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Our Students

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Bard College students are bold, bright, and creative. Since Bard acquired the Montgomery Place property in 2016, students have used the buildings and grounds for scientific and historical research, preservation, gardening, volunteer activities, and performances. We can't wait to see where they go next. We're pleased to share a selection of their work here.

Past Projects

Spring Sculpture Exhibit

Spring Sculpture Exhibit

“Bard sculpture students sited their final projects of the spring semester throughout the grounds of Montgomery Place. They chose not to compete with the landscape/architecture but to work within it:  balloon bird houses, a burial shrine, a spilled oversized martini glass, a tethered line of voile flags between two trees, a steel viewing box, a curtain of mirrors, a sound tube for transmitting the voice to a confession booth and a pair of steel spiders crawling near a pond. Well done!” —Arthur Gibbons, Professor of Sculpture, Bard College 

  

 

Who Counts?

A Bard College Class Project on the U.S. Census

The Past in the Present, an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course taught by Myra Young Armstead in the fall of 2020, focused on the relationship between one’s positionality in the present and truth-telling about the past. The class culminated in an audiovisual performance of an original graphic novel that considers the question, “Who counts, and why?” It introduces the audience to the politics underlying decadal population enumerations and their relationship to democracy in the United States. The federal census of 1820 and 2020 are compared on issues pertaining to race, citizenship rights, and equality.

Who Counts?

This course engaged with speakers throughout the fall 2020 semester, including the mayor of the Village of Red Hook, the director of community engagement for Dutchess County, and a talent outreach specialist for the U.S. census, along with scholarly literature, fiction, and journalistic reports that address the themes of violence and slavery, permissible civic discourse, the politics of celebration narratives, Constitutional originalism, and citizenship and belonging. The course especially used the concept of strategic presentism as a useful tool leading to new perspectives about the past that stand up to the scrutiny of historical disciplinary standards.

Fall Sculpture Exhibit: Inside Out
Installation by Finn McMurray. Photo by Carly Maruca

Fall Sculpture Exhibit: Inside Out

Professor Judy Pfaff’s fall sculpture class, Installation, moved outdoors with the exhibition Inside Out. Seven artists created site-specific works installed throughout the grounds of Montgomery Place, responding to the landscape and activating the surrounding environs and their features.

Explore Inside Out at Montgomery Place

Explore Inside Out at Montgomery Place

Featuring artwork by:

Nell Dreyfus
Carly Maruca
Finn McMurray
Celia Nicolson
Moshopefoluwa Olagunju
Nicole Schemansky
Isaiah Schwartz

Exhibition Map (PDF)
Gilsonfest: The Exceptional Journey of Alexander Gilson

Gilsonfest: The Exceptional Journey of Alexander Gilson

A Digital Exhibition

This digital presentation was produced by students in a Bard College course entitled The Window at Montgomery Place, taught by Professor Myra Young Armstead during the spring of 2019. As a combined History and Experimental Humanities course, the class provided students with the opportunity to think creatively and artistically of ways to use visual electronic media technologies to present historical narratives. Using Alexander Gilson's life as a reference, the images address the themes of slavery, gardening at Montgomery Place, business and property ownership, and family/community connections.

View the Exhibition

Food Microbiology: Cider Making
Gabriel Perron's spring 2019 Food Microbiology course ferments jalapeños to make hot sauce. Photo by Sarah Wallock '19

Food Microbiology: Cider Making

This fall 2019 biology course taught by Gabriel Perron is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences offering. The course explores different concepts in food microbiology, environmental sciences, and biochemistry associated with the process of cider making at Montgomery Place Orchards. At the beginning of the course, students learn how to best pick apples throughout the harvest season based on their chemical properties and how to produce sweet cider in aseptic conditions. Students then learn how to harness and characterize the microbial life associated with fermentation to favor the production of natural cider in a commercial capacity. Back in the lab, students learn to monitor the safe production of cider by conducting different assays that are commonly used in state-mandated analytical laboratories. In addition to the practical aspects of the course, students also engage in discussion regarding the societal issues associated with cider making and food safety in general both locally and internationally.

The Curiosity Cabinet
Students in the Curiosity Cabinet course listen to their classmates present their research.

The Curiosity Cabinet

The Curiosity Cabinet class, taught by Associate Professor of Art History Susan Merriam, met regularly in the basement of the mansion at Montgomery Place during the fall 2021 semester to study some of the fascinating objects in the collection, which boasts well over 8,000 items. Students researched objects that illuminate the historical phenomenon of the curiosity cabinet. These collections of oddities, as small as a box or as large as a room, are precursors to the modern museum. Students became familiar with the collections, learning about collections management, and doing original research. An exhibition of Montgomery Place objects and student research took place at Stevenson Library over the winter of 2021, with an opening reception on December 10.

More about the Course

Spring Sculpture Exhibition: Steel and Scale Remarks
Photo by Sarah Wallock '19

Spring Sculpture Exhibition: Steel and Scale Remarks

Professor Arthur Gibbons’s spring sculpture class, Steel, presents their work in an exhibition titled Steel and Scale Remarks. The work was on view on the grounds of Montgomery Place through July 2019. Artists created and installed site-specific works throughout the Montgomery Place grounds, including in trees and water features. The inspiration for these steel sculptures came from a study of Montgomery Place’s collection of 19th-century outdoor furniture and sculpture, which was on display concurrently with the student exhibition.

History in 3D: Art History Major Lin Barnett ’19 Maps Cedar Hill

History in 3D: Art History Major Lin Barnett ’19 Maps Cedar Hill

Cedar Hill: A Case Study in Preservation and Education in a Digital World is a research project and virtual reality reconstruction that allows viewers to visit Cedar Hill (now Annandale-on-Hudson) as it stood over a century ago. This interactive exhibition recalls the Hudson Valley’s mill communities, which have not been as thoroughly preserved in the archeological record as the neighboring communities of Bard College and Montgomery Place. The project analyzes the structures' changing purposes and architectural qualities in order to trace the story of the hamlet’s decline at the turn of the 20th century.

Lin Barnett's Senior Project

Reimagined Farms in Reimagined Spaces
Photo by China Jorrin '86

Reimagined Farms in Reimagined Spaces

This Environmental and Urban Studies course was taught by Katrina Light in spring 2019 as an ELAS course offering. It examines the role farms and gardens play within institutions and the interplay of race, gender, class and power within these spaces. Working closely with farmer Rebecca Yoshino, students answer the questions: What purpose do these spaces serve? Who are the primary stakeholders and who benefits? Students study issues surrounding land use, equity, and social capital. Students gather this information through a series of lectures and site visits to nonprofit growing spaces, including work in the Montgomery Place greenhouse. Through this process they hone interview techniques, create visual representations and ultimately, examine, synthesize and distribute findings to community stakeholders. Finally, students develop a mission statement and reimagined direction for Bard’s agricultural initiatives.

The Hudson Valley Apple Project

The Hudson Valley Apple Project

Over two weeks during the 2017 winter break, five Bard students in Experimental Humanities conceived, designed, and built an interactive website that includes a database of more than 800 cultivars grown in New York State, including about 60 varieties grown in the orchards on Bard’s Montgomery Place Campus. The students enriched their project, connecting it to place and their experience, by building relationships with local historians at Historic Red Hook as they worked in their archives, as well as a community of Dutchess County apple growers, informally interviewing them on visits to their farms. Funding for this project was made possible through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and from Bard's Center for Civic Engagement (CCE).

Visit the Apple Project

The Window at Montgomery Place

The Window at Montgomery Place

This student-curated exhibit, which opened in the Red Hook Village Hall in December 2017, provided an overview of the development and management of the Montgomery Place property, from its beginnings as a nursery and working farm to a pleasure ground for its elite residents and their peers. Special emphasis was given to the laborers who enabled the estate's business operations, maintained its landscape features, and therefore facilitated the creation of an American antebellum aristocracy. This project was part of Professor Myra Young Armstead's inaugural Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course taught in collaboration with Bard's Center for Civic Engagement.

  • Exhibit Brochure
  • Reaction Paper by Olivia Gibson
  • Reaction Paper by Sarah Gichan

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