Graduate Alumni/ae

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Bard Center for the Study of Hate Names Jamal Armstead ’26 as Winner of the 2026 Beth Rickey Award

The Bard Center for the Study of Hate (BCSH) is proud to announce Jamal Armstead ’26 as the recipient of this year’s Beth Rickey Award. The award is presented annually to a member of Bard College’s international network of schools who has taken sustained and effective action against hate.

 
The annual Beth Rickey Award is given in memory of Elizabeth “Beth” Rickey, who died on September 12, 2009. Rickey was a Republican state committeewoman in Louisiana. Politically conservative, Rickey was appalled when neo-Nazi and former Klansman David Duke won elected office, and devastated that many of her fellow Republicans in state government welcomed Duke into their midst. She made it her mission to expose Duke, following him to meetings with other white supremacists, showing that he continued to sell Mein Kampf and Holocaust-denying material from his legislative office. 
 
The recipient’s achievements can be through their scholarship, adding to our understanding of how hatred works, or through their actions, such as public advocacy and community organizing.
 
Rickey’s dedication to justice is shared by Armstead, although the two activists followed quite different trajectories. Armstead was arrested at 17 and has spent most of the last two decades behind bars. In 2021, he enrolled in the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), which offers undergraduate and graduate degrees to students incarcerated in New York state prisons. He graduated this year with his bachelor’s degree after completing his senior project entitled “The Public Health Implications of Anti-LGBTQ+ Discrimination: How Conformity and Lack of Awareness Lead to Crisis.”
 
Armstead completed a public health fellowship after his release from prison. He is now pursuing a Bard MBA in Sustainability, working toward his goal of creating an organization that will, in the words of Megan Callaghan, dean of BPI, “help design a safe haven for LGBTQ+ youth impacted by the criminal legal system.”
 
As Dean Callaghan recounted in her nominating letter:
 
“While incarcerated at a men’s maximum security prison, Jamal became aware of the way that he and others around him had actively ostracized anyone who was openly gay or gender nonconforming. Incarcerated as a teenager, he had grown up with these social norms and knew that anyone seen socializing with someone who had been identified as gay could be a target of violence . . . [A] combination of personal experience and the readings he encountered [in Bard classes] provoked him to begin reflecting on the injustice of this situation for the first time . . . For four years, in two different prisons, Jamal used his time at Bard to build an inclusive community and to develop academic expertise that would position him to support LGBTQ+ youth in the future.”
 
Kenneth S. Stern ’75, director of the BCSH and a friend of Rickey’s, said: “Of all the nominees this year, Mr. Armstead stood out. I used to be a criminal defense attorney who sometimes had a gay client, and I always worried about the extra danger they’d face if they were sent to prison. Mr. Armstead saw this hatred first hand and acted. Doing so while behind bars took courage. We hope this acknowledgment, in the spirit of Beth Rickey, may help him achieve his goals, empowered in part by the academic skills he learned through his Bard degree.”

Post Date: 09-12-2026

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Alexa West MFA ’14 Included in ArtNews’ “New Talent 2026”

Choreographer Alexa West MFA ’14 was featured in ArtNews as part of their “New Talent 2026” series, following the staging of her immersive dance performance Jawbreaker. After premiering at the TONO Festival in Mexico in March, Jawbreaker was staged in August at the New York Museum of Modern Art as part of the museum’s Kravis Studio artist residency program. “West’s uncanny, Rube Goldberg-esque dances have made her one of the stars of the city’s experimental dance scene,” writes Madeleine Seidel for ArtNews. “[Jawbreaker] is a near-perfect distillation of what makes West one of America’s most exciting choreographers: kinetic movement, a hypnotic soundtrack, and props that serve as objects for the dancers to work against.” West, who studied sculpture at Bard’s Milton Avery School of the Arts, says her time in Bard’s sculpture program influenced her dance practice. “I’ve learned how to make dances from a sculptural approach in terms of material, scale, and time,” she told ArtNews.

Bard’s MFA Program is a two-year multidisciplinary program focused on individual process and work in progress, as each student confronts the conceptual and practical questions at the core of all artistic production. Each MFA candidate chooses a primary field: Moving Image, Music/Sound, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, or Writing.
 

Post Date: 09-03-2026