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An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts, was interviewed for a feature on Louisiana Channel, the YouTube channel of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark with weekly videos on art and design. Lê spoke about her project Silent General and also about her experiences photographing military technology and the aftermath of war. In her conflict photography, Lê values subtlety and presenting a picture without telling the viewer how to think. “A good picture is one that is surprising,” she said. “It may be something that is familiar to me, but it's described in a way I've never seen before, [so that] it’s making me understand the situation in a new way.”

Lê spoke about understanding her childhood after she evacuated from Vietnam to the US through her work as an artist. When she took her first photography class in college, she discovered her skills in visual expression and was encouraged by a professor to become a photographer. She eventually traveled back to Vietnam and photographed the country in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. “Dealing with the unknown is a big part of being a photographer,” she says. “It requires one to be courageous, to go to places you don’t normally go to, or you may fail; it’s about realizing something that you don’t know.”

A New Day, a cello concerto released in 2021 by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard College, was featured in Times Union. The work, which began as a commission by the Colorado Music Festival, Cleveland Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, was written while Jeff Litfin, her late husband of 50 years, was dying. “I was in real bad shape,” Tower said. “So I decided to write. In fact, all the music I've been writing since then is about him.” The concerto, which will be performed by Albany Symphony in Troy on November 16 and 17, contains four movements: “Daybreak,” “Working Out,” “Mostly Alone” and “Into the Night.” The titles are intentionally simple, allowing for many interpretations of a single day, she told Times Union.

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.”

The Fund for Visual Learning (FVL) recently held their annual sale in the Fisher Studio Art Building Galleries and online, generating $8,650 to support studio arts students at Bard. Faculty, students, and staff all contributed work to the 2024 FVL art sale. The exhibition was hung by Roman Hrab and organized by Paige Mead and Erin Dougherty, with the help of students Heidi Lind ’26, Praagya Khand ’25, and Calum Tinker ’25. FVL began in 2014 to improve access to the Studio Arts Program for students experiencing financial challenges, and to enrich classroom and campus experiences for all. Since its founding, FVL has provided grants for an ambitious range of diverse student art projects.

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.”

Professor An-My Lê’s photographs are featured in the New York Times Opinion piece “The Price,” which is part of the Times series “On the Brink” about the modern threat of nuclear weapons. “The Price” covers the United States’ $1.7 trillion overhaul of its nuclear arsenal and its impact on American communities. Lê’s photographs show the infrastructure of the US military, including the inside of nuclear facilities and the people working inside them. They illustrate the tension that writer W. J. Hennigan describes: “Congress decided that America needed new weapons… but it’s clear, after I visited these places, that the American people have not.”

Lê is a professor of photography whose work has covered war’s impact on culture and the environment for over 30 years. Her past projects have been exhibited in solo shows at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

The Sunday Times profiled Bard alumna Gia Coppola ’09, whose feature film The Last Showgirl premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. The film, which stars Pamela Anderson, follows a showgirl who has to reconsider her life when her show closes. Coppola told the Times that the film came together like a “divine intervention,” particularly Anderson’s casting, of whom Coppola said “no one else could be this character.”

Coppola studied photography at Bard and got her start shooting films for fashion brands. She moved on to assist the costume departments in family films before eventually making her first movie, Palo Alto, in 2013. She also recently shot short film-ads for jewelry company Mejuri. Throughout many of her projects, especially her newest film, she is interested in “how society confines women in all different generations.”

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.”

Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College artist and collaborator Justin Vivian Bond is named a recipient of a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship. One of this year’s 22 recipients of the prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Justin Vivian Bond, an artist and performer, has a long relationship with the Fisher Center and Bard College. They curated and hosted the Spiegeltent season for five years (2014–2018), and continue to return as a performer each summer to sold-out audiences. They have taught in Bard’s undergraduate Theater and Performance Program, and have received developmental support from Fisher Center LAB on multiple projects. MacArthur Fellows receive $800,000 stipends that are bestowed with no conditions; recipients may use the money as they see fit.

In a statement about their work, the MacArthur Foundation says, “Justin Vivian Bond (Viv) is an artist and performer working in the cabaret tradition weaving history, cultural critique, and an ethic of care into performances and artworks animated by wit, whimsy, and calls to action. Bond uses cabaret to explore the political and cultural ethos of the moment and tie it back to history to address contemporary challenges, in particular those facing queer communities. Bond’s decades-long journey across the landscape of gender has both informed their artistic practices and played a significant role in ongoing conversations around gender identity and LGBTQ+ rights.”

Justin Vivian Bond studied theater at Adelphi University (1981–1985) and received an MA (2005) from Central Saint Martins College, London. They have taught performance at New York University and Bard College and held a long-term residency at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater (New York). Bond has appeared on stage at such venues as Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and the Vienna Staatsoper, among others. They are the author of a memoir, Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels (2011), and their art has been exhibited at The New Museum, VITRINE (London), and Participant, Inc. (New York). 

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.”

Suzanne Kite, aka Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies, and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard, was interviewed by ArtNews about her work in ensuring that Indigenous artists are involved throughout the development of AI systems. “I think that what we call AI is soon going to be split into its many, very separate systems, instead of this blanket calling everything AI,” said Kite, an Oglála Lakȟóta artist who has been using machine learning in artwork since 2018. “There are so many different things happening. If there is not diversity of thought, even basic cultural thought—but real diversity of thought—then we will just end up at a dead end with things.” Kite discusses earlier models of machine learning which she used to create art, how her work at Bard focuses on developing ethical AI frameworks deeply rooted in indigenous methodologies, and her public art project Cosmologyscape, in collaboration with Alisha B Wormsley, which solicits dreams from the public that are translated into quilting patterns generated from 26 Black and Lakota symbols and which will debut as sculptures at Ashland Plaza in Brooklyn from September 22 to November 3.

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 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.

An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts, interviewed the renowned photographer Dawoud Bey, her friend and peer, for Bomb magazine’s Oral History Project, which aims to document the stories of distinguished visual artists of the African Diaspora. In conversation with Lê, Bey discusses his experiences as an artist, photographer, and educator, and the journey that has now cemented him within a legacy and tradition of contemporary Black photographers in the United States. “I felt beholden to that piece of the history that I had been responding to,” Bey said. “I wanted to extend that and also apply that history to the Black subject in a way that elevated the Black subject in the photograph, in a way that cut through the stereotypical, more socially pathologically driven representations of African American subjects in photographs. I started out wanting to make work in opposition to those kinds of stereotypical pathology-driven photographs. But as I began working and immersing myself in the work, that receded to the point where my ambition was to make the most honest, clear-eyed, resonant representation of what was in front of me.”

Heeryoon Shin, assistant professor of art history and visual culture at Bard College, has been awarded an individual fellowship of $5,500 from the Asian Cultural Council in support of a new project in India. Shin’s research will focus on investigating the localized reception of blue-and-white ceramics in colonial India, and examine the innovative architectural reuse of Chinese, Dutch, and British ceramics in Indian interiors. Blue-and-white ceramics incorporated into palace interiors have been seen as derivative imitations of European practices of collecting and displaying ceramics, or have often been considered too foreign to be part of the narrative of India’s national art history. Shin’s project aims to reframe these historical spaces as sites of multilayered cultural exchanges facilitated by the creativity of Indian patrons and artists—and to ultimately contribute to the decolonization of global art history by emphasizing the Indian agency and initiative in ceramic practices and histories.

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 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.

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.

Kelly Reichardt, S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence at Bard College, spoke with Bard alum Connor Williams ’18 for a profile in Interview Magazine. “Reichardt’s body of work is remarkable for its consistency in quality and creative vision,” Williams writes. “She simply hasn’t made a film that wasn’t great.” In conversation with Williams, Reichardt discusses what she’s learned from her first film jobs years ago, her long-lasting collaborative friendships, and introducing students to her understanding of the cultural and cinematic canon. “I just wouldn’t really be connected with that generation if I didn’t teach,” she said. “I like being around young people and being in the flow of that conversation.”

Bard College’s Division of the Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Ivan Lopez Munuera as Assistant Professor of Architecture. His appointment will begin in the fall of the 2024–25 academic year. Ivan L. Munuera is a New York–based scholar, critic, and curator working at the intersection of culture, technology, politics, and bodily practices in the modern period and on the global stage. His research has been generously sponsored by Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and Canadian Centre for Architecture. In 2020, Munuera was awarded the Harold W. Dodds Fellowship at Princeton University. This fellowship recognizes scholars displaying the highest academic excellence and professional promise. Munuera has presented his work at various conferences and academic forums, such as the Society of Architectural Historians, Association for Art History, European Architectural History Network, Cornell AAP, Columbia GSAPP, Princeton University, Cooper Union, Penn University, Sussex University, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Université de Montréal, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Manchester University, Politecnico di Milano, CIVA Brussels, Willem de Kooning Academy, UTS Sydney, University of Texas, University of Virginia, MICA, and ETSAM, among others. His work has been published in the Journal for Architectural Education (JAE), The Journal of Architecture (RIBA), Log, Perspecta, Thresholds, The Architect’s Newspaper, ARCH+, e-flux, Domus, and El País, among others. Munuera has curated several exhibitions and developed a series of projects that have been presented internationally at numerous venues including the 2023 and 2021 Venice Architecture Biennales.

“The first question they ask when you want to start making a film is: who is your target audience?” said Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor and director of film and electronic arts, in an interview with ArtReview. Touching on topics as broad as the history of the avant-garde and the three-act structure functioning as a “cage,” Asili was also asked what defines the “Asili method.” His answer was that it all came back to that question of audience and, for Asili, the desire to make movies that would please him as a viewer. “I want to make something to the best of my ability that is compelling to me, as compelling as I can make it for myself, and then I assume that it might be interesting to other people.”

Bard Architecture has selected Farah Alkhoury as its 2024–26 Architectural Fellow. Alkhoury, an Iraqi spatial designer and researcher, will join the College this fall for two academic years. Alkhoury’s work examines environmental violence and political entanglements as consequential to architecture and spatial thinking. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 and the Jewish Museum in New York. During her fellowship at Bard, Alkoury will work on the project: “Occupied Ecologies: Architecture of Toxic Proliferation”, which attends to the presence of military toxicity that remains embedded in the soil, water, and air long after wars end. This design research traces depleted uranium’s infrastructural, spatial, and material effects across three interconnected ecologies within Iraq, Puerto Rico, and the United States, engaging with activism that emerges against invisible forms of environmental violence. She will also have the opportunity to teach a total of three courses each academic year taught through the lens of her research. Alkhoury’s residency will culminate in a public presentation of her research work in the form of an exhibition, an event, or other form.  

Bard Architecture’s two-year fellowship is awarded biennially to an emerging architect, urban designer, landscape architect or other spatial practitioner whose creative work and research advances new cultures of design that address a larger public. The fellowship is intended to support those embarking on a career in research and design pedagogy and to provide a context in which to develop new modes of thought relevant to the urgencies of the present.

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.

Bard College will receive a $50,006 grant as part of New York State’s Higher Education Capital Matching Grant Program, which supports projects at colleges and universities across the state by providing construction and renovation of laboratory and research spaces, the purchase of instructional technologies and equipment, and other significant investments. The grant will support the purchase of pianos and equipment for Bard’s László Z. Bitó Conservatory building. The equipment will be available to Bard’s community of students, faculty, and staff, as well as to the greater Hudson Valley community that participates in the opportunities Bard provides for learning, enrichment, and enjoyment. “New York’s colleges and universities are second to none, offering students unparalleled opportunities to learn, explore, and prepare to launch their careers,” Governor Hochul said. “With this funding, my administration is reaffirming our commitment to providing our students—including those at our private, not-for-profit institutions—with a top-tier, New York education with the best possible resources and facilities that will help them succeed inside and outside of the classroom.”

Jazz pianist and Bard Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music Marcus Roberts was a featured artist in the dedication and gala concert held in the newly named Marian Anderson Hall in Philadelphia to honor the legacy of internationally renowned American contralto and civil rights icon Marian Anderson (1897–1993), who was the first Black singer to perform at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, reports NPR. Music and Artistic Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra Yannick Nézet-Séguin said, “To have exceptional artists like Queen Latifah, Angel Blue, Audra McDonald, Latonia Moore, and Marcus Roberts—themselves trailblazers in their fields—join us for this momentous occasion will make the evening even more special, as we continue to create a more representative art form. We hope that every person feels welcome in our music and in the concert hall, and that every performance in Marian Anderson Hall serves as a reminder of her legacy and as an inspiration.”

From June 6–26, 2024, Julia Weist, visiting artist in residence at Bard College, will be a visual art resident at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. Weist will spend this time working on a photographic collage of images and data obtained through a private investigator license granted to the artist by the New York Department of State. Weist plans to exhibit this project at Moskowitz Bayse Gallery in Los Angeles, California, in September 2024. The Yaddo residency is offered annually to approximately 275 professional creative artists from all nations, individually or as collaborative teams, working in choreography, film, literature, musical composition, painting, performance art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and video.

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.

Ross Exo Adams and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, assistant professors of architectural studies and codirectors of the Architecture Program at Bard College, were interviewed in Koozarch. In conversation with Valerio Franzone, they discussed contemporary architecture pedagogy and the challenges for the field, as well as the opportunities that open when architecture can be taught in a liberal arts context. “Architectural tools should be taught not only to produce new spaces but also to map systems and relationships, similar to Forensic Architecture, to reset the tools of architecture so that they can play roles in forms of advocacy, and broader forms of spatial justice,” said Exo Adams.

Soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon, visiting faculty in vocal arts at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, has been awarded a 2024 fellowship from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust (BBT) in support of her professional projects. The BBT Fellowship Program rewards musical excellence demonstrated by outstanding young musicians—for individuals and ensembles that have been selected from over 32 countries—with fellowships in 2024 being given to seven artists, including Fitz Gibbon. BBT winners are awarded between £20,000 and £30,000. There are no set criteria for how artists spend their budget. Winners are encouraged to be creative and to use their awards in a way that will help to establish and build their careers. Over the next three years, BBT’s fellowship funding will support Fitz Gibbon in the commissioning of new works, performances, and recordings. BBT also will provide advice, guidance, contacts, and public relations exposure. BBT artists join a supportive family that helps to advance their careers.

“I am overwhelmed with gratitude to have received one of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust’s 2024 Artist Fellowships. The nomination process asked me to dream about what I could accomplish with the kind of latitude that this funding and administrative support would represent, but I found the range of possibilities almost too tantalizing to imagine, as if I could permit myself only an oblique gaze at what might be,” wrote Fitz Gibbon upon receiving the fellowship.

Lucy Fitz Gibbon is noted for her “dazzling virtuoso singing” (Boston Globe) and believes that creating new works and recreating those lost in centuries past makes room for the diversity of voices integral to classical music’s future. Spotlighted as a Rising Star of Classical Music for 2024 in the February 20, 2024, edition of the British Broadcasting Corporation's (BBC) Music Magazine, Fitz Gibbon is one of 15 young classical musicians that the BBC has identified worldwide who are making a prominent stamp on the industry, whether with concert performances, opera roles, or dazzling new recordings.

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

Tanya Marcuse, associate professor of photography at Bard College, has received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship for 2024–25. The fellowship, for $5,000, will support her creative arts project Tree of Yggdrasil: Photographing Fragility and Growth, which will focus on Iceland’s vividly contrasting landscapes of treeless expanses and small forest enclaves. In the summer of 2024, she will visit Iceland to create large-scale color photographs foregrounding its extensive afforestation efforts, in affiliation with the Icelandic Forestry Association, one of the oldest environmental organizations in the country. Her project aims to capture the ethereal light on individual trees and barren vistas, symbolizing the balance between life and emptiness, and drawing parallels to Norse mythology’s Yggdrasil tree as a cosmic center, suggesting that every tree, however mundane, can or might be that center. 

Bard College student Madilyn Herring ’26 has been awarded both a highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship by the US Department of State and a Freeman Award for Study in Asia (Freeman-ASIA) to study abroad. Herring ’26, a studio arts and written arts double major from Lebanon, New Hampshire, has been awarded a $3,500 Gilman scholarship and a $5,000 Freeman-ASIA scholarship to study at Kyoto Seika University, Japan, for spring 2025. Kyoto Seika University is a longtime tuition exchange partner institution with Bard.

“I'm extremely grateful to be a recipient of the Gilman Scholarship and the Freeman-ASIA Scholarship. They make it possible for me to pursue my goals and dreams in a way that perfectly combines all of my interests in art, writing, and Asian studies. Being able to study abroad seemed like a dream out of reach but being able to have the financial support to do so means so much to me,” says Herring.

This year’s cohort of Gilman scholars will study or intern in more than 90 countries and represents more than 500 US colleges and universities. Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000, or up to $8,000 if also a recipient of the Gilman Critical Need Language Award, to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. Since the program’s inception in 2001, more than 41,000 Gilman Scholars from all US states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other US territories have studied or interned in more than 160 countries around the globe. The Department of State awarded approximately 2,100 Gilman scholarships in the spring 2024 application cycle.

The late Congressman Gilman, for whom the scholarship is named, served in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chaired the House Foreign Relations Committee. When honored with the Secretary of State’s Distinguished Service Medal in 2002, he said, “Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views but adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

The Gilman Program is sponsored by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education (IIE). To learn more, visit: gilmanscholarship.org

The Freeman-ASIA program is designed to support US-based undergraduates with demonstrated financial need who are planning to study abroad in East or Southeast Asia. The program’s goal is to increase the number of US citizens and permanent residents with first-hand exposure to and understanding of Asia and its peoples and cultures. Award recipients are required to share their experiences with their home campuses or communities to encourage study abroad by others and fulfill the program’s goal of increasing understanding of Asia in the United States. From its inception in 2001, Freeman-ASIA has made study abroad in East and Southeast Asia possible for over 5,000 US undergraduates from more than 600 institutions. To learn more, visit: iie.org/programs/freeman-asia/

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.

New Muse 4tet, an ensemble led by jazz faculty member Gwen Laster, was awarded a $11,300 Performance Plus grant by Chamber Music America, a national network for ensemble music professionals. The grant will enable New Muse 4tet to record new music, building off of the successes of their debut album, Blue Lotus. The grant will also enable coaching sessions from jazz pianist and composer Michele Rosewoman, helping New Muse 4tet build new works through the lenses of jazz composition and Caribbean folkloric idioms.

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, was once advised to tone down his work: to make it less colorful, less bold. “We’ve been dismissed as garish and too much, because of our use of color,” Gibson told the New York Times. Now, Gibson will be the first Native artist to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition—his embrace of color having propelled him to this stage. In a profile of Gibson for the Times, Jillian Steinhauer traced Gibson’s history as an artist, his preparation for the Biennale, and his relationship to the US. “I have a complicated relationship with the United States,” he said. His project for the Biennale “aims to interweave a Native American narrative with other histories of struggle and freedom,” borrowing its title from a poem by Bard alumna Layli Long Soldier MFA ’13. “‘The space in which to place me’ seemed like this idea of both decentralizing things and making things central that are oftentimes on the periphery,” Gibson said. The 2024 Venice Biennale runs April 20 through November 24, 2024.

Walid Raad, currently distinguished visiting professor of photography, will begin his tenured appointment at Bard College in fall 2024 as professor of photography in the Division of the Arts. Raad is an artist whose works include photography, video, mixed media installations, and performances. His works include the creation of The Atlas Group, a 15-year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon, as well as the ongoing projects Scratching on Things I Could Disavow and Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut). His books include Walkthrough, The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead, My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair, and Let’s Be Honest The Weather Helped.

Raad’s solo exhibitions have been featured at institutions including the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza (Madrid), Louvre (Paris), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), ICA (Boston, USA), Museo Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico), Kunsthalle Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland), The Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, UK), Festival d’Automne (Paris, France), Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels, Belgium), The Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, Germany). 

His works have also been shown in Documenta 11 and 13 (Kassel, Germany), The Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), Whitney Bienniale 2000 and 2002 (New York, USA), Sao Paulo Bienale (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Istanbul Biennal (Istanbul, Turkey), Homeworks I and IV (Beirut, Lebanon) and other institutions across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. In addition, Raad is the recipient multiple grants, prizes, and awards, including the Aachener Kunstpreis (2018), ICP Infinity Award (2016), the Hasselblad Award (2011), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2007), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2007), the Camera Austria Award (2005), and a Rockefeller Fellowship (2003). Raad was named Harvard University’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) 2024 Solomon Fellow and is in residence at AFVS from April 7 to 13, 2024.

Bard College senior Melonie Bisset ’24, a film and electronic arts major, has won a highly selective Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) for the 2024 summer session. CLS, a program of the US Department of State, provides recipients with overseas placements that include intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences designed to promote rapid language gains. Each summer, American undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at US colleges and universities across the country, spend 8 to 10 weeks learning one of 13 languages at an intensive study abroad institute. The CLS Program is designed to promote rapid language gains and essential intercultural fluency in regions that are critical to US national security and economic prosperity. The languages include Arabic, Azerbaijani, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu.

Bisset will study Portuguese at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The CLS Program in Rio de Janeiro provides a language learning environment designed to cover the equivalent of one academic year of university-level Portuguese study during an eight-week period. While in Brazil, Bisset will live with a local host family, eating breakfast with them each morning and spending free weekends with them. Host families help students integrate into daily life in Rio de Janeiro, introduce them to their extended networks, and create opportunities for them to practice their Portuguese in a more relaxed setting. Students also meet with a language partner several hours per week to practice conversational language skills and explore the city, planning their own activities with their language partners based on their interests.

Bisset writes that her interests have always been at the intersection of multiple cultures. That is where she feels most like herself—where she belongs. Accordingly, that is why Brazilian culture has always captivated her: its intense mix of diverse cultures. Aside from music and dance, she is also attracted to Brazilian filmmakers engaged in debates surrounding ecocinema, poverty, and multiculturalism. Her ultimate goal is to create a US-based nonprofit that facilitates cross cultural exchange and understanding through language and art.

“I am extremely grateful to receive the Critical Language Scholarship, and even more excited for the opportunity to study Portuguese in Rio de Janeiro this summer,” says Bisset. “As a multicultural-multiracial English, Mandarin, and Spanish speaker, a certified TESOL instructor, a filmmaker, an Argentine Tango dancer, a translator, and most importantly a story teller, my aspiration has always been to facilitate greater intercultural understanding through engagement with the arts and languages. I hope to establish my own organization dedicated to these dreams one day. This immersive language and cultural experience will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on my personal life and career development.”

The CLS Program is part of a US government effort to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical foreign languages. CLS scholars gain critical language and cultural skills that enable them to contribute to US economic competitiveness and national security. Approximately 500 competitively selected American students at US colleges and universities participate in the CLS Program each year.

“Critical” languages are those that are less commonly taught in US schools, but are essential for America’s engagement with the world. CLS plays an important role in preparing US students for the 21st century’s globalized workforce, increasing American competitiveness, and contributing to national security. CLS scholars serve as citizen ambassadors, representing the diversity of the United States abroad and building lasting relationships with people in their host countries.

For further information about the Critical Language Scholarship or other exchange programs offered by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, please visit  http://www.clscholarship.org/ and https://studyabroad.state.gov/.

Bard College alumna and Studio Arts faculty member Tschabalala Self has won the prestigious Fourth Plinth Commission with her sculpture Lady in Blue. Her work will be installed in Trafalgar Square in 2026 in what Justine Simons, London’s deputy mayor for culture and the creative industries, refers to as “the most successful public art commission in the world.” Self shares the honor with Romanian-born artist Andra Ursuţa, whose Untitled will be installed in 2028.

“My work Lady in Blue will bring to Trafalgar Square a woman that many can relate to,” Self said in a statement. “She is not an idol to venerate or a historic figurehead to commemorate. She is a woman striding forward into our collective future with ambition and purpose. She is a Londoner, who represents the city’s spirit.”
 

“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.”

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.”

Bard Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Yebel Gallegos will spend the week of March 18– 22 in the MADarts Residency Program, which provides artists and their collaborators unlimited access to a dance studio and a quiet, comfortable living space at the Modern Accord Depot in Accord, New York. Gallegos will continue work on his long-term dance production project, MACHO Sensibilities, which critically examines the imposition of machismo on male-identifying dancers of Mexican and Mexican-American descent. During the residency, he will be developing a new section with his collaborators that is set to premiere at the Faculty Dance Concert, taking place in the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts’ LUMA Theater at Bard College in spring 2024.The section will be a trio comprising three Mexican and Mexican-American artists including Gallego, costume and stage designer David Arevalo, and composer/sound designer/percussionist Jonathan Rodriguez. This research project is anchored in autoethnographic writing, oral history research, and movement analysis. “I define machismo as an exaggerated performance of a ‘man’s role’ as it is encouraged by the confines of heteronormativity and patriarchy. Machismo overshadows the individuality of gender representation, preventing the inclusion of diverse interpretations of masculinity in society,” writes Gallego.

“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.

A. Sayeeda Moreno, assistant professor of Film and Electronic Arts at Bard, was honored with a one-week residency to develop her upcoming feature film, Out in the Dunes, a coming-of-age romance set in 1990s Provincetown on Cape Cod. Immersing herself in the locale, she explored Provincetown to seek enrichment for her screenplay. Sayeeda also showcased three of her short films, Sin Salida, Bina, and White, at the Provincetown International Film Festival followed by a Q&A session, sharing the intricacies of her creative process as a writer and director with an engaged audience. The Provincetown Film Institute Women’s Residency Program offers established women-identifying filmmakers from around the world the opportunity to work in Provincetown during the off-season alongside other artists and writers who use the solitude of the outer Cape Cod area as inspiration for their work. Residents are selected by a panel of film industry professionals and given a small travel stipend, lodging, and roundtrip travel from Boston. 
 A. Sayeeda Moreno is a director and screenwriter whose award-winning short films and screenplays are nourished by the mythology of the New York City metropolis where she was born, and the exhilarating cast of characters that filtered through her bohemian home. She documents and filters this World through her own body and a body of work that is character-driven, utilizing genre to illuminate our human experiences: how we survive, what is in opposition to us, what our mind grapples with, and how we love. Sayeeda is a Film Independent, Sundance Women in Finance, and Tribeca All Access Fellow and earned her MFA in Film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts as a dean’s fellow. She is developing her feature film Out in the Dunes and has been an assistant professor in Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College since 2018.

Listening to music, often a solitary activity, takes on new dimensions among a group of friends who have been meeting for 15 years to encounter songs together. Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91 writes about the Golden Ears and their weekly meetups in Tivoli, New York, and the particular pleasure of gathering to share music. “By now we’re used to listening to music for one another, in a way that privileges adventure over taste,” he writes. “Having a listening group as a sounding board of directors turns the sprawl of music history into a rolling conversation with friends, a renewable resource, an endless delight.”

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.

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

Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor of film and electronic arts and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program, has won a 2024 Creative Capital Award for $50,000 to support his documentary film Eternal Rhythm. Creative Capital Awards provide artists with unrestricted project funding up to $50,000, bespoke professional development services, and community-building opportunities.

Eternal Rhythm explores the personal and artistic relationship between Don and Moki Cherry after the couple moved from New York to Moki’s native Sweden in 1970. There they began a decade-long collaboration that merged multicultural expressions of art, music, and radical living into a synergetic model for communal creativity. 

Creative Capital’s “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards in Visual Arts and Film/Moving Image total $2.5 million in grants to artists for the creation of 50 groundbreaking new works. Chosen from 5,600 applications, this year’s awards will fund 28 innovative visual arts projects and 22 film/moving image projects, representing 54 artists in total.

Artistic Director of Bard Conservatory of Music’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program and acclaimed mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe spoke to The Daily Catch ahead of her concert performance, Stephanie Blythe Sings Brahms, with The Orchestra Now at the Fisher Center on February 3–4. Renowned for the emotional depth of her performances, Blythe connects the lines of Brahm’s “Alto Rhapsody,” which uses Goethe’s poetry for lyrics, to “a feeling of a place where you can breathe. I understand the notion of breaking through and wanting to breathe. When you understand the universality of this music, you understand its essential nature,” says Blythe, who believes opera, when presented for what it actually is, can appeal to a broader, more popular audience. “Being able to illuminate and elevate opera in a new way is really important,” she said. “I find that far too often people who present opera feel like they need to repackage it. Opera doesn’t need to be excused. You don’t need to make it something else for people to appreciate it.”