Bard News

The Fisher Center presents 1619: A Commemoration in Sound, a music, dance, and spoken word performance in remembrance of the 400th anniversary of the first arrival of enslaved people from Africa in the North American British Colonies—the beginning of slavery in what would become the United States of America. African descendants’ virtuosic negotiations with Western tonality and forms, as well as cosmopolitan explorations of different sounds, aesthetics, and cultures, have shaped vital contributions to the art, music, and dance of America. Dr. Whitney Slaten, assistant professor of music, brings together virtuosic jazz artist T.K. Blue, choreographer and visiting artist in dance Souleymane Badolo, and lauded illustrator and Dutchess County resident James Ransome for an exploration of history, memory, legacy, and gestures between the U.S. and Africa. The program will be performed on Monday, December 16 at 7:30 p.m. in the Sosnoff Theater. Tickets are $25. For tickets and more information go to fishercenter.bard.edu, or call the box office at 845-758-7900.

Presented in partnership with the Difference and Media Project, the Office of Inclusive Excellence, and the Ethnomusicology Area, with support from The Music Program, Historical Studies, Art History, Africana Studies, American Studies, The Arts Division, the Center for Civic Engagement, and the Center for Experimental Humanities.

Whitney Slaten earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology. His dissertation, “Doing Sound: An Ethnography of Fidelity, Temporality, and Labor among Live Sound Engineers,” contributed to scholarship about music, technology, and labor studies. He has worked as a recording engineer and as a saxophonist in the New York City jazz and world music scenes, performing with artists including Babatunde Olatunji and Clark Terry. He previously taught or served as part-time lecturer at The New School, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, Seton Hall University, William Paterson University, and Columbia University, leading courses such as “Thriller”: Deconstructing Popular Music Production, Recording Studio as Instrument, Progressive Trends in Jazz and Concert Music, Technologies of Global Pop, Music Engineering, Theory of Music, and Masterpieces of Western Music. He has authored articles and reviews that have appeared in Current Musicology, The Diapason, Ethnomusicology Review, and Souls. His discography as a performer includes Expedition, Clark Terry and Louie Bellson; That Holiday Feeling, Ron Foster and Kindred Spirits; Live at Trumpets, Kelvin Quince Quintet; and Live at Marian’s, Clark Terry Big Band. As a producer/engineer, his discography includes Arthur Bird: Music for the American Harmonium, Artis Wodehouse; Creation Story, John-Carlos Perea; and This Little Light of Mine, Courtney Bryan. Assistant professor of music, Bard College; BM, William Paterson University; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. At Bard since 2018.

T.K. Blue  is a saxophonist, flautist, composer, educator, bandleader, and former musical director and arranger for NEA Jazz Master Randy Weston. T.K. Blue appears on over eighty recordings and has performed with such artists as Don Cherry, Abdullah Ibrahim, Sam Rivers, Archie Shepp, Dizzy Gillespie, Pharoah Sanders, Melba Liston, Chico Hamilton, Stefon Harris, Regina Carter, Bobby McFerrin, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Jimmy Scott, Jayne Cortez, Benny Powell, Mal Waldron, Winard Harper, Warren Wolf, Gregoire Maret, Allan Harris, Candido Camera, Bobby Sanabria, Steve Turre, Arturo O’Farrill, David Murray and Hale Smith to name just a few. In May 2017, T.K. released Amour, his 11th CD, cited as one of the best jazz recordings of the year by DownBeat Magazine (four stars). Deeply indebted to organizations such as Jazzmobile, Jazz-interactions, Henry Street Settlement, and the Muse for his own jazz studies, T.K. has remained committed to music education from pre-K to the university level. In addition Professor Blue has a Bachelor’s Degree in Liberal Arts from NYU, with a major in Music and Psychology, and a Master’s in Music Education from Teacher’s College, Columbia University.  He has taught at Suffolk Community College, Montclair State University, and Long Island University where he was also the Director of Jazz Studies from 2007 to 2014. In 2007, T.K. was commissioned by NYSCA and Transart Inc. to compose a work dedicated to the early African American presence in the Hudson Valley area of upstate New York. He released Follow the North Star, a suite based on the life of Solomon Northup and his memoir, Twelve Years a Slave. http://www.tkblue.com/

Souleymane 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 previously taught at the New School, Denison University, and Bennington College. Artist in residence, Bard College. M.F.A., Bennington College. At Bard since 2017.

The Children’s Book Council named James E. Ransome as one of seventy-five authors and illustrators everyone should know. Currently a member of the Society of Illustrators, Ransome has received both the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration and the IBBY Honor Award for his book, The Creation. He has also received a Coretta Scott King Honor Award for Illustration forUncle Jed’s Barbershop which was selected as an ALA Notable Book and is currently being shown as a feature on Reading Rainbow. How Many Stars in the Sky? and Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt were also Reading Rainbow selections. PBS’s Storytime featured his book, The Old Dog. Ransome has exhibited works in group and solo shows throughout the country and received The Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance award for his book, The Wagon. In 1999 Let My People Go received the NAACP Image Award for Illustration and Satchel Paige was reviewed in Bank Street College of Education’s “The Best Children’s Books of the Year.” In 2001, James received the Rip Van Winkle Award from the School Library Media Specialists of Southeast New York for the body of his work.  How Animals Saved the People received the SEBA (Southeastern Book Association) Best Book of the Year Award in 2002 and the Vermont Center for the Book chose Visiting Day as one of the top ten diversity books of 2002.  In 2004 James was recognized by the local art association when he received the Dutchess County Executive Arts Award for an Individual Artist.  He has completed several commissioned murals for the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Hemphill Branch Library in Greensboro, NC. He created a historical painting commissioned by a jury for the Paterson, NJ Library and a poster for the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Brown vs the Board of Education.  His traveling Exhibit, Visual Stories has been touring the United States since 2003.  His work is part of both private and public children’s book art collections. Jamesramsome.com

The Bard College Conservatory of Music presents “Winter Songfest,” an annual holiday concert on Sunday, December 15 at 3 p.m. The matinee program features works by Berlioz, Bach, excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, and more. The program is conducted by James Bagwell, and performed by the Conservatory Orchestra, Bard College Chamber Singers, Bard College Symphonic Chorus, Bard Conservatory Preparatory Chorus, and members of Bard College Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Soloists include acclaimed mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, bassist Ira Coleman, and pianist John Esposito, among others. All ticket sales benefit the Conservatory Scholarship Fund. Tickets are $20. To reserve tickets, go to fishercenter.bard.edu or call the box office at 845-758-7900.

James Bagwell maintains an active international schedule as a conductor of choral, operatic, and orchestral music. He was recently named associate conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN), and in 2009 was appointed principal guest conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. From 2009 to 2015, he served as music director of The Collegiate Chorale. Highlights of his tenure include conducting a number of operas-in-concert at Carnegie Hall, including Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda, Rossini’s Moïse et Pharaon, and Boito’s Mefistofele. He conducted the New York premiere of Philip Glass’s “Toltec” Symphony and Golijov’s Oceana, both at Carnegie Hall. Since 2011, he has collaborated with singer and composer Natalie Merchant, conducting major orchestras across the country, including the San Francisco and Seattle Symphonies.
He has trained choruses for numerous American and international orchestras, including the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Budapest Festival Orchestra, and American Symphony Orchestra. He has worked with conductors including Charles Dutoit, Andris Nelsons, Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert, Gianandrea Noseda, Yannik Nézet-Séguin, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Michael Tilson Thomas, Louis Langrée, Ivan Fischer, Jesús López-Cobos, and Robert Shaw.

Bagwell prepared The Collegiate Chorale for concerts at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland; in 2012, the Chorale traveled to Israel and the Salzburg Festival for four programs with the Israel Philharmonic. Since 2003, he has been director of choruses for the Bard Music Festival, conducting and preparing choral works during the summer festival at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. He frequently appears as guest conductor for orchestras around the country and abroad, including the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Tulsa Symphony, and the Interlochen Arts Festival. He is professor of music at Bard College, director of performance studies, and codirector of the Graduate Conducting Program at Bard College Conservatory of Music.

A renowned opera singer and recitalist, mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe is one of the most highly respected and critically acclaimed artists of her generation. Her repertoire ranges from Handel to Wagner, and German lieder to contemporary and classic American songs. Blythe has performed on many of the world’s great stages, such as Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, Paris National Opera, San Francisco, Chicago Lyric, and Seattle Opera. She was named Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year in 2009, received an Opera News Award in 2007, and won the Richard Tucker Award in 1999. Blythe recently released her first crossover recording on the Innova Recordings label with pianist Craig Terry.Blythe’s performances include the title roles in Carmen, Samson et Dalila, Orfeo ed Euridice, La Grande Duchesse, Tancredi, Mignon, and Giulio Cesare; Frugola, Principessa, and Zita in Il Trittico; Fricka in both Das Rheingold and Die Walküre; Waltraute in Götterdämmerung; Azucena in Il Trovatore; Ulrica in Un Ballo in Maschera; Baba the Turk in The Rake’s Progress; Ježibaba in Rusalka; Jocasta in Oedipus Rex; and Ino/Juno in Semele. She also created the role of Gertrude Stein in Ricky Ian Gordon’s 27 at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.Blythe has appeared with many of the world’s finest orchestras, such as the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Opera Orchestra of New York, Hallé Orchestra, and Concertgerbouworkest, among others. She has also appeared at the Tanglewood, Cincinnati May, and Ravinia festivals, and at BBC Proms. Conductors with whom she has worked include Harry Bicket, James Conlon, Charles Dutoit, Mark Elder, Christoph Eschenbach, Mstislav Rostropovitch, Robert Spano, Patrick Summers, and Michael Tilson Thomas.Blythe has been presented in recital in New York by Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in both its Great Performers Series at Alice Tully Hall and American Songbook Series at the Allen Room, Town Hall, 92nd Street Y, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has also been presented by the Vocal Arts Society and at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.; Cleveland Art Song Festival; University Musical Society in Ann Arbor; Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; Shriver Hall in Baltimore; and San Francisco Performances.She has premiered several song cycles written for her, including Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson by the late James Legg; Covered Wagon Woman by Alan Louis Smith, which was commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and recorded with the ensemble (CMS Studio Recordings); and Vignettes: Ellis Island, also by Smith, featured in a television program entitled Vignettes: An Evening with Stephanie Blythe and Warren Jones. She is also artistic director of the Fall Island Vocal Arts Seminar at the Crane School of Music and artistic director of the Bard Conservatory Graduate Vocal Arts Program.

Ira Coleman was born on April 29th, 1956 in Stockholm, Sweden.  He was raised in France until 1968 and thereafter lived in Germany for fourteen years.  Ira studied bass at Germany’s “Hochschule für Musik, Köln” from 1980 to 1982.  Thereafter, he moved to the US to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston and graduated in 1985.

Coleman currently resides in Rhinebeck, New York and has performed with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Jessye Norman, Milt Jackson, Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie, Grover Washington Jr., Barbara Hendricks, Branford Marsalis, Betty Carter, Kathleen Battle, Tony Williams, Baaba Maal, Michel LeGrand, Billy Taylor, Cab Calloway, Billy Cobham, The Carnegie Hall Jazz Ensemble, The Duke Ellington Orchestra under the direction of Mercer Ellington and many other artists. Ira Coleman was the musical director for Ernest Ranglin’s Ska Ensemble from 1996-1999 and Dee Dee Bridgewater from 2002-2009.  Ira Coleman has branched out to play world music and has  arranged, recorded and produced for musicians from Senegal and Mali.

Coleman has performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Tokyo’s Budokkan Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertsgebouw, Paris Olympia and Salle Pleyel, Montreux Stravinsky Hall, Lucerne KKL, Cologne Philharmonie, the Hollywood Bowl, Beiteddine (Lebanon), Berkeley’s Greek Theatre as well as at the JVC, Nice, Berlin, Paris, Playboy, Antibes, North Sea, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Pori, Montreal Jazz and Womad Festival to name a few.

John Esposito is an American pianist/composer/drummer/producer who works on a wide array of creative music projects. His technical skills and the range of his artistic palette extend across the stylistic boundaries of the Stride Piano, Swing, Bebop, Modal and Free Music movements. He has performed and recorded with artists including Nick Brignola, Dave Douglas, Dave Holland, Carter Jefferson, Franklin Kiermyer, Joe Lovano, J.R. Monterose, David “Fathead” Newman, Eric Person, Arthur Rhames, Sam Rivers, Roswell Rudd, Pharaoh Sanders and John Stubblefield. 
John is the owner/executive producer of Sunjump Records. He has created music for theater, dance, film, TV commercials, and multimedia performance art. He is a music faculty member and artist-in-residence at Bard College and resides in New York State’s Hudson Valley. 

Maximillian Jansen, a tenor originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, is a student in the Graduate Vocal Arts Program studying in the studio of Lorraine Nubar. Known for his sweet timbre and sensitivity to text, he has performed the roles of Ferrando in Così fan tutte, the titular role in Albert Herring, and Monostatos in Die Zauberflöte. Jansen has appeared as a soloist with Concerts in the Village, Cincinnati Fusion Ensemble, Civic Orchestra of Victoria, and Middletown Symphony. He has been a member of professional opera choruses such as Pacific Opera Victoria, Queen City Opera, and Cincinnati Opera. Jansen was a Schubert Fellow at SongFest at the Colburn School in 2014, where he worked with composers Libby Larsen, Jake Heggie, and John Musto in master classes on their own work. Jansen has collaborated with coaches including Graham Johnson, Sanford Sylvan, Vicki Kirsch, and Lisa Hasson. He holds a bachelor of music degree in vocal performance from Miami University (2015).

Pauline Tan is a Filipino mezzo-soprano whose deep love for poetry and song has taken her across the globe to pursue a career in music. She began her studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston, where she completed her undergraduate degree in vocal performance. Some notable performances at the conservatory include mezzo-soprano soloist for Duruflé’s Requiem, alto soloist for Handel’s Messiah, and alto soloist for Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. She is a frequent soloist with the NEC Chamber Singers, with whom she was an alto section member. Her operatic debut was as Amastre in Serse, and in 2019 she sang the role of Ottavia in NEC’s production of L’incoronazione di Poppea. She has also performed the title role of Carmen and Mistress Quickly in Falstaff. She is pursuing a master’s degree in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory under the artistic direction of Stephanie Blythe, Kayo Iwama, and Erika Switzer. She has studied voice with Christopher Arceo and Karen Holvik, and is currently studying under Edith Bers. 

Tate Tiemann is a baritone from Conowingo, Maryland. A recent graduate of Towson University, Tiemann is excited to be a part of the Bard Graduate Vocal Arts Program, pursuing his master’s degree in music. His most recent roles include Bob from The Old Maid and the Thief, Dr. Gregg from Gallantry, and Il conte d’Almaviva from Le nozze di Figaro. When he’s not singing, he enjoys cooking, watching medical dramas, and playing with his cat, Rómulo. 
 
 
Margaret Tigue was recently a Vocal Arts Fellow at Tanglewood Music Center (TMC). In 2019, she was the soprano soloist in Verdi’s Requiem with The Orchestra Now, and was praised in OperaWire for “a power and a seeming effortlessness that was quite amazing.” Her performance highlights include the role of Helena in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mozart’s Exsultate, Jubilate with the Ann Arbor Camerata Orchestra, and the New York premiere of Tania León’s Memory at National Sawdust, and Oliver Knussen’s Whitman Settings with the TMC Orchestra. Tigue studies at the Bard Conservatory’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, where she works with Stephanie Blythe, Kayo Iwama, and Lorraine Nubar. Tigue was awarded an encouragement award in the Michigan district of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in 2017, and received first prize in the University of Michigan Friends of Opera Undergraduate Competition in 2015.

Filipino American soprano Diana Schwam is receiving her master’s degree at the Bard Conservatory of Music, under the tutelage of Lorraine Nubar. As an avid lover of opera, she has portrayed La Contessa in Le nozze di Figaro, the title role in Massenet’s Cendrillon, and Madame Lidoine in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites with Oberlin Opera Theater. Schwam has also performed as Pamina (Die Zauberflöte), Zdenka (Arabella), and Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni). Recent highlights include performing at Oberlin College and Conservatory’s 2019 Commencement Recital, the soprano solo in Brahms’s Requiem with Oberlin’s 50th reunion class, and the premiere of a song cycle by composer Liam Kaplan in April 2019. Past highlights include the Danenberg Honors Recitals at the Oberlin Conservatory and in New York City, and a master class with the internationally renowned Marilyn Horne during her residency at the Oberlin Conservatory. A firm believer in the role of the singer-actor, Schwam has roots in her love of musical theater, which has taught her the importance of storytelling in her music making.

Recognized as one of the finest conservatories in the United States, The Bard College Conservatory of Music, founded in 2005, is guided by the principle that young musicians should be broadly educated in the liberal arts and sciences to achieve their greatest potential. All undergraduates complete two degrees over a five-year period: a bachelor of music and a bachelor of arts in a field other than music. The Conservatory Orchestra has performed twice at Lincoln Center, and has completed three international concert tours: in June 2012 to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; in June 2014 to Russia and six cities in Central and Eastern Europe; and in June 2016, to three cities in Cuba. For additional information about The Bard College Conservatory of Music please go to the website at bard.edu/conservatory. 

A new case study from a leading education research center finds that Bard College’s early college high school model is successful at increasing high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion rates across its network of public high schools. The study also concludes that Bard High School Early Colleges (BHSECs), serve as models for other colleges and universities seeking to expand college access and success nationwide, particularly in areas that have not historically had sufficient access.

Bard High School Early College: A Case Study, conducted by Ithaka S+R, highlights the diverse background of BHSEC students and significantly higher college graduation rates as among the model’s impressive achievements. “With an emphasis on providing rigorous college coursework and training, particularly for lower-income and minority students, the BHSECs have established a curriculum, faculty, and admissions process with proven results for their students in terms of graduation and college enrollment rates,” the study finds. While many institutions are focused solely on how to bring more students of different backgrounds to their campus, “Bard College, a liberal arts college whose home campus is in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, stands out for its focus on bringing the liberal arts to students who have not previously had access where they are.”

Citing an independent evaluation conducted by the research firm Metis Associates, the Ithaka S+R study reports that New York City BHSEC students are significantly more likely to graduate from high school compared to similarly situated peers in other district schools. These BHSEC graduates also enroll in and graduate from four-year colleges and universities at rates far higher than their peers: 97 percent of 2012 BHSEC Manhattan and Queens graduates in enrolled in college, compared to 82 percent of their peers. Furthermore, 79 percent of BHSEC students finish a bachelor’s degree in six years or less. Nationally, around 60 percent of students who start college earn a degree within eight years.

Founded in 2001, the Bard Early Colleges are a nationally recognized network of tuition-free early college high schools and early college centers operated through partnerships with public school systems in five states and Washington, DC. These schools provide high school students, regardless of background, with a rigorous, tuition-free college course of study in the liberal arts and sciences and the opportunity to earn college credit and an associate’s degree alongside their high school diploma. To learn more about Bard Early Colleges, visit bhsec.bard.edu.

 

A case study from Ithaka S+R—an independent, nonprofit research center—finds that the Bard High School Early College model improves access, affordability, and success in higher education for its students. “With an emphasis on providing rigorous college coursework and training, particularly for lower-income and minority students, the BHSECs have established a curriculum, faculty, and admissions process with proven results for their students in terms of graduation and college enrollment rates,” the study finds. For other institutions, particularly selective colleges, interested in expanding the reach of a rigorous liberal arts experience to students from a range of backgrounds who do not historically have access, early college should be considered as a strategy: “The BHSECs have shown what is possible with such an approach.”

“As I walked across the stage this year to graduate with my MSW at Hunter College, I thought about the incarcerated people I’ve left behind—especially those who grew up in any of the seven communities where over 70 percent of New York’s prison population come from. I was one of them, ” writes Mack. “If we are serious about criminal justice reform, then restoring Pell Grants for incarcerated students is an essential way forward.” Mack, an alumnus of the Bard Prison Initiative who earned his MSW from Hunter College earlier this year, is director of community engagement and advocacy at JustLeadership, an organization dedicated to ending mass incarceration.

Wondering what to get for the designer, fashionista, or art historian on your holiday list? WSJ art critic Ann Landi suggests the BGC exhibition catalogue French Fashion, Women, and the First World War.

By Delia Mellis ’86
In the Bardian

At a recent orientation session for newly enrolled Bard students at Taconic Correctional Facility, I found myself thinking about my own undergraduate experience and the ways Bard connects people across campuses and decades. We were there to talk about the extended world of the College—the Bard archipelago stretching from Al-Quds to Baltimore to Kyrgyzstan—and also to explain what it means to be a Bard student at that particular campus.

Orientations focus on the mutual commitment between the College and its students and alumni. Once you accept the invitation to enroll, we are with you for life. We speak frankly and seriously about the mutual promise that enrollment entails. For the student, the obligation is to prioritize coursework and to be selfish; to guard your time and allow yourself to focus deeply on school. For the College, the commitment is to make stringent demands on you and to equip you to meet those demands. The College promises to see you, and to see you through.
From its inception, the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) has been a quintessentially Bard endeavor. Max Kenner ’01 launched BPI as a sophomore in 1999. Having recognized the pressing need to restore college opportunity for incarcerated people a few years after the 1994 “crime bill” made them ineligible for Pell Grants, he met with President Leon Botstein and other College leaders to sketch a vision, and then set out to find a prison that would welcome Bard. He drove hundreds of miles across New York State, meeting with prison officials and educators to determine where and how best to approach the project. He finally landed at Eastern NY Correctional Facility, in Napanoch, a little under an hour from Annandale. Now, 20 years later, with more than 100 students enrolled at any given time, the BPI site at Eastern is the largest of six Bard College campuses inside prisons around the Hudson Valley. Bard students at those campuses earn associate and bachelor’s degrees. They begin, as all Bard students do, with the Language and Thinking Program (L&T) before proceeding to First-Year Seminar (FYSEM) and the liberal arts curriculum familiar to all Bardians.

The PBS documentary College Behind Bars will make all this, and much more, familiar to the wider world. We encounter students, professors, and staff describing the program and their individual experiences. By foregrounding the voices of students and alumni/ae, the film asks viewers to examine their own assumptions—about college, about prison, about who belongs in those spaces and about what they are for. We see where students live and go to school, their discussions with each other and their professors, and we hear their family members reflect. We are moved to think differently and more deeply about what is going on behind the walls of our carceral institutions as well as our educational ones.
  
One of the striking things about this film, and about BPI as well, is that it makes no attempt to soften or elide the violence that brought so many people to prison. There is no implication that the only incarcerated people deserving of visibility are those who are locked up for nonviolent offenses or “victimless” crimes. It confronts and disrupts the prevalent discourse on criminal justice reform, which focuses on the injustice of locking away for so long so many people whose crimes were less frightening. The film emphasizes the humanity, depth, and complexity of people who caused real harm and have confronted it—who, in their own telling, confront it every day. It makes the argument that they must not, as social justice activist Bryan Stevenson puts it, be defined by the worst thing they ever did. Their lives do not stop when we lock them away.

I began teaching for BPI in 2008, when the full-time administrative staff consisted of four or five people. Today BPI employs more than 30 full-time and another 20 part-time staff, a significant number of whom are Bard and BPI alumni/ae. Every year we offer 160 courses across those six sites. BPI has recently expanded to include two Bard Microcollege campuses outside of prison, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York. In partnership with community-based organizations, we offer the same associate’s degree to students whose pursuit of higher education has been thwarted by poverty and racism.

One of the things I found myself saying to those new students at Taconic was that Bard people everywhere recognize each other. In describing this phenomenon to me recently, Michael Crawford ’15 said, with a kind of wonder, that he’s realized that BPI is a “brand.” Crawford was incarcerated at 17 and released this past January on clemency after 20 years. When he meets someone who went to Bard, there are certain things he knows instantly about them because of his own experience. We connect, across generations and locations—we know one another. I used to think it was because Bard drew certain kinds of people, but now I understand that it’s because Bard shapes certain kinds of people. The College makes us Bardian. What BPI has taught me is that it’s not the place itself—special, beautiful, transformative though Annandale is. But if not the place, what is it that connects us?
 
It’s the work. In Bard classrooms, art studios, and laboratories, students are taken seriously and are held to account, and they return the favor. BPI is prototypically Bard because of what happens in the classroom and the relationships that creates. BPI epitomizes the spirit of Bard not just because it was built by Bard undergraduates whose sense of possibility—and responsibility—was fed by their educational experience. It is also not simply because the College has required from the beginning that Bard courses and degrees in prison answer the same needs and meet the same standards as those in Annandale, though that is crucial to BPI’s identity and effectiveness. Likewise, the fact that BPI offers rigorous, expansive, intense liberal arts education in unlikely places is very Bard (especially in the 21st century), but none of this is what makes BPI so Bard.

Dorothy Crane worked in Annandale for years, as a counselor and in academic resources. She has been a part of BPI since early on, as an academic adviser and Senior Project writing consultant. She says that BPI is “Bard distilled. The essence. At the core there’s this belief that every student has something of value to give. They have something important to say, and Bard gives them the tools to say it so that people will understand and attend to their ideas. The core is in the relationships.” BPI students are seen and heard. There’s no small irony in this, of course, in a prison environment. We’re not surveilling them, but we are taking them seriously and treating actions and speech as if they really matter. Coursework happens at human scale, advising is one-on-one, classes are seminar sized, and—ultimately—the relationship with the institution is intimate and long-term.

BPI students enter the College through a subjective, idiosyncratic admission process that prioritizes the present and future over the past. We do not look at anyone’s educational history; we assume that many terrific candidates have had terrible relationships with institutions in the past—including schools. Applicants are not prescreened or admitted based on a consideration of their crime of conviction, length of sentence, or disciplinary record; they are representative of New York’s incarcerated population. We make no pretense that most are in prison for nonviolent offenses, wrongly convicted, or otherwise exceptional among incarcerated New Yorkers. This is central to our ethos as educators, and we are unapologetic and uncompromising about it. BPI students are likewise typical of the larger incarcerated population in that many are serving or have served very long sentences, and were often locked up very young. One of the things that is radical about BPI’s engagement with students is that we make a point of not knowing or involving ourselves with what brought them to prison or their disciplinary record. Our only interface regarding prison discipline has to do with whether it will cause them to miss class.

When I was in graduate school, one of my mentors insisted that the trope of dehumanization so frequently used to describe the totalizing institution of U.S. slavery was deeply mistaken. By definition, humans cannot be dehumanized. One might argue that to characterize a person as dehumanized is to participate in, or unconsciously assent to, their oppression, to naturalize the idea that people can be denatured. College-in-prison gives this idea the lie in a profound and immediate way. BPI students who were seen—and too often pushed to see themselves—as limited, incapable, “at risk,” a “problem,” lay claim to and express their intellectual, creative, and expansive humanity through the act of reading, rereading, analyzing, questioning, and rethinking Plato, Du Bois, Nietzsche, Morrison; learning calculus; or debating medical ethics. A young woman who “couldn’t do math” discovers that in fact she wants to be a math major. This is the power of a liberal arts education in prison. The liberal education is designed to identify, cultivate, and extend those things that express and create our humanity most directly. Bard’s commitment to this endeavor is what makes BPI Bard, and BPI in turn makes Bard more Bard.

The liberal education is designed to identify, cultivate, and extend those things that express and create our humanity most directly. Bard’s commitment to this endeavor is what makes BPI Bard, and BPI in turn makes Bard more Bard.

Jessica Neptune ’02, BPI’s director of national engagement, helps colleges and universities outside New York build their own colleges-in-prison. She was part of BPI from the beginning, and returned after completing a PhD in U.S. history, several years as an American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellow, and service on the Obama administration’s Federal Interagency Reentry Council. As an undergraduate, she came to BPI for personal reasons—a number of family members had been in prison—but also political ones. “I was one of many Bard students in those years who began to see the issue we now call mass incarceration as the central civil rights issue of our generation,” says Neptune. More than that, she adds, her Bard experience drove her desire to extend the reach of the College: “Bard opened the world up to me and allowed me to know myself in new ways—to imagine my place in the world differently. I was drawn to BPI because as a student I thought a lot about how so many people I knew back home would thrive at a college like Bard if they’d ever had the chance. They’d thrive and they would in turn make it a better place.”

Bard students in prison, like those in Annandale and across the College’s international network, must start where they are. But because the College takes them seriously, BPI students, too, are enabled and encouraged to critically engage—not just imbibe—the insights, discoveries, and arguments of others. This means putting Shakespeare into conversation with James Baldwin in FYSEM, taking a seminar on the impact of migration on U.S. history and contemporary politics, tangling with ordinary differential equations, researching and writing a Senior Project on the eugenicist dangers of gene-editing technology or on the role of history and memory in formulating Korean-American identity. It’s a summer course exploring why Plato prioritized mathematics in his curriculum for a just society, and another that examines the notion of conflict and crisis in contemporary African states. It’s second-year, writing intensive courses on 20th-century French literature in translation, U.S. gentrification, or the politics and economy of modern Latin America.

BPI is a stripped-down version of Bard. Resources are scarce. We use chalkboards and pen and paper. Our computers are old, with no internet. We might be richer for it. Faculty are pushed to the edges of their knowledge by students’ questions, their voraciousness, the originality and power of their insights. As an administrator, one of my areas of responsibility is BPI’s writing curriculum. While it is the Bard curriculum, and our pedagogy is Bard’s—writing based and rigorous—I have made it my business to be in dialogue with students about their experience. I need to hear from them in order to continue developing and honing the courses. Students know they are responsible for their own education; part of living up to that responsibility is asking their questions and expressing their needs.

This can be a profoundly ambivalent thing. The College teaches us—or cultivates in us—criticality, a skepticism that makes no exceptions. Bard encourages us to question, and teaches us how to do it effectively, powerfully. Inevitably we come to question the College itself. It belongs to us and we belong to it, so naturally we cast our questioning eye upon it. We take it seriously as an object of critical examination and analysis. This, for the College, is a mark of success, but it is double-edged. We may not always acknowledge the power the College cultivated in us, the ways in which we are enriched and empowered by the skills of perspective, of questioning, of expression, and the awareness of possibility the College teaches us. For students inside, such criticality can be very familiar—the carceral space readily feeds skepticism. As hard as it is, we welcome critical questioning from students. We want them to advocate for themselves, to be demanding, to make as much use of the College as they can. We want them to ask questions and to expect to be heard and challenged.

One of my first students at BPI, Sylvester Reddick ’10, is now associate director of BPI-TASC, a high school equivalency course taught by BPI alumni/ae in partnership with a community-based organization in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Reddick speaks eloquently of his realization that college was, in fact, for him; that the classroom was his space; that the work was his work. He talks about how he tries to instill that feeling in his own students, that sense of ownership and belonging that he gained as a Bard student who had always liked school but had not always felt it was a place where his needs and interests were recognized or seen as legitimate.
 
Students at Bard must examine and rethink prior assumptions and metabolize previously unimagined perspectives and information. And they must do it in concert and contention with each other. This is another of the points we emphasize at orientation: they must be able to disagree. They must learn to read together, to think together, to use their conflicting ideas to sharpen themselves, not destroy one another. This is difficult anywhere, and it may be particularly challenging in prison. But they do it, and they do it well. The BPI Debate Union’s famous victory over Harvard in 2015, and our subsequent defeats of Cambridge, Morehouse, West Point, and others, all attest to students’ work ethic—they work harder and with fewer resources than anyone. These victories also show that disagreement is another area of possibility and growth, and that they embrace the challenges that confront them.

Danielle Riou, associate director of Bard’s Human Rights Project (HRP), was involved in the earliest days of BPI. She feels that one of BPI’s effects on Bard has been to make the College more nimble, more adaptable, more daring. “In some way, BPI helped to change the culture at Bard,” says Riou. “It made us more amenable to trying new models of education, but not only that, to thinking about higher ed as something that isn’t confined to a traditional campus.” She says that BPI has helped Bard better “imagine itself,” and to live up to its vision. Annandale students who tutor for BPI frequently find that their relationship to their own education is changed by their experience with BPI students and the urgency with which they approach their coursework. The stakes are very high, and this intensity often pushes their fellow undergraduates to think differently about their own work. As a tutor at Coxsackie Correctional Facility, Tayler Butler ’17 was profoundly affected by the seriousness and diligence of the BPI students she worked with. “Through my work at BPI, I learned to value my education, to truly appreciate the freedom that it brought me,” says Butler, who is now director of student services and enrichment at Bard Early College New Orleans. “As an educator, I am passionate about teaching my students to do the same.”
 
Having been both inspired and challenged by the seriousness with which Bard took me and my intellect at a young age, I have felt pushed to live up to the image of myself I developed as a Bard student. As an undergraduate I connected powerfully with the people I found at Bard. At those orientations, when we welcome new students to BPI and the College, we describe the intensity of the academic work incoming students can expect and the layers of connectedness that bind students to the institution and to one another through years of study and long after. Introducing himself to new students, Kenner tells them that one of the things that inspired the idea of BPI at the outset was a sense of indebtedness to the College, and the need for the College to be in new and different spaces.

BPI has set a new standard for college-in-prison nationwide. More than 1,000 students have enrolled; some 600 alumni/ae have now returned home, committed to engaging their communities. They deploy their education in myriad ways, but always they do it in concert with one another across personal, professional, and civic life. My Bard friends are still among the people most important to me. As a professor at BPI, I connect again as a Bardian, with students who are Bardians, through the work we do together and through the expectations we have of each other—to push our thinking, to rise to the challenges of the text, of the question, of the possibility.

---

 Delia Mellis ’86 is director of program and faculty development for BPI and an associate in Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. She holds a PhD in U.S. history. Like most BPI administrators (and many in Annandale), she continues to teach.
 

The Morning Show, a new series from AppleTV starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, mirrors the events documented by Bard College and Simon's Rock alumnus Ronan Farrow '04 in his book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, 31, exposed alleged sexual misconduct and cover-ups at NBC when he published Catch and Kill last month.
Read the Story in People

Farrow doggedly investigated claims of harassment at NBC at great personal and professional risk. In an interview with the BBC, he talks about being followed and fearing for his life, and the dangers withstood by reporters covering #MeToo as they uncover the truth. 
Watch the BBC Interview

Farrow's new Catch and Kill Podcast, which provides further details about the investigative reporting behind the book, is getting attention from prominent media outlets for the new evidence it is unveiling. 
Read the Interview in Forbes

The Montgomery Place Fall Salon Series, Renewable Energies: Balancing Outputs and Historic Landscapes, presents two sessions highlighting how a local community balances the implementation of renewable energies within an historically significant landscape. Session 1: Solar Energy takes place on Tuesday, November 12, 3–5 p.m. and Session 2: Hydro Energy, on Tuesday, December 3, 3–5 p.m. Programs are free and open to the public. Seating is limited; registration required. For more information and to register send an email to montgomeryplace@bard.edu or call 845-758-7505.

“The Town of Red Hook has areas that have been recognized locally, statewide, and nationally both as a scenic region, and for having significant historic architecture, landscapes, and viewsheds,” says Emily Majer, Town of Red Hook historian. “These attributes, along with the firm commitment to agriculture and open space, are character defining features of the town which contribute to the quality of life, and economic vitality. Consequently, it is important to be sensitive in the placement of ground and roof-mounted solar panels in designated historic districts and on historic structures, and to protect the viability of important agricultural land and built structures within the town.” Local Law 143-37 “Solar Energy Systems” spells out what kind, size, and placement of array is allowable in each zoning district in order to maximize the utilization of this renewable energy source, while preserving the historic and bucolic nature of the town. 

“Small-scale hydropower was historically an important energy source in this area that may see a resurgence as we work to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel-based energy sources that are driving the climate crisis,” says Robyn Smyth, assistant professor of environmental and urban studies, Bard College.

The Town of Red Hook is home to the Hudson River National Historic Landmark District, the most prestigious designation of historic resources in the nation.
 
Panel Speakers

Session 1: Solar Energy
November 12, 3–5 p.m.
Emily Majer ’95, Town of Red Hook historian and deputy mayor, Village of Tivoli
Audrey Friedrichsen, land use and environmental advocacy attorney, Scenic Hudson
Jeff Irish, vice president, SunCommon
Moderated by Ben Hoen CEP ’06, research scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Session 2: Hydro Energy
December 3, 3–5 p.m.
Emily Majer ’95, Town of Red Hook historian and deputy mayor, Village of Tivoli
Jan Borchert, head of hydro facility design and permitting, Current Hydro
Tracy Brown, restoration manager, Connecticut and New York Northeast Coldwater Habitat Program, Trout Unlimited 
Weston Davey, historic site restoration coordinator, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation
Moderated by Robyn Smyth, assistant professor of environmental and urban studies, Bard College

For more information and to register send an email to montgomeryplace@bard.edu or call 845-758-7505.

Hollywood Reporter names BoJack Horseman, cocreated and produced by Raphael Bob-Waksberg '06, the #6 best TV show of the decade.
Full Story

TIME magazine calle the animated series Undone, created by Bob-Waksberg, one of the 10 best TV shows of the year.
Read the Story in TIME

Raphael Bob-Waksberg '06 will be competing against himself at the Gotham Awards this year: his shows Tuca & Bertie and Undone have both been nominated for Breakthrough Short-Form Series.
Read the Story in Variety

The Washington Post reviews Live Dangerously, the current exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, whose "most deliberately unsettling single image" is a photograph by Xaviera Simmons '05. Frieze reviews Soft Power, an exhibition at SFMOMA that features Simmons's work. 

The Anonymous Was A Woman grant program champions women artists over 40 who are at a significant juncture in their lives or careers. Each artist in the 2019 cohort, who range in age from 45 to 84, will receive an unrestricted grant of $25,000 to support the continued development of their practice.
 

Preconcert Talk: Florence Price and the Emergence of African American Composers in the 21st Century

The Bard College Conservatory Orchestra performs a concert at the Fisher Center at Bard’s Sosnoff Theater on Saturday, December 7 at 8 p.m. Conducted by James Bagwell, director of performance studies and the Graduate Conducting Program at Bard Conservatory of Music, the Orchestra performs Florence Price Symphony No. 1 in E minor; Jackson Spargur ’20 Polaris premiere; and Aaron Copland Billy the Kid. There will be a preconcert talk, “Florence Price and the Emergence of African American Composers in the 21st Century,” at 7 p.m. All ticket sales benefit the Conservatory Scholarship Fund. Tickets are $15-20 suggested donation. To reserve tickets, go to fishercenter.bard.edu or call the box office at 845-758-7900.

The Symphony in E minor is the first symphony written by the American composer Florence Price. The work was completed in 1932 and was first performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The piece was Price’s first full-scale orchestral composition and was the first symphony by a black woman to be performed by a major American orchestra. The opening movement has melodies and rhythms typically found in Afro-American folk music, while the following slow movement features a moving hymn tune of Price's design. Both concluding movements are fast and return to the juba dance concept. They contain hints of fiddles and banjos, antic slide whistle effects, and a recurring three-against-two melody which end this loveable work on a whimsical note.

The preconcert talk, “Florence Price and the Emergence of African American Composers in the 21st Century,” is with James Bagwell; Whitney Slaten, Assistant Professor of Music; Kyle Gann, Taylor Hawver and Frances Bortle Hawver Professor of Music; and  and Myra Young Armstead, Vice President for Academic Inclusive Excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies.
 

Upcoming Conservatory Programs:

Winter Songfest
James Bagwell, Conductor
Sunday, December 15 at 3 p.m. December 7, 2019To reserve tickets, go to fishercenter.bard.edu or call the box office at 845-758-7900.

About the Artists:

Guest conductor James Bagwell maintains an active international schedule as a conductor of choral, operatic, and orchestral music. He was recently named associate conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and in 2009 was appointed principal guest conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. From 2009 to 2015 he served as music director of The Collegiate Chorale. Highlights of his tenure include conducting a number of operas-in-concert at Carnegie Hall, including Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda, Rossini’s Möise et Pharaon, and Boito’s Mefistofele. He conducted the New York premiere of Philip Glass’s “Toltec” Symphony and Golijov’s Oceana, both at Carnegie Hall. Since 2011, he has collaborated with singer and composer Natalie Merchant, conducting major orchestras across the country, including the San Francisco and Seattle Symphonies.

He has trained choruses for numerous American and international orchestras, including the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Budapest Festival Orchestra, and the American Symphony Orchestra. He has worked with numerous conductors including Charles Dutoit, Andris Nelsons, Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert, Gianandrea Noseda, Yannik Nézet-Séguin, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Michael Tilson Thomas, Louis Langrée, Ivan Fischer, Jesús López-Cobos, and Robert Shaw.

Bagwell prepared The Collegiate Chorale for concerts at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland; in 2012 the Chorale traveled to Israel and the Salzburg Festival for four programs with the Israel Philharmonic. Since 2003, he has been director of choruses for the Bard Music Festival, conducting and preparing choral works during the summer festival at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. He frequently appears as guest conductor for orchestras around the country and abroad, including the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, Tulsa Symphony, and the Interlochen Arts Festival. He is professor of music at Bard College, and director of performance studies and the Graduate Conducting Program at Bard College Conservatory of Music.

Jackson Spargur, a composer and multi-instrumentalist from Los Angeles, California, is in his fifth year studying music composition at the Bard Conservatory of Music. His second major is computer science.  He composed his first serious works for Peruvian Sleep, an experimental improvisatory ensemble that he helped found while attending New Roads High School in Santa Monica, California. His most recent concerts have included premieres of his chamber works Twine, for violin and cello, and Blue Owl, Night Fowl, for clarinet, viola, trombone, and percussion; both performed by the Da Capo Chamber Players at the Bard Conservatory. The premiere of his solo viola piece Render was performed at the Hartt School. He is currently working on a new piece for the concert of student compositions to be performed by the Da Capo Chamber Players at Bard on December 13.

Whitney Slaten
Assistant Professor of Music
BM, William Paterson University; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. Whitney Slaten earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology. His dissertation, “Doing Sound: An Ethnography of Fidelity, Temporality, and Labor among Live Sound Engineers,” contributed to scholarship about music, technology, and labor studies. He has worked as a recording engineer and as a saxophonist in the New York City jazz and world music scenes, performing with artists including Babatunde Olatunji and Clark Terry. He previously taught or served as part-time lecturer at The New School, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, Seton Hall University, William Paterson University, and Columbia University, leading courses such as “Thriller”: Deconstructing Popular Music Production, Recording Studio as Instrument, Progressive Trends in Jazz and Concert Music, Technologies of Global Pop, Music Engineering, Theory of Music, and Masterpieces of Western Music. He has authored articles and reviews that have appeared in Current Musicology, The Diapason, Ethnomusicology Review, and Souls. His discography as a performer includes Expedition, Clark Terry and Louie Bellson; That Holiday Feeling, Ron Foster and Kindred Spirits; Live at Trumpets, Kelvin Quince Quintet; and Live at Marian’s, Clark Terry Big Band. As a producer/engineer, his discography includes Arthur Bird: Music for the American Harmonium, Artis Wodehouse; Creation Story, John-Carlos Perea; and This Little Light of Mine, Courtney Bryan. At Bard since 2018. 

Myra Young Armstead
Vice President for Academic Inclusive Excellence; Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies
B.A., Cornell University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Chicago. Specialization: U.S. social and cultural history, with emphasis on urban and African American history. Fellowships: Danforth-Compton, Josephine de Karman, University of Chicago Trustees, and New York State African-American Research Institute. Frederick Douglass Award, Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History (Sullivan County, New York, chapter). Author of Freedom's Gardener: James F. Brown, Horticulture, and the Hudson Valley in Antebellum America (2012); Mighty Change, Tall Within: Black Identity in the Hudson Valley (2003); "Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August": African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs (1999). Speaker in the Humanities, New York Council for the Humanities (2003–11). Member, New York Academy of History (since 2006). NEH Fellow/Schomburg Center Scholar-in-Residence (2014–15). At Bard since 1985.

Kyle Gann
Taylor Hawver and Frances Bortle Hawver Professor of Music
B.Mus., Oberlin Conservatory of Music; M.Mus., D.Mus., Northwestern University. Recipient, National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant (1996); Peabody Award (2003); American Music Center Letter of Distinction (2003). Music critic for the Village Voice, 1986–2005. Taught at Bucknell University, Columbia University, Northwestern University, Brooklyn College, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Books include The Arithmetic of Listening: Tuning Theory and History for the Impractical Musician (2018); Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays after a Sonata (2017); Robert Ashley (2012); No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” (2010); Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (2006); American Music in the 20th Century (1997); The Music of Conlon Nancarrow (1995); and, as coeditor, The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music (2013). Vice president of the Charles Ives Society. Music on the Other Minds, New World, New Albion, Mode, Cold Blue, Lovely Music, and other record labels. At Bard since 1997.

Recognized as one of the finest conservatories in the United States, The Bard College Conservatory of Music, founded in 2005, is guided by the principle that young musicians should be broadly educated in the liberal arts and sciences to achieve their greatest potential. All undergraduates complete two degrees over a five-year period: a bachelor of music and a bachelor of arts in a field other than music. The Conservatory Orchestra has performed twice at Lincoln Center, and has completed three international concert tours: in June 2012 to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; in June 2014 to Russia and six cities in Central and Eastern Europe; and in June 2016, to three cities in Cuba. For additional information about The Bard College Conservatory of Music please go to the website at bard.edu/conservatory.
 

The exhibition catalogue Emil Nolde: The Artist during the Third Reich, by Soika and the Cambridge historian Bernhard Fulda, provides a new historical narrative for an artist who fashioned himself a martyr of the Nazi regime—a narrative that has had political reverberations for the current German government. 
 

Nationwide, the number of public safety agencies using drones more than doubled between 2016—when the Federal Aviation Administration finalized rules for nonrecreational drones—and 2018, according to researchers at Bard’s Center for the Study of the Drone. Early adopters of drone technology tended to be smaller, more rural agencies, says Codirector Dan Gettinger ’13. But more recently, the nation’s largest departments, including those in New York and Los Angeles, have also begun using them, prompting concerns from privacy and civil liberties advocates. “There’s a recognition that public engagement on this issue is a requirement,” says Gettinger.

 

The Out100 Journalist of the Year talks to the founder of #MeToo, Tarana Burke, about his new book Catch and Kill, and the very real dangers of telling the truth.

As America’s fiscal deficit nears $1 trillion for the first time since the financial crisis, the House Budget Committee held a hearing on November 20 seeking answers to a crucial question: Does it pose a clear and present danger to the economy? Professor Wray’s response: “Federal deficits and debt are not so scary. Neither is on an unsustainable path. Rather, persistent deficits and rising debt are normal.” Wray is one of the leading advocates of Modern Monetary Theory, an emerging school of thought that says countries like the United States, which borrow in their own currency, can pursue growth through deficit spending so long as prices are under control. His paper for the committee argued that MMT has never said deficits or debt don’t matter but that they are best viewed as outcomes of policies aimed at lifting the economy, not goals in themselves. When economists and lawmakers push for debt reduction, said Wray, “MMT cautions that what we might be reducing is economic growth.”

Historian Richard Aldous reviews the third volume of Charles Moore’s biography of the iconic and divisive British prime minister. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher won a landslide third term as prime minister of the U.K. Beneath the sheen of triumph, however, her administration would be beset by decay.

Bard CCE senior fellow Jonathan Cristol ’00 considers the Trump administration’s reported request that South Korea increase its contributions to the maintenance of U.S. forces in Korea by 400 percent. “The reported cost increase itself is a non-starter that sends an extraordinarily damaging signal to American allies around the world—and it is a gift to America's adversaries.”

Parts 3 and 4 of College Behind Bars will air on Tuesday, November 26, at 9/8c on PBS stations and stream on PBS.org.

College Behind Bars, the PBS documentary series following students in the Bard Prison Initiative, premiered this week, earning widespread praise. The series release is amplifying a national conversation about criminal justice reform and higher education in prison. Parts 1 and 2 of the series aired for the first time on Monday, November 25. Parts 3 and 4 will air on Tuesday, November 26, at 9/8c. The entire series will be available for streaming on PBS for 60 days.

College Behind Bars, a four-part documentary film series directed by award-winning filmmaker Lynn Novick, produced by Sarah Botstein, and executive produced by Ken Burns, tells the story of a small group of incarcerated men and women struggling to earn college degrees and turn their lives around in one of the most rigorous and effective prison education programs in the United States—the Bard Prison Initiative.

Shot over four years in maximum and medium security prisons in New York State, the four-hour film takes viewers on a stark and intimate journey into one of the most pressing issues of our time—our failure to provide meaningful rehabilitation for the over two million Americans living behind bars. Through the personal stories of the students and their families, the film reveals the transformative power of higher education and puts a human face on America’s criminal justice crisis. It raises questions we urgently need to address: What is prison for? Who has access to educational opportunity? Who among us is capable of academic excellence? How can we have justice without redemption?

BPI alumni and staff have been traveling around the country with the filmmakers engaging in conversations about College Behind Bars and their experiences at BPI and beyond. 

---

Selected media coverage of College Behind Bars

Bard Prison Initiative Alumni in Their Own Words

Some of My Proudest Accomplishments Happened in Prison. How Should I Talk About Them?
In the Washington Post
Bard Prison Initiative alumnus Alexander Hall, now a housing associate with the Bard Prison Initiative, writes about the lingering stigma of prison. "But every day, I am more convinced that this cloud looms only because people like me don’t talk about the remarkable transformations we were able to make while in prison or what those transformations enable us to accomplish when we are released. It is our responsibility to show, prove and educate the public."

Former Incarcerated Student: Society Owes Men and Women in Prison Chance to Return Whole
In USA Today
“I have been out of prison for more than three years; my liberal arts education contributes to my successful reentry every day,” writes Giovannie Hernandez in USA Today. “My understanding of history, literature and politics allows me to interact confidently and capably with people from diverse backgrounds. I work as a case manager for the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, where I am better able to communicate with and advocate for my clients because BPI taught be how to be a resilient, tenacious and compassionate thinker.”

An Inside Look

In College Behind Bars, Prisoners Step Into the Classroom
In Vulture
Reporter Ted Alcorn attends an early screening of College Behind Bars at Fishkill Correctional Facility, and captures BPI students' reactions to the series.

Documentary Provides Rare Look at Higher Education in Prison
In the Conversation
Mneesha Gellman is a Bard College alumna and was one of the first student volunteers for the Bard Prison Initiative. Now a faculty member at Emerson College, she used her experience and the Bard Prison Initiative as a model to launch the Emerson Prison Initiative, which expands access to higher education to incarcerated people in Massachusetts.

Interviews

"This Is a Story of Hope." New Documentary Series College Behind Bars Follows Men and Women Working to Gain College Degrees While in Prison
In Time Magazine
Director Lynn Novick, producer Sarah Botstein, and BPI alumnus Dyjuan Tatro discuss the film.

Incarcerated Men and Women Find Rehabilitation and Hope in College Behind Bars
From NPR's Fresh Air
Director Lynn Novick and graduates Sebastian Yoon and Dyjuan Tatro talk about how the program changes lives.

Higher Education and Incarceration
On WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show
The documentary filmmaker Lynn Novick and Jule Hall, a Bard College Prison Initiative alumnus and program associate for the Ford Foundation, talk about Novick’s new film, College Behind Bars.

Reviews

PBS’s College Behind Bars Offers a Lasting Lesson: Learning Is Its Own Kind of Freedom
In the Washington Post
"Serious scholarship gives them a sense of identity they’d never had before; as Novick’s camera reveals over time, the knowledge they acquire makes them stronger, fuller people and engaged citizens. Indeed, they become even more remorseful about their crimes, with increased empathy for other people and a greater understanding of the human condition."

"Undoing a Mistake": Ken Burns Film Looks Inside the Push to Bring College Education Back to Prison
In USA Today

How College in Prison Turns Around Lives and Saves Taxpayers Money
In Forbes

PBS Chronicles 12 Inmates Who Value Education in College Behind Bars
From NBC News
The film fills the screen with stories about human transformation as cameras follow a dozen incarcerated men and women as they try to earn college degrees.
 

“When fires raged across Brazil this summer and deforestation rates reached startling highs, users began downloading a small German search engine in a modest effort to counteract the devastation,” writes Drozdiak. “Ecosia GmBH, a Berlin-based alternative to Google, donates as much as 80% of the profit it makes from running ads alongside search results to plant trees around the world.”

Mariel Fiori, managing editor of La Voz, and Martha Tepepa of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard  College will speak as part of “Immigration Advocacy in the Hudson Valley,” a Chronogram Conversation presented in partnership with Radio Kingston and The River Newsroom. The public is invited to hear from community members who have organized to counteract what they view as unjust federal policies targeting immigrants. Wednesday, December 4, at 6:00 p.m., Holy Cross/Santa Cruz Episcopal Church in Kingston.

Bard College is well represented in this year’s Grammy nominations. The Broadway production of Oklahoma!—which began at Bard and stars Patrick Vaill ’07—received a nomination for Best Musical Theater Album for the 2019 cast recording. The audio recording of Beastie Boys Book, containing stories about the late founding member Adam Yauch ’86, was nominated for Best Spoken Word Album. The Black Pumas, with Vince Chiarito ’08 on bass, received a nomination for Best New Artist. 

CCS Bard is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for the 30th annual Day With(out) Art by presenting Still Beginning, a program of seven newly commissioned videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic by Shanti Avirgan, Nguyen Tan Hoang, Carl George, Viva Ruiz, Iman Shervington, Jack Waters / Victor F. M. Torres, and Derrick Woods-Morrow. The series will be on view at CCS Bard on Sunday, December 1, beginning at 2:00, in classroom 102.

Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies Features New Work from Brian Evenson, Joyce Carol Oates, James Morrow, Lance Olsen, Rae Armantrout, Quincy Troupe, Eliot Weinberger, Nathaniel Mackey, Sabine Schiffner, Rob Nixon, Heather Altfeld, Arthur Sze, Francine Prose, Troy Jollimore, and Kristine Ong Muslim

To be mindful of the planet we call home is to be aware that our natural world is suffering. Its oceans are rising up, as if in protest. Its populations of birds and fish, of mammals and reptiles, are, many of them, in steep and steady decline. Forests, coral reefs, habitats of every sort of life form, from tree frogs to butterfly fish, from elephants to bees, are profoundly afflicted. Conjunctions:73, Earth Elegies—the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College—gathers writings that examine and lament the plight of our planet, while also celebrating its grand sublimity, its peerless beauty, and its indispensability. Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, Earth Elegies features an exclusive interview with Underland author Robert Macfarlane, conducted by Diane Ackerman; a new translation of Sabine Schiffner poems; as well as new work from Brian Evenson, James Morrow, Lance Olsen, Joyce Carol Oates, Rae Armantrout, Quincy Troupe, Eliot Weinberger, Nathaniel Mackey, Sabine Schiffner, Rob Nixon, Heather Altfeld, Arthur Sze, Francine Prose, Troy Jollimore, and Kristine Ong Muslim.
The Washington Post says, “Conjunctions offers a showplace for some of the most exciting and demanding writers now at work.”

Edited by Bradford Morrow and published twice yearly by Bard College, Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by emerging voices and contemporary masters. For nearly four decades, Conjunctions has challenged accepted forms and styles, with equal emphasis on groundbreaking experimentation and rigorous execution. Named a “Top Literary Magazine 2019” by Reedsy, the journal was a finalist for both the 2018 and 2019 ASME Award for Fiction and the 2018 CLMP Firecracker Award for General Excellence. In addition, contributions to recent issues have been selected for The Best American Essays (2018, 2019), The Pushcart Prize XLIV: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best Small Fictions 2019, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2019.

For more information on the latest issue, please visit conjunctions.com/print/archive/conjunctions73. To order a copy, go to annandaleonline.org/conjunctions, call the Conjunctions office at 845-758-7054, e-mail conjunctions@bard.edu, or write to Conjunctions, Bard College, PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000. Visit the Conjunctions website at conjunctions.com.

 

Bard Prison Initiative alumni/ae, staff, and the College Behind Bars creative team have appeared at the Apollo Theater in New York City, in Boston with the New England Patriots, at the National Conference on Higher Education in Prison in St. Louis, and much more over the last few weeks. They are hosting screenings and panels to highlight the new documentary series, which will air on PBS and stream live this coming Monday and Tuesday. 

BPI alumnus Dyjuan Tatro appeared with College Behind Bars producer Ken Burns and director Lynn Novick on the Today Show last week to discuss the film.
 

The collaborative work by Tanowitz and classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein—performed by Dinnerstein and Pam Tanowitz Dance—will have its New York premiere at the Joyce Theater on December 10.

Significant new data on Bard's two high school early colleges in New York City reveals them as the state leaders in on-time college success. New analysis from the Education Trust–New York follows the rates at which low-income high school students in New York State are progressing to a bachelor's degree. Their research shows that Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) Manhattan and BHSEC Queens, of New York State's 1,100 public high schools, are the two leading schools in on-time college success for economically disadvantaged students. Low-income students who graduate from BHSEC complete bachelor's degrees on time at a higher rate than at any other high school in New York State.

The data validates a central premise of BHSEC: that young people have a greater chance of success when we challenge and inspire them at a younger age. Since the first BHSEC was founded in 2001, over 3,000 students have earned Bard associate in arts degrees. Today, across eight Bard Early Colleges nationwide, half of Bard's 3,000 early college students are first-generation college goers. 

"The BHSEC community should be truly proud," says Stephen Tremaine, Vice President for Early College Policies and Programs at Bard. "At the heart of the BHSEC community is an idea that we take extraordinary pride in: that, through inclusive excellence, education can resolve—not reflect—long-held disparities."

The Fisher Center presents a four-day festival on the subject of borders—physical borders, political borders, and borders of the body—and how we might in time transcend them. This third edition of the LAB Biennial is co-curated by Lebanese artist Tania El Khoury, a 2019 Soros Art Fellow, and Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s Artistic Director for Theater and Dance. The festival features nine new performances and installations by contemporary artists from the Middle East and the Americas.

“What we’re trying to do at the festival is to open up this discussion that it’s outside of the artwork, actually looking at it widely and globally, to reimagine a world where there are no walls, where we can move freely without discrimination, without being massacred, without being asked to perform all the time our identity. I think it is one of the main important topics of our contemporary political life.” —Tania El Khoury, Co-Curator of Where No Wall Remains

In their new book False Alarm: The Truth about Political Mistruths in the Trump Era, Ethan Porter ’07 and Thomas J. Wood find that if you correct untruths you can make people’s opinion of the facts substantially more accurate; you can also correct outright fake news. “That, however, is the end of the good news,” writes columnist Daniel Finkelstein in the London Times. “Porter and Wood provide a depressing reason why factual correction is possible: it is that facts just aren’t that important to people in forming their political views. So people can accept a correction of a fact that supports their candidate or partisan view without feeling fundamentally challenged. Their basic position and affiliation doesn’t crumble when a mere fact is corrected, so they are content to accept the correction. As the authors put it: ‘People do not care enough about facts to engage in motivated reasoning against them.’”

On November 20 at 10:00 a.m., the U.S. House Committee on the Budget will hear testimony about the growing debate on the costs and consequences of debt, the different perspectives that are driving this important conversation, and the implications of recent economic developments for how we think about our fiscal challenges. Among the expert witnesses is L. Randall Wray, professor of economics and senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. The hearing will stream on the Committee’s website and Professor Wray's remarks will be available on the Levy Economics Institute website.

The Bard Prison Initiative Debate Union defeated the Duke University team on Friday, November 15, at Eastern Correctional Facility. The debate topic was: The United States federal government should provide substantial support for clinical trials of human germ-line genome editing. BPI argued in the affirmative. The judges decided unanimously in favor of the BPI team, which now has a record of 10 wins and two losses.

Professor Luzzi participated in the November 16 roundtable “Emergence of Empathy: Encountering the Other through Fiction” at the Helix Center in New York City, which draws together leaders from different spheres of knowledge in the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology for interdisciplinary roundtables.

Bard College received a gold seal, the highest honor, at the 2019 ALL IN Challenge Awards Ceremony held to recognize colleges and universities committed to increasing college student voting rates. Bard achieved a student voting rate between 40 percent and 49 percent.

“Bard students truly appreciate the importance of voting as one of the first rites of passage into participatory American democracy. Their engagement is key to our future and exemplifies the spirit of the 26th Amendment where young adult voices are equal and encouraged. It’s part of what drives Election@Bard to inspire a student voter culture,” said Erin Cannan, vice president for student affairs. 

Student participation in elections has increased from the 2014 midterm election to the recent 2018 midterm election. According to the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, an initiative of Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy & Higher Education, voter turnout at the more than 1,000 institutions participating in the study increased by 21 points, from 19 percent to 40 percent. The voter registration rates for Bard College demonstrate that 47.2 percent of students voted in the 2018 elections and 82.5 percent of students were registered and eligible to vote.  

“Working in partnership with the Center for Civic Engagement and the Andrew Goodman Foundation, we saw a huge rise in students voting in the 2018 midterm election,” said Ava Mazzye ’20, student director of Election@Bard. “We hope this is the beginning of a lifelong commitment to democratic engagement.” 

“We are excited to honor Bard College with an ALL IN Challenge gold seal in recognition of their intentional efforts to increase democratic engagement and full voter participation,” said Jennifer Domagal-Goldman, executive director of the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. “More institutions like Bard are changing the culture on campus by institutionalizing nonpartisan democratic engagement efforts that are resulting in the incredible student voter turnout rates that we’ve seen across the country.”

The ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge is a nonpartisan, national initiative recognizing and supporting campuses as they work to increase nonpartisan democratic engagement and full student voter participation. The Challenge encourages higher education institutions to help students form the habits of active and informed citizenship, and make democratic participation a core value on their campus. More than 560 campuses, enrolling more than 6.2 million students, have joined the Challenge since its launch in summer 2016.

Born in Harlem, Tschabalala Self ’12 studied studio art at Bard before attending the Yale School of Art for her MFA. Since her graduation she has enjoyed—and suffered—an astounding art world trajectory. Prices for her paintings have increased more than thirtyfold over the past five years, only sometimes to her benefit. She has gained international respect and recognition but she’s also lost significant control over where her artworks end up. The story of Self’s rapidly rising popularity is a case study in the pleasures and perils of early-career acclaim for young artists.

“We tolerate mockery of the elderly that we’d never allow if it targeted another group,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Francine Prose. “But we’ll all be old one day. In any case, I think that the animosity toward the old is less economic than existential, less political than primal, less about student debt than about fear of one’s own ageing. No one particularly wants to get old, however preferable it is to the alternative: an early death. What’s striking is that the prejudice against the elderly is the only bigotry directed at the inevitable future of the bigot.”

In film after film, including his latest, Dark Waters, the director Todd Haynes asks viewers to contend with ambiguity, writes John Lahr in the New Yorker: “Dark Waters subverts by taking the legal thriller—a form that traditionally concludes with the triumph of good over evil—into areas of psychological complexity and ambiguity. All investigative stories, he told me, when we met in Los Angeles in June, have the burden of revealing a truth. ‘What I love so much about the genre,’ he explained, ‘is the cost of revealing the truth. The drama of that, and what it does to people. That is the part that kills you.’

So much of what has catapulted race and racial identity into the mainstream over the past 10 years has been molded by our political climate. Of course, this emphasis on identity politics happens on the left as well as the right—and it’s growing. “It’s a bad strategy to have an identity-based strategy on the left,” says Williams. “Deemphasizing identity all around would help our politics because we would have to pay more attention to the issues. We may have to pay more attention to class if we didn’t have these self-defeating identity agendas.”

Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, spoke on “Antisemitism as a Form of Hate” as part of the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ Countering Hate initiative on November 7.

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is pleased to announce that Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, has been selected as the recipient of the 2020 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of CCS Bard. For the past 21 years, the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence has celebrated and awarded the individual achievements of a distinguished curator whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive of exhibition-making today. The award reflects CCS Bard’s commitment to recognizing individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice. This year the award will be presented to Butler by artist Andrea Fraser at a gala celebration and dinner co-chaired by CCS Bard Board of Governors member Lonti Ebers and Chairman of the CCS Bard Board Martin Eisenberg, and will take place on April 7, 2020, at One Manhattan West, 395 9th Avenue, in New York City. Event location provided by Brookfield Properties with additional generous support from Lonti Ebers.

“Connie Butler represents the best of curating; independently minded, always curious, dedicated to artists and consistently bold in the scope of her exhibitions and choices of subject.  Her exhibitions are touchstones of curating in the United States—helping to redefine subjects and the institutions where she works.” —Tom Eccles, Executive Director, CCS Bard

The awardee is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. Past recipients include Harald Szeemann (1998), Marcia Tucker (1999), Kasper König (2000), Paul Schimmel (2001), Susanne Ghez (2002), Kynaston McShine (2003), Walter Hopps (2004), Kathy Halbreich and Mari Carmen Ramírez (2005), Lynne Cooke and Vasif Kortun (2006), Alanna Heiss (2007), Catherine David (2008), Okwui Enwezor (2009), Lucy Lippard (2010), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2011), Ann Goldstein (2012), Elisabeth Sussman (2013), Charles Esche (2014), Christine Tohme and Martha Wilson (2015), Thelma Golden (2016), Nicholas Serota (2017), Lia Gangitano (2018), and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2019).

“I am thrilled to receive the Audrey Irmas prize for curatorial excellence. The history of this award is truly a distinguished one and it is an honor to be among such incredible colleagues at this critical time in our field. Now more than ever our work matters and I continue to follow and support the work of artists and believe in the future of museums.” —Connie Butler

The 2020 award will once again be given under the name of patron Audrey Irmas, who has bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize of $25,000. Irmas is an emeritus board member of CCS Bard and an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award has been designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, and is based on his 2006 commission Bard Enter, conceived for the entrance to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.

Connie Butler is the Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, where she has organized numerous exhibitions including the biennial of Los Angeles artists Made in L.A. (2014), Mark Bradford: Scorched Earth (2015) and Marisa Merz: The Sky Is a Great Space (2017). She also co-curated Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions which opened at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in April of 2018 and at the Hammer in October 2018; Andrea Fraser: Men on the Line, 2019 and Lari Pittman: Declaration of Independence a retrospective exhibition which opened at the Hammer September 2019. From 2006 to 2013 she was The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she co-curated the first major Lygia Clark retrospective in the United States, Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988 (2014); and co-curated On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (2010) and mounted Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, the first US retrospective of the artist’s career. Butler also organized the groundbreaking survey WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles where she was curator from 1996 to 2006.

Eban Goodstein, director of Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability, says putting the planet and its inhabitants before profits “is an incredible paradigm shift” for business schools that have long trained their students to maximize shareholder value. Bard’s MBA in Sustainability bakes sustainability principles into every class rather than simply offering sustainability electives as many business schools do. “In theory, you don’t want to have a sustainability department. The goal should be to make sustainability part of the business model,” says 34-year-old Nour Shaikh MBA ’16, a vice president at ING Financial Services.

Mueller, who teaches painting at Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, talks to Art in America’s Steel Stillman about the evolution of her work in video, audio, performance, and alternative ways of painting. “I came to understand that the trajectory for my work was to move deeper into the studio and toward painting as a receding horizon,” says Mueller. “At the same time, I was beginning to feel overly safe and in control. I’d become fairly good at negotiating the processes and decisions involved in making the drawings that became enamel paintings and rugs. What would happen if I removed some of that mediation and started to use a brush? I wanted to challenge myself, to operate across a fuller spectrum.”

Bard Center for Civic Engagement Senior Fellow James Ketterer, who is currently dean of the School of Continuing Education at the American University Cairo, recently joined WAMC’s Roundtable panel for a conversation about the Trump impeachment inquiry, the climate crisis, and the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, among other issues.

The winners of the 2019 Concerto Competition were announced on Saturday, November 2, after the final round of performances at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Twenty-one students in the Bard College Conservatory of Music competed for the honor over a three-day period. This year’s winners are two undergraduates—Gitta Markó ’20, violin, who performed Concerto funebre by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and Yixin Wang ’23, guzheng, who performed Fragrance of Jasmine Blossoms by Zhanhao He—and a second-year student in the Graduate Vocal Arts Program, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy, who performed Shéhérazade by Maurice Ravel. The three winners will perform as soloists with the Conservatory Orchestra, The Orchestra Now, or the American Symphony Orchestra during the 2020–21 season.

On Monday, November 4, the New England Patriots hosted a special red carpet event and screening of College Behind Bars at Patriot Place in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Bard Prison Initiative alumni Sebastian Yoon and Salih Israil joined NFL stars Jason and Devin McCourty and director Lynn Novick to talk about the film with executive producer Ken Burns. “It kind of goes against the status quo of what we already think the prison system is for,” Jason McCourty said. “’Hey, you did something bad. You should be punished for it.’ Now to understand that there’s another way to rehabilitate people in prison and when they get out, give them an opportunity so they don’t end up back there.”

You never know what you'll find in the Montgomery Place collection. The Curiosity Cabinet class, taught by Associate Professor of Art History Susan Merriam, meets regularly in the basement of the mansion at the Montgomery Place Campus to study some of the fascinating objects in the collection. Items include a mechanical cat, dueling pistols, and a chicken foot letter opener. The collection boasts well over 8,000 objects.

Students have been researching 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. In class on Tuesday, November 5, students gave presentations on their research, discussing such themes as shifting colonial structures in the era of the objects, the romanticism of nature and early American identity, and Victorian death culture.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, fabulous shells, valuable oil paintings, and exquisitely carved ivory pieces shared display space with oddly shaped vegetables, primitively taxidermied animals, and an array of other oddities in curiosity cabinets. Until relatively recently, scholars believed that the cabinets were merely eccentric exercises in the appreciation of peculiar or marvelous things. Recent research, however, has shown that the collections constitute a premodern system of classifying objects and an important step in the emergence of our modern taxonomic systems.

This course analyzes the emergence of the cabinets, the collecting practices that sustained them, the relationship between colonization and the cabinets, the curiosity aesthetic, and the role the cabinets played in the history of science. The main project for the course is to conceptualize and research a curiosity cabinet exhibition featuring objects from Montgomery Place. At least half of the classes during the semester meet at Montgomery Place, where students become familiar with the collections, learn about collections management, and do original research.

The exhibition of Montgomery Place objects and student research will take place at Stevenson Library over the winter, with an opening reception on December 10 from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
 

“Gay reparation reflects the maturation of the gay rights movement,” writes Professor Encarnación. “It is no accident that gay reparation policies have arrived in the wake of numerous gay rights victories, most notably the legalization of same-sex marriage in some two dozen nations. These victories have had a two-fold effect in facilitating the rise of gay reparation: significantly advancing the normalization of homosexuality while at the same time allowing gay activists to shift their attention from demanding new rights to redressing past wrongs.”

Drones are increasingly being used by criminals across the country, and local law enforcement agencies are often powerless to stop them. “The use of drones by criminal groups is appealing in part because drones are harder to catch,” says Holland Michel, codirector of the Bard Center for the Study of the Drone. All reported sightings of drones flying in restricted airspace are recorded by the F.A.A., and the agency can impose civil penalties on those who break the rules. But the F.A.A. does not have criminal enforcement authority, and though it requires drones to be registered, it depends on the honor system. “The consensus is, no one has cracked the code on countering drones,” Holland Michel says. “It’s an unresolved challenge.”

“In her new memoir, In the Dream House, Machado achieves a formally inventive representation of a difficult subject,” writes Katy Waldman in the New Yorker. “Yet the arc of this ordeal, although it forms the book’s skeleton, is not Machado’s true subject. Instead, In the Dream House is primarily about the quandary of constructing In the Dream House. It is a quandary both because the telling is painful and because Machado, who has no language for this telling, must invent one.”

Artnet speaks to gallerist Mariane Ibrahim and her mentor, Marieluise Hessel—collector, scholar, and cofounder of Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies—about how they connected; how they talk about representation, race, and politics in the art world; and what advice they have for young women in the art industry today.