Newsmakers

Amber Esseiva (CCS Bard ’15) to Receive CCS Bard Alumni Award

Awardees to be Honored at CCS Bard’s Spring 2025 Gala

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) announces Gridthiya Gaweewong as the recipient of its 2025 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.

Currently the artistic director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, Gaweewong has dedicated her career to championing contemporary Thai artists and developing a curatorial practice addressing the social transformation faced by artists from Thailand and beyond following the Cold War. An independent panel of leading curators, artists, and museum directors selected Gaweewong to receive the annual award, which is accompanied by a $25,000 prize and was launched in 1998 to honor the outstanding achievements of curators who bring innovative thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition-making.

“Gridthiya’s curatorial approach, which subverts institutional narratives in lieu of artist-led and personal perspectives, embodies the innovative contributions to the curatorial field CCS Bard aims to recognize with this award,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

In addition to Gaweewong, CCS Bard recognizes curator and educator Amber Esseiva (Class of ’15) with the 2025 CCS Bard Alumni Award. As Acting Senior Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) and former Curator-at-Large at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Esseiva develops exhibitions that center emerging, mid-career, and underrecognized artists. Established in 2023, CCS Bard awards this $10,000 prize to honor outstanding graduates who demonstrate sustained innovation and engagement with exhibition-making, public education, and research in the field of curation.

Gaweewong and Esseiva will accept their awards at CCS Bard’s Spring 2025 gala celebration and dinner on April 7, 2025. 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.

“I’m deeply honored to receive this award and thank the esteemed committee. This milestone manifests the collaborative efforts of my family, friends, artists, mentors, and vibrant art community in Thailand, the region, and beyond,” said Gaweewong. “It inspires me to curate passionately, trusting art’s power to foster resilience and meaningful societal change."

“It brings me so much joy to receive this recognition from CCS Bard, an institution that has had such a profound impact on my work and career. It was at CCS that I first developed my passion for collaborating with artists and colleagues to produce new works of art,” said Esseiva. “To be acknowledged by so many talented alumni I admire, is both humbling and truly meaningful to me.”

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) announces Gridthiya Gaweewong as the recipient of its 2025 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.

Bard alumnus, restaurateur, and sommelier Chase Sinzer ’11 has been awarded the Michelin Guide New York 2024 Sommelier Award, alongside Ellis Srubas-Giammanco, who is the wine director of Sinzer's raw bar restaurant Penny, which he opened earlier this year in New York City. After serving as wine director of the two-Michelin star restaurant The Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare, Sinzer opened Claud and Penny, overseeing both wine programs. In conversation with Michelin Guide, Sinzer discussed sustainability in their wine menus, wines worth splurging on, and the advice he has for aspiring sommeliers. “Seek out as much wine as humanly possible to develop your own style,” says Sinzer. “So when someone asks a question, you've accumulated an encyclopedic notion of the aesthetics and business of wine that you have a quick, formulated idea of what your wine list represents to you and what you want people to get from it.”

On Monday, December 2, Bard College Margaret and John Bard Society members, staff, and students gathered in New York City for this year’s annual luncheon. This special occasion is dedicated to honoring and celebrating our esteemed donors who have made generous contributions through their estate plans. Their commitment to Bard College’s mission through future planning is not only inspiring but instrumental in defining the experiences and opportunities Bard can offer its students. Bard is deeply appreciative of the generosity and foresight that the members of the Margaret and John Bard Society have.

“This special annual gathering celebrates the generous alumni/ae, family, and friends who have chosen to support Bard through planned giving. Their commitment and philanthropy play a vital role in shaping the future of Bard College, ensuring that Bard can continue to provide a transformative education for generations to come. It’s a time to connect, share stories, and inspire each other with the legacy of support helping fulfill Bard's mission,” said Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein.

Artist and Bard alumnus Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12 has been recognized by ARTnews as a 2024 Emerging Artist of the Year. For his first solo museum presentation, which took place earlier this year, Aparicio was selected by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to take over part of its sprawling Geffen Contemporary location for the relaunch of its “MOCA Focus” exhibition series, which featured works he made between 2016 and 2023 alongside three site-specific commissions. “In Aparicio’s work there is a commitment to experimentation and to pushing materials to their limits, only to show us new ways of seeing and thinking,” ARTnews wrote of the exhibition. “This is the beginning of an incredibly promising career.” His work explores the visual and conceptual po­­ssibilities of globally ubiquitous raw materials and products of Indigenous knowledge of Latin America. In recent years, Aparicio has produced large scale rubber casts that document the social and economic relationships between Latin America and the United States through specific use of material, multiplicity of site and metaphorical gestures.

Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, aka Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies, and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard, was interviewed by News10 NBC for an article about how Indigenous engineers and artists are using artificial intelligence for cultural preservation projects. Of the 4,000 Indigenous languages worldwide, it is estimated that one dies every two weeks with its last speaker, according to data from the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. AI can be a valuable tool in the initiatives designed to preserve those languages and other aspects of Indigenous culture and creative practices, such as the art which Kite is using machine learning to create. “My question is simple: How do we create ethical art with AI by applying Indigenous ontologies?” Kite said. “I try to resist Western personification of AI and instead dig into the hyperlocal, grounded and practical frameworks of knowledge that American Indigenous communities provide.”

Bard alum Rob Brunner ’93, politics and culture editor at the Washingtonian magazine, writes about how Tom Stoppard’s Tony Award–winning play Leopoldstadt—which follows the story of the Merz family, a wealthy, deeply assimilated family of Viennese Jews, from the cultural heyday of Vienna’s pre-war period, through two world wars, and their terrifying aftermath—made him finally confront his own family's tragic history. Brunner’s grandparents, also Viennese Jews, fled their beloved city in 1938, shortly after the Nazis annexed Austria, evaded the Gestapo through a chance meeting, secretly crossed the French border into Paris, and miraculously received two American refugee visas on August 31, 1939, one day before Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II. The rest of his grandparents’ Viennese family, like most of the Merz family in Stoppard’s play, did not survive. “None of it felt like it belonged to me. That was a delusion that I held onto for too long . . . ” writes Brunner of his family’s Holocaust story. “But had the cousins survived, they would have been my family, my son’s family. They would have come over for Thanksgiving dinner; I might have been friends with their children. Their loss isn’t some abstraction, I have finally come to realize. It’s my loss, too.”