Bard News

CCS Bard alumna Kelly Kivland has been announced as chief curator and director of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Kivland was formerly a curator at Dia Art Foundation, New York. In her new role, Kivland will work closely with Wexner Center director Johanna Burton, helping to conceive and stage exhibitions as well as overseeing commissions and visual arts residencies. Additionally, she will cultivate the institution’s audience and foster collaborations across the university, the central Ohio community, and beyond.

The Bard College Art History and Visual Culture Program announces the appointment of Heeryoon Shin as tenure track faculty, effective fall 2021. Shin specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of South Asia, with a particular focus on early modern and colonial India.

About Heeryoon Shin
Heeryoon Shin’s current book project, tentatively titled Temples Between Empires: Architectural Encounters in Banaras, ca. 1750-1850, explores architectural revival, cross-cultural exchange, and historiography during the fraught moments of transition between the Mughal and British empires through the lens of temple architecture in the Hindu pilgrimage city of Banaras. Shin’s work on temple architecture is part of a larger interest in the complexity of global and local exchanges fostered by travel, trade, and colonialism, and she is currently developing a second project on the global circulation of blue-and-white ceramics and their interaction with the local production and use in South Asia. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Samsung Scholarship Foundation, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and published in Artibus Asiae and Journal 18.

Shin received her PhD in the History of Art at Yale University in 2015. She also has secondary training in East Asian art from Seoul National University in South Korea, where she received her BA and completed MA coursework in Art History. Her transnational research interests and training tie into her teaching, which ranges from introductory courses on South Asian art and Korean art to broader thematic courses that emphasize interregional connections across Asia and beyond, including art and ritual, architecture and empire, and decorative arts and maritime trade. In Fall 2021, she is excited to teach new courses on the visual cultures of colonial South Asia and the history and politics of craft with a focus on twentieth-century South Asia, Japan, and Korea. Before coming to Bard, she taught at Colorado College, Williams College, and Vanderbilt University, where she recently received a COVID-19 Innovative Teaching Award. 

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.(5/11/21)
 

Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Mie Inouye to a tenure track faculty position with the Bard Political Studies Program, effective fall 2021. A joint PhD candidate in political science and religious studies at Yale University, Inouye is a political theorist and organizer who studies theories of political action in 20th-century U.S. social movements. Her scholarship investigates the ways that institutions shape people’s understandings of themselves and the social world, and the practices that allow racially and economically oppressed people to develop and exercise agency.

About Mie Inouye
In her dissertation, Antinomies of Organizing, Mie Inouye takes the praxis of political organizers as a source of political theory. She presents a dilemma that social movement organizers have faced in their pursuit of more democratic institutions: How can people constituted as political subjects by oppressive institutions develop the capacity to resist and transform those institutions? Drawing on histories, biographies, and her own archival research, she reconstructs the answers that four influential twentieth-century American organizers—William Z. Foster, Saul Alinsky, Myles Horton, and Ella Baker—offered to this question. She argues that the American organizing tradition offers democratic theory important insights into the modes, ends, and spheres of democratic participation.

Inouye is committed to engaged scholarship and has written on topics related to her research in Jacobin Magazine and The Forge. She holds a BA from Tufts University and an MA from the University of Toronto and is a joint PhD candidate in political science and religious studies at Yale University.

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.(5/11/21)
 

Bard College announces the appointment of Ranjani Atur as the inaugural recipient of the College’s Academic Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship in Classical Studies, effective fall 2021. The newly established fellowship brings to Bard’s liberal arts classroom the cutting-edge research of early-stage teacher-scholars whose work takes the study of Ancient Greece and Rome in important new directions. Recipients of the two-year award will share their research with the Bard College community by teaching interdisciplinary courses connected to their research and by leading events that bring scholarly conversations about the ancient Greek and Roman worlds to the public sphere.

About Ranjani Atur
Ranjani Atur earned her BA in Classical Studies from Georgetown University, 2013, and is completing her PhD in Religious Studies, with an emphasis in Ancient Mediterranean Religions, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Ranjani’s research interests include Greek and Roman religion, early Christianity, and comparative religions across the ancient Mediterranean, Near East, and Asia. She is particularly interested in issues of religious materiality, spatiality, and experience. Ranjani has presented her research at the annual meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature (2019, 2020, and 2021 upcoming) and is currently supported by the American Association of University Women, American Dissertation Fellowship.

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.(5/11/21)
 

“We’re thrilled to announce our next FPI-Bard Fellow cohort,” said BGIA Director and FPI CEO Elmira Bayrasli. “It includes a mathematician focused on data, a former intelligence analyst focused on national security and climate change, a former NYPD official focused on counterterrorism and extremism, and experts in immigration, the rule of law and the UN, Russia, the EU and Turkey, and the Middle East.” The FPI-Bard Fellowship is for mid-career women in foreign policy who are eager to share their expertise and engage in policy discussions.

The photographs of An-My Lê play with assumptions about photographic truth and narrative, questioning how we process mediated information. Whether by capturing confederate monuments removed from their pedestals, war reenactments, or American soldiers training in 29 Palms, California, Lê reframes American history and its myriad legacies. She chooses viewpoints that, in her words, “speak to experiences of a shared past in an unfolding present.” In this live conversation, Lê speaks with Getty Museum assistant curator Mazie Harris about her experience traveling across the United States to make photographs.

The classicist Milman Parry, who died in 1935 at the age of 33, “completely revolutionized the study of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, showing that the epics had not been written, as had long been thought, but were oral—composed in the act of performance,” writes Professor Cioffi in the New York Times. “His work has had wide-ranging ramifications, ushering in an emphasis on orality that has become increasingly central to modern literary culture—from professional storytellers and TED talks to podcasts and audiobooks. In Hearing Homer’s Song, the biographer Robert Kanigel offers the first full-scale account of Parry’s short life, mysterious demise and long-lived influence.”

Pavlina Tcherneva, associate professor of economics, joins the second installment of Current Affairs’s podcast series Is MMT Real? to talk about the connection between Modern Monetary Theory and a nationwide jobs guarantee. She counters the assumption that unemployment is a natural feature of the economy, and talks about how a direct jobs program could work.

Terminal Piece (1972), an installation by the late feminist artist and writer Kate Millett, creates a “palpable feeling of suspense,” writes Ksenia Soboleva for the Brooklyn Rail. The piece is a master’s thesis exhibition curated by the artist, curator, and CCS Bard student Jenni Crain MA ’21. It is one of 13 exhibitions with more than 40 artists organized by the graduating class of the master of arts program in curatorial studies, on view through May 30 by reservation. Learn more at ccs.bard.edu.

The New York Times lists the Bard Graduate Center’s latest exhibition catalogue among six insightful new titles highlighting often overlooked creators and creations. “More than 1,000 lustrous Victorian vessels” appear in Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915 (Yale University Press, 2021), the catalogue for a traveling exhibition opening this fall at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan and already online. Learn more at bgc.bard.edu.

Bard SummerScape 2021 opens with the live world premiere of I was waiting for the echo of a better day, a major new commission from Pam Tanowitz, the Fisher Center’s inaugural choreographer in residence, with Jessie Montgomery, next composer in residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Set to new arrangements of Montgomery’s chamber music, which has been called “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (Washington Post), together with material from her duo project big dog little dog, I was waiting for the echo of a better day is one of the nation’s first large-scale, full-length dance commissions with a live, in-person audience since the start of the pandemic. It also marks Tanowitz’s first return to SummerScape since the resounding success of her dance setting of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. A Fisher Center commission, Four Quartets was named “Best Dance Production of 2018” by the New York Times, which pronounced it “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.” Performed by eight members of Pam Tanowitz Dance with live musical accompaniment from a string quintet featuring Montgomery on violin, I was waiting for the echo of a better day will premiere in three performances on July 8, 9, and 10 against the glorious backdrop of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains, using the historical parkland of Bard’s Montgomery Place campus as inspiration. A companion film from visual artist and filmmaker Jeremy Jacob will be released in the Fisher Center’s fall 2021 UPSTREAMING season.

SummerScape has long produced and premiered significant dance productions, including commissions from choreographers Ronald K. Brown, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Bill T. Jones, John Heginbotham, and Mark Morris. Since making her acclaimed festival debut at SummerScape 2015, Pam Tanowitz has been recognized as “one of the most formally brilliant choreographers around” (New York Times), with honors including a Bessie Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the prestigious 2017 Cage Cunningham Fellowship.

I was waiting for the echo of a better day takes its title from a song lyric from Jean-Luc Godard’s film Masculin Féminin. Tanowitz chose it in part for the way it resonates after the past year of loss and grief, offering hope for the future as people begin to gather again after so many months of isolation and mourning. She explains:

“I see the work as an invitation to be together, for dancers and audiences to share space, to actually be with each other, to look each other in the eye, when that hasn’t been possible for so long. We can’t know how that will feel yet, but I imagine it will evoke what we’ve lost, and those we’ve lost, as well as our intense joy and relief at reuniting and turning to the future.”

The world premiere of I was waiting for the echo of a better day will feature eight members of her company, Pam Tanowitz Dance, which has been included in the New York Times’s annual “Best of Dance” list for the past eight years. Seven of the dancers—Jason Collins, Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, Lindsey Jones, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura, and Melissa Toogood—previously appeared in SummerScape 2018’s Four Quartets, while the eighth and newest member of Pam Tanowitz Dance, Brittany Engel-Adams, can be seen in Spike Lee’s film Chiraq and HBO’s TV series Boardwalk Empire.

Tanowitz’s new work was created in close collaboration with composer-violinist Jessie Montgomery, a winner of both the Sphinx Medal of Excellence and the ASCAP Foundation’s Leonard Bernstein Award, who has emerged as one of the most compelling and sought-after voices in new music today. Tanowitz and Montgomery are deeply inspired by the landscape and history of Bard’s Montgomery Place site, and of the Hudson River Valley. Says Montgomery:

“We have been exploring the archives of Montgomery Place, learning about how and why the landscape has changed over the centuries – and learning about those who have tended to the land who came before us. Though the performance won’t make literal reference to those histories, we are working on this site with deep humility and gratitude to its original origins and custodians, and those whose labor has transformed and preserved it for future generations.”

The score for the performance includes a selection of Montgomery’s existing chamber works, including new arrangements of works from big dog little dog, her collaboration with composer-double-bassist Eleonore Oppenheim. To interpret the music for I was waiting for the echo of a better day, Oppenheim and Montgomery will be joined by Grammy-nominated violinist Jannina Norpoth of PUBLIQuartet, Grammy-winning violist Nathan Schram of the Attacca Quartet, and cellist Gabriel Cabezas, a laureate of the Sphinx Medal of Excellence.

Lighting design for the production is by Barbara Samuels, a nominee for multiple Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk and Hewes Design awards, with costumes – as for Four Quartets – by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, whose works for Tanowitz have been called “exquisite” (New York Times). Stage management is by Four Quartets’ Betsy Ayer, with sound design by Garth MacAleavey, the Resident Sound Designer and current acting Director of Production at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, whose credits include SummerScape 2019’s Acquanetta.

The health and safety of Bard’s audiences, artists and staff are of paramount importance. All SummerScape productions will be presented in adherence with strict COVID protocols and in accordance with CDC and NY State guidance and regulations. Click here to learn more about the SummerScape 2021 health and safety protocols.

Tickets go on sale on June 2. The Box Office can be reached by telephone at (845) 758-7900 on Mondays through Fridays at 11am–4pm EST, or by email at boxoffice@bard.edu. Tickets are also available 24/7 on Bard’s website at fishercenter.bard.edu.

To download high-resolution photos, click here.

Commissioning funds for I was waiting for the echo of a better day are provided by Jay Franke and David Herro. Commissioning and development support for the Stage at Montgomery Place are provided by the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.

The 2021 SummerScape season is made possible in part through the generous support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, and Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

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Dance at Bard SummerScape 2021

Pam Tanowitz and Jessie Montgomery
I was waiting for the echo of a better day
World premiere of SummerScape commission

The Stage at Montgomery Place
July 8, 9, and 10 at 7:30 pm

Choreography by Pam Tanowitz
Music by Jessie Montgomery and big dog little dog

Dancers: Pam Tanowitz Dance members Jason Collins, Brittany Engel-Adams, Christine Flores, Zachary Gonder, Lindsey Jones, Victor Lozano, Maile Okamura and Melissa Toogood

Musicians: Jessie Montgomery and Jannina Norpoth, violins; Nathan Schram, viola; Gabriel Cabezas, cello; and Eleonore Oppenheim, bass

Musical arrangements: Eleonore Oppenheim
Filmmaker: Jeremy Jacob
Lighting design: Barbara Samuels
Costume design: Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung
Sound design: Garth MacAleavey
Stage management: Betsy Ayer

SummerScape 2021: other key dates

July 15–17                  Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Mx. Justin Vivian Bond
July 23 & 24                Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Black Roots Summer, Weekend One
July 28–August 1        Opera: Chausson’s King Arthur (first fully staged American production)
July 29–31                  Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Black Roots Summer, Weekend Two
August 5–7                 Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Most Happy in Concert
August 6–8                 Bard Music Festival, Weekend One: Music in Paris
August 13–15             Bard Music Festival, Weekend Two: The 20th-Century Legacy of Nadia Boulanger

“‘I think the risk of this scenario is remote,’ Evans said Wednesday during a virtual conference hosted by the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College,” reports Bloomberg. “The Chicago Fed chief, who has long been one of the central bank’s biggest worriers about inflation being too low, was responding to critics of the Biden administration’s fiscal programs, which include not only Republicans but also some economists associated with the Democratic party.”

Day’s End (2014–21), located in Hudson River Park opposite the Whitney Museum of American Art, “is Hammons’s first permanent public artwork in more than three decades, located in tantalizing proximity to one of the many major institutions that the artist has spent a career impishly frustrating, critiquing, and flirting with,” writes Professor L’Official in Artforum. “Engaging with the nearby institution while evading it, it is a space of possibility that encloses no space at all. Its form is rigid, yet time and tide and air and light flow beneath, above, and through it, and the structure continually reframes the world as we move around it. It is infinitely propositional, an architectural frame to house unhoused improvisation.”

“A lot of scholarly research, teaching, and funding ends up reproducing existing institutions. And so, in thinking about the intersection between human rights and the arts, we want to look for it in places that rarely get a light shone on them, and to highlight and better understand them,” said Abu-Rish, director, Bard MA Program in Human Rights and the Arts. “We want to look at a community level that’s rarely taken seriously in academia or in the art world,” said El Khoury, director, OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts.

Max Kenner ’01, founder and executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the program. BPI was profiled in a four-part PBS documentary, College Behind Bars. Kenner talks about the origins of the program, what students experience, and the injustice he sees in both the criminal justice system and the educational system in the United States.

“Simply put, the Biden doctrine holds that geopolitical competition must not be allowed to drive world history,” writes Mead, James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College, in the Wall Street Journal. “Competition with China is real and must be vigorously pursued, but the essential goal of American foreign policy is to construct a values-based world order that can tackle humanity’s common problems in an organized and even collegial way.”

“Built on the gnawed bones of its predecessor, and reset in the modern-day South among members of a Black family that runs a barbecue restaurant, ‘Fat Ham’ refuses the tropes of Black suffering even as it engages the seriousness of the Shakespeare. It is the rare takeoff that actually takes off—and then flies in its own smart direction.” The world digital premiere of Fat Ham is streaming through May 23 as part of the Wilma Theater’s virtual spring season.

Bard SummerScape returns to live performance with a wide-ranging and adventurous lineup this summer. Staged for limited in-person audiences, the 2021 season presents the 31st Bard Music Festival, “Nadia Boulanger and Her World,” which pays tribute to one of the most important female figures in classical music history; the first fully staged American production of King Arthur (Le roi Arthus), the only opera by Boulanger’s compatriot and near-contemporary Ernest Chausson; the world premiere of I was waiting for the echo of a better day, a major new dance commission from Bard’s Fisher Center Choreographer-in-Residence Pam Tanowitz and Sphinx Medal of Excellence-winning composer Jessie Montgomery; Most Happy in Concert, comprising songs from Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, directed by Tony nominee Daniel Fish; “Black Roots Summer,” a two-weekend celebration of Black roots music curated by Michael Mwenso and Jono Gasparro; and a newly commissioned concert from longtime SummerScape favorite Mx. Justin Vivian Bond. All programs will be staged between July 8 and August 15 in both the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center and outdoors at Bard’s Montgomery Place campus, a designated National Historic Landmark set amid rolling lawns, woodlands and gardens against the spectacular backdrop of the Catskill Mountains. Select programs will also be livestreamed at UPSTREAMING, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage.

Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of the Fisher Center at Bard College, explains:

“This summer’s festival includes new works by artists who have deep and evolving relationships with the Fisher Center. We are also thrilled to be presenting several artists for the first time, including some we’ve collaborated with over the past year as part of our continuing journey toward becoming a more equitable and inclusive organization. After the uncertainty and isolation of the pandemic, the coming months will offer particularly joyous and meaningful opportunities for all these artists to return to rehearsal and performance again, inviting audiences to join them on voyages of creation and discovery.”

The health and safety of Bard’s audiences, artists and staff are of paramount importance. All SummerScape productions will be presented in adherence with strict COVID protocols and in accordance with CDC and NY State guidance and regulations. Learn more about SummerScape 2021 health and safety protocols here.

Bard SummerScape 2021 – highlights by genre

Music: 31st Bard Music Festival, “Nadia Boulanger and Her World”
Founded by co-artistic director Leon Botstein, it is the Bard Music Festival – “a highlight of the musical year” (Wall Street Journal) – that provides the creative inspiration for SummerScape. The first woman to come into Bard’s festival spotlight, Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979) was a true musical polymath. A prize-winning composer, peerless composition teacher and trailblazing conductor, organist and scholar, she is “arguably … the most important woman in the history of classical music” (BBC Music magazine). Through the prism of her life and career, “Nadia Boulanger and Her World” offers an illuminating series of concerts, pre-concert talks and panel discussions over the final two weekends of SummerScape. On August 6–8, Weekend One explores Music in Paris in the first half of the 20th century, and on August 13–15, Weekend Two addresses The 20th-Century Legacy of Nadia Boulanger. Twelve concert programs spaced over the two weekends explore such themes as Paris as the epitome of chic, the crosscurrents of influence between France and America, and the relationship between French Catholicism and spirituality.

The festival will present examples of Boulanger’s own, little-known oeuvre alongside music by her teachers and mentors, including Gabriel Fauré, Louis Vierne and Charles Marie Widor; her Parisian contemporaries, like Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, Francis Poulenc, Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie and expats George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Igor Stravinsky; her male students, including Jean Françaix, Astor Piazzolla, and illustrious Americans Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Walter Piston and Virgil Thomson; her female students, like Marcelle de Manziarly, Thea Musgrave, Julia Perry and Louise Talma; other women composers, Germaine Tailleferre and Lili Boulanger, Nadia’s celebrated sister, among them; and some of the bygone composers whose music she vociferously championed, like Monteverdi, Bach and Brahms. Finally, two thought-provoking panel discussions will be supplemented by informative pre-concert talks to illuminate each concert’s themes. As the Los Angeles Times writes, Bard offers “the summer’s most stimulating music festival.”

Opera: Ernest Chausson’s King Arthur (first fully staged American production)
Musical America observes: “Bard’s annual opera has become an indispensable part of the summer operatic landscape.” Of an earlier generation than the Boulanger sisters, Ernest Chausson (1855–99) played a pivotal part in the development of French late-Romanticism. Set to his own libretto, Chausson’s sole completed opera, King Arthur (Le roi Arthus, 1886–95) depicts the tragic love triangle between the mythological English king, his wife Guinevere and his trusted knight Lancelot. Despite having enjoyed recent revivals in Edinburgh and Paris, the opera has yet to be seen on the American stage. With its rich lyricism, ravishing harmonies and otherworldly final chorus, however, it has won many advocates. In King Arthur, Gramophone affirms, “passion is often white-hot; the orchestration is opulent; and there are … passages of sheer beauty.”

Marking the opera’s long overdue first fully staged American presentation, Bard’s new production will be directed by Princess Grace Award-winner Louisa Proske, Founding Co-Artistic Director of Heartbeat Opera and designated Associate Artistic Director and Resident Director of Germany’s Halle Opera. Singing the title role will be baritone Norman Garrett, who made his Metropolitan Opera debut in last season’s Porgy and Bess after winning top prizes in more than a dozen international vocal competitions. He will be joined by Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke as Guinevere under the baton of Leon Botstein, who previously led the opera both on a Telarc recording with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and in a 2001 concert performance with the American Symphony Orchestra at Lincoln Center. That performance was hailed as “one of the best Leon Botstein and the American Symphony have given together,” showing Chausson’s score to be “sumptuous, majestic, brilliant in its fanfare moments and often powerful” (Paul Griffiths, New York Times). King Arthur will run for four performances in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater on July 25, 28 and 30 and August 1.

Dance: world premiere of I was waiting for the echo of a better day by Pam Tanowitz and Jessie Montgomery

SummerScape has long produced and premiered significant dance productions, including commissions from choreographers Ronald K. Brown, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Bill T. Jones, John Heginbotham and Mark Morris. SummerScape 2021 opens with the world premiere of I was waiting for the echo of a better day, a new commission from Pam Tanowitz, the Fisher Center’s inaugural Choreographer-in-Residence, in collaboration with Jessie Montgomery, next Composer-in-Residence of the Chicago Symphony, whose honors include the ASCAP Foundation’s Leonard Bernstein Award. Set to new arrangements of Montgomery’s chamber music, which has been called “turbulent, wildly colorful and exploding with life” (Washington Post), along with material from her collaboration with Eleonore Oppenheim, big dog little dog, this large-scale work marks Tanowitz’s first return to SummerScape since the resounding success of her ballet Four Quartets. A Fisher Center commission, Four Quartets was named “Best Dance Production of 2018” by the New York Times, which pronounced it “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century.”

Performed with live musical accompaniment from artists including Montgomery on violin and Oppenheim on double bass, I was waiting for the echo of a better day will premiere in three performances on July 8, 9 and 10 against the glorious backdrop of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains, using the historical parkland of Montgomery Place as inspiration.

Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Most Happy in Concert
The legendary composer-songwriter behind Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Frank Loesser accrued a string of honors including an Oscar, multiple Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. Featuring some of his most soaring lyricism, his classic 1956 show, The Most Happy Fella, “is one of the greatest musicals ever. Or one of the greatest operas. Hell, it’s just great,” declares New York magazine.

Loesser’s songs take center stage in Most Happy in Concert, a setting of his ebullient songs for a cast of seven female and non-binary vocalists with a 13-piece instrumental ensemble. Originally developed for a full production in SummerScape 2020, this meditation on our longing for human connection, made only more poignant by the isolation of the past year, will now be presented as a concert under the summer sunset.

Helming the concert is director Daniel Fish, whose revelatory, Tony Award-winning revival of Oklahoma! debuted at SummerScape 2015 before traveling to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and then to Broadway, where it scored the director his first Tony nomination. Most Happy in Concert will take place in three performances on August 5, 6 and 7 on the Stage at Montgomery Place.

Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Black Roots Summer
Bard celebrates the uplifting spirit of Black roots music over two weekends this July, with Black Roots Summer, presented in association with Electric Root and curated by jazz vocalist Michael Mwenso, the London-raised Sierra Leone native whose mentors include James Brown and Wynton Marsalis, and Jono Gasparro, former curator of Ginny’s Supper Club in Harlem.

Both weekends take place on the Stage at Montgomery Place, where Mwenso and the Shakes give two performances of their set “Love Will Be the Only Way” on July 23 and 24. Fronted by Mwenso himself, the Harlem-based Shakes hail from destinations ranging from Madagascar, South Africa and France to Hawaii and Jamaica. Taking listeners on a journey through the kaleidoscope of Black ancestral diasporic music and traditions, by way of Fats Waller, Muddy Waters, James Brown and other musical legends, the Shakes’ international blend of jazz and blues has been called “intense, prowling and ebullient” (New York Times).

Next, on July 29, Mwenso leads a lineup of special guest vocalists in “Genius Mother Mary”: A Sonic Retrospective of Mary Lou Williams. A Black woman in the male-dominated field of jazz, Grammy-nominated American pianist, arranger and composer Mary Lou Williams (1910–81) wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements, some of them for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, as well as making more than a hundred recordings and serving as a friend, mentor and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and many more. As NPR put it, it was she who “mastered the language of swing and pushed the genre towards more expansive, experimental sounds.”

Finally, on July 30 and 31, the hills come alive with The Sound of (Black) Music, when Bard presents “Edelweiss,” “My Favorite Things,” “Do-Re-Mi” and other favorite songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s beloved final musical, as reimagined through an Afrofuturistic lens by the 20-plus BIPOC vocalists and instrumentalists assembled by Mwenso and Gasparro.

Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Mx. Justin Vivian Bond
A longtime SummerScape favorite, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond has been heralded as “the greatest cabaret artist of this generation” (New Yorker). The recipient of an Obie, a Bessie and a Tony nomination, they return to Bard this season for three performances of a new concert specially commissioned for Montgomery Place, in the picturesque setting of the Stage at Montgomery Place on July 15, 16 and 17.

SummerScape tickets
All tickets go on sale on June 2. The Box Office can be reached by telephone at (845) 758-7900, on Mondays through Fridays at 11am–4pm EST, or by email at boxoffice@bard.edu. Tickets are also available 24/7 on Bard’s website at fishercenter.bard.edu.

The 2021 SummerScape season is made possible in part through the generous support of Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, and Fisher Center members, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Commissioning and development support for the Stage at Montgomery Place provided by the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman.

Commissioning funds for I was waiting for the echo of a better day are provided by Jay Franke and David Herro.Fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape
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Spotify.com/bardfisherSummerScape 2021: key dates

July 8–10              Dance: I was waiting for the echo of a better day by Pam Tanowitz and Jessie Montgomery (world premiere)
July 15–17            Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Mx. Justin Vivian Bond
July 23 & 24         Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Black Roots Summer, Weekend One
July 25–August 1 Opera: Chausson’s King Arthur (first fully staged American production)
July 29–31            Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Black Roots Summer, Weekend Two
August 5–7           Concerts on the Stage at Montgomery Place: Most Happy in Concert
August 6–8           Bard Music Festival, Weekend One: Music in Paris
August 13–15       Bard Music Festival, Weekend Two: The 20th-Century Legacy of Nadia Boulanger

Following a two-year-long expansion and renovation, Dia Chelsea reopened to the public on April 16 with an exhibition of newly commissioned work by artist Lucy Raven MFA ’09. The culmination of a four-year engagement with Dia, Raven’s two installations fill both galleries. Admission to Dia Chelsea is now permanently free, making all of Dia’s five sites and locations in New York City free to the public.
 

Bard Center for Environmental Policy faculty Dr. Robyn Smyth and Dr. Monique Segarra, along with Bard College alumna Uroosa Fatima MS ’18, are the lead authors of an article published in a special issue of Environmental Development focusing on interdisciplinary research on global change across the Americas, funded by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research. The article, “Engaging stakeholders across a socio-environmentally diverse network of water research sites in North and South America,” describes the approaches used and challenges faced by research teams aiming to advance integrated and inclusive understanding of climate risks to water resources at a continental scale. 

 This research is part of the Sensing the Americas’ Freshwater Ecosystem Risk (SAFER) project and supported by a supplemental grant awarded by the National Science Foundation’s Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) to Dr. Tom Harmon of the University of California Merced. “It's important to keep changing your perspective on hard, socio-environmental problems,” says Dr. Harmon. “When we started the SAFER project, we placed a lot of emphasis on creating sensing systems to monitor freshwater systems and help understand the risk of losing these ecosystems to pollution. Having good data is important, but equally if not more important is the stakeholders’ perception about the risk and how to manage it.”

“A gap in vaccination rates between residents and staff means that long-term-care facilities remain particularly vulnerable to coronavirus outbreaks,” writes Gessen in the New Yorker. “As long as the virus is circulating in the community, an unvaccinated staff member can pick it up and bring it to the nursing home, where conditions may make the otherwise rare breakthrough infections more likely.”

Azikiwe Mohammed celebrates everyday heroes and small acts of care in his work. Through different media—painting, textiles, performative installations—he constructs spaces of safety and welcome for people of color and for immigrants whose space is often threatened.

“When natural disasters and other emergencies hit, resources become scarce, and, too often, people with disabilities cannot access them,” writes Mateo in Just Security. “As global warming continues to drive up temperatures and sea levels around the world, discussions of climate resilience and adaptation must do better to include these communities.”

Last March changed all of our lives. What have we learned about the coronavirus? Now that there are vaccines, how quickly will we go back to “normal”? What does the future hold for future pandemics? On March 10, BGIA hosted a virtual event, COVID-19: One Year On, which tackled these questions. The recording aired on C-SPAN and is now available online. BGIA was joined by Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, and Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project.

Solve Climate by 2030 is a coordinated climate education initiative across the Open Society University Network and beyond. It organizes educators to dedicate the first Wednesday in April as a day for global, coordinated education on climate solutions, creating and promoting templates for ways in which students and other citizens can engage with communities to support these solutions. The April 6 launch of the initiative’s webinar series drew over 10,000 viewers, who engaged in more than 100 university-hosted global dialogues on the topics of green recovery, alternative policies, and just transitions at the local and regional levels.
 

Alizada, Afghan rapper and international advocate to end forced marriage, was selected by more than 5,000 young voters worldwide.

Bard College student Sonita Alizada has been awarded the 2021 Freedom Prize in recognition of her international advocacy to end forced marriage. Alizada is a 24-year-old rapper and human rights activist from Afghanistan and a sophomore at Bard College. She was chosen by 5,683 young people from 86 countries to receive the prize, which carries an award of €25,000 to support her work. The Freedom Prize, organized by the Normandy for Peace Initiative in the Normandy Region of France, recognizes an inspiring young person committed to an exemplary fight for freedom. Alizada is the third Freedom Prize laureate. The prize was awarded in 2019 to Greta Thunberg for her fight for climate justice and to Loujain Al Hathloul in 2020 for her fight for women's rights in Saudi Arabia. Normandy for Peace will present the award at the Normandy World Peace Forum in Abbaye-aux-Dames in Caen, Normandy, June 3–4, 2021.

An international panel of judges selected three Freedom Prize finalists from 251 applications in February. The panel comprised 30 young people of 17 different nationalities. Alizada was selected in addition to Agnes Chow, Hong Kong pro-democracy leader, and Omar Radi, a Moroccan investigative journalist. The Freedom Prize then invited young people aged 15 to 25 to vote for their favorite finalist by April 25. 

Sonita Alizada is a rapper who was born in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. At the age of 10, her family sold her into forced marriage, but the contract fell through. Her family fled the war in Afghanistan for Iran, where they lived as undocumented refugees. In Tehran, an NGO provided Alizada with access to education and a cleaning job. Her family tried again to sell her when she was 16, but she resisted. When Alizada stumbled upon a song by the rapper Eminem, she had an artistic breakthrough. She began writing to tell her story and to speak out against forced marriage and the plight of millions of children around the world. Her first single, “Daughters for Sale,” garnered worldwide attention. Having moved to the United States, she is now a Human Rights major studying law at Bard College. She plans to become a lawyer and to return to her country to defend Afghan women and children.

Alizada’s story is the subject of the award-winning documentary Sonita, directed by Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016.  Alizada has addressed the United Nations and other global forums to advocate against the practice of forced child marriage. She has be named as one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Global Thinkers of 2015, the BBC’s 100 Women of 2015, an Asia Societies Game Changer of 2017, a 2018 MTV Generation Change Award recipient, Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2019, and has been featured by CNN, NPR, BBC, Buzzfeed and over 150 publications in 20 countries.

About the Freedom Prize
The Freedom Prize is an educational initiative that aims to raise awareness of freedom, peace, and human rights, inspired by the values of the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944 in Normandy, France.   

The Freedom Prize invites young people aged 15 to 25 from France and around the world to choose an inspiring person or organization committed to an exemplary fight for freedom.   What makes the prize unique is that it involves young people at each stage: from the proposals submitted to the international panel of judges to the final selection of the winner.  

Organized by the Normandy for Peace Initiative, implemented with the International Institute of Human Rights and Peace, in partnership with the academic authorities of Normandy and the Canopé network, the Freedom Prize pays tribute to all those who have fought and continue to fight for this ideal.

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.

The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) has announced the launch of its third tuition-free microcollege, which will open in Harlem this fall. Culminating in associate degrees from Bard College, the Bard Microcollege for Just Community Leadership will enroll students who are formerly incarcerated or directly impacted by the justice system and others who aspire to careers in advocacy, community building, or social justice. Admission for the inaugural cohort begins in May.

The Bard Raptors swept a doubleheader at Vassar on Saturday, edging the Brewers, 5–4, in game 1, and rallying from six runs down to win game 2, 15–11. The deficit overcome to win game 2 was a Bard baseball record. Bard is 3–3 in the Liberty League and 4–6 overall. Bard College sophomore Joe Barcia was named Liberty League Baseball Rookie of the Week after his stunning performance in the series.

Women of Color United (WOCU) is a campus club created by and for, as the name suggests, women of color. Headed by a host of active and impressive women and femmes of center, Talaya Robinson-Dancy, Sage Swaby, Stecy Mbemba, Naty Rosario, and Luna Ramirez. They bring the spectrum of their expertise into the club experience as they attempt to curate a place where all can feel welcome.

Skye Carter interviewed Sage Swaby to ask about the club and how it has fared during COVID.

Being a club member myself, I wanted to ask you how or if WOCU’s definition and mission has changed over time? 

I know before me, I think it was called Colored Women United, and that changed as soon as I got here, my freshman year. I remember when I joined, I roughly knew their mission as being a safe space for women of color on campus to come together, build community, have fun, and talk about things we can’t talk about with the wider population of the school. I honestly believe that the mission statement, to my understanding and how I interpret it, has never really changed much, it’s always been about creating a safe space, making sure that all the women on campus know they can come to WOCU meetings, find somewhere they can feel loved, feel safe, and find someone who can support them in all their endeavors. I also feel like the club isn’t exclusive to women of color if that makes sense. We’ve had members who were non-binary come to our meetings and have a really great experience. And while the club is specified as Women of Color United, it is great to know that people who aren’t women also feel welcome into the family of the club and the space that we have. 

How has it been to work during COVID? 

Before COVID, everyone looked forward to those two hours.  I remember the room used to be packed. There was just a lot of love in the room. I feel like over Zoom, while you can feel the love, it was just really hard. We saw a smaller attendance of course. People are really struggling and dealing with life because of COVID. It was really hard to navigate that.  

Some people didn’t come back to Bard physically, so now we have some people at home and some on campus. Even when we were doing meetings in person we had people request Zoom during our meetings. How is that gonna work? Will everyone be able to hear each other? So that was definitely a difficulty.  We were also aware of how COVID was affecting everyone’s lives and didn’t pressure people to attend meetings or have the same leadership capabilities as they did before COVID. 

Do you feel like your identity is present in how you run the club?

I think when I joined the club I felt seen. I just remember feeling seen.  Within the first five minutes of being in the room,  it was such a great energy. There was so much love in the room. Even if we didn’t know each other, it just seemed like everyone was very friendly with one another. If I was not an active part of that club I definitely would not have the friends I have today. I owe a lot to that energy. I think as a woman, and as a dark-skinned Black woman, I felt seen. On campus it felt like if ever I needed to have a conversation that centered around my identity I wondered, “Who can I talk to about this?” I knew I could talk about that in the club. I knew I would be seen and that others would have similar, or even the same experience as me.  When I became the club head I wanted to echo that energy. I wanted students who are coming up to feel the same way I did.  The word “safe space” can be so wishy-washy. But it’s what I mean.

A safe space isn’t devoid of conflict or devoid of issues. But it is a space where you can voice that conflict and voice those issues. That’s what I want WOCU to be about, coming into the room and speaking on what you want to speak about and having people hear and respond to you.  Hopefully, you’ll walk away feeling like you had a well-rounded conversation that was needed and necessary.

Are you looking forward to the next generation of leaders to take over the club? 

Oh definitely! We don’t know exactly who will take over the club. I do know from the freshman women that I’ve spoken to that there are so many great people on campus. I could see them being potential co-heads of WOCU and doing the leadership positions with so much justice. 

Thank you, Sage, for talking with me today! I can’t wait to see what WOCU has on the horizon. 
 

Three members of the Bard College undergraduate faculty have been honored with the American Philosophical Society’s Franklin Research Grant, given annually to support the cost of noncommercial research leading to publication: Franco Baldasso, assistant professor of Italian, for his book project Against Redemption: Democracy, Memory, and Literature in Post-fascist Italy, which challenges the received categories of cultural analysis of the period to focus on the role of literature in institutionalizing collective memory; Artist in Residence Adriane Colburn, for The Divining Forest, a suite of artworks that explores the poetics of scientific fieldwork being conducted in the dense and biodiverse environment of a tropical forest; and James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, to support research connected to his forthcoming book The Sacred Band, which involves the Theban hegemony of 379–362 BC, during which Thebes played a leading role in central Greek affairs and defeated the army of Sparta by deploying a corps made up of 300 male lovers—the Sacred Band of Thebes.

The Bridgeway Foundation—the philanthropic arm of Bridgeway Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund with investments in oil and pharmaceuticals—has moved beyond documenting atrocities in Central Africa to endeavoring to stop them militarily, writes Epstein in the Nation. “Bridgeway’s unusual approach is in line with ideas advanced by supporters of muscular humanitarianism around the turn of the 21st century who claimed that some atrocities, such as genocide, are so evil that they justify an armed response. . . . In 2005, the United Nations unanimously endorsed this concept, calling it the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P. The problem with R2P is that it doesn’t include a prior obligation to understand the conflicts waded into. What might look from Washington, D.C., or Texas like a simple contest between good and evil will inevitably be a more complicated fight on the ground.”

Comprising 150 male couples, Thebes’s Sacred Band was undefeated until it was wiped out in 338 B.C. The warriors’ valor, the Greeks believed, was due to the fact that no man would ever exhibit cowardice in front of his beloved. In the 19th century, their mass grave was found. Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities Daniel Mendelsohn pens this article in the New Yorker ahead of the publication of a new book by James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics James Romm, The Sacred Band: Three Hundred Theban Lovers Fighting to Save Greek Freedom (Simon and Schuster, June 2021). Read the Article
 
Bard faculty member and Princeton alum James Romm speaks with the Princeton Alumni Weekly about the new book and his work to bring the heroism of Ancient Thebes to light. Read the Interview
 

South Louisiana contains around half of the country’s wetlands—and accounts for almost 90 percent of the country’s wetland losses. Bard alumna Virginia Hanusik ’14, a New Orleans–based photographer whose work centers on climate change and environmental justice, documents Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands in this National Geographic feature on the “Amazon of North America.”

Crip Time—a meditation on the task of organizing weekly medications and pills—explores cinematic time and the essential work of care. “It is a durational work, and duration plays a large part in my practice,” says Lazard. “My own interests in terms of the medium of video have a lot to do with video’s capacity to represent real time, a kind of duration that matches with our lived experience. I think it is really different from how we normally relate to video or cinema, in which we’re often put into a temporal pace that is accelerated and manipulated. And I think slowness has a lot to do with the mundane in some ways because our lives are made up of myriad slow experiences that are the foundation of keeping us alive.”

A growing body of evidence suggests that biodiversity loss increases exposure to both new and established zoonotic pathogens. Restoring and protecting nature is essential to preventing future pandemics.

So reports a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper that synthesizes current understanding about how biodiversity affects human health and provides recommendations for future research to guide management. The research is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Lead author Felicia Keesing of Bard College and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies says, "There's a persistent myth that wild areas with high levels of biodiversity are hotspots for disease. More animal diversity must equal more dangerous pathogens. But that turns out to be wrong. Biodiversity isn't a threat to us; it's actually protecting us from the species most likely to make us sick."

Olga Touloumi, assistant professor of architectural history at Bard College, has been awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend to support her scholarly book project The Global Interior: Modern Architecture and the Ordering of the World. Professor Touloumi joins other NEH Summer Stipends awardees in pursuing advanced, new research recognized to be of value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both.

David Ungvary, assistant professor of classics, has been selected to receive Harvard University’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship for the 2021–22 academic year. This highly competitive fellowship supports major research and publications in classical studies, and will allow Professor Ungvary to complete his first monograph, The Poetics of Asceticism in Late Antique Gaul, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. The book provides an original history of provincial Christian Latin authors of the fifth century CE, composing amid “the fall of the Roman Empire,” who responded to political instability with poetic performances of strict religious discipline.

Diplomat in Residence Frederic C. Hof, who served as ambassador and special adviser for transition in Syria under Barack Obama, revisits his one-on-one meeting with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in February 2011: “One of the more memorable things I experienced during my attempt to mediate Syria-Israel peace a decade ago was listening to the president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, explain to me why Hezbollah’s post-May 2000 justification for keeping its arms—its claim that Israel was still occupying Lebanese land in the ‘Shebaa Farms’ and ‘Kfar Shuba Hills’—was false. His explanation was straightforward: The land in question was Syrian.”

College Raises Additional $250 Million in Response as Part of a $1 Billion Endowment Drive

Bard College has announced a transformational $500 million endowment from philanthropist and long-time Bard supporter George Soros. This challenge grant — among the largest ever made to higher education in the United States — will facilitate and strengthen Bard’s exemplary educational and social initiatives, establish the College’s most substantial endowment ever, and set the stage for a $1 billion endowment drive. In response to Mr. Soros’s generous challenge grant, Bard announced it has raised an additional $250 million from supporters, including trustees, alumni/ae, and friends, and will raise another $250 million over the next five years.  

“This is the most historic moment since the college’s founding in 1860,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “When this endowment drive is complete, Bard will have a $1 billion endowment, which will ensure its pioneering mission and its academic excellence for the future.” Botstein said, adding, “Bard has played an innovative and progressive role in American education without any historical wealth; it will continue to do so with this new and highly competitive endowment, to ensure equity in financial aid, reform the relationship between higher education and secondary education, promote international education, and defend the arts, the humanities and basic science as the essence of the liberal arts.”

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Bard is widely recognized for its excellence in undergraduate education and rigorous liberal arts curriculum, its emphasis on the arts, and civic engagement. Over the last four decades, the College has created pioneering initiatives such as the Bard Early Colleges, the Bard Prison Initiative, and international partnerships such as Al-Quds Bard and the American University of Central Asia, all of which broaden access to higher education for underserved communities. 

Mr. Soros’s visionary support of Bard’s role as one of two founding partners of the new Open Society University Network, a global network of educational institutions created with the Central European University in partnership with Mr. Soros’s Open Society Foundations, has permitted the College to expand and strengthen the College’s pathbreaking network of domestic and international partnerships. 

“Bard has had an outsized impact, setting the standard in liberal arts education in prisons, in high school age students, and in the arts and in its international work,” said Mr. Soros.

This endowment pledge from Mr. Soros, along with Bard’s matching contributions, will endow the College’s full array of student financial aid, faculty, and programs; enable the College to sustain its mission and to grow its international profile; and begin its endowment drive with $750 million.

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.
 

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded five Bard faculty and Bard MFA faculty and graduates 2021 Guggenheim Fellowships. Bard Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, Bard MFA faculty Roberto Tejada and A.K. Burns MFA ’10, and MFA graduates Luba Drozd MFA ’15 and Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 were named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows. Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 3,000 applicants, Asili, Tejada, Burns, Drozd, and Lusztig were among a diverse group of 184 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2021 Fellowship.

“We are delighted and impressed that so many Bard MFA alums and faculty have been named 2021 Guggenheim Fellows,” said Hannah Barrett, director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. “The Milton Avery School for the Arts wishes to congratulate these faculty and alumni on their 2021 Guggenheim awards. Their recognition is richly deserved and we will follow their careers with pride and admiration.”

“As an experimental filmmaker, our colleague Ephraim Asili has won critical acclaim for The Diaspora Suite (2017), an ambitious cycle of 16 mm short films, and most recently his feature-length The Inheritance (2020), a poetic meditation on history, politics, art, and Black liberation,” said Bard’s Dean of the College, Deirdre d’Albertis. “Asili's presence on the faculty of Bard’s Film and Electronic Arts Program represents for our students both deep continuity with Bard's storied past as a haven for artistic experimentation and a stunningly contemporary approach to documentary and narrative with full awareness of the urgency of our present moment.”

“I am thrilled to announce this new group of Guggenheim Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, “especially since this has been a devastating year in so many ways. A Guggenheim Fellowship has always been meaningful, but this year we know it will be a lifeline for many of the new Fellows at a time of great hardship, a survival tool as well as a creative one. The work supported by the Fellowship will help us understand more deeply what we are enduring individually and collectively, and it is an honor for the Foundation to help them do what they were meant to do.”

Created in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the Guggenheim Foundation has offered fellowships to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions. The great range of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. In all, 49 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 73 different academic institutions, 28 states and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 60 Fellows have no full-time college or university affiliation. Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. For more information on the 2021 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11 is a filmmaker, artist, educator and DJ whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His award-winning films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA PS1, LAMOCA, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Whitney Museum, and The Barbican Center in London. Asili's 2020 feature debut, The Inheritance, premiered at the 2020 Toronto International film festival and was recently acquired for distribution by Grasshopper Films. As a DJ, Asili has been a regular program host on WGXC, and done guest sets for NTS Radio, Afropop Worldwide, and WFMU. He also hosts a monthly dance party Botanica. Asili currently resides in Hudson, NY, and is a professor in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard.

Roberto Tejada, Bard MFA writing faculty, is the author of poetry collections Full Foreground (Arizona, 2012), Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), Mirrors for Gold  (Krupskaya, 2006), Todo en el ahora (Libros Magenta, 2015), selected poems in Spanish translation, and a LatinX poetics of the Americas, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019). He is the author of art histories that include National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009), Celia Alvarez Muñoz (Minnesota, 2009), and with Michelle White and others the co-author of Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021) He is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and Art History at the University of Houston.

A.K. Burns MFA ’10, Bard MFA film & video faculty, is an interdisciplinary artist who views the body as a contentious domain wherein issues of gender, labor, ecology and sexuality are negotiated. Burns is currently producing Negative Space, a cycle of video-installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The opening episode, A Smeary Spot (2015) debuted at Participant Inc., NY, followed by an exhibition at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR, in 2016. The second in this series, titled Living Room (2017) debut at the New Museum, and was subsequently exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia in 2018. Additionally in 2018 Burns exhibited a new video work titled Survivors Remorse (2018) at the Harvard Museum and a public sculpture The Dispossessed (2018) at the FRONT International Cleveland Triennial. As a frequent collaborator and advocate for labor issues in the Arts, Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Great Economy) in 2008. Burns’ works can be found in public collations including the Museum of Modern Art, NY and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was also a 2018 NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Arts, a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University as well as a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award.

Irene Lusztig MFA ’06 is a filmmaker, visual artist, and archival researcher. She is a professor, Film & Digital Media, and director, Center for Documentary Arts & Research (CDAR), at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Her film and video work mines old images, technologies, and objects for new meanings in order to reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of her work is centered on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001), the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013), the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011), and her newest performative documentary feature Yours in Sisterhood (2018). Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and RIDM Montréal, and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She was the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal.

Luba Drozd MFA ’15 is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist. She earned a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Bard College. Her films and installations articulate the absurd in the established exploitative social structures and demonstrate how the systems of control are manifested and echoed in restrictive architectural environments. Luba’s works screened at Smack Mellon, Apexart, Anthology Film Archives, the New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center and Art in General. She is a 2015 Media Arts fellow at BRIC in Brooklyn, NY. In 2020, Drozd was featured by the New York Post as “hero of the day” and highlighted in the New York Times for her work making and distributing face shields for hospital workers in the early weeks of the pandemic. Drozd is a recipient of the 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Arts. Her two-room site specific sound, sculpture, and 3D animation installation piece, “The Aesthetic Limits of Water,” was commissioned and exhibited by the Hessel Museum in 2020.

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.(4/09/21)
 

“On April 13, 1941, Japan’s foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, and the Soviet commissar of foreign affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a neutrality pact, valid for five years. Although less notorious than the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviets and the Nazis, which plunged Europe into war, the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact had similar consequences in Asia,” writes Sean McMeekin in the Wall Street Journal. “As the London News Chronicle observed in reporting on the agreement: ‘What better guarantee [for Stalin] against Japanese hostility than that Japan turn south and cross swords with the United States? Moscow will feel secure in the Far East only when the Japanese and American navies engage.’”

A growing body of evidence suggests that biodiversity loss increases our exposure to both new and established zoonotic pathogens. Restoring and protecting nature is essential to preventing future pandemics. So reports a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper that synthesizes current understanding about how biodiversity affects human health and provides recommendations for future research to guide management. To read the PNAS paper, please click here.

Lead author Felicia Keesing is a professor at Bard College and a Visiting Scientist at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. She explains, “There's a persistent myth that wild areas with high levels of biodiversity are hotspots for disease. More animal diversity must equal more dangerous pathogens. But this turns out to be wrong. Biodiversity isn't a threat to us, it’s actually protecting us from the species most likely to make us sick.”

Zoonotic diseases like COVID-19, SARS, and Ebola are caused by pathogens that are shared between humans and other vertebrate animals. But animal species differ in their ability to pass along pathogens that make us sick.

Rick Ostfeld is a disease ecologist at Cary Institute and a co-author on the paper. He explains, “Research is mounting that species that thrive in developed and degraded landscapes are often much more efficient at harboring pathogens and transmitting them to people. In less-disturbed landscapes with more animal diversity, these risky reservoirs are less abundant and biodiversity has a protective effect.”

Rodents, bats, primates, cloven-hooved mammals like sheep and deer, and carnivores have been flagged as the mammal taxa most likely to transmit pathogens to humans. Keesing and Ostfeld note, "The next emerging pathogen is far more likely to come from a rat than a rhino.”

This is because animals with fast life histories tend to be more efficient at transmitting pathogens. Keesing explains, “Animals that live fast, die young, and have early sexual maturity with lots of offspring tend to invest less in their adaptive immune responses. They are often better at transmitting diseases, compared to longer-lived animals with stronger adaptive immunity.”

When biodiversity is lost from ecological communities, long-lived, larger-bodied species tend to disappear first, while smaller-bodied species with fast life histories tend to proliferate. Research has found that mammal hosts of zoonotic viruses are less likely to be species of conservation concern (i.e. they are more common), and that for both mammals and birds, human development tends to increase the abundance of zoonotic host species, bringing people and risky animals closer together.

“When we erode biodiversity, we favor species that are more likely to be zoonotic hosts, increasing our risk of spillover events,” Ostfeld notes. Adding that, “Managing this risk will require a better understanding of how things like habitat conversion, climate change, and overharvesting affect zoonotic hosts, and how restoring biodiversity to degraded areas might reduce their abundance.”

To predict and prevent spillover, Keesing and Ostfeld highlight the need to focus on host attributes associated with disease transmission rather than continuing to debate the prime importance of one taxon or another. Ostfeld explains, “We should stop assuming that there is a single animal source for each emerging pathogen. The pathogens that jump from animals to people tend to be found in many animal species, not just one. They’re jumpers, after all, and they typically move between species readily.”

Disentangling the characteristics of effective zoonotic hosts – such as their immune strategies, resilience to disturbance, and habitat preferences – is key to protecting public health. Forecasting the locations where these species thrive, and where pathogen transmission and emergence are likely, can guide targeted interventions.

Keesing notes, “Restoration of biodiversity is an important frontier in the management of zoonotic disease risk. Those pathogens that do spill over to infect humans—zoonotic pathogens—often proliferate as a result of human impacts.” Concluding, “As we rebuild our communities after COVID-19, we need to have firmly in mind that one of our best strategies to prevent future pandemics is to protect, preserve, and restore biodiversity.”

This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Grant OPUS 1948419 to Keesing.

Felicia Keesing, David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, has been on the Bard faculty since 2000. She has a B.S. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1995, she has studied how African savannas function when the large, charismatic animals like elephants, buffaloes, zebras, and giraffes disappear. She also studies how interactions among species influence the probability that humans will be exposed to infectious diseases. Keesing also studies Lyme disease, another tick-borne disease. She is particularly interested in how species diversity affects disease transmission. More recently, she has focused on science literacy for college students, and she led the re-design of Bard College’s Citizen Science program. Keesing has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among others. She has been awarded the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2000). She is the coeditor of Infectious Disease Ecology: Effects of Ecosystems on Disease and of Disease on Ecosystems (2008) and has contributed to such publications as Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecology Letters, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Ecology, BioScience, Conservation Biology, and Trends in Ecology & Evolution, among others.(4.5.21)
 

“We’re facing an existential crisis in our lives, and loneliness often appears when people are hungry for meaning. When people talk about loneliness, they’re often actually talking about social isolation. But they’re not the same thing, and I think this is kind of a dangerous way to understand loneliness.” Speaking on NPR’s To the Best of Our Knowledge, Professor Hill drew on Hannah Arendt’s 1951 On the Origins of Totalitarianism to describe a form of “organized loneliness” that, today, we see “not in totalitarianism but in tyrannical thinking. We see it in the emergence of populism from the left and the right. And we see it in the Republican Party, which is comfortable rejecting the facts of science in the face of a deadly pandemic, and where the president of the United States is unable to accept the reality of electoral defeat.”

Public conversation about the pandemic has revolved around individual choice, autonomy, safety, and personal responsibility. Schools expose the shortcomings of this framing, writes Distinguished Writer in Residence Masha Gessen. “In late March, New York’s public high schools reopened for in-person instruction. Elementary schools have been offering some in-person instruction since December, middle schools since February. The country’s largest school district has managed to provide more in-school hours than many other districts that might have seemed better equipped for the task. But, nearly three months after vaccines became available to teachers, fewer than half—around sixty-five thousand, out of approximately a hundred and forty-seven thousand Department of Education employees—have received at least a first shot of the vaccine.”

“In world historical terms, the birth of India and Pakistan as separate countries, and the subsequent break-up of Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh, were the result of the emergence of the nation-state as the new global norm of political organisation. But as thinkers such as Hannah Arendt have warned us, the formation of new states is almost always a refugee-generating process.” That there are migration flows across the Partition border even after seven decades wouldn’t surprise many historians, says Baruah. “Partition was not a conclusive one-time event; it has been a protracted and long-drawn-out affair.

The Wolf Trap Foundation has awarded grants to eight high schools across metropolitan Washington, DC, to fund music, dance, or theater projects, as part of the foundation’s Grants for High School Performing Arts Teachers Program. BHSEC DC’s winning proposal, “Shades of Sound: Understanding Diversity within Different Musical Settings,” was submitted by teacher John Peasant Jr. Through a series of performances and professional lectures from local artists, students will gain insight into how musicians of color navigate the professional music industry. These conversations will compare and contrast varied musical genres while exploring the rich music community in Washington, DC. Follow their progress via Wolf Trap Virtual Stage.

Preliminary conference program:

29th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference on the State of the U.S. and World Economies

Prospects and Challenges for the US and Europe in an Emerging Post-Pandemic Recovery
 

Wednesday, April 17

 

9:15–9:30 a.m.	Welcome and Introduction
	Dimitri Papadimitriou, President, Levy Institute
9:30–10:30 a.m.	Speaker
	Charles Evans, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
	MODERATOR: Binyamin Appelbaum, Editorial Board Member, New York Times
10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m.	Session 1. PROSPECTS FOR REFORMING THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM
	MODERATOR: TBA
	SPEAKERS: Charles Goodhart, Emeritus Professor of Banking and Finance, London School of Economics
	Paolo Savona, Chairman, CONSOB
	Jan Kregel, Director of Research, Levy Institute
12:00–1:00 p.m.	Speaker
	Robert Barbera, Director, J.H.U. Center for Financial Economics; Economics Department Fellow, The Johns Hopkins University
1:00–2:30 p.m.	Session 2. WHAT'S AHEAD FOR THE US ECONOMY
	MODERATOR: Robert Huebscher, Advisor Perspectives
	SPEAKERS: Lakshman Achuthan, Cofounder and Chief Operations Officer, Economic Cycle Research Institute
	Michalis Nikiforos, Research Scholar, Levy Institute; Professor University of Geneva
	Frank Veneroso, President, Veneroso Associates, LLC
2:30–4:00 p.m.	Session 3. ECONOMIC POLICY FOR THE NEW ADMINISTRATION
	MODERATOR: David P. Henry, Reuters
	SPEAKERS: Jason Furman, Aetna Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and the Department of Economics at Harvard University
	Bruce Greenwald, Professor, Columbia Business School
	L. Randall Wray, Senior Scholar, Levy Institute; Professor, Bard College
Thursday, May 6, 2021
10:00–11:00 a.m.	Speaker
	Robert Kaplan, President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
	MODERATOR: Deborah Solomon, Economics Editor, New York Times
11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.	Session 4. FINANCIAL GOVERNANCE AND REGULATION
	MODERATOR: Peter Coy, Bloomberg
	SPEAKERS: Michael Greenberger, Professor, University of Maryland Law School
	Kathryn Judge, Harvey J. Goldschmid Professor of Law, Columbia Law School
	Patricia McCoy, Liberty Mutual Insurance Professor, Boston College Law School
12:30–2:30 p.m.	Session 5. US FINANCIAL MARKET INSTABILITY
	MODERATOR: Jeanna Smialek, New York Times
	SPEAKERS: Jan Hatzius, Chief Economist, Goldman Sachs
	Bruce Kasman, Managing Director and Head of Economic Research, JP Morgan
	James Paulsen, Chief Investment Strategist, The Leuthold Group, LLC
2:30–3:30 p.m.	Session 6. WHAT'S AHEAD FOR EUROPE
	MODERATOR: Dimitri Papadimitriou, Levy Institute
	Lex Hoogduin, Professor, Groningen University, the Netherlands; Founder, GloComNet
	Denis MacShane, Former UK Europe Minister; Senior Advisor, Avisa Partners
	Gennaro Zezza, Research Scholar, Levy Institute; Professor, University of Cassino

Press registrations should be made by calling Mark Primoff at 845-758-7412 or BY sending an email to primoff@bard.edu.(4.12.21)

 

In the show Brand New Heavies at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, three female artists answer the curators’ invitation “to do stuff they haven’t been able to do” elsewhere. For Bard MFA alumna Xaviera Simmons—whose practice includes photography, performance, and sculpture—the show was a chance to try a new medium, ceramics. She has built a 15-foot edifice of clay spheres fired at high heat; two video works are shown within, one didactic, the other brashly sensual.

“Nepal has reopened Mount Everest and its seven other 26,200-foot-plus peaks in the hope of a mountain-climbing rebound,” reports Schmall from Kathmandu. The tiny Himalayan country was forced to close trails last year, dealing its economy a devastating blow. For this year’s climbing season, from March to May, Nepal has granted more than 300 climbers the licenses needed to ascend Mount Everest. But the pandemic has made the already deadly climb—traffic on Everest contributed to 11 deaths in 2019—even more hazardous. But Nepal, one of the poorest countries in Asia, is taking a calculated risk. “In 2019, tourism brought in $2 billion in revenue and employed about a million people,” writes Schmall. “For tens of thousands of Nepalis, the three-month climbing season is the only opportunity for paid work.” At least 1.5 million people in the country of 30 million lost jobs or substantial income during the pandemic.