, a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Shehab Awad is a writer and curator from Cairo living in New York City. He/she operates as Executive Care*, an all-encompassing self-as-agency at the service of artists.

The Bard College Exhibition Center will be open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m., and Saturday/Sunday, 1–5 p.m. For the opening reception, a return shuttle service will be offered from Rhinecliff Amtrak station. Schedules and more information are available here. Parking is available in the Saint Christopher’s Church lot at 7411 South Broadway or on Garden Road. Accessibility: Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery is located by an unpaved gravel road, and the building is accessible by a 19-foot-wide roll gate entrance positioned at the west side of the building. There are three accessible parking spots adjacent to the entrance. We encourage guests who do not require accessible parking to park at the Saint Christopher’s Church lot, located at 7411 South Broadway, or on Garden Road. Please note that the shuttle return service from Rhinecliff station is not wheelchair accessible. The building has a wheelchair-accessible, all-gender restroom. We provide scent-free soaps and encourage guests to consider attending our events scent-free. Please contact the MFA Administrative Office at T 845-758-7481 or [email protected] for any questions or requests regarding accessibility, including audio or film descriptions.

Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student—serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist students engage with accomplished faculty members, while developing their individual studio practices. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography, and music/sound. Bard MFA is a low-residency program that takes place over two years and two months, with students on campus during three consecutive eight-week summer sessions and two independent study sessions off campus completed during the intervening winters. For more information please contact Lawre Stone, associate director, Bard MFA, at [email protected] or 845-758-7481, or visit bard.edu/mfa.

 (7/13/21)

“From targets to the neon lights of Bakersfield [California], Mary Weatherford honed a unique practice fueled by overwhelming curiosity,” writes Kathaleen Roberts for the Albuquerque Journal. On view at SITE Santa Fe, Mary Weatherford: Canyon – Daisy – Eden is the first solo survey exhibition of the California artist’s work created between 1989 and 2017.

The 2021 Wilderstein Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition invites us to unsettle how we look. The artworks refocus our attention on the multidimensional ways we might experience the location, history, and ecology of Wilderstein. The exhibition—curated by Bard Professors Krista Caballero and Julia B. Rosenbaum—features work from artist John Ruppert, the Bard Center for Experimental Humanities, Bard Artist in Residence Julianne Swartz, as well as Jean-Marc Superville Sovak MFA ’07, and Bard MFA student Mindy Solis.

Following a two-year-long expansion and renovation, Dia Chelsea reopened to the public on April 16 with an exhibition of newly commissioned work by artist Lucy Raven MFA ’09. The culmination of a four-year engagement with Dia, Raven’s two installations fill both galleries. Admission to Dia Chelsea is now permanently free, making all of Dia’s five sites and locations in New York City free to the public.
 

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded five Bard faculty and Bard MFA faculty and graduates 2021 Guggenheim Fellowships. Bard Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, Bard MFA faculty Roberto Tejada and A.K. Burns MFA ’10, and MFA graduates Luba Drozd MFA ’15 and Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 were named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows. Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 3,000 applicants, Asili, Tejada, Burns, Drozd, and Lusztig were among a diverse group of 184 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2021 Fellowship.

“We are delighted and impressed that so many Bard MFA alums and faculty have been named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows,” said Hannah Barrett, director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. “The Milton Avery School for the Arts wishes to congratulate these faculty and alumni on their 2021 Guggenheim awards. Their recognition is richly deserved and we will follow their careers with pride and admiration.”

“As an experimental filmmaker, our colleague Ephraim Asili has won critical acclaim for The Diaspora Suite (2017), an ambitious cycle of 16 mm short films, and most recently his feature-length The Inheritance (2020), a poetic meditation on history, politics, art, and Black liberation,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre d’Albertis. “Asili's presence on the faculty of Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program represents for our students both deep continuity with Bard's storied past as a haven for artistic experimentation and a stunningly contemporary approach to documentary and narrative with full awareness of the urgency of our present moment.”

“I am thrilled to announce this new group of Guggenheim Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, “especially since this has been a devastating year in so many ways. A Guggenheim Fellowship has always been meaningful, but this year we know it will be a lifeline for many of the new Fellows at a time of great hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. The work supported by the Fellowship will help us understand more deeply what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do what they were meant to do.”

Created in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Foundation has offered fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions. The great range of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. In all, 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 73 different academic institutions, 28 states and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. For more information on the 2021 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 is a filmmaker, artist, educator and DJ whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His award-winning films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA PS1, LAMOCA, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Whitney Museum, and The Barbican Center in London. Asili's 2020 feature debut, The Inheritance, premiered at the 2020 Toronto International film festival and was recently acquired for distribution by Grasshopper Films. As a DJ, Asili has been a regular program host on WGXC, and done guest sets for NTS Radio, Afropop Worldwide, and WFMU. He also hosts a monthly dance party Botanica. Asili currently resides in Hudson, NY, and is a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard.

Roberto Tejada, Bard MFA writing faculty, is the author of poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold  (Krupskaya, 2006), Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish translation, and a LatinX poetics of the Americas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019). He is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and with Michelle White and others the co-author of Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021) He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.

A.K. Burns MFA ’10, Bard MFA film & video faculty, is an interdisciplinary artist who views the body as a contentious domain wherein issues of gender, labor, ecology and sexuality are negotiated. Burns is currently producing Negative Space, a cycle of video-installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The opening episode, A Smeary Spot (2015) debuted at Participant Inc., NY, followed by an exhibition at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR, in 2016. The second in this series, titled Living Room (2017) debut at the New Museum, and was subsequently exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2018. Additionally in 2018 Burns exhibited a new video work titled Survivors Remorse (2018) at the Harvard Museum and a public sculpture The Dispossessed (2018) at the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial. As a frequent collaborator and advocate for labor issues in the Arts, Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Great Economy) in 2008. Burns’ works can be found in public collations including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was also a 2018 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts, a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University as well as a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award.

Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 is a filmmaker, visual artist, and archival researcher. She is a professor, Film & Digital Media, and director, Center for Documentary Arts & Research (CDAR), at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Her film and video work mines old images, technologies, and objects for new meanings in order to reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of her work is centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001), the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011), and her newest performative documentary feature Yours in Sisterhood (2018). Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and RIDM Montréal, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She was the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal.

Luba Drozd MFA ’15 is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist. She earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Her films and installations articulate the absurd in the established exploitative social structures and demonstrate how the systems of control are manifested and echoed in restrictive architectural environments. Luba’s works screened at Smack Mellon, Apexart, Anthology Film Archives, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and Art in General. She is a 2015 Media Arts fellow at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY. In 2020, Drozd was featured by the New York Post as “hero of the day” and highlighted in the New York Times for her work making and distributing face shields for hospital workers in the early weeks of the pandemic. Drozd is a recipient of the 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Arts. Her two-room site specific sound, sculpture, and 3D animation installation piece, “The Aesthetic Limits of Water,” was commissioned and exhibited by the Hessel Museum in 2020.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(4/09/21)
 

In the show Brand New Heavies at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, three female artists answer the curators’ invitation “to do stuff they haven’t been able to do” elsewhere. For Bard MFA alumna Xaviera Simmons—whose practice includes photography, performance, and sculpture—the show was a chance to try a new medium, ceramics. She has built a 15-foot edifice of clay spheres fired at high heat; two video works are shown within, one didactic, the other brashly sensual.

“Flatwing represents years of research, producing an examination of the adaptive choreography of survival in a poetic environment of light, color, sound, and space. Investigating the tensions between art and science, this multi-sensory installation, immersing us in the hidden world of the rainforest, speaks to the ethical imperatives innate in Madeline’s practice,” said Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, who co-organized the exhibition, which is on view through August 8.

“For more than four decades—across painting, drawing, animation, zines, and an increasing corpus of writing—Sillman has combined a dialectics of intimacy and awkwardness, self-deprecation and prowess, figuration and abstraction. She has developed a pragmatic philosophy of painting that mobilizes doubt, treating mark-making not as a grand testament to an artist’s skill but as an invitation for us to follow and think alongside her.” 

Bard College announced today that artist George Condo has made a significant gift supporting the arts on campus, including a new online concert series and a dedicated $400,000 fund underwriting scholarships, musical events, and exhibitions at Bard’s Conservatory of Music, The Orchestra Now, the Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Masters in Fine Art programs. Among those scholarships is the new Inclusive Excellence in Music Scholarship Program that addresses inequities in access to higher education in music.

“The Condo Concerts,” presented by the Bard College Conservatory of Music and CCS Bard, begins February 19 with a performance by violinist Leila Josefowicz, winner of the Avery Fisher Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship, and continues with recitals by The Fred Sherry Quartet on March 14 and April 18, and clarinetist Anthony McGill on May 2. Full details on upcoming performances follow below.

“During one of the most challenging times for colleges in the United States, I wanted to provide both funding and inspirational programming for students,” says Condo, whose daughter, Raphaelle, graduated from Bard in 2018. “Bard College is a place where my daughter thrived and one where the arts are central to the student experience.”

“We are grateful to George Condo for his support not only of the students at Bard, but also for underwriting these concerts and supporting the great musicians on this series, whose opportunities to perform have been so limited by the pandemic,” said Bard Conservatory Director Franks Corliss.

In establishing this fund, Condo created a special edition etching being sold through Hauser & Wirth, with all proceeds dedicated to supporting the arts at Bard. For more information on purchasing Condo’s etching, contact Cristopher Canizares at Hauser & Wirth.

About the Condo Concert Series
The first concert in the series, streaming February 19 at 8 pm, is a solo performance by the internationally renowned violinist Leila Josefowicz, winner of the Avery Fisher Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her program combines a Partita by J. S. Bach with a new work by the noted conductor and composer Matthias Pintscher, La Linea Evocativa, that was composed for her in 2020 and inspired by Condo’s artwork.

For the next two concerts, streaming on March 14 and April 18, Josefowicz will perform as part of the Fred Sherry String Quartet with her renowned colleagues, violinist Jesse Mills, violist Hsin-Yun Huang, and cellist Fred Sherry, to perform string quartets by Schoenberg and Schubert, and other works to be announced.

The final concert in the series will be a recital by clarinetist Anthony McGill, who is the principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic and a recipient of the 2020 Avery Fisher Career Prize.

The Condo Concerts Spring 2021 programs

Friday, February 19, at 8 pm
Matthias Pintscher La Linea Evocativa (2020)
Bach Partita No. 2 BWV 1004
Leila Josefowicz, violin

Sunday, March 14, at 3 pm
Schoenberg String Quartet #1, Opus 7
Fred Sherry String Quartet, with Leila Josefowicz and Jesse Mills, violins, Hsin-Yun Huang, viola, and Fred Sherry, cello.

Sunday, April 18, at 7 pm
Schubert String Quartet No. 15 in G Major
Fred Sherry String Quartet, with Leila Josefowicz and Jesse Mills, violins, Hsin-Yun Huang, viola, and Fred Sherry, cello.

Sunday, May 2, at 3 pm 
Anthony McGill, clarinet

Please click here for reservations and additional program details.


About the Artists
Leila Josefowicz’s passionate advocacy of contemporary music for the violin is reflected in her diverse programs and enthusiasm for performing new works. In recognition of her outstanding achievement and excellence in music, she won the 2018 Avery Fisher Prize and was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2008, joining prominent scientists, writers and musicians who have made unique contributions to contemporary life.
 
Highlights of Josefowicz’s 2019/20 season include opening the London Symphony Orchestra’s season with Sir Simon Rattle and returning to San Francisco Symphony with the incoming Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen to perform his Violin Concerto. Other engagements include concerts with Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland and Philadelphia orchestras, where she will be working with conductors at the highest level, including Susanna Mälkki, Matthias Pintscher and John Adams.
 
A favourite of living composers, Josefowicz has premiered many concertos, including those by Colin Matthews, Steven Mackey and Esa-Pekka Salonen, all written specially for her. This season, she will perform the UK premiere of Helen Grime’s Violin Concerto with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Dalia Stasevska. Other recent premieres include John Adams’ Scheherazade.2 (Dramatic Symphony for Violin and Orchestra) in 2015 with the New York Philharmonic and Alan Gilbert, and Luca Francesconi’s Duende – The Dark Notes in 2014 with Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Susanna Mälkki. Josefowicz enjoyed a close working relationship with the late Oliver Knussen, performing various concerti, including his violin concerto, together over 30 times.
 
Alongside pianist John Novacek, with whom she has enjoyed a close collaboration since 1985, Josefowicz has performed recitals at world-renowned venues such as New York’s Zankel Hall, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center and London’s Wigmore Hall, as well as in Reykjavik, Chicago, San Francisco and Santa Barbara. This season, they appear together at Washington DC’s Library of Congress, New York’s Park Avenue Armory and Amherst College. She will also join Thomas Adès in recital to perform the world premiere of his new violin and piano work at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and the Japanese premiere at the Tokyo Opera City Cultural Foundation.
 
Recent highlights include engagements with the Berliner Philharmoniker, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Washington’s National Symphony Orchestra, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and Boston and Finnish Radio symphony orchestras. In summer 2019, Josefowicz took part in a special collaboration between Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Royal Ballet, and Company Wayne McGregor featuring the music of composer-conductor Thomas Adès.
 
Josefowicz has released several recordings, notably for Deutsche Grammophon, Philips/Universal and Warner Classics and was featured on Touch Press’s acclaimed iPadapp, The Orchestra. Her latest recording, released in 2019, features Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Violin Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted byHannu Lintu. She has previously received nominations for Grammy Awards for her recordings of Scheherazade.2 with the St Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson, and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Violin Concerto with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer.Violist Hsin-Yun Huang has forged a career by performing on international concert stages, commissioning and recording new works, and nurturing young musicians. Highlights of her 2017–2018 season included performances as soloist under the batons of David Robertson, Osmo Vänskä, Xian Zhang, and Max Valdés in Beijing, Taipei, and Bogota. She is also the first solo violist to be presented in the National Performance Center of the Arts in Beijing and was featured as a faculty member with Yo-Yo Ma and his new initiative in Guangzhou. She has commissioned compositions from Steven Mackey, Shih-Hui Chen, and Poul Ruders. Her 2012 recording for Bridge Records, titled Viola Viola, won accolades from Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine. Her next recording will be the complete unaccompanied sonatas and partitas of J. S. Bach, in partnership her husband, violist Misha Amory.

Ms. Huang regularly appears at festivals, including Marlboro, Spoleto, Ravinia, Santa Fe, and Music@Menlo, among many others. Huang first came to international attention as the gold medalist in the 1988 Lionel Tertis International Viola Competition. In 1993, she was the top-prize winner in the ARD International Competition in Munich and was awarded the highly prestigious Bunkamura Orchard Hall Award. A native of Taiwan, she received degrees from the Yehudi Menuhin School, the Curtis Institute of Music, and The Juilliard School. She now serves on the faculties of Juilliard and Curtis and lives in New York City.Two-time Grammy nominated violinist Jesse Mills performins music of many genres, from classical to contemporary, as well as composed and improvised music of his own. Since his concerto debut at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, Mr. Mills has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada. He has been a soloist with the Phoenix Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the New Jersey Symphony, the Green Bay Symphony, Juilliard Chamber Orchestra, the Denver Philharmonic, the Teatro Argentino Orchestra (in Buenos Aires, Argentina), and the Aspen Music Festival's Sinfonia Orchestra.

As a chamber musician Jesse Mills has performed throughout the U.S. and Canada, including concerts at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, the 92nd Street Y, the Metropolitan Museum, the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, Boston's Gardener Museum, Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, and the Marlboro Music Festival. He has also appeared at prestigious venues in Europe, such as the Barbican Centre of London, La Cité de la Musique in Paris, Amsterdam’s Royal Carré Theatre, Teatro Arcimboldi in Milan, and the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels. Mills is co-founder of Horszowski Trio and Duo Prism, a violin-piano duo with Rieko Aizawa, which earned 1st Prize at the Zinetti International Competition in Italy in 2006.

Mills is also known as a pioneer of contemporary works, a renowned improvisational artist, as well as a composer. He earned Grammy nominations for his performances of Arnold Schoenberg's music, released by NAXOS in 2005 and 2010. He can also be heard on the Koch, Centaur, Tzadik, Max Jazz and Verve labels for various compositions of Webern, Schoenberg, Zorn, Wuorinen, and others. As a member of the FLUX Quartet from 2001-2003, Mills performed music composed during the last 50 years, in addition to frequent world premieres. As a composer and arranger, Mills has been commissioned by venues including Columbia University’s Miller Theater, the Chamber Music Northwest festival in Portland, OR and the Bargemusic in NYC.

Jesse Mills began violin studies at the age of three. He graduated with a Bachelor of Music degree from The Juilliard School in 2001. He studied with Dorothy DeLay, Robert Mann and Itzhak Perlman. Mr. Mills lives in New York City, and he is on the faculty at Longy School of Music of Bard College and at Brooklyn College.Fred Sherry has introduced audiences on five continents and all fifty United States to the music of our time for over five decades. He was a founding member of TASHI and Speculum Musicae, Artistic Director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and has been a member of the Group for Contemporary Music, Berio's Juilliard Ensemble and the Galimir String Quartet. He has also enjoyed a close collaboration with jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea.
Elliott Carter, Mario Davidovsky, Steve Mackey, David Rakowski, Somei Satoh, Charles Wuorinen and John Zorn have written concertos for Sherry, and he has premiered solo and chamber works dedicated to him by Milton Babbitt, Derek Bermel, Jason Eckardt, Lukas Foss, Oliver Knussen, Peter Lieberson, Donald Martino and Toru Takemitsu among others.

Fred Sherry’s vast discography encompasses a wide range of classic and modern repertoire; he has been soloist and “sideman” on hundreds of commercial and esoteric recordings. Mr. Sherry was the organizer for Robert Craft’s New York recording sessions from 1995-2012. Their longstanding collaboration produced celebrated performances of the Schoenberg Cello Concerto, all four String Quartets and the String Quartet Concerto as well as major works by Stravinsky and Webern.

Mr. Sherry's book 25 Bach Duets from the Cantatas was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 2011, the revised edition was released in 2019. C.F. Peters unveiled his treatise on contemporary string playing, A Grand Tour of Cello Technique in 2018. He is a member of the cello faculty of The Juilliard School, The Mannes School of Music and The Manhattan School of Music.Clarinetist Anthony McGill is one of classical music’s most recognizable and brilliantly multifaceted figures. He serves as the principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic — that orchestra’s first African-American principal player — and maintains a dynamic international solo and chamber music career. Hailed for his “trademark brilliance, penetrating sound and rich character” (The New York Times), as well as for his “exquisite combination of technical refinement and expressive radiance” (The Baltimore Sun), McGill also serves as an ardent advocate for helping music education reach underserved communities and for addressing issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in classical music. He was honored to take part in the inauguration of President Barack Obama, premiering a piece written for the occasion by John Williams and performing alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Gabriela Montero.

McGill’s 2019-20 season includes the premiere of a new work by Tyshawn Sorey at the 92Y, and a special collaboration with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato at Carnegie Hall. He will be a featured soloist at the Kennedy Center performing the Copland concerto at the SHIFT Festival of American Orchestras with the Jacksonville Symphony, and will also perform concertos by Copland, Mozart, and Danielpour with the Richmond, Delaware, Alabama, Reno, and San Antonio Symphonies. Additional collaborations include programs with Gloria Chien, Demarre McGill, Michael McHale, Anna Polonsky, Arnaud Sussman, and the Pacifica Quartet.

McGill appears regularly as a soloist with top orchestras around North America including the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera, Baltimore Symphony, San Diego Symphony, and Kansas City Symphony. As a chamber musician, McGill is a favorite collaborator of the Brentano, Daedalus, Guarneri, JACK, Miró, Pacifica, Shanghai, Takacs, and Tokyo Quartets, as well as Emanuel Ax, Inon Barnatan, Gloria Chien, Yefim Bronfman, Gil Shaham, Midori, Mitsuko Uchida, and Lang Lang. He has led tours with Musicians from Marlboro and regularly performs for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Festival appearances include Tanglewood, Marlboro, Mainly Mozart, Music@Menlo, and the Santa Fe, Seattle, and Skaneateles Chamber Music Festivals.

In January 2015, McGill recorded the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto together with Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic, which was released on DaCapo Records. He also recorded an album together with his brother Demarre McGill, principal flute of the Seattle Symphony, and pianist Michael McHale; and one featuring the Mozart and Brahms Clarinet Quintet with the Pacifica Quartet that were both released by Cedille Records.

A dedicated champion of new music, in 2014, McGill premiered a new piece written for him by Richard Danielpour entitled “From the Mountaintop” that was commissioned by the New Jersey Symphony, Kansas City Symphony, and Orchestra 2001. McGill served as the 2015-16 Artist-in-Residence for WQXR and has appeared on Performance Today, MPR’s St. Paul Sunday Morning, and Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. In 2013, McGill appeared on the NBC Nightly News and on MSNBC, in stories highlighting the McGill brothers’ inspirational story.

A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, McGill previously served as the principal clarinet of the Metropolitan Opera and associate principal clarinet of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. In-demand as a teacher, he serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute of Music, and Bard College’s Conservatory of Music. He also serves as the Artistic Advisor for the Music Advancement Program at the Juilliard School, on the Board of Directors for both the League of American Orchestra and the Harmony Program, and the advisory council for the InterSchool Orchestras of New York.2/11/21

Bard MFA candidate Woojae Kim writes for Canadian Art on the complex role of smell in human emotions and the natural world. “On one hand, smell is a memory. I know each smell through lived experience. On the other hand, smell is a chemical compound that triggers reactions in other organisms.” Woojae Kim is an artist living in Vancouver. His works accommodate contact between nonhuman/material intelligence and human memory. His current research is on olfactory communication.
 

Time-lapse photographs of airplane arrivals and departures by Bard alumnus Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ‘00 are on view through March 1 as part of A Trip Back in Time at the Quad City International Airport in Moline, Illinois. The exhibit comprises Mauney’s photographs, Drew Morton’s digital drawings of airport runways around the world, and a selection of mid-century modern artifacts. For this series, Mauney camped out in select locations for hours at a time with his camera aperture open to capture the light emitted from airplanes and stars as they moved through the night sky. Pete Mauney lives and works in Tivoli, New York. He received his BA and MFA in photography from Bard College. 

“New York–based outfit Grasshopper Film has acquired North American rights to Ephraim Asili’s debut feature, The Inheritance, following its premiere at Toronto and screening at the New York Film Festival,” writes Variety. “A Pennsylvania-born filmmaker, Asili has been exploring different facets of the African diaspora for nearly a decade, and The Inheritance is based on his own experiences in a Black liberationist group.” Ephraim Asili is assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard and a graduate of the Bard MFA Program.

“What I love most about Sillman’s writing is how you can feel her pawing around in the dark, trying to suss out not only the right words to use, but the right way to contend with her subjects: the work of her peers and forebears, and the unwieldy question of painting’s status in a world preoccupied with bigger problems,” writes Andrea Gyorody. “She adeptly pokes fun at theory and art history, but she’s at her best making the case for awkwardness, for all that ‘which is fleshy, funny, downward-facing, uncontrollable.’”

“A diagram is a perfect visual schema for posing impossible things, invisible forces, enigmas like the future—all posed as perfectly plausible vectors,” Sillman writes. “The diagram even outdid the camera as the early twentieth century’s best new thing because it could depict things in the universe that exceed the eye, like particles, waves, and quarks. A diagram’s scale is endless. It can indicate how dwarfed we are by the universe, or how busy the microscopic world is, all mapped out on the back of some envelope.”

“Martine Syms has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humour and social commentary. For her short-form moving image artwork, Kita’s World, Martine introduces viewers into her personal mythology; equal parts biological, psychological and sociological,” writes FAD Magazine. “My world is a strange combination of core material, broken samples, seductive loops, and heavy theory. Kita’s World considers the problem of the psychosomatic slip in the digital era,” says Syms.

Twice Removed, Sillman’s current exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, “proves how abstract art can speak to our time,” writes Jason Farago in the Times. “The rolling crises of the last few years have brought along a shift in art galleries toward easy-to-read, politically forthright imagery, some of it righteous, some just agitprop. It’s a time more prone to the certainties of rage than the ambiguities of art. So I wanted to see how, or even whether, these miserable months would be reflected in Ms. Sillman’s painting, and how she understood her place in an art world that seems to be growing ill at ease with the fundamentals of shape, color and line. What I found, at Gladstone, was more than just a confirmation that Ms. Sillman is at the top of her game, but a master class in how abstract art can be as alive with the inflamed spirit of 2020 as any portrait or photograph.”

“I refuse to foreground art-world or film-industry politics in my art in order to gain acceptance. I made the film politically, embedding MOVE, radical politics, the input of my cast, crew, and my elders into not only the story of the film but the form and structure of the work,” says Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, assistant professor of film and electronic arts at Bard College. “The Inheritance is not about the expression of rage or disgust; it’s about what happens the morning after, when we go back home after the protest. That’s where the work begins.” The Inheritance will screen virtually at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14 and 17, and at the New York Film Festival September 18–23.

Bard MFA alumna Suzanne Kite is one of the first class of 11 Women at Sundance | Adobe Fellows, announced this week by the Sundance Institute. The new program is designed to meaningfully support women artists creating bold new work in film and media, with a priority on filmmakers from historically underrepresented communities. Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer. Her scholarship and practice highlights contemporary Lakota epistemologies through research creation, computational media, and performance.

Bard College announces the appointment of Hannah Barrett as director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Prior to this appointment, Barrett, an award-winning artist and educator who has taught, lectured, and exhibited widely, was the international program coordinator at Bard College Berlin. Barrett succeeds Arthur Gibbons, who served as director of the Bard MFA program since 1990. Gibbons will continue teaching at Bard as professor of sculpture in the College’s Division of the Arts.

“I am delighted that Hannah Barrett has accepted the appointment as the new Director of the MFA program, one of Bard’s most distinguished graduate programs and one of the finest MFA programs in the country,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “She has been a terrific colleague and is uniquely suited to take this vital task on. She follows the remarkable, long, and distinguished tenure of Arthur Gibbons, who led the MFA to achieve its international renown. I thank Hannah and the faculty in the MFA program for their cooperation in finding a path to continue the excellent and innovative work of the MFA in this challenging time.”

Hannah Barrett is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based artist. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven her painting for over a decade, which has led to the current exploration of dandy monsters in domestic space. Recent exhibitions include a 2020 retrospective at Childs Gallery, Boston, a two-person invitational in 2019 at La MaMa Galleria, and a solo at Yours Mine and Ours Gallery in 2018. Selected group shows include Spring Break 2020, Platform Project Space, Dumbo NY, Kate Werble and Calicoon galleries in NYC, Mother Gallery, Beacon NY, and September Gallery in Hudson NY. Museum Shows include the Decordova Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Time Out New York, and Modern Painters. Barrett is on the curatorial staff of Soloway Gallery in Williamsburg. Barrett is also the illustrator of a vegan and lesbian themed children’s book “Nuts in Nutland”. Prior to coming to Bard, Barrett taught painting and drawing for 18 years and was on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Pratt Institute Brooklyn. Barrett holds a BA in studio art and German literature from Wellesley College and an MFA in painting from Boston University.

Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student—serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist students engage with accomplished faculty members, while developing their individual studio practices. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography, and music/sound.

Christine Sun Kim and Xaviera Simmons are among the 35 artists and designers who are making works to display across digital screens throughout New York City, Boston, and Chicago in recognition of the continued service of essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Organized by Times Square Arts, For Freedoms, and Poster House, the public art campaign aims to “encourage a sense of community and pride among New Yorkers, and give artists the opportunity to express their gratitude and optimism through the power of art.”

“I am always pushing and pulling against aspects of the political inside my practice, with politics as clearly foundational,” says Simmons. “I think it’s really important to consider new ways of seeing and new ways of living, new ways that can become politically tangible should we act as a group with compassion and creativity.”

Bard MFA alumna Luba Drozd has been working around the clock to make face shields for New York City hospitals in dire need of protective equipment during the COVID-19 emergency. With the help of a team of volunteers for distribution, she has been able to get nearly 200 masks to health care professionals in the city.