Bard News

Bard College Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts Joan Tower has been honored with one of the music industry’s most prestigious awards: Musical America’s Composer of the Year. “Trained in an era when academic modernism reigned, she developed from a composer of intensely wrought chamber works into a creator of dramatic orchestral music that can only be described as, well, towering,” writes Musical America. The award will be presented at the 59th Annual Musical America Awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall in December.

Tower is widely regarded as one of the most important American composers living today. During a career spanning more than fifty years, she has made lasting contributions to musical life in the United States as composer, performer, conductor, and educator.

She was also recently awarded Chamber Music of America’s Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award, which recognizes an individual or entity that has made a significant contribution to the ensemble music field on a national level and spanning an entire career. Earlier this year the League of American Orchestras presented Tower with its highest honor, the Gold Baton, at the league’s 74th national conference.

“It has been quite the year for me—three huge awards from the music industry. At 81, its very welcomed!” says Tower. “I’ve also been invited to be inducted into the Classical Music Hall of Fame, and to archive all my works at the Library of Congress, so it’s been a very momentous year.”

Tower has been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for a new work to debut in a future season. 

She is currently Asher Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College, where she has taught since 1972.

About the Artist

Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of the most important American composers living today. During a career spanning more than fifty years, she has made lasting contributions to musical life in the United States as composer, performer, conductor, and educator. Her works have been commissioned by major ensembles, soloists, and orchestras, including the Emerson, Tokyo, and Muir quartets; soloists Evelyn Glennie, Carol Wincenc, David Shifrin, Paul Neubauer, and John Browning; and the orchestras of Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Nashville, Albany NY, and Washington DC among others. In 2019 the League of American Orchestras awarded her its highest honor, the Gold Baton, at the League's 74th national conference. Tower is the first composer chosen for a Ford Made in America consortium commission of sixty-five orchestras. Leonard Slatkin and the Nashville Symphony recorded Made in America in 2008 (along with Tambor and Concerto for Orchestra).
 
The album collected three Grammy awards: Best Contemporary Classical Composition, Best Classical Album, and Best Orchestral Performance. Nashville’s latest all-Tower recording includes Stroke, which received a 2016 Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. In 1990 she became the first woman to win the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Silver Ladders, a piece she wrote for the St. Louis Symphony where she was Composer-in-Residence from 1985-88. Other residencies with orchestras include a 10-year residency with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (1997-2007) and the Pittsburgh Symphony (2010-11). She was the Albany Symphony’s Mentor Composer partner in the 2013-14 season. Tower was cofounder and pianist for the Naumburg Award winning Da Capo Chamber Players from 1970-85. She has received honorary doctorates from Smith College, the New England Conservatory, and Illinois State University. She is Asher Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College, where she has taught since 1972.

In Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, Farrow—who, in reporting for the New Yorker, shared a Pulitzer Prize last year with the New York Times for investigations into sexual harassment in the workplace—details the extraordinary lengths some of the world’s most powerful people, including Harvey Weinstein, go to protect themselves: silencing their accusers, intimidating journalists, and more.

“Kingston is experiencing rapid change right now, so I see that it could head in several different directions,” says Fiori. “What I would like to see in five years is a truly diverse and inclusive community, where currently underrepresented communities occupy positions of power throughout the power structure.”

In its review of the Freehand New York, Business Insider points to the hotel’s abundant art—commissioned from students and alumni/ae of Bard College for its public spaces, corridors, and all 395 guest rooms—as its not-to-be-missed feature. “Take time to explore,” their critic writes, “and appreciate the fact that you’re practically living in a gallery.”

New Faculty Chairs and Distinguished Professorships include Susan Aberth in Art History, Valeria Luiselli in Written Arts, Kelly Reichardt in Film and Electronic Arts, and An-My Lê in Photography

Bard College has appointed four new chairs and distinguished professorships across disciplines this fall. In the Division of the Arts’ Art History and Visual Culture Program, Susan Aberth has been named Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History. This chair was formerly held by Jean French. In the Division of Languages and Literature’s Written Arts Program, Valeria Luiselli has been named Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. In the Division of the Arts’ Film and Electronic Arts Program, Kelly Reichardt has been named S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence. In the Division of the Arts’ Photography Program, An-My Lê has been named Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts. This chair was formerly held by Peter Hutton.

Susan Aberth is an art historian whose area of specialization is surrealism in Latin America. Aberth’s teaching interests focus on Latin American art, African art, Islamic art, and other religious art and practices. Additional interests include African religious practices in the Americas, and the art and iconography of Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and the occult. In addition to her 2004 book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries), she has contributed to Seeking the Marvelous: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (Fulgur Press, 2020), Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos mágicos (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Black Mirror, and the Journal of Surrealism of the Americas. She received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles; MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Aberth has been at Bard since 2000.

Valeria Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. A 2019 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is the author of the novels Lost Children Archive (2019); The Story of My Teeth (2015), named Best Book in Fiction by the Los Angeles Times and one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and Faces in the Crowd (2014), for which she received a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” prize, among other honors. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Question, a nonfiction work published in 2017, won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle and Kirkus Prize finalist. Other nonfiction publications include “Maps of Harlem,” in Where You Are; and Sidewalks, a collection of essays that was named one of the 10 best books of 2014 by New York. Recent journal, newspaper, and radio work has appeared in the New York Times (“The Littlest Don Quixotes versus the World”), Guardian (“Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry”), Outlook Interview Series, BBC World Services (“Undocumented Central American Minors”), Harper’s Trump special (“Terrorist and Alien”), and NPR’s This American Life (“The Questionnaire”), among others. Honors also include an Art for Justice Fellowship (2018–19) and residencies at Under the Volcano, USA-Mexico; Poets House, New York City; and Castello di Fosdinovo, Italy. She previously taught at Hofstra University, City College, the New York University MFA Writing Program in Paris, and Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. Luiselli founded the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association at Hofstra in 2015, a program that offers continuous support to immigrant and refugee teens through one-on-one English classes, soccer games, and civil rights education. She is a member of PEN America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She received her BA from UNAM in Mexico, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. She has been at Bard since 2019.

Kelly Reichardt is a filmmaker whose latest film, Certain Women—starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone—premiered in 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival and won the top award at the London Film Festival. Her other films include: Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy (2006), and River of Grass (1994). Her film First Cow is currently in postproduction. Reichardt has received the United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at the Whitney Biennial (2012), Film Forum, Cannes Film Festival in “un certain regard,” Venice International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and BFI London Film Festival. She has had retrospectives at the Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the Moving Image, Walker Art Center, and American Cinematheque Los Angeles. Reichardt received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University. She has taught at Bard College since 2006.

An-My Lê is a photographer who was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960, but left that country during the final year of the war in 1975 and subsequently found a home as a political refugee in the United States. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1993. Her film and photography examine the effects and representation of war and have included the documentation of (and participation in) Vietnam War reenactments in South Carolina. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, and has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and MoMA PS1. An-My has been teaching at Bard since 1999.

Whether or not President Trump explicitly “greenlighted” a Turkish invasion of Kurdish areas in northern Syria, writes Hof, he erred significantly by leaving his Turkish counterpart with the impression that the United States would not materially oppose a Turkish invasion. “The president would have been well-advised to object strenuously to an invasion on the grounds that the preliminary victory over ISIS could be undone, and a pathway cleared for the regime and Iran to take territories liberated at great cost from ISIS by an American-led coalition.”

Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts and one of America’s most significant living composers, was recognized by Musical America for her artistic excellence and achievement in the arts. The award will be presented at the 59th Annual Musical America Awards ceremony at Carnegie Hall in December.

How can established powers manage the peaceful rise of new great powers? Professor Murray argues that power transitions are principally social phenomena, whereby rising powers struggle to obtain recognition as world powers. She examines a moment at the turn of the 20th century, when two rising states—the United States and Imperial Germany—looked to the established powers to recognize their status.

“On the whole, Williams’s book is more rigorous than mournful, an account of solutions more than of problems,” writes the Times’s Andrew Solomon. “At a time of increasing division, his philosophizing evinces an underlying generosity. He reaches both ways across the aisle of racism, arguing above all for reciprocity, and in doing so begins to theorize the temperate peace of which all humanity is sorely in need.”

In addition to a solo turn at London’s Pilar Corrias Gallery, Self is included in the group show Rock My Soul at Victoria Miro, which features works by renowned black women artists Sonia Boyce, Frida Orupabo, Howardena Pindell, and Betye Saar, among others. Through November 2.

On Monday, October 7, four cadets from the United States Military Academy at West Point joined four members of the Bard Debate Union for a public debate on whether the U.S. prison system should be abolished or reformed. The debate served as an opening event for the annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference, "Racism and Antisemitism," which takes place Thursday and Friday, October 10–11. West Point argued in favor of prison reform, while the Bard team argued in favor of abolishing prisons, drawing upon key arguments about institutionalized racism and criminal justice from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness.

The debate was moderated by Dyjuan Tatro '18, a Bard alumnus who began his college career with the Bard Prison Initiative while incarcerated, completed his degree at Bard College in Annandale, and now serves as BPI's government affairs and advancement officer. Dyjuan was also a member of the famous BPI Debate Union team that defeated Harvard in 2015 and is featured in the upcoming PBS documentary College Behind Bars, directed by Lynn Novick and executive produced by Ken Burns. This four-part series follows a dedicated group of BPI students as they pursue their educations while incarcerated. The film is currently in previews and will air and stream on PBS on November 25 and 26.
 

James Beard Award–winning Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge reservation and founder of the company The Sioux Chef, is committed to revitalizing Native American cuisine. Chef Sean comes to the Fisher Center to discuss The (R)evolution of Indigenous Food Systems of North America, Tuesday, October 29, in the LUMA Theater at 5 p.m. The talk will be followed by a question and answer period and book signing. Admission is free; to reserve tickets and for additional information visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900.

Through his research Chef Sean has uncovered and mapped out the foundations of the indigenous food systems through an indigenous perspective. His book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen, earned a 2018 James Beard Award and was a top 10 cookbook of 2017. He has become renowned nationally and internationally in the culinary movement of indigenous foods and is leading a movement to completely redefine North American cuisine.

Copies of The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen will be available for purchase in the lobby of LUMA Theater courtesy of Oblong Books. In addition, Ken Greene from Seedshed will be showcasing Haudenosaunee crops grown in the Native American Seed Sanctuary, a collaborative initiative with the St. Regis Mohawk tribe Seedshed and The Hudson Valley Farm Hub.

This event is sponsored by Bard College’s Center for the Study of Land, Air and Water, American Studies, Environmental and Urban Studies, Bard Farm, Bard Office of  Sustainability, Experimental Humanities, The Bard Center for Civic Engagement, Trustee Leader Scholar Program, and Oblong Books. The Fisher Center’s presentation of the event is in tandem with the upcoming Live Arts Bard Biennial, Where No Wall Remains: An International Festival About Borders, November 21–24, 2019.

Chef Sean Sherman, Oglala Lakota, born in Pine Ridge, SD, has been cooking across the US and Mexico over the past 30 years, and has become renowned nationally and internationally in the culinary movement of indigenous foods. Chef Sean has studied extensively to determine the foundations of Native American indigenous foods systems to bring back a sense of Native American cuisine to today’s world. In 2014, he opened the business titled The Sioux Chef as a caterer and food educator in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul area. He and his business partner Dana Thompson also designed and opened the Tatanka Truck, which featured pre-contact foods of the Dakota and Minnesota territories.  

In October 2017, Sean was able to perform the first decolonized dinner at the James Beard House in Manhattan along with his team. His first book, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen was awarded the James Beard medal for Best American Cookbook for 2018 and was chosen as one of the top ten cookbooks of 2017 by the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, as well as the Smithsonian Magazine. This year, Chef Sean was selected as a Bush Fellow, as well as receiving the 2019 Leadership Award by the James Beard Foundation. The Sioux Chef team of twelve people continues with their mission to help educate and make indigenous foods more accessible to as many communities as possible through the recently founded nonprofit North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems (NATIFS). Learn more: natifs.org.

The Fisher Center develops, produces, and presents performing arts across disciplines through new productions and context-rich programs that challenge and inspire. At once a premier professional performing arts center and a hub for research and education, the Fisher Center supports artists, students, and audiences in the development and examination of artistic ideas and perspectives from the past, present, and future. The organization’s home is the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Frank Gehry and located on the campus of Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Fisher Center offers outstanding programs to many communities, including the students and faculty of Bard, and audiences in the Hudson Valley, New York City, across the country and around the world. The Fisher Center illustrates Bard’s commitment to the performing arts as a cultural and educational necessity. Building on a 150-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard is committed to enriching culture, public life, and democratic discourse by training tomorrow’s thought leaders.
 

Crocodile, Leidy Churchman’s first U.S. survey, is currently on view at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College through October 13.

By Alex Jen 
Hyperallergic

Curated by Lauren Cornell and including over 60 paintings of everything from the blue Maine coast to thickly laid abstractions to appropriations of other people’s art, Crocodile brims with a genuine curiosity and care. Churchman seems to be painting as a way to better comprehend his subjects; the canvases feel like dedications, striving to embody someone or something’s true nature. Many of the paintings feature animals, their expressions so coolly composed you can’t help but admire how well they seem to understand themselves.

Bard faculty members Marina van Zuylen and Daniel Terris spoke at "Educating for Freedom, for All," a forum marking the 75th Anniversary of the Teagle Foundation. The event featured leaders and fresh voices promoting equity in higher education. It took place on Thursday, October 3, at the Harold Pratt House in New York City. Daniel Terris, dean of the Al-Quds Bard College of Arts and Sciences in East Jerusalem, spoke on the panel "Opening Minds" on the topic of educating for citizenship. Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature at Bard College and national academic director of the Clemente Course in the Humanities, spoke on the panel "Liberal Arts for All" on how the humanities bring hope to adults in crisis.

The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) will present a special screening of the upcoming PBS documentary series College Behind Bars at Bard’s Fisher Center on Monday, October 21, at 5 pm. Directed by Lynn Novick, produced by Sarah Botstein, and executive-produced by Ken Burns, College Behind Bars explores the lives of several BPI students as they try to earn Bard College degrees through the program. Shot over four years in maximum and medium security prisons in New York State, the film reveals the power of higher education and raises two key questions: What is prison for? Who has access to educational opportunity?

The Bard Prison Initiative was founded in 1999 by undergraduates at Bard College responding a nationwide decimation of college-in-prison. After obtaining access to the New York State prison system and securing limited funding, then undergraduate Max Kenner ‘01 launched BPI as a pilot program with 15 students. Over the last twenty years, BPI has enrolled hundreds of incarcerated students and impacted thousands more. It has inspired similar programs across the country and persuaded government leaders to begin to reinvest in education in prison at every level. Most importantly, BPI alumni/ae are thriving – earning graduate degrees, establishing careers, and opening businesses.
 
This preview event will feature segments from the documentary followed by panel discussions with BPI alumni featured in the film, director Lynn Novick, producer Sarah Botstein, and BPI Executive Director Max Kenner ’01.
 
This screening is free and open to the public, reservations are strongly encouraged. For more information and to reserve tickets, call 845-758-7900 or visit fishercenter.bard.edu.

College Behind Bars is a production of Skiff Mountain Films, in association with Florentine Films. The four-part series airs on PBS November 25-26 and will be available to stream on the PBS Video App.
 

The Bard College Department of Athletics and Recreation, in partnership with Bard's Center for Civic Engagement, has announced the launch of an initiative to encourage greater participation and leadership in the area of civic and community engagement among student-athletes.

Launched on October 1, 2019, the Raptors Cup is an annual competition between Bard's 19 varsity programs. The name of the winning team will be engraved on the Raptors Cup each year, and the cup will be kept in the trophy case in the Stevenson Athletic Center.

Click here to get the Raptors Cup form.

The Student-Athlete Advisory Committee participated in establishing the goals of the program, which are meant to build the athletic community, inspire leadership and civic development among student-athletes, and to get everyone actively engaged in volunteer efforts, both on campus and off.

Student-athletes can collect points for their team in six value areas:

• Athletes Supporting Athletes
• Personal Development
• Civic Engagement and Community Service
• Team Development
• Student-Athlete Advisory Committee
• Above and Beyond

The 2019 LightField Arts exhibit, Photo + Synthesis, features Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis and Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse among seven artists selected to make or exhibit work focusing on the Hudson River Valley and climate change. The exhibition will be on view at Hudson Hall in Hudson, New York, October 12 to December 21, 2019.

The show draws a geographic line around the Hudson River Valley. In part this is to prompt a fresh look at the mythology of the Valley’s art, ecology, and history, but through the lens of our Anthropocene era. Works on exhibit include contemporary landscape photography, mid-19th century landscape painting, and data visualization art about tree ring science.

Participating artists contribute newly commissioned and existing work. The roster includes: Sarah Bird, Tim Davis, Christopher Griffith, Genevieve Hoffman, Tanya Marcuse, Daniel McCabe, Laura Plageman, and paintings by Hudson River School artists. Alongside these works, LightField exhibits the art produced in its annual Young Photographers Workshop.
 

Lauded around the world and in the New York Times as “one of the best new American plays of the last 25 years,” the Ars Nova Production of Underground Railroad Game comes to the Fisher Center’s LUMA Theater on October 9-12 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $25; to purchase tickets and get additional information go to fishercenter.bard.edu or call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900.

Underground Railroad Game is performed by the work’s creators, Jennifer Kidwell (last seen at the Fisher Center in the 2016 SummerScape production of Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed) and Scott R. Sheppard, who go round after round on the mat of our nation’s history, tackling race, sex, and power in this R-rated, kaleidoscopic, and fearless comedy. “This riveting, whip-smart performance piece... is as daringly unexpurgated as anything you’ll encounter onstage today,” writes Peter Marks in The Washington Post. “It’s an effort to reset the table for the complicated conversation about race that America eternally attempts to start, and always ends up recoiling from in guilt and insecurity and anger.” The play, inspired by an actual classroom game Sheppard experienced as a child in Hannover, PA, is a pointed and hilarious look at the legacy of slavery in America and how that legacy influences contemporary dialogues around race 400 years after the first enslaved peoples from Africa arrived on this continent.

Underground Railroad Game is written by Kidwell and Sheppard with Lightning Rod Special, directed by Taibi Magar, and produced by Octopus Theatricals. It is presented as part of Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center’s annual conference, Racism and Antisemitism.

“Explosive! Fearlessly, ferociously uninhibited . . . the show’s most subversive quality is also quintessentially American: it’s wildly entertaining.”—Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New Yorker

Underground Railroad Game contains sexually explicit material, strong language, and mature themes and is recommended for adventurous audiences ages 18 and up.

“Over a career that dates to the 1980s, including formative years in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the influential artist, curator and teacher (Blake chairs a joint master’s program run by Bard College and the International Center of Photography in New York) has become known for visceral works. These include performance, but also sculpture and assemblage that take everyday objects—shoes, toys, record albums, bondage gear—and uses them to pick apart social categories such as gender, race, queer sexuality and the fraught points at which they can meet.” The exhibition runs through January 26.

“What we wear tells the story of our times,” writes exhibition cocurator Maude Bass-Krueger, “from the tailored-suit wearing midinettes who went on strike in May 1917 asking for higher pay and a half-day off, to the overall-clad munitionnettes who replaced men in the factories. This narrative continues up to the blue jean and T-shirt-wearing youth at the Global Climate Strike.” On view through January 5.

Plans to build barriers in New York Harbor were set in motion by Superstorm Sandy, which in 2012 barreled up the East Coast, killing 72 people in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast and causing $65 billion in damage. To protect the metro area’s people and property from future Sandys, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has devised five possible schemes for erecting walls to hold back the sea during future catastrophic storms. But environmental advocates say such storm surge barriers will do nothing to shield against expected sea level rise from climate change and—judging by the impact of barriers elsewhere—may even destroy the ecological integrity of harbors they’re meant to protect. Science/nature writer and Bard alumna Elizabeth Royte ’81 talks to stakeholders on both sides of the debate.

Bard Center for Civic Engagement Senior Fellow James Ketterer, who is currently dean of the School of Continuing Education at the American University Cairo, recently visited Serbia, where he delivered the keynote address at an event marking the anniversary of the founding of the Center for the Study of the United States of America in the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Belgrade. He spoke about continuities and disruptions in American foreign policy in the post–Cold War period. He also gave a presentation at the American Studies Center in the Faculty of Philosophy, focusing on jazz diplomacy, and met with Serbian students as part of the EducationUSA program, discussing with them the value of the liberal arts approach to higher education. The trip was supported by the United States Embassy in Belgrade. While in Serbia, Ketterer met with two people with connections to Bard College, both PhD candidates in political science at the University of Belgrade: Milan Krstic, who participated in the 2017 Bard U.S. Foreign Policy Institute in Annandale, which was supported by the U.S. State Department; and Marko Kovacevic, who was a Program in International Education student in 2005–06, spending the fall semester in Annandale and the spring semester at BGIA.

Katie Boyle talks with Jon Bowermaster about Patagonia’s two-day stop at Bard to repair damaged clothing as part of their Worn Wear cross-country initiative. Their visit to Bard takes place in conjunction with a community sustainability exhibition, with students working to repair bicycles, furniture, and smartphones. Patagonia chose Bard as a tour location because the Bard MBA in Sustainability students performed well in a case competition at Stanford a couple years ago, creating a proposal for how Patagonia could go carbon neutral by 2025. Bard MBA beat competitors from top-notch business schools like Yale and Wharton to place second. The event put Bard on Patagonia’s shortlist for the Worn Wear Tour. Boyle is the director of enrollment and marketing at the Bard Graduate Programs in Sustainability and Bowermaster is a visiting lecturer in Environmental and Urban Studies at Bard, teaching a class this semester on Multimedia Environmental Storytelling.

Author Clare Beams has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her debut collection of short stories, We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books 2016). Beams’ residency at Bard College is for the fall 2020 semester, during which time she will continue her writing and meet informally with students. Beams will give a public reading at Bard in spring 2020.

The Bard Fiction Prize committee writes: “The nine stories in Clare Beams’ debut collection of fiction, We Show What We Have Learned, range from factual, historical settings and characters to eerily fantastical ones, displaying a startling depth and an epic scale of imagination. While the characters, and the situations they find themselves in, are sometimes surreal, their psychologies are always absolutely real—fully, compassionately drawn. Every one of these stories has a world and a lifetime behind it, and every one is a compelling, disquieting, and immensely pleasurable journey, reverie, and dream for its reader. Clare Beams is a subtle, quiet master of short fiction, who writes in beautiful and exquisitely crafted prose.”

“I am so much more grateful to Bard and to the Bard Fiction Prize committee than I can possibly say for this recognition of my work and for this gift—one of the best gifts anyone could give me, as a writer who’s also a parent of young children—of time. To join this list of winners, so many who are heroes and heroines of mine, is an honor, and to join the inspiring Bard community is a thrill. I can’t wait to meet the students and faculty and work on my third book, a new novel, in their midst,” says Beams.

Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016 and a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her first novel, The Illness Lesson, will be published by Doubleday in February of 2020. Her fiction appears in One Story, n+1, Ecotone, The Common, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two daughters, and has taught creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and St. Vincent College.

The creation of the Bard Fiction Prize, presented each October since 2001, continues Bard’s long-standing position as a center for creative, groundbreaking literary work by both faculty and students. From Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, Mary McCarthy, and Ralph Ellison to John Ashbery, Philip Roth, William Weaver, and Chinua Achebe, Bard’s literature faculty, past and present, represents some of the most important writers of our time. The prize is intended to encourage and support young writers of fiction, and provide them with an opportunity to work in a fertile intellectual environment. Last year’s Bard Fiction Prize was awarded to Greg Jackson for his short story collection Prodigals (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016).

The Orchestra Now’s popular concert series at Bard College’s Fisher Center continues its fall season with five performances of three different programs from October 19 through November 13, 2019. Highlights include the U.S. premiere of Egon Wellesz’s Prospero’s Incantations—inspired by the character in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest—under the baton of Grammy Award–winning guest conductor Hans Graf (November 2–3); and the first New York performances in over 50 years of Honegger’s Rugby and Mitropoulos’s Concerto Grosso (November 13).

Guest soloists include Bard Conservatory’s concerto competition winner Xinran Li in a performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto (October 19–20); and German baritone Michael Nagy, who will sing composer Othmar Schoeck’s song cycle Buried Alive about a man who wakes up to find he has mistakenly been buried. The composer adapted the work from Gottfried Keller’s poem Lebendig begraben.

TŌN’s winter/spring series will return in 2020 with Beethoven’s Eroica in celebration of the great composer’s 250th birthday (February 8–9); a program titled Into the Wilderness presenting the U.S. premiere of Franck’s What You Hear on the Mountain (April 25–26); and Mahler’s massive Resurrection Symphony (May 9–10).

Bard College, supported by New York State Energy Research and Development Authority’s (NYSERDA) REV Campus Challenge, announced today the launch of a new website to be a centralized, public resource for exploring sustainable micro hydropower in New York State. The website also documents this process for the Saw Kill Micro Hydropower Project on the Bard Campus, including the installation of real-time water quality monitoring equipment.

The website is organized to streamline and standardize the process for evaluating and implementing a potential micro hydropower site responsibly. The site breaks down the requirements for assessing, implementing, and maintaining a micro hydropower system. Using the Saw Kill Project as an example, lessons learned are provided as a resource for landowners, local governments, and researchers alike.

The MicrohydroNY website will be updated on a regular basis with news about the Saw Kill Project and changes that affect micro hydropower in New York State. Visitors are encouraged to explore the website and sign up for direct emails from MicrohydroNY at microhydrony.org.
 

The Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities is offering a college-level introduction to the humanities—philosophy, literature, U.S. history, art history, critical thinking, and writing—again this fall in Kingston, New York, to adults living on low incomes. Students attend at no cost. Tuition, books, and childcare will be provided. Transportation is free within the immediate Kingston area. Students who successfully complete the course earn 6 college credits from Bard College. Classes will meet Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., from October 1 through May at the Kingston Library, 55 Franklin Street, Kingston, NY 12401. Prospective applicants are invited to attend the first class on October 1 and can submit applications until October 3.

Applicants must be 17 years of age or older; living in a low-income household; able to read a newspaper in English; highly motivated and committed; and have the time and desire to attend classes regularly, complete assignments outside of class, and participate fully in the course for the entire nine-month term.

“The impact this course has had on the lives of people in the Kingston area—veterans, single mothers, homeless, people in recovery, citizens in search of a community—is a great example of the power of education to change lives,” said Clemente Course Director Marina van Zuylen, stressing that many of the course’s graduates go on to enroll in part- and full-time college programs, while others have been successful in finding new career opportunities and getting their creative work published or exhibited. “The Clemente Course’s supportive and devoted teachers provide a very rare kind of personal and intellectual nurturing. Each year, we’re reaching more people and engaging more partners in the community who are eager to support the course and our students.”

Applications can be picked up from the Kingston Library, by clicking (2019 Application), or by visiting clemente.bard.edu. The application deadline for the 2019 Kingston Clemente Course is October 3. If you miss the deadline, please contact Marina van Zuylen at vanzuyle@bard.edu. Once the application is completed, please e-mail it to Marina van Zuylen at vanzuyle@bard.edu, or drop it off at the front desk of the Kingston Library at 55 Franklin Street, Kingston, NY 12401. For library hours, please call 845-331-0507 or go to kingstonlibrary.org/hours.php. For more information about the Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities being offered in Kingston, please visit clemente.bard.edu or e-mail vanzuyle@bard.edu.

The Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities, taught by Bard College faculty, provides college-level instruction for college credit to economically disadvantaged individuals. Begun as a pilot project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Clemente Course is currently in its 21st year of operation. Overall, the program has enrolled over 3,000 students. More than 2,000 have completed the course and earned college credit; and more than 1,500 students have transferred to four-year colleges and universities or plan to do so. The Clemente Course was awarded a 2014 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama.

The program is based on the belief that by studying the humanities, participants acquire the cultural capital, conceptual skills, and appreciation for reasoned discourse necessary to improve their societal situation. Clemente students receive 110 hours of instruction in five humanistic disciplines and explore the great works of literature, art history, moral philosophy, and American history. Instruction in critical thinking and writing is also offered. The program removes many of the financial barriers to higher education that low-income individuals face: books, carfare, and childcare are provided, and tuition is free. Bard grants a certificate of achievement to any student completing the Clemente Course and 6 college credits to those completing it at a high level of academic performance. For more information, please visit clemente.bard.edu.
 

This fall, Bard College will inaugurate the Jacob Neusner Memorial Lectures in Jewish and Religious Studies  with lectures by distinguished scholar of Jewish studies Moshe Halbertal October 24 and 27 on the Bard campus in Annandale-on-Hudson and in New York City. An internationally renowned scholar of religion, Neusner, who died in 2016, was Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History and Theology of Judaism at Bard. “The Biblical Book of Samuel and the Birth of Politics: Two Faces of Political Violence” takes place Thursday, October 24, at 4:45 p.m. in room 102 of the F. W. Olin Humanities Building on the Bard College campus. “Confronting Loss: The Meaning & Experience of Mourning from the Talmud to Maimonides” takes place Sunday, October 27, at 7 p.m. at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue, 325 East 6 Street, New York, N.Y. The lectures are free and open to the public. No reservations are required.

Two Bard College faculty members have been named 2019 MacArthur Fellows. Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence in the Studio Arts Program and Valeria Luiselli, writer in residence in the Written Arts Program, are both recipients of this prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. Fellows may use their award to advance their expertise, engage in bold new work, or, if they wish, to change fields or alter the direction of their careers. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the Fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential. Indeed, the purpose of the Fellowship is to enable recipients to exercise their own creative instincts for the benefit of human society. MacArthur Fellows receive $625,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Eleven Bard faculty members have previously been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.



Jeffrey Gibson grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, Korea, and England. He is a Choctaw-Cherokee artist who incorporates his heritage into his multi-disciplinary work, which includes abstract sculptures, paintings, and prints. Gibson earned his Master of Arts in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1998 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. Gibson has work in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Canada, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and more. Recent solo exhibitions include Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer at the Seattle Art Museum in Washington and Madison Museum of Art in Wisconsin and Jeffrey Gibson: This is the Day at Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Gibson is a past TED Foundation Fellow, and a Joan Mitchell Grant recipient. He lives and works in New York.



Valeria Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. She is the author of the novels Lost Children Archive (2019); The Story of My Teeth (2015), named Best Book in Fiction by the Los Angeles Times, one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, and a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and Faces in the Crowd (2014), for which she received a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” prize, among other honors. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, a nonfiction work published in 2017, won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle and Kirkus Prize finalist. Other nonfiction publications include “Maps of Harlem,” in Where You Are, and Sidewalks, a collection of essays that was named one of the 10 best books of 2014 by New York. Recent journal, newspaper, and radio work has appeared in the New York Times (“The Littlest Don Quixotes versus the World”), Guardian (“Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry”), Outlook Interview Series, BBC World Services (“Undocumented Central American Minors”), Harper’s Trump special (“Terrorist and Alien”), and NPR’s This American Life (“The Questionnaire”), among others. Honors also include an Art for Justice Fellowship (2018–19) and residencies at Under the Volcano, USA-Mexico; Poets House, New York City; and Castello di Fosdinovo, Italy. She previously taught at Hofstra University, City College, the New York University MFA Writing Program in Paris, and Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. She founded the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association at Hofstra in 2015, a program that offers continuous support to immigrant and refugee teens through one-on-one English classes, soccer games, and civil rights education. She is a member of PEN America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She was born in Mexico City and currently lives in New York City.

Ninety-five countries now own military drones, a sharp increase from 2010, and drone operations are becoming deeply embedded in armed forces worldwide in ways that are changing global security, according to a new report by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. The report found not just a rising number of drones but also an expanding infrastructure of military bases, test sites, and training academies to support the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles. “A lot of countries, not just technologically advanced countries … have gone out to create drone programs,” said Dan Gettinger, codirector of the center and the report’s author, who used open-source data for the research. Unmanned aerial vehicles, he said, “are featuring more prominently in world affairs, as we’ve seen most recently in the Saudi drone attacks.”

Once a novelty, drones have become standard military equipment around the world. In The Drone Databook, a new study released today, the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College presents an encyclopedic catalogue of military drone inventories, units, bases and test sites, training academies, research and development programs, operational experiences, and exports, showing that at least 95 countries now maintain active military drone programs, a 58 percent increase over a decade ago, and that there are likely at least 21,000 military drones in operation around the globe.

“Drones are no longer the sole domain of technologically advanced militaries,” said Dan Gettinger, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone and the author of the study. “Military drone programs around the world are maturing and diversifying as more and more countries are seeking an unmanned capability. This will have a significant effect on the future of armed conflict.”

Among other key findings, the Center identified over 260 units that have been activated to operate drones, over 230 bases and test sites, and more than 170 different types of drones in service around the world.

The report is available for free online at dronecenter.bard.edu.

“Pulitzer Prize–winning author and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power has written an engaging and informative memoir: The Education of an Idealist. In it, her treatment of the Syrian crisis as it unfolded during the administration of former US President Barack Obama is as illuminating as it is unsatisfying. In the end, Power succeeds in drawing a bright line between her views on Syria and those of her former boss.”

“My family’s multigenerational transformation from what is called ‘black’ toward what is assumed to be ‘white’ has led me to yearn for ways of seeing and relating to one another that operate somewhere between the poles of tribal identitarianism and Panglossian utopianism. People will always look different from one another in ways we can’t control. What we can control is what we make of those differences.”

When Hannah Arendt came to the United States as a stateless refugee, she began writing for small Jewish journals and reflected upon the similarities and differences between racism in American and antisemitism in Europe. Arendt argued that racism is an ideology like antisemitism, thereby offering a pseudo-scientific justification for violence that elevates one group at the expense of another. From The Origins of Totalitarianism to The Crises in Little Rock, Arendt’s thinking on race is controversial and has often led many to quickly dismiss her thoughts on race and antisemitism entirely. The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College’s 12th annual conference, “Racism and Antisemitism,” gathers a diverse group of thinkers to explore these oft shunned concepts in Arendt’s work in the context of our contemporary political moment, which is marked by antisemitic and racist violence.

The two-day conference takes place on Thursday, October 10 and Friday, October 11 in Olin Hall, on Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson campus. For registration information, please visit hac.bard.edu/conference2019. Speakers will discuss questions such as: What is racism? Is antisemitism a form of racism? What does anti-racism mean today? Is it antisemitic to criticize the state of Israel? Is equality possible in a world where prejudice exists? How can we respond to racist fantasies?

Featured speakers include:
Kenyon Victor Adams, multidisciplinary artist and curator; Peter Baehr, research professor in social theory, Lingnan University, Hong Kong; Étienne Balibar, emeritus professor of philosophy, University of Paris-Nanterre, and anniversary chair of contemporary European philosophy at Kingston University, London; Aliza Becker, associate fellow, Hannah Arendt Center; Kathryn Sophia Belle, associate professor of philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, and author, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question; Roger Berkowitz, academic director, Hannah Arendt Center; Robert Boyers, editor, Salmagundi, director, New York State Summer Writers Institute, and professor of English, Skidmore College; Ian Buruma, Paul W. Williams Professor of Human Rights and Journalism, Bard College; Joy Connolly, president, American Council of Learned Societies; Deirdre d’Albertis, dean of Bard College; Lewis R. Gordon, professor of philosophy, University of Connecticut-Storrs; Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, professor of sociology and anthropology, University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis; Eric Kaufmann, professor and assistant dean of politics, Birkbeck, University of London; Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning historian, speaker, and author of Stamped From The Beginning; Jennifer Kidwell, performing artist and cocreator of the Obie Award-winning play Underground Railroad Game; Rev. Jacqui Lewis, public theologian and senior minister, Middle Collegiate Church in Manhattan; John McWhorter, associate professor of English and comparative literature, Columbia University; Marwan Mohammed, sociologist, research fellow, Centre Maurice Halbwachs in Paris, and visiting scholar, John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY); Shany Mor, associate fellow, Hannah Arendt Center, and research fellow, Chaikin Center, Haifa University; Nikita Nelin, writer and winner of 2019 Dogwood Literary Prize; Emilio Rojas, multidisciplinary artist; Peter Rosenblum, professor of international law and human rights, Bard College; Batya Ungar Sargon, journalist and opinion editor, The Forward; Amy Schiller, associate fellow, Hannah Arendt Center; Adam Shatz, contributing editor, London Review of Books, and contributor, to New York Times Magazine, New York Review of Books, New Yorker, and other publications; Scott R. Sheppard, OBIE Award-winning theater artist, codirector, Lightning Rod Special, and cocreator of the Obie Award-winning play Underground Railroad Game; Allison Stanger, Russell Leng ’60 Professor of International Politics and Economics at Middlebury College, technology and human values senior fellow at Harvard University’s Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics, New America Cybersecurity fellow, and external professor, Santa Fe Institute; Kenneth S. Stern, director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, a program of Bard’s Human Rights Project; Mebrak Tareke, writer and a content strategy advisor; Eric K. Ward, executive director, Western States Center; Marc Weitzmann, journalist and author of 12 books, including Hate (2019), which explores the rise of antisemitism in French society; Thomas Chatterton Williams, author, Losing My Cool, and contributing writer, New York Times Magazine; Ruth Wisse, former Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and professor of comparative literature, Harvard University, and distinguished senior fellow, Tikvah Fund.

Arendt Center conferences are attended by nearly a thousand people and reach an international audience via live webcast. Past speakers have included maverick inventor Ray Kurzweil; whistleblower Edward Snowden; irreverent journalist Christopher Hitchens; businessman Hunter Lewis; authors Teju Cole, Zadie Smith, Masha Gessen, and Claudia Rankine; Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead; and political activist and presidential candidate Ralph Nader. Previous conferences have explored citizenship and disobedience, crises of democracy, the intellectual roots of the economic crisis, the future of humanity in an age increasingly dominated by technology, the crisis in American education, and American exceptionalism. The Arendt Center’s 13th annual conference, “Revitalizing Democracy: from Sortition to Federalism,” will take place October 15–16, 2020.

For a full conference schedule and bios of featured speakers, please visit hac.bard.edu/conference2019. For more information or answers to questions about the conference, please contact arendt@bard.edu.

The halls and classrooms of Olin were bustling last weekend as the Bard Debate Union hosted the Bard IV Debate Tournament. The tournament welcomed over 200 visitors to campus from regional, national, and international debating programs. Among the participating institutions were Cornell, Colgate, Vassar, Middlebury, University of Vermont, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges, as well as Bard Network institutions Al-Quds Bard (Abu-Dis, East Jerusalem), Smolny College (St. Petersburg, Russia), and the Bard High School Early Colleges in Queens and Cleveland. Students from the fledgling debate program at Bard College at Simon's Rock also joined as observers on Saturday. 

All participants in the tournament competed in five debates on topics ranging from universal basic income to "cancel culture" to Puerto Rican statehood. Top scoring teams then debated in quarter-final, semi-final, and final rounds. Hobart and William Smith Colleges won the final round, making them the tournament champion. Bard High School Early College Queens won the novice final round, making them the novice champions. 

Bard Debate Union codirectors Ruth Zisman and David Register ran the tournament, together with 20 members of the Bard Debate Union and alumni/ae Eva-Marie Quinones '17 and Clarence Brontë '18. "It was wonderful to see members of the Bard Debate Network from near and far join together in the spirit of competition and collaboration for an exciting weekend of debating," said Ruth Zisman. "We are so proud of our students and the debate leaders throughout the Bard Network for all of the work they put into this event. It is a testament to the value and importance of public discourse and exchange today." 

Upcoming Bard Debate Union events include: the Annual Hannah Arendt Center Conference Public Debate on October 7 (topic: U.S. Prison System: Abolish or Reform) and the Annual Family Weekend Faculty-Student Roundtable on October 26 (topic: Trump and American Foreign Policy). Visit the Bard Debate Union website for a complete list of events.

On Thursday, October 10, Bard College features author Isabella Tree presenting her new work Wilding: returning nature to our farm (New York Review Books, 2019), winner of the 2019 Richard Jefferies prize for nature writing and chosen by Smithsonian as a top 10 science book for 2018. The event takes place at 5 p.m., in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center. Admission is free and no reservations are necessary. Books will be available for purchase at this event courtesy of Oblong Books & Music.

The event is sponsored by the Bard Center for Civic Engagement, Office of Sustainability, Environmental and Urban Studies Program, and Lifetime Learning Institute.

About the Author
Isabella Tree writes for publications such as National Geographic, Granta, and the Guardian, and is the author of five nonfiction books. Her articles have been selected for the Best American Travel Writing and Reader’s Digest Today’s Best Non-Fiction, and she was Overall Winner of the Travelex Travel Writer Awards. Her latest book Wilding: returning nature to our farm charts the story of the pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex where she lives with her husband Charlie Burrell. Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy Sussex clay was economically ruinous, they decided to step back and let nature take over. By introducing free-roaming herbivores—proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain—the Burrells’ degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again. In less than 20 years, wildlife has rocketed and numerous endangered species have made Knepp their home. The Knepp experience challenges conventional ideas about our past and present landscapes, and points the way to a wilder, richer future—one that benefits farming, nature, and us.

For more information about the book, visit nyrb.com.

For more information about the author and Knepp Castle Estate, visit isabellatree.com and knepp.co.uk.

The Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH), an initiative of the Human Rights Project at Bard College, has received a $165,000 grant from the GS Humane Corp. to fund five projects over the next two years. The new initiatives will help increase the serious study of hate and will provide research, ideas, and direction for people and groups seeking to combat hate and its manifestations.
 
GS Humane’s funding will allow BCSH to support Bard faculty as they design and teach new hate-focused courses, including multidisciplinary ones; create an “economic cost of hate” index, directed by Bard Assistant Professor of Economics Michael Martell; create a “level of annual hate” index, conceived and directed by Robert Matthew Tynes, Associate Director for Research Bard Prison Initiative; underwrite a consultation on how those opposing hate can use social media more effectively; and underwrite a multiday retreat both for academics who study hate and key NGO staff members working to oppose hate.
 
BCSH Director Kenneth S. Stern ’75 said, “GS Humane’s gift is transformative. It will allow Bard faculty to increase the depth of their teaching and research about hate, and establish a model for other colleges and universities to follow. It will enable academics who are experts in hate and those seeking to combat it, to create new ways, grounded in testable theories, to approach this vexing problem.”
 
Glenn Opell, GS Humane Corp.’s executive director, said, “The increase in antisemitism and white supremacy in the United States warrants far more study and attention than what’s currently allocated. We think Bard is the perfect laboratory for these studies and we’re excited to support the innovative and vital work of BCSH Director Stern and his colleagues.”
  
For more information about BCSH and its programs, visit bcsh.bard.edu.

The Bard Center for the Study of Hate has created a new award presented to a member of the Bard community who has taken sustained and effective action against hate. It is named for Elizabeth “Beth” Rickey, a Republican official who was most responsible for derailing neo-Nazi David Duke’s attempts to be elected to statewide office in Louisiana in the early 1990s.

More on the BCSH Website

As part of the 20th Annual Hudson River Valley Ramble, Bard College hosts a Garden Open House and Paint Out at Blithewood Garden on Sunday, September 29 from 12 to 5 p.m. Participants are invited to paint and tour Blithewood Garden and watch a plein air painter in action. Coloring books and free refreshments will be provided. Garden tours will be given at 2 and 4 p.m. For more information visit: bard.edu/arboretum/gardens/blithewood. For a complete listing of Ramble events, visit hudsonrivervalleyramble.com.

Bard College is one of more than 150 partner organizations participating in the Ramble. The Ramble provides people of all ages an opportunity to experience the cultural landscape of the Hudson River Valley by hiking a trail, visiting an historic site, or paddling on the river. Ramble events are led by naturalists, ecologists, historians, geologists and experienced volunteers.

Scott Keller, Acting Director of the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area and Greenway said, “If it’s September, then it’s time to Ramble, and even more so in 2019 as we celebrate our 20^th annual Ramble! It’s amazing to see the tremendous diversity of great events that are offered by our partners each year, and we’re proud to be able to showcase some 200 exciting Ramble events this year. The Ramble demonstrates that celebrating our natural and cultural resources provides a big boost to our regional economy.”

The 2019 Ramble is presented by the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area and the Hudson River Valley Greenway in partnership with the New York State Division of Tourism’s I Love NY Program, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s Hudson River Estuary Program, the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, and the National Park Service. The Ramble is made possible through the efforts of many partner environmental, cultural and recreational organizations, communities and historic sites throughout the region including Bard College.

Tan Dun, dean of the Bard College Conservatory of Music, conducts the Conservatory Orchestra in a film with live orchestra performance featuring excerpts from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; and The Banquet. See a video preview here. Conservatory faculty members Daniel Phillips, violin; Peter Wiley, cello; Blair McMillen, piano; and Benjamin Hochman, piano, will perform. This special program takes place on September 28 at 8 p.m., at the Fisher Center Center for the Performing Arts’ Sosnoff Theater. Tickets sales benefit the Conservatory Scholarship Fund. Tickets are $25–$150; the $150 ticket level includes a reception and meet and greet with the artists. To reserve tickets, go to fishercenter.bard.edu or call the box office at 845-758-7900.

For over 30 years, Bard MFA chair and Bard College alum Nayland Blake '82 has been a critical figure in American art, working between sculpture, drawing, performance, and video. No Wrong Holes marks the most comprehensive survey of Blake’s work to date and their first solo institutional presentation in Los Angeles.

Lampedusa is Price’s fictional account of how the aristocratic Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa came to write one of the best-selling novels in Italian history: The Leopard. “Price’s novel excels where it counts most: inside Lampedusa’s head,” writes Luzzi. “The prose is superbly controlled, richly textured, brimming with wise and lyrical insights that make it a worthy heir to its mighty predecessor.”

The paper, by Bard alum Silas E. Busch ’16 and Professor Arseny S. Khakhalin, builds on a study undertaken by Busch for his Senior Project in biology. Busch explored whether different neurons in the optic tectum of Xenopus tadpoles—the part of the brain that helps tadpoles navigate in the water without running into objects or each other—are tuned to synaptic inputs of different duration. What he found is that most tectal neurons do have a preference for either short or long patterns of activation, and that this preference changes depending on what tadpoles see and hear. It means that the tadpole brain as a whole, and each individual neuron within it, adjusts to changes in the animal’s environment, enabling the tadpole to better navigate and survive. The paper describes this particular type of neuron-by-neuron “temporal tuning” in the tectum for the first time, applying an electrophysiological measuring technique called dynamic clamp in an entirely new way. 

In this podcast Associate Dean of Civic Engagement Brian Mateo talks about his involvement as a Climate Reality Leader and how it’s shaped his ideas about climate change activism; climate migration in Afghanistan, Central America, and the United States; and how to get through to climate change deniers. “Sometimes I feel like the conversation is only about emissions,” says Mateo, “and there's so much more than that. I want to be able to see politicians and world leaders talk more about the people who are being displaced, talk more about food scarcity, talk about how we’re building communities. Lowering emissions is very important, but that's not the only driving part of the conversation.”

NPR interviews Professor Mead regarding the United States’ failure to build a consensus on dealing with China, in contrast to the unified American front against the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Mead doesn’t think the U.S. and China are destined to have a military showdown. But, he adds, “It's almost always been the case through human history that when people rationally sum up the costs and benefits of war, it's very often the smarter thing not to go to war. And yet wars still happen.”

Fifth Season Presents Concert Series at Carnegie Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Fisher Center at Bard, and Four Free Concerts in New York City and Beyond

World Premiere of Zhou Long’s Men of Iron and the Golden Spike

U.S. Premieres of Galina Ustvolskaya’s Symphonic Poem No. 1, César Franck’s What You Hear on the Mountain, Zhou Long’s Classic of Mountains and Seas, and Egon Wellesz’s Prospero’s Incantations; and NYC Premieres of Leonard Slatkin’s Kinah and Cindy McTee’s Double Play

Rare Performances of Honegger’s Rugby and Symphony No. 1, Mitropoulos’s Concerto Grosso, d’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air, and Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 7, Sinfonia Antartica

Guest Artists Include Conductors Tan Dun, Hans Graf, and Leonard Slatkin; Pianists Anna Polonsky and Blair McMillen; Violinist Xinran Li, Soprano Paulina Swierczek, and Baritone Michael Nagy

The Orchestra Now’s residency at Bard College’s Fisher Center renews with 13 performances of seven different programs, all conducted by music director Leon Botstein. The opening night program, “Copland & Strauss,” Saturday, September 14,  features the U.S. premiere of Ustvolskaya’s 1948 work Symphonic Poem No. 1, originally titled The Light of the Steppes; and Strauss’s Four Songs with Canadian soprano Paulina Swierczek, a winner of Bard Conservatory’s concerto competition. Tickets are priced at $25–$35; subscriptions are available. Tickets may be purchased online at fishercenter.bard.edu, by calling the Fisher Center at 845-758-7900, or at the Fisher Center box office in the lobby of the Sosnoff Theater.

For upcoming activities and more detailed information about the musicians, visit theorchestranow.org.

“Undone is something fresh,” writes Merrill Barr in Forbes. “Something that pushes every boundary television has to offer while still playing like a true entrant to the medium it's playing in. This show doesn’t think it’s better than television. Rather, it opts to try and push the idea of where the medium can go in a way that won’t alienate audiences just out for a decent character drama.” Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of Undone and the critically acclaimed BoJack Horseman, graduated from the Theater Program at Bard College in 2006.

NPR’s Scott Simon speaks with Ronan Farrow of the New Yorker, which recently published Farrow’s exposé on the MIT Media Lab’s efforts to conceal the extent of its fund-raising relationship with the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The Greater Hudson Heritage Network (GHHN) has announced Gilsonfest, a project of Bard College and Historic Red Hook, among the winners of its 2019 Awards for Excellence. The awards recognize and commend exceptional efforts among Hudson Valley heritage organizations. Awards are made to projects that exemplify creativity and professional vision resulting in a contribution to the preservation and interpretation of the historic scene, material culture, and diversity of the region. Gilsonfest is one of seven projects receiving awards this year.

Gilsonfest is a Bard College–led collaboration including Historic Red Hook, the Dutchess County Historical Society, and the Red Hook Quilters, funded by the Lumina Foundation, focusing on the life of Alexander Gilson (ca. 1824–1889). Gilson was an African American who labored for 50 years at Montgomery Place, an estate that utilized slave labor, eventually becoming the head gardener. Gilsonfest featured lectures, exhibitions at the Historic Red Hook Annex and Bard’s Montgomery Place Campus, new signage, a commissioned quilt, an artistic digital display, and a brochure. Bard students in Professor Myra Young Armstead’s spring 2019 course The Window at Montgomery Place, an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences offering, conducted historical research and assisted in developing the exhibition in partnership with local historians and Bard staff. Gilsonfest focused on and interpreted the life of Gilson, which allowed the project to illuminate the contributions of African Americans in 19th-century New York and the Hudson Valley, including the experiences of slaves, indentured servants, and free-born blacks.

The awards will be presented at GHHN’s Experimenting With History Annual Conference on Tuesday, September 24, at the Bear Mountain Inn and Conference Center, in Bear Mountain, N.Y. Awardees will also be featured in a poster session at the conference.

The U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board are pleased to announce that Yezu Woo has received a Fulbright U.S. Student Program award to Germany in Performing Arts/Violin. A graduate of the State University of New York Stony Brook and the Bard College Conservatory of Music's Advanced Performance Studies Program, Yezu will conduct research at Hochschule für Musik und Darstel-lende Kunst Frankfurt am Main and the Isang Yun Foundation Berlin as part of her project "Discovering Isang Yun and His World." She will spend a year in Frankfurt, as an academy member of Ensemble Modern and in Berlin, working at the foundation dedicated to the Korean-German composer Isang Yun.

Yezu is one of over 2,100 U.S. citizens who will conduct research, teach English, and provide expertise abroad for the 2019–20 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as their record of service and leadership potential in their respective fields.

The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program and is designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The Fulbright Program is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the Program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.

Since its establishment in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program has given more than 390,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and professionals of all backgrounds and fields the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.

Fulbrighters address critical global challenges in all disciplines while building relationships, knowledge, and leadership in support of the long-term interests of the United States. Fulbright alumni have achieved distinction in many fields, including 59 who have been awarded the Nobel Prize, 84 who have received Pulitzer Prizes, and 37 who have served as a head of state or government.