Newsmakers

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.

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.”