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Three Bard alumni/ae and an Artist in Residence have been named to the TIME100 Art list for 2026, which identifies the 100 most influential curators and artists working today. Those alumni include Christine Sun Kim MFA '13, a visual artist who pairs drawings with sound, and Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson, a sculptor whose work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The list also includes Cecilia Alemani MA-CCS '05, director and chief curator of New York City's High Line, and Diya Vij '08, commissioner of cultural affairs for the City of New York.

“Artists don’t work in a vacuum,” TIME writes. “They are supported by a massive ecosystem, from philanthropists and nonprofits who fund work, to gallerists and advisers who shape careers, to curators, museum leaders, [who] make art possible.” Asked by TIME about her work with New York’s Cultural Stability Fund, Vij said, “I was really interested in making gathering spaces where people could surface the ideas of what it looks like [to] live together differently, to govern differently, to build a different world.”

Bard’s programs include the undergraduate Studio Arts Program, which provides a breadth of expanded offerings while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in artistic techniques and principles. They also include Bard’s MFA Program, a two-year multidisciplinary program focused on individual process and work in progress, as each student confronts the conceptual and practical questions at the core of all artistic production. 
 

Works by two Bard College alumni/ae, Ei Arakawa-Nash MFA '07 and Lotus L. Kang MFA ’15, will be featured in the 2026 Venice Biennale, which will run from May 9 to November 22. Arakawa-Nash, a performance artist and member of Fac Xtra Retreat (FXR), a collective of seven LA–based Asian American artists, will represent Japan at the Biennale. He is collaborating with other FXR members on a performance project coproduced by the Getty Center and the Japanese Foundation for the Biennale’s Japan Pavilion. “Ei Arakawa-Nash and FXR bring together irreverence, generosity, and collective experimentation in ways that feel both intimate and expansive,” said Sarah Cooper, performance programs specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum. “These performances contribute to the wider story of Asian diasporas in Greater Los Angeles … while embodying his distinctive alchemy of humor and truth that unsettles fixed roles, challenges social and institutional norms and honors the multiplicities we all hold.” Additionally, alumna Talullah Pratt ’24 was chosen as one of five electronic musicians under 30 for a residency at the Venice Biennale Musica College 2026 by curator Caterina Barbieri.

Sculptor Lotus L. Kang MFA ’15 has been commissioned to produce a major new installation for the inaugural Bulgari Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Kang’s artistic practice utilizes sculpture, photography and site-responsive installation to communicate themes drawn from industrial and architectural forms, familial and social histories, poetry, and non-human figures. “Known for her complexly layered environments that meld organic, structural and metabolic languages, Lotus L. Kang’s works give poetic form to reflections on themes spanning inheritance, impermanence, memory, and translation,” writes ArtDaily. “Working fluidly between sculpture, photography and site-responsive installation, she frequently draws on unfixed, unstable materials and forms in her practice, giving evocative, often expansive shape to questions of ‘becoming.’” 

Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts is a graduate program for interdisciplinary study in the visual and creative arts. Bard MFA takes place over two years and two months, with students in residence on campus during three consecutive summers, and two winter sessions of independent study completed off campus.