Newsmakers

Awardees to Be Honored at CCS Bard’s Spring 2024 Gala

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) announces internationally renowned art historian and curator Manuel Borja-Villel as the 2024 recipient of the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. Accompanied by a $25,000 prize, the award, which first launched in 1998, honors outstanding curatorial achievements that have brought innovative thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to advancing the field of exhibition-making today.

In addition to the 2024 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, CCS Bard announces the inaugural Scott Lorinsky Alumni Award recognizing an outstanding graduate for sustained innovation and engagement in exhibition making, public education, research, and a commitment to the field. CCS Bard Alum Carla Acevedo-Yates (2014) will be the first recipient to receive the newly created award, which comes with a $10,000 prize.
Borja-Villel and Acevedo-Yates will both be honored at CCS Bard’s spring 2024 gala celebration and dinner on April 8, 2024. The event, which is chaired by the CCS Bard Board of Governors, will be held in New York City at The Lighthouse at Pier 61.

“Manuel Borja-Villel embodies the critical role of curators today in challenging accepted modes of practice to facilitate meaningful and responsive discourse on visual culture, past and present,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. “As we celebrate Manuel’s achievements following his departure as the transformational director of Museo Reina Sofia, we also recognize the outstanding contributions of Carla Acevedo-Yates, whose curatorial career has brought visibility to overlooked artists across the Americas. We thank Scott Lorinsky for his generosity in establishing an award that celebrates individuals from our incredible network of CCS Bard alumni whose impact is being felt throughout the field.” 

“Needless to say, I am very honored and grateful. I am honored because I have collaborated on different occasions with many of the past awardees and I have always respected and admired their work,” said Borja-Villel. “To be part of this group of people is a joy. I am grateful because the award is in recognition of a trajectory. Mine has developed in museums, that is, my work has always been done together with others. My award is also theirs."

“I’m delighted to recognize the exceptional achievements of CCS Bard graduates with the Scott Lorinsky Alumni Award, and to celebrate the outstanding accomplishments by Carla Acevedo-Yates as its initial recipient,” said CCS Board Member Scott Lorinsky. “Carla is an innovative leader in the curatorial field with an impeccable commitment to centering artistic practices by artists from the Global South, with a focus on Caribbean, Latin American and Latinx artists.”

“I am honored to be recognized by my peers as the inaugural recipient of the Scott Lorinsky Alumni Award at CCS Bard, an institution that has been deeply influential in how I approach curatorial practice and working with artists,” said Acevedo-Yates. “CCS was such a meaningful experience in so many ways. Apart from understanding exhibition-making as an intellectually driven spatial practice, I also gained a generous community of colleagues that have accompanied me through the years.”

About Manuel Borja-Villel
Manuel Borja-Villel (Burriana, Spain, 1957) is an art historian and curator. He previously served as Director of the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid from 2008 to 2023. During his tenure, he carried out a radical reinstallation of the collection and established the Museo en Red, a network of organizations, collectives, and institutions that question and affect the museum's ways of doing, expanding its boundaries from beyond. Prior to this role, Borja-Villel was Director at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA (1998-2007) and at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona (1989-1998). As Director of these institutions, he developed an extensive body of work that signified a turning point in contemporary curatorial practice: resignifying narratives and exhibition dispositives and their role in the governance of the institution. Most recently, Borja-Villel was one of the curators at the 35th edition of the São Paulo Biennial, where he contributed to the exhibition choreographies of the impossible.

Borja-Villel has curated numerous exhibitions dedicated to some of the most important artists of our time, such as those featuring Marcel Broodthaers and Lygia Clark. Similarly, he has been instrumental in the recovery of works by lesser known and unjustly forgotten artists such as Andrzej Wróblewski, Nasreen Mohamedi, Ree Morton, Elena Asins or Ulises Carrión. He has also organized important thesis-driven exhibitions such as La Ciudad de la Gente (The City of the People) (1996), Antagonismos (Antagonisms) (2001), Un Teatro sin Teatro (A Theater without Theater) (2007), Principio Potosí (2010), Playgrounds, Reinventar la Plaza (Playground, the Reinvention of the Square) (2014), and Maquinaciones (2023). Among his most ambitious achievements is the comprehensive rehanging of the collection of the Museo Reina Sofía. Entitled Vasos Comunicantes (Communicating Vessels), the reinstallation encompassed approximately 12,000 square meters and included more than 3,000 works and documents, a significant portion of which was shown publicly for the first time. Vasos Comunicantes was organized into micro-exhibitions, proposing an open-ended rhizomatic structure, in which past events were interwoven with the present.

After completing his bachelor's degree at the Universidad de Valencia (Spain) in 1980, Borja-Villel moved to the United States to study at Yale University and later at the City University of New York, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1989. His latest book, titled Campos Magnéticos. Textos sobre arte y política (Magentic Fields. Texts on art and politics) (Barcelona, 2020) was written in Spanish and recently published in expanded editions in both Italian and Portuguese.

About Carla Acevedo-Yates
Carla Acevedo-Yates was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico and has worked as a curator, researcher, and art critic across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. She currently serves as the Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the MCA Chicago, where she recently curated the 2022 exhibition Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora 1990s – Today (touring to ICA Boston beginning in October 2023 and MCA San Diego in 2024), and the MCA Chicago presentation of Duane Linklater: mymothersside, and Entre Horizontes: Art and Activism Between Chicago and Puerto Rico, currently on view. Previous exhibitions at the MCA Chicago include Carolina Caycedo: From the Bottom of the River (2020) and Chicago Works: Omar Velázquez (2020). She also conceptualized and leads the museum’s Hemispheric Initiative, a pan-institutional effort that centers Caribbean, Latinx, and Latin American art and perspectives through exhibitions, programs, and international collaborations. This institution-wide initiative led to the transformation of the MCA Chicago into a fully bilingual English/Spanish museum.

Previously, she was Associate Curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University where she curated over 15 exhibitions, including solo presentations of new work by Johanna Unzueta, Claudia Peña Salinas, Duane Linklater, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. She curated Fiction of a Production (2018), a major exhibition by conceptual art pioneer David Lamelas and co-curated Michigan Stories: Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw (2017). Major group exhibitions include The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes (2019). In 2015, she was awarded The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for an article on Cuban painter Zilia Sánchez. After earning a bachelor’s degree at Barnard College, she pursued her graduate studies at CCS Bard, where she was awarded with the Ramapo Curatorial Prize for the exhibition Turn on the bright lights.

About Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence
Launched at CCS Bard in 1998 to recognize groundbreaking visionaries in the curatorial field, the Award for Curatorial Excellence is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. The award is named in recognition of patron Audrey Irmas, who bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize of $25,000. Irmas is an emeritus board member of CCS Bard and an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award itself is designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, and is based on his 2006 commission Bard Enter, conceived for the entrance to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.

Past recipients of the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence include Adriano Pedrosa (2023), Valerie Cassel Oliver (2022), Connie Butler (2020), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2019), Lia Gangitano (2018), Nicholas Serota (2017), Thelma Golden (2016), Christine Tohmé and Martha Wilson (2015), Charles Esche (2014), Elisabeth Sussman (2013), Ann Goldstein (2012), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2011), Lucy Lippard (2010), Okwui Enwezor (2009), Catherine David (2008), Alanna Heiss (2007), Lynne Cooke and Vasif Kortun (2006), Kathy Halbreich and Mari Carmen Ramírez (2005), Walter Hopps (2004), Kynaston McShine (2003), Susanne Ghez (2002), Paul Schimmel (2001), Kasper König (2000), Marcia Tucker (1999), and Harald Szeemann (1998).

About the Scott Lorinsky Alumni Award
The Scott Lorinsky Alumni Award recognizes an outstanding graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies for sustained innovation and engagement in exhibition-making, public education, research and a commitment to the field.  The Award, which is designed by artist Liam Gillick, was endowed by CCS Bard board member, Scott Lorinsky, in 2023, and the awardee is selected annually by faculty members of the program.  The award is presented annually at the CCS Bard Gala in New York and the awardee will receive $10,000. 

For Sarah Elia ’06, Bard College alumna and an English as a New Language teacher at Saugerties Central School District, using news resources has been an invaluable part of teaching her students about language and culture. For the New York Times, Elia writes about four methods that she has used in her classroom for bringing a global perspective to language studies. Using reporting from the Times, she has had her students give public presentations that draw on varied viewpoints, engage in bilingual discussions of articles, use Venn diagrams to compare cultures, and include news images to illustrate culture-themed art projects. “Presenting their work to audiences throughout the school has boosted my students’ confidence and given them a greater presence in the school community,” Elia writes for the Times. “It also has given listeners the chance to learn from and engage with their international peers in contexts that are connected to the curriculum.”

 

Good and Fugly, cofounded by Jonathan Englert ’92, rescues aesthetically imperfect fruits and vegetables that have been rejected by supermarkets and delivers this “fresh but wonky” produce directly to customers’ homes. The Guardian reports on their recently commissioned Farm to Supermarket Food Waste Report 2023 that found almost 14 million kilograms of perfectly edible fruit and vegetables are rejected by supermarkets in Australia each year based on appearances alone. This commercial demand for “perfect” produce is leading to huge annual food waste and financial losses for farmers. “We hear back from parents who tell us their kids are looking for a really crazy cucumber or strawberry to show friends at school,” Englert said. “Our goal is for supermarkets to just get rid of the aesthetic and size standards. It would be a huge victory.”

Five Bard Conservatory of Music and Music Program faculty members and alumni/ae have been nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY Awards. Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe is featured on the album Champion, nominated for Best Opera Recording. Bard Composers in Residence Jessie Montgomery and Missy Mazzoli are both nominees for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Mazzoli’s concerto Dark With Excessive Bright and Montgomery’s “Rounds” for piano and string orchestra (featured in pianist Awadagin Pratt’s Stillpoint) have been nominated for the GRAMMY. Julia Bullock MM ’11 has been nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her album Walking In The Dark. In the category of Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, music program alumnus Max Zbiral-Teller ’06, along with his House of Waters bandmates, has been nominated for On Becoming. The 2024 GRAMMYs, officially known as the 66th GRAMMY Awards, will take place Sunday, February 4 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

John Reisert ’22, who was a member of the men’s swimming team while at Bard, spent five months from March to August this year hiking the whole Appalachian Trail. Reisert set out northbound and completed the trail successfully—something only about a quarter of hikers who attempt it are able to achieve. Bard Athletics interviewed him about his experience and how being a student-athlete at Bard prepared him. “It prepared me mentally . . . The mental preparation of knowing what it takes to push yourself was really good to have.” Reisert drew upon the coaching he received from Bard Head Swimming Coach and Aquatics Director John Weitz to give him the endurance he needed to finish the trail, and Reisert was happy to share this motivation with other hikers he met along the way.

Art & Krimes by Krimes, an MTV documentary featuring Bard Microcollege alumnus Russell Craig ’22, has won the Emmy for Outstanding Arts & Culture Documentary. The film follows the story of Jesse Krimes, who covertly created monumental works of art during his six-year imprisonment, and features the voices of his friends and fellow artists, including Craig, Jared Owens, and Gilberto Rivera, whose works reflect their experiences with incarceration. Since graduating from the Bard at Brooklyn Public Library Microcollege, Craig has spoken on numerous panels about criminal justice reform, and his work has been a part of key galleries and museums, including a prominent feature in the critically-acclaimed Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration at MoMA PS1, which included a portrait of Bard Prison Initiative alumnus Rodney Spivey-Jones ’17. Craig and Krimes have formed a friendship over the years, collaborating on projects such as “Portraits of Justice” in Philadelphia, which featured portraits of citizens returning from prison, and in 2017 cofounded the Right of Return fellowship, a national program supporting formerly incarcerated artists. 

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“Like so many documentary photographers, I often pick a post or set up a frame and wait for something to happen within it,” Sam Youkilis ’16 said to i-D. “I truly believe in the camera’s ability to will things happening within its frame.” After publishing his debut monograph, Somewhere, Youkilis spoke with i-D and Interview magazine about capturing the mundane, his use of vertical video, and finding a following on Instagram. “I’m lucky that I’ve been able to find success in what I do on Instagram in a really organic way,” Youkilis said to Quinn Moreland ’15 for Interview. “And I am lucky that I’m able to share my work in a diaristic way where it’s very much an insight into my life from morning to the end of the day.” Somewhere, which totals more than 500 pages in length, represents this diaristic practice in a physical format, with the size of the monograph somewhere between the size of a postcard and an iPhone, with a purposeful intermixture of the commonplace and the grandiose. “The point of the book, in a way, is to level any hierarchy across this imagery and present my work democratically so no moment is given more value than others,” Youkilis said.