Newsmakers

In an article for National Geographic, science writer and Bard alumna Elizabeth Royte ’81 explores the life cycles and habitats of rattlesnakes, and the various conservation efforts to protect them. More than 50 species of rattlesnakes occur exclusively throughout the Americas, and Royte notes that though there may be pockets where they thrive, the fate of most of the venomous snakes is grim. “From southwestern Canada to central Argentina, people continue to capture them for the pet or skin trade, swerve to flatten them as they warm themselves on roads, and chop up their habitat with subdivisions, pipelines, and cell towers,” she writes for National Geographic. “Timber rattlesnakes, once abundant, have been extirpated in a number of northern US states and Ontario, and they’re threatened or endangered in pockets throughout their broad US range. Several other species are categorized from generally threatened to critically endangered.”

Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist and Bard alumnus Ronan Farrow ’04 spoke to NPR and the Guardian about his new HBO documentary, Surveilled, in which he delves into the shadowy world of surveillance and the private companies that sell powerful commercial spyware technology. The documentary “records the emotional toll, scope and threat potential of a technology most people are neither aware of nor understand,” writes Adrian Horton for the Guardian. “It also serves as an argument for urgent journalistic and civic oversight of commercial spyware—its deliberately obscure manufacturers, its abuse by state clients and its silent erosion of privacy.” Farrow addresses how the lack of regulations surrounding this technology has wide reaching implications for political and social abuse. “In the film, I am motivated by having come face-to-face with surveillance and understanding how intrusive that is, how devastating it can be personally and invasive,” Farrow told NPR. “But also, more consequentially, how much it shrinks the space for the free flow of information and the expression of dissent.”

Artist and Bard alumna Martine Syms MFA ’17 was interviewed in PIN-UP magazine. In conversation with Jordan Richman, Syms discusses how her upbringing in Los Angeles impacted her interest in film, how media shapes culture and identity, her experiences with museums and art institutions, and the origin of fictional versions of herself in the forms of an AI model and the character in her semi-autobiographical sitcom She Mad. “At this point, the real and fictional Martines are very different,” Syms told Richman. “But in 2015, I was pulling from my own life experience because I was exploring representation. I was envisioning a fictionalized version of my own life in the traditional sitcom format, which was somewhat outdated in 2015, but which I felt was being reinscribed on Instagram.” Syms describes how the real and fictional Martines diverged several years later with her project Intro to Threat Modeling, “Which I made in 2017, when I started working with AI and AR. I had just finished this complicated AR app when ARKit dropped. It became much easier. I already had a 3D model of myself that I kept improving. I was learning ARKit and Blender with it. Teenie, which is what I call the model, became its own thing.” 

Bard alumnus Titus Ogilvie-Laing ’13, a beekeeper who maintains hives on New York City rooftops, was featured in the New York Times. “At the Empire State Building, on a roof of Madison Square Garden and on a terrace adjacent to the Chrysler Building, thousands of veritable worker bees have been turning nectar into honey,” writes Patrick McGeehan for the New York Times. On a recent warm day as he tended to hives belonging to the Danish Consulate, Ogilvie-Laing “blew smoke from silver canisters to calm the bees before opening the hives. Using metal tools shaped like small crowbars, they pried frames out of the wooden hive boxes. Each frame was covered with hundreds of bees and filled with combs brimming with raw honey.” Ogilvie-Laing, who also works part time in the photo and video department of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, beekeeps for the Queens-based company Best Bees, which manages hives in a variety of locations around the metropolitan area, including in Long Island City, the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and Madison Square Garden. 

Daniel Terna ’09 ICP ’15 was profiled in Artsy Artist’s “Artists On Our Radar,” an editorial series featuring five artists who made an impact in the past month through exhibitions, gallery openings, and other events. Terna’s latest exhibit The Terrain is on view at the Jack Barrett Gallery in Tribeca until December 14. The Terrain features Terna’s photographs of political events from 2017 to the present, including the Women’s March and the Global Climate Strike, along with day-to-day photographs from his own life. The Terrain was also reviewed by the New York Times, which writes that Terna's photography contains “narrative restraint... [it] keeps admitting how hard it is to really know another human being.”

Terna has exhibited at the BRIC Arts Media Biennial, MoMA PS1’s film program, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, among others, and will exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery in May 2025. His photography is focused on intergenerational relationships, combining personal narratives with his outside perspective on current events. Of Terna’s 2023 photo Monastery, taken near the Dachau concentration camp where his father was imprisoned, Artsy writes, “The peaceful scene is transformed by its context, invoking the weight of memory and survival.”

On Monday, November 11, 2024, Bard College will host a Veterans Day event to rededicate the Old Gym at Bard as Memorial Hall in honor and remembrance of alumni/ae, faculty, and staff who have served the country in armed services. Dedication and remarks by Malia Du Mont ’95, vice president for strategy and policy and chief of staff at Bard, will take place at 11 am at 39 Henderson Circle Drive on Bard’s Annandale campus, followed by a reception at 11:30 am in Schwab ’52 Atrium in the Franklin W. Olin Humanities Building. The event will close with a talk given at 3 pm in Barringer House by Dev Crasta ’09, a clinical psychologist who works with veterans in the mental health field. The event is free and open to the public. Please register here.

The event is the culmination of efforts to honor Veterans Day which began last year, when Du Mont asked Bard archivist Helene Tieger ’85 to unearth the College’s veterans-related material. They discovered a 100-year-old handmade service flag, with dozens of stars representing students and alumni/ae of Bard who served during World War I, and learned that the building at the center of Bard’s campus, known as the Old Gym, was built in honor of those Bardians. A new sign at Memorial Hall will be unveiled at the event on Monday to share this history with the Bard community.

“I am looking forward to unveiling the new sign, reacquainting the Bard community with this important history, and helping our colleagues and students understand the role that Bard has played in enabling military service to our nation, in support of democracy and in defense of the US Constitution, throughout the institution's history,” said Du Mont, who is also leading plans to turn a room in the building into a permanent exhibition space where items about the military service of current and past members of the Bard community will have a permanent display in the center of the college’s campus.

Bard’s Center for Indigenous Studies (CfIS) hosted a convening in Venice to consider how Indigenous aesthetics, futurity, and arts intersect with global practices and modernism. The name of the convening, “if I read you/what I wrote bear/in mind I wrote it,” from a poem by Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14 (Oglala Lakota), gathered Native and non-Native poets, academics, artists, musicians, curators, teachers, and students to address the interdisciplinary, transnational nature of Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson's (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) work in the US Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte.

“The convening as a whole felt like an energizing disco, a kaleidoscopic exploration of Native identities in all their rich dualities, contrasts, and dichotomies: familiar and unfamiliar, past and future, joy and sorrow, detailed and monumental,” wrote Sháńdíín Brown (Navajo) for Hyperallergic.
  
The three-day event hosted luminaries of Native American and Indigenous studies and cutting-edge performers. Panels on beads, materiality, economies of labor and trade, aesthetics, poetry, performance, silhouette, and color also celebrated contemporary Indigenous artists, writers, and activists while examining the continued segregation of Indigenous voices in conversations regarding taste making, trade, modernity, and power. Several Bard College faculty and staff participated including Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies, associate professor of history and American and Indigenous studies, and CfIS director; Brandi Norton (Iñupiaq), CfIS curator of public programs; Melina Roise, CfIS program coordinator; and Dinaw Mengetsu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program.

Further reading:
The Art of Jeffrey Gibson Shines in Venice (ICT)

Rock band Hello Mary, including bassist Mikaela Oppenheimer ’25, were profiled in a backstage photo essay in Rolling Stone. Alongside images of their October 24 concert at Bowery Ballroom in New York City, Rolling Stone spoke to the band about the significance of headlining a show at the Bowery and their journey through pre-concert nerves. Oppenheimer, shown in the photoset playing bass and also doing homework backstage, says the adrenaline from shows makes her “energized for 10 minutes—then I’m ready to sleep [for] a long time.”

Hello Mary was formed in 2019 and released its first EP, Ginger, in 2020. Their latest album, Emita Ox, was released this year on September 14. Rolling Stone calls the album “excellently moody,” and fellow band member Stella Wave agreed, “there’s definitely a different mood on this album … it’s darker and more subtle.” The band ended this touring season on November 3, and now are taking time to put together their next project.