“At Bard, a Cutting-Edge Program Offers Students from Conflict Zones a Path to Art-Making,” Writes ARTnews

The inaugural class of master’s graduates in Human Rights and the Arts through the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA) were profiled in ARTnews. “The program, meant to support mature activists and artists who live in ongoing crisis zones, and who have experienced persecution, war, surveillance, and poverty, has just matriculated its first graduating class in this impressive and unique program,” writes Shanti Escalante-De Mattei. Tania El Khoury, director of CHRA, spoke to the importance of “[creating] an institution that really practices its politics.” “The idea was to create a space in which both the artists and activists could be together and co-create,” she said. “How can we build a space that puts people’s well-being first? How can we be in solidarity with people from around the world and understand inequality together?”

ARTnews also spoke with Carol Montealgre HRA ’23 and Adam HajYahia HRA ’23, who are among this year’s cohort of graduates, about their master’s theses. Montealgre returned to Colombia and reconnected with a union of Indigenous survivors of the country’s civil war. “I asked them what they needed, and they said they needed healing,” she said. HajYahia, meanwhile, researched the history of gender and sexuality in Palestine, finding “documentation of individuals who lived beyond the traditional boundaries of the gender binary and the patriarchy, focusing on sex workers, same sex relationships, and other activities and behavior that were found to be deviant by English colonizers.”

El Khoury told ARTnews she was proud of the inaugural class—and excited for what was to come. “I think so far, we’re managing to practice what we preach,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like this is too good to be true, like someone is going to find out and stop it. But so far, it’s happening.”

Post Date: 06-06-2023