Newsmakers

“Give it back.” These are the first words seen by visitors to The World’s UnFair, the newest multimedia work by New Red Order (NRO), a “public secret society” cofounded by brothers and Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14. World’s Fairs “have historically presented a theory of progress, technological advancement, imperial advancement,” Jackson Polys, who cocreated NRO with the Khalil brothers, told the New York Times. The World’s UnFair, by contrast, subverts expectations with an animatronic beaver who speaks about private land ownership and satirical real estate ads featuring “comically small” portions of land given back to Native groups. The exhibition, curated by Bard alumna Diya Vij ’08, is meant to be provocative, asking questions about not only Native sovereignty, but also performances of Indigeneity and art’s place (or lack thereof) in the pursuit of decolonization. The World’s UnFair is on view now through October 15 in Long Island City, Queens.

Read More in the New York Times

Further Reading:

• Smithosian magazine: "‘The World’s UnFair,’ a New Exhibition Calling for the Return of Indigenous Land, Comes to Queens."
• Artnet: “A New Kind of World’s Fair Is Coming to Queens. Its Message? Give Back All Indigenous Land”
• Hyperallergic: “The World’s UnFair in Queens Echoes Calls to Give Native Land Back”

Bon Appétit has just published its picks for the best 24 new restaurants of 2023. The restaurant scene is currently bursting with creativity so this year’s list is more than double than it has been in the past. Breaking with industry tradition, the food magazine let every restaurant on its list know they had been selected before the publication was released. “Running a restaurant is already challenging enough, and we want this to really be net positive,” said Bon Appétit Restaurant Editor Elazar Sontag ’20. “We want the restaurants to be able to not just celebrate it, but actually grow from it, and grow their businesses. When business changes overnight, the way it does after you’re on BA’s list, you need time to adjust. You need more staff.” The list spotlights new restaurants across the country, from Bainbridge Island in Washington State to Savannah, Georgia, to Philadelphia, as well as including a handful of select recipes like one for Bolo Bao (Pineapple Buns) from Rubato, a Hong Kong–style café in Quincy, Massachusetts.

“If you’d met Edris Tajik at Bard College earlier this summer, his life might have seemed like that of a typical college student,” writes the Chronicle of Higher Education. What led Edris Tajik ’23 to this moment of seeming normalcy was far from typical, however. The Chronicle profiles Tajik’s educational career, beginning at Herat University, where his studies were interrupted by the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. After fleeing Afghanistan for Germany, Tajik found his way to the United States—and to Bard.

Tajik was a natural fit for Bard, with a background in activism and civic engagement. He’d worked as a program officer for Hope for Education and Leadership in Afghanistan, “where he trained 240 students for Model United Nations, helping them develop their leadership abilities,” writes the Chronicle. “His background was very compelling, with all the civil-society work he’d done,” says Jennifer Murray, dean of international studies. At Bard, Tajik dove into his studies, feeling “a seriousness of purpose” that guided his time in Annandale. “Everything was new to me — the teaching style, the class discussion,” Tajik said. “It was exciting.”

Now, post-Bard, Tajik plans to complete two one-year master’s programs, with the ultimate goal of working in Washington, DC. “Whatever Tajik does, he’ll bring a valuable perspective, not only as a young person who’s already amassed professional experience in his field,” writes the Chronicle, “but also as someone whose life has been shaped—directly and dramatically—by foreign-policy choices and lack of access to education.”

Unions and their supporters have recently seen some progress thanks to tight labor markets, pandemic-era fiscal policy, and the $15 minimum wage movement, yet working Americans still face a generations-long crisis, writes David Rolf ’92, Bard alumnus and founder and president emeritus of SEIU 775, a labor union representing long-term care sector workers, in an opinion piece for Newsweek. “Our broken labor laws, designed for the economy of the 1930s, have functionally stopped enabling collective bargaining and have become a tool to prevent it,” he says. Support for unions is at historic highs, particularly amongst young Americans, yet unions represent only six percent of eligible private sector workers because most companies are incentivized to avoid or bust unions and to minimize their bargaining gains. Yet research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and by David Madland, Center for American Progress scholar, show that “when more workers are covered by union contracts, things get better for workers, employers, and national economies.” Rolf continues, “Centralized and broad-based labor law systems are predictive of economies with high employment, high productivity, high wages, adequate leisure time for the working class, positive trade balances, and lower levels of inequality.”

The Dallas Opera recently announced that Micah Gleason GCP ’21 VAP ’22, who graduated from the Bard College Conservatory's Graduate Conducting Program in 2021 and Vocal Arts Program in 2022, is one of four talented musicians selected to participate in the 2023–24 Hart Institute for Women Conductors Showcase. Gleason (US), Maria Benyumova (Germany), Shira Samuels-Shragg (US), and Jingqi Zhu (China) were chosen from a worldwide applicant pool of more than 75 conductors hailing from 27 countries on five continents.

Launched in 2015, the Hart Institute for Women Conductors Showcase is the only program of its kind in the world and seeks to address the extreme gender imbalance of leadership on the podium as well as in administration in opera companies. Now in its 7th year, more than 500 women conductors from 40 nations have applied to be trained, advised, and supported by this extraordinary initiative.

The annual Institute begins in November (November 13-17) with a week of daily virtual sessions, many of which are livestreamed and open for the public to view at no cost on The Dallas Opera’s You Tube channel. During an intensive ten-day residency in Dallas (January 19-28, 2024), participants will work with esteemed faculty and mentors in group and one-on-one sessions, as well as in rehearsals for the annual Showcase Concert on Sunday, January 28, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. The performance will feature each Institute conductor leading the Dallas Opera Orchestra and guest singers in selections of opera excerpts featuring overtures, solo arias, and ensemble pieces from across the centuries of the canon.
 

Elías Beltrán ’17, Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) alumnus, is completing his PhD in comparative literature at Cornell University and is the first BPI alumnus to join the BPI faculty beginning in fall 2023. Beltrán, who has taught at Cornell and worked at the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library in its early years, talks with Megan Callaghan, dean of BPI, about becoming a faculty member, his experiences in teaching, and the importance of accessible and unconventional liberal arts education models like BPI, Bard Microcolleges, and Bard Early Colleges. 

“None of the distinctions of prison-yard politics—race, cliques, neighborhoods, age, orientation—mattered in the classroom,” he recalls about his time as a BPI student. “The issues that obscured the commonality of our plight, the immediacy of our predicament, all became clear to us on the page. That was our point of focus, and everything else gave way to that. I saw something very similar at work in the Microcollege, and I was so heartened to see students of all ages and backgrounds sharing that space too.”
 
Beltrán, whose research focuses on postcolonial and decolonial trauma, as well as the history and culture of the Caribbean and its literature, is excited to start teaching at BPI. His message to new BPI students: “Commit. Commit to your education. Be committed like nothing else to it and value the time you have for it. Another thing is to not be afraid to ask questions, to acknowledge the gaps in your knowledge and then work at filling those gaps, including asking for additional readings and material. Last thing is to believe in yourself unflinchingly.”

“The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new,” writes Ronan Farrow ’04 in a piece on Elon Musk for the New Yorker. “But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive.” The United States government is widely dependent on Musk and his companies, Farrow reports, “from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space.” A recent crisis regarding the abrupt disruption of communication among Ukrainian military forces via Musk’s Starlink technology only furthered the point that Musk, despite not being a diplomat or statesman, increasingly operates as such. Tracing both the histories of Musk’s companies and the man himself, Farrow argues that science fiction has influenced the billionaire’s mindset, especially Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the video game series Deus Ex. “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, told Farrow. “But only if he can be the one to save it.”

Speaking with Bard professors Francine Prose and Stephen Shore, Susan D’Agostino ’91 probes the legal and creative implications of the use of generative AI programs like ChatGPT and DALL-E for Inside Higher Ed. At the heart of the debate is whether these programs “copy” journalistic and creative works, or whether they could be considered “fair use,” D’Agostino writes. Alongside this concern is whether the output of these programs could be considered art—or human. “The question of ‘what is a human being?’ is resurfacing through this and starting really good discussions,” Prose told D’Agostino. “There’s so much pressure to dehumanize or commodify people, to tell young people that they are their Instagram page.” Some imagine a future where these kinds of programs are used to assist human artmaking, a future which may have already arrived. “Shore recently asked DALL-E—a generative AI image tool—to create a photograph in his style,” D’Agostino writes. Reviewing DALL-E’s output, Shore was “satisfied, if not wowed, by the result.” “I would have made one decision slightly differently, but it was pretty good,” he said.

Writing for the Times Union, Maria Silva profiles human rights major Rukhsar Balkhi ’23 and political studies major Edris Tajik ’23, two recent Bard College graduates who are part of a group of 250 student refugees from Afghanistan who received the Qatar Scholarship for Afghans Project to complete their education in the US. Both Balkhi and Tajik hope to make a positive impact on the world and will pursue master’s degrees in international affairs at Columbia University and international relations at the University of Chicago, respectively. Balkhi describes the shock of evacuating Kabul in 2021 and the transition to the US. “You have everything in your life and you have a lot of dreams. And you just suddenly forget everything and come to a country with literally nothing,” she said.

The art world has been “pitifully slow” to acknowledge “even the existence of contemporary Native American art,” writes Holland Cotter, cochief art critic at the New York Times. But with Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969, on view now through November 26 at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, “Native American art has a presence in the art world it hasn’t had before.” Candice Hopkins CCS ’03 “has organized a frisky intergenerational group show of some 30 Native American artists,” Cotter writes, including Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson and Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14, members of the “public secret society” New Red Order. Drawing on a treatise written by the late Native American fashion designer Lloyd Kiva New, Indian Theater was created in part “on the premise that much traditional Indigenous art was fundamentally theatrical in nature, incorporating movement, sound, masking, storytelling, communal action, and that these elements could be marshaled to create distinctive new forms.”

In a video and written piece for the New York Times, journalist Alexandra Eaton ’07 traces the fascinating story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of the 19th-century painting Bélizaire and the Frey Children, attributed to Jacques Amans, a French portraitist of Louisiana’s elite in that era. The Met describes the painting as “one of the rarest and most fully documented American portraits to come to light of an enslaved Black subject depicted with the family of his Southern White enslaver.” For generations, the painting was neglected in family attics and the basement of the New Orleans Museum of Art until Jeremy K. Simien, an art collector from Baton Rouge, tracked it down. Simien had seen the painting in a 2013 auction house record with four figures depicted, and later discovered a 2005 record with the figure of the Black youth overpainted. “The fact that he was covered up haunted me,” Simien said in an interview. The painting has now been acquired by the Met for its permanent collection. “I’ve been wanting to add such a work to the Met’s collection for the past 10 years,” said Betsy Kornhauser, the curator for American paintings and sculpture who handled the acquisition, “and this is the extraordinary work that appeared.”

Inheritance, a new installation inspired by the 2020 film of the same name by Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, program director and associate professor of film and electronic arts at Bard, is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In paintings, sculptures, videos, photos, and time-based media installations spanning from the 1970s to present day, the show is a meditation on the impacts of the past and legacies across the interwoven contexts of family, history, and aesthetics. “Inheritance reflects on multiple meanings of the word, whether celebratory or painful, from one era, person, or idea to the next,” reads the exhibit text. “The exhibition takes a layered approach to storytelling by interweaving narrative with documentary and personal experiences with historical and generational events.” The show, on view through February 2024, includes works by 43 leading artists, including Asili; An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard; Kevin Jerome Everson, former MFA visiting artist 2011; Kevin Beasley, former MFA visiting artist 2017; former MFA faculty in photography David Hartt and Emily Jacir, and WangShui, MFA ’19.

“I met Laura Steele while studying photography at Bard College,” writes Alice Fall ’22. “Her steadiness, intelligence, wit, and engagement with the world is grounding and immediately magnetic. Laura’s constant reminder to me, both inside and out of school, has been to trust my vision and intuition. I’m thankful for her for bringing me back to myself, again and again.” In this conversation for Lenscratch, the Bard alumna and Bard faculty member talk about the contours of collaboration, the tension between creative work and the imperative to market that work, and how a given tool or artistic process can limit or liberate the art.

Read the Conversation in Lenscratch

Further Reading
Alice Fall ’22 Wins Second Place in Lenscratch Student Awards

Bard alumnus Dan Whitener ’09 MM ’12 plays banjo for Gangstagrass, a hip-hop and bluegrass group that Farah Stockman called “a band that is making music that actually unites us” in a New York Times opinion piece. At a time when American culture is especially polarized, Gangstagrass makes music that seeks to invite social cohesion rather than division, and hopes to alleviate people’s fear of one another. “Those who are lucky enough to stumble on their live shows are likely to get sucked in by the oddball energy. They have die-hard fans who came for the bluegrass and stayed for the rap, and vice versa. Instead of pitting rural America against urban America,” Stockman writes, “Gangstagrass tries to appeal to both at the same time.”

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an experimental documentary by filmmaker and Bard MFA alumnus Todd Haynes, showcased a very different type of Barbie narrative from the Greta Gerwig film now topping the box office. “To a certain slice of the Gen X cognoscenti, ‘the Barbie movie’ will always and forever refer to a very different film, one both notorious and barely seen,” writes Jessica Winter for the New Yorker. Made in the summer of 1985 when he was still a student at Bard, Haynes used Barbie dolls to portray the life of musician Karen Carpenter, from her rise to fame as part of the successful duo the Carpenters and throughout her descent into anorexia and her death at age 32. The film “begins as a droll prank and then tilts, almost imperceptibly, into surreal domestic nightmare and, finally, authentic tragedy,” Winter continues. “It was sui generis in both its execution and, arguably, its reception.”
 

Stephanie Harris ’08 CCS ’13 is a special agent with the US Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) currently serving as a liaison at the FIFA Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. Harris is embedded with the US Women’s National Team and is responsible for ensuring the safety of players as they travel across the region to compete with teams from around the world. Along with her fellow DSS agents, she collaborates with US Soccer, FIFA, host-nation counterparts, and colleagues across the United States Government to identify and address potential threats to players and their staff.

At Bard, Harris majored in film and human rights as an undergraduate then went on to study curating at the Center for Curatorial Studies. She credits her experiences at Bard for inspiring a love of analysis and problem solving and writes: “Bard taught me to love learning and left me with an intellectual curiosity that is at the core of everything I do—whether it is art, diplomacy, or global security.” In her first year with DSS, Harris has traveled to more than 10 countries and empowers US and foreign dignitaries to conduct diplomacy safely around the world.

Poet and art critic John Yau ’72 talks with LA Review of Books Radio Hour hosts Kate Wolf and Eric Newman about his process and experiences writing about artists and art in New York City. He discusses the complexities of how biracial, multiracial, and transcultural identities influence artists’ work within American art, and the ways those identities have been traditionally and historically ignored by the art world. “It enlarges the notion of identity to have at least two identities or in [artist] Wifredo Lam’s case three identities, Afro, Cuban, and Chinese,” says Yau. “In my essay, I talk about how he’s read as a white artist that is derivative. So his whole identity gets ignored.” The deeper Yau dives into these questions, the more he realizes how this monocultural lens pervades the art world. Drawn from decades of writing, Yau’s first collection of essays, Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art, reflects on the work of Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American artists who have been overlooked and misrepresented. 

Jack Smith ’16, who majored in film and was a captain of the squash team for two seasons at Bard, returns to the College in his new role as head men’s and women’s squash coach. Bard’s Director of Athletics and Recreation David Lindholm says that Smith “distinguished himself in our search as a coach with the knowledge and ability to help our program grow and develop in the coming years.” Smith comes to Bard from CitySquash in the Bronx, a Squash and Education Alliance nonprofit after-school enrichment program for elementary, middle, and high school–aged students. “It’s truly an honor to be able to return to the program that shaped the player, coach, and person I am today,” said Smith. “I’m looking forward to joining the department, meeting the student-athletes, and getting started with the teams.”

Art historian and curator Darienne Turner BGC ’17, an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe of California, speaks with Terence Trouillot, senior editor of Frieze, about her curatorial practice, what it means to “Indigenize” museums, her studies of material culture at the Bard Graduate Center, and her upcoming role at the Brooklyn Museum of Art as its first full-time curator of Indigenous art. Turner, who is currently assistant curator of Indigenous art of the Americas at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), grapples with the term “decolonization” in the context of museums because of what that language centers. “But what really works against the colonial armature that encyclopaedic museums rest upon? For me that work happens through Indigenizing, through bringing in Indigenous artists and actually listening to what they have to say,” she says. 

Her first show at the BMA in 2020, Stripes and Stars: Reclaiming Lakota Independence, was inspired by objects she found in the museum’s vault—children’s clothing with American flags in their Lakota beadwork designs. “These objects were conundrums for me. I asked myself, ‘Why would the Lakota people, at this moment of intense conflict with the US government, use the symbol of their oppressor on these objects?’ The question catapulted me into deep research into the history of the Lakota people, and the moment of their transition to the reservation in the late 19th century.” What she found was that the Lakota people leveraged patriotic images like the flag in order to make space for themselves to enact cultural practices that had been banned, such as giveaways and puberty ceremonies, all taking place under the cover of the American flag during “patriotic” celebrations like the Fourth of July. “Listening to the stories of the objects is a big part of my practice, as is engaging with community,” says Turner.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein interviewed Leslie Kean ’73, an investigative journalist and the author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, on his podcast The Ezra Klein Show. Since 1999, Kean’s reporting has delved into the topic of UFOs or unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) and most recently she broke the story of United States Air Force officer, former intelligence official, and whistle-blower David Grusch who claims the US government is covertly in possession of “intact and partially intact vehicles” of nonhuman origin. Kean discusses the implications of the story, her decades of reporting on the beat, and how Congress is responding to Grusch’s testimony. 

For Kean, Grusch’s claims follow the accumulation of years of conversations she’s had with other highly regarded sources with top security clearances telling her essentially the same thing: the government is harboring objects which are not of human origin. “I’m willing to put it out as a story. I think the point of it is that Congress needs to investigate and find out if what he is saying is true or not, and I think it’s up to Congress to take the next step," said Kean.
 

Brothers@, an organization founded at Bard College by alumni Dariel Vasquez ’17 and Harry Johnson ’17 to support young men of color in high school and through college, has successfully launched its next mentorship satellite program at Vassar College. Vassar student Devyn Benson, Johnson’s brother and Brothers@ ambassador, led the launch with help from Vasquez, now CEO of Brothers@, and Wesley Dixon, Vassar’s deputy to the president and secretary of the board of trustees. "When Dariel Vasquez and I launched Brothers@ in 2014, Devyn was one of my key motivations,” said Johnson. “With a nine-year age gap between us and growing up in a single-parent household, it hurt to leave for college knowing there was so much I could give at home.... 10 years later, Devyn has embarked on that same journey, but with a clear understanding that young men of color don't have to wait to make an impact in the lives of others; instead, he knows he is uniquely positioned to create generational impacts in the lives of other young men of color and communities of color at a scale, today." Since 2014, Brothers@ has grown from a student-led pilot program, Brothers@Bard, and institutional initiative, to a scalable model focused on expanding to college campuses and local communities across the country.

“In the middle of June, a trio of Christmas trees hang upside down above a dimly lit stage at Bard College’s Fisher Center, north of New York City,” writes Bard alumna Quinn Moreland ’15 for Pitchfork. Reporting back from a dress rehearsal of Illinois, a stage adaptation of the acclaimed Sufjan Stevens album of the same name, Moreland spoke with Justin Peck, director, choreographer, and cowriter of the production, an “unusual project that the acclaimed ballet dancer and choreographer can’t quite define himself.”

“I couldn’t tell you if it’s a concert or dance-theater piece or musical,” Peck told Pitchfork. “It’s somewhere amidst all that but feels like its own thing.” Adapting the acclaimed album had long been an ambition of Peck’s, whose admiration for Stevens’s work stretches back to his teenage years, before the two became frequent collaborators. With the Fisher Center production, Peck and his cocreators sought to create something that would capture the spirit of Stevens’s Illinois, a 22-track epic that weaves personal experience with state history. Nostalgia for the album was also in Peck’s mind as he adapted it. “Not only does everyone love this album, they can tell me where they were when they first heard it, what they were going through, and how the album helped them understand themselves,” Peck says. “It’s an album that touched an entire generation.”

Artist Nayland Blake ’82, professor of studio arts and codirector of the Studio Arts Program at Bard, has collaborated with fashion label JCRT to launch the inaugural capsule collection of ATDM (“Artist, Title, Date, Medium”), a new clothing line of limited-run collections created with contemporary artists. Blake’s designs include a shirt printed with the phrase “This is clothing of the opposite gender”—a commentary on Arizona’s anti-LGBTQ+ Senate Bill 1026, which targets drag performances. “Blake, who is nonbinary, intends these pieces to function as wearable messages of resistance and support for trans people and anyone caught wearing the ‘wrong’ clothes,” writes Hyperallergic. In honor of Pride Month, all the profits from this ATDM x Nayland Blake collection will be donated to the Transgender Law Center, the largest trans-led organization for trans advocacy in the US, with $30,000 raised once all 400 of the limited-edition shirts are sold.

Lucky Red (Dial Press, 2023), the new novel by Bard alumna Claudia Cravens ’08, is among a cohort of new fiction that is reexamining the Western, writes the New York Times. For Cravens, the trope of the “mysterious stranger” was irresistible while drafting the novel. “I love that archetype,” Cravens said to the Times, “but I thought, ‘what if the stranger Bridget falls in love with is a woman instead of a man?’”‌ Other contemporaries of Cravens are bringing more racial diversity to the genre, including those exploring old archetypes with an Indigenous perspective. For Cravens, “playing with the genre and the mythic space” brought new life to her love of the Western, but perhaps another genre is on the horizon. Recently, she’s been “reading a lot about forests and monsters and mysteries.” “I’m looking forward to seeing where that takes me,” Cravens said.

The Mythmakers, the debut novel by Bard alumna Keziah Weir ’13, was reviewed in the New York Times. The book, which follows the story of a young journalist searching for redemption and meaning in the midst of her crumbling career, is a fresh addition to the category of self-reflective fiction about writers which explores various facets of appropriation, plagiarism, and the adoption of others’ personal experiences. “Some of us… have an insatiable appetite for stories that grapple with these issues,” writes Jean Hanff Korelitz for the New York Times. “I am happy to report that Keziah Weir’s assured first novel, The Mythmakers, is a laudable addition to a reading list that already includes such standouts as Meg Wolitzer’s The Wife, Karen Dukess’s The Last Book Party, Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort, and R.F. Kuang’s new novel, Yellowface. In The Mythmakers, most of the relevant offenses surround a recently deceased novelist named Martin Keller as a young journalist sets out to investigate a simple act of appropriation and finds something far more complex.”
 

Nathaniel Sullivan MM ’17 has been named a winner of the 2023 Astral Artists National Competition. Once awarded a place in Astral’s career development program for classical musicians, National Competition winners receive customized mentorship, a robust portfolio of promotion assets, opportunities for innovative performance and community engagement, artistic exploration, and networking with top professionals in the field. Sullivan is one of seven exceptional artists invited to join Astral’s program for 2023–24, after being selected from an initial pool of candidates from across the United States, and following a competitive audition and interview process. Sullivan, an “alert and highly musical baritone” (Opera News), is an alumnus of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program of the Bard College Conservatory of Music. He has been awarded the Grace B. Jackson Prize for exceptional service at Tanglewood, and earlier this year he received Third Prize at the 2023 Washington International Competition

The inaugural class of master’s graduates in Human Rights and the Arts through the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College (CHRA) were profiled in ARTnews. “The program, meant to support mature activists and artists who live in ongoing crisis zones, and who have experienced persecution, war, surveillance, and poverty, has just matriculated its first graduating class in this impressive and unique program,” writes Shanti Escalante-De Mattei. Tania El Khoury, director of CHRA, spoke to the importance of “[creating] an institution that really practices its politics.” “The idea was to create a space in which both the artists and activists could be together and co-create,” she said. “How can we build a space that puts people’s well-being first? How can we be in solidarity with people from around the world and understand inequality together?”

ARTnews also spoke with Carol Montealgre HRA ’23 and Adam HajYahia HRA ’23, who are among this year’s cohort of graduates, about their master’s theses. Montealgre returned to Colombia and reconnected with a union of Indigenous survivors of the country’s civil war. “I asked them what they needed, and they said they needed healing,” she said. HajYahia, meanwhile, researched the history of gender and sexuality in Palestine, finding “documentation of individuals who lived beyond the traditional boundaries of the gender binary and the patriarchy, focusing on sex workers, same sex relationships, and other activities and behavior that were found to be deviant by English colonizers.”

El Khoury told ARTnews she was proud of the inaugural class—and excited for what was to come. “I think so far, we’re managing to practice what we preach,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like this is too good to be true, like someone is going to find out and stop it. But so far, it’s happening.”

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, a new memoir by Bard alumna and poet Jane Wong ’07, documents her childhood growing up as a second-generation working class American, falling asleep on bags of rice in her immigrant parents’ Atlantic City Chinese restaurant, which her father eventually loses to his gambling addiction. “The poet Wong’s book is reminiscent of an abstract watercolor, free-flowing, nonlinear, without clear borders,” writes Qian Julie Wang for the New York Times. Ultimately a love song, Wong’s memoir “explore[s] the many forms of hunger that come with being Asian in America.” Wong’s memoir was also reviewed in the Boston Globe, and she was interviewed about her book for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Lit Hub.

Interviews:
LA Review of Books: “Tenderness and Ferocity Go Hand in Hand: A Conversation with Jane Wong”
Lit Hub: “Jane Wong: How Non-Linearity Mirrors the Experience of Migration”
 

Brandon Blackwood ’13, Bard alumnus and designer, was invited to speak at the White House by Vice President Kamala Harris as part of the Young Men of Color Small Business Roundtable. Blackwood was one of more than 35 entrepreneurs and small business owners of color to attend the event, where Vice President Harris discussed resources and opportunities offered by the Biden-Harris Administration, reported Essence. In opening remarks, Vice President Harris spoke of the importance of access and resources to overcome obstacles faced by many businesses owned by people of color, including “access to capital, access to markets, access to consumers—access—and what can we do to facilitate and better improve access so that you can then be out there to compete.”

“It was really amazing to see a room full of black entrepreneurs being heard or listened to and voicing their opinions,” Blackwood told Essence. “That was a really beautiful and cool thing to see that I wasn’t the only person that had these issues and that these issues were things that people such as Madam Vice President wanted to address and talk about.”

Juliana Maitenaz ’22, who graduated with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance, has been selected for an independent study–research Fulbright scholarship to Brazil for the 2023–24 academic year. Her project, “Rhythm and Statecraft,” seeks to identify Brazilian percussion and rhythms as a method of cultural communication. Maitenaz aims to conduct her research in São Paulo and will focus on how percussional elements in the Brazilian traditions of Carnival and Samba School performances are instrumental to the country’s statecraft and national identity. The goal of her research is to examine international communication and collaboration through cultural and musical diplomacy. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to learn more about the role Brazilian percussion plays as an inspiring means of cultural communication,” Maitenaz said. 
 
Evan Tims ’19, who was a joint major in Written Arts and Human Rights with a focus on anthropology at Bard, has been selected for a Fulbright-Nehru independent study–research scholarship to India for the 2023–24 academic year. His project, “From the River to Tomorrow: Perceptions of Kolkata’s Water Future,” studies the perceptions of Kolkata’s water future among urban planners, infrastructure experts, and communities—such as those who work in river transport, fishing, and who live in housing along the banks—most vulnerable to water changes along the Hooghly River. He will analyze the dominant narratives of the city and river’s future and reference scientific and planning literature in understanding the points of confluence and divergence between scientific and colloquial understandings of the river, particularly as different stakeholder communities approach an uncertain water future. “In light of urban development and climate change, Kolkata’s water is facing significant change over the coming decades,” said Tims. “It is crucial to understand the complex, layered relationships between stakeholder communities as they seek to negotiate an increasingly uncertain water future.” While in India, Tims also plans to teach a climate fiction writing workshop. In 2021-2022, he was Bard’s first recipient of the yearlong Henry J. Luce Scholarship, which enabled him to conduct ethnographic research on Himalayan water futures and lead a climate writing workshop in Nepal and, later, in Bangladesh. Earlier this academic year, Tims won the prestigious Schwarzman Scholarship to China. As an undergraduate at Bard, Tims also won two Critical Language Scholarships to study Bangla in Kolkata during the summers of 2018 and 2019. 
 
Elias Ephron ’23, a joint major in Political Studies and Spanish Studies, has been selected as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) to Spain for the 2023–24 academic year. While in Spain, Ephron hopes to engage with his host community through food, sharing recipes, hosting dinner parties, and cooking together; take part in Spain’s unique and visually stunning cultural events, like flamenco performances, and Semana Santa processions; visit the hometown of the great poet and playwright Federico García Lorca; and, as a queer individual, meet other queer people. “Having learned Spanish, French, and German to fluency or near-fluency, I understand that language learning requires many approaches. Some are more commonly thought of as ‘fun’ or ‘nascent’ modes of learning, while others more clearly resemble work. I hope to marry this divide, showing students that language learning is both labor and recreation; they may have to work hard, but it can be a great deal of fun, too,” said Ephron. In addition to his work as a writing tutor in the Bard Learning Commons, Ephron has received multiple awards, including the PEN America Fellowship and the Bard Center for the Study of Hate Internship Scholarship.  
 
Eleanor Tappen ’23, a Spanish Studies major, has been selected as a Fulbright ETA to Mexico for the 2023–24 academic year. Tappen has studied abroad in Granada, Spain, received her TESOL certification (which involved 40 hours of training), volunteered in a local elementary school in the fall of 2022, and works as an ESL tutor at the Learning Commons. For Tappen, a Fulbright teaching assistantship in Mexico is an intersection of her academic interest in Mexican literature and her passion for accessible and equitable language learning. During her Fulbright year, Tappen intends to volunteer at a local community garden, a setting she found ideal for cross-cultural exchange and friendship during her time at the Bard Farm. She also hopes to learn about pre-Colombian farming practices, whose revival is currently being led by indigenous movements in Mexico seeking to confront issues presented by unsustainable industrial agricultural practices. “I’m thrilled by the opportunity to live in the country whose literature and culture have served as such positive and significant points in both my academic and personal life. During my time as an ETA in Mexico, I hope to inspire in my students the same love of language-learning I found at Bard.”
 
Biology major Macy Jenks ’23 has been selected as an ETA to Taiwan for the 2023–24 academic year. Jenks is an advanced Mandarin language speaker having attended a Chinese immersion elementary school and continuing her Mandarin language studies through high school and college, including three weeks spent in China living with host family in 2015. She has tutored students in English at Bard’s Annandale campus, as well as through the Bard Prison Initiative at both Woodbourne Correctional Facility and Eastern New York Correctional Facility. She also has worked with the Bard Center for Civic Engagement to develop curricula and provide STEM programming to local middle and high school students. “As a Fulbright ETA, I hope to equip students with the tools necessary to hone their English language and cultural skills while encouraging them to develop their own voices,” says Jenks. While in Taiwain, she plans to volunteer with the Taiwan Root Medical Peace Corps, which offers medical care to rural communities, or with the Taipei Medical University in a more urban setting to further engage with the community and learn more about Taiwan’s healthcare systems and settings. With her love of hiking, Jenks also hopes to explore various cultural sites including the cave temples of Lion’s Head Mountain and Fo Guang Shan monastery and enjoy the natural beauty of Taiwan.

Bard Conservatory alumna Avery Morris ’18, who graduated with a BA in Mathematics and a BM in Violin Performance, has been selected for a prestigious Fulbright Study Research Award for 2023–24. Her project, “Gideon Klein’s Lost Works and the Legacy of Czech Musical Modernism,” aims to bring to light the early works of Czech composer and Holocaust victim Gideon Klein (1919–1945), which were lost until they were discovered in a suitcase in the attic of a house in Prague in the 1990s. She will live in Prague for the upcoming academic year and continue her research on Klein, which has been a focus of her studies at Stony Brook University, where she is pursuing a Doctorate of Musical Arts in Violin Performance.

Getzamany "Many" Correa ’21, a Global and International Studies major, has been selected as an ETA to Spain for the 2023–24 academic year. Correa was an international student in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Hungary. As an international student in high school, she started an initiative called English Conversation Buddies with the State Department-sponsored American Corner in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has received her TESOL certification (which involved 40 hours of training) and worked as an ESL tutor at the Learning Commons. In Spain, Correa hopes to create a book club that introduces students to diverse authors writing in English, study Spanish literature, and host dinners with the locals she meets. She also plans to volunteer with EducationUSA and support students applying to colleges and universities in the U.S. “A year-long ETA in Spain will allow me to experience a culture and language central to my academic and personal interests, leverage my background in education while furthering my teaching experience, and make meaningful connections through cross-cultural engagement,” says Correa.
 
The Fulbright US Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. Fulbright creates connections in a complex and changing world. In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright US Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad. us.fulbrightonline.org.

Marty Two Bulls Jr. MFA ’24 was chosen as one of 21 Indigenous leaders to receive a 2023–24 NDN Changemaker Fellowship. The fellowship comes with a flexible cash prize of $75,000 to invest in a project of the fellow’s choosing. “Each fellow was uplifted and selected by grassroots members of their region in a process which involved over 300 applicants from 21 different regions across the colonial nation-states of Canada, Mexico, and the US, including its surrounding Island nations,” said the NDN Collective.

“I’m extremely humbled to have received the NDN Collective Changemaker Fellowship,” Two Bulls said. “The fellowship will support my work as an artist and educator in my rural tribal community on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in western South Dakota. It means a great deal to me to receive such tremendous support and acknowledgment from an Indigenous-run organization like NDN Collective; I feel like I’m on the right path in the work that I am doing.”

Thrift 2 Fight cofounders Masha Zabara ’21 and Jillian Reed ’21 both studied music at Bard’s Conservatory of Music. However, it was their shared mission to support grassroots social justice organizations that brought them together. Recently profiled in the Times Union, Thrift 2 Fight originated as a yard sale in 2020 to raise donation funds in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and has since expanded into a sustainable business model—raising and redistributing almost $65,000 to date through secondhand clothing sales. In 2022, Thrift 2 Fight opened its Tivoli storefront, staffed by volunteers from Bard College as well as Camp Ramapo, and hosts many community events including free clothing swaps and “Art Is How I Fight” gallery shows for artists who are currently incarcerated. 

Further reading:
Thrift 2 Fight Cofounder Jillian Reed ’21 Wins $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace Grant

Lisa Kereszi ’95, photographer and Bard College alumna, is launching Mourning, a new monograph that explores family grief through photographs. In 2018, Kereszi’s father passed away, less than a year after she lost her grandmother. She asked family members to install a trail camera so she could view her father’s grave plot—after the headstone had tipped over and required re-mounting—which automatically generated photos she could view every day. In this way, she was able to regularly experience visiting her father’s grave through thousands of images taken over a seven-month period, despite being hundreds of miles away. The resulting Mourning is an intimate and lovingly created album, with 112 of those photographs as testimony of her grieving process. 

Mourning is available for presale through August 1 at the collaborative publishing platform Minor Matters Books, and will include an essay by curator and writer Marvin Heiferman. 

Kereszi, a photography major at Bard, first became interested in visiting cemeteries to make photographs after photographer Stephen Shore showed her Walker Evans’s famous 1936 picture of a desolate grave in Alabama. In publishing Mourning, she is collaborating for the second time with Bard alumna Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95, with whom she worked previously on Joe’s Junk Yard, 2012 by Damiani Books. Marsh founded Minor Matters Books with the aim of creating a publishing platform that makes its audience co-publishers of photo book titles, enabling production support solely through pre-sales, rather than through traditional means.
 

Gabriel Kilongo ’15, Bard alumnus and founder of the art gallery Jupiter Contemporary in Miami, was interviewed by Artnet News about the founding of Jupiter and its upcoming exhibitions. “With the help of Martin Peretz and Leon Botstein, I went to Bard College on a full scholarship to study art history,” Kilongo told Artnet. “While there, I was introduced to many facets of the art world, and it immediately clicked.” In March 2022, he founded the gallery with the intention of highlighting and fostering emerging artists. “Our focus is to identify, exhibit, and develop artists who are off-the-beaten-path, and offer a breath of fresh air to the discourse of the art industry.” The next exhibition planned for Jupiter Contemporary will be a solo show featuring new work by Yongqi Tang, showcasing the broad scope of her practice in paintings, drawings, and sculptures.

The New York Times profiled the “singular, tender, euphoric, hypnotic opera” Stranger Love and its collaborators, composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities. The Times also reviewed the opera, naming it a Critic's Pick, calling it “an earnest exercise in deep feeling that takes sensations and stretches them from the personal to the cosmic, and goes big in a time when contemporary music tends to go small.”

Stranger Love premiered on Saturday, May 20, 2023—its only planned performance at the time of writing. Writer Zachary Woolfe tracked the project from its envisioning 11 years ago to its final incarnation: a six-hour, three-act production to be staged at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Contemporaneous, which Mattingly cofounded with David Bloom ’13 as an undergraduate at Bard, will play, with Bloom conducting. Whether Stranger Love will have a future performance after this weekend is unclear, though “Mattingly has dreamed of doing it at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.” Regardless, Mattingly and Bartscherer are at work on their next collaboration, the ambitiously titled “History of Life.”

Choreographer Joanna Haigood ’79 is the recipient of a 2023 Rainin Fellowship for her work in dance. Now in its third year, this fellowship annually awards four visionary Bay Area artists working across the disciplines of dance, film, public space, and theater with unrestricted grants of $100,000. An initiative of the Kenneth Rainin Foundation and administered by United States Artists, the fellowship funds artists who push the boundaries of creative expression, anchor local communities, and advance the field. Fellows also receive supplemental support tailored to address each fellow’s specific needs and goals, including financial planning, communications, and marketing help and legal services. The 2023 Fellows were nominated by Bay Area artists and cultural leaders and selected through a two-part review process with the help of national reviewers and a panel of four local jurors. Haigood is the artistic director of Zaccho Dance Theatre and was a recipient of a Bard Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters.

Haigood is a choreographer and site artist who has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative since 1980. Haigood’s stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of urban neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by arts institutions including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Walker Arts Center, the Exploratorium Museum, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d’Avignon. Haigood has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary young artists internationally at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque in France, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in England, Spelman College, and many more, including members of her company Zaccho Dance Theatre. Her honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship, USA Fellowship, New York Bessie Award, and the Doris Duke Artist Award.

Filmmaker Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, who is associate professor and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard, has been selected as a member of the 2023–2024 cohort of Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellows for his work in the arts. During their fellowship year, this international cohort will work on projects that “contend with the urgent, the beautiful, and the vast: from reckoning with the challenges of climate change to creating digital models of iconic Italian violins to detecting distant galaxies.” Asili has been named a Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellow, an honor which includes a stipend of $78,000 plus an additional $5,000 to cover project expenses. Radcliffe-Film Study Center Fellows are provided studio or office space, use of the Film Study Center’s equipment and facilities, and access to libraries and other Harvard University resources during the fellowship year.

The Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program annually selects and supports artists, scholars, and practitioners who bring both a record of achievement and exceptional promise to the institute. A Radcliffe fellowship offers scholars in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and arts—as well as writers, journalists, and other distinguished professionals—a rare chance to pursue ambitious projects for a full year in a vibrant interdisciplinary setting amid the resources of Harvard. The 2023–2024 fellows represent only 3.3 percent of the many applications that Radcliffe received.

What began as a Senior Project is now Don’t Call Me Home, a new book by Alex Auder ’94 chronicling her relationship with her mother, Viva, the larger-than-life personality and Warhol superstar. “Don’t Call Me Home is fully cooked, wicked in its humor and often heartbreaking,” writes Penelope Green in a profile of Auder for the New York Times. Auder began the manuscript while a student at Bard, but put it away for years, returning to the project in 2019. The memoir explores her life with Viva and their bohemian lifestyle in the Chelsea Hotel. Auder ultimately sees the book as a “feminist story.” “It’s about women!” Auder said. “Strong women, crazy women, women in love, women in rage, women in despair, birth, desire, sex, single mothers, friendships only women can have, women trying to make art and raise a family at the same time, women trying to do it all and failing. Women enduring … each other.”

Speaking with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Auder was asked about her relationship with Gaby Hoffman ’04, her half-sister and fellow Bard alumna, for whom Auder “became like a second mother,” and her father Michel Auder, photographer and filmmaker, whose film of Auder’s birth features in the memoir. When Auder was three, she asked to watch the film. She permitted to do so, and her reaction itself was caught on film. The experience of watching herself watching herself being born was difficult for Auder to sum up in words. “It’s a long video, with the camera just trained on my face watching the video,” Auder said to Gross. “And you can see every expression sort of across my face as each moment in the birth video happens.”

While Don’t Call Me Home is in part a reflection on the difficulties of Auder’s relationship with her mother, it is also an ode to the woman, for whom Auder holds a great deal of love and admiration. “She was a trailblazer,” Auder said to the Times. “Ahead of her time in many respects. Too ahead of her time in the sense that she was considered crazy before she was revered. She was outspoken when being outspoken was not hip. Nude, when nudity was not hip. Raging against the machine before the machine created a platform, the internet, from which to be raged about.”

Three Bard College alumni/ae—Beatrice Abbott ’15, Megumi Kivuva ’22, and Tobias Golz Timofeyev ’21—have been awarded competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships for the 2023 award year. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) aims to “ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States” and “seeks to broaden participation in science and engineering of underrepresented groups, including women, minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans” through selection, recognition, and financial support of individuals who have demonstrated the potential to be high achieving scientists and engineers early in their careers.

Beatrice Abbott ’15, who majored in political studies at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of social sciences. She is a master’s student in geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research interests include evidence/forensics, critical migration studies, critical cartography and geographic information systems (GIS), and visual culture.

Megumi Kivuva ’22, who majored in Spanish studies and computer science with a concentration in Experimental Humanities at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of STEM education and learning research. Kivuva is a PhD student in computing education at the University of Washington. Their research “aims to broaden participation in computing education for Black and refugee students,” and they “use community participatory research to understand the barriers to accessing computing education and codesign interventions to make computing education more accessible to these communities.”
 
Tobias Golz Timofeyev ’21, who majored in mathematics at Bard, has won a fellowship for the field of mathematical biology. He is a PhD student in mathematical sciences at the University of Vermont. The fellowship will allow him to focus on his research project, "Decoding Parallel Processing in the Brain using the Connectome Eigenfunctions." 

As the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the GRFP has a long history of selecting recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. The five-year fellowship period provides a three-year annual stipend of $37,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees, as well as access to opportunities for professional development. NSF Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. Each year, the NSF receives more than 12,000 applications to the GRFP program, which has awarded fellowships to its selected scholars since 1952.

After the Writers Guild of America voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, Adam Conover ’04 spoke with Alison Stewart on WNYC’s All of It about what comes next and what is at stake for writers in the current set of negotiations. One of the primary reasons for the strike authorization vote, Conover said, was the discrepancy in residuals between work produced for traditional television and work produced for streaming. Contrary to traditional screenwriting, where writers are paid each time a work is rerun or rescreened, streaming media pays a flat rate to writers, which has “made it almost impossible for writers to put a career together and afford to live and work in Los Angeles or New York, where most of us have to live in order to do our work,” Conover said. Asked about potential lessons from the 2007 writers’ strike, Conover said, “The biggest lesson is when you fight, you win. [...] If we hadn't gone on strike that year, no streaming show would be a union show.”

In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Bard Written Arts alumna and journalist Moira Donegan ’12 cautions that we should not be fooled by the highest court’s decision to allow the abortion drug mifepristone to remain available—temporarily staying a Texas federal judge’s ruling to reverse the drug’s FDA approval and pull it from US markets—while the case goes through an appeals process. Donegan deduces “sharp intra-Republican disagreement over how to handle the unexpectedly virulent political fallout from the Dobbs decision” among the right-wing Supreme Court justices who jointly ruled to overturn abortion access as a federal right. She asserts the ideologues want to “hit the gas” while the institutionalists want to “pump the brakes,” but that doesn’t change where they are all headed. “Do not let the mifepristone ruling fool you about where this extremist court is going,” she writes. 

While the nation waited for the Supreme Court to issue its order on mifepristone, the past week served as a stark realization of “just how far the Overton window has shifted, and just how low the standards for women’s health and freedom have sunk, in the months since Dobbs.” She notes that “developments that could only have been fairly understood as grave insults to women’s dignity were instead pitched as mercies or signs of moderation.”

Dale Beran ’04, Bard alumnus and lecturer at Morgan State University, appeared for an interview on CNN, where he spoke about the online radicalization of young men and discussed how certain online communities form, such as the spaces on Discord and other platforms where highly classified US documents were first leaked by Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old air national guardsman. “The larger set of Discords that these leaks appeared in, and finally 4chan, all sort of share a culture of dropped-out, idle young men,” says Beran. “So you have a lot of young men radicalizing, or being more extreme than they would because they’re spending all their time dropped-out, online… They end up getting a very distorted picture of reality.” Beran, author of It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office, is a writer and artist whose work has been published in McSweeney’s, Quartz, the Huffington Post, the Daily Dot, the Nib, and the Baltimore City Paper.

The latest issue of the Bardian informs the Bard community of news from the College and Bard alumni/ae. The Spring 2023 Bardian features articles by alumni/ae and faculty, class notes, alumni/ae profiles, obituaries, and the honor roll of donors. 

Top Stories 
Maya Lin—Dancing about Architecture
Sonita Alizada '23
Gilman Winners Go Far
Mneesha Gellman '03
A Place to Rethink
Trustee Leader Scholar Program at 25

If you would like to receive the Bardian, please email [email protected]. If you have an idea for an article please let us know. We hope you enjoy your college magazine.

On Sunday, April 30, the film Miúcha, The Voice of Bossa Nova will have its first public premiere at Bard College. Produced by alumnus Mostafiz ShahMohammed ’97, the film will be screened in Bard’s Jim Ottaway Jr. Film Center at 4 pm, with a reception to follow until 6:30 pm. The event is cosponsored by the Office of the President, the Latin American Students Organization, and the Office of Alumni/ae Affairs. This event is free and open to the public with limited space. RSVP to reserve: https://bardian.bard.edu/register/miucha-premiere. 
 
This groundbreaking documentary, which received global recognition at Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and Rio Film Festival, explores the illustrious life of Brazilian singer Heloísa Maria Buarque de Hollanda, known by her artistic name Miúcha, and captures the story of her unique talent. 

Miúcha was often overshadowed by the male musicians in her life: she was the mother of Grammy-nominated musician Bebel Gilberto, former spouse of João Gilberto—known as the father of bossa nova—and sister of the legendary Chico Buarque. Miúcha, The Voice of Bossa Nova serves as a much-needed correction to this perspective, highlighting her life and her extraordinary contributions to the bossa nova musical genre. “Miúcha’s vibrant spirit couldn’t be held back, even as she struggled to find her own voice in a man’s world,” said Marta Sanchez, the film’s producer, CEO of FILMZ LLC, and executive director of Pragda, a leading distributor for the newest Latin American, Spanish, and Latinx cinema. “She earned unprecedented success, becoming a symbol of female resilience and a musical legend forever.”

With a stunning display of never-seen-before archival footage, photos, animation, and audio recordings, the film is an intimate exploration of the artist’s life and career as she embraced her talent as a performer and songwriter and emerged as the true voice of bossa nova.

“It is a rare and exciting opportunity to make a film with such a strong connection to Bard,” said ShahMohammed. Produced, directed, and edited by Bardians, including recent alumni/ae Hakima Alem ’21, Emanuel Castro ’22, Stela Gatti ’21, and Julie Reed ’22, the documentary is an important step towards reviving Miúcha’s musical legacy and introducing a new audience to her original work. “Building on Bard’s exceptional focus on critical thinking and creativity, we want this film to inspire the next generation of artists and activists to become the voices of change, addressing the most pressing issues of equity.”
 

New York capital region’s public media network WMHT recently featured the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) in its new video series, Work in Progress, which shares stories of people navigating a rapidly changing economy and how they respond to the evolving needs and conditions of work. This episode, “How College in Prison is Changing Lives,” explores the transformative power of education in prison programs. BPI Upstate Reentry Coordinator Shawn Young ’19, Director of Special Projects at the Center for Community Alternatives in Brooklyn Tammar Cancer ’17, BPI Director of Reentry Jed B. Tucker, and BPI alumnus Gordon Davis ’13 are interviewed about the impact BPI’s work has had on them personally as well as the long-term outcomes of receiving a liberal arts education in prison. 

Fashion designer and Bard alumnus Brandon Blackwood ’13 was one of 10 new members inducted into the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) this year. Thom Browne, chairman of the CFDA, said, “Our newest members represent everything America has to offer . . . diversity . . . creativity . . . and true individual talent.” Blackwood's eponymous accessories brand first made its mark in the fashion world with a tote embellished with the words: “End Systemic Racism.” Now, Blackwood’s fashion label has expanded to include statement shoes, outerwear, and soon swimwear. 

In a recent designer profile published in Harper’s Bazaar, Blackwood says, “These last two years for me have been really about finding the brand’s aesthetic and really beginning to mold itself. We built the foundation in the last few years, but—I know it sounds corny—we’re trying to really find our voice.”

Tschabalala Self ’12, visiting artist in residence in Studio Arts, is the subject of her first solo European museum exhibition Tschabalala Self: Inside Out, on view at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland through June 18. Curated by Gianni Jetzer, the show centers the Black body, especially the female Black body, through the conceptual and compositional lens of the artist in what Self has termed as a “pantheon of invented characters.” Featuring the show in its weekly spotlight, Artnet News writes: “Though clearly deeply rooted in the tradition of painting, the compound of materials and techniques within Self’s two-dimensional compositions defy easy categorization . . . The figures are singular and specific, yet they are far from traditional portraiture.”

The London run of Bard Fisher Center’s reorchestrated revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! has won two 2023 Olivier Awards. Director Daniel Fish’s Tony Award–winning production of Oklahoma!, which premiered at Bard SummerScape in 2015, won the Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival, and Arthur Darvill won Best Actor in a Musical for his leading role as Curly McLain. Considered the United Kingdom’s most prestigious stage honors, the Laurence Olivier Awards are presented annually by the Society of London Theatre to recognize excellence in professional theater in London. This year’s award ceremony and celebration took place on April 2 at London’s Royal Albert Hall. 

The widely acclaimed production of Oklahoma!, directed by Daniel Fish, originated as a Bard College undergraduate Theater Program production in 2007. The Fisher Center produced it professionally in SummerScape 2015, and it subsequently transferred to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn and on to Broadway, where it won a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical in 2019. In 2022, the production moved to the Young Vic in London and is currently playing in London’s West End at the Wyndham’s Theatre. Patrick Vaill ’07 reprises his role as Jud Fry—which he played in Bard’s initial student performance and in the SummerScape, off-Broadway, and Broadway productions—in the London staging.

For further reading:
In the Smithsonian Magazine’s recent article, “Behind ‘Oklahoma!’ Lies the Remarkable Story of a Gay Cherokee Playwright,” Patrick Vaill ’07 discusses the complexity and vulnerability of the character Jud Fry, a role he has played on and off for the past 16 years.

 

Bard alumna Juliana Maitenaz ’22 has received an independent study–research Fulbright Scholarship to Brazil for the 2023–24 academic year. Her project, “Rhythm and Statecraft,” seeks to identify Brazilian percussion and rhythms as a method of cultural communication. Maitenaz, a former Conservatory student, graduated from Bard last May with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance. 

Her project, which she aims to conduct in São Paulo, will focus on how percussional elements in the Brazilian traditions of Carnival and Samba School performances are instrumental to the country’s statecraft and national identity. The goal of her research is to examine international communication and collaboration through cultural and musical diplomacy. “I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to learn more about the role Brazilian percussion plays as an inspiring means of cultural communication,” Maitenaz said. 

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. During their grants, Fulbrighters will meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences to facilitate cultural exchange.

Bard alumnus Dariel Vasquez ’17 appeared on the Today Show, speaking to the importance of peer mentoring and how it changed his life as a teenager. Now he’s paying it forward with Brothers@, a program he cofounded as a Bard student to support young men of color in high school and through college. In Vasquez’s experience, small acts of support and educational investment can make an outsized impact on a student’s trajectory. “It’s a story of making sure that we remember to always take chances on our young people and believe in them,” says Vasquez. “The adults in my life audaciously believed in me and took a chance on me and my future.”