Newsmakers

Lexi Parra ’18 is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based between Caracas and New York. Parra will be on campus on Wednesday, November 1. A Conversations and Lunch event will take place in the George Ball Lounge of the Campus Center from noon to 1:30 that day.

By Lauren Rodgers ’27

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
A: I am a Venezuelan-American photographer, community educator, and a Bard alum. After graduating in 2018 with my degree in Photography and Human Rights, I began to focus my work on youth culture, migration, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. I’m the founder of Project MiRA, an arts education initiative based in Caracas, and also a community manager at Women Photograph. I’m bilingual (Spanish and English), and am currently working between Caracas and New York.

Q: What inspired you to pursue photography?
A: I grew up going to my dad’s sets—he is a director of photography in the commercial world—and, even though I didn’t realize it at the time, it set me up to want to be a photographer. I was the kid with a big DSLR camera on my shoulder wherever I went, taking mediocre travel pictures. When I got accepted to Bard, I realized the Photography Program was renowned and thought it was something I should pursue. What has inspired me to make images and tell stories is my obsessive curiosity and want to connect with people. My camera is one of the ways that I do that.

Q: Your photography focuses on youth culture, migration, inequality, and resilience. What inspired you to incorporate activism into your artistic work?
A: Honestly, I don’t know if my work as a photographer / journalist would be considered ‘activism.’ During my time at Bard, I was a community organizer and my senior thesis work had a lot to do with representation and healing, which was my response to our world at the time. That ethos continues to guide me; to make beautiful and dignified images, particularly because I work in places and with people who are going through crises. While I don’t know if an image can have any tangible impact on the world, I do think it matters how we show up and engage. I hope that
in the way I work that it is an interaction, rather than something that is extractive.

Q: Why did you choose to attend Bard?
A:  When it came time to make a decision, Bard seemed to be the right fit for me. I had visited the campus and, coming from Minneapolis, was new to the landscape of Northeast private colleges. Bard had a flexibility in its programming that intrigued me. The financial aid package was substantial, too, which I needed to go to a college like Bard. I didn’t have crazy high expectations when I got to campus because I was so out of my element—but the teachers/mentors and friends I made, the experiences I had, absolutely shaped me into the person I am today.

Q: How do you feel your roots in Venezuela and Hispanic culture have influenced your work and photographic perspective?
A: I think living in Venezuela since graduating Bard has shaped my work more so than being Venezuelan. It took going back to my dad’s home country to actually feel those roots. Growing up, I didn’t have strong connections beyond making arepas or visiting my dad’s few Venezuelan friends, who also somehow landed in Minneapolis. In college, I embraced my latinidad but, still, it didn’t have roots yet. Going back to Caracas, though, as an adult shaped my work immensely.

As an insider-outsider, I learned to listen first. Having lived in Venezuela during a part of its years-long crisis, I now feel a deep sense of responsibility to cover the ongoing effects on communities with the focus being on the strength and resilience that people have to create something as everything is on the brink of collapse. That duality, that complexity, has informed how I see the world. My connection to Venezuela has translated into an intimacy with stories of migration, too, which has been both heartbreaking and fulfilling.

Q: Could you tell us about Project MiRA, the arts education initiative you founded?
A: Project MiRA brought me to Caracas after graduating from Bard in 2018. Through the Davis Peace Prize, I went to Venezuela with a bag of old digital cameras to host workshops through the Tiuna el Fuerte cultural park. The idea was to give cameras to people who are living the crisis, to see the reality through their eyes and change the dynamic of photographer-subject during a time of turmoil. After a year of traveling the country teaching groups of kids and adults, I formalized the initiative into Project MiRA (“look” in Spanish). Our methodology brings photography workshops to informal community spaces in remote areas of the barrios of Caracas, collaborating with local community leaders, to work with teen girls. The programming focuses on issues of representation, storytelling and visual literacy. In five years, we have taught over 600 young people, exhibited their work in both Caracas and New York and have been a part of a children’s photography book. The work I do with Project MiRA has been so informative to my person, as well as my work as a photographer, and I am beyond grateful for the community support that makes it possible.

Q: For you, what does it mean to be an active community member?
A: Being an active community member really comes down to being human: someone who has empathy, who shows up. It is so easy, especially in the US, to isolate and think of ourselves in terms of our individual self. When we come together in community and actually understand that we are a part of something bigger, it can be both empowering and reassuring. We just have to show up and offer what we can.

Q: When do you feel your work is most challenging, and when do you feel your work is most rewarding?
A: My work is most challenging when I feel helpless. Hearing someone talk about their journey through the Darien Gap, or holding their hand as they tell me about losing their brother in a police raid ... I can’t do anything tangible to help. My work isn’t going to take their pain away, or make it better. I can be there, and be present with them, but the feeling of not being able to do more is always the worst part of my job. The most rewarding thing is when people see their picture in a newspaper or an article, or hold a print I brought for them. It’s the most rewarding because they feel seen, acknowledged. Similarly, when I’m teaching, I get so excited when a student learns to claim her space, her opinion—when she trusts us enough to really flex. There’s nothing better than that.

Q: You've only been out of college for five years. What are your tips to cultivating a successful career post-grad?
A: I would definitely take advantage of the opportunities that are available at Bard. Go to every conference you can, have coffee with a professor whose work you admire, scour for internships or jobs that can give you some experience and insight while you are still in school. Photojournalism found me after college, and I’m grateful to have had mentors who guided me into this career. While I didn’t study photojournalism, my varied experiences through Bard did set me up with skills that are vital to what I do now. So, I would say be open to any opportunities and use the network to your advantage.
 

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More about Lexi Parra ’18:

• lexiparra.com
• As gang, police violence rages, a neighborhood tries to connect (Washington Post)
• Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
• Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects for Peace Prize

While the rate of homelessness has held largely steady across the United States, increasing by roughly 1% over a five-year period, complaints using 311 and other emergency phone numbers have skyrocketed during that same span. “In many cities we've seen extraordinary growth in using 311 to complain about homelessness that go far beyond the number of people experiencing homelessness,” Bard College alumnus Chris Herring ’08, assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, told ABC News. Among the reasons for this, Herring and other experts posit, is that the type of homelessness people are experiencing is changing, and with it, their visibility. The public is much more likely to perceive unsheltered homelessness than sheltered homelessness, and as a result, much more likely to report the presence of people experiencing homelessness to the police, which in turn can create a feedback loop, says Herring. Forcing people to relocate can exacerbate mental health symptoms, which then makes them more visible, and thus more likely to be reported. “It could increase problematic behaviors that are more visible,” Herring said. “It's different from when someone has a stable camp in a hidden spot.”

Bard alum Carolyn Lazard ’10 has been named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Lazard, an interdisciplinary artist who uses the experience of chronic illness to examine concepts of intimacy and social and political dimensions of care, is one of this year’s 20 recipients of the prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In a statement about their work, the MacArthur Foundation says, “Lazard is an artist exploring the limits of aesthetic perception and using accessibility as a creative tool for collective practices of care. With a practice that spans the mediums of video, installation, sculpture, and performance, their work challenges ableist expectations of solo productivity and efficiency. They approach these subjects using the minimalist language of conceptual art and avant-garde cinema.”

The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award for extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selection of MacArthur Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.

MacArthur Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee, recipients learn of their selection only when they receive a call from the MacArthur Foundation just before the public announcement.

Carolyn Lazard received a BA (2010) from Bard College and an MFA (2019) from the University of Pennsylvania. Their work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; MoMA PS1; Museum für Moderne Kunst; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Venice Biennale.

Lazard often repurposes ready-made objects—such as a HEPA air purifier, a noise machine, and a power-lifter recliner chair—calling attention to the dependencies and infrastructures of care that sustain social life. CRIP TIME (2018) is a video-based meditation on the time Lazard devotes to organizing a week’s worth of different medications into brightly colored, plastic pill containers. Through documenting this care-based task, Lazard makes visible the often-obscured care and labor of staying alive. Lazard’s work also addresses complex histories of institutional harm and racialized violence. The video piece Pre-Existing Condition (2019) focuses on medical experiments that a University of Pennsylvania professor conducted on incarcerated people at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia between 1951 and 1974. Lazard displays archival documents that list each experiment and the sponsoring institutions overlayed with the voice of Yusef Anthony, a Holmesburg Prison experiment survivor and advocate, who discusses his mistrust of medical and legal systems. As in much of their practice, access is both a theme and a material of their work.

In addition to their work as an artist, Lazard writes about their experience of chronic illness and the limitations of biomedical understandings of health. They authored the guidebook Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice (2019), which details specific ways that museums and other cultural spaces can meet the needs of disabled communities.

Raven Chacon, a former visiting Bard MFA faculty member and composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, has also been named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. “Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among sound, space, and people,” stated the MacArthur Foundation. “In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.”

Learn more and meet the 2023 MacArthur Fellows here.

In a joint opinion piece for Scientific American, Greg Eghigian ’83, Bard alumnus and professor of history and bioethics at Penn State University, writes that speculative discussions surrounding UFOs—which have been attracting public attention in the US from ex-government officials, prominent politicians, intelligence agencies, major news outlets, and civilian scientists—have been transforming our politics and culture, and warrant closer attention to how they are influencing both. According to the piece coauthored by Eghigian and Christian Peters, social scientists are particularly well-equipped to weigh in on the debates surrounding UFOs, recently renamed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). “They not only offer effective techniques for assessing social change, but for decades, social scientists have been conducting research on such relevant topics as human-technological systems, behavioral factors in manned space travel, public attitudes toward UFOs, and the psychophysical and cognitive aspects of sightings.” The piece continues, “Talk about UFOs has never been just about UFOs. The social sciences likely won’t tell us whether UAP are from another world. They will, however, help us explore the ‘what ifs’ and reveal what our actions today tell us about ourselves.”

In the program’s second year, two Bard alumnae, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi MFA ’18 and Alisha B. Wormsley MFA ’19, were awarded Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants. The grants, given by the New York Foundation for the Arts, support environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists in the United States and US Territories that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi was awarded a grant for Oil Research Group (ORG), which “investigates two environments contiguously: oil, the world’s most important non-renewable resource, and data, the information environment that fertilizes the production of shared meaning.” Alisha B Wormsley was awarded a grant for Children of NAN: A Survival Guide, “a film for future Black femmes that spans Black womxn’s relationship to craft, land/space, and spirit.” Anonymous Was A Woman awarded $309,000 in total to 20 projects led by women-identifying artists this year.