Newsmakers

JSTOR, the online resource that gives access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources, is now available in 1,000 prisons spread across four continents. Led by Stacy Burnett ’20 MBA ’23, alumna of the Bard MBA in Sustainability Program and the Bard Prison Initiative, the JSTOR Access in Prison Initiative now connects more than 500,000 incarcerated people to the digital equivalent of a college library. “Creating more equitable learning environments inside prisons is the best way to pay forward my own prison-based education,” Burnett said. “We have proven that through understanding, collaboration, and creativity, we can create workable solutions that deliver meaningful digital equity and information literacy for incarcerated people.”

“The Harlem Renaissance has been a part of my lexicon since birth,” said Bard alumna Xaviera Simmons ’05 to the New York Times. Simmons, along with five other artists, were invited by the Times to reflect on the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance. Recent works by Simmons pay homage not only to artists like Jacob Lawrence, but to those whose contributions were either diminished or erased by history. Simmons’s work They’re All Afraid, All of Them, That’s It! They’re All Southern! The Whole United States Is Southern! elevates and recontextualizes the work done by the artist Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence’s wife, who cowrote the labels that accompany Lawrence’s famous Migration Series. Simmons’s piece recontextualizes Knight’s work and words in order to emphasize that “the text, which you don’t really pay much attention to, is just as critical” as the visuals.

Produced in conjunction with the Ohio Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, the opera Blind Injustice explores the impact of wrongful convictions on the incarcerated and their families. Blind Injustice, which the New York Times calls “a spirited call for reforms to the American criminal justice system,” is based on interviews with exonerees conducted by librettist and Bard alumnus David Cote ’92, who found it a challenge to give the proper attention to each real-life account. “Any one of these cases would have been a full-length opera,” Cote told the Times. Appropriately, “about 40 percent of the libretto is verbatim,” Javier C. Hernández wrote.

Bard College is proud to be included on the list of U.S. colleges and universities that produced the most 2023–24 Fulbright students and scholars. Each year, the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs announces the top producing institutions for the Fulbright Program, the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program. The Chronicle of Higher Education publishes the lists annually.
 
Seven graduates from Bard received Fulbright awards for academic year 2023–24. Getzamany “Many” Correa ’21, a Global and International Studies major, and Elias Ephron ’23, a joint major in Political Studies and Spanish Studies, will live in Spain as Fulbright English Teaching Assistants (ETAs). Biology major Macy Jenks ’23 will be an ETA in Taiwan. Eleanor Tappen ’23, a Spanish Studies major, will be an ETA in Mexico. Juliana Maitenaz ’22, who graduated with a BA in Global and International Studies and a BM in Classical Percussion Performance, was selected for an independent study–research Fulbright scholarship to Brazil. Bard Conservatory alumna Avery Morris ’18, who graduated with a BA in Mathematics and a BM in Violin Performance, won a Fulbright Study Research Award to Poland.  Evan Tims ’19, who was a joint major in Written Arts and Human Rights with a focus on anthropology at Bard, received a Fulbright-Nehru independent study–research scholarship to India. Additionally, Adela Foo ’18 won a Fulbright Study Research Award to Turkey through Yale University, where she is a PhD candidate in art history.

“As an institution, Bard College is proud and honored to be included in the list of Top Producing Fulbright Institutions for 2023-2024,” said Molly J. Freitas, Ph.D., associate dean of studies and Fulbright advisor at Bard. “We believe that Fulbright's mission to promote and facilitate cross-cultural exchange and understanding through teaching and research is in perfect alignment with Bard's own institutional identity and goals. We wish to extend our congratulations to our newest Fulbright awardees and reiterate our gratitude to the faculty, staff, and community members who have supported these students during the Fulbright application process and throughout their time as Bard students.”

“Fulbright’s Top Producing Institutions represent the diversity of America’s higher education community. Dedicated administrators support students and scholars at these institutions to fulfill their potential and rise to address tomorrow’s global challenges. We congratulate them, and all the Fulbrighters who are making an impact the world over,” said Lee Satterfield, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Fulbright is a program of the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the program. 

Fulbright alumni work to make a positive impact on their communities, sectors, and the world and have included 41 heads of state or government, 62 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 80 MacArthur Fellows, and countless leaders and changemakers who build mutual understanding between the people of the United State and the people of other countries.  
 

A high school student is assigned a five-paragraph essay on the subject: “Is Shakespeare’s Othello racist?” Her tutor, Milo Cramer ’12, wants to guide her toward a nuanced argument, but their tutee just wants an A. This and other scenes from tutoring sessions serve as the subject of Cramer’s one-person show School Pictures, a hybrid musical monologue that recently had its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons. School Pictures was excerpted on an episode of This American Life, where host Ira Glass says of Cramer’s work: “There’s just something in the intentional roughness and sincerity of what they’re doing that kind of matches the rawness of these kids and their feelings—and of Milo’s reactions to them.”

At the 66th annual GRAMMY Awards ceremony, the Recording Academy honored the 2024 GRAMMY winners. Among them, Bard Composer in Residence Jessie Montgomery won Best Contemporary Classical Composition, her first GRAMMY award, for her composition “Rounds.” Bard Conservatory of Music’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program alumna Julia Bullock MM ’11 also won her first GRAMMY award, winning Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her album Walking in the Dark. Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe is featured on the album Blanchard: Champion, which won for Best Opera Recording. 

Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” is a composition for piano and string orchestra inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets, fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales), and the interdependency of all beings. 

Julia Bullock’s Walking in the Dark was recorded with her husband, conductor and pianist Christian Reif, and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. The album combines orchestral works by American composers John Adams and Samuel Barber with a traditional spiritual and songs by jazz legend Billy Taylor and singer-songwriters Oscar Brown, Jr., Connie Converse, and Sandy Denny.

The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Terence Blanchard’s Champion, an opera about young boxer Emile Griffith who rises from obscurity to become a world champion, was conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and featured a cast including mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe as Kathy Hagen. 
The GRAMMYs are voted on by more than 11,000 music professionals—performers, songwriters, producers, and others with credits on recordings—who are members of the Recording Academy. 

Further Reading:
Jessie Montgomery’s “Rounds” Wins 2024 GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition

Julia Bullock Wins First Grammy Award with Walking in the Dark, Her Solo Album Debut

The Metropolitan Opera wins 2024 Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording for Terence Blanchard’s Champion

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies; New Red Order, an Indigenous art collective whose core contributors are Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 (Ojibway) and Zack Khalil ’14 (Ojibway); and Trisha Baga MFA ’10 have received 2024 United States Artist (USA) Fellowships in the disciplines of Music and Visual Arts. Hennies, New Red Order, and Baga are among this year’s 50 awardees, encompassing artists and collectives spanning multiple generations, who are dedicated to their communities and committed to building upon shared legacies through artistic innovation, cultural stewardship, and multifaceted storytelling. USA Fellowships provide $50,000 in unrestricted money to artists across 10 creative disciplines. In addition to the award, current fellows have access to financial planning, career consulting, legal advice, and other professional services as requested. 

Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought.

New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) that collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. 

Trisha Baga is a Filipino-American artist working in stereoscopic 3D video installation, paint, clay, consumer grade electronics, and community performance. Compelled by an interest in what they call “the stuff that makes things stick together,” Baga recombines objects and images into scenarios that address issues related to the environment, technology, and identity.

Representing a broad diversity of regions and mediums, the USA Fellows are awarded through a peer-led selection process in the disciplines of Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing.

“Since the spring of 2022, New York City has received some 165,000 migrants and asylum seekers,” writes Chris Crowley for GrubStreet. But who is helping to feed them? Beatrice Ajaero ’12 MBA ’17, who runs the takeout restaurant Nneji in Astoria, is among those who have stepped up. Ajaero told GrubStreet that, beyond meeting the need for nutritional meals, she hoped to tailor the food to reduce the stressors experienced by migrants and asylum seekers. “When we are able to make meals that are highly nutritious, we also get to help mitigate the stress people are experiencing from having traveled so far from home,” Ajaero said. “What better than a nourishing plate of food, where they have ingredients that can remind them of a positive experience? We hope to lift some spirits and also the nutrition of what people consume.”

“Every year since 2009, a handful of artists, engineers, musicians, and hobbyists from around the world arrive in Atlanta, Georgia, with one-of-a-kind instruments in tow,” writes Andrew Paul for Popular Science. Among them is Pippa Kelmenson ’17, inventor of the Bone Conductive Instrument, or BCI. Popular Science named the BCI, which “emits sound signals to vibrate individual body resonant frequencies to aid hard-of-hearing users,” as one of 2023’s most innovative musical inventions. According to Kelmenson, the BCI “calls for an inclusive and innovative way for users across the hearing spectrum to interact with sound.”

Bard College faculty members and alums will be among the 71 artists and collectives selected to participate in this year’s Whitney Biennial, the 81st installment of the landmark exhibition series. Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing opens on March 20. Works by Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies; Assistant Professor of American and Indigenous Studies, Distinguished Artist in Residence in Studio Arts, and Bard MFA Faculty in Music/Sound Kite MFA ’18; and Bard MFA Faculty in Sculpture Lotus Laurie Kang MFA ’15 will be featured alongside those by alums Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20, Carolyn Lazard ’10, and Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12. The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College graduate Min Sun Jeon CCS ’22 helped to organize the exhibition.

The 2024 Whitney Biennial is organized by Chrissie Iles (Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Curator) and Meg Onli (Curator at Large), with Min Sun Jeon CCS ’22 and Beatriz Cifuentes. The performance program is organized by Iles and Onli, with guest curator Taja Cheek. The film program is organized by Iles and Onli, with guest curators Korakrit Arunanondchai, asinnajaq, Greg de Cuir Jr, and Zackary Drucker.

“After finalizing the list of artists last summer, we have built a thematic Biennial that focuses on the ideas of ‘the real,’” write the curators. “Society is at an inflection point around this notion, in part brought on by artificial intelligence challenging what we consider to be real, as well as critical discussions about identity. Many of the artists presenting works—including via robust performance and film programs—explore the fluidity of identity and form, historical and current land stewardship, and concepts of embodiment, among other urgent throughlines, and we are inspired by the work they are creating and sharing.”

Two Bard faculty members and two alumni/ae are recipients of MacDowell Fellowships. Carl Elsaesser, visiting artist in residence at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts, has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship to MacDowell's Residency Program in the Film/Video Artists category for fall/winter 2023. Elsaesser’s residency will support the completion of his project, Coastlines, a feature-length film that intertwines the ethnographic intricacies of Maine’s coastline with the intimate video diaries of a Portland family, inviting a reevaluation of evolving identities and artistic representation within the private and public spheres. Drawing from queer phenomenology and traditional historical narratives, the film challenges perceptions and redefines the boundaries of storytelling, revealing Maine’s dual role as a backdrop and active participant in shaping inhabitants’ sense of self.

Daaimah Mubashshir, playwright in residence at Bard, received a MacDowell Fellowship in MacDowell’s Artist Residency Program for fall 2023 in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in support of their work on a new play about their great grandmother, Begonia Williams Tate, who defied all odds in Mobile, Alabama, in the late 19th century. Chaya Czernowin, a composer and Bard MFA ’88 in Music, and Bard alumna Hannah Beerman ’15, are also 2023 MacDowell Fellowship recipients. The MacDowell Fellowships are distributed by seven discipline-specific admissions panels who make their selections based on applicants’ vision and talent as reflected by work samples and a project description. Once at MacDowell, selected Fellows are provided a private studio, three meals a day, and accommodations for a period of up to six weeks. 

Listening to a demo of Stephen Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind” is a very different experience from the final product available on the original cast recording of the musical Follies. “What happened? The short answer: Jonathan Tunick,” writes Darryn King for the New York Times. In a profile of the career of Bard alumnus Jonathan Tunick ’58, King asked many experts what, exactly, an orchestrator does. For his part, Tunick refers to his work as “lighting for the ears.” “[Tunick] often confers with a show’s lighting designer to determine which colors and shadings will be used onstage,” King writes. “The orchestra, [Tunick] said, has the ability ‘to provide its own shadings of light, darkness, warmth, and texture to the music and lyrics.’” Orchestration “can hint at unspoken secrets,” Tunick says, enhancing character alongside harmony: “Things that the characters don’t say, or don’t want to say, or don’t even know.”

Confronted with an ugly sweater this holiday season? Bard alumnus Nguyên Khôi Nguyễn ’04, artist and professor of digital media at Loyola University Maryland, is here to help. Nguyễn created a helpful cartoon for the New Yorker titled “How to Disappear Your Partner’s Ugly Sweater.” When subtle suggestions don’t do the trick, it’s time to escalate to novel solutions like “Capitalism” or “Self-Reflection.” Nguyễn’s multidisciplinary work has been featured in McSweeney’s and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. He has won a Rubys Artist Grant and an Independent Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Pete Wells, restaurant critic for the New York Times, says he “can’t find more than six layers on this seven-layer cake” available at Gertrude’s, a restaurant owned by Bard alumna Rachel Jackson ’11. Regardless, that didn’t stop Wells from naming Getrude’s Black-and-White Seven-Layer Cake as one of the top eight New York City dishes of 2023. “Gertrude’s monumental version, almost as dense and moist as pudding cake, alternates chocolate and yellow layers like piano keys,” Wells writes.

Tschabalala Self ’12, visiting artist in residence at Bard, talks about being asked to do a portrait of Nicki Minaj for Vogue’s December digital cover—using photographer Norman Jean Roy’s cover shoot as a starting point. “I do not usually delve too deeply into realism,” she says, “so by working on this project, I realized something I already suspected, which is that a portrait is more about capturing someone’s aura, as opposed to their appearance.”

Alumnus Sam Asa Pratt ’14 performed at the 2023 Dance Magazine Awards Ceremony, where Pratt received a Harkness Promise Award alongside Amadi Washington. Their dance company, Baye & Asa, was praised by Harkness Foundation for Dance Executive Director Joan Finkelstein for its ability to “create political metaphors, interrogate systemic inequities, and contemporize ancient allegories.” Accepting the award, Pratt said, “In a contemporary world, there’s a lot of pressure to put yourself into a camp, to distill, succinctly and uncompromisingly, what you believe and where you stand. I think dance is uniquely positioned as an art form that can liberate thought into indeterminacy and to widen toward multiplicity instead of narrowing towards one singular thesis. Art remains one of the most advanced pieces of technology we have as a species.”

The one-night-only, six-hour-long opera Stranger Love by composer and Bard alumnus Dylan Mattingly ’14 and librettist Thomas Bartscherer, Bard’s Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, has been selected as one of the best classical music performances of 2023 by the New York Times. The performance was conducted by Mattingly’s fellow Bard alumnus David Bloom ’13. “For all its abstraction and timelessness — what is more ageless than the opera’s themes of love and beauty? — this work is absolutely of its time, slowing down emotion in a world that moves uncontrollably fast,” writes Joshua Barone. “The premiere run, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic in May, was just a single evening, but Stranger Love deserves a life far beyond that.”

See the Best Classical Music Performances of 2023 from the New York Times

Read the New York Times Review of Stranger Love

Speaking with the New York Times, Sara Mednick ’95, professor and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, says the best time to nap is about six to eight hours after you wake up in the morning. Mednick, who researches sleep and the autonomic nervous system, points out the benefits of napping even if you don’t actually fall asleep. We remain “somewhat conscious” in the early stages of sleep and “it’s still good rest,” says Mednick, who references a recent study that found that drifting into the lightest stage of sleep for even one minute during a 20-minute rest generated more creativity and better problem-solving in young adults.

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. 

Learn More
 

“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.

Lexi Parra ’18 is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based between Caracas and New York. Parra will be on campus on Wednesday, November 1. A Conversations and Lunch event will take place in the George Ball Lounge of the Campus Center from noon to 1:30 that day.

By Lauren Rodgers ’27

Q: Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
A: I am a Venezuelan-American photographer, community educator, and a Bard alum. After graduating in 2018 with my degree in Photography and Human Rights, I began to focus my work on youth culture, migration, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. I’m the founder of Project MiRA, an arts education initiative based in Caracas, and also a community manager at Women Photograph. I’m bilingual (Spanish and English), and am currently working between Caracas and New York.

Q: What inspired you to pursue photography?
A: I grew up going to my dad’s sets—he is a director of photography in the commercial world—and, even though I didn’t realize it at the time, it set me up to want to be a photographer. I was the kid with a big DSLR camera on my shoulder wherever I went, taking mediocre travel pictures. When I got accepted to Bard, I realized the Photography Program was renowned and thought it was something I should pursue. What has inspired me to make images and tell stories is my obsessive curiosity and want to connect with people. My camera is one of the ways that I do that.

Q: Your photography focuses on youth culture, migration, inequality, and resilience. What inspired you to incorporate activism into your artistic work?
A: Honestly, I don’t know if my work as a photographer / journalist would be considered ‘activism.’ During my time at Bard, I was a community organizer and my senior thesis work had a lot to do with representation and healing, which was my response to our world at the time. That ethos continues to guide me; to make beautiful and dignified images, particularly because I work in places and with people who are going through crises. While I don’t know if an image can have any tangible impact on the world, I do think it matters how we show up and engage. I hope that
in the way I work that it is an interaction, rather than something that is extractive.

Q: Why did you choose to attend Bard?
A:  When it came time to make a decision, Bard seemed to be the right fit for me. I had visited the campus and, coming from Minneapolis, was new to the landscape of Northeast private colleges. Bard had a flexibility in its programming that intrigued me. The financial aid package was substantial, too, which I needed to go to a college like Bard. I didn’t have crazy high expectations when I got to campus because I was so out of my element—but the teachers/mentors and friends I made, the experiences I had, absolutely shaped me into the person I am today.

Q: How do you feel your roots in Venezuela and Hispanic culture have influenced your work and photographic perspective?
A: I think living in Venezuela since graduating Bard has shaped my work more so than being Venezuelan. It took going back to my dad’s home country to actually feel those roots. Growing up, I didn’t have strong connections beyond making arepas or visiting my dad’s few Venezuelan friends, who also somehow landed in Minneapolis. In college, I embraced my latinidad but, still, it didn’t have roots yet. Going back to Caracas, though, as an adult shaped my work immensely.

As an insider-outsider, I learned to listen first. Having lived in Venezuela during a part of its years-long crisis, I now feel a deep sense of responsibility to cover the ongoing effects on communities with the focus being on the strength and resilience that people have to create something as everything is on the brink of collapse. That duality, that complexity, has informed how I see the world. My connection to Venezuela has translated into an intimacy with stories of migration, too, which has been both heartbreaking and fulfilling.

Q: Could you tell us about Project MiRA, the arts education initiative you founded?
A: Project MiRA brought me to Caracas after graduating from Bard in 2018. Through the Davis Peace Prize, I went to Venezuela with a bag of old digital cameras to host workshops through the Tiuna el Fuerte cultural park. The idea was to give cameras to people who are living the crisis, to see the reality through their eyes and change the dynamic of photographer-subject during a time of turmoil. After a year of traveling the country teaching groups of kids and adults, I formalized the initiative into Project MiRA (“look” in Spanish). Our methodology brings photography workshops to informal community spaces in remote areas of the barrios of Caracas, collaborating with local community leaders, to work with teen girls. The programming focuses on issues of representation, storytelling and visual literacy. In five years, we have taught over 600 young people, exhibited their work in both Caracas and New York and have been a part of a children’s photography book. The work I do with Project MiRA has been so informative to my person, as well as my work as a photographer, and I am beyond grateful for the community support that makes it possible.

Q: For you, what does it mean to be an active community member?
A: Being an active community member really comes down to being human: someone who has empathy, who shows up. It is so easy, especially in the US, to isolate and think of ourselves in terms of our individual self. When we come together in community and actually understand that we are a part of something bigger, it can be both empowering and reassuring. We just have to show up and offer what we can.

Q: When do you feel your work is most challenging, and when do you feel your work is most rewarding?
A: My work is most challenging when I feel helpless. Hearing someone talk about their journey through the Darien Gap, or holding their hand as they tell me about losing their brother in a police raid ... I can’t do anything tangible to help. My work isn’t going to take their pain away, or make it better. I can be there, and be present with them, but the feeling of not being able to do more is always the worst part of my job. The most rewarding thing is when people see their picture in a newspaper or an article, or hold a print I brought for them. It’s the most rewarding because they feel seen, acknowledged. Similarly, when I’m teaching, I get so excited when a student learns to claim her space, her opinion—when she trusts us enough to really flex. There’s nothing better than that.

Q: You've only been out of college for five years. What are your tips to cultivating a successful career post-grad?
A: I would definitely take advantage of the opportunities that are available at Bard. Go to every conference you can, have coffee with a professor whose work you admire, scour for internships or jobs that can give you some experience and insight while you are still in school. Photojournalism found me after college, and I’m grateful to have had mentors who guided me into this career. While I didn’t study photojournalism, my varied experiences through Bard did set me up with skills that are vital to what I do now. So, I would say be open to any opportunities and use the network to your advantage.
 

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More about Lexi Parra ’18:

• lexiparra.com
• As gang, police violence rages, a neighborhood tries to connect (Washington Post)
• Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
• Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects for Peace Prize

While the rate of homelessness has held largely steady across the United States, increasing by roughly 1% over a five-year period, complaints using 311 and other emergency phone numbers have skyrocketed during that same span. “In many cities we've seen extraordinary growth in using 311 to complain about homelessness that go far beyond the number of people experiencing homelessness,” Bard College alumnus Chris Herring ’08, assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, told ABC News. Among the reasons for this, Herring and other experts posit, is that the type of homelessness people are experiencing is changing, and with it, their visibility. The public is much more likely to perceive unsheltered homelessness than sheltered homelessness, and as a result, much more likely to report the presence of people experiencing homelessness to the police, which in turn can create a feedback loop, says Herring. Forcing people to relocate can exacerbate mental health symptoms, which then makes them more visible, and thus more likely to be reported. “It could increase problematic behaviors that are more visible,” Herring said. “It's different from when someone has a stable camp in a hidden spot.”

Bard alum Carolyn Lazard ’10 has been named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. Lazard, an interdisciplinary artist who uses the experience of chronic illness to examine concepts of intimacy and social and political dimensions of care, is one of this year’s 20 recipients of the prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In a statement about their work, the MacArthur Foundation says, “Lazard is an artist exploring the limits of aesthetic perception and using accessibility as a creative tool for collective practices of care. With a practice that spans the mediums of video, installation, sculpture, and performance, their work challenges ableist expectations of solo productivity and efficiency. They approach these subjects using the minimalist language of conceptual art and avant-garde cinema.”

The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award for extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential. There are three criteria for selection of MacArthur Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. Recipients may be writers, scientists, artists, social scientists, humanists, teachers, entrepreneurs, or those in other fields, with or without institutional affiliations. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award, but rather an investment in a person’s originality, insight, and potential.

MacArthur Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit. Nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee, recipients learn of their selection only when they receive a call from the MacArthur Foundation just before the public announcement.

Carolyn Lazard received a BA (2010) from Bard College and an MFA (2019) from the University of Pennsylvania. Their work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at such national and international venues as the Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; MoMA PS1; Museum für Moderne Kunst; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Venice Biennale.

Lazard often repurposes ready-made objects—such as a HEPA air purifier, a noise machine, and a power-lifter recliner chair—calling attention to the dependencies and infrastructures of care that sustain social life. CRIP TIME (2018) is a video-based meditation on the time Lazard devotes to organizing a week’s worth of different medications into brightly colored, plastic pill containers. Through documenting this care-based task, Lazard makes visible the often-obscured care and labor of staying alive. Lazard’s work also addresses complex histories of institutional harm and racialized violence. The video piece Pre-Existing Condition (2019) focuses on medical experiments that a University of Pennsylvania professor conducted on incarcerated people at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia between 1951 and 1974. Lazard displays archival documents that list each experiment and the sponsoring institutions overlayed with the voice of Yusef Anthony, a Holmesburg Prison experiment survivor and advocate, who discusses his mistrust of medical and legal systems. As in much of their practice, access is both a theme and a material of their work.

In addition to their work as an artist, Lazard writes about their experience of chronic illness and the limitations of biomedical understandings of health. They authored the guidebook Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice (2019), which details specific ways that museums and other cultural spaces can meet the needs of disabled communities.

Raven Chacon, a former visiting Bard MFA faculty member and composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation, has also been named a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. “Raven Chacon is a composer and artist creating musical experiences that explore relationships among sound, space, and people,” stated the MacArthur Foundation. “In an experimental practice that cuts across the boundaries of visual art, performance, and music, Chacon breaks open musical traditions and activates spaces of performance where the histories of the lands the United States has encroached upon can be contemplated, questioned, and reimagined.”

Learn more and meet the 2023 MacArthur Fellows here.

In a joint opinion piece for Scientific American, Greg Eghigian ’83, Bard alumnus and professor of history and bioethics at Penn State University, writes that speculative discussions surrounding UFOs—which have been attracting public attention in the US from ex-government officials, prominent politicians, intelligence agencies, major news outlets, and civilian scientists—have been transforming our politics and culture, and warrant closer attention to how they are influencing both. According to the piece coauthored by Eghigian and Christian Peters, social scientists are particularly well-equipped to weigh in on the debates surrounding UFOs, recently renamed unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). “They not only offer effective techniques for assessing social change, but for decades, social scientists have been conducting research on such relevant topics as human-technological systems, behavioral factors in manned space travel, public attitudes toward UFOs, and the psychophysical and cognitive aspects of sightings.” The piece continues, “Talk about UFOs has never been just about UFOs. The social sciences likely won’t tell us whether UAP are from another world. They will, however, help us explore the ‘what ifs’ and reveal what our actions today tell us about ourselves.”

In the program’s second year, two Bard alumnae, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi MFA ’18 and Alisha B. Wormsley MFA ’19, were awarded Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants. The grants, given by the New York Foundation for the Arts, support environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists in the United States and US Territories that inspire thought, action, and ethical engagement. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi was awarded a grant for Oil Research Group (ORG), which “investigates two environments contiguously: oil, the world’s most important non-renewable resource, and data, the information environment that fertilizes the production of shared meaning.” Alisha B Wormsley was awarded a grant for Children of NAN: A Survival Guide, “a film for future Black femmes that spans Black womxn’s relationship to craft, land/space, and spirit.” Anonymous Was A Woman awarded $309,000 in total to 20 projects led by women-identifying artists this year.

“Give it back.” These are the first words seen by visitors to The World’s UnFair, the newest multimedia work by New Red Order (NRO), a “public secret society” cofounded by brothers and Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14. World’s Fairs “have historically presented a theory of progress, technological advancement, imperial advancement,” Jackson Polys, who cocreated NRO with the Khalil brothers, told the New York Times. The World’s UnFair, by contrast, subverts expectations with an animatronic beaver who speaks about private land ownership and satirical real estate ads featuring “comically small” portions of land given back to Native groups. The exhibition, curated by Bard alumna Diya Vij ’08, is meant to be provocative, asking questions about not only Native sovereignty, but also performances of Indigeneity and art’s place (or lack thereof) in the pursuit of decolonization. The World’s UnFair is on view now through October 15 in Long Island City, Queens.

Read More in the New York Times

Further Reading:

• NPR: “An 'anti-World's Fair' makes its case: give land back to Native Americans”
• Smithosian magazine: "‘The World’s UnFair,’ a New Exhibition Calling for the Return of Indigenous Land, Comes to Queens."
• Artnet: “A New Kind of World’s Fair Is Coming to Queens. Its Message? Give Back All Indigenous Land”
• Hyperallergic: “The World’s UnFair in Queens Echoes Calls to Give Native Land Back”

Bon Appétit has just published its picks for the best 24 new restaurants of 2023. The restaurant scene is currently bursting with creativity so this year’s list is more than double than it has been in the past. Breaking with industry tradition, the food magazine let every restaurant on its list know they had been selected before the publication was released. “Running a restaurant is already challenging enough, and we want this to really be net positive,” said Bon Appétit Restaurant Editor Elazar Sontag ’20. “We want the restaurants to be able to not just celebrate it, but actually grow from it, and grow their businesses. When business changes overnight, the way it does after you’re on BA’s list, you need time to adjust. You need more staff.” The list spotlights new restaurants across the country, from Bainbridge Island in Washington State to Savannah, Georgia, to Philadelphia, as well as including a handful of select recipes like one for Bolo Bao (Pineapple Buns) from Rubato, a Hong Kong–style café in Quincy, Massachusetts.

“If you’d met Edris Tajik at Bard College earlier this summer, his life might have seemed like that of a typical college student,” writes the Chronicle of Higher Education. What led Edris Tajik ’23 to this moment of seeming normalcy was far from typical, however. The Chronicle profiles Tajik’s educational career, beginning at Herat University, where his studies were interrupted by the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. After fleeing Afghanistan for Germany, Tajik found his way to the United States—and to Bard.

Tajik was a natural fit for Bard, with a background in activism and civic engagement. He’d worked as a program officer for Hope for Education and Leadership in Afghanistan, “where he trained 240 students for Model United Nations, helping them develop their leadership abilities,” writes the Chronicle. “His background was very compelling, with all the civil-society work he’d done,” says Jennifer Murray, dean of international studies. At Bard, Tajik dove into his studies, feeling “a seriousness of purpose” that guided his time in Annandale. “Everything was new to me — the teaching style, the class discussion,” Tajik said. “It was exciting.”

Now, post-Bard, Tajik plans to complete two one-year master’s programs, with the ultimate goal of working in Washington, DC. “Whatever Tajik does, he’ll bring a valuable perspective, not only as a young person who’s already amassed professional experience in his field,” writes the Chronicle, “but also as someone whose life has been shaped—directly and dramatically—by foreign-policy choices and lack of access to education.”

Unions and their supporters have recently seen some progress thanks to tight labor markets, pandemic-era fiscal policy, and the $15 minimum wage movement, yet working Americans still face a generations-long crisis, writes David Rolf ’92, Bard alumnus and founder and president emeritus of SEIU 775, a labor union representing long-term care sector workers, in an opinion piece for Newsweek. “Our broken labor laws, designed for the economy of the 1930s, have functionally stopped enabling collective bargaining and have become a tool to prevent it,” he says. Support for unions is at historic highs, particularly amongst young Americans, yet unions represent only six percent of eligible private sector workers because most companies are incentivized to avoid or bust unions and to minimize their bargaining gains. Yet research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and by David Madland, Center for American Progress scholar, show that “when more workers are covered by union contracts, things get better for workers, employers, and national economies.” Rolf continues, “Centralized and broad-based labor law systems are predictive of economies with high employment, high productivity, high wages, adequate leisure time for the working class, positive trade balances, and lower levels of inequality.”

The Dallas Opera recently announced that Micah Gleason GCP ’21 VAP ’22, who graduated from the Bard College Conservatory's Graduate Conducting Program in 2021 and Vocal Arts Program in 2022, is one of four talented musicians selected to participate in the 2023–24 Hart Institute for Women Conductors Showcase. Gleason (US), Maria Benyumova (Germany), Shira Samuels-Shragg (US), and Jingqi Zhu (China) were chosen from a worldwide applicant pool of more than 75 conductors hailing from 27 countries on five continents.

Launched in 2015, the Hart Institute for Women Conductors Showcase is the only program of its kind in the world and seeks to address the extreme gender imbalance of leadership on the podium as well as in administration in opera companies. Now in its 7th year, more than 500 women conductors from 40 nations have applied to be trained, advised, and supported by this extraordinary initiative.

The annual Institute begins in November (November 13-17) with a week of daily virtual sessions, many of which are livestreamed and open for the public to view at no cost on The Dallas Opera’s You Tube channel. During an intensive ten-day residency in Dallas (January 19-28, 2024), participants will work with esteemed faculty and mentors in group and one-on-one sessions, as well as in rehearsals for the annual Showcase Concert on Sunday, January 28, 2024 at 7:30 p.m. The performance will feature each Institute conductor leading the Dallas Opera Orchestra and guest singers in selections of opera excerpts featuring overtures, solo arias, and ensemble pieces from across the centuries of the canon.
 

Elías Beltrán ’17, Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) alumnus, is completing his PhD in comparative literature at Cornell University and is the first BPI alumnus to join the BPI faculty beginning in fall 2023. Beltrán, who has taught at Cornell and worked at the Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library in its early years, talks with Megan Callaghan, dean of BPI, about becoming a faculty member, his experiences in teaching, and the importance of accessible and unconventional liberal arts education models like BPI, Bard Microcolleges, and Bard Early Colleges. 

“None of the distinctions of prison-yard politics—race, cliques, neighborhoods, age, orientation—mattered in the classroom,” he recalls about his time as a BPI student. “The issues that obscured the commonality of our plight, the immediacy of our predicament, all became clear to us on the page. That was our point of focus, and everything else gave way to that. I saw something very similar at work in the Microcollege, and I was so heartened to see students of all ages and backgrounds sharing that space too.”
 
Beltrán, whose research focuses on postcolonial and decolonial trauma, as well as the history and culture of the Caribbean and its literature, is excited to start teaching at BPI. His message to new BPI students: “Commit. Commit to your education. Be committed like nothing else to it and value the time you have for it. Another thing is to not be afraid to ask questions, to acknowledge the gaps in your knowledge and then work at filling those gaps, including asking for additional readings and material. Last thing is to believe in yourself unflinchingly.”

“The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new,” writes Ronan Farrow ’04 in a piece on Elon Musk for the New Yorker. “But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive.” The United States government is widely dependent on Musk and his companies, Farrow reports, “from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space.” A recent crisis regarding the abrupt disruption of communication among Ukrainian military forces via Musk’s Starlink technology only furthered the point that Musk, despite not being a diplomat or statesman, increasingly operates as such. Tracing both the histories of Musk’s companies and the man himself, Farrow argues that science fiction has influenced the billionaire’s mindset, especially Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the video game series Deus Ex. “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved,” Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, told Farrow. “But only if he can be the one to save it.”

Speaking with Bard professors Francine Prose and Stephen Shore, Susan D’Agostino ’91 probes the legal and creative implications of the use of generative AI programs like ChatGPT and DALL-E for Inside Higher Ed. At the heart of the debate is whether these programs “copy” journalistic and creative works, or whether they could be considered “fair use,” D’Agostino writes. Alongside this concern is whether the output of these programs could be considered art—or human. “The question of ‘what is a human being?’ is resurfacing through this and starting really good discussions,” Prose told D’Agostino. “There’s so much pressure to dehumanize or commodify people, to tell young people that they are their Instagram page.” Some imagine a future where these kinds of programs are used to assist human artmaking, a future which may have already arrived. “Shore recently asked DALL-E—a generative AI image tool—to create a photograph in his style,” D’Agostino writes. Reviewing DALL-E’s output, Shore was “satisfied, if not wowed, by the result.” “I would have made one decision slightly differently, but it was pretty good,” he said.

The art world has been “pitifully slow” to acknowledge “even the existence of contemporary Native American art,” writes Holland Cotter, cochief art critic at the New York Times. But with Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969, on view now through November 26 at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, “Native American art has a presence in the art world it hasn’t had before.” Candice Hopkins CCS ’03 “has organized a frisky intergenerational group show of some 30 Native American artists,” Cotter writes, including Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson and Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14, members of the “public secret society” New Red Order. Drawing on a treatise written by the late Native American fashion designer Lloyd Kiva New, Indian Theater was created in part “on the premise that much traditional Indigenous art was fundamentally theatrical in nature, incorporating movement, sound, masking, storytelling, communal action, and that these elements could be marshaled to create distinctive new forms.”

In a video and written piece for the New York Times, journalist Alexandra Eaton ’07 traces the fascinating story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of the 19th-century painting Bélizaire and the Frey Children, attributed to Jacques Amans, a French portraitist of Louisiana’s elite in that era. The Met describes the painting as “one of the rarest and most fully documented American portraits to come to light of an enslaved Black subject depicted with the family of his Southern White enslaver.” For generations, the painting was neglected in family attics and the basement of the New Orleans Museum of Art until Jeremy K. Simien, an art collector from Baton Rouge, tracked it down. Simien had seen the painting in a 2013 auction house record with four figures depicted, and later discovered a 2005 record with the figure of the Black youth overpainted. “The fact that he was covered up haunted me,” Simien said in an interview. The painting has now been acquired by the Met for its permanent collection. “I’ve been wanting to add such a work to the Met’s collection for the past 10 years,” said Betsy Kornhauser, the curator for American paintings and sculpture who handled the acquisition, “and this is the extraordinary work that appeared.”

Inheritance, a new installation inspired by the 2020 film of the same name by Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, program director and associate professor of film and electronic arts at Bard, is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In paintings, sculptures, videos, photos, and time-based media installations spanning from the 1970s to present day, the show is a meditation on the impacts of the past and legacies across the interwoven contexts of family, history, and aesthetics. “Inheritance reflects on multiple meanings of the word, whether celebratory or painful, from one era, person, or idea to the next,” reads the exhibit text. “The exhibition takes a layered approach to storytelling by interweaving narrative with documentary and personal experiences with historical and generational events.” The show, on view through February 2024, includes works by 43 leading artists, including Asili; An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard; Kevin Jerome Everson, former MFA visiting artist 2011; Kevin Beasley, former MFA visiting artist 2017; former MFA faculty in photography David Hartt and Emily Jacir, and WangShui, MFA ’19.

“I met Laura Steele while studying photography at Bard College,” writes Alice Fall ’22. “Her steadiness, intelligence, wit, and engagement with the world is grounding and immediately magnetic. Laura’s constant reminder to me, both inside and out of school, has been to trust my vision and intuition. I’m thankful for her for bringing me back to myself, again and again.” In this conversation for Lenscratch, the Bard alumna and Bard faculty member talk about the contours of collaboration, the tension between creative work and the imperative to market that work, and how a given tool or artistic process can limit or liberate the art.

Read the Conversation in Lenscratch

Further Reading
Alice Fall ’22 Wins Second Place in Lenscratch Student Awards

Bard alumnus Dan Whitener ’09 MM ’12 plays banjo for Gangstagrass, a hip-hop and bluegrass group that Farah Stockman called “a band that is making music that actually unites us” in a New York Times opinion piece. At a time when American culture is especially polarized, Gangstagrass makes music that seeks to invite social cohesion rather than division, and hopes to alleviate people’s fear of one another. “Those who are lucky enough to stumble on their live shows are likely to get sucked in by the oddball energy. They have die-hard fans who came for the bluegrass and stayed for the rap, and vice versa. Instead of pitting rural America against urban America,” Stockman writes, “Gangstagrass tries to appeal to both at the same time.”

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an experimental documentary by filmmaker and Bard MFA alumnus Todd Haynes, showcased a very different type of Barbie narrative from the Greta Gerwig film now topping the box office. “To a certain slice of the Gen X cognoscenti, ‘the Barbie movie’ will always and forever refer to a very different film, one both notorious and barely seen,” writes Jessica Winter for the New Yorker. Made in the summer of 1985 when he was still a student at Bard, Haynes used Barbie dolls to portray the life of musician Karen Carpenter, from her rise to fame as part of the successful duo the Carpenters and throughout her descent into anorexia and her death at age 32. The film “begins as a droll prank and then tilts, almost imperceptibly, into surreal domestic nightmare and, finally, authentic tragedy,” Winter continues. “It was sui generis in both its execution and, arguably, its reception.”
 

Poet and art critic John Yau ’72 talks with LA Review of Books Radio Hour hosts Kate Wolf and Eric Newman about his process and experiences writing about artists and art in New York City. He discusses the complexities of how biracial, multiracial, and transcultural identities influence artists’ work within American art, and the ways those identities have been traditionally and historically ignored by the art world. “It enlarges the notion of identity to have at least two identities or in [artist] Wifredo Lam’s case three identities, Afro, Cuban, and Chinese,” says Yau. “In my essay, I talk about how he’s read as a white artist that is derivative. So his whole identity gets ignored.” The deeper Yau dives into these questions, the more he realizes how this monocultural lens pervades the art world. Drawn from decades of writing, Yau’s first collection of essays, Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art, reflects on the work of Black, Asian, Latinx, and Native American artists who have been overlooked and misrepresented. 

Jack Smith ’16, who majored in film and was a captain of the squash team for two seasons at Bard, returns to the College in his new role as head men’s and women’s squash coach. Bard’s Director of Athletics and Recreation David Lindholm says that Smith “distinguished himself in our search as a coach with the knowledge and ability to help our program grow and develop in the coming years.” Smith comes to Bard from CitySquash in the Bronx, a Squash and Education Alliance nonprofit after-school enrichment program for elementary, middle, and high school–aged students. “It’s truly an honor to be able to return to the program that shaped the player, coach, and person I am today,” said Smith. “I’m looking forward to joining the department, meeting the student-athletes, and getting started with the teams.”

Art historian and curator Darienne Turner BGC ’17, an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe of California, speaks with Terence Trouillot, senior editor of Frieze, about her curatorial practice, what it means to “Indigenize” museums, her studies of material culture at the Bard Graduate Center, and her upcoming role at the Brooklyn Museum of Art as its first full-time curator of Indigenous art. Turner, who is currently assistant curator of Indigenous art of the Americas at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), grapples with the term “decolonization” in the context of museums because of what that language centers. “But what really works against the colonial armature that encyclopaedic museums rest upon? For me that work happens through Indigenizing, through bringing in Indigenous artists and actually listening to what they have to say,” she says. 

Her first show at the BMA in 2020, Stripes and Stars: Reclaiming Lakota Independence, was inspired by objects she found in the museum’s vault—children’s clothing with American flags in their Lakota beadwork designs. “These objects were conundrums for me. I asked myself, ‘Why would the Lakota people, at this moment of intense conflict with the US government, use the symbol of their oppressor on these objects?’ The question catapulted me into deep research into the history of the Lakota people, and the moment of their transition to the reservation in the late 19th century.” What she found was that the Lakota people leveraged patriotic images like the flag in order to make space for themselves to enact cultural practices that had been banned, such as giveaways and puberty ceremonies, all taking place under the cover of the American flag during “patriotic” celebrations like the Fourth of July. “Listening to the stories of the objects is a big part of my practice, as is engaging with community,” says Turner.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein interviewed Leslie Kean ’73, an investigative journalist and the author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, on his podcast The Ezra Klein Show. Since 1999, Kean’s reporting has delved into the topic of UFOs or unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) and most recently she broke the story of United States Air Force officer, former intelligence official, and whistle-blower David Grusch who claims the US government is covertly in possession of “intact and partially intact vehicles” of nonhuman origin. Kean discusses the implications of the story, her decades of reporting on the beat, and how Congress is responding to Grusch’s testimony. 

For Kean, Grusch’s claims follow the accumulation of years of conversations she’s had with other highly regarded sources with top security clearances telling her essentially the same thing: the government is harboring objects which are not of human origin. “I’m willing to put it out as a story. I think the point of it is that Congress needs to investigate and find out if what he is saying is true or not, and I think it’s up to Congress to take the next step," said Kean.
 

Brothers@, an organization founded at Bard College by alumni Dariel Vasquez ’17 and Harry Johnson ’17 to support young men of color in high school and through college, has successfully launched its next mentorship satellite program at Vassar College. Vassar student Devyn Benson, Johnson’s brother and Brothers@ ambassador, led the launch with help from Vasquez, now CEO of Brothers@, and Wesley Dixon, Vassar’s deputy to the president and secretary of the board of trustees. "When Dariel Vasquez and I launched Brothers@ in 2014, Devyn was one of my key motivations,” said Johnson. “With a nine-year age gap between us and growing up in a single-parent household, it hurt to leave for college knowing there was so much I could give at home.... 10 years later, Devyn has embarked on that same journey, but with a clear understanding that young men of color don't have to wait to make an impact in the lives of others; instead, he knows he is uniquely positioned to create generational impacts in the lives of other young men of color and communities of color at a scale, today." Since 2014, Brothers@ has grown from a student-led pilot program, Brothers@Bard, and institutional initiative, to a scalable model focused on expanding to college campuses and local communities across the country.

“In the middle of June, a trio of Christmas trees hang upside down above a dimly lit stage at Bard College’s Fisher Center, north of New York City,” writes Bard alumna Quinn Moreland ’15 for Pitchfork. Reporting back from a dress rehearsal of Illinois, a stage adaptation of the acclaimed Sufjan Stevens album of the same name, Moreland spoke with Justin Peck, director, choreographer, and cowriter of the production, an “unusual project that the acclaimed ballet dancer and choreographer can’t quite define himself.”

“I couldn’t tell you if it’s a concert or dance-theater piece or musical,” Peck told Pitchfork. “It’s somewhere amidst all that but feels like its own thing.” Adapting the acclaimed album had long been an ambition of Peck’s, whose admiration for Stevens’s work stretches back to his teenage years, before the two became frequent collaborators. With the Fisher Center production, Peck and his cocreators sought to create something that would capture the spirit of Stevens’s Illinois, a 22-track epic that weaves personal experience with state history. Nostalgia for the album was also in Peck’s mind as he adapted it. “Not only does everyone love this album, they can tell me where they were when they first heard it, what they were going through, and how the album helped them understand themselves,” Peck says. “It’s an album that touched an entire generation.”