Newsmakers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Monday, November 4, at 5 pm, Bard College will host a screening and discussion for the public premiere of the Open Society University Network’s (OSUN) documentary film, A Poll to Call Our Own: The Bard Voting Story. The screening will be followed by a discussion with key actors, including Bard alumni/ae Sarah deVeer ’17, Jonian Rafti ’15, Seamus Heady ’22 (producer/director), lawyer Yael Bromberg, Bard Vice President for Civic Engagement Erin Cannan, and Bard Vice President for Academic Affairs Jonathan Becker. The event will take place at the Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. It will also be broadcast as a webinar. Register in advance for this webinar here.

The short film A Poll to Call Our Own: The Bard Voting Story chronicles the quarter-century fight at Bard over student voting rights, a period during which Bard students and administrators, with the support of groups like the Andrew Goodman Foundation and the New York Civil Liberties Union, won four lawsuits—three state and one federal—to protect students’ right to vote locally and to secure a polling place on the Bard campus. Bard’s experience helped inspire New York State to pass a law in 2022 mandating polling places at or near college campuses that have 300 or more registered on-campus voters.

The film was produced as an open educational resource for the course, Student Voting: Power, Politics and Race in the Fight for American Democracy. The course, which is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and OSUN, is collaboratively taught by faculty from Bard, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (North Carolina A&T), Prairie View A&M University, and Tuskegee University. Students meet virtually weekly to discuss issues in the course, including case studies which explore histories of student voting at each institution. By the end of the project, there will be a film and written case study for each campus, chronicling their fight for student voting rights.

A Poll to Call Our Own: The Bard Voting Story contains interviews with key players in the fight for a polling place, including current and former students, key administrators, and legal counsel, as well as archival footage of students being harassed at a local poll site and speaking before the Red Hook Town Board about the need for a polling place on campus. It is accompanied by a written case study.

Director and producer Seamus Heady ’22 said: “Our film reveals the powers which have worked, often quietly, to stand between youth voters and the polls. Nobody goes out of their way to silence meaningless voices. It is my hope that youth everywhere, who may feel dubious about the power of their votes, take this film as an affirmation of the significant role they play in our democracy. Bard as an institution has committed significant resources to bring attention to local municipal injustice, which could otherwise go unnoticed. I believe all universities owe it to their students to do the same.”

Bard College President Leon Botstein, who was a litigant in two of the cases, said: “This film illustrates Bard’s belief in the inextricable link between education and democracy. I am proud to have served as a litigant with Bard students and administrators in our successful campaign to secure a polling place on campus and to advocate for a law mandating polling places on college campuses in New York State with 300 or more registered voters. As trust in institutions and faith in democracy wanes in the United States, particularly amongst American youth, it is more important now than ever to fight for justice and change through securing for all citizens the right to vote.”

Bard’s Vice President for Academic Affairs, Director of Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement, and Professor of Political Studies Jonathan Becker said: “The film covers many of the critical milestones of Bard’s long fight over student voting rights. It effectively captures how successive generations of Bard students mobilized with the support of the Bard administration and partnered with organizations like the Andrew Goodman Foundation and the New York Civil Liberties Union to fight for their democratic rights. It is a testament to the capacity of higher education institutions to serve as civic actors in an America whose democracy is increasingly under threat.”

Bard student Sierra Ford ’26, who is the head of Election@Bard and an Andrew Goodman Ambassador, said: “It is incredible to be a part of a legacy of rich voter advocacy at Bard. What a privilege it has been to join my peers, administration, and mentors in realizing an electorally engaged community.”

Bard Vice President for Civic Engagement Erin Cannan said: “The Bard student voting story is a reminder to all of us that fair elections require vigilance and engagement of young people. And that the fear of ‘over enfranchising’ students cannot be a reason for election officials to act illegally. This work is never finished.”

Assistant Producer at OSUN Maria Pankova said: “Working on this case study was an opportunity for me to learn more about Bard College’s history and the culture of civic engagement on campus. As a Bard graduate, I felt closer to my alma mater, knowing the full extent of voting activism taking place there and administration advocacy for students’ rights.”

In conversation for Bomb magazine, Bard alumnae and visual artists Adriana Farmiga MFA ’04 and Fawn Krieger MFA ’05, who lectured together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for nearly a decade and now both teach at the Cooper Union School of Art, discussed Farmiga’s new body of work. The AVATAR series features scaled up wooden plywood sculptures described by Farmiga as masks or protest posters, currently on view at Marisa Newman Projects gallery in New York. “A mask allows an individual to lose or transcend their identity, while protest posters serve to signal one’s belief systems or demands,” Farmiga told Krieger. “Both function as barriers between the individual and the world; both peddle in anonymity and identification. In my hybridized version, the scaled-up form of the protest poster on a stick also assumes the role of a mask or shape of a sentient being.”

Valve Turners, a documentary feature film directed and produced by Steve Bonds-Liptay MS ’10, premiered and won the Climate Action Award in this year’s Climate Film Fest. Valve Turners follows a small group of activists from the Pacific Northwest as they turn the valves and halt the flow of five oil pipelines entering the United States from Canada to spotlight the climate emergency. Facing felony charges, they defend their actions as necessary in light of decades of political inaction and urgent warnings from climate scientists. The film festival called Bonds-Liptay’s feature “riveting and incisive.” Bonds-Liptay graduated from Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability with a masters degree in environmental policy. 

The 2024 Dance Magazine Awards honor Bard alumna Joanna Haigood ’79, alongside George Faison, Liz Lerman, Mavis Staines, Shen Wei, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose work with Baryshnikov Arts earned him the Chairman’s Award. From its first year in 1954, the Dance Magazine Awards have been given annually in appreciation of the artistry, integrity, and resilience that dance artists have demonstrated over the course of their careers. The theme for this year’s awards is “the stage and beyond”—the dancers, choreographers, and educators recognized are invested in work that often transcends the proscenium.

“Since 1980 Joanna Haigood has been creating work that uses natural, architectural, and cultural environments as points of departure for movement exploration and narrative,” says the Dance Magazine Awards statement. “Her stages have included grain terminals, a clock tower, the pope’s palace, military forts, and a mile of neighborhood streets in the South Bronx. Her work has been commissioned by many arts institutions, including Dancing in the Streets, Jacob’s Pillow, the Walker Art Center, the National Black Arts Festival, and Festival d’Avignon. Haigood has had the privilege to mentor many extraordinary young artists at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque, the Trinity Laban Conservatoire, Spelman College, Stanford University, the San Francisco Circus Center, and Zaccho Studio.”

Brandon Blackwood ’13, Bard alumnus and designer, has been named in TIME magazine’s TIME100 Next list for 2024, which highlights influential figures who are shaping the future of business, entertainment, sports, politics, science, health, and other fields. “As one of few preeminent Black designers, Blackwood represents changemakers who lead by example with fearlessness, innovation, and a steadfast embrace of inclusivity,” writes Elaine Welteroth for TIME. “His influence extends beyond the runway, inspiring a new generation of designers to merge style with substance. The B on his bags not only honors their namesake—it also reflects his brilliance across every design, collection, and work of art he offers to this world.”

Bard alumni/ae Rosa Polin ’16 and Ryan Rusiecki ’20, graduates of the photography program, have been featured in Cultured magazine’s Young Photographers 2024, a list highlighting the next generation of image makers who have dedicated themselves to photography as an art form. “I try to use photography the same way I try to live the rest of my life,” said Polin ’16, who blends realism and the uncanny in intimate imagery. “I am trying to find my voice. It’s all a big mixture of shame, curiosity, fear, playfulness, boredom, irony, sadness, lust, humor, and empathy.” For his environmental photography, Rusiecki ’20 has revisited the same subject each year, watching its transformation under imminent threat. “The subject of my practice — the Hudson River estuary — is a globally rare habitat that is under threat by rising sea levels and climate change,” he said. “I have only been able to photograph the estuary after having spent four years of repeated return, and multidisciplinary research, to understand its nuances and visual fragility. I consider the estuary a friend.”

A new photo book by Bard alumna Virginia Hanusik ’14, Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana, which documents a decade spent in the coastal region of the state, has been reviewed in Aperture. “Photographs appear alongside an anthology of essays and poetry commissioned for the book,” writes Michael Adno for Aperture. “For Hanusik, architecture is also a clear sign of time passing; buildings, like hands on the face of a clock, float along a canal one year and disappear the next, while others are raised twenty feet up in the air to escape the coming flood.” Hanusik’s photographs and written contributions explore the cultural legacy of weather and storms in coastal areas, the physical and psychological marks left behind by hurricanes, and the privileges afforded to certain communities over others in responses to flood damage. “At the core of the project,” Hanusik writes, “is an effort to encourage thinking of this region—and coastal communities around the country—as an interconnected system rather than as separate and expendable landscapes.”

Mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce VAP ’19, alumna of the Bard Conservatory Vocal Arts Program, has won third prize in Operalia 2024, the world opera competition founded by Plácido Domingo in 1993 to discover and help launch the careers of the most promising young opera singers of today. Operalia’s goal is to attract singers between the ages of 20 and 32, of all voice types from and all over the world, to have them audition and be heard by a panel of distinguished international personalities, in the most prestigious and competitive showcase in the world. 

The international jury, presided by Plácido Domingo, listens to each of the chosen participants during two days of quarterfinals. Twenty participants are then selected to continue on to the semifinals, and ten singers are chosen for the finals. The quarterfinals and semifinals are carried out in audition form, but the final round is presented in the form of a gala concert accompanied by a full orchestra. This year, Operalia was held at The National Centre for the Performing Arts in Mumbai, India, September 15–21.

SF Gate profiled Bard alumna Joanna Letz ’06, who is the owner and manager of Bluma Flower Farm in Berkeley, California. She manages the rooftop farm day-to-day and also organizes events and online sales. While the rooftop is idyllic, Letz says running it is hard work: “People romanticize farming —‘it must be so beautiful’ — but it takes so much effort to grow something and to grow it well.”

Letz started her rooftop farm in 2019 after more than a decade of working on other farms and running her own business. Despite initial challenges—farming plants on a rooftop means more wind, for example—Bluma has thrived. As an urban farm, not only does it have a lower carbon footprint than internationally-importing competitors, it also supports biodiversity for pollinators in the area. In the future, Letz hopes to host more educational programming at the farm to teach children about growing plants and share her love of flowers more widely.

Artist Brandon Ndife MFA ’20, whose first solo exhibition, Clearance, is on view at Greene Naftali gallery in Chelsea, was profiled in the New York Times. “His art reminds its viewers that nature—even in the face of civilization—has an ultimately ungovernable power,” writes Zoë Hopkins. Ndife’s otherworldly creations fuse forms that resemble domestic objects, such as furniture, with elements derived from the natural world to evoke the sense of wild growth overtaking built environments. “They’re interchangeable to me, the native and the natural,” Ndife said. “There’s a mutiny that can happen in the work. I describe the sculptures as struggling to be, struggling to take hold in their environment. And I think that’s our story as Black people.”

Celebrated artist R.H. Quaytman ’83 was invited to create new works for Frieze magazine's September issue to accompany an essay about Gertrude Stein’s poem, “If I Told Him: A Portrait of Picasso.” She responded with a series of images using abstract and photographic elements, which she discusses with Marko Gluhaich, associate editor of Frieze. “Naturally I was more interested in Stein than Picasso. How incredibly photogenic she was,” she told Gluhaich. “While playing around with transparencies I accidentally made Picasso’s portrait of her look like a self-portrait. Suddenly his face was her face.”

Quaytman was the 2022 recipient of Bard’s Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters.

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) has announced that Bard math alumna Mona Merling ’09 has won the 2025 AWM Joan and Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry. Merling was recognized for her innovative and impactful research in algebraic K-theory, equivariant homotopy theory, and their applications to manifold theory.

“I would not be here today without the many amazing women I was lucky to have as role models at every step of the way: from my math teacher back in Romania, Mihaela Flamaropol, who ignited my passion for math competitions; to my undergraduate mentor at Bard College, Lauren Rose, who early on inspired me about both research and teaching; to some of the senior leaders in my field who initiated and fostered the Women in Topology Network, Maria Basterra, Kristine Bauer, Kathryn Hess, and Brenda Johnson, who I was very privileged to be able to collaborate with as part of these workshops and who have always served as a huge inspiration and a source of endless support to me and other younger women in homotopy theory,” said Merling, who is currently associate professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. She was previously a J.J. Sylvester Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, and received her PhD in Mathematics at the University of Chicago in 2014.

In a statement, AWM wrote: “Merling is an exceptional researcher whose work in algebraic topology has both depth and breadth. She is a recognized authority on equivariant homotopy theory and its applications to equivariant manifolds. Her recent work generalizes and reinterprets results in differential topology in the equivariant context. Her work is the first progress seen in decades on certain foundational questions about equivariant manifolds.”

The AWM Joan & Joseph Birman Research Prize in Topology and Geometry serves to highlight to the community outstanding contributions by women in the field and to advance the careers of the prize recipients. The prize is awarded every other year and was made possible by a generous contribution from Joan Birman, whose work has been in low dimensional topology, and her husband, Joseph, who was a theoretical physicist specializing in applications of group theory to solid state physics.

The novella The Plotinus by Bard alumna Rikki Ducornet ’64 was reviewed by Marina Warner in the New York Review of Books. Ducornet’s fifteenth work of fiction, The Plotinus is about a futuristic narrator who is arrested for going on a walk, and it incorporates a style Warner calls “[something] between astringent honesty, madcap fantasy, parodic sci-fi, surreal absurdism, metaphysical absorption, and rapturous lyric.”

Ducornet earned her BA from Bard in fine arts before publishing her first book The Stain in 1984. Throughout her career, she’s followed the trajectory of Surrealist authors and the Latin American literary tradition of the “marvelous real.” In addition to her writing, she has illustrated books by authors including Jorge Luis Borges and Anne Waldman. Warner writes that The Plotinus forms “an arc of feeling [tracing] the transformation of the narrator from despairing to loving,” comparing the novella to sci-fi works by authors like Ursula K. LeGuin, Doris Lessing, and China Miéville. Her many honors include The Bard College Arts and Letters Award (1998), The Lannan Literary Award for Fiction (2004), and The Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2008), among others.

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.”

Orange Blossom Trail, a new book of photography by Bard alumnus Joshua Lutz ’97 MFA ’05, documents the lives of workers along a 400-mile stretch of highway from Georgia to Miami. Three texts by author George Saunders accompany Lutz’s photographs, which display an “austere frankness,” writes Walker Mimms in a review for the New York Times. “Though not without dignity—see Lutz’s portraits of fruit inspectors, as they glance up from a conveyor belt of tumbling oranges—his photos lack any social agenda,” Mimms continues, an effect that is emphasized by inclusion of the Saunders texts. Mimms walks away surprised not only by the collaboration itself, but its commitment to portraying “the demoralizing American grind with an attitude between sympathy and resignation. An attitude that’s rare in art because we seldom admit it to ourselves.”

Bard alum Raphael Bob-Waksberg ’06 speaks with the A.V. Club about the lessons learned from his hit Netflix comedy BoJack Horseman and its ever-growing legacy. Ten years since its debut, Bob-Waksberg’s BoJack Horseman, a showbiz satire of life in Hollywood, is finding new fans who resonate with its parody while also continuing to capture the attention of its older fans who first watched the series during its run from 2014 to 2020. “It has been really surprising and rewarding for me to see people are still finding it and still falling in love with it in spite of some parts of it feeling a little dated or irrelevant. And not just as a nostalgic artifact, it holds up as a new thing if you start watching it now,” said Bob-Waksberg.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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