Newsmakers

A new photo book by Bard alumna Virginia Hanusik ’14, Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana, which documents a decade spent in the coastal region of the state, has been reviewed in Aperture. “Photographs appear alongside an anthology of essays and poetry commissioned for the book,” writes Michael Adno for Aperture. “For Hanusik, architecture is also a clear sign of time passing; buildings, like hands on the face of a clock, float along a canal one year and disappear the next, while others are raised twenty feet up in the air to escape the coming flood.” Hanusik’s photographs and written contributions explore the cultural legacy of weather and storms in coastal areas, the physical and psychological marks left behind by hurricanes, and the privileges afforded to certain communities over others in responses to flood damage. “At the core of the project,” Hanusik writes, “is an effort to encourage thinking of this region—and coastal communities around the country—as an interconnected system rather than as separate and expendable landscapes.”

Mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce VAP ’19, alumna of the Bard Conservatory Vocal Arts Program, has won third prize in Operalia 2024, the world opera competition founded by Plácido Domingo in 1993 to discover and help launch the careers of the most promising young opera singers of today. Operalia’s goal is to attract singers between the ages of 20 and 32, of all voice types from and all over the world, to have them audition and be heard by a panel of distinguished international personalities, in the most prestigious and competitive showcase in the world. 

The international jury, presided by Plácido Domingo, listens to each of the chosen participants during two days of quarterfinals. Twenty participants are then selected to continue on to the semifinals, and ten singers are chosen for the finals. The quarterfinals and semifinals are carried out in audition form, but the final round is presented in the form of a gala concert accompanied by a full orchestra. This year, Operalia was held at The National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, India, September 15–21.

SF Gate profiled Bard alumna Joanna Letz ’06, who is the owner and manager of Bluma Flower Farm in Berkeley, California. She manages the rooftop farm day-to-day and also organizes events and online sales. While the rooftop is idyllic, Letz says running it is hard work: “People romanticize farming —‘it must be so beautiful’ — but it takes so much effort to grow something and to grow it well.”

Letz started her rooftop farm in 2019 after more than a decade of working on other farms and running her own business. Despite initial challenges—farming plants on a rooftop means more wind, for example—Bluma has thrived. As an urban farm, not only does it have a lower carbon footprint than internationally-importing competitors, it also supports biodiversity for pollinators in the area. In the future, Letz hopes to host more educational programming at the farm to teach children about growing plants and share her love of flowers more widely.

Artist Brandon Ndife MFA ’20, whose first solo exhibition, Clearance, is on view at Greene Naftali gallery in Chelsea, was profiled in the New York Times. “His art reminds its viewers that nature—even in the face of civilization—has an ultimately ungovernable power,” writes Zoë Hopkins. Ndife’s otherworldly creations fuse forms that resemble domestic objects, such as furniture, with elements derived from the natural world to evoke the sense of wild growth overtaking built environments. “They’re interchangeable to me, the native and the natural,” Ndife said. “There’s a mutiny that can happen in the work. I describe the sculptures as struggling to be, struggling to take hold in their environment. And I think that’s our story as Black people.”

Celebrated artist R.H. Quaytman ’83 was invited to create new works for Frieze magazine's September issue to accompany an essay about Gertrude Stein’s poem, “If I Told Him: A Portrait of Picasso.” She responded with a series of images using abstract and photographic elements, which she discusses with Marko Gluhaich, associate editor of Frieze. “Naturally I was more interested in Stein than Picasso. How incredibly photogenic she was,” she told Gluhaich. “While playing around with transparencies I accidentally made Picasso’s portrait of her look like a self-portrait. Suddenly his face was her face.”

Quaytman was the 2022 recipient of Bard’s Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters.

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) has announced that Bard math alumna Mona Merling ’09 has won the 2025 AWM Joan and Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry. Merling was recognized for her innovative and impactful research in algebraic K-theory, equivariant homotopy theory, and their applications to manifold theory.

“I would not be here today without the many amazing women I was lucky to have as role models at every step of the way: from my math teacher back in Romania, Mihaela Flamaropol, who ignited my passion for math competitions; to my undergraduate mentor at Bard College, Lauren Rose, who early on inspired me about both research and teaching; to some of the senior leaders in my field who initiated and fostered the Women in Topology Network, Maria Basterra, Kristine Bauer, Kathryn Hess, and Brenda Johnson, who I was very privileged to be able to collaborate with as part of these workshops and who have always served as a huge inspiration and a source of endless support to me and other younger women in homotopy theory,” said Merling, who is currently associate professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. She was previously a J.J. Sylvester Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, and received her PhD in Mathematics at the University of Chicago in 2014.

In a statement, AWM wrote: “Merling is an exceptional researcher whose work in algebraic topology has both depth and breadth. She is a recognized authority on equivariant homotopy theory and its applications to equivariant manifolds. Her recent work generalizes and reinterprets results in differential topology in the equivariant context. Her work is the first progress seen in decades on certain foundational questions about equivariant manifolds.”

The AWM Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry serves to highlight to the community outstanding contributions by women in the field and to advance the careers of the prize recipients. The prize is awarded every other year and was made possible by a generous contribution from Joan Birman, whose work has been in low dimensional topology, and her husband, Joseph, who was a theoretical physicist specializing in applications of group theory to solid state physics.

The novella The Plotinus by Bard alumna Rikki Ducornet ’64 was reviewed by Marina Warner in the New York Review of Books. Ducornet’s fifteenth work of fiction, The Plotinus is about a futuristic narrator who is arrested for going on a walk, and it incorporates a style Warner calls “[something] between astringent honesty, madcap fantasy, parodic sci-fi, surreal absurdism, metaphysical absorption, and rapturous lyric.”

Ducornet earned her BA from Bard in fine arts before publishing her first book The Stain in 1984. Throughout her career, she’s followed the trajectory of Surrealist authors and the Latin American literary tradition of the “marvelous real.” In addition to her writing, she has illustrated books by authors including Jorge Luis Borges and Anne Waldman. Warner writes that The Plotinus forms “an arc of feeling [tracing] the transformation of the narrator from despairing to loving,” comparing the novella to sci-fi works by authors like Ursula K. LeGuin, Doris Lessing, and China Miéville. Her many honors include The Bard College Arts and Letters Award (1998), The Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (2004), and The Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008), among others.

Orange Blossom Trail, a new book of photography by Bard alumnus Joshua Lutz ’97 MFA ’05, documents the lives of workers along a 400-mile stretch of highway from Georgia to Miami. Three texts by author George Saunders accompany Lutz’s photographs, which display an “austere frankness,” writes Walker Mimms in a review for the New York Times. “Though not without dignity—see Lutz’s portraits of fruit inspectors, as they glance up from a conveyor belt of tumbling oranges—his photos lack any social agenda,” Mimms continues, an effect that is emphasized by inclusion of the Saunders texts. Mimms walks away surprised not only by the collaboration itself, but its commitment to portraying “the demoralizing American grind with an attitude between sympathy and resignation. An attitude that’s rare in art because we seldom admit it to ourselves.”

Bard alum Raphael Bob-Waksberg ’06 speaks with the A.V. Club about the lessons learned from his hit Netflix comedy BoJack Horseman and its ever-growing legacy. Ten years since its debut, Bob-Waksberg’s BoJack Horseman, a showbiz satire of life in Hollywood, is finding new fans who resonate with its parody while also continuing to capture the attention of its older fans who first watched the series during its run from 2014 to 2020. “It has been really surprising and rewarding for me to see people are still finding it and still falling in love with it in spite of some parts of it feeling a little dated or irrelevant. And not just as a nostalgic artifact, it holds up as a new thing if you start watching it now,” said Bob-Waksberg.

Bard alum Clark Wolff Hamel ’17, the educational director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy group PFLAG NYC, was interviewed on the podcast Leading Queer, hosted by John B. Weinsten, provost of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and Carla Stephens, director of the Bard Queer Leadership Project at Simon’s Rock. The hosts spoke to Wolff Hamel about his work with PFLAG providing guidance for K–12 educators and administrators on following New York State’s LGBTQ+ policies.

The New York City chapter of PFLAG serves over 1.2 million students, meaning that Wolff Hamel has to balance working across more than 1700 schools. While his work centers on helping overhaul curriculums and school programs to make them more inclusive, Wolff Hamel encourages educators to add inclusive practices to what they already have in place. “It can be small, simple things that actually make a really big difference and ensure that queer young people are seeing themselves in the curriculum.”