Newsmakers

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

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

Bard College is pleased to announce that the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI, directed by Dr. Suzanne Kite, distinguished artist in residence and assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies, has been designated as a Humanities Research Center on AI by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This prestigious recognition will confer a $500,000 grant in support of the Center, and position Wihanble S’a at the forefront of innovative research that integrates Indigenous Knowledge systems with cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

Beginning in Fall 2024, the Wihanble S’a Center will embark on groundbreaking research aimed at developing ethical AI frameworks deeply rooted in Indigenous methodologies. The Center’s mission is to explore and address the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI through an Indigenous lens, ensuring that AI technologies reflect diverse perspectives and contribute positively to society.

“This award is a tremendous honor and a recognition of the importance of American Indian perspectives in the rapidly evolving fields of AI,” said Dr. Kite, who is an award-winning Oglála Lakȟóta artist and academic, and Bard MFA ’18 alum. “Our goal is to develop ethical methodologies for systems grounded in Indigenous knowledge, offering new guidelines and models through collaboration between Indigenous scholars and AI researchers, challenging the predominantly Western approach to AI. Wihanble S’a (WEE hah blay SAH) means dreamer in Lakota, and we are dreaming of an abundant future.”

The NEH designation will support the Center’s initiatives, including the establishment of a dedicated facility on Bard College’s Massena Campus. This facility will serve as a collaborative hub, bringing together scholars from across diverse academic disciplines—including computer science, cognitive and neuroscience, linguistics, ethics, and Indigenous Studies—to engage in interdisciplinary research and educational activities.

In addition to research, the Center will host public events, workshops, and an interdisciplinary Fellowship and Visiting Scholars program, all aimed at advancing the field of Indigenous-informed AI. The Center’s work will complement the recruitment and support of Indigenous students ongoing at Bard’s Center for Indigenous Studies, enhancing Bard College’s commitment to being a leader in Indigenous studies in the United States as well as complementing Dr. Kite’s work with the international Abundant Intelligences Indigenous AI research program. Wihanble S’a Center’s designation as an NEH Humanities Research Center on AI underscores Bard College’s dedication to fostering innovative, socially responsible research that bridges the humanities and technological advancements.

A recent column in The Chronicle of Higher Education describes how, in the three years since the Taliban took power, the exiled American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) is thriving, enrolling 1000+ students in 20 different countries. AUAF President Ian Bickford SR ’95, and former provost of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, explains that liberal arts education is particularly important in authoritarian societies because it encourages agency and critical and independent thinking. “For our students, education is their lifeline,” said Bickford. AUAF offers a dual degree with Bard College and AUAF students can enroll in OSUN Online Courses.

Patrick Kindlon ’08, the frontman of the punk post-hardcore band Drug Church, was profiled in Rolling Stone in advance of the release of the band’s fifth studio album PRUDE on October 4. Drug Church is a collaboration between Kindlon as lyricist and musicians Nick Cogan, Cory Galusha, Chris Villeneuve, and Patrick Wynne.

Drug Church started as a side project a few years after Kindlon left Bard, when he worked with the band Self Defense Family. Rolling Stone described Kindlon’s lyrics as “equal parts poetic and cutting” and said the band’s music as a whole is full of “raw humanity” and “a sympathetic touch.” Speaking about PRUDE’s content, Kindlon said he was interested in writing about ordinary people whose lives take an unexpected turn. “I’m very sympathetic to things just going a little out of control for you.”

Bard alumna Michelle Handelman ’01 was awarded an $8,000 grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) as part of their NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program. The triennial program is highly competitive, and Handelman was one of only 87 artists selected out of an applicant pool of 4,587 this year. “I am endlessly grateful to have received this NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship,” Handelman said. “I’m excited to use it to shoot my new project, DELIRIUM, a multichannel installation featuring the amazing performers Lydia Lunch, Christeene, M Lamar, and Shannon Funchess.” Handelman said she appreciated the “unrestricted access” the fellowship afforded to its winners, who are chosen at all stages of their lives as artists. “It’s a beautiful thing,” she said.

Bard College announces the creation of The Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression in Photography. This fund is made possible through a generous endowment from the Schwartz Family to honor their sister, Barbara Ess, a beloved teacher, colleague, mentor, artist, friend, and much-loved family member. The Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression in Photography is an annual award that will cover the cost of course-related materials for a limited number of Bard College photography students on financial aid.

After taking some time to process the loss, Barbara’s sisters, Janet and Ellen, have decided to honor Barbara by creating a special endowment fund at Bard College, The Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression in Photography. This fund will allow students on financial aid to fully participate in photography classes. They believe Barbara would have loved that.

After joining the faculty at Bard in 1997 as a professor in the photography department, Barbara Ess committed herself to inspiring and encouraging her students to be the most interesting artists they could be. She shared her unique perspective and approach to photography and art in a way that connected with her students, demanding only that the work be honest, authentic, and thoughtful. Her students loved and respected her. Many of them have gone on to make impressive art and enjoy successful careers.

According to former student and Co-Chair in Photography at Bard MFA, Megan Plunkett, MFA ’17, “Barbara Ess was an artist of immense power and I continue to be amazed by all that she accomplished in her work. As a teacher, she was abuzz with ideas, energy, and experiments. She gave us the gift of being seen as artists, and the freedom to be ourselves in our studios. She changed so many of her student’s lives, mine very much included. It is my absolute pleasure to speak on behalf of the Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression. In funding materials for photo students with financial need, Barbara’s frenetic, infectious joy for making will continue to thrive in new generations of Bard artists, something I know would bring her immense joy in return.”

To donate to the fund via Bard’s secure website, please click here. For other ways to give to the fund, please click here. Note all contributions are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law. We encourage you to check with your employer to ask if your donation can be matched.

About Barbara Ess
Barbara Ess was born in 1944 in Brooklyn, NY. In 1969 she received her BA in Philosophy and English Literature from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. Ess has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, including at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (1985); High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (1992); and Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2003). She has also participated in many group exhibitions, including Currents, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (1985); Postmodern Prints, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, UK (1991); Bowery Tribute, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (2010); and Who You Staring At: Culture visuelle de la scène no wave des années 1970 et 1980, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2023). Ess died in 2021 in Elizaville, NY.

The poem “Sudanese Saying” by Bard College alum Pierre Joris ’69 was featured as Poem of the Week in the Guardian. Joris’s work relays the pain and injustice of the 2016 demolition of the refugee encampment once known as the Calais “Jungle” in France, where the inhabitants numbered about 10,000 when they were evicted and the camp demolished. “Poems that put the case for the rights and dignity of refugees often adopt a refugee’s persona,” writes Carol Rumens for the Guardian. “It’s remarkable that Joris’s carefully distanced manner and elegant precision are able to make a statement as powerful—one at whose climax the translated ‘Sudanese saying’ burns into the mind.”
 

Jonian Rafti ’15, a Bard College alumnus, will be inducted into the first annual Andrew Goodman Alumni Hall of Fame. The inaugural cohort includes 10 Andrew Goodman alumni, one from each year of the program since it began in 2014. Inductees are recognized not only for their contributions during their time as Andrew Goodman Ambassadors or Puffin Democracy Fellows, but also for their continued dedication to the Goodman organization’s mission to make young voices and votes a powerful force in democracy by training the next generation of leaders, engaging young voters, and challenging restrictive voter suppression laws. Rafti is an associate in the Corporate Department and a member of the Health Care Group at Proskauer Rose LLP, representing private equity investors, health systems, management companies, physician groups, and lenders in complex transactional and health care regulatory matters. He has previously served as member of the Board of Directors and Vice Chair of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, and as a member of  Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement’s Young Alumni/ae Advisory Council.

Bard alumna Micah Gleason GCP ’21 VAP ’22 was profiled in the New York Times for a piece which for a year followed five students attending the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Gleason is “an easygoing yet fiercely skilled conductor and singer,” writes Joshua Barone for the Times. “On the eve of graduation, Gleason presented a workshop performance of a chamber opera she was developing with Joanne Evans, a former classmate from Bard College and her duo partner.” The Curtis Institute of Music educates and trains exceptionally gifted young musicians to engage a local and global community through the highest level of artistry. Students at Curtis hone their craft through more than 200 orchestra, opera, and solo and chamber music offerings and programs, bringing arts access and education to the community.

Associate Professor of Physics Paul Cadden-Zimansky and three recent Bard graduates in physics and mathematics Li-Heng Henry Chang ’23, Ziyu Xu ’23, and Shea Roccaforte ’21, have coauthored the cover story in the July 2024 issue of the American Journal of Physics. Their peer-reviewed research article, “Geometric visualizations of single and entangled qubits,” presents a new way of visualizing the phenomenon of quantum entanglement between two interacting objects. Intended for a range of audiences—from students just starting to learn about concepts in quantum mechanics to active researchers who are using quantum bits ("qubits") to create new types of computers, sensors, and secure communication systems—the article focuses on visual tools and maps that can be used to complement the formal mathematics and algebra of quantum mechanics.

Jacquelyn Stucker ’13, an alumna of Bard’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, was reviewed in the New York Times for her role as Delilah in the opera Samson at the Aix-en-Provence festival. Samson, a never-performed opera by Voltaire and Rameau, two of Enlightenment France’s most important cultural figures, was performed as an updated production with pieces drawn from other Rameau works to replace the original score, which was lost some 250 years ago. The Aix production “retains the hypnotic continuity of Rameau’s complete operas, their steadiness and also their variety, veering from festive to soulful, from raucous dances to hushed, hovering arias and radiant choruses,” writes Zachary Woolfe for the New York Times.  “The mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre (Timna) and the soprano Jacquelyn Stucker (Dalila) are both exquisitely sensitive in their floating music.”

Bard alumna Tiffany Sia ’10 thinks and works across text and film. Her newest book, On and Off-Screen Imaginaries, is a collection of six essays that grapple with the complexities of post-colonial experience. The first three essays focus on new Hong Kong cinema and examine the national security policies, censorship, surveillance that followed Hong Kong’s mass protests in 2019 and 2020. The second half of the book “abruptly drifts toward other geographies, specifically the US, as I challenge how dominant Asian American aesthetics conceive of a falsely unified imaginary of Asia and its politics,” says Sia. She reimagines the work of Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê in one essay and the work of Taiwanese filmmaker King Hu in another. “The essays trace a shift in my focus beyond Hong Kong––toward the ‘elsewhere’ sites of the Cold War, such as Vietnam, Taiwan, and even Lithuania and Turkey, in brief mention––and facile East-West tensions to illuminate a lattice of North-South tensions and their vexing histories and politics,” says Sia, who recently won the prestigious 2024 Art Baloise Prize, which carries an award of approximately $33,400.

The BMI Foundation has named Luke Haaksma ’21 as a recipient of the 72nd BMI Composer Awards, an annual competition open to young composers engaged in the creation of classical music. Haaksma, a composer, filmmaker, and hammered dulcimerist, studied composition at Bard College Conservatory of Music with Joan Tower and George Tsontakis, and is now completing graduate study at Yale School of Music studying with Katherine Balch. His work often focuses on non-human states of consciousness, finding influences in themes of anthropomorphization, murder ballads, and folk-horror, and he has received awards and recognition from organizations such as the Young Concert Artists and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The BMI Foundation is a nonprofit supporting the creation, performance, and study of music through awards, scholarships, grants, and commissions, and its Composer Awards competition has a prestigious history of discovering and encouraging many of today’s most prominent and talented young composers. 

Born in Los Angeles, where he still works, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12 “finds beauty amid the ruin. His art engages serious social and political experience, but it succeeds by its refusal to be monolithic,” writes the Los Angeles Times. Aparicio’s current solo exhibition of recent works focuses on the various connections between Central America and Los Angeles—and posits multiple sites as a part of the same community and history as a crucial decolonizing strategy and one that problematizes the term “native.” In his cast rubber piece, “Who Do You Believe More, the Subversive or the Embassy? (W. Washington Blvd. and Hoover St., Los Angeles, CA),” specific use of materials that have a strong tie to pre-Hispanic cultures in Central America are key. The living ficus tree from which the work was cast is located at a major street intersection in the heart of the city’s El Salvadoran community. “Nature is scrutinized as an index of American culture. The landscape view subtly shifts. After seeing Aparicio’s show, you’re unlikely to look at our omnipresent ficus trees quite the same way again.” His show is on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA through June 16.

The Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is led by three co-artistic directors including Bard Theater and Performance alumna Morgan Green ’12, will receive the 2024 Regional Theatre Tony Award. This honor recognizes a regional theater company that has displayed a continuous level of artistic achievement contributing to the growth of theater nationally and is accompanied by a grant of $25,000. The Wilma Theater was named this year’s recipient based on the recommendation by the American Theatre Critics Association. Green’s recent directing credits include premieres of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Fat Ham by James Ijames (digital, The Wilma Theater) and School Pictures by Milo Cramer ’12  (The Wilma Theater, Playwrights Horizons), who also majored in theater at Bard. In 2019, Green directed the Theater and Performance Program’s production of Promenade at the Fisher Center. This summer, Green and Cramer will return to Bard to present their performance of School Pictures in the Spiegeltent for SummerScape on July 20.

Further reading:
School Pictures, A One-Person Show by Milo Cramer ’12, Featured on This American Life
https://www.bard.edu/news/milo-cramer-12-school-pictures-this-american-life-2024-02-13

Fat Ham, a Black, Queer Take on Hamlet Directed by Morgan Green ’12, Is a New York Times Critic’s Pick
https://www.bard.edu/news/fat-ham-a-black-queer-take-on-hamlet-directed-by-morgan-green-12-is-a-new-york-times-critics-pick-2021-05-04

Bard College is pleased to announce that Dariel Vasquez ’17 has been appointed Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Institutional Initiatives, a newly created position at Bard. In this role at the College, Vasquez will help to usher in a new wave of transformational change and collaboration with other collegiate institutions across the country. While his main focus will remain on leading Brothers@, which facilitates the persistence and graduation of collegiate men of color, he will also expand the College’s reach through partnerships and initiatives to support students with identities historically underrepresented in higher education attain a rigorous liberal arts education. In addition to the work being done at Brothers@, Vasquez will be facilitating a center between Bard College and Howard University. This center will be a collaboration between Bard and Howard working for the advancement and persistence for young men of color, with the focus of supporting and graduating the most marginalized populations in higher education within and beyond Bard College.

From Harlem, New York, Dariel Vasquez was raised by immigrant parents in public housing and became a first-generation college graduate from Bard College’s class of 2017, where he achieved a joint bachelor’s degree in history and sociology with a concentration in Africana-Studies. Vasquez’s passion for his community has led him into program design and facilitation of youth engagement workshops since he was 16 years old. He eventually expanded his programming to Bard where he cofounded Brothers at Bard during his first year. Within the last three years of Brothers@, Vasquez has raised more than six million dollars, expanding the organization to 133 college students, 98 of which participate in the Ambassador program reaching Oakland, California; Dallas, Texas; Chicago, Illinois; Washington, DC; and New York State. Alongside this the high school academic persistence programs across New York state have aa roster of 150 students. Through the high school and college initiatives, Brothers@ currently serves nearly 300 students. At Bard College, Dariel Vasquez will become one of the youngest vice presidents in the College’s history.

Alumna Lexi Parra ’18 contributed photography and video to an NPR article about Girl Scout Troop 6000, a New York City–based troop composed of the daughters of asylum seekers. Parra’s photos and videos accompany the story of Troop 6000, whose members take part in traditional scouting activities, as well as supporting each other through the traumas associated with migrancy. “This is probably the only sense of stability they have right now,” Giselle Burgess, founder and senior director of Troop 6000, told NPR. The mission of Troop 6000 aligns with the broader mission of the Girl Scouts, said Meredith Mascara, CEO of Girl Scouts of Greater New York. “They will be the ones running the city,” Mascara said. “I’m proud that Girl Scouts are part of that.”

Two Bard College graduates have won 2024–25 Fulbright Awards for individually designed research projects and English teaching assistantships. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with, and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The Fulbright program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.

Sara Varde de Nieves ’22, who was a joint major in film and electronic arts and in human rights at Bard, has been selected for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Chile for the 2024–25 academic year. Their project, “Regresando al Hogar/Returning Home,” aims to preserve the legacy of Villa San Luis, a large-scale public housing complex built in Las Condes, Santiago, Chile from 1971 to 1972. Through a multi-format documentary comprising interviews with former residents and project planners, archival documents, and footage of the current buildings, Varde de Nieves seeks to capture the collective memory of Villa San Luis’s original residents and planners. In executing this project, Varde de Nieves aims to expand the label of “heritage conservation” to include buildings and infrastructure that are not considered culturally significant as classic historical monuments and to make connections among narrative, memory, ephemera, and the historical archive. “I’m very excited to conduct in-person research on Villa San Luis, an innovative project that strove for class integration and high-quality construction. During my time abroad, I hope to foster long-lasting relationships and get acquainted with Chile's fascinating topography,” says Varde de Nieves.

While at Bard, Varde de Nieves worked as an English language tutor in Red Hook as well as at La Voz, the Hudson Valley Spanish language magazine. Their Senior Project, “Re-igniting the Clit Club,” a documentary about a queer party in the Meatpacking district during the 1990s, won multiple awards at Bard.

Jonathan Asiedu ’24, a written arts major, has been selected for an English Teaching Assistantship (ETA) Fulbright to Spain. His teaching placement will be in the Canary Islands. While in Spain, Asiedu plans to hold weekly poetry workshops in local cultural centers, communities, and schools. He hopes to invite the community to bring in their work or poems that speak to them, to share poets and writers and the ways they speak to us. “Studying poetry, learning pedagogical practices to inform my future as an educator, and mentorship opportunities throughout my college career have shaped both my perception of education and the work that needs to be done to improve students’ experiences within the educational system,” he says.

At Bard, Asiedu serves as a lead peer counselor through Residence Life, an Equity and Inclusion Mentor with the Office of Equity and Inclusion, admission tour guide, and works as a campus photographer. Moreover, this past year, he gained TESOL certification and has served as an English language tutor, as well as a writing tutor at the Eastern Correctional Facility through the Bard Prison Initiative. Asiedu, who is from the South Bronx, decided early on that he wanted to speak Spanish and has taken the Spanish Language Intensive at Bard, which includes four weeks of study in Oaxaca, Mexico. After the completion of his Fulbright ETA, he plans to pursue a master degree in education with a specialization in literature from Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching program.

Three Bard students have also been named alternates for Fulbright Awards. Bard Conservatory student Nita Vemuri ’24, who is majoring in piano performance and economics, is an alternate for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Hungary. Film and electronic arts graduate Elizabeth Sullivan ’23 is an alternate for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Germany. Mathematics major Skye Rothstein ’24 is an alternate for a Fulbright Study/Research Award to Germany.

Fulbright is a program of the US Department of State, with funding provided by the US 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.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship to Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College. Chosen through a rigorous review process from 3,000 applicants, Shatz was among 188 scholars, photographers, novelists, historians, and data scientists to receive a 2024 Fellowship. Bard MFA faculty and alumna Lotus Kang MFA ’15, and alumnae Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 and Ahndraya Parlato ’02 were also named Guggenheim Fellows for 2024. 

“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”

In all, 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 84 academic institutions, 38 US states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in the 2024 class, who range in age from 28 to 89. More than 40 Fellows (roughly 1 out of 4) do not hold a full-time affiliation with a college or university. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to timely issues such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change and community.

Created and initially funded in 1925, by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2024 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Adam Shatz, who will be working on a book about jazz throughout his Fellowship, is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and The Nation, among other publications. He is the author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) and Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso, 2023). He is also host of the podcast Myself with Others, produced by the pianist Richard Sears. His political reporting and commentary have covered subjects such as Trump and the white supremacists in Charlottesville, mass incarceration, Israel’s Putinization, the deep state, and Egypt after Mubarak. Published profiles and portraits include Franz Fanon and Michel Houellebecq (London Review of Books), Nina Simone (New York Review of Books), saxophonist Kamasi Washington (New York Times Magazine); French cartoonist Riad Sattouf (New Yorker); and jazz great Charles Mingus (The Nation). Shatz previously taught at New York University and was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.

Lotus Laurie Kang MFA ’15 works with sculpture, photography and site-responsive installation, exploring the body as an ongoing process. Combining theory, poetics and biography, her work takes a regurgitative approach rather than a prescriptive or reiterative one. Kang considers the multiplicitous, constructed nature of identity and the body and its knots to larger social structures through sculpture, architectural interventions and material innovations, and an expansive approach to photography where materials are often left in unfixed and continually sensitive states. Notable group exhibitions include Hessel Museum of Art, The New Museum, SculptureCenter, Cue Art Foundation, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Art Gallery of Ontario, Franz Kaka, Cooper Cole, Toronto; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; Misk Art Institute, Riyadh; Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana; and Camera Austria, Graz. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Mercer Union, Gallery TPW, Franz Kaka, Toronto; Oakville Galleries, Oakville, and Helena Anrather, Interstate Projects, New York. Artists residencies include Rupert, Vilnius; Tag Team, Bergen; The Banff Centre, Alberta; Triangle Arts Association and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; and Horizon Art Foundation, Los Angeles.

Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 uses photography, writing and performance to plumb photography’s continuing significance. Considering analog photography as a mimesis of the body, Hubbard asks how its procedures might be called upon to investigate social politics, history, and narrative. In her photographs, the physical positioning of one’s body has an essential relationship to how one processes images, exploring this encounter as a time based experience. Hubbard’s writing practice forms the core of her performances, culling the malleability of vision to frame a politics of looking, bridging the imaginary with the familiar. She is currently Associate Professor and MFA Director at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.

Ahndraya Parlato ’02 is an artist based in Rochester, New York. She has published three books, including Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), East of the Sun, West of the Moon, (a collaboration with Gregory Halpern, Études Books, 2014). Additionally, she has contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), and The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture, 2014). Parlato has exhibited work at Spazio Labo, Bologna, Italy; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Aperture Foundation, New York, New York; and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. She has been awarded residencies at Light Work and The Visual Studies Workshop and was a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Joy of Photography Grant recipient.

Nona Faustine: White Shoes, a series of 43 self-portraits shot throughout New York City over the course of decades, explores the city’s central but often obscured role in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as examining questions about representation and perception of the Black body—and, more specifically, the Black female body—in art and other spaces. Currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum through July 7, this first solo exhibition of Nona Faustine MFA ’13 was selected as a New York Times Critic’s Pick when it opened in March and was recently reviewed on CNN. The body of work, including many striking photographs of the artist posing fully nude apart from a pair of crisp white pumps, began while Faustine was a graduate student at the International Center of Photography (ICP) program at Bard College. “All my knowledge, everything I know about photography, and everything I know about history and life is part of the work. My heart and soul is in that series,” Faustine told CNN in an email. 

How does one combat disparities in access to computer science classes for historically marginalized populations? One answer, proposed in a paper coauthored by Bard alum Megumi Kivuva ’22, could be embroidery. “We’ve come a long way as a country in offering some computer science courses in schools,” Kivuva said to the University of Washington. “But we’re learning that access doesn’t necessarily mean equity. It doesn’t mean underrepresented minority groups are always getting the opportunity to learn.” Using Turtlestitch, an open-source coding language, Kivuva and their coparticipants worked with 12 students from demographically diverse backgrounds, using a unique pedagogical approach “where the students had a say each week in what they learned and how they’d be assessed,” the University of Washington reports. “We wanted to dispel the myth that a coder is someone sitting in a corner, not being very social, typing on their computer,” Kivuva said. The subsequent paper on their findings, “Cultural-Centric Computational Embroidery,” won Best Paper at the inaugural technical symposium of Special Interest the Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE).

The late Bard alumnus and Manhattan cinematographer Jamie Livingston ’79 took a single Polaroid photo every day, from when he was a senior at Bard College, in 1979, until 1997, when he died of cancer at the age of 41. Livingston’s photos captured everyday moments in New York City, forming a unique visual diary of the era. After Livingston’s passing, his friends scanned and shared his Polaroids online, garnering more than 300 million views, as well as an exhibition, a book, and daily posts on Instagram. Now Livingston’s work will have yet another life in music: In Number Our Days: A Photographic Oratorio, his friend David Van Taylor honors his memory. The production runs April 12–14 at PAC NYC.

In ceremonies held in Japan in summer 2023, Tatjana Myoko von Prittwitz und Gaffron CCS ’99, artist in residence and Buddhist chaplain, achieved the rank of Zen priest, symbolically officiating at the two Soto Zen head monasteries of Eiheiji and Sojiji. These ceremonies marked the culmination of a 25-year journey for Tatjana Myoko, which began during her time as a Bard student. “I came to Bard to study at the Center for Curatorial Studies,” she said. “At that time, after the sudden death of a close friend, I encountered the Buddhist path, which transformed and shaped my entire life, both in terms of creativity as well as my academic career.” She spoke about the experience in her talk at TEDxBard College.

Studying at Zen Mountain Monastery as a lay practitioner for 20 years, she founded the Bard Meditation Group in 2001, helped to create the interfaith Center for Spiritual Life, and became the College’s first Buddhist chaplain in 2015. In 2017, Tatjana Myoko took a leave of absence from Bard in order to begin the process of acquiring the necessary qualifications to become a certified Zen priest at a three-year residency at Toshoji, the International Training Monastery of the Soto Zen school in Okayama. “Without that residency I would never be a Zen priest now,” she said. “So I think this mutual support, of Bard giving me a vessel to fill, and me ready to fill it, has been an amazing journey together, and I am very grateful.” 

This new status will allow Myoko Osho, her official title, to perform ceremonies like weddings and funerals, as well as the ability to open her own Zen temple, but the achievement has personal significance for her as well. “For me it is the formal recognition of a 25-year-long training path,” Tatjana Myoko said. “To be recognized as a lineage holder in a tradition extending from the Buddha, to my teacher in Japan, and now to me, confirms and upholds me to the highest standards of integrity. I am excited to pass on this way of liberation, especially as expressed through the Zen arts, to the next generation: my students.”

“I’m very interested in how truth and belief are created,” Kite, aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, told the Times Union. In a profile of Kite, published in conjunction with her inclusion in the 81st Whitney Biennial, Times reporter Michelle Falkenstein asked Kite about her artistic practice and pedagogy, including her embrace of AI in the creation of art. “We’re making art with dreams and AI,” Kite said. “I move and the computer translates that movement into sound.” Kite also spoke about her life in the Hudson Valley, including her teaching at Bard and her involvement with the Forge Project. “It’s made it wonderful to live here,” Kite said.

The Hudson Valley Venture Hub, a local organization and resource for startups and entrepreneurs, was designated by Empire State Development as one of five innovation hotspots in New York State to receive $250,000 annually for the next five years. “The biggest change, with the new funding, is that we’re running an accelerator program with 20 of the strongest technology-forward companies that come out of our region, and we’re working very closely with them,” Eliza Edge MBA ’20, director of the organization, told Chronogram. The goal is to connect entrepreneurs with various funders, educational experts, and angel investors, and to expand business resources to underserved communities. As of 2023, 70 percent of the businesses served by the Hudson Valley Venture Hub were women- or minority-owned. “As someone from the Hudson Valley, a big part of my vision is to provide the kind of job I was looking for when I left the area at age 18,” Edge said.

“James Fuentes Gallery, long a forward-looking presence in the contemporary art scene on New York’s Lower East Side, is the latest space to decamp to Tribeca,” writes Jillian Billard for the Art Newspaper. The eponymous gallery of alumnus James Fuentes ’98, who will be awarded the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters at this year’s Bard College Awards, has long championed “artists with practices outside the commercial conventions of the contemporary art market.” This curatorial focus, Fuentes says, was first furnished at Bard. “I kind of picked up this idea of curating as a profession through osmosis, studying adjacent to the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and spending time in the library founded by Marieluise Hessel,” Fuentes says. “The program planted a seed.”

Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck and Montgomery Place Mansion at Bard College proudly hosts Returning Home, an exhibition curated by Rethinking Place Post-Baccalaureate Fellow Olivia Tencer ’22 and Rethinking Place Administrative Coordinator Melina Roise ’21, open from April 6 to 12, 2024. This groundbreaking exhibition features works by four contemporary Indigenous photographers, Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena/Jewish), Dana Claxton (Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi Indian Tribe), and Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke (Crow)), along with a written commission by Bonney Hartley (Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican) and archival records of local land transfers and the United States’ Indian boarding school history. The exhibition, centered around narratives of Indigenous families, particularly women and children, will delve into the experiences of Native peoples facing settler colonialism, focusing specifically on Indigenous child removal practices and policies.

Returning Home aims to highlight Indigenous representation, narrative, survivance, futurism, and resilience through contemporary Native art. The show will include pieces from the Forge Project’s collection, as well as a written commission from Bonney Hartley, who is an MFA candidate at Institute of American Indian Arts. An accompanying publication will provide in-depth contextualization of land dispossession in the United States, forced removal of Native peoples in New York State, and the impact of Indian boarding schools.

The exhibition will fill various rooms within the historic Montgomery Place mansion, situated on Bard College’s 380-acre estate. While the estate is renowned for its ties to the Livingston family, Montgomery Place is committed to exploring marginalized histories, including the forced removal of the Stockbridge-Munsee Community and the estate’s use of enslaved African American labor.

On the exhibition, Tencer writes: “This will be the first exhibition in the mansion, and the first exhibition on campus that will discuss the forced removal of the Stockbridge-Munsee peoples on current Bard lands or the Livingston’s history as one intertwined with the land dispossession of Native people in the Hudson Valley and other land bases in the East Coast. Positioned as an intervention, Returning Home disrupts preconceived notions of Native people, specifically Native women, and makes visible purposefully erased historical narratives of land and wealth accumulation in New York State.”

“I am grateful for all the support my artwork and cultural work has received. I am indebted to the sun and my sundance teachings – mni ki wakan – water is sacred,” says artist Dana Claxton.

The exhibition is free and open to the public.

On behalf of the curators and Rethinking Place team, we would like to extend gratitude to The Mellon Foundation, Hudson Valley Greenway, Forge Project, and Montgomery Place Historic Estate for making this exhibition possible. 

Exhibition Viewing Hours:
April 6 and 7, 1:00pm–5:00pm (timed entry every half hour - register here)
April 10 to 12, 1:30pm–4:00pm (timed entry every half hour - register here)

Schedule of Events:
April 6, 1:30pm: Opening Remarks & Activation, poetry reading by Bonney Hartley. Doors open at 1:00pm. Registration required. Register here.
April 6, 4:00pm: Cara Romero in conversation with Suzanne Kite. Registration required. Register here.
April 7, 3:00pm: Dana Claxton Artist Talk, on zoom, seating available at MP visitor’s center. Register for the zoom talk here.
April 10, 6:30pm: Cara Romero: Following the Light, Preston Cinema, Bard College. A short documentary on the work & practice of Cara Romero. No registration required.

To celebrate the 81st edition of the Whitney Biennial, the New York Times sent three critics to report “on the highs and lows of the exhibition everyone will have an opinion about.” Their consensus? Bard faculty and alumni/ae are ones to watch. Jason Fargo called Lotus L. Kang MFA ’15 “an artist of rare precision,” calling her work, In Cascades, a “richly sedimented, beautifully vulnerable installation in a perpetual state of becoming.” Fargo went on to praise the film In Her Time by Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’19, calling it “a vibrant case study of digital-political bafflement and the hazards of projecting the present onto the past.” Travis Diehl, meanwhile, asks, “Should art comfort?” Reviewing Toilette by Bard alum Carolyn Lazard ’10, “a small maze of chrome medicine cabinets standing on the floor,” the answer, for Diehl, is a resounding no. “The piece addresses you, the viewer, as someone with a body,” Diehl writes. “These works ask, ‘Are you comfortable?’ and don’t expect you to say yes.” Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly by Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12, a “block of shifting, pre-fossilized amber, embedded with plants and even typewritten documents,” was named one of the best works in the show by Martha Schwendener. The 81st edition of the Whitney Biennial is now open to the public and runs through August 11, 2024.

Rita McBride ’82 spoke with Art Newspaper about her exhibition Particulates, which was on view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition, which built on McBride’s past work Portal, was “composed of high-intensity laser beams, water molecules, and dust particles dancing mid-air.” The exhibition was installed in conjunction with a renovation of the Hammer Museum, which McBride said influenced her artistic process. “I was thinking about it as a corporate ruin: what things were important to keep and what things were important to get away from as they went forward with their renovations,” McBride said. “Particulates can exist anywhere—any size, any scale—so it can take on hermetic situations or, like this one, open to the street and to a more narrative space than at Dia or in Liverpool.”

What started as a Bard College Trustee Leader Scholar program is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. La Voz, founded by Mariel Fiori ’05 and Emily Schmall ’05 in 2004, was conceived to address a lack of quality Spanish-language publications in the Hudson Valley—a need it is still meeting in 2024. “When all these newspapers were coming out with statistics and information about vaccines, all really crucial information, it was only in English,” said Elizabeth Liotta ’24, one of six editorial assistants for La Voz, to Hudson Valley Pilot. “La Voz was translating everything, and every day we’d share what we translated with those who needed it.” While La Voz has evolved and expanded over the years, the central mission remains the same, says Managing Editor Mariel Fiori ’05. “Our goal has always been to share what’s available with these populations, to encourage them to have hope, and to ultimately uplift them,” said Fiori.

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.

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.”

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.  
 

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.”