Bard News

The Bard College Conservatory of Music has appointed acclaimed composers Jessie Montgomery and Missy Mazzoli to the faculty as composers in residence. Composer, violinist, and educator Montgomery has been called “One of the most distinctive and communicative voices in the US, as a player and a creator” (BBC). Grammy-nominated composer, pianist, and keyboardist Mazzoli was recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (New York Times). They both join the Bard Conservatory in fall 2022.

Jessie Montgomery is an acclaimed composer, violinist, and educator. A recipient of the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence, Montgomery’s works are performed frequently around the world by leading musicians and ensembles. Her music interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st century American sound and experience. Her profoundly felt works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (The Washington Post).

Her growing body of work includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. Some recent highlights include Shift, Change, Turn (2019) commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Coincident Dances (2018) for the Chicago Sinfonietta, and Banner (2014)—written to mark the 200th anniversary of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—for The Sphinx Organization and the Joyce Foundation, which was presented in its UK premiere at the BBC Proms on 7 August 2021.

Summer 2021 brought a varied slate of premiere performances, including Five Freedom Songs, a song cycle conceived with and written for soprano Julia Bullock, for Sun Valley and Grand Teton Music Festivals, San Francisco and Kansas City Symphonies, Boston and New Haven Symphony Orchestras, and the Virginia Arts Festival (7 August); a site-specific collaboration with Bard SummerScape Festival and Pam Tanowitz Dance, I was waiting for the echo of a better day (8 July); and Passacaglia, a flute quartet for The National Flute Association’s 49th annual convention (13 August).

Since 1999, Montgomery has been affiliated with The Sphinx Organization, which supports young African American and Latinx string players and has served as composer-in-residence for the Sphinx Virtuosi, the organization’s flagship professional touring ensemble.

A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and a former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery holds degrees from the Juilliard School and New York University and is currently a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University. She is professor of violin and composition at The New School. In May 2021, she began her three-year appointment as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. jessiemontgomery.com

Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (New York Times), “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out NY), and praised for her “apocalyptic imagination” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), Missy Mazzoli has had her music performed by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, the BBC Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra, Scottish Opera and many others. In 2018 she became, along with Jeanine Tesori, the first woman to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, and was nominated for a Grammy award in the category of “Best Classical Composition.” 

From 2018-2021 Mazzoli was Mead Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and from 2012-2015 was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia. Her 2018 opera Proving Up, created with longtime collaborator librettist Royce Vavrek and based on a short story by Karen Russell, is a surreal commentary on the American dream. It was commissioned and premiered by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and Miller Theatre, and was deemed “harrowing… a true opera for its time” by The Washington Post. 

Mazzoli’s 2016 opera Breaking the Waves, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and Beth Morrison Projects, was called “one of the best 21st-century American operas yet” by Opera News. Breaking the Waves received its European premiere at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival; future performances are planned at LA Opera, Houston Grand Opera, and the Adelaide Festival. Her next opera, The Listeners, will premiere in 2022 at the Norwegian National Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera and Opera Philadelphia. 

Mazzoli is also active in the orchestral and chamber music field, recently writing new works for the National Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, BBC Philharmonia, and the Bergen Symphony, among others. In 2016, Mazzoli and composer Ellen Reid founded Luna Lab, a mentorship program for young female, non-binary and gender nonconforming composers created in partnership with the Kaufman Music Center. 

Mazzoli attended the Yale School of Music, the Royal Conservatory of the Hague and Boston University.  She has studied with (in no particular order) David Lang, Louis Andriessen, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayres, John Harbison, Charles Fussell, Martin Amlin, Marco Stroppa, Ladislav Kubik, Louis DeLise and Richard Cornell. Her works are published by G. Schirmer. missymazzoli.com

As part of the Big Read 2022, Sandra Cisneros spoke at the Fisher Center, sharing the history of The House on Mango Street and offering up advice to aspiring writers. Recounting the night for Lion’s Roar, Angélica Paljor highlighted Cisneros’s practical and spiritual guidance given to the audience at Bard this past April. “Writing, she said at Bard, ‘is sacred work, as sacred as a nun or a monk who meditates for days or hours—that’s how I see it,’” Paljor writes. The conversation, prompted by questions from Dinaw Mengestu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of Written Arts, and Mariel Fiori ’05, managing editor of La Voz, also touched on aspects of representation in writing and one’s intended audience. Ultimately, Cisneros implored beginning writers to write for themselves—and those they love: “I wrote [The House on Mango Street] to stay alive when I was dying, on behalf of the people I loved. That’s the difference: when we make something for those we love and we don’t do it with a personal agenda, siempre sale bonito—it’s always going to turn out well. That’s what The House on Mango Street taught me.”

This summer, Lobsang Sonam, who received an M.Ed in Environmental Education from Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability in 2021, led Bard’s first environmental education summer camp in China. Fifteen students in grades 9–11 participated in the immersive two-week sleepover camp hosted at the Old Creek Nature Reserve in Sichuan Province. Students experienced firsthand a naturally rich environment; worked closely with local researchers, community members, and natural resource management professionals; and completed their own research projects. Activities included visits to different villages, learning the history of the reserve, hiking with local patrollers to study the region’s conservation work and challenges, identifying wild animals, weeding invasive plants, designing tree taps, and helping local beekeepers with their work on bee farms.

With Bard College at Simon’s Rock Geography and Asian Studies Professor Chris Coggins as adviser, the camp was developed to encourage students in thinking critically about local environmental issues, nurturing a strong sense of environmental protection and stewardship, and conducting their own service-learning projects.

Bard College Assistant Professor of Physics Shuo Zhang has received a $91,933 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in support of her investigation, “Joint NuSTAR and EHT Probe of SgrA*: Flares, Black Hole Shadows, a New Hard X-Ray Source.” The NASA grant supports Zhang’s investigation, which includes the engagement of a postdoctoral researcher, three undergraduate research assistants, equipment, and travel. As the joint observation involves the international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, coinvestigators on this project come from around the globe including Canada, the Netherlands, and Japan. 

NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is a space telescope that detects high-energy X-ray light and studies some of the most energetic objects and processes in the universe. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is an international collaboration capturing images of black holes using a virtual Earth-sized telescope. Zhang’s investigation proposes an observation of Sgr A*, the now inactive supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. This research aims to capture bright X-ray flares from Sgr A* and feed this result to the EHT analysis. A secondary goal is to study a mysterious X-ray source located at merely three light years from Sgr A*.

“Among all the fascinating science one can pursue via a joint X-ray and EHT observations of our own supermassive black hole, the physics behind mysterious daily Sgr A* flares is the jewel in the crown that astronomers have been pursuing. I am proud of our own students, physics major Nathalie Jones ’21, dance and mathematics major Rose Xu ’23, and physics major Grace Sanger-Johnson ’23, who have contributed to this exciting project.” says Zhang.

This NASA grant supports the training and involvement of three Bard undergraduate research assistants who will work on the preparation and analysis of the new data during the summer of 2023. Under Zhang’s supervision, the Bard students will study NuSTAR data analysis pipeline, X-ray spectral and image analysis softwares, and will contribute to data preparation.

Since 2019, Zhang has received five grants from NASA for her astrophysics research, totaling more than $331,000 in NASA funding to date.

The Borromeo String Quartet (BSQ), now entering its 33rd season, will welcome violist and Bard Conservatory faculty member Melissa Reardon as the newest member of the ensemble. Reardon takes the place of Mai Motobuchi, who is retiring from performing after a remarkable 22-year tenure in the quartet. Leading a multifaceted career, Reardon is an artist in residence at Bard College and the Bard Conservatory, artistic director of the Portland Chamber Music Festival, and a founding member and executive director of East Coast Chamber Orchestra.

A Grammy-nominated performer, Reardon was the violist of the Ensō Quartet from 2006 to 2018. On joining the BSQ, she says, “I have long admired the Borromeo String Quartet and I feel so incredibly excited and lucky to join Nick Kitchen, Kris Tong, and Yeesun Kim. I have some big shoes to fill and hope to honor Mai Motobuchi’s legacy in the group. It is a dream come true to have the opportunity to play quartets with these musicians!” Reardon begins performing with the BSQ in August 2022.

Support from Bard to jumpstart her cultural and artistic vision has led Joelle Powe to places she never imagined possible. The anthropology major from Jamaica directed a documentary on Jamaican dancehall that has toured the United States, Jamaica, and elsewhere, creating a buzz around the budding filmmaker who calls herself a “visual anthropologist.” 
 
Out There Without Fear details the Jamaican popular dance form as a social, political, and cultural phenomenon, with lively depictions of the music and moves of the genre that has ignited passion as far away as Russia and Japan. The subjects interviewed also reflect on the impact of classism and sexism on dancehall in the Caribbean island nation. 
 
“Abundant opportunities at Bard have supported my academic interest in Jamaica,” Powe says. A Community Action Award from Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement, support from the Trustee Leader Scholar program, and the Naomi Bellinson Feldman ’53 Internship Award (for student internships in music or the social sciences—in this case, both) gave her partial funding for the film, which she directed with producer Adtelligent, a social media company in Jamaica.
 
Powe says her time at Bard has been “a truly amazing journey,” one that began when she was on a global voyage during Semester at Sea, a four-month study abroad program for United World College students on a ship that takes them to four continents. She was aboard when she learned she had been accepted to the College. 
 
She was an anthropology major because she is “very excited about local opportunities for anthropological study in Jamaica, a wellspring of culture.” Her Senior Project was a study of a Jamaican family’s participation in the national response to COVID-19, for which she received grants from the Anthropology Program and the Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard.  Continuing interest in Out There Without Fear, the ideas for which were published in the Jamaica Journal in 2021, has Powe curating discussions on dancehall with Jamaican academics and dancers through universities and cultural centers around the world. She is working on her second documentary, Beverley Manley Uncensored, which follows the ex-wife of former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and explores her reflections on the 1970s in Jamaica, a significant decade in Jamaican political history. The first episode of the documentary series premiered on Adtelligent TV in July 2022.
 
Powe notes the value of the Language and Thinking Program in setting her up to appreciate wrestling with big ideas. “L&T teaches you to read and write. I loved being exposed to great thinkers from around the world in the readings. My mind has been stretched by exposure in my classes across the disciplines—from Cuban documentaries, constitutional laws in Myanmar, Caribbean poetry, and Iranian art, to Spanish short stories. As an anthropology major, I need cultural literacy across diverse mediums.” Also, she says, “I appreciate that I was exposed to international cinema through screenings here. I didn’t know I would get that.”
 
In addition to being a peer counselor—which taught her about “being responsible for people my age and for their ideas about what to expect from their community”—she also decided to join the swim team. “I was stretched beyond my imagination of what was possible, and learned about patience and determination, showing up for practice, getting better over time. The discipline I learned in swimming enhanced my time management skills and focus.”
 
Bard has enriched Powe’s life “in three very significant ways.” The support she received to pursue academic interests outside the College—through independent study, grants, and student-led initiatives, supported by Bard’s energetic professors—“sped up where I want to be in my career.” She was exposed to “the spirit of internationalism in the College, the community, and academia as a whole,” which led to lifelong friendships; and she found “the freedom to try new things.” Oh, and another thing: “being allowed to make mistakes and try again.” 

Where does someone who is at the top of their game in both basketball and biology go to college? For Christina Kiser, the answer was Bard, hands down. 
 
The native of North Providence, Rhode Island, was recruited for the women’s basketball team at Bard, and also is a recipient of the prestigious Distinguished Scientist Scholarship. “Through high school I knew I wanted to go to med school and be a surgeon,” says Kiser, who early on joined Bard Emergency Medical Services, an experience that “solidified my desire to work in the medical field,” she says. “And my access to hands-on research was really important. Getting into a lab setting as early as the first year is almost unheard of. The Bard-Rockefeller Semester in Science is a fantastic opportunity that no other school can provide.”
 
In her Senior Project, Kiser examined antibiotic resistance and effective treatments. Having taken both epidemiology and human rights courses, she wanted to underscore not only the diseases but the social problems behind them: “changing the system itself from within.”
 
On the sports side, Kiser is copresident of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, which aims to bridge gaps between athletics and the rest of the Bard community. And she works three jobs: at the front desk of the Stevenson Athletic Center, at the Dean of Students Affairs Office, and as a babysitter for several families. 
 
Outside her major, she has taken several psychology courses “simply for fun,” history, and literature, “which pushes me to write in a different way from science, since I am able to put my opinion in there. Because that’s unfamiliar, it’s been a struggle but I’ve enjoyed it.” But her most memorable experience has been the pre–first year Language and Thinking Program (L&T). “It is how I was introduced to college, my first time feeling I had to be an adult, having to take responsibility for myself. I tend to be introverted and had to force myself to be out there. L&T was difficult in terms of learning, critical thinking, and a lot of reading. But when I finished, I felt I’d gotten past various barriers. It prepared me for ‘real’ college courses.” 
 
Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude, Kiser’s Senior Project adviser, has been a huge influence. “The energy in her classroom is unparalleled, you just feed off it. She also is so involved with the Bard community as one of the house professors [who oversee informal student communities], and she comes to most student events. I go to her for almost everything.” 
 
In light of that sense of community, Kiser feels inspired by “the atmosphere at Bard, encouraging people to both display and find their true selves. People feel they don’t have to hide who they are. It’s a place where your voice can be heard.” And having her voice heard led to the most rewarding part of her time at Bard: “The friendships I’ve been able to build here. Having the opportunity to foster those friendships is not something you see at other colleges.” 
 
Her advice to prospective Bard students: “Try to come to campus. Photos can’t do it justice. People don’t realize that coming to Bard, which feels rural and secluded, means access to beautiful surroundings two hours from New York City. The small class size is also so important; you can foster close relationships with professors. I’m in a class of nine students, and know everyone very well.”
 
Finally, she says, “It was vital for me to see where I was going and visit the surrounding area, have candid conversations with students and ask important questions. And I needed to know about the dining experience. I love food.”

Levi Lakota Lowe’s arrival at Bard was like going on a successful blind date: he came to Bard sight unseen—and fell in love with the campus as soon as he saw it. The senior from Jamestown, California, had heard of Bard from the director of a play he’d acted in during high school. 
 
“My first impression was of a campus that’s huge and gorgeous, monumental and so beautiful,” he says. Academically, he was drawn to Bard because “I was attracted to the double major aspect and the fact that it was a small school. I wanted to do things with brains—neurology—and heart—drawing.” Deciding to pursue art on his own, he became a double major in biology and philosophy “because I’m obsessed with questions. What I love to do in my free time is think of new ways to do things and approach new things, and look at their philosophical implications. I love this type of thinking.” His Senior Project in philosophy looks at dependence theory and addiction, advised by Kathryn Tabb, assistant professor of philosophy.
 
Science at Bard is also exciting. “We have really high-tech stuff. We were able to collect soil, inventory the bacteria in it, and extract, isolate, and replicate its DNA.” His Senior Project, with Associate Professor of Biology Gabriel Perron as adviser, examines how temperature affects bacteria that are common in hospital infections. 
 
Lowe’s interactions with Tabb, Perron, and Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude have inspired him. “Brooke is super welcoming and so warm and excited about things,” he says. “I got interested in genetics in her class.” And his associations with fellow students “have completely changed my life. My friends have taught me about morals, patience, relationships, confidence, community.” 
 
His advice to students looking at Bard? “Be willing to talk with people. Ask questions—it’s insane how much the faculty are willing to help you. Go up to a professor after class. It could change the whole course of your life.” He adds, “I have never seen so many resources. All the advice, whether academia or personal, is awesome.”
 
Extracurricular activities for Lowe make Bard “a place to destress,” such as the Surrealist Circus, which creates pop-up events with puppets, costumes, stilts, and acrobatics. Lowe also belonged to the Bard Bars rap club and Brothers at Bard, a mentoring group for young men, “which was a great place to be surrounded by people of color.” Slacklining among trees on campus is a favorite pastime, though juggling two majors means that finding time for activities outside of class is a challenge. 
 
After Bard, Lowe plans to attend graduate school in philosophy; he hopes to teach philosophy of science or medical ethics at the college level. “Being able to see people interested in what I’m interested in is why I want to be a teacher. 
 
“Bard is a place that forces me to think about things,” he says when asked how Bard has changed him. “It’s helped me see I can do whatever I want, so my studies don’t feel like work. I’ve found a way to do two Senior Projects and carry 21 credits and stay relaxed. I’m so excited about going to class. Bard’s given me a perfect metric for what I feel should be a baseline for an education. I’m charmed by this place; this is my safe haven.” 

Jen Lara arrived at Bard intending to become a physics major with a future in engineering, but an important part of her Bard education included the realization that other interests were dearer to her heart. 
 
“I saw that my real passion is not in the world of engineering. It doesn’t hold the sparkle for me. I've always been teaching, I have always tutored, I've always worked with nonprofits. I want to work in education in the minority community to see women in STEM [science, technology, engineering, mathematics]. STEM is where I can use my talents and abilities to do what I'm really passionate about, which is helping my community to do better in these subjects.”
 
So she is majoring in mathematics, and spent time teaching STEM at a nonprofit and at a local middle school. “Everything in my life revolves around education,” she says.
 
The daughter of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, and the first in her family to attend college, Lara grew up in the Corona, Queens, neighborhood of New York City. Her adviser convinced her to look at Bard, which, she says, was “the only school” that noted her first-generation status could be empowering rather than limiting. “They said, ‘We need to make a plan and find a space for you to be able to accomplish whatever you want to do. We’ll figure it out and we’ll make it happen.’ It was the first time I thought, ‘I don't have to do things by myself.’”
 
Lara became a  peer counselor (PC) at Bard—someone in the residence halls who is trained to deal with many of her fellow residents’ concerns—which helped bring her out of her shell. “My first year I experienced culture shock, and being a PC has made me more social. I like being a support system for students, and the students are just as much a role model for me as I am for them. I take as much as I give. I tell them, ‘Advocate for yourselves; it’s the best thing that you can do.’” 
 
In addition to being a PC and tutoring, she holds two jobs on campus while carrying her academic load. Nevertheless, she says, “I have students in my residence who run clubs and do athletics and their academics—that’s inspiring to me.” 
 
One surprising thing she has learned at Bard is that “I learn very differently from most students. The time and dedication the faculty invested to help me made me realize that there are many different ways to learn. The strong support system makes sure that the way they are teaching matches the way you are learning.”
 
She wants students who are interested in Bard to know the kind of education she is receiving in Annandale: “You really learn how to be confident in your abilities and not be hard on yourself when things go wrong,” she advises. “You should be hungry, when you get here, to build the community that you want. The fact that Bard gives you the opportunity to do that is not something you’ll find at any other school.”
 
“At Bard,” she adds, “you are going to do things that you never thought you were capable of doing. And they might make you feel uncomfortable, but the fact that you can create a support system means you can also create the path that you want to take.”

Viveca Lawrie wasn’t looking to come to Bard. She was discovered—by a member of the faculty at the Bard College Conservatory of Music. 
 
Lawrie recalls that Edward Carroll, who teaches trumpet, heard her play and asked her to apply to Bard. She enrolled in the Conservatory, as a bachelor of music student in trumpet performance, and in the College, as a bachelor or arts student majoring in French studies, with a concentration in medieval studies. “The double degree appealed to me,” says the Sedona, Arizona, native. “Trumpet and French are two things I enjoy.” 
 
Her first impression of Bard was of “a beautiful campus.” Her next impression was one of welcome. “It’s a small community and I felt part of it right away.” She soon met Karen Sullivan, Irma Brandeis Professor of Romance Literature and Culture, “and that set me up for the rest of my academic career.” She credits Sullivan with teaching classes “that were 100 percent fun,” and Carroll with “being on board with my love of contemporary music, and help with the technical side” of horn virtuosity. “Bard is very good at matching you with someone,” she says. 
 
At the Conservatory, she and colleagues played together and critiqued one another in “brass class.” “We are a tight-knit group. We really support each other,” she says. “Elsewhere there’s competition, but it’s never been that way here.” 
 
At Bard, “I definitely learned how to write an essay and push the boundaries of how to study.” A surprise was realizing how much she enjoyed academic research and “learning history from the perspective not of the conqueror but of those not in power. This is something that will forever influence how I approach all my research.”
 
With work for her Senior Project in Welsh Arthurian legend, and her Graduation Recital in trumpet, she has little time for extracurricular activities. But she works in the Conservatory audio-visual office on live streaming and recording, and gave AV assistance to a student-organized concert to benefit a Conservatory student whose family is suffering from consequences of COVID-19.
 
For Lawrie, that kind of outreach exemplifies the Bard community. “I meet people who are interested in what I’m doing and I’m open to what they’re doing. It’s healthy that we all show such curiosity.”
 
After graduation, she plans to apply to an MA program in Wales, then a PhD in comparative literature; she also wants to commission composers of contemporary works. “I think people should have multiple options,” she says.
 
How should high school students prepare for Bard? “Come with an open mind. I can’t stress enough how wonderful a preparation Bard’s Language and Thinking Program is for thinking about the world.” She adds, “And come uncomfortable, because you won’t be used to such focused thinking. But don’t feel afraid of it, and be open to listening to others.” 
 
Bard has changed Lawrie’s life in myriad ways. “I am a lot more confident,” she says. “As a homeschooled student, I learned to live on my own. Here I’ve learned how to make friends. I’ve learned—through the support system, counseling, and Upper College students who do tutorials—how to deal when things don’t go my way. Every professor lets me know I can come to them with any problem, especially in the Conservatory. And the French Studies Program has more of a support system than I could imagine, in terms of recommendations, tutoring, wanting to help. Not a lot of colleges have that.”

“I never thought I would be ready for college until I realized that I was already in one,” writes Aarsha Joshi, a current student at BHSEC Queens. In an opinion piece for the Gotham Gazette, Joshi argues that an early college experience ought to be equally attainable for everyone: “Early college instills a sense of belonging in students, especially those who are typically underrepresented in academia.” Calling on New York State and City leaders to offer more early college opportunities, Joshi cites improved outcomes for first generation and low-income students. “The ability to interact with complex topics while still maintaining the innocence of being a teenager and living at home is a privilege that I will be eternally grateful for,” Joshi writes.

Lexi Parra ’18, who majored in human rights and photography at Bard, has been selected as one of eight photojournalists from around the world to be collectively awarded $40,000 in grants from Getty Images, a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace. Parra is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based in Caracas, Venezuela. Her work focuses on youth culture, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. 
 
The annual Getty Images Inclusion Grants aim to support emerging editorial talent within underrepresented groups, offering aspiring photojournalists the creative means and solutions to pursue education that will enable careers within the industry. Eight grants of $5,000 each were awarded to editorial photographers and videographers from different professional specialties, including News, Sport, Arts & Entertainment, and Multimedia. Parra was selected for her work in news photography. Recipients were selected by an esteemed panel of judges comprising accomplished professionals from the fields of photography and journalism and convened by Women Photograph, a non-profit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists; Diversify Photo, a community of photographers, editors, and visual producers working to diversify how people interact with media; and Getty Images. 

Writer Alice Gregory ’09 reports for the New Yorker on the work of Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), an art project and artists’ collective with a recently commissioned art museum called the White Cube built in the former palm oil plantation of Lusanga. Gregory probes the possibilities of the project as well as the problematic role Dutch artist Renzo Martens, who originally devised its creation, plays in its development. CATPC founding member Cedart Tamasala says, “If a museum can create a whole economy around it in London or in New York City, then it could do the same thing on the plantation. The goal is to change this reality that has been imposed on us for decades—on us, on our parents, and on our grandparents.”

On Friday August 5, the Bard Music Festival returns with an intensive two-week exploration of “Rachmaninoff and His World.” In twelve themed concert programs, the festival’s 32nd season examines Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), perhaps the last great exponent of Russian Romanticism, tracing the complex course he navigated between Russia and Modernity (Weekend One: Aug 5–7), and investigating his relationship with the New Worlds he went on to conquer (Weekend Two: Aug 12–14). Enriched by the music of Rachmaninoff’s compatriots, contemporaries, fellow pianist-composers, American influences and more, all events take place in the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s Hudson River campus. New Yorkers can take round-trip bus transportation to Programs 6 and 12 (see details below), and home audiences around the world can enjoy Programs 1, 3, 6, 7, 9 and 12 when they stream live on the Fisher Center website. Anchoring Bard SummerScape as in previous seasons, the Bard Music Festival once again promises to be “the summer’s most stimulating music festival” (Los Angeles Times).

“One of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture” (NYC Arts, THIRTEEN/WNET), festival founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein is music director of both the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and The Orchestra Now (TŌN), Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra. His festival appearances with the ASO include an all-Rachmaninoff event pairing the composer’s posthumously rediscovered First Symphony, celebrated for its melodic invention, thematic cohesion and rich orchestral color, with his last one-act opera, The Miserly Knight. Featuring vocal soloists Nathan Berg, Limmie Pulliam, Rodell Rosel and Ethan Vincent under Jordan Fein’s direction, Bard’s semi-staged production of the Pushkin adaptation marks a bona fide rarity (Program 6). Botstein’s TŌN performances include accounts of Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, a symphonic poem inspired by Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin (Program 1), and of Henry Cowell’s avant-garde theater piece Atlantis (Program 9), which received its long overdue New York premiere under Botstein’s leadership in 2020. This will be heard alongside other examples of the extraordinarily diverse array of musical styles and approaches on offer in 1930, from Webern’s Symphony, a modernist poetic miniature, to Ferde Grofé’s tone poem Grand Canyon Suite, a one-time audience favorite; the Suite from Shostakovich’s satirical, politically charged ballet, The Golden Age; and Respighi’s orchestral transcriptions of Rachmaninoff’s Études-tableaux (Program 9).

Rachmaninoff was one of classical music’s preeminent pianist-composers, and the piano figures prominently in this year’s festival. A top prizewinner at the 2021 Sydney International Piano Competition, Ukrainian pianist Artem Yasynskyyjoins TŌN as soloist in the composer’s virtuosic Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Program 1); celebrated Rachmaninoff interpreter Zlata Chochieva undertakes the composer’s accomplished but seldom-performed Fourth Piano Concerto (Program 9); and Gramophone Award-nominated festival favorite Danny Driver joins the ASO for Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto (Program 3), arguably the best-loved example of the genre in the canon. This is juxtaposed with Busoni’s Piano Concerto (Program 3), a monumental rarity for vast forces that was previously championed by Botstein and the ASO at Carnegie Hall. There, as now, their soloist was Piers Lane, who brought “drive, athleticism and muscularity, certainly, but also lyricism and shapeliness” (New York Times) to Busoni’s fiendishly challenging score.

BBC Music Magazine Award-winner Andrey Gugnin joins the Viano String Quartet for the Piano Quintet by Rachmaninoff’s teacher Anton Arensky (Program 2), and peerless collaborative pianist Brian Zeger for that of the composer’s great friend and colleague Nikolai Medtner (Program 5). Solo piano highlights include Yasynskyy’s accounts of Rachmaninoff’s perennially popular C-sharp minor Prelude (Program 1) and the beautifully crafted, single-movement Third Piano Sonata by Prokofiev (Program 5); and Lane’s interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s masterful Variations on a Theme of Chopin, heard on a wide-ranging program that sheds light on the grueling touring careers of virtuoso pianists (Program 8). Driver and Lane join forces for the composer’s little-known two-piano arrangement of his own Symphonic Dances, which synthesize nostalgia for Rachmaninoff’s Russian roots with the sounds of Cole Porter, Duke Ellington and other contemporary Americans, whose music may be heard at the same event (Program 7).

Besides anchoring piano quintets by two of his Russian contemporaries, the Viano String Quartet – first prizewinner at the Banff International Quartet Competition – performs Rachmaninoff’s own little-known Second String Quartet(Program 1). Sphinx Competition-winner Gabriel Martins is the cellist in the composer’s superlative Cello Sonata(Program 5), Chinese violinist Luosha Fang lends her “finesse and emotional heft” (Gramophone) to Nikolay Myaskovsky’s Violin Sonata in F (Program 11), and two-time Grammy-nominated violinist Jesse Mills takes part in the A-minor Sonata for Violin and Piano by Rachmaninoff’s teacher Sergei Taneyev, whose profile Bard has already done much to raise (Program 2).

Italian American soprano Alexis Seminario, mezzo-soprano Rebecca Ringle Kamarei, tenor William Ferguson and baritone Tyler Duncan interpret songs by Rachmaninoff, Medtner and Prokofiev in “Rachmaninoff and the Female Muse,” a concert with commentary by Scholar-in-Residence Philip Ross Bullock (Program 4). Other vocal highlights include performances of songs by Rachmaninoff (Program 1) and Florence Price (Program 11) by Armenian soprano Mané Galoyan, second prizewinner at the 2021 Operalia.

As in previous seasons, all choral works showcase the Bard Festival Chorale and James Bagwell. Hailed as “one of the high points of every Bard Festival” (New York Arts), this season’s annual choral program presents Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, a spiritual work in the Russian Orthodox tradition whose resonant a cappella sonorities use the full range of the human voice (Program 10). To conclude the festival, Bagwell and the choir join Botstein and TŌN for a pair of grand-scale choral symphonies: the Wagnerian, six-movement First Symphony by Rachmaninoff’s classmate Scriabin, and The Bells, the apocalyptic yet ultimately uplifting piece that was Rachmaninoff’s favorite of his own works (Program 12).

Supplementary events and publication
Besides the twelve concert programs, there will be two free panel discussions and a series of informative pre-concert talks, all free to ticket-holders, by scholars Byron Adams, Michael Beckerman, Leon Botstein, Marina Frolova-Walker, Emily Frey, Christopher Gibbs, Dana Gooley, Rebecca Mitchell, Steve Swayne and Richard Wilson. In a special event on August 12, there will be screenings of two films in which Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos play a key part: David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Scott Hicks’s Shine (1996). The Bard Music Festival and ASO also present the U.S. premiere of At the Reading of a Psalm by Sergei Taneyev at Carnegie Hall (July 15), and Bard SummerScape stages The Silent Woman (“Die schweigsame Frau”), a comic opera by Rachmaninoff’s close contemporary Richard Strauss, in a rare new production from German director Christian Räth (July 22–31). Edited by Bard’s 2022 Scholar-in-Residence, Philip Ross Bullock, a Professor of Russian Literature and Music at the University of Oxford, Rachmaninoff and His World is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Round-trip bus transportation from New York City
Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for select SummerScape and Bard Music Festival programs. Round-trip transportation for Programs 6 and 12 may be ordered online or by calling the box office. The meeting point for coach pick-up and drop-off is at Lincoln Center, Amsterdam Avenue, between 64th & 65th Streets. More information is available here.

SummerScape tickets
Tickets for all Bard Music Festival and other SummerScape events are now on sale, starting at $25. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu. or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.
 

L. Randall Wray, professor of economics and senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, has won the 2022 Veblen-Commons Award. This award is the highest honor given annually by the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) in recognition of significant contributions to evolutionary institutional economics. Named after the founders of institutional economics, Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) and John R. Commons (1862–1945), and awarded since 1969, the Veblen-Commons Award is presented to scholars “on the basis of their contributions to a better understanding of both the economic process and the behavior of the major institutions that shape that process and society’s goals and values” (Trebing, 1992, 333). By recognizing significant contributions to institutional analysis, this award furthers the goal of institutional economics to make the world a better place.

Recipients of the Veblen-Commons Award have made outstanding contributions to institutional economics in the tradition of Veblen and Commons. Award recipients have focused their work on some of the most important topics confronting human society. Such topics include exploring the underlying power relations within society, the origins and implications of inequality, feminist economics, the origins of discrimination, the enabling myths of the dominant groups, the continuing conflict between rights and duties, the possibilities offered by modern technologies and the use of those possibilities for good or ill, the causes of financial crises, among others. Previous recipients include Levy scholars James Galbraith (2020), John F. Henry (2017), Jan Kregel (2011), and Hyman P. Minsky (1996).

L. Randall Wray is a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and professor of economics at Bard College. He is one of the original developers of Modern Money Theory. Wray’s most recent books are Why Minsky Matters (Princeton University Press, 2016), and A Great Leap Forward (Academic Press, 2020), and Handbook of Economic Stagnation(with Flavia Dantas; Elsevier, 2022). Four new books will be published in 2022/2023: Making Money Work for Us (Polity Press, Fall 2022), Money For Beginners (with Heske Van Doornen; Polity Press, 2023), Modern Monetary Theory: Key Thinkers, Leading Insights (editor; Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), and The Elgar Companion to Modern Money Theory (with Yeva Nersisyan; Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023).

Wray is the author of Money and Credit in Capitalist Economies (Edward Elgar Publishing, 1990), Understanding Modern Money (Edward Elgar Publishing, 1998), The Rise and Fall of Money Manager Capitalism (with É. Tymoigne; Routledge, 2013), Modern Money Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; 2nd rev. ed., 2015), and Macroeconomics (with William Mitchell and Martin Watts; Red Globe Press, 2019).

Wray previously taught at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and at the University of Denver, and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Paris, Bologna, Bergamo and Rome, as well as UNAM in Mexico City. He holds a BA from the University of the Pacific and an MA and a Ph.D. from Washington University, where he was a student of Minsky. He has held a number of Fulbright Grants, including most recently at the Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia. He is the 2022 Veblen-Commons Award winner for contributions to Institutionalist Thought and will be the 2022-2023 Teppola Distinguished Visiting Professor at Willamette University, Salem Oregon.

Learn more about the Veblen-Commons Award here.

What’s the secret to Food and Wine’s best ice cream in New York State? Keeping it local, says Brian Ackley ’02 and Lisa Farjam ’00, owners of Fortunes, the award-winning ice cream shop in Tivoli, New York. Speaking with Chronogram, Ackley said: “We wanted to take advantage of not only the upstate dairy, but the upstate fruit, which has this really short moment, but when it comes it’s really amazing and very special.” Drawing from local sources, including Montgomery Place Orchards, clearly helps Fortunes stay in the news, but ultimately, for the two Bard alums, it’s always been about the local experience. “We just decided that Tivoli really needed an ice cream shop. So we started the shop four years ago and it’s just been going ever since,” Ackley says.

Bard student athletes on both the men’s and women’s soccer teams won the Team Academic Award from the United Soccer Coaches, each for the 13th consecutive year. The men’s and women’s soccer teams produced cumulative GPAs of 3.43 and 3.40 respectively for the 21–22 academic year, surpassing the 3.0 grade point average needed to earn the honor. Bard is one of 130 institutions to have both the men’s and women’s teams qualify.

Lear More about Women’s Team Win
 
Learn More about Men’s Team Win

Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities Daniel Mendelsohn talks with David Naimon, host of Tin House’s Between the Covers podcast, about Mendelsohn’s book Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate, which weaves together the stories of three exiled writers Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald. Their conversation circles around narrative structures and representation, Greek and Hebrew modes of storytelling, ancient classical and biblical texts, literary digression, ring composition, family histories, the Holocaust, Homer, Cavafy, Proust, and Joyce, among other topics. “As we all know, just to make an obvious point, we’re living in a world in which the power of narratives—true, false, deliberately false, accidentally false—is something of vital importance in our lives and that is our existential struggle now. How do you know when something’s true? How do you tell it to people? Will they believe it? I think these are rather urgent points,” says Mendelsohn.

With its “witty staging, engaging cast, and efficiently evocative designs,” Christian Räth’s “delightful production” of Richard Strauss’s The Silent Woman, on view now through July 31 as part of Bard’s SummerScape, is a New York Times Critic’s Pick. The Fisher Center for the Performing Arts offers a rare staging of the comic opera, the libretto of which, written by Stefan Zweig, who was Jewish, was submitted “two weeks before Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933,” a fact that contributed to its banning, alongside Strauss’s “dim view of Nazism.” Now, Räth’s production attempts to “[reconcile] the featherlight subject and its fraught historical context”—to great success. “The troupe — and the cast — fully commits to its roles,” Oussama Zahr writes, with conductor Leon Botstein “deprioritizing tonal grandeur, [showing] the opera to be light on its feet.” The Silent Woman is showing now through July 31 at Bard SummerScape.
 
Read More in the New York Times
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Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, associate professor of anthropology, was interviewed by Melanie Ford Lemus for American Ethnologist on “the spatial politics and practices of occupation, infrastructure as performative assemblages, shared environments, and their public constitutions.” Discussing concepts outlined in her book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine, Stamatopoulou-Robbins explained the usage of “siege” as a conceptual framework. “The word siege suggests overlap with occupation, partly conceptually but also in showing how there are overlapping, not always perfectly, challenges to Palestinian life that are also siege-like and made possible by occupation but that cannot be reduced to it,” Stamatopoulou-Robbins says. “I was interested in the way that, through infrastructure, [engineers] were on the one hand aiming to build the future, to make the future now, by building the state that is not yet here,” she continues, “and on the other hand deferring the future that they might want.”

Asleep on the job? Dr. Sara Mednick ’95, Bard alumna and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, says that could be a good thing for productivity. Speaking with Discover magazine, Mednick shared insights into the cognitive benefits of naps, which “benefit everything that nighttime sleep helps, including emotional regulation, attention, alertness, motor function and memory.” The length and timing of a nap also impacts its effects on our well-being, with higher benefits from naps before 1 pm, leading many companies and universities to create “designated sleeping pods to allow students and employees to nap whenever they need to.” Building off of findings from a 2018 paper coauthored by Mednick, Discover outlines that while “the benefits of napping may vary across different individuals,” given their many cognitive benefits, it might be time to reconsider how naps fit into our personal and professional lives.

Novelist, critic, and Bard alumna Elvia Wilk ’10, author of the essay collection Death by Landscape, talks with Electric Lit about decentering the human protagonist as the leader of the story. Wilk discusses the ways in which dystopian narratives can mask the crises of the present, how fiction can help us grasp the enormity of climate change, and how the pandemic lockdowns changed her perspective on work. 

For her “lyrical and haunting” Senior Project, I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, Alice Fall ’22 won second place in Lenscratch’s 2022 Student Prize Awards. “In Alice Falls’s I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, images are alive, the still photographs aren’t still,” writes Alexa Dilworth. Fall will receive $750 as well as a mini exhibition on the Curated Fridge as part of the prize package. In an interview with Lenscratch, Fall described her process and artistic philosophy. “When I am in tune with my body and emotion and the way I physically respond to an image—whether I am making work or engaging with images I’ve already made, my vision is sharpest,” she said.

Emily Schmall ’05, who reports on Sri Lanka for the New York Times, discusses the country’s recent protests and presidential resignation with her colleague German Lopez for the Times’ Morning Newsletter. Schmall talks about the conditions leading up to the civil uprising in Colombo, how it began, and how unexpectedly nonviolent and orderly the protestors and activists were. “After about 24 hours, a gleefulness overtook the place, and some people swam in the president’s pool. They had done it: They had forced this extremely powerful president–who was accused of war crimes, who was feared–to leave his own home and even the country. But they did it peacefully, without taking up arms,” said Schmall.

Greenbiz has named Bard MBA alumna Michelle Aboodi to its 2022 “30 Under 30” list. Aboodi has a passion for sustainable sourcing, which she’s brought to roles at Unilever and, now, Converse. “Aboodi hopes to contribute to creating cutting-edge products that people want to buy, partly because they understand how they’re made,” write the editors at Greenbiz. “It’s become far too easy to just throw things away,” says Aboodi. “What I’d like to see for anything that involves production and making of things is how we can be less wasteful and more cognizant of all that we’re producing.”

What does it take to make a global education network truly collaborative and equitable? In the journal Internationalisation of Higher Education, Jonathan Becker, executive vice president of Bard College and vice chancellor of the Open Society University Network (OSUN), and Liviu Matei, head of education, communication, and society at King’s College London, discuss the global trend of “internationalization through integration” and how OSUN's model of deep partnerships with diverse institutions supports a values-driven network of overlapping projects that are sustainable and truly global.

Micah Gleason GCP ’21, VAP ’22 is currently the music director and conductor on a project in residency at the cell theatre in Manhattan. The Final Veil is a new movement chamber opera based on the true story of Franceska Mann, a Polish-Jewish ballet and burlesque dancer who was captured by the Nazis and used her skills as a dancer to attempt to escape. It was composed by JL Marlor and co-conceived with dancer/director Cassandra Rosebeetle. The show also includes two current VAP students, Abby Cheng and Katherine Lerner-Lee.

Performances are July 14–31, on Thursday Friday, Saturday at 8pm, and Sunday at 5pm at the cell theatre. Book tickets and learn more here.
 

Bard Conservatory of Music horn faculty member Barbara Jöstlein Currie will perform and teach at the International Horn Society symposium at Texas A&M University in Kingsville, Texas. Performing the opening event recital together with fellow Bard horn faculty member Julia Pilant, they will be joined by Philadelphia Orchestra Principal Horn Jennifer Montone. For this recital, Currie commissioned a new piece for horn and piano from Bard Advanced Performance Studies horn student Liri Ronen. The piece is called “Verdant Place,” which is Ronen’s translation of the German title “Anmutige Gegend,” from Faust, Part II by Goethe. The recital will be held at the school of music Performance Hall at Texas A&M University on Monday, August 1 at 8 pm CT. 

Other events, such as an opera excerpt masterclass and a presentation on “How to Succeed in a Time of Need, the Story of the Met Orchestra during the Pandemic,” will be given by on Tuesday, August 2. 

Currie has invented an accessory for brass instruments and created a new company called Brass Witch, which will debut at the symposium. 
Using strong NeoDymium “rare Earth” magnets, she found a new way to attach a pencil to all makes and types of brass instruments. This new product is a vast improvement over the existing hard plastic pencil clip which regularly scratches the surfaces of the instrument and frequently falls off of the instrument. This patent-pending design was tested by many of Currie’s Met Orchestra colleagues, many of whom are also Bard faculty members. Being used in such a rigorous environment such as during 6-hour-long performances of Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger”, or while teaching outside in a tent at Bard during the early stages of the pandemic were great practical ways to test the durability of the product. 

For more information, please visit Brass Witch.

Dr. Felicia Keesing, Bard College’s David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, has been selected as the winner of the 2022 International Cosmos Prize by the Expo ’90 Foundation. Dr. Keesing will receive a certificate of merit, a medallion, and a monetary prize of 40 million yen (approximately $290,000 USD) at the award ceremony, which will be held in Osaka, Japan, on November 9. Dr. Keesing will also give a commemorative lecture, participate in a symposium held in her honor, and have an audience with the Emperor and Empress of Japan. 

The International Cosmos Prize Committee states: “Dr. Felicia Keesing clarified the relationship between biodiversity and the risk of zoonotic pathogen transmission by conducting practical research and studies. She has demonstrated that while ecosystems with high biodiversity can be a breeding ground of various pathogens, the overall infection risk can be reduced in these ecosystems due to the presence of a dilution effect, thereby proving that biodiversity is of critical value to human society. These research achievements are instrumental in exploring the interrelationships among all life forms and provide sensible suggestions for seeking the ideal state of ‘Harmonious Coexistence between Nature and Humankind’ in the post-COVID-19 era.” Read the Committee’s Reasons for Awarding the Prize to Dr. Keesing here.

“I am honored to receive the International Cosmos Prize for 2022. The purpose of this prize and the activities of the Expo ’90 Foundation focus on the harmonious coexistence of humanity and the natural world. I can imagine no more important topic,” said Dr. Keesing. “Working closely with undergraduate students has been an ongoing source of inspiration. Perhaps most importantly, as I watch my students, and my children, grapple with the realities of the world they are inheriting, I am acutely aware of the stakes of the choices we are making.” Read Dr. Keesing’s full comments on winning the award here.

The annual Cosmos Prize is awarded in recognition of a body of work that has significantly advanced our understanding of the relationships among living organisms and the interdependence of life and the global environment. The decision to award the prize to Dr. Keesing was reached after the committee evaluated 174 nominations from 28 countries.

Previous recipients include Jared Diamond (1998), David Attenborough (2000), E.O. Wilson (2012), and Jane Goodall (2017).

“Sophocles had no trouble with structure,” writes Mary Norris for the New Yorker, struggling to find a way into her own tale. Taking a page from the late John Bennet, her friend and longtime editor for the New Yorker, Norris started at the beginning, telling the story of her trip to see Antigone with Bennet before his recent death. The Senior Project of Francis Karagodins ’22, Antigone, based on an original translation by Karagodins, was staged outdoors at Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York, the sculpture park and museum created by the late Bard professor and alumnus Harvey Fite ’30. “The setting was evocative: birdsong and scudding clouds at twilight, with the mountains for a backdrop,” Norris writes. While Bennet was studied in the play, Norris found herself more unfamiliar, and as such found Tiresias’s entrance to be the play’s most startling development. “While the other performers all seemed afraid of stumbling on the paving stones (Fite actually died of a fall in his own quarry), Tiresias alone, blind and urgent, had a motive to place each foot squarely on the earth.” Shortly after the two saw Antigone, Bennet was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “Two weeks later, on July 9, he died, at home,” Norris writes, “releasing a great commingling of sadness and gratitude among family and friends, our lives graven where his plow had gone.”

Vincenzo de Bellis CCS ’08 is leaving his position as Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to take on the new role of director of fairs and exhibition platforms at Art Basel, which now stages four major fairs in Hong Kong, Basel, Paris, and Miami Beach. Speaking to Artnet, de Bellis reflects, “When I was a student at Bard College, the Walker was one of the top museums in the world I could imagine working at.” He adds the pandemic proved that, while digital programming is important, “the physical experience cannot be replaced. Visual art is called that for a reason. It needs to be experienced in person.”

Bard College’s Division of the Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Anne Hunnell Chen as Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Culture. Her tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year.

Anne Hunnell Chen specializes in the art and archaeology of the globally connected Late Roman world. She is the founder and director of the NEH-funded International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA), aimed at virtual reassembly and recontextualization of archaeological information from a uniquely preserved archaeological site of cross-disciplinary significance. Dr. Chen has published on Roman, Persian, and Digital Humanities topics, and taught equally wide-ranging coursework.

In addition, she is currently at work on a monograph, Tetrarchic Art, Architecture, and Ideology Between East and West (284-325 CE). Taking a transculturally-sensitive, multimedia, and contextual approach, hers is the first book to treat the imperial art of this critical transitional era in its own right, rather than as an accessory in a longue durée narrative. She argues that emperors of this era sensitively adjusted their ideological messaging to address ever-evolving internal and external political pressures—including inordinate pressure from the Persian Sassanid East—and that the stylistic abstraction most commonly associated with the imperial art of the period was not as all-pervasive as generally assumed.

She has excavated at the Roman Baths in Iesso (Spain), and at the Roman imperial palace at Felix Romuliana (Serbia), a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2013–14, she spent a year as a fellow in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she worked on the international loan exhibition Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. Dr. Chen also serves as co-chair of the international Pelagios Network, and an historical consultant for the Virtual Center for Late Antiquity (VCLA).

She earned her B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fields of Art History and Classical Studies, and her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Bard community, she taught at Brown, Hofstra, and Yale Universities.

Peter L’Official, associate professor of literature and director of the American Studies Program at Bard College, has won a Rabkin Prize of $50,000 for his work in visual art journalism. L’Official is one of eight visual art journalists to receive a Rabkin Prize from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. Jurors for this sixth cycle of awards were: Eric Gibson (Arts in Review editor of the Wall Street Journal), Sasha Anawalt (Professor Emerita of Journalism at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism), and Paul Schmelzer (Founder of The Ostracon: Dispatches from Beyond Contemporary Art’s Center).

“I am humbled to be recognized among such a brilliant group of fellow recipients by the Rabkin Foundation. Thank you to the jurors, the anonymous nominators, the Rabkin Trustees, and—most especially—to all the editors and writers and readers who make the work of arts criticism both possible and worthwhile,” said L’Official.

Peter L’Official (he/him) is a writer, arts critic, and teacher of literature and American studies from The Bronx, NY. He is an associate professor in literature and director of the American Studies Program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he teaches courses in African American literature and culture, twentieth- and twenty-first century American literature, and on how the visual arts intersect with literature, place, and architecture. He is also the project coordinator for “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck,” a grant supported by the Mellon Foundation “Humanities for All Times” Initiative. 

L'Official is the author of Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, published by Harvard University Press in 2020. His writing has appeared in Artforum, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Village Voice, and other publications, and he is on the editorial board of The European Review of Books. He has written catalogue essays for exhibitions by artists such as Carl Craig and Becky Suss, and his next book project will explore the intersections of literature, architecture, and Blackness in America. L’Official has a B.A. in English from Williams College, and an M.A. in Journalism from New York University’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism program. He received his Ph.D. in American studies from Harvard University, and was formerly a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for American History at Harvard University in 2014-15. 

Now in its sixth cycle, the Rabkin Prize started in 2017. To date, the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has given a total of $2,775,000 to individual art writers. The award program is by nomination only. A distinguished group of 16 nominators, working in the visual arts in all parts of the country, provided the list of potential winners. The nominators were asked to identify, “The essential visual art journalist working in your part of the country.” Candidates for the award submitted two recent published articles and a brief curriculum vita. Writers can be re-nominated and are eligible until they win a Rabkin Prize. This is an annual program and a central initiative of the foundation.

This cycle’s other winning journalists include: Shana Nys Dambrot (Los Angeles); Bryn Evans (Decatur, Georgia); Joe Fyfe (New York City); Stacy Pratt (Tulsa); Darryl F. Ratcliff, II (Dallas); Jeanne Claire van Ryzin (Austin); Margo Vansynghel (Seattle). 

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents the Class of 2023 thesis presentation. Bringing together works by candidates in the disciplines film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing, the exhibition will be on view from July 16–24 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook, New York. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11am–5pm; Saturday and Sunday, 1pm–5pm.

Evening presentations, including performances, readings, and screenings will be held throughout the week at several locations on the Bard College campus. All presentations are free and open to the public. 

Global Commons, an online literary, arts, and news publication of the Open Society University Network (OSUN), is now accepting submissions for its fall 2022 issue. Global Commons publishes a free and open exchange of student work in core thematic areas, including sustainability and climate, inequalities, human rights, global justice, global public health, arts and society, and liberal arts and sciences. Created and developed by college and university students from OSUN, of which Bard College is a founding member, Global Commons publishes twice a year and encourages students to write and publish in any genre or language while also developing as writers, leaders, and global citizens. Submission deadline: August 15, 2022.

 

Walter Russell Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, discusses his new book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. In an interview with Yair Rosenberg of the Atlantic’s Deep Shtetl newsletter, Mead unpacks misconceptions of Jewish power and the decidedly non-Jewish roots of support for the Jewish state. 

 

“How can we find such camaraderie in the very thing that so often slights us?” asks Joe Vallese ’04 MAT ’05, editor of It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, calls the anthology “full of surprises.” Comprised of 25 essays on horror from contemporary queer authors, including 2018 Bard Fiction Prize winner Carmen Maria Machado, “the pieces are a brilliant display of expert criticism, wry humor, and original thinking.” Awarding it a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly says “there’s not a weak piece in the pack.” It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror will be published October 4, 2022, by Feminist Press and is available for preorder now.

Bard Class of 2003 alumna Pia Carusone’s distillery, Republic Restoratives, released Dissent Gin in the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v Wade. For each bottle sold, the company will donate $10 to the National Network of Abortion Funds to help cover travel and lodging costs for women in dire need of abortion care. Republic Restoratives created the gin in honor of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her dissenting opinions. “Millions of Americans live in communities where safe and legal abortions were just banned. The war on women is raging but we won’t be silent,” Carusone tells DC Eater.

Robert Culp, professor of history, and ​​Lu Kou, assistant professor of Chinese, have been awarded Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar grants in support of their individual professional work. Culp was awarded a $15,000, one-year grant in support of his book project, Circuits of Meaning: Book Markets and Knowledge Production in Modern China, 1900-1965, which explores “how changing systems of book distribution in modern China shaped knowledge production and the formation of reading communities from 1900 to 1965.” Kou received a $20,000, one-year grant to support War of Words: Courtly Exchange, Rhetoric, and Political Culture in Early Medieval China, his book project that “examines the ‘discursive battles’ fought among rival states in China's early medieval period, specifically, how rhetoric—the art of verbal persuasion—constructed and contested political legitimacy in this age of multipolarity.”

Ahead of the release of his new documentary, Endangered, Ronan Farrow ’04 spoke with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show about the threats facing journalists worldwide. In the United States, journalists are facing threats of violence for their reporting, spurred by authoritarian figures framing them as the enemy of the people—a tactic that, while not new, as Farrow notes, is nonetheless troubling when it comes to the health of our democracy. “We need more and better reporting in communities around this country. We need to support our journalists,” he said. “Otherwise, we're going to have people who are in this state of rage, who are very manipulable by these political leaders, who want to deploy these authoritarian arguments.” Endangered, which follows four journalists and the dangers they face in their work, is streaming now on HBO Max.

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Between 2009 and 2011, a team of U.S. negotiators including Bard Diplomat in Residence and Ambassador Frederic C. Hof came historically close to realizing a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement by seizing on an alignment of interests in Damascus, Jerusalem and Washington. The United States Institute of Peace and Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy present a discussion reflecting on Hof’s experience trying to broker Syrian-Israeli peace and what it can tell us about the possibilities and limitations of American conflict mediation.

“I’m finally at the point where I can do whatever I want, and I am going for it,” says Christine Sun Kim MFA ’13, who is a recent music/sound faculty member in Bard’s MFA program, where experimental approaches to the medium are encouraged. Born deaf, Kim is acutely aware of the opportunities afforded to the hearing that she was denied as a child and later as an aspiring artist. Now, Kim’s work is sought after by museums and collectors around the world, and she has become a role model for deaf children. “Over the past decade, working in wry drawings (charts, text and musical notation), video, audio, performance and the odd airplane banner, Ms. Kim, 42, has made work that is poetic and political, charismatic and candid, and that upends the conventions of language and sound,” writes Andrew Russeth in the New York Times profile. 

Alison Bechdel SR ’77, alumna of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, is known for many things, from her Macarthur “genius” grant to the enduring popularity of Fun Home, but the “Bechdel-Wallace Test,” which she first outlined in her serial cartoon Dykes to Watch Out For, remains an important media metric to this day, writes Madeline Carpou for the Mary Sue. Tracing the origins of the Bechdel-Wallace Test, which posits that a piece of media must have at least two women characters who speak to each other about something other than men, Bechdel’s career is outlined as a primer to those unfamiliar with her work. More commonly known as the “Bechdel Test,” Bechdel attributes the test to her friend Liz Wallace and prefers for it to be referred to it as such.

For the first time in two years, Bard students were able to join in person for the Annual Get Engaged Student Action and Youth Leadership Conference. This year's conference took place June 23–30 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan on the beautiful campus of the American University of Central Asia, bringing together undergraduate student leaders and mentors from 28 countries and 17 institutions in the Open Society University Network. 
 
Students, faculty, and staff at the Get Engaged conference discussed the civic engagement projects students have been developing and implementing in their respective countries. Students learned new skills, honed leadership styles, and networked with like-minded innovators who are collaborating with community partners across the globe to develop solutions to pressing local and global challenges.

Opening Friday, July 22, Richard Strauss’s comic opera, The Silent Woman (“Die Schweigsame Frau”), receives a rare American presentation at Bard SummerScape. Harold Wilson, “a stentorian bass … with impressive focus, carrying power and quiet charisma” (New York Times), heads a strong cast in a new production by Christian Räth, whose SummerScape staging of Das Wunder der Heliane prompted Musical America to declare: “Opera productions don’t get much better than this.” Running for five performances on July 22, 24, 27, 29 and 31, Räth’s exuberant and colorful treatment features the American Symphony Orchestra and Bard Festival Chorale under the baton of festival founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein, in the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center on Bard’s idyllic Hudson Valley campus. In two pre-performance Opera Talks, which are free and open to the public, Räth speaks before the matinee on July 24, and Botstein before the matinee on July 27. Home audiences around the world can enjoy the opening-night performance when it streams live online on July 22, with an encore stream on July 30.

Like Sergei Rachmaninoff, subject of this year’s Bard Music Festival, Richard Strauss is one of the last great exponents of musical Romanticism. In spite of his importance to the field, however, the composer’s eleventh opera, The Silent Woman (1935), was banned by the Third Reich after just four performances, because of librettist Stefan Zweig’s Jewish identity. Even today, despite having long overcome these troubled origins, the opera is still only rarely staged in the States, because of Strauss’s fiendishly difficult vocal writing. Such neglect should not be ascribed to any artistic failings, however. As the Los Angeles Times observes, The Silent Woman is “remarkable for its joie de vivre and, more important, its moments of profound old-world warmth, affection and rapture,” not to mention its “intricate, radiant score.” Set to Zweig’s sparkling libretto, the opera tells the madcap tale of a retired British admiral who craves the quiet life, his nephew Henry, Henry’s actress wife, and the scheming barber who intervenes between them. Featuring a counterfeit wedding designed to secure Henry’s inheritance, The Silent Woman is an intricately plotted screwball comedy in which all is ultimately forgiven. As Airmail noted last month in a preview piece:

“Its charms are many: hummable tunes, a rapturous love duet, scintillating pastiche harking back to Monteverdi, … all driving a well-told tale. Even so, The Silent Woman remains a wallflower. How like Leon Botstein, inveterate champion of neglected genius, to give the piece a spin at his adventurous festival on the campus of Bard College.”

Bard’s new production and set design are both by Christian Räth, whose work has graced stages from the Metropolitan Opera to Covent Garden and La Scala. He explains: “The Silent Woman is first and foremost a declaration of love to the art of opera. This ‘woman’ is anything but silent, and even at the age of 87 feels surprisingly up to date.”

Räth’s production stars bass Harold Wilson as Sir Morosus, the cantankerous naval veteran. Seen earlier this spring in Elektra at the Metropolitan Opera, Wilson is also a familiar face at houses and festivals from Deutsche Oper Berlin to Opera Philadelphia, Santa Fe Opera, Glimmerglass and Caramoor, where his Il pirata performance prompted the Washington Post to urge: “Casting directors take note.”

Praised by Opera News for hitting “high notes with ease, singing with a luxuriant warm glow that seduced the ear,” tenor David Portillo sings the admiral’s nephew Henry, with soprano Jana McIntyre, a Metropolitan Opera National Council grand finalist, as his wife, Aminta; mezzo-soprano Michaela Martens, a “passionate and sympathetic vocal actress” (Boston Globe), as the admiral’s Housekeeper; and baritone Edward Nelson, winner of the 2020 Glyndebourne Opera Cup, as the Machiavellian barber.

Bard’s colorful and elegant costumes are by European Opera Prize-winner Mattie Ullrich, who previously worked on SummerScape stagings of Le roi malgré lui and Euryanthe, with choreography by Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle and Tony Award-nominee David Neumann, and lighting by Tony and Drama Desk Award-winner Rick Fisher. The supertitle translation is by Stover Prize-winning poet and translator Peter Filkins. 

SummerScape tickets
Tickets for all SummerScape and Bard Music Festival emainstage events are now on sale, starting at $25. For complete information regarding programs, tickets, series discounts and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.
 

Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of painter Andy Robert as Visiting Artist in Residence in the Studio Arts Program for the fall 2022 semester.

Andy Robert (b. 1984, Les Cayes, Haiti) is a painter who conceptually negotiates abstraction with recognizable imagery; his paintings wrestle between the lyrical and the concrete. In a play of content and form, Robert’s paintings draw from a breadth of historical and personal references, which enjoys the tinkering that comes with painting pictures. Andy Robert lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

“I want my paintings to feel like sketches—quick with the immediacy and intimacy of a rough draft, haptic but thought out in terms of their scale, detail and consideration. As with a thumbnail, my intuitive, beginning impulses, gestural marks of dry-brushing and scraping; of adding and removing of paint and line considered and preserved and valued throughout the painting as it approaches its finish, its resolve.”

Through experimentation he has arrived at a deeply personal and an inventive, deconstructive approach to painting that relies on the premise that images are to be bent and folded, taken apart and put back together again; and a belief that art is a philosophical means to look at and examine things—to question, test ideas, and engage with the world. And that in painting a picture something is being taken apart to put back together; there is an inherent risk in breaking it. 

A diasporic Haitian-American immigrant and painter, Andy Robert views the world critically as a contradiction of mass-communication and increased voicelessness. Interior and contemplative —like the telling of memory or that of a song, his topographical abstractions favor a wandering, poetic ambiguity, and a breaking free that is a strategic opacity abetted by his deconstructive application of paint, mosaic-like accumulations in assemblage, exhaust and come to.  

Recent solo exhibitions include Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Significant group shows include MoMA PS1: Greater New York Exhibition (2021); Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, Curated by Duro Olowu, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2020); Dirty Protest: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019); The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe & Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2018); and We Go as They: Artists in Residence 2016-17, Studio Museum in Harlem (2016 – 2017). 

Robert was a special gift recipient from The Estate of Pierre Guyotat (2021); the recipient of the Benny Andrews Fellowship for the MacDowell Residency in Peterborough, NH (2020); a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient (2019); and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award Recipient (2019). 

He was in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; Skowhegan, ME (2016); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016) and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York (2015). His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; The AstrupFearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; and The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Chicago, IL.

Andy Robert was recently named on the artist list for the 2022 edition of the Carnegie International, the United States’ oldest biennial-style show.

“Universities have a role to play in humanizing refugees and helping them establish new lives in new countries,” writes Rebecca Granato ’99, associate vice president for global initiatives at Bard College and the director of the Open Society University Network (OSUN) Hubs for Connected Learning Initiatives. In an essay for Times Higher Education, Granato offers four simple ways universities can support displaced persons and students, using OSUN as an example of the efficacy of collaboration across networks. Alongside collective advocacy for expanded visa access, university networks like OSUN can “share best practices and develop new approaches to admitting and supporting refugee students, leverage their collective strength to advocate with governments for safe and durable solutions, and share both financial and human resources.” “There is strength in numbers,” Granato writes, “and university collaborations demonstrate this when it comes to supporting displaced youth in accessing higher education.”

In the New York Times, Cynthia Conti-Cook ’03, civil rights lawyer and technology fellow in gender, racial, and ethnic justice at the Ford Foundation, discusses how data from personal digital devices can be weaponized to prosecute pregnant people accused of feticide or endangering their fetuses. Conti-Cook’s 2020 research paper catalogs the digital evidence anti-abortion prosecutors have used against pregnant people and abortion providers. “It’s hard to say what will happen where and how and when, but the possibilities are pretty perilous,” Conti-Cook said to the New York Times. “It can be very easy to be overwhelmed by all the possibilities, which is why I try to emphasize focusing on what we have seen used against people.” She adds that types of data that have already been used in courts to criminalize pregnant people include Google searches, text and email receipts, website visits. “The text to your sister that says, ‘Expletive, I’m pregnant.’ The search history for abortion pills or the visitation of websites that have information about abortion.”

The Margarita Kuchma Project Award selection committee has named two final winning projects. Anna Schupack ’22 and Sarah Soucek ’22 from Bard’s Annandale campus won for their project, “The Columbia Collective,” a multimedia arts mentorship collective where incarcerated artists are given the opportunity to define their own voices. Michael Nyakundi ’23 and Abdullah Naseer ’23 from Bard College Berlin also won for their project, “Project MA3: Masanse Na Mayouthman (From Violence to Co-existence),” which focuses on community engagement as a working solution to police brutality in Soweto slums in Embakasi, Nairobi. The two winners will split the $10,000 award to realize their projects over their proposed timelines. The results of the winning projects will be presented to the Bard community in a public presentation sometime during the fall 2022 semester.

“We want to collaborate with high school and college-age incarcerated women and non-binary individuals at the maximum detention center, Brookwood Secure Center for Youth (formerly titled the Columbia Secure Center for Girls) near Hudson, in order to facilitate an exhibition of their artwork at the Foreland Contemporary Arts Campus in Catskill, New York, and to catalyze the formation of an ongoing multimedia arts mentorship collective called the Columbia Collective.” write Anna Schupack and Sarah Soucek. “We want the public to see the other side of their stories. The stories are not heard or seen in the courtroom. We hope to mobilize a network in support of prison abolition for youth in NY and to build a community of mentorship with incarcerated youth that will foster resiliency and collaboration, eliminate recidivism, and build a pipeline to higher education and the professional arts community.”

Michael Nyakundi and Abdullah Naseer write, “Most solutions to police brutality have involved the often-lengthy process of bringing police to justice through jurisprudence, or, as is the case in the US, demanding for the defunding of police. While these solutions are salient, they rarely mend the bad blood/fears between police and the youth.” Their project introduces a workshop where police representatives and youth representatives (a) have a dialogue about ways in which they both can civically engage/communicate in order to promote conviviality and (b) go through various restorative justice measures the police can explore when dealing with crime. They will also organize a community engagement endeavor, such as rubbish collection or a soccer tournament, in which both the police and the youth would engage to further cement a cordial relationship. Further, they plan to lobby members of parliament to promote police and youth engagement in my Soweto slums. 

The award winners were decided through a multi-step process. Twenty-five applicants submitted project proposals in an open call round. Five projects were selected to advance to a second round and given an award of $1000 and another month to conduct research and identify partners and materials needed to realize the project. Two finalists were selected from this stage and awarded a further $5000 to create a detailed project activation blueprint and timeline. Both finalists were named winners and split the final $10,000 award to realize their projects.

The five second round winners included: Sonita Alizada ’23 from Bard’s Annandale campus and Ghulam Sakhi Ataye ’23 from American University of Central Asia–Bard in Bishkek, Kyrgyz Republic for their projects, “Freedom to Learn: Online Higher Education for Afghan Girls” and “Afghan Girls Education Program,” which both aim to provide a viable pathway for Afghan girls and women to pursue higher education in the wake of the Taliban takeover; Shadin Nassar ’21 and Ramez Hayek ’23 from Al-Quds Bard College for their project “Written Voices,” which seeks to construct a much-needed safe outlet that solidifies the Palestinian struggle for justice through distinctive methods empowering artistic self-expression and critical inquiry; Clay Davies ’22 from Bard’s Annandale campus for his/her/their site-specific project to transport Disabled people in Humboldt County, California, to a center of community arts engagement in the town of Arcata where as a group they could participate in summer learning and adapting various studio art fabrication practices, such as concrete pouring, large scale knotting/knitting/crocheting with rope, paper mache, block printing, and other sculptural techniques.

This award’s selection committee was chaired by Associate Director of the Human Rights Project Danielle Riou and included Dean for Social Action and Director of the Trustee Leader Scholar Program Paul Marienthal, Vice-Chair of Bard College Berlin Susan Gillespie, former Research Professor at the Andrew Gagarin Center for the Study of Civil Society and Human Rights at Saint Petersburg State University Carine Clément, and Executive Director of [email protected] Dariel Vasquez ’17.

About the Margarita Kuchma Project Award
Organized by Bard’s Human Rights Project, the Margarita Kuchma Project Award was created in honor of Margarita Kuchma, a student who was passionate about confronting injustice head-on. The award supports a real-world, student-led project that addresses fundamental issues of equality, freedom, social justice, civil rights, and human rights. Currently enrolled students and recent alumni/ae from across the Bard network, including Al Quds, Bard Berlin, AUCA, Bard Annandale, were invited to apply. 

A longer and wilder lawn can be better for the ecosystem, but it raises questions about the health risks of a potentially larger tick population around your home. “When we’re talking about your risk of exposure, we are talking about two things,” Dr. Keesing told the New York Times. “At work are both the entomological risk — how many ticks there are in the habitat — and also how much time you’re spending in that habitat.” Dr. Keesing discusses the results of her five-year Tick Project study for the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. Felicia Keesing is the David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing and has been on the Bard College faculty since 2000.