Newsmakers

With fewer students choosing to enroll in college immediately after high school, the Bard High School Early College model provides not only hope but proof that educational reform is possible. Early colleges, which give students the opportunity to earn an associate’s degree while in high school, have been proven to “bridge the gap between high school and higher education,” writes Wayne D’Orio for Education Next. The benefits of attending an early college are many, including savings in tuition costs and higher college graduation rates. Building off of ideas first forwarded by Bard President Leon Botstein in Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Creation of a Hopeful Culture, there are now seven Bard High School Early Colleges nationwide, each of them charting a path forward for their students and for American education as a whole. Still, though the early college model is, by definition, future-focused, the immediate student experience is one of self-discovery and self-belief. “Students surprise themselves” with their achievements, says Stephen Tremaine ’07, vice president for the Early Colleges. After a student told him they hated reading but loved Gilgamesh, he responded: “‘Maybe you don’t hate reading.’ They have success that hasn’t registered yet.”
 
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It might seem natural that visual artists look to the visual for inspiration, but what about the written word? Mieke Marple, writing for LitHub, spoke with 14 contemporary artists about how reading influences their work, including Jibade-Khalil Huffman ’03 and Azikiwe Mohammed ’05. Huffman, whose work incorporates “subtitles, titles, and more abstract juxtapositions of text,” and who has published several books of poetry, says he’s currently reading Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest by Hanif Abdurraqib. In his work, “there is typically lots of veering back and forth between a clear sort of description/essay and the more indeterminate shifts of thought that poetry allows.” Mohammed, meanwhile, cites Todd McFarlane’s Spawn as an inspiration. “It is drawn out in a way that feels luxurious, for me, as a Black man, rarely able to have time exist as such,” he says. “The character Spawn is a Black man who has died, and in death found the time that I lack here while among the living.”
 
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After leaving his job at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Gabriel Kilongo ’15 wanted not only to open a gallery, but to start a scene. His new gallery, Jupiter, which opened on March 5 in the North Beach community of Miami Beach, Florida, is meant to challenge not only where art galleries are supposed to open, but what they are designed to do. “I wanted to find a space that was not in a place that is already too trendy, already overdeveloped,” Kilongo said to the New York Times. The gallery, currently showing works by Marcus Leslie Singleton, will emphasize “emerging artists who are adding new perspectives to canonized art historical conversation,” Kilongo says.
 
Read More in the New York Times

Katy Schneider ’14, features editor for New York magazine, won the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) Next Award for journalists under 30. ASME Next Award winners are judged by their portfolio of work and are chosen each year for “their potential to make significant contributions to magazine journalism.” Schneider and the rest of this year’s winners will be honored at ASME’s annual award presentation on April 5, 2022.
 
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Read More on the Verge, as Reported by Aude White ’12

Ahead of their first solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Carolyn Lazard ’10 spoke with Frieze about their work and how they incorporate Blackness, queerness, disability, and collectivity into their aesthetic. A cofounder of the art collective Canaries, “a network of women and gender non-conforming people living and working with autoimmune conditions and other chronic illnesses,” Lazard sometimes feels uncomfortable with the idea of individuation, of focusing on one artist over another. “The truth is that my work comes out of a long lineage of Black, disabled, and queer people making art,” they say. “My practice doesn’t exist in a vacuum: it is made in relation to the work of other artists who have come before me, and those whose work I learn about day to day.” 
 
Lazard’s work, which spans different mediums, progressed from a love of avant-garde cinema, which they first came into contact with at Bard. Recently, Lazard has experimented with providing multiple ways of presenting a single artwork, both visual and non-visual. “Access has this capacity to break through the boundaries of medium, because of the way it makes art necessarily iterative,” they say. “Through access, a single artwork might exist as a description, as a notation, as sign language, as a transcript or as a tactile object—depending on what people need.” Still, though these categories inform their work, they are resistant to the market trends which seek to define artists, especially Black artists, by a singular trait or identity. “Most museums seem committed to receiving Black art, Black aesthetics, and Black politics—provided it’s on the museum’s terms,” they say. “It’s a complex time to be a Black artist, but when has it not been?”
 
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Learn More about Carolyn Lazard: Long Take