Newsmakers

The New York Times published a retrospective on the restoration premiere of No Picnic, a film written and directed by Bard alumnus Phil Hartman ’79. The film, which was originally released in 1987, follows a musician living in the East Village as he searches for a mysterious woman. The restoration of No Picnic premiered at the Museum of Modern Art’s annual To Save and Project series and was shown at Film Forum in New York City for a week this April. “The East Village’s seedy glamour has never been more lovingly presented,” the Times writes.

No Picnic won the Best Cinematography Award in 1987 for filming by the late Peter Hutton, former Bard professor. Cast members include Bard alumni/ae Andy Aaron ’76, Tim Allen ’84, Martha Atwell ’85, Margaret DeWys, Sharon Garbe ’83, Leon Hartman ’08, Manon Hutton-DeWys ’06, Josefa Mulaire ’79, Paul Marcus ’76, Jeff Preiss ’79, Rebecca Quaytman ’83, Emily Rubin ’78, and Lewis Schaffer ’79. The film is screening at Time & Space Limited in Hudson NY on May 2 through 4, 2026.

Abigail Wilson ’23, Bard College alumna and graduate student in chemical synthesis at UCLA, has been announced as a recipient of a 2026 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, a federal agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the nonmedical fields of science and engineering. Since 1952, the Graduate Research Fellowship Program has recognized and supported outstanding graduate students who are pursuing full-time research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in STEM fields, including STEM education. Each fellowship provides three years of support over a five-year fellowship period. 

The Chemistry and Biochemistry Program at Bard is geared toward meeting the needs of students planning to do graduate and/or professional work in a variety of chemistry, biochemistry, and engineering subfields. During their course of study, students receive research training in modern methods in chemistry, including extensive hands-on experience with contemporary instruments and equipment. 

Bard alumna Lindsey Aldrich Jordan ’24 and Bard students Tessa Ni ’28, Anna Gaylord ’27, and Myla Allen ’27 each wrote about their experiences attending a three day reading event in Vienna, coordinated by the Hannah Arendt Center. The Hannah Arendt Lesen event focused on the “Irreversibility and the Power to Forgive” chapter of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and its counterpart “die Unwiderruflichkeit des Getanen und die Macht zu verzeihen” in Arendt’s German translation, titled Vita Activa. “What moved me most during the weekend, was not only the intellectual content of our discussion, but the way the event itself enacted what the text describes,” writes Ni. “We were not gathered merely to analyze forgiveness as a concept. We were speaking, responding, risking our thoughts in front of others. In Arendt’s sense, we were acting.”

The event was hosted by the translation collective Versatorium, in partnership with Transletting, a translation project formed by a group of students from Leipzig, Germany. Over the course of three days, the participants examined Arendt’s metaphors and imagery, her linguistic networks, and how the differences and similarities between the two translations could expand their reading of Arendt’s work. “There are words or whole sentences in the German that don’t appear in the English version,” writes Jordan. “This is a big reason reading the two chapters side by side was of interest to Transletting and, I would learn in the course of the weekend, to the Versatorium, too. It offered an opportunity to discuss not only what Arendt meant when she wrote about forgiveness but to compare the language, metaphors, and images in English versus German. How did they differ and how did they resemble one another across the two versions? What did English allow her to say, and how did the German language require her to say it differently, and vice versa?” 

The mission of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College is to create and nurture an institutional space for bold, risky, and provocative thinking about our political world in the spirit of Hannah Arendt. Its vision is to empower people to discover their unique opinions and political agency and also find common ground to build together a shared world through thinking, listening, and talking with one another.
 

Bard alumna Kate McNamara MA-CCS ’07 has been named director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University. The Carpenter Center develops programming like artist talks, curator Q&As, and workshops that involve the community in artistic practice. Previously, McNamara curated cross-genre art exhibitions and served as interim director of Providence College Galleries. “What excites me most about this moment is the opportunity to deepen the Carpenter Center’s role as a leading contemporary art space,” said McNamara. “We are building an ecosystem where artists, students, scholars, and local residents encounter art as a living, shared practice.”

The Center for Curatorial Studies is an incubator for experimentation in exhibition-making and the leading institution dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies. It includes the Graduate Program for Curatorial Studies, an intensive course of study in the history of contemporary art, the institutions and practices of exhibition making, and the theory and criticism of contemporary art since the 1960s.