Newsmakers

The Chicago-based Floating Museum, an art collective codirected by Bard alumnus Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford ’07, will serve as the artistic team leading the fifth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, or CAB 5. Titled This is a Rehearsal, CAB 5 “will build on and expand the collective’s ongoing work,” writes Matt Hickman for the Architect’s Newspaper. “Floating Museum is organized to work at the intersection of disciplines, where civic participation inspires and shapes our process. It’s both a thrill and challenge to collaborate with the CAB as the artistic team of the 2023 edition,” said the members of Floating Museum. With This is a Rehearsal, the collective hopes to showcase work that demonstrates the ways in which “contemporary environmental, political, and economic issues are shared across national boundaries but are addressed differently around the world through art, architecture, infrastructure, and civic participation.” CAB 5, This is a Rehearsal, is scheduled to open September 2023.

As the world watches the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant suffer “weeks of shelling,” the potential for “another nuclear disaster on the scale of the Chernobyl explosion” looms large, writes Bard alum C Mandler ’19 for CBS news. The similarities between Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia are as much organizational as they are structural, says Jonathan Becker, executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs for Bard College. Both share “an environment… in which people are disincentivized from communicating genuine problems to higher-ups,” Becker says, which could result in a “series of mistakes, which are reinforced by a system which doesn't encourage transparent communication.” A nuclear disaster in Ukraine would be catastrophic on “both human and geopolitical” levels, Becker says. Should a nuclear disaster occur, “it will be difficult to imagine the path forward after that,” he said.

 

This month, New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency following evidence of the spread of poliovirus in wastewater. Nsikan Akpan ’06, who runs the health and science desk at WNYC/Gothamist, spoke with NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe to explain what this executive order means. “Health officials say the poliovirus that's in Long Island sewage right now—it's genetically linked to the paralytic case that was recorded in Rockland County earlier this summer, which was the first such case in nearly a decade in the United States,” says Akpan.

Countertenor Chuanyuan Liu, who graduated from the Bard Conservatory of Music’s Vocal Arts Program in 2021, has been named a grantee of the Met’s Education Fund. Education Fund grants are available to semifinalists, finalists, and Grand Finals winners of the Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition, following an audition with the Met artistic staff. The grants are intended to support the development of these young artists and are made possible by the generosity of donors. Since the 2021 Laffont semifinals, Chuanyuan Liu has been involved in three world premiere projects: Pittsburgh Opera’s production of In a Grove, with music by Christopher Cerrone and libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann; Philadelphia Orchestra’s concert version of Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce’s The Hours; and Huang Ruo and David Henry Hwang's highly anticipated new opera M. Butterfly 蝴蝶君 at Santa Fe Opera. Liu has committed himself to an Asian-focused project each year stating, “as someone who grew up in China and spent all of my adulthood in the US, I have seen firsthand the differences but also the common ground. I want to use as much power as I have to build a bridge.”

LSA Family Health Service, a leading community nonprofit supporting thousands of low-income and immigrant families in East Harlem, announced that Jonah Gensler ’92 will lead the organization as its new chief executive officer (CEO). Gensler brings deep experience in nonprofit executive leadership, social services, and community engagement.

Profiled in the New York Times, the artist Martine Syms MFA ’17 “is the sort of ‘new media’ artist who antiquates the term. Since her days as a film programmer at clubs like the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, she has turned the various lenses of media around to interrogate what society expects of Black women, and Black artists in particular,” writes Travis Diehl. This fall, Syms has an independent feature film showing in theaters with worldwide distribution, as well as exihibtions on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and CCS Bard. "Grio College," the title of Syms’ retrospective show at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum, is also the fictional school in Syms’s feature film The African Desperate (2022). “The curriculum that she presents is larger than what a college typically covers,” said Lauren Cornell, the chief curator at the Hessel. “It encompasses one’s whole life, friends, thinkers, culture.”

Martine Syms: Grio College, curated by Lauren Cornell, Chief Curator and Director of the Graduate Program, is on view at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art through November 27, 2022.