Bard News

Bard College announces the appointment of Juliet Morrison ’03 to the College’s board of trustees. Morrison is an assistant professor in the microbiology and plant pathology department at University of California Riverside, where she specializes in combining computational analysis with immunological and virological methods to address questions at the host-pathogen interface. She has spent the last 17 years studying innate immune responses to viral pathogens such as dengue virus, rhinovirus, poliovirus, yellow fever virus, and influenza virus.

“I am thrilled to welcome Juliet, a distinguished scientist and young alumna, to the Bard Board,” said Bard President Leon Botstein.

About Juliet Morrison
During her graduate studies at Columbia University, Morrison discovered that a viral protease facilitated poliovirus and rhinovirus interferon resistance. In her postdoctoral training at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, she discovered and characterized two novel and disparate mechanisms whereby the NS5 proteins of dengue virus and yellow fever virus inhibit interferon signaling to enhance viral replication and pathogenesis. At the University of Washington, Morrison showed that influenza disease severity correlates with host transcriptional signatures of increased cytokine production, and decreased coagulation and lipid metabolism signaling.

Morrison has received several awards for her work in the field of science and medical research, including the John and Samuel Bard Award in Science and Medicine from Bard College in 2020, the Calderone Junior Faculty Award in 2017 from Columbia University, and the Women in STEM Award from Bronx Community College in 2017.

Her Bard Senior Project, “Characterization of the Product of a Putative Mitochondrial Isocitrate Dehydrogenase Gene (ICD1) from Tetrahymena pyriformis,” was a study in which a clone of ICD1 was mutagenized to be made readable in E. coli and, after expression, shown to have isocitrate dehydrogenase activity. Her Senior Project advisor was Professor John Ferguson. Juliet received Ph.D. in microbiology from Columbia University in 2009. Juliet lives in Riverside, California.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(2/24/21)
 

Does the conversion of natural habitats to human use favor animals that harbor agents causing human disease? A global analysis of vertebrates provides an answer to this pressing question. In their commentary accompanying the report, disease ecologists Felicia Keesing of Bard College and Richard Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies note that the study shows “the greatest zoonotic threats arise where natural areas have been converted to croplands, pastures and urban areas.” Ostfeld and Keesing have seen evidence of that firsthand during two decades studying Lyme disease transmission in New York’s Hudson Valley. Where development has cut the valley’s forests into small fragments, Professor Keesing says, “populations of white-footed mice boom because their predators and competitors have disappeared.” She and Ostfeld have found that white-footed mice “not only host more of the ticks that transmit Lyme, but they also are more likely than other mammals to infect ticks with the bacterium that causes the disease. The ticks, in turn, pass it to people.”

Felicia Keesing is the David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing at Bard College.

Kelly Taxter, curator of contemporary art at The Jewish Museum in New York City, has been appointed director of the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. Taxter studied fine art before shifting her focus from art making to art show making in the early 2000s, when she enrolled in the master’s program at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies. “At the time, it was one of two masters programs in the world,” she says. “I got my MA there and it was an incredible school. The network and support you get is tremendous.” When asked to offer her vision of what she sees in terms of moving the Parrish forward as a cultural institution, Taxter responds: “I’m committed to not making it a strictly white space, and the Hamptons reads that way from the outside. I’d like to understand who’s here and what their needs are.” Her tenure at the Parrish begins March 22.

Bard alumna, historian Erin Maglaque ’10 talks to Thomas Jones of the London Review of Books about abortion in early modern Italy, the stories of women who experienced it, how it was investigated, and why attitudes to pregnancy 400 years ago were in some ways preferable to those now.

Black-owned businesses often face an uphill battle to success, and the pandemic has only exacerbated that struggle. Black business owners receive the financing they need at lower rates than their white counterparts, and Black-owned businesses are failing at a higher rate during the pandemic. Inside Edition highlights Black entrepreneurs who have carved out their own path in local communities during COVID, including Bard alumna Beatrice Ajaero ’12 MBA ’17, who opened her restaurant Nneji, serving West African cuisine, in Astoria, Queens in summer 2020. Ajareo developed her vision for Nneji as part of her yearlong capstone project in the Bard MBA in Sustainability Program. For Ajaero, it’s all about responsible sourcing, community engagement, and standing on the shoulders of her forebears.

Bard College is proud to be included on the list of U.S. colleges and universities that produced the most 2020–21 Fulbright U.S. students. Each year the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announces the top producing institutions for the Fulbright Program, the U.S. government's flagship international educational exchange program. The Chronicle of Higher Education publishes the lists annually.

Bard had nine recipients in 2020–21, placing the College in the top 15 among BA institutions. This is the third year in a row Bard has made the list, and the fourth time in the past five years. Seventeen additional Bard semifinalists are awaiting their results and will find out in the coming months whether they will receive awards for 2021–22.

The Henry Luce Foundation announced today that Evan Tims ’19 has been named a 2021–22 Luce Scholar. The Luce Scholars Program is a nationally competitive fellowship program launched by the Henry Luce Foundation in 1974 to enhance the understanding of Asia among potential leaders in American society. Tims is one of 18 finalists (chosen from among 164 semifinalists from over 70 participating colleges and universities) selected for the new class of Luce Scholars. After working with Luce in the coming months to choose the organization and country in Asia where he will be placed, he plans to explore the field of climate justice, relationships between nature and culture, and the future-oriented practices of social change, as well as write stories and novels that explore the changing global environment.

“My focus is on finding ways to address the climate crisis through interdisciplinary and intersectional leadership. Despite the unique challenges of COVID-19 this year, I believe that global connectivity and understanding are more critical than ever.” said Tims. “I’m grateful to Luce for the opportunity to follow my curiosity and passion in a completely new sociocultural and geographic context. Given the necessity for international collaboration in combating the climate crisis, Luce provides a critical avenue for developing global connection and understanding.”

Evan Tims ’19 is a police misconduct investigator, climate fiction writer, and researcher. Growing up in coastal Maine, he developed an early interest in the relationship between narrative, social justice, and environmental change. At Bard, Tims received a joint BA degree in human rights and written arts, two fields that allowed him to explore formulations of rights and cultural attentiveness to injustice through a variety of lenses. While at Bard, Evan won two Critical Language Scholarships that funded Bangla studies in Kolkata, India. Tims’s Senior Project explored the intersections between climate and social justice using a combination of experimental fiction and academic research. He received the Bard Written Arts Prize and the Christopher Wise Award in environmentalism and human rights for his thesis, which he later published in shortened form in Mapping Meaning: The Journal. His passion for human rights led him to become an investigator for the Civilian Complaint Review Board of New York City (CCRB), the largest police oversight agency in the United States. Tims ultimately hopes to spend his career addressing the social harm engendered by the climate crisis through the perspective of human rights.

About the Luce Scholars Program
The Luce Scholars Program provides stipends, language training, and individualized professional placement in Asia for 15-18 Luce Scholars each year, and welcomes applications from college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals in a variety of fields who have had limited exposure to Asia. The program, open to both U.S. citizens and permanent residents, is unique among American-Asian exchanges in that it is intended for young leaders who have had limited experience of Asia and who might not otherwise have an opportunity in the normal course of their careers to come to know Asia. For more information, visit hluce.org/programs/luce-scholars. Bard students interested in applying to the Luce Scholars Program should contact the Dean of Studies Office at studies@bard.edu.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 161-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.(2/19/21)
 

Dariel Vasquez ’17 cofounded Brothers at Bard with Harry Johnson ’17 to provide peer support for men of color on campus. What began in 2014 as a Bard Trustee Leader Scholar project expanded to include a successful mentoring program for high school students in Kingston, New York, and has grown into the larger Brothers@ organization, which supports students across the country. Vasquez talks to NY1 News about his upbringing in Harlem, transition to college life, and his commitment to providing positive role models to other young men of color.

“A well-regarded research center like OII gets immediate big headlines whenever it produces new research, but the authors have made far more of these findings than they can reasonably claim,” writes Briant, visiting research associate in human rights. “Misleading reporting about such weak findings risks undermining public confidence in research and new policies on disinformation, making it more urgent than ever that we get the difficult research that’s needed done.”

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Kobena Mercer as the Charles P. Stevenson Chair in Art History and the Humanities, a joint appointment between the Art History and Visual Culture Program in the undergraduate College, and the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS). Mercer, who comes to Bard from Yale University, will assume his faculty position in fall 2021.

“We are delighted that Kobena Mercer has chosen to accept the Stevenson professorship,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “It is an honor to have as distinguished a scholar and teacher as Professor Mercer, whose wide-ranging work spanning the arts and humanities feels crucial to Bard’s mission, as a member of our undergraduate and graduate faculties.”

“I am honored beyond words to be coming to Bard, which is renowned worldwide for its interdisciplinary excellence,” said Mercer. “Not only have I found the best home for my scholarship, which cuts across Art History, Black Studies, and Cultural Studies, but I am also looking forward to collaborating with Bard’s innovative arts and humanities programs to further grow a liberal arts education that is critically responsive to the urgent questions we face today.”

“Mercer joining the faculty of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, is momentous for the graduate program. His luminary scholarship has fundamentally shaped our fields of focus and his writing is already essential to our curriculum,” said Lauren Cornell, director of the graduate program at CCS Bard. “He is one of the leading figures of Cultural Studies, Art History, and Black Studies, and it is an enormous privilege that his perspective will be available firsthand to CCS graduate students.”

Kobena Mercer teaches modern and contemporary art in the Black Atlantic, examining African American, Caribbean and Black British artists with critical methods from cultural studies. His work has significantly transformed current thinking about art and identity. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994), his first book, was a groundbreaking contribution to multiple fields, bringing a Black British perspective to wide-ranging cultural forms that arose from the volatile transformations of the 1980s. This collection of essays was followed by influential studies on artists including Romare Bearden, Keith Piper, Isaac Julien, and James VanDerZee.  Throughout his career, Mercer’s research has illuminated the art of our time through evolving frameworks and subjects. His recent essay collection, Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s (2016), examined artists such as John Akomfrah, Renée Green, and Kerry James Marshall, showing how Black artists contributed to art’s transformation in an age of globalization. He edited and introduced Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (2017), and prior to that he conceived and edited the Annotating Art’s Histories series, published by MIT, whose titles are Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Culture (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008). Over the last few years his exhibition catalogue contributions include Wilfredo Lam at Centre Pompidou, Frank Bowling at Haus der Kunst, Adrian Piper at Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Theaster Gates at Tate Liverpool. His forthcoming book is Alain Locke and the Visual Arts, published by Yale University Press in 2022.

A prolific and dedicated teacher, Mercer has taught at Yale University, New York University, University of California Santa Cruz and Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he earned his PhD. Educated in Ghana and England, he is an inaugural recipient of the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, awarded by the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in 2006.2/17/21
 

In the impeachment trial, a key element of the prosecution's case is a dramatic video taken at the Capitol during the insurrection. Who were the actual faces in the crowd? Ronan Farrow has profiled three different rioters to learn more about their backgrounds. All three have been arrested and now face criminal charges. Farrow joins PBS’s Michel Martin to discuss the takeaways from his investigation.

Brian Mateo, associate dean of civic engagement and director of strategic partnerships for the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, has been elected to the board of directors of BYkids. Started in 2007, BYkids is a global movement that uses storytelling through film to inform, engage, and inspire action. BYkids provides kids around the world with the training and the video cameras to make short documentaries about their lives. Renowned filmmakers mentor these young people in the art of filmmaking.

“I am very excited to join the Board of extraordinary talented individuals and help the BYkids organization strategize their goals for the next ten years and also the next generation of young filmmakers and its viewers,” says Mateo.

Brian Mateo also serves on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, and as a term member on the Council on Foreign Relations, a security fellow for the Truman National Security Project and a climate reality leader trained by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore through the Climate Reality Project.

“We are honored to have Brian’s international and educational expertise and welcome him as we expand our impact of this powerful films as a way to promote cross-cultural conversations,” says Holly Carter, BYkids founder and executive director. “We have done a number of screening and conversation events with his students and Bard colleagues, and it is always a rich experience.”

BYkids is a non-profit organization pairing master filmmakers, including Albert Maysles and Ric Burns, with youth (ages 8-21) from around the world to create short documentaries that educate Americans about globally relevant issues. By giving kids the tools and mentoring to make documentary films about their lives and packaging those films for a wide American audience, BYkids gives voice to youth from diverse cultures, and encourages international understanding and engagement by giving viewers concrete ways to respond.

BYkids films air on PBS with a supporting curriculum for students and teachers and are distributed through PBS LearningMedia, Discovery Education, and PenPal Schools. The organizations holds film screenings and panel discussions at schools, film festivals, Lincoln Center, the United Nations, and SXSW. We engage on social media. Each of our young filmmakers creates empathy touching 248.6 million viewers. Our instructional webinar, hosted by WNET and accessible to all educators, is promoted to more than 170,000 educators worldwide, including middle, junior, and high school librarians, social studies, and world history teachers. To learn more about BYkids, please click here.(2/15/21)
 

This February, the Bard Music Festival presents “A Program of French Piano Music, Inspired by the World of Nadia Boulanger,” a recital of French music performed by pianists Danny Driver and Piers Lane recorded at The Menuhin Hall, Sussex, England in fall 2020.  Commissioned by the Bard Music Festival, the concert features works by César Franck, Lili Boulanger, Gabriel Fauré, and Camille Saint-Saëns. The program includes a talk by renowned scholars Byron Adams and Kimberly Francis introducing the work of these four composers and of the person who connects them, Nadia Boulanger.

Both the recital and scholar talk will be available to stream on-demand through UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center at Bard’s virtual stage, February 19–25. Tickets are $15–35, with $5 Bard student tickets available through the Passloff Pass. For information and to reserve tickets, click here.

“A Program of French Piano Music, Inspired by the World of Nadia Boulanger.”
Program
César Franck (1822–90)
Organ Chorale No. 1 in E Major, arranged for two pianos by Henri Duparc (1890)

Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)
Theme and Variations in C-sharp Minor, Op. 73 (1895)

Lili Boulanger (1893–1918)
Theme and Variations in C Minor (1915)

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)
Variations on a Theme of Beethoven for Two Pianos Op. 35 (1874)
One of Britain’s most respected pianists, Danny Driver is recognized internationally for his sophistication, insight, and musical depth. His studies at Cambridge University and Royal College of Music inspired his holistic approach to performance and enabled him to cultivate a broad repertoire from J. S. Bach to the present. Concerto engagements have included the Hallé, Royal Philharmonic, and Minnesota Orchestras, and two appearances at the BBC Proms. Recent solo recital highlights include London’s Wigmore Hall (where Driver is frequently invited to perform) and Southbank International Piano Series as well as engagements in Toronto, Montreal, Paris, and Osaka. Driver has released an extensive series of acclaimed recital and concerto recordings on Hyperion Records, and in 2017 recorded all of Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas with Chloë Hanslip (Rubicon Classics). Future projects include a recording of György Ligeti’s Piano Études (Hyperion) and a three concert series focused on Ligeti at Wigmore Hall in 2021–22.

London-based Australian pianist Piers Lane is in great demand as a soloist and collaborative artist. Recent highlights include performances of Busoni’s mighty piano concerto, Frank Bridge’s Phantasm, and Ferdinand Ries’s Eighth Concerto at Carnegie Hall; premieres of Carl Vine’s second Piano Concerto, written for him, with the Sydney Symphony and the London Philharmonic; sold out performances at Wigmore Hall; Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 at St. John’s Smith Square and at the Sydney Opera House with the Sydney Symphony; the Ireland Piano Concerto under Sir Andrew Davis with the Melbourne Symphony; and Moszkowski Piano Concerto and Litolff’s Scherzo with the Queensland Symphony. Lane has a discography of more than 60 CDs. Recent recordings include Piers Lane Goes to Town, concertos by the Australians Alfred Hill and George Boyle, and sonatas with violinist Tasmin Little. In the Queens Diamond Jubilee Birthday Honours, he was made an Officer in the Order of Australia.

Byron Adams is a composer and musicologist. His essays have appeared in journals such as 19th-Century Music and Music and Letters. He has contributed chapters to volumes such as The Cambridge Companion to Elgar (2004), The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (2013), The Sea in the British Musical Imagination (2015), and The Music of Herbert Howells (2014). In 2000, the American Musicological Society presented him with the Philip Brett Award. In 2007, he was appointed scholar in residence for the Bard Music Festival and edited the volume Edward Elgar and His World. He is an associate editor of The Musical Quarterly. Adams is distinguished professor of music at the University of California, Riverside.

Kimberly Francis is an associate professor of music at the University of Guelph, Canada. She is the author of Teaching Stravinsky: Nadia Boulanger and the Consecration of a Modernist Icon (2015); the editor of Nadia Boulanger and the Stravinskys: A Selected Correspondence (2018); and co-editor of Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music (2020). She currently serves as coeditor-in-chief for the Grove Music Online revision project on women, gender, and sexuality.
(2.15.21)

 

Radical listening, electricity blackouts in Lebanon, participatory art and political art—Tania El Khoury talks with DRAFF about her artistic practice in this mini-documentary. Tania El Khoury is a distinguished artist in residence in the Theater and Performance Program and director of the new OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard.

Video and installation artist Carolyn Lazard ’10 is the recipient of a 2021 United States Artists (USA) fellowship. The Chicago-based arts nonprofit announced 60 winners of its 2021 fellowships, marking the largest fellowship class in its 15-year history. Each of the selected artists, working across 10 creative disciplines, will receive an unrestricted $50,000 cash award.

The impeachment trial affirmed Hannah Arendt’s insight that two paradoxical qualities characterize the audiences of totalitarians: gullibility and cynicism. “Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial was an artifact of his Presidency,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Masha Gessen. “It was a battle of meaning against noise, against nothing-means-anything-and-everything-is-the-same nihilism—and nihilism won.”

“Sasha Phyars-Burgess’s Untitled features essays, poems and stunning photographs that delve into the black experience and the true meaning of ‘home,’” writes Elena Goodinson in the Guardian. Phyars-Burgess explains: “I am trying to make sense of a place that is not responsible for my upbringing but is wholly responsible for my existence. The place that leaks into my daily references and confuses me about what I call home. I do not always understand this place, though I long to be a part of it.” The volume includes a conversation between Phyars-Burgess and fellow artists Juliana Huxtable ’10 and Carolyn Lazard ’10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Condo Concerts Spring 2021 programs

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

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

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

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

Please click here for reservations and additional program details.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The collection offers a rich variety of solo pieces, chamber works and concertos by Beethoven, Berio, Chopin, Mozart, Takemitsu, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and more — in probing, lucid, often exhilarating performances. Some of these recordings I didn’t know; others I’d not listened to in years. The set has rekindled strong memories of Peter — as I came to know him — and his great artistry, and the intersection of our lives and professions,” writes Tommasini.

As Yeva Nersisyan and Wray “have pointed out, the US government is engaged in relief, not stimulus, spending. It is offering much-needed assistance to the devastated balance sheets of households, school districts and local governments. Rescuing public services, making sure people don’t starve and building Covid-testing systems is not an economic stimulus but a necessary antidepressant. Reducing the size of the relief package would prolong the recession, which, given the virus’s capacity to surprise, may last longer than the experts predict.”

Keziah Weir, a Bard alumna and senior editor at Vanity Fair, interviews Billie Eilish—the Grammy Award–winning multiplatinum artist and cultural phenomenon, who has just turned 19.

On February 26, novelist and Bard College literature professor Bradford Morrow, founding editor of Conjunctions, the celebrated literary journal published by Bard College, hosts an evening of readings and performances with some of the contributors to Conjunctions:75, Dispatches from Solitude. This issue gathers fiction, poetry, essays, and genre-bending work from writers far and wide who respond to the deficits of quarantine, self-isolation, and distancing. Morrow will be joined by contributors Sandra Cisneros and Henry Cisneros, Brandon Hobson, Nathaniel Mackey, and Barbara Tran. The livestreamed event, presented by Conjunctions and Elliott Bay Book Company, takes place Friday, February 26, at 8 p.m. For reservations, please click here.

Edited by Morrow, Dispatches from Solitude features two previously unpublished poem-songs by Sandra Cisneros; fiction by the late H. G. Carrillo; and new writing by Brandon Hobson, Nathaniel Mackey, Barbara Tran, Forrest Gander, Helena María Viramontes, Bennett Sims, Anne Waldman, Colin Channer, Rikki Ducornet, Kyoko Mori, John Yau, Charles Bernstein, Marc Anthony Richardson, Michael Ives, Rick Moody, and many others. In his Editor’s Note, Morrow describes how plans for an entirely different fall issue, States of Play, were dashed as the coronavirus pandemic took over.

“As hundreds, then thousands, began to die—among them dear friends of mine, such as Conjunctions donor Jay Hanus and longtime contributor H. G. Carrillo—New York and other cities were forced into lockdown,” writes Morrow. “COVID-19 became the daily and nightly shadow that fell across our lives. Amid this harrowing outbreak, another, more urgent theme for the fall Conjunctions became imperative, one where we might gather writing from those who were compelled to change their daily routines, even reevaluate what their work and lives meant to them. Contributions didn’t necessarily have to be about the pandemic, as such, but shaped by its constraints, by the terrors and courage it has provoked.”

Additional contributors to Dispatches from Solitude include Jane Pek, Meredith Stricker, David Ryan, Gillian Conoley, Yxta Maya Murray, Vanessa Chan, Cyan James, Clare Beams, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Alyssa Pelish, Erin L. McCoy, Alan Rossi, John Darcy, Rae Armantrout, Sylvia Legris, and Susan Daitch.

Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, and visual artist whose work explores the lives of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Her numerous awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Medal of Arts, a Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, and the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. She will be joined by her brother Henry Cisneros, who has set her poetry from Dispatches to music.

Brandon Hobson is the author of the novel The Removed (Ecco, Feb 2021); Where the Dead Sit Talking (Soho Press), a 2019 National Book Award finalist; and other books. An assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University, he also teaches in the low-res MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe.

Nathaniel Mackey is the author of poetry collections Late Arcade, Nod House and Blue Fasa (all New Directions), and Lay Ghost (Black Ocean). He edits the literary magazine Hambone.

Bradford Morrow (editor) is the author of ten books of fiction and the founding editor of Conjunctions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction, an Academy Award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Nora Magid Award for excellence in editing a literary journal.

Barbara Tran is a poet, with writing published or forthcoming in Bennington Review, The Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker. In spring 2021, her first poem film will tour with a Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network exhibition.
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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. In 2020, Conjunctions received the prestigious Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. The judges noted, “Every issue of Conjunctions is a feat of curatorial invention, continuing the Modernist project of dense, economical writing, formal innovation, and an openness to history and the world.” 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/conjunctions75. 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.

[Note to editors: To obtain review copies, please call Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or e-mail primoff@bard.edu]

(2.8.21)
 

The US-China Music Institute presents its second annual concert of symphonic music to celebrate the Lunar New Year in collaboration with musicians both here in New York and abroad.

The Sound of Spring will be offered free online in a livestream from the Fisher Center at Bard at 8 p.m. on Saturday, February 13. The program will feature a new performance by The Orchestra Now, conducted by Jindong Cai, along with performances from special guests including the Central Conservatory of Music Chinese Chamber Orchestra, the China NCPA Orchestra, the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, and the Contemporary Legend Theater from Taiwan. For information and reservations, click here.

The evening will be hosted by acclaimed pipa performer Wu Man and conductor Jindong Cai, who is the director of the US-China Music Institute. Musical selections include works by Tan Dun, Bao Yuankai, Wu Man, Julian Yu, Li Shaosheng, and more, plus a very special excerpt of a Chinese opera style adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Soloists include Wu Man performing a world premiere of her own composition for the pipa responding to this special time we are all experiencing; pianist and Bard faculty member Blair McMillan in the US-premiere of Li Shaosheng’s Spring China Capriccio; and Bard College Conservatory of Music undergraduate erhu major Beitong Liu performing with The Orchestra Now in two arrangements of traditional Chinese folk tunes. Kunqu opera masters Wu Hsing-kuo and Wei Han-min are the lead performers in the Contemporary Legend Theater adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The beginning of the concert will feature Tan Dun’s Internet ‘Eroica’ symphony to honor the many heroes worldwide who are working to combat the pandemic. The symphony will first be performed by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tan Dun, and then followed by a rearrangement of the same piece for the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra using all Chinese instruments.

The program also offers a sampling of traditional and contemporary Chinese symphonic, chamber, solo, and theatrical music, showcasing different regional folk traditions, as well as blending Chinese and Western instruments and musical forms. Musical selections will send a message of hope, gratitude, renewal, and new beginnings, in the spirit of the Chinese New Year tradition of the Spring Festival.

“The Lunar New Year is celebrated by people all around the world. This is the year of the Ox, which symbolizes strength and determination. We created this year’s program to give people some feelings of hope and looking forward to the future. We hope through music we can give you inspiration.” - Jindong Cai


Saturday, February 13, at 8 p.m.
Free tickets may be reserved in advance at
fishercenter.bard.edu/events/the-sound-of-spring-2021
Donations may be added to your reservation and are gratefully accepted.

More detailed program information please visit
barduschinamusic.org/events/sound-of-spring-2021

Contact information:
uschinamusic@bard.edu


Selected Artists’ Biographies

Conductor Jindong Cai is director of the US-China Music Institute, professor of music and arts at Bard College, and associate conductor of The Orchestra Now. Over his 30-year career in the United States, Cai has established himself as an active and dynamic conductor, scholar of Western classical music in China, and leading advocate of music from across Asia. Born in Beijing, Cai received his early musical training in China, where he learned to play violin and piano. He came to the United States for his graduate studies at the New England Conservatory and the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. In 1989, he was selected to study with famed conductor Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Center, and won the Conducting Fellowship Award at the Aspen Music Festival in 1990 and 1992.

Cai started his professional conducting career with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and has worked with numerous orchestras throughout North America and Asia. He maintains strong ties to his homeland and has conducted most of the top orchestras in China. Cai has served as the principal guest conductor of the China Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra since 2012. He is a three-time recipient of the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music. Cai serves as the principal guest conductor of the Mongolia State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Ulaanbaatar. In 2004 he joined Stanford University faculty as director of orchestral studies and conducted the Stanford Symphony Orchestra for 11 years. He is also the founder of the Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival. Cai founded the US-China Music Institute at the Bard Conservatory in 2017 and created the Institute’s the annual China Now Music Festival in the following year. In its first two seasons, China Now presented new works by some of the most important Chinese composers of our time, with concerts performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, Bard’s Fisher Center, and Stanford University.

Together with his wife Sheila Melvin, Cai has coauthored many articles on the performing arts in China and the book Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese. Their latest book, Beethoven in China: How the Great Composer Became an Icon in the People’s Republic, was published by Penguin in September 2015.


Recognized as the world’s premier pipa virtuoso, Wu Man is a soloist, educator and composer who gives her lute-like instrument—which has a history of more than 2,000 years in China—a new role in both traditional and contemporary music. Wu Man has premiered hundreds of new works for the pipa, while spearheading multimedia projects to both preserve and create global awareness of China’s ancient musical traditions. Projects she has initiated have resulted in the pipa finding a place in new solo and quartet works, concertos, opera, chamber, electronic, and jazz music as well as in theater productions, film, dance, and collaborations with visual artists. She has performed in recital and with major orchestras around the world, is a frequent collaborator with ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet and Shanghai Quartets and The Knights, and is a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble. Wu Man has appeared in more than 40 recordings throughout her career, including seven Nominee Awards and the Silkroad Ensemble’s Grammy Award-winning recording Sing Me Home, featuring her own composition. She is also a featured artist in the 2015 documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.

Born in Hangzhou, China, Wu Man studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master's degree in pipa.  At age 13, she was hailed as a child prodigy and became a nationally recognized role model for young pipa players. She subsequently received first prize in the First National Music Performance Competition, among other awards, and participated in many premieres of works by Chinese composers. She moved to the U.S. in 1990 and was awarded the Bunting Fellowship at Harvard University in 1998. Wu Man was the first Chinese traditional musician to receive the United States Artist Fellowship (2008) and the first artist from China to perform at the White House. In 2013, she was named Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year. Now she is a distinguished Professor at both the Zhejiang and the Xi'an Conservatory, China. Wu Man serves as artistic advisor and teaches master classes for the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music.


Pianist Blair McMillan is a member of the faculty of the Bard College Department of Music. He studied at Oberlin College, The Juilliard School, and the Manhattan School of Music. A pianist, chamber musician, improviser, concert series curator, his appearances as soloist include Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, le Poisson Rouge, Moscow Conservatory, Casals Hall (Tokyo), Miller Theatre. He has performed with American Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, Albany Symphony, Juilliard Orchestra (Lincoln Center and tour of Japan). He is a member of the Da Capo Chamber Players, American Modern Ensemble, and the Avian Orchestra. His solo recordings include Soundings (Midnight Productions), Concert Music of Fred Hersch (Naxos), and Multiplicities '38 (Centaur). He has been at Bard since 2006.


About the Presenters

The US-China Music Institute was founded in 2018 by conductor Jindong Cai and Robert Martin, founding director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, with the mission to promote the study, performance, and appreciation of music from contemporary China and to support musical exchange between the United States and China. In partnership with the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, the Institute has embarked on several groundbreaking projects including the first degree-granting program in Chinese instrument performance in a U.S. conservatory. barduschinamusic.org

Recognized as one of the finest conservatories in the United States, Bard College Conservatory of Music is guided by the principle that young musicians should be broadly educated in the liberal arts and sciences to achieve their greatest potential. The mission of the Conservatory is to provide the best possible preparation for a person dedicated to a life immersed in the creation and performance of music. The five-year, double-degree program combines rigorous conservatory training with a challenging and comprehensive liberal arts program. All Conservatory students pursue a double degree in a thoroughly integrated program and supportive educational community. Graduating students receive a bachelor of music and a bachelor of arts in a field other than music. At the Bard Conservatory the serious study of music goes hand in hand with the education of the whole person. Founded in 2005 by cellist and philosopher Robert Martin, the Conservatory welcomed the composer Tan Dun as its new dean in the summer of 2019. bard.edu/conservatory

The Orchestra Now (TŌN) is a group of vibrant young musicians from across the globe who are making orchestral music relevant to 21st-century audiences. They are lifting the curtain on the musicians’ experience and sharing their unique personal insights in a welcoming environment. Conductor, educator, and music historian Leon Botstein founded TŌN in 2015 as a master’s degree program at Bard College, where he also serves as president. The orchestra is in residence at Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, presenting multiple concerts there each season as well as taking part in the annual Bard Music Festival. It also performs regularly at the finest venues in New York and beyond, including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and elsewhere. The orchestra has performed with many distinguished conductors, including Fabio Luisi, Neeme Järvi, Gerard Schwarz, and JoAnn Falletta. theorchestranow.org

The Fisher Center at Bard develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present, as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 160-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. fishercenter.bard.edu(2.5.21)

Dina Ramadan, assistant professor of Arabic, reviews Yara El-Sherbini's Forms of Regulation and Control at the Cue Art Foundation in New York for Art-agenda. “The first US solo exhibition for British-born, Santa Barbara–based El-Sherbini, curated by Naeem Mohaiemen, is an elegant rejoinder to the din of recent months,” Ramadan writes. “Deftly weaponizing humor through a series of discreet interventions, it challenges the so-called ‘unconscious’ bias that permeates even the most seemingly benign forms of knowledge and their production.”

We know the Roman conquest of Masada only through the account of the enigmatic Jewish historian Josephus, whose shifting allegiances make his motives hard to discern. James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, writes for the New York Review of Books, reviewing A History of the Jewish War, AD 66–74 by Steve Mason (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth by Jodi Magness (Princeton University Press, 2019).
 

“Expanding prison education opportunities through TAP restoration would have an exponentially beneficial outcome and substantially improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers,” writes Burnett. “My education allows me to remain financially secure at a time many people are struggling. . . . My education has made me an empathetic, diligent and highly efficient professional. Bard Prison Initiative sets high expectations for its students, and when we return to our communities, we bring those lessons home with us.”

“Inasmuch as the economic and jobs numbers are indisputable, the need to protect copyrights at home and abroad is about more than numbers,” writes Newhoff. “Through this period of pandemic and political strife, we have been reminded quite often these days how important the arts are to our personal health and to the health of our democracy. More than just decorative amusements to bide our time or escape our anxieties in isolation, the arts continue to remind us that in America, aspiration is everything. And that is worth protecting at almost any price.”

The Bard Globalization and International Affairs (BGIA) Program Bard College and Foreign Policy Interrupted (FPI), in cooperation with the Open Society University Network (OSUN), are now accepting applications for the 2021 FPI-Bard Fellowship. Launched in 2020, the FPI-Bard Fellowship is for midcareer women in foreign policy who are eager to share their expertise and engage in policy discussions.

The fellowship is a six-week online workshop that covers such topics as op-ed writing, media training, editorial story pitching, and public speaking. It is intended for women over 30 in the middle of their careers in international relations, finance and investing, technology, foreign policy, or national security. There are between five to ten slots for the FPI-Bard Fellowship, which will take applications through Monday, March 1. Interviews will be conducted late March. Final decisions will be made by early to mid April. For more information and to apply, click here.

BGIA Director and FPI CEO Elmira Bayrasli described the inaugural class of fellows as a diverse group of highly qualified women focused on a broad range of foreign policy interests, from Japanese foreign policy to infrastructure development to technology issues. “The FPI-Bard Fellowship is proud to be at the forefront, identifying talented women from every sector and helping them share their expertise,” said Bayrasli.

FPI started the fellowship in 2014 and has trained over 40 women, across a wide range of areas, including cybersecurity, Asian defense, conflict resolution, science, and technology. Previous FPI Fellows have been published in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, and the New York Times.

“This is a fellowship for women around the world, from different backgrounds and disciplines. Bard and OSUN provide wonderful networks to help FPI reach more talented women whose voices and expertise can only add value to today’s pressing challenges,” said Jonathan Becker, executive vice president of Bard College and vice chancellor of OSUN.

ABOUT FPI
FPI exists to help make women working in foreign policy, national security, and international relations heard. We are a resource for journalists, conferences, and other public forums. FPI provides a platform for journalists et al. to find female foreign policy experts. We are not exclusively focused on promoting journalists or journalistic pieces. From our expert lists to our workshops, our goal is to provide media training and skills building so that women working in this field can contribute to foreign policy discussions everywhere.

ABOUT BGIA
The Bard Globalization and International Affair Program (BGIA) provides a unique opportunity for college students and recent graduates from around the world to take advanced courses in international affairs while working in carefully selected internships based on individual interests from its Manhattan location.

BGIA students engage in the study and practice of international lay, international relations theory, global public health, political economy, international reporting, and other aspects of international affairs.
2/5/21



 

“In this world of tasers, special-forces troops, manufactured criminal prosecutions, and teams of assassins, Navalny’s incantation of ‘Do not be afraid!’ does not mean ‘There is nothing to fear,’” writes Gessen. “A young man in Moscow, asked by a TV Rain journalist why he hadn’t been scared to join the protests, answered, ‘I was scared. I am still scared. But what’s happening in the country now—it’s bigger than the fear. What else is there to do?’”

Rogers, a visiting associate professor of writing at Bard College, “assembles an exquisite array of diverse voices united by a shared love of birding” (Publishers Weekly). Each essay explores birding “as an art of wanderlust and extreme patience while highlighting varied species, in habitats from the shoreline of the Sargasso Sea in Bermuda (where Jenn Dean describes how the cahow, a species thought extinct since the 17th century, was rediscovered in the 20th) to the North Dakota prairie (where Richard Bohannon considers the Baird’s sparrow and the Sprague’s pipit, both small, unremarkable-looking species known in the birding world as LBJs, or ‘little brown jobs’).”

Continuing its commitment to bring the world’s boldest artists and most exciting projects to audiences beyond the walls of our building, the Fisher Center at Bard announces its spring 2021 season of music and performance. The Fisher Center’s virtual stage, UPSTREAMING, extends its programming into the new year with As Far As Isolation Goes (Online), an interactive, one-on-one performance from live artist Tania El Khoury, cocurator of last season’s Live Arts Bard Biennial, and the new director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, based at Bard; The Future Is Present, a project intended to model community building with a focus on intimacy and discourse; as well as streamed concerts from The Orchestra Now and the Bard Conservatory College Orchestra; The Sound of Spring, a Chinese New Year celebration, from the US-China Music Institute, and a recital of French music with Piers Lane and Danny Driver, commissioned by the Bard Music Festival.

All events are available on UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage, adding to an already robust selection of archival HD opera recordings and contextual materials.

Reserve online or call the box office at 845-758-7900. Box office hours: Monday–Friday, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m. EST.

Program information

THE FUTURE IS PRESENT
Ongoing

In late 2020, artists Charlotte Brathwaite, Justin Hicks, Janani Balasubramanian, Sunder Ganglani, June Cross, and Alyssa Simmons initiated The Future Is Present: A Casting the Vote Project, a high-impact, liberatory media project. Across seven weeks, a small community of Black and Indigenous young artists/activists and a small community of young artists from Bard College (Adrian Costa, Megan Lacy, Cam Orr, Anya Petkovich, Taty Rozetta, Hakima SmithStone, Dani Wilder, and Mengchen Zhang) virtually cultivated intimacy and discourse. Over the course of these weeks, the youth cohort created demands on our collective future; now a process of amplifying those demands is underway. Using the youth cohort’s words to inspire scenes, animations, and other moving-image fragments, the Bard artists created a film for the youth cohort, to be released in February, as part of an ongoing collaborative process.

An introductory video, released on UPSTREAMING following the 2021 presidential inauguration, is an invitation for people to participate on terms that make sense in their communities.


TANIA EL KHOURY AND BASEL ZARAA
AS FAR AS ISOLATION GOES (ONLINE)
February 24 – March 21
Very limited availability
ZOOM
$20 ($5 Bard student tickets available through the Passloff Pass)

An online, interactive, one-on-one performance brings audience members into contact with people experiencing inhumane detention centers and a mental health system that disregards their political and emotional humanity. A collaboration between live artist Tania El Khoury and musician and street artist Basel Zaraa, and reimagined for an online context during the coronavirus lockdown, the piece builds on an earlier collaboration, As Far As My Fingertips Take Me, in which El Khoury commissioned Zaraa to record a rap song inspired by the journey his sisters made from Damascus to Sweden.

In As Far As Isolation Goes, Zaraa and El Khoury worked together to create another iteration of their previous piece focused on the mental and physical health experiences of refugees in the United Kingdom. Zaraa created a song inspired by conversations with friends and colleagues who have recently claimed refuge in the UK.


THE ORCHESTRA NOW (TŌN)
The Orchestra Now’s 2021 Season features livestreamed virtual concerts including a world premiere by Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music at Bard; Popcorn Superhet Receiver by Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead); Maestro Leon Botstein conducting Schoenberg and Bach; and more. All concerts, which are livestreamed from the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard, are free, but reservations are required.

SCHOENBERG & BACH
Sunday, February 7 at 2 p.m. EST
Leon Botstein conductor

TŌN Music Director Leon Botstein kicks off the spring season with J.S. Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto and Arnold Schoenberg’s romantic tone poem Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). Also on the program are works for string orchestra by Venezuelan composer Teresa Carreño and Polish composer Witold Lutosławski.

J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
Witold Lutosławski Funeral Music
Teresa Carreño Serenade for Strings
Arnold Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night)


NEW & CLASSIC WORKS FOR STRINGS
Sunday, February 21 at 2 p.m. EST
James Bagwell conductor

This concert features the world premiere of a new work by composer Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music at Bard; and the 2005 piece Popcorn Superhet Receiver by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, which was used in the film There Will Be Blood. The program also includes Edvard Grieg’s classic Holberg Suite and a popular work by Vaughan Williams.

Sarah Hennies New Work TBA
Jonny Greenwood Popcorn Superhet Receiver
Ralph Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Edvard Grieg Holberg Suite


ANDRÉS RIVAS CONDUCTS THE ORCHESTRA NOW
Sunday, March 7 at 2 p.m. EST

TŌN Assistant Conductor Andrés Rivas leads this March concert by The Orchestra Now, livestreamed online for free from the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard. Music on the program will be announced in the weeks preceding the concert.


ZACHARY SCHWARTZMAN CONDUCTS THE ORCHESTRA NOW
Saturday, March 20 at 8 p.m. EST

TŌN Resident Conductor Zachary Schwartzman leads this March concert by The Orchestra Now, livestreamed online for free from the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard. Music on the program will be announced in the weeks preceding the concert.


AN APRIL CONCERT WITH LEON BOTSTEIN
Saturday, April 10 at 8 p.m. EST

TŌN Music Director Leon Botstein leads this April concert by The Orchestra Now, livestreamed online for free from the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard. Music on the program will be announced in the weeks preceding the concert.


A MAY CONCERT WITH LEON BOTSTEIN
Saturday, May 1 at 8 p.m. EST

TŌN Music Director Leon Botstein leads this May concert by The Orchestra Now, livestreamed online for free from the Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at Bard. Music on the program will be announced in the weeks preceding the concert.


THE US-CHINA MUSIC INSTITUTE
THE SOUND OF SPRING
Saturday, February 13 at 8 p.m. EST
Prerecorded concert streamed online
Free; reservations required

A concert of symphonic music to celebrate the Lunar New Year, featuring a new performance by The Orchestra Now conducted by Jindong Cai, along with performances from orchestras in Asia including the China NCPA Orchestra and the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra.

This year’s concert will carry a message of hope, renewal, and new beginnings, in the spirit of the Chinese New Year tradition of the spring festival.


BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL
FRENCH MUSIC RECITAL
Pre-recorded recital streamed on demand February 19–25
$15, $25, $35 ($5 Bard student tickets available through the Passloff Pass)

A recital of French music with Danny Driver and Piers Lane commissioned by the Bard Music Festival, featuring works by César Franck, Lili Boulanger, Gabriel Fauré, and Camille Saint-Saëns.


BARD COLLEGE CONSERVATORY ORCHESTRA
Saturday, March 13 at 8 p.m. EST
Livestreamed from the Sosnoff Theater
Free; reservations required

Leon Botstein and Andrés Rivas lead the Bard College Conservatory of Music in a program with works by Richard Strauss, William Grant Still, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and Peter Illych Tchaikovsky.


About UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage, Archival Discoveries, and New Commissions for the Digital Sphere
UPSTREAMING broadens the Fisher Center’s commitment to reaching audiences far beyond the physical walls of our building, and offers new ways for us to engage with artists. Launched in April 2020, UPSTREAMING has released new content, including digital commissions, virtual events, and beloved performances and rich contextual materials from the archives of the SummerScape Opera, as well as Bard Music Festival’s 30-year history. UPSTREAMING highlights different aspects of the breadth of programming the Fisher Center offers. New releases are announced via the Fisher Center’s weekly newsletter. To receive those updates and stay connected to UPSTREAMING, join the mailing list here.
#UPSTREAMINGFC

ABOUT THE FISHER CENTER AT BARD
The Fisher Center at Bard develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. As a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas, offering perspectives from the past and present, as well as visions of the future. The Fisher Center demonstrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard College, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country, and around the world. Building on a 160-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.(2.1.21)

The British-born artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is one of the more fascinating figures to emerge from the Surrealist movement. The magical themes of Carrington’s otherworldly paintings are well-known, but the recent discovery of a suite of tarot designs she created for the Major Arcana was a revelation for scholars and fans of Carrington alike. Susan Aberth, Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College, and curator Tere Arcq examine their new discovery in The Tarot of Leonora Carrington (Fulgur Press, 2020). 

“Once we saw the tarot, we immediately knew that this was very important to the iconography,” says Professor Aberth. “For many years, people thought her work was playful, a bit like fairy tales. But it’s a very serious study of esoteric principles—primary among them the tarot.”

“March 2021 will mark the tenth anniversary of Bashar al-Assad’s decision to wage war on peaceful protestors rather than pursue peace with Israel via a very promising and productive American mediation,” writes Frederic Hof. “Assad’s decision would produce refugee flows that would ultimately change the politics of Europe in ways that delighted the Kremlin. It would also lead to the destruction of the Syrian state. And it would produce American policy responses that would only deepen the crisis while compromising the credibility of the United States, both inside Syria and far beyond. Now a new administration must grapple with this problem from hell. What is to be done?”

The Bard College Dance Program is pleased to announce that Yebel Gallegos, a dance artist from El Paso, Texas, will be joining the Bard Dance Program faculty in fall 2021.

“I am looking forward to Yebel joining the dance faculty at Bard,” said Maria Simpson, director of the Dance Program at Bard. “His accomplishments as an artist in the U.S. and Mexico and his research into the history of dance in Mexico through the lens of border politics, are a robust combination that I am certain will draw students to his courses and colleagues to collaborative projects.”

Cameron McKinney and Alanna Morris-Van Tassel will be the spring 2021 Bard Dance Program/Gibney Partnership Teaching Fellows. McKinney and Morris-Van Tassel will be teaching the Intermediate/Advanced Modern and Dance Repertory courses. The Bard/Gibney Partnership was launched in fall 2020 by the Bard Dance Program and GIBNEY, a New York City–based dance and social justice organization led by Founder, Artistic Director, and CEO Gina Gibney. The Partnership provides unique opportunities for Bard students to work closely with Gibney’s resident dance troupe, Gibney Company, a commission-based, repertory company that works with renowned and rising international choreographers representing a broad range of aesthetics and techniques. For more information, visit dance.bard.edu/gibney.

“We are very excited to have Cameron and Alanna on board for the spring semester,” said Simpson. “Each represents a unique and dynamic boundary-pushing point of view in their work in Dance and I am thrilled that the students will have the opportunity to work with them this spring.”

Yebel Gallegos, a dance artist from El Paso, Texas, played an important role in the founding of Cressida Danza Contemporánea in Yucatán, Mexico. During his time in Cressida Danza he served as dancer, company teacher, rehearsal director, and academic coordinator for the Conservatorio de Danza de Yucatán. While in Mexico, he also helped in the creation and implementation of the Festival Yucatán Escénica, an international contemporary dance festival hosted by Cressida Danza. Yebel recently concluded a six-year tenure working full time with the Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, based in Salt Lake City, Utah. While in Utah, he also involved himself in projects with local artists, as well as teaching various population groups in Utah and across the United States. He has performed work from artists such as; Twyla Tharp, Doug Varone, Ann Carlson, Daniel Charon, Stephen Koester, Netta Yerushalmy, Claudia LaVista, Joanna Kotze, Jonah Bokaer, among others. Yebel has had the fortune to travel internationally as a performer and educator to countries such as; South Korea, Mongolia, France, Austria, and Chile. He earned his BFA in dance, both from the University of Texas at Austin and from the Escuela Profesional de Danza de Mazatlán, directed by Delfos Dance Company. He currently resides in Seattle, WA, where he is expected to receive his Master in Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington in the Spring of 2021.

Cameron McKinney, the artistic director of Kizuna Dance, is a New York City-based choreographer and educator. With over 15 years of Japanese language study, he created Kizuna Dance with the mission of using contemporary floorwork to create works that celebrate the Japanese culture. He was recently selected as a 2019-20 U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission Creative Artist Fellow to collaborate with renowned Japanese choreographer Toru Shimazaki and present work in showcases in Japan alongside the 2020/2021 Tokyo Olympic Games’ events. He is a 2020 Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellow at The School at Jacob’s Pillow (under the direction of Dianne McIntyre and Risa Steinbeirg), a 2017-18 Alvin Ailey Foundation New Directions Choreography Lab Fellow, and a 2018 Asian Cultural Council Individual Grantee. Through Kizuna Dance, Cameron has presented work and taught in fifteen states and in Japan, Mexico, France, and the UK. His commissions include Princeton University, twice from the Joffrey Ballet School, twice from the Let’s Dance International Frontiers Festival, The Dance Gallery Festival, LIU Brooklyn, CREATE:ART, The Thacher School, and SUNY Brockport, among numerous others. His teaching credits include Adjunct Lecturer positions at Princeton University and Queensborough Community College, and he has taught on faculty at Gibney Dance since 2016. He has also taught on faculty at the Joffrey Dance School, the Charlotte Dance Festival, the Tennessee Dance Festival, the Southern Vermont Dance Festival, and Williamsburg Movement and Arts Center. He is currently building Nagare Technique, a training module that blends street dance styles and contemporary floorwork. Through Kizuna Dance’s new Culture Commissions program, he also directly supports emerging artists through commissions for new works created through research-oriented explorations into the Japanese culture.

Brooklyn native and Saint Paul-based artist Alanna Morris-Van Tassel, is a dancer, choreographer, educator, and artist organizer whose work excavates cultural retention and fragmentation within Caribbean diasporic identity. Morris Van Tassel was named one of Dance Magazine's “25 to Watch!” for 2018 and City Pages’ Artist of the Year for 2018. She was a featured dancer with Minnesota-based dance company TU Dance (2007-2017), a TU Dance Artistic Associate (2020), and is a current advisor to Springboard Danse Montreal. Her self-produced solo project,“Yam, Potatoe an Fish!” was named Star Tribune’s Best of Dance (2018) and earned her City Pages’ Best Choreographer (2019).

Morris-Van Tassel is artistic director of Alanna Morris-Van Tassel Productions (AMVTP), founded in 2017 to produce dance, education, and community-building initiatives. She was a 2015 McKnight Dance Fellow. Morris-Van Tassel is a graduate of Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in New York City and holds a BFA in Dance from The Juilliard School. She is currently building a performance art project, Black Light, which explores the nobility of black-ness, divine feminine expression, and primordial creativity. alannamvt.com.

For more information about the Bard Dance Program, please visit dance.bard.edu.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 160-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.

Two members of the Bard College faculty have been awarded the National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowships Award (up to $60,000) to support their scholarly humanities book projects: Richard H. Davis, professor of religion, for his book project, Religious Cultures of Early India, up to 700 CE, which describes the development of religious cultures in India, from the earliest evidence to 700 CE, including the interrelated traditions that became Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and Laura Kunreuther, associate professor of anthropology, to support research and writing for her book project, Interpreting the Field, Translating Global Voices: On the Labor of Interpreters in U.N. Field Missions, which studies how U.N. mission interpreters translate trauma across different languages and how such translation affects the interpreters themselves. 
 

Bard faculty members Omar Encarnación and Masha Gessen spoke as part of PEN America’s Town Hall on “Reckoning and Reconciliation in Biden’s America," held as the centerpiece of the organization’s virtual annual general meeting on January 26, 2021. Encarnación and Gessen joined PEN America President Ayad Akhtar, historian Jill Lepore, and columnists Charles Blow and Peggy Noonan for this timely and wide-ranging discussion moderated by PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel. Omar G. Encarnación is professor of political studies at Bard. Masha Gessen is distinguished writer in residence at the College.

For the past 50 years, Bard alumnus Chris Claremont ’72 has graced the Marvel Universe with his brilliant storytelling—creating and defining some of its most iconic heroes and building the framework for one of its most treasured franchises. In the Chris Claremont Anniversary Special, the acclaimed writer returns to the world of the X-Men with a brand-new story.

 

“The trauma imposed by these land seizures is still felt, even as nearly nine million people depend daily on the water system,” the series introduction states. “New York’s reservoirs exemplify the social compact that undergirds ambitious public infrastructures, while the stories of their making emphasize divisions between city and country, wealth and poverty, the potentials and risks inherent in large-scale environmental intervention.”

“This stunningly photographed semi-autobiography draws on CRISPR-Cas9-mediated genome research into the iconic butterflies to step into a narrative about hybrid identities, diminishing spaces, social evolution and divided territories. The film goes, in the director’s own words, ‘from the vein of a butterfly wing to the border between countries,’” writes Scientific American. “Gambis, a seasoned science communicator and storyteller, manages to strike a delicate balance in tone rarely seen in science-driven movies.”
 

Bard College announces the appointment of Jomaira Salas Pujols to its Sociology Program faculty. Pujols, a doctoral candidate in the department of sociology at Rutgers University, uses qualitative methods to study race, place, education, and Black girlhood. She will teach courses on the sociology of race and ethnicity; the sociology of youth; and race, space, and place starting in the fall 2021.

“Jomaira Salas Pujols's doctoral thesis, Black Girls’ Journeying: Identifying and Challenging (In)justice through Movement, is interdisciplinary and path-breaking. Interfacing with history, anthropology, and Africana Studies, as well as sociology, her scholarship engages deeply with public-facing projects and civic engagement,” said Deirdre d’Albertis, Bard’s Dean of the College. “As a proud alumna of Bryn Mawr College, Professor Salas Pujols will bring her intellectual commitments and experience to Annandale with real understanding of the Bard's distinctive mission.”

“I am thrilled to be joining the Bard College community this fall,” said Pujols. “I first encountered sociology as an undergraduate, and it offered me a window for making sense of the world around me. In my courses, I plan to work together with students to think about society's most pressing problems and our shared responsibility to solve them. Knowing Bard students, I can't think of a better place to take on this work!”

Pujols’s dissertation examines the consequences of movement on Black girls' perceptions of self, their identities, and their worlds—a concept she defines as journeying. Jomaira is also a youth worker, community-based facilitator, and founding member of the Black Latinas Know Collective. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and published by the Youth & Society journal.

The Bard Sociology Program provides students with an understanding of the structures and processes of human society—from everyday interactions with friends, coworkers, and family members to macro-level processes of global magnitude. The sociology curriculum offers a theoretical and methodological foundation for examining social, cultural, and political forces and analyzing how they shape people’s behavior, interpretations, social status, and well-being. Through exposure to a wide array of quantitative, qualitative, and historical research, sociology students learn to study the social world in a way that is both rigorous and flexible. For more information, visit sociology.bard.edu.

About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences located 90 miles north of New York City. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; eight early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 160-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world to meet broader student needs and increase access to liberal arts education. The undergraduate program at our main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement. Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.1/26/21
 

“Navalny’s superpower has been his ability to show people what they had always known about the Putin regime but had the option of pretending away,” writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Masha Gessen. “He has shown the depth of the regime’s corruption. He has shown that Putin’s secret police carries out murders. With his return to Russia, he has shown the regime’s utter lack of imagination and inability to plan ahead. He has also shown that, contrary to the Kremlin’s assertions and to conventional wisdom among Western Russia-watchers, there is an alternative to Putin.”

“Since meeting at Bard College nearly a decade ago, Ivry-Block, Konigsberg and Ryser have gradually built a reputation as one of the most dynamic live acts in New York’s D.I.Y. scene (and one of the most woefully missed during the pandemic),” writes Lindsay Zoladz, reviewing Palberta5000. “Palberta uses the tricks of pop structure here to a destabilizing effect: These are the kinds of hooks that implore you to sing along before you quite realize what you’re singing about.”

“I think (Celan’s work) is the work that came out of the mid-20th century that most directly addresses the disaster . . . of Western culture,” Joris says. “I think of the incredible clear-sightedness this man had in relation to the political situation of his time. He had the same clear-sightedness in terms of writing after events such as Khurbn [the Holocaust] . . . and knew that language needed to be transformed, that you could not use the old German, because the Nazi years had contaminated it.”

“As equipment for life and art, An-My Lê’s exemplary work suggested to me that one way forward might be back—into the tangles of memory and history, onto the contested terrain of the past,” writes Hai-Dang Phan for the Baffler. An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College.

Buzzfeed features the work of students in HR 321, Advocacy Video, in which Bard undergraduates worked together with students in the clemency clinic at CUNY Law School and the human rights organization WITNESS to create short video self-presentations by applicants for clemency. Buzzfeed reporter Melissa Segura highlights the video narrative of Rodney Chandler, incarcerated at Cayuga Correctional Facility, and also interviews David Sell, with whom the class worked last year on two videos from Wende Correctional Facility. Advocacy Video is an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences class cotaught by Thomas Keenan, professor of comparative literature and director of the Human Rights Program, and Brent Green, visiting artist in residence. This is a Human Rights course crosslisted with Film and Electronic Arts. The four videos produced by students in fall 2020 are available on the Human Rights Program website.

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

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

As part of the College’s 11th Annual MLK Day of Engagement, more than 175 Bard students participated in workshops, action groups, a legal justice panel, and a conversation with civil rights pioneer Fred Gray.

Bard College students, staff, and faculty celebrated the life of Martin Luther King Jr. with a weeklong series of campus events and virtual activities with community partners, culminating with the 11th annual MLK Day of Engagement. Beginning Tuesday, January 12, and continuing through Monday, January 18, Bard students participated in service projects, civic engagement workshops, a legal panel on “Pathways to Justice,” and a conversation with civil rights pioneer Fred Gray. Most participants were first-years on campus for Citizen Science; they were joined by 18 Upper College student leaders.
 
Bard’s MLK Day of Engagement events—organized by the Bard Center for Civic Engagement (Bard CCE), the Office of Sustainability, and the Citizen Science Program, in cooperation with local and national nonprofits—take place as part of the nationwide Day of Service that marks the King holiday. Volunteers around the country respond to Dr. King’s call, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?’”

“Despite the challenges of COVID, we were able to honor Dr. King’s legacy, which was summed up by MLK Day panelists who asked deep, reflective questions that invited all of us to ask ourselves, ‘Am I who I am meant to be in the world?’ An important question for all of us as we move into the coming year,” said Bard Vice President for Civic Engagement Erin Cannan.

Bard students and staff took part in a conversation on Black-owned businesses with Cynthia Herivaux, owner of Cyn’s Sweet Tooth in Poughkeepsie; wrote letters to students at Ramapo for Children, which serves children and young adults with learning differences and special needs in Rhinebeck; and participated in virtual workshops with local and national organizations, including The Library at the A. J. Williams-Myers African Roots Center in Kingston, which promotes literacy through teaching and learning about the African roots experience, and Braver Angels, a national citizens movement to reduce political polarization in the United States.

“Being able to contribute my ideas and voice to the development of MLK Day of Engagement this year was a very meaningful experience, especially seeing how excited and engaged everyone was with the events leading up to the big day,” said MLK Day of Engagement Fellow Tsitsi Mambo ’21. “I believe that the work done to get this program running and successful will have a big positive butterfly effect on Bard as a whole as students take everything that they learned with them into their own lives and contribute to making positive impacts in their communities.”

This year’s events were kicked off by two discussions: an engagement panel, “Pathways to Justice: The Courts,” on Saturday, January 16, featuring New York State Supreme Court Justice Debra James, Vassar College Professor Taneisha Means, and Honorable Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and a conversation, on Tuesday, January, 12, between pioneering civil rights lawyer Fred Gray and attorney Douglas Mishkin. The late Congressman John Lewis called Gray, who represented Rosa Parks and Dr. King in the Montgomery Bus protests, one of “the Founding Fathers of modern America.”
 
As part of Bard’s commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Accord, MLK Day events included civic engagement workshops and discussions on climate action, recycling, and natural habitats, among other topics. Students participated in a workshop on citizen science data collection—a nationwide effort in which Bard and other colleges and organizations collect data on various projects and engage the American public in addressing societal needs and accelerating science, technology, and innovation.

Bard CCE Special Events Administrator and Outreach Coordinator Sarah deVeer ’17, who was involved with MLK Day of Engagement as an undergraduate, said she’s especially pleased to see how the initiative continues to evolve with the contributions of students and staff. She highlighted Assistant Dean Darnell Pierce introducing an MLK Day Hoodie Fundraiser for the Bard Student Emergency Fund and 2020 student fellows Mikalah Jenifer ’22 and Daniella Mingo ’21 introducing a civil rights trivia night and movie night.

“It’s an honor to be working behind the scenes now on a project that is such a pillar to the overall Bard first-year experience,” said deVeer.

Jenifer, who served as an MLK Day of Engagement fellow for the second time this year, talked about how MLK Day(s) are just a jumping off point for students’ continued engagement on campus and in the community.

“MLK Day of Engagement is a great way to introduce students to not only the many aspects of the Center for Civic Engagement but also all of the organizations that are doing amazing work within a few miles of Bard’s campus,” said Jenifer. “The CCE has opened so many doors for me personally, and I hope that students can find ways to create the change that they want to see on campus and in their community by utilizing CCE’s knowledge, ties with the community, and overall support of its students in the their various endeavors.”

“Crowl said that his group had no plans for the Inauguration, because he was told, by leadership he declined to identify, that it was ‘a fucking trap,’” writes Farrow. “However, his sister and mother said that they were helping to identify him because they nevertheless worried about the threat posed by armed militias like his around the country. ‘I don’t want him to come after me,’ (Crowl’s sister) Denissa Crowl told me. ‘But I’d rather he come after me than a bunch of people at the Inauguration.’”

“I was just looking at my Facebook memories this morning, and 10 years ago this morning I posted about walking into the Pentagon past a group of protestors who were calling us murderers and torturers, but it was peaceful protest,” said Du Mont, vice president for strategy and policy and chief of staff at Bard College. “To see what happened on January 6 was heartbreaking. I’m glad that military leaders have called it out as a violent riot and some have gone so far as to call it an insurrection because that’s what I believe it is.”