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

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

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

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

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

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

Student Artwork Exhibited on Billboard in Hudson and in Temporary Installation in Richard Abraham’s Memorial Park in Red Hook

Bard Community Arts Collective and the Center for Civic Engagement at Bard are pleased to announce the installation of several student artworks in Dutchess County and Columbia County.

How Long Will We Be Driving by Bard student James Wise ’26 is on view at a billboard located at 3391 US-9, Hudson, NY 12534 from December 20, 2023 to January 17, 2024. This work is presented through a partnership with Shandaken Projects’ public art initiative 14x48, which has exhibited new work by contemporary artists on billboards across New York State since 2021.

Additionally, works from students in the Studio Arts Program at Bard have been temporarily installed in Richard Abraham’s Memorial Park in Red Hook, as part of a pilot partnership with the Village of Red Hook’s Public Spaces Initiative Committee. 

These projects originated in an Extended Media course taught by artist Julia Weist in the Studio Arts Program at Bard. This class explores the potential of presenting art in an expanded field of engagement, including in the public realm, asking students to consider how the interpretation of their work changes when it is experienced in a mass media or civic context. In addition to exercises and instruction in the classroom, students visited the offices of Shandaken Projects and met with the Village of Red Hook’s Chair for the Public Spaces Initiative Committee, Ash Bradley-Rickard, and the Red Hook Village Board to learn more about opportunities for artists in the public sector. Each student created a two-dimensional billboard proposal, reviewed by Shandaken Projects, and a three-dimensional public art proposal, which was presented at a Village Board meeting on November 13, 2023. One billboard proposal was selected by Shandaken Projects for production, and every student proposal was approved for temporary installation in Richard Abraham’s Memorial Park.

The selected billboard, created by James Wise, was created by layering more than 50 AI-generated images. At first glance from the vantage of a moving car, the image appears to be a standard insurance ad. A closer look reveals that the uncanny advertisement includes only one legible question—“How long will we be driving?”—along with other text-like elements that are distorted and nonsensical. The billboard’s question highlights several challenging issues related to emerging technologies and the future of our planet, such as the loss of human autonomy that may come from an increased reliance on AI (including through self-driving cars) and the impact of driving carbon-polluting cars on a warming climate. The figure at the center of the ad, the avatar created by artificial intelligence to represent an insurance salesman, represents another troubling facet of algorithmic technology: these tools often closely reflect those who create them. The AI field is predominately white and male, and Wise’s artwork asks us to consider if those individuals who are in the driver’s seat of our tech future broadly represent the diverse communities that will use artificial intelligence. Wise said of the project, “Making a piece for the public takes what I’ve been doing within a class environment to a larger, more diverse audience, so I approached it as such. I sought to create something with enough depth to conjure a diverse array of reactions, regardless of what I intended, and I hope to see that reflected in public feedback to the project."

The student artwork installed in Richard Abraham’s Memorial Park spanned a variety of materials, from sculptures made from wood and steel to large format photographic prints. Each was developed with the park’s landscape and context in mind. Several of the pieces are interactive and all were made to be installed without impacting the local habitat native to the site. Although the temporary installation was not open to the public, this project served as a pilot program allowing the Village and Bard Community Arts Collective to imagine future collaborative opportunities. A student in the course, Elena Schneider ’27, said of the project, “Being able to make something to be displayed in the landscape where we live pushed me to create something I really care about and am proud of. I put a lot of work into my sculpture and it was very rewarding to see it come to life in such a beautiful place. I hope to have more opportunities to present student work in public places.”

Concerto for Piano (Homage to Beethoven) by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts and composition faculty of the Conservatory of Music at Bard, and Dark with Excessive Bright by Missy Mazzoli, Bard composer in residence, were both included in NPR's roundup of top ten classical albums of 2023. NPR music producer and classical music reviewer Tom Huizenga writes, "Now 85, Tower could rest on her achievements, but she's still fulfilling commissions with her singular, sturdy music," noting the many leading contemporary composers revere her, including Missy Mazzoli, whose album was also selected in this year's top ten. "[T]he album is tonal — in a Bartók or Joan Tower kind of way — with notes stacked to produce fresh, often unusual sounds," writes Huizenga, who says this album proves Mazzoli "can create shimmering instrumental music with large forces." 

Trudy Poux ’26, a current theater and performance major at Bard, plays the lead character in the TV pilot Do Nothings, which tells the story of Tamarin, a teenage singer-songwriter plagued by paralyzing stage fright. Produced in the Hudson Valley by their director, educator, and filmmaker mother Amy Poux, the show was inspired by Trudy’s real-life experiences. Trudy, who cowrote the script with their mother, says that LGBTQ+ screen narratives tend to focus on tragedy or the build up to coming out, “but thereʼs not a lot of media that shows what itʼs like to live day-to-day as a nonbinary person whoʼs already come out . . . The story is about everything else that happens in high school as well and itʼs really inspiring to see a story like that.”

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

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

A posthumous album by Richard Teitelbaum, a member of Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV) and former Bard College professor of music, has been included in Bandcamp’s 2023 list of Best Contemporary Classical Music. Symphony No. 107 — The Bard, a previously unreleased live recording, was performed in Olin Hall at Bard College in 2012, and was edited, mixed, and mastered by Matt Sargent, assistant professor of music at Bard, in October 2022. “The music builds from near-silence to unleash a spirited collage of texture and gesture, constantly mutating and blending, with live instrumental bits—on piano, shofar, or harmonica—seeping in, sometimes taking over, or blending within electronic soundscapes,” writes Peter Margasak for Bandcamp. Teitelbaum taught electronic and experimental music at Bard for over 30 years, and cochaired the music department of the Master of Fine Arts program. He was one of the founding members of the pioneering electronic music group MEV, created in Italy in 1966, together with Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski.

New York Times cochief art critic Holland Cotter names CCS Bard’s exhibition Indian Theater and An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers among his picks for the best art of 2023. “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art and Self-Determination Since 1969 at the Hessel Museum, Bard College, was, hands down, the most stimulatingly inventive contemporary group show I saw this year,” writes Cotter about the large-scale exhibition curated by CCS Bard Fellow in Indigenous Curatorial Studies Candice Hopkins. Cotter calls the work of photographer An-My Lê, who is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard, “lucid,” and notes that the main subject of Lê’s Museum of Modern Art survey, on view through March 9, is “war as a perpetual reality, nascent or active.”

See the Best Art of 2023 from the New York Times

Read the New York Times Review of Indian Theater

Read the New York Times Review of An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers
 

Professor Emeritus of Photography Larry Fink—who joined the faculty in 1988 and taught at Bard for three decades—has died at the age of 82. Professor Fink is known for his frank photographs of New York high society and Hollywood stars, as well as his intimate images of rural America. “He treated the classroom like it was the Village Vanguard,” Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91 tells the New York Times. “It was completely improvisatory. A critique would involve mouth trumpet sounds, his own poetic raps and scat singing; maybe at some point he’d pull out his harmonica. On the one hand, it kneecapped the whole idea of art education, and on the other, if you were listening, it was completely profound.” 

“He adjusted the emotional temperature in any room,” writes Lucy Sante, who taught writing and photography at Bard for nearly 25 years, for Vanity Fair. “He was countrified, with his suspenders, his work boots, his wild grin and honking laugh, his utter disregard for decorum, but he had the chutzpah of a city boy and was so sophisticated he had no need to prove it. It further enhances any of his pictures to imagine Larry in the act of taking them.”

Mr. Fink was the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships, in 1976 and 1979. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many other institutions in the United States and abroad. He worked on assignment for numerous publications, including Manhattan, Inc., Vanity Fair, and the New York Times, and was the author of 12 books.

Further Reading

Larry Fink, Whose Photographs Were ‘Political, Not Polemical,’ Dies at 82 (New York Times)

A Fond Farewell to Photographer Larry Fink, 82 (Professor Sante for Vanity Fair)

In Memoriam: Bard Remembers the Life of Professor Larry Fink (from President Botstein)
 

Isabel Ahlam Ahmed ’25, a Bard College student majoring jointly in film production and human rights, has received a scholarship from Fund for Education Abroad (FEA) for the spring 2024 semester. Ahmed is one of 66 undergraduates from around the country selected by 88 volunteer reviewers who scored 1,466 applications over three review phases, and with FEA's American University in Cairo (AUC) Access Partner Scholarship, she will attend AUC via the longstanding tuition exchange between AUC and Bard.

“As a first generation college student, I feel extremely proud and honored to be one of 66 people receiving an FEA scholarship,” Ahmed said. “For many students like me, the financial burden is a huge reason we are afraid to even consider going abroad, so receiving the FEA allows me to fully experience my excitement and plans. In addition to this, it also provides an FEA community of scholars and alumni to connect with, which has already made this process feel better supported, and I know it will feel even better to have access to this community while studying in Cairo.”

The Fund for Education Abroad supports US students with financial need who are traditionally underrepresented in study abroad. FEA aims to make life-changing, international experiences accessible to all by supporting students of color, community college, and first-generation college students. Of the 66 scholars awarded this application cycle, 90% identify as students of color and 39% identify as LGBTQ+. Males make up 32% of Spring 2024 Scholars; female, 64%; and non-binary, 4.5%. Additionally, 88% are first-generation college students, 30% are current or former community college students, and 67% have never left the US.

Since its inception in 2010, FEA has awarded more than $3.4 million in scholarships to more than 1,090 scholars, and supports students before, during, and after their study abroad experience with scholarships and programming.

“We are grateful to all of FEA’s supporters, donors, and partners who make study abroad scholarships possible,” said Angela Schaffer, the FEA executive director. “FEA is excited to be a part of the Spring 2024 Scholars’ international education journeys.”

For W magazine, Camille Okhio interviewed Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson about representing the United States in a solo exhibition at the upcoming Venice Biennale in 2024, his global journey as an Indigenous artist of Cherokee and Choctaw lineage, and his work. “Our motto in the Choctaw is self-determination,” says Gibson. “After college, my chief said to me, ‘You would be more effective out in the world; you don’t need to come back here. You are fulfilling what I have said our tribe will do one day if you go out and you are successful.’ I hope, through my practice, that I’m letting Indigenous people know they can move around the world freely.” Asked what has been left out of his narrative, Gibson answers: “The work is not beautiful for beauty’s sake. The beauty is a strategy.” 

Samantha Simon ’26, a Bard student majoring in art history and visual culture, has been named as one of the members of the National Humanities Center’s 2023–24 Leadership Council. As a member of the council, which was established to help prepare a select group of students with humanities-based leadership skills, Simon will join 31 other students from around the US in a unique series of interactive experiences with humanities scholars and leaders.

Nominated by faculty from colleges and universities across the country, the student council members will receive professional development and mentoring from leading scholars and other humanities professionals as well as research support, opportunities for networking, and access to National Humanities Center programming and expertise. In round tables and discussion sessions, they will explore the essential importance of humanistic perspectives in addressing the concerns of contemporary society, and may focus on specific projects and engagement with the communities at their institutions.

“The exceptional students selected for the council this year are pursuing an assortment of majors, from art history to biochemistry to Middle Eastern studies, but they all share a deep interest and passion for the humanities,” said Jacqueline Kellish, the National Humanities Center’s director of public engagement. “We are looking forward to working with these brilliant young people in the coming months and exploring with them the ways that their humanities knowledge and training can help them forge successful careers and make a difference in their communities and beyond.”

The National Humanities Center is a private, nonprofit organization, and the only independent institute dedicated exclusively to advanced study in all areas of the humanities. Through public engagement intimately linked to its scholarly and educational programs, the center promotes understanding of the humanities and advocates for their foundational role in a democratic society.

Since its original publication in Mexico in 1955, Juan Rulfo’s sparse and haunting novel Pedro Páramo “has cast an uncanny spell on writers,” famously inspiring Gabriel García Márquez to write One Hundred Years of Solitude—yet for English-speaking readers it “remains something of a best-kept secret, a book that people either cherish or have never heard of,” writes Valeria Luiselli, Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. “The book shows its readers how to read all over again, the same way The Waste Land or Ulysses does, by bending the rules of literature so skillfully, so freely, that the rules must change thereafter.” Rulfo once suggested that Pedro Páramo, the only book Rulfo ever published, was meant to be read three times before understood. “Maybe the novel was also meant to be translated three times before it seeped more broadly and indelibly into the Anglophone consciousness. Maybe its time has finally come,” writes Luiselli, who deems the Mexican novel’s newly published and third English language translation by Douglas J. Weatherford “by far, the best of Rulfo in English.”

Angelica Sanchez, assistant professor of music, was inspired by “the sounds of the pitch-dark woods at night” while composing her newest album, Nighttime Creatures. Reviewing the album for NPR’s Fresh Air, music critic Kevin Whitehead says that pastoral inspiration is felt throughout the record. “You get a sense of sonic depth, foreground versus background. That sort of spatial awareness is another thing one might cultivate in the woods at night, where the same animal cry can be charming or alarming, depending on distance,” Whitehead says. “For open-eared composer Angelica Sanchez, such encounters set the mind buzzing. On Nighttime Creatures, she bottles that open-air feeling and brings it into the studio.”

Five Bard Conservatory of Music and Music Program faculty members and alumni/ae have been nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY Awards. Artistic Director of the Graduate Vocal Arts Program Stephanie Blythe is featured on the album Champion, nominated for Best Opera Recording. Bard Composers in Residence Jessie Montgomery and Missy Mazzoli are both nominees for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Mazzoli’s concerto Dark With Excessive Bright and Montgomery’s “Rounds” for piano and string orchestra (featured in pianist Awadagin Pratt’s Stillpoint) have been nominated for the GRAMMY. Julia Bullock MM ’11 has been nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for her album Walking In The Dark. In the category of Best Contemporary Instrumental Album, music program alumnus Max Zbiral-Teller ’06, along with his House of Waters bandmates, has been nominated for On Becoming. The 2024 GRAMMYs, officially known as the 66th GRAMMY Awards, will take place Sunday, February 4 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.

This fall, Bard College is launching the Bard Community Arts Collective, a collaboration between the Fisher Center at Bard, Bard Center for Civic Engagement (CCE), Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard), the Bard Conservatory, and The Orchestra Now (TŌN). The aim of the collective is to inspire connection and community through arts-based educational programming, coordinated in partnership with local organizations and schools.

Bard has long partnered with Hudson Valley artists, organizations, and schools, including the school systems of Kingston, Rhinebeck and Red Hook, as well as organizations such as Kite’s Nest, and the Boys & Girls Club of Ulster County. The Community Arts Collective will make Bard’s resources more accessible to these and other community partners, assisting with the development of new programs and connections within the region. It will partner with schools and community organizations to link the College’s educational resources with community interests.

The Arts Collective’s programs include a wide variety of arts events that are open to the public. Weekly rehearsals by the Bard College Conservatory Orchestra, including community engagement activities with the musicians and conductor, will be open to local school groups, and the Conservatory will perform at local events, such as its recent concert at the Dutch Reformed Church in Kingston as part of the “Burning of Kingston” festival, a historical reenactment that commemorates the events that occurred in the city during the Revolutionary War.

The Orchestra Now has opened several dress rehearsals to children from local daycare and school programs, while CCS Bard will host tours for young visitors at its current exhibition, Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, the first large-scale exhibition of its kind to center performance and theater as an origin point for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Alaska Native artists.

The College sponsors a variety of student-led initiatives through its CCE Trustee Leader Scholars (TLS) program, run by Paul Marienthal. Sister2Sister, a student-led mentorship program run by Bard alumni Skylar Walker, provides guidance and opportunities for young women of color in Kingston with an arts focus, and will start its 6th consecutive year providing regular after school activities and annual conferences.

“It's been an honor watching our program grow from what was once a student-led TLS project to an institutionally supported entity,” said Walker. “The most touching part about this experience has been being able to genuinely connect, empower, and inspire young women who look like me. I am incredibly grateful that Bard has provided a platform and a space for programs like ours, it is truly what our youth need.”

Another TLS program, the Musical Mentorship Initiative, which is led by Bard Conservatory students, has offered free music lessons to children of all ages since the pandemic began in 2020. “The students constantly create and run new projects. The key is student ownership. We are good cheerleaders, but students with their imaginations blazing do the heavy lifting,” explains Marienthal.

The Collective will make coordination and innovation easier for community partners, acting as a transparent entity for interested organizations and schools to approach with ideas for collaboration. “The concept of a collective is powerful—we already see a shift in how we collaborate with communities making the College’s resources easier to access and better reflect shared interests. Here, interdisciplinary approaches to learning can evolve to respond to the community’s needs and desires for arts programming,” observed CCE’s Vice President for Civic Engagement Erin Cannan. “The Hudson Valley has always been an incubator for art and art making, and Bard has played a key role. This approach allows us to reach new organizations, schools, communities, and helps our students learn the power of community art building.”

For more information, contact [email protected].

“Like so many documentary photographers, I often pick a post or set up a frame and wait for something to happen within it,” Sam Youkilis ’16 said to i-D. “I truly believe in the camera’s ability to will things happening within its frame.” After publishing his debut monograph, Somewhere, Youkilis spoke with i-D and Interview magazine about capturing the mundane, his use of vertical video, and finding a following on Instagram. “I’m lucky that I’ve been able to find success in what I do on Instagram in a really organic way,” Youkilis said to Quinn Moreland ’15 for Interview. “And I am lucky that I’m able to share my work in a diaristic way where it’s very much an insight into my life from morning to the end of the day.” Somewhere, which totals more than 500 pages in length, represents this diaristic practice in a physical format, with the size of the monograph somewhere between the size of a postcard and an iPhone, with a purposeful intermixture of the commonplace and the grandiose. “The point of the book, in a way, is to level any hierarchy across this imagery and present my work democratically so no moment is given more value than others,” Youkilis said.

The Bard Prison Initiative hosted its long-running orchestral concert program at Eastern Correctional Facility last week. Conducted by Leon Botstein, the program included Beethoven, Bartók, and Duke Ellington’s New World A-Comin’ performed by Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music Marcus Roberts, accompanied by Jason Marsalis and others from Roberts’ band The Modern Jazz Generation. 

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra, an 80-student ensemble comprised primarily of undergraduates, performed on the stage of the prison’s auditorium for an audience of almost 150 incarcerated men. Yuchen Zhao, a second-year graduate student and violinist with the Conservatory Orchestra, told Andrew Checchia, who covered the concert for the Red Hook Daily Catch, that the men at Eastern were “the most focused audience in the world.” 

“This is a great opportunity to come together and enjoy a unique experience,” said Daniel F. Martuscello III, acting commissioner of New York State’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, before the performance. “People go to prison as punishment, but they shouldn’t be defined by the worst moments of their life.”

At MoMA, Professor ​​An-My Lê’s images of Vietnam, the American South, and the California desert “are tour-de-force beautiful.” Holland Cotter reviews Between Two Rivers, Lê’s MoMA exhibition, as a Critic’s Pick for the New York Times. “​​In Lê’s photographs we find the line between boot camp and theater, battle-prepping and playacting, almost comically blurred,” writes Cotter. An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1998.

Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music Marcus Roberts will receive this year’s Dorothy and David Dushkin Award at the Music Institute of Chicago gala, where he will also perform, in May 2024. Established more than 30 years ago and named for the Music Institute’s visionary founders, the award recognizes international luminaries in the world of music for their contributions to the art form and youth education.
 
Marcus Roberts is a highly acclaimed modern jazz pianist, composer, and educator who has graced the Music Institute of Chicago’s Nichols Concert Hall stage for many years. He is known for his ability to blend jazz and classical idioms into something wholly new and for his unique approach to jazz trio performance, which relies on all musicians sharing equally in shaping the direction of the music by using a system of musical cues and flexible forms to change its tempo, mood, texture, or form. He is the founder of the Modern Jazz Generation, a multigenerational ensemble that is the realization of his long-standing dedication to training and mentoring younger jazz musicians. 

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

By Lauren Rodgers ’27

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More about Lexi Parra ’18:

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

The Hunt, a new Kate Soper opera directed by Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Ashley Tata, was named a Critic’s Pick by the New York Times. This “darkly funny fairy tale,” writes Joshua Barone, “makes the medieval modern.” “Think Waiting for Godot, but with the female rebelliousness of a Sofia Coppola film,” he writes. Complementing the biting text set in “medieval and/or contemporary times,” Barone praises the production as much as the text: “Tata’s direction slowly dissolves pristine, satirized virginal presentation into something wilder, and free.” The opera premiered October 12, 2023, at the Miller Theatre in New York City.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more and meet the 2023 MacArthur Fellows here.

The sixth season of the China Now Music Festival, a joint endeavor by Bard College's U.S.-China Music Institute and the Central Conservatory of Music in China, was featured and reviewed in multiple news outlets. The annual festival is dedicated to promoting an understanding and appreciation of music from contemporary China through an annual series of concerts and academic activities. Its theme this year, “The Bridge of Music,” focused on connecting people through music, and featured an unprecedented series of uniquely curated events tracing how generations of musicians and music organizations from the US and China have worked together and inspired each other. "Academic exchange is an important way to promote academic development and cultural exchange between the two countries,” Yu Hongmei, professor and director of the Chinese Music Department at the Central Conservatory of Music, told China News. “Its implications are abroad and far-reaching. Civilization is more colorful through communication, and culture is enriched through mutual understanding and learning."

Further Reading: 
U.S.-China forum calls for revitalizing relations through music (China News)

China Now Music Festival ends with tribute to three generations of composers bridging U.S., China (Xinhua)

“What they share, beyond mutual admiration, is their status among America’s foremost orchestral composers,” writes Daniel Stephen Johnson of Bard faculty members Joan Tower and Jessie Montgomery for Symphony. In a wide-ranging interview, Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, and Montgomery, composer in residence, spoke about their compositional practices, their experiences as living composers, and what equity means in their profession. On the latter point, Montgomery said it’s not simply a question of access, but of the breadth of artistry. “Music doesn’t have a gender, but music does have cultural influences and folkloric origins,” Montgomery said. “Bringing in people who have had other influences makes the music richer.”

In a field dominated by “mostly dead white European males,” Tower said it was difficult, especially early on, to be taken seriously by audiences. Early in her career, she would poll the audience about how many of them expected to dislike her compositions, and a majority of the audience would raise their hands. Still, she’s always introduced herself as a “woman composer” as a point of pride. “I always introduced myself as a woman composer, and I’d get giggles in the audience,” Tower told Symphony. “Now, I’m getting cheers! I say I’m an older woman, and I get even more!”

Why does your brain look different on Bach than it does on Beethoven? It’s a question that’s stuck with Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music, since she watched the PBS documentary Musical Minds with Oliver Sacks, where an MRI showed his beloved Bach engaged more portions of his brain than Beethoven. “One of my questions always has been like, well, what is that?” Hennies said on Science Friday. “Why would his brain respond so much to one piece of music and then not at all to some really similar thing? And so that’s part of what inspired this piece.” Hennies discusses Rodolfo Llinás’s “motor tapes” neurological theory, which “theorizes that the brain is a giant mass of constantly-running tape loop,” and how it connects to her compositional practice. Hennies’s new work, “Motor Tapes,” takes its inspiration—and name—from the repetitive rhythmic theory.

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

Read More in the New York Times

Further Reading:

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

The US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music announces the sixth season of the China Now Music Festival, from October 2 to 8. The festival’s major concerts will take place at the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College and at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City.

The China Now Music Festival is dedicated to promoting an understanding and appreciation of music from contemporary China through an annual series of concerts and academic activities. In the previous five seasons, China Now has attracted more than 10,000 live audience members, and nearly 100,000 viewers have participated in online programs. The sixth annual festival will focus on the theme The Bridge of Music, with an unprecedented series of uniquely curated events that will trace how generations of musicians and music organizations from the US and China have worked together and inspired each other through music exchange.

“Music is both the common wealth of human civilization and the unique creation of individual cultures and peoples,” said Jindong Cai, the artistic director of the China Now Music Festival. “It is a bringer of hope and joy, and a bridge to understanding. I hope that this year's China Now Music Festival will bring you this hope, joy, and understanding.”

The first concert program, “Bard East/West Ensemble and Special Guest Wu Man,” presents new arrangements of music by Tan Dun and Zhou Long, as well as several new works by outstanding young composers from China, including Tian Tian and Yao Chen, faculty members at the Central Conservatory of Music. It will be held on October 2 at the Bard Conservatory in Annandale-on-Hudson, and on October 4 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. The ensemble combines Chinese and Western instruments together as a new model of cross-cultural performance, consisting of a Western string quintet and seven Chinese instruments including dizi, erhu, pipa, ruan, suona, and guzheng, as well as Chinese and Western percussion. The program features renowned pipa virtuoso Wu Man performing “King Chu Doffs His Armour” by the Pulitzer Prize winner composer Zhou Long and based on the famous love story portrayed in the 1993 film Farewell My Concubine. It also includes Tan Dun’s Northwest Suite, a collection from his dance score “The Yellow Earth,” which blends traditional Chinese elements with contemporary concepts. 

The second program, “The Orchestra Now (TŌN) Celebrates the Music of Chen Yi and Zhou Long,” on October 6 at Bard’s Fisher Center and October 8 at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, will pay tribute to the extraordinary Chinese-American composers, along with works by their mentor and teacher, Chou Wen-Chung, and two of their acclaimed students, Zhou Juan and Li Shaosheng. Chen Yi and Zhou Long, two remarkable composers now in their 70s, had studied at Columbia University in the 1980s under composer Chou Wen-Chung, whose compositions reflected his deep connection to both Eastern and Western traditions. Chen Yi and Zhou Long were greatly influenced by their mentor’s fascination for exploring the intersection of different musical cultures, and over the decades of their storied careers in America, both have blended their cultural heritage with contemporary compositional techniques, resulting in a unique and captivating musical language. Chen Yi’s Symphony No. 3, My Musical Journey to America, was commissioned by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra for its centennial season and premiered by the SSO at Benaroya Hall on March 18, 2004, conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Zhou Long composed Beijing Rhyme in 2012 and it was commissioned by the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, first performed and recorded in September 2012 in Beijing, conducted by Tan Lihua.

The third program, “US-China Music Forum – Confronting Challenges and Looking to the Future,” on October 7 at Asia Society in New York City, will present an afternoon of engaging discussion and live music with a distinguished panel of musicians and leaders in the world of classical music performance and education, providing diverse perspectives on the future of US-China relations in music. The panel speakers will include Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and artistic director of The Orchestra Now (TŌN); composer Chen Yi, Lorena Searcy Cravens/ Millsap/ Missouri Distinguished Professor of Composition at University of Missouri, Kansas City; Gary Ginstling, president and CEO of the New York Philharmonic; and Yu Hongmei, chairwoman of  the University Council of the Central Conservatory of Music, China. The panel will be moderated by Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society, and Jindong Cai, director of the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music. The forum will also feature live music performances by pipa virtuoso Liu Xiaojing from the Central Conservatory of Music, China, and members of the Bard East/West Ensemble.

EVENT DETAILS AND TICKETING

Program I: Bard East/West Ensemble and Special Guest Wu Man
Monday, October 2 at 8 pm
László Z. Bitó ‘60 Conservatory Building, Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Free and open to the public.
           
Wednesday, October 4 at 7 pm
(Pre-concert talk at 6:15 pm)
Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
The Shops at Columbus Circle, New York, NY
For tickets, visit: https://ticketing.jazz.org/15697/15698

Program II: The Orchestra Now (TŌN) Celebrates the Music of Chen Yi and Zhou Long
Friday, October 6 at 7 pm
(Q&A with the composers at 6 pm)
Sosnoff Theater, Fisher Center at Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
For tickets, visit: https://tickets.fishercenter.bard.edu/3084/3085
           
Sunday, October 8 at 3:00 pm
(Q&A with the composers at 2:15 pm)
Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
The Shops at Columbus Circle, New York, NY
For tickets, visit: https://ticketing.jazz.org/15697/15700

Program III: US-China Music Forum – Confronting Challenges and Looking to the Future
Saturday, October 7 from 3 pm to 5 pm
Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium
Asia Society of New York
725 Park Avenue, New York, NY
For tickets, visit: https://asiasociety.org/center-us-china-relations/events/us-china-music-forum

For more information about the China Now Music Festival and for full programming details, please visit: barduschinamusic.org/the-bridge-of-music

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Jindong Cai, artistic director
Jindong Cai is director of the US-China Music Institute, professor of music and arts at Bard College, and associate conductor of The Orchestra Now (TŌN). Previously, he was a professor of performance at Stanford University. Over his 30-year career in the United States, Cai has established himself as an active and dynamic conductor, scholar of Western classical music in China, and leading advocate of music from across Asia.

Born in Beijing, Cai received his early musical training in China, where he learned to play violin and piano. He came to the United States for his graduate studies at the New England Conservatory and the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati. He is a three-time recipient of the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming for Contemporary Music. Cai started his conducting career with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and has worked with orchestras throughout North America and Asia. He has conducted most of the top orchestras in China.

At Bard, Cai founded the annual China Now Music Festival, which presents new works by some of the most important Chinese composers of our time. Concerts are performed by The Orchestra Now at Bard’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and Stanford University. In 2019, the festival premiered Men of Iron and the Golden Spike by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Zhou Long—a symphonic oratorio in commemoration of the Chinese railroad workers of North America on the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.

With his wife, Sheila Melvin, Cai has coauthored many articles on the performing arts in China, as well as two books, Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese and Beethoven in China: How the Great Composer Became an Icon in the People’s Republic.

Chen Bing, conductor
A professor in the Conducting Department at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM), Chen Bing is one of China’s most promising conductors. She has conducted concerts in more than a dozen countries in Asia, North America, South America, and Africa. Her repertoire covers a wide range of musical forms, including symphony, opera, choral works, Chinese music, and chamber music. She has conducted at a number of events for world leaders, heads of state, and ambassadors, and produced numerous albums, including Tug at China’s Heartstrings, which is in the permanent collection at the Library of Congress. She frequently conducts new concerts featuring a wide variety of both Chinese and Western pieces.

Wu Man, pipa
Prominent instrumentalist of traditional Chinese music, composer, and educator Wu Man has premiered hundreds of works for the pipa, and performed with major orchestras worldwide. She is a frequent collaborator with ensembles such as the Kronos and Shanghai Quartets and The Knights, and is a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble. Born in Hangzhou, Wu Man studied at the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master’s degree in pipa. Wu received the 2023 National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and was honored with the Asia Society’s Asia Arts Game Changers Award for her contributions to contemporary art. She is visiting professor at CCOM and a Distinguished Professor at the Zhejiang and the Xi’an Conservatories.

Liu Xiaojing, pipa
A pipa teacher in the Folk Music Department of the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM), Liu Xiaojing also is an instructor for the CCOM Plucked String Orchestra and a primary member of Zhang Hongyan’s Plucked String Band. She earned both her undergraduate and her master’s degrees at the Central Conservatory, studying with famed pipa player Zhang Hongyan and earning several scholarships. She has held solo concerts and participated in major state performances and cultural events, and has participated in exchange visits with more than 20 countries and regions.

Bryan Zhe Wang CMC ’24, guqin
Bryan Zhe Wang is among the first candidates in Bard Conservatory’s Master of Arts in Chinese Music and Culture, where he studies with guqin virtuoso Zhao Jiazhen of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Wang ranked first in both the traditional and nontraditional categories at the 2021 Singapore International Guqin Tournament. In 2022, he won the Bard Conservatory Concerto Competition.

The Bard East/West Ensemble aims to combine the instrumentation and musical traditions of the East and the West, to bring together Chinese music and Western music, and to seek a new model of cross-cultural music cooperation. Under the direction of Jindong Cai, the ensemble consists of young musicians from the Bard College Conservatory of Music and invites accomplished artists to collaborate as guest soloists.

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS  Bard) and Bard College’s Human Rights Project named author Suki Kim as the 2023–24 recipient of  the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism. Established in 2014, the fellowship supports an  annual faculty position that brings a prominent scholar, activist, or practicing artist to teach and conduct research within the CCS Bard graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program. The fellowship, which was fully endowed in 2022, represents a longstanding commitment by Bard College and the Keith Haring Foundation to support scholarship and creative practices at the intersection of art and activism.

Through her work as a journalist and author, Kim has provided unprecedented insights into one of  the world’s most secretive and dangerous dictatorships. Born in South Korea, Kim has been  traveling to North Korea since 2002, where she has contributed groundbreaking reporting on the  country to publications including the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the New Republic, and the New Yorker. In 2011, Kim published the New York Times bestseller, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014), based on her experience living  undercover in Pyongyang for six months with the country's future leaders during the final year of  Kim Jong-il’s reign. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the PEN Open Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Open Society Foundations fellowship, a Fulbright Senior Scholar  grant, an American Academy Berlin Prize, and a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship  at Harvard University. 

“It is an honor to welcome Suki Kim to Bard, where I am sure she will inspire a new generation to act boldly in advancing human rights in their respective fields,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of the center for curatorial Studies, Bard College. “As a novelist and significantly as an  investigative journalist, her work has led to real change in our world.”

“Suki Kim is at once a courageous risk-taker and a brilliant writer," said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard’s Human Rights Project. “That rare combination of political commitment and artistic  eloquence is exactly what the Haring Fellowship was created to honor." 

Kim’s appointment follows that of Haytham el-Wardany, the 2022-23 Haring Fellow. Additional details on the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism follow below, with more information on previous fellows found at ccs.bard.edu.

About Suki Kim
Suki Kim is an investigative journalist, a novelist, and the only writer ever to have lived undercover in North Korea.

Kim’s New York Times bestseller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (Crown, 2014) is an unprecedented literary documentation of the world's most secretive gulag nation during the final year of Kim Jong-il’s reign. Her novel, The Interpreter (Farrar,  Straus, & Giroux, 2003) was the PEN Open Book Award winner and a PEN Hemingway Prize finalist.

She is currently working on her next nonfiction book The Prince and the Revolutionary: Children of  War (W.W. Norton), which was shortlisted for a 2022 Lukas Prize work-in-progress, given by  Columbia University School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Kim’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Washington  Post, Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Her TED Talk on her  experiences living undercover in North Korea has drawn millions of viewers. She has appeared in  media around the world including CNN, BBC, CBS, NBC, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. 

Kim served as a Ferris Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Princeton University in 2017. 

About the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College
Founded in 1990, CCS Bard is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively  to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform  exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art at its core, alongside  an extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for  the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice. Broadly  interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty, and researchers to question the critical  and political dimension of art and its social significance.

About the Human Rights Project
The Human Rights Project, founded at Bard in 1999, introduced the first interdisciplinary  undergraduate degree program in Human Rights in the United States. The Project maintains a  special interest in freedom of expression and the public sphere, and through teaching, research,  and public programs is committed to exploring the too-often neglected cultural, aesthetic, and  representational dimensions of human rights discourse. Since 2009, the Human Rights Project has  collaborated with CCS Bard on the development of seminars, workshops, research projects, and  symposia aimed at exploring the intersections between human rights and the arts. While  academic in nature, this research and teaching draws heavily on the realm of practice, involving  human rights advocates, artists, and curators.

About the Keith Haring Foundation
Keith Haring (1958-1990) generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes  during his life. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public  service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and  communities impacted by systemic inequity. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure  that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.

The Keith Haring Foundation gives grants to not-for-profit entities that engage in charitable and  educational activities. In accordance with Keith’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving  in two areas: the support of organizations which enrich the lives of young people, and the support  of organizations which engage in education, prevention, and care with respect to AIDS and HIV  infection. The Foundation additionally maintains a collection of Haring’s art and archives and  funds exhibitions, programming, and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate the  artist’s work and philosophy. www.haring.com.

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra will present a performance from one of the most enduring films in cinema history with A Symphonic Night at The Movies: The Wizard of Oz, which will merge the 1939 cinematography produced by MGM Studios with a live symphony. The event, taking place in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater on Saturday, September 23, and Sunday, September 24, “marks the first time many of the student musicians will perform a so-called film concert, an experience that conservatory educators say will teach the popular side of the symphonic tradition,” writes Andrew Checchia for the Daily Catch. Conducted by James Bagwell, the orchestra’s rendition will accompany a screening of the film, replacing the film’s original songs and keeping precise timing with the original studio voice recordings. “This score was written for studio orchestras, and those scores sound good from the very beginning,” Bagwell told Checchia.

 

The Fisher Center at Bard continues its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground with the world premiere of Ulysses, from Elevator Repair Service, which the New York Times has called “one of New York City’s few truly essential theater companies,” September 21 – October 1 (opening Sunday, September 24). 

James Joyce’s Ulysses has fascinated, perplexed, scandalized, and/or defeated readers for over a century. ERS takes on this Mount Everest of twentieth-century literature having staged modernist works including Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—all with highly acclaimed results.

In the world premiere at the Fisher Center, seven ERS ensemble members—Dee Beasnael (7 Daughters of Eve), OBIE Award-winner Kate Benson (Fondly, Collette Richland), Maggie Hoffman (founding member, Radiohole), Vin Knight (Gatz, The Select (The Sun Also Rises), The Sound and the Fury, and more with ERS), OBIE Award-winner Scott Shepherd (Gatz, The Wooster Group), Christopher-Rashee Stevenson (Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge), and Stephanie Weeks (The Whitney Album)—sit down for a sober reading but soon find themselves guzzling pints, getting in brawls, and committing debaucheries as they careen on a fast-forward tour through Joyce’s funhouse of styles. With madcap antics and a densely layered sound design, ERS presents an eclectic sampling from Joyce’s life-affirming masterpiece.

Ulysses is directed by ERS Artistic Director John Collins, with co-direction and dramaturgy by Scott Shepherd and text by James Joyce. The production features set design by dots (The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Public Obscenities), costume design by Enver Chakartash (A Doll's House, Is This A Room on Broadway) and Assistant Costume Designer Caleb Krieg, lighting design by Marika Kent (ERS’s Seagull) and Assistant Lighting Designer Matt Lazarus, sound design by OBIE Award-winner Ben Williams (The Whitney Album), sound engineering by Gavin Price, projections by Matthew Deinhart (El Amor Brujo, ANIMUS ANIMA//ANIMA ANIMUS) and Assistant Projections Designer Alessandra Cronin, and props by Patrícia Marjorie (Wolf Play, Flex) and Assistant Properties Designer Ned Gaynor. Maurina Lioce (Fondly, Collette Richland; Baldwin and Buckley at Cambridge) is the Assistant Director and Stage Manager, and Jack Ganguly is the Assistant Stage Manager. Hanna Novak of ERS is the producer.  

Ulysses is a Fisher Center LAB commission and is co-commissioned by Symphony Space, where the work was partly developed. Daphne Gaines, April Matthis, and Mark Barton contributed to the development of the work.

Performance Schedule and Ticketing

Performances of Ulysses take place in the LUMA Theater at the Fisher Center:
Thursday, September 21, at 8pm
Friday, September 22, at 8pm
Saturday, September 23, at 8pm
Sunday, September 24, at 3pm
Thursday, September 28, at 8pm
Friday, September 29, at 8pm
Saturday, September 30, at 2pm
Saturday, September 30, at 8pm
Sunday, October 1, at 3pm

Critics are welcome as of Saturday, September 23, at 8 pm for an official opening on Sunday, September 24, at 3 pm.

Tickets start at $25 ($5 for Bard students through the Passloff Pass) and can be purchased here. 

Credits
The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season is dedicated to the founders of the Fisher Center who have cultivated extraordinary artistic experiences—past, present, and future. We honor the memory of Richard B. Fisher, a true champion of the arts and Bard College, and his visionary leadership. 
The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, Felicitas S. Thorne, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.
 

The Bard Conservatory Orchestra presents a live symphony performance of the music from one of the most enduring films in cinema history with A Symphonic Night at The Movies: The Wizard of Oz. Conducted by James Bagwell, the orchestra’s rendition will accompany a recently remastered screening of the film, performing the film’s original songs by composer Harold Arlen and Academy Award-winning score by Herbert Stothart, accompanied by Judy Garland’s original 1939 studio recordings.

The event will take place in two viewings on Saturday, September 23, at 7 pm, and on Sunday, September 24, at 2 pm, in the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. Tickets start at $25 and sales benefit the Bard Conservatory Scholarship Fund. 

To reserve tickets, please visit here. 

Beginning in fall 2023, the Bard College Dance Program is launching a two-year partnership with Villa Albertine, a cultural institution that supports exchanges in arts and ideas between the United States, France, and beyond. Each semester, artists selected by Tara Lorenzen, director of Bard’s Dance Program, and Nicole Birmann Bloom, Villa Albertine’s program officer for the performing arts, in collaboration with Centre National de la Danse (CN D, Pantin, France) and other French choreographic centers, will teach technique and repertory courses in Bard’s dance curriculum.

“The Bard Dance Program is thrilled to partner with Villa Albertine,” said Lorenzen. “There has always been a robust exchange of innovative dance ideas between French-supported artists and the US and I look forward to continuing this tradition with the next generation of dance students here in Annandale.”

During the spring semester, a choreographer will conduct a one week creative residency in the Luma Theater/Fisher Center with a public showing for the Bard community and masterclasses for the student body.  A unique component of this partnership allows Bard dance students to participate in the international dance platform CAMPING at the CN D in Pantin, France, each June. CN D is a public institution created in 1998, devoted to the preservation of choreographic and dance culture. Its distinctive CAMPING dance festival gives students the opportunity to work with choreographers from around the globe, perform their own choreographic projects, and develop teaching practices by conducting morning classes with their peers.

The partnership is launching during Albertine Dance Season, the year-long exploration of dance from inception to performance that includes multi-city tours by French, France-based, African, and Caribbean companies, artistic residencies for up-and-coming choreographers, a dance-themed symposium featuring global leaders in the field, and more. 

“The team at Villa Albertine shares with Bard College the deepest appreciation of the true value of educational exchange and the enduring cultural benefits of arts in education,” said Gaëtan Bruel, cultural counselor and director of Villa Albertine. ” We have the greatest confidence that this two-year partnership will uniquely support and sustain Bard students in the enrichment of their arts experience while at Bard and shape their future artistry.”

Since 2009, the Bard Dance Program has hosted an in-residence dance company or performing arts organization bringing professional technique and composition to the academic program in the form of teaching, educational licensing projects, master classes, full-Company production residencies, and public performances.

This fall, choreographers and performers Marcela Santander (Chile/France) and Volmir Cordeiro (Brazil/France) will join the Dance faculty in Annandale-on-Hudson. Wanjiru Kamuyu (Kenya/France/USA) will have a discussion on September 18, 2023, based on her current touring project “An Immigrant’s Story” and her unique creative process.

Maria Q. Simpson, professor of dance at Bard College, has launched Three Ballet Teachers... (3BT) in collaboration with Zvi Gotheiner and Hannah Wiley. 3BT is an online resource featuring video documentation of original ballet class choreography by the three contemporary ballet teachers. “The website provides teachers of all levels of experience with choreographed center-floor sequences that can be used in full or in part, or as inspiration for their own classes,” Simpson said. The project came out of the mutual belief among Simpson, Gotheiner, and Wiley that ballet class choreography represents a huge body of unrecognized creative work, and that this work should be accessible. “3BT is looking to both highlight and exalt the training space and the choreography that occurs there as representative of the living history of the art form,” Simpson said.

Joining a growing list of fellows from Bard College, Bard faculty members Jessie Montgomery and Angelica Sanchez both received 2023 Civitella Ranieri Fellowships, spending their time in Umbria, Italy, working on individual projects and collaborating. Since 1995, Civitella Ranieri has hosted more than 1,000 fellows and director’s guests, including Bard faculty members Mary Caponegro and Jenny Xie, as well as Simon’s Rock alumna Alison Bechdel SR ’77, among others. Fellows are chosen through a nomination and jury process by a rotating group of distinguished artists, academics, and critics. They then spend four to six weeks living and working at the 15th-century castle the fellowship calls home.

“It has been great to have the time and space to work on these big projects surrounded by the beauty of the countryside, without the usual distractions that I face in the city,” said Montgomery, composer in residence at Bard College. “It has been especially nice to get to know my colleague, Angelica Sanchez, more as a person and artist. We are looking forward to a short upcoming presentation of a piece she wrote for violin and piano.” During her time at Civitella, Montgomery completed a new work for percussion quartet to be premiered at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in November in Indianapolis. She is also at work on a new percussion concerto for Cynthia Yeh, principal percussionist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Montgomery said she is looking forward to returning to Bard after this productive summer: “It will feel good to return to the academic year with new perspectives on my work and stronger connection to and understanding of our work.”

“My time at Civitella Ranieri has been wonderful,” said Sanchez, assistant professor of music. “Many Bard faculty have been fellows, and I’m happy to add my name to the list.” While at Civitella, Sanchez worked on a commission from the Jazz Gallery, to premiere this September. She is also at work on a piece for solo piano to debut in 2024. To have a Bard connection so far from home was not something she’d expected. “It was a nice surprise to meet Jesse Montgomery,” Sanchez said. “Her artistry inspired me to compose a piece for her that we will premiere at Civitella Ranieri.” Like Montgomery, Sanchez is excited about the prospect of translating her experience as a fellow back to Bard: “Having this uninterrupted time to work and develop my ideas has been invaluable to me, and I’m looking forward to sharing my experience at Civitella with Bard students.”

Sarah Hennies, visiting assistant professor of music at Bard College, has been awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Hennies, who is a composer, received an emergency grant to support her premiere of two major compositions at the Darmstadt Summer Festival in Darmstadt, Germany, with performances in August. Hennies participated in the Darmstadt Summer Course, where her two new hour-long works were each premiered. French ensemble Dedalus performed Hennies’ Motor Tapes, a work inspired by findings of neuroscientists Oliver Sacks and Rodolfo Llinás, the latter who “speaks of ‘motor tapes’ in connection with our motoric memory and compares it with neuronal processes underlying human creativity.” Hennies’ other new work, Borrowed Light, written for and performed by New York string ensemble Mivos String Quartet, “derives from a technique developed by American Shakers to install windows in interior walls of buildings to let in light from adjacent rooms with exterior windows.” 

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) was founded by John Cage, Jasper Johns, and other artists in 1963 with a mission to encourage, sponsor, and promote innovative work in the arts created and presented by individuals, groups, and organizations working in dance, music/sound, performance art/theater, poetry, and the visual arts. FCA’s Emergency Grants provide urgent funding for visual and performing artists who have sudden, unanticipated opportunities to present their work to the public when there is insufficient time to seek other sources of funding, or who are set to incur unexpected or unbudgeted expenses for projects close to completion with committed exhibition or performance dates. Emergency Grants is the only active, multidisciplinary program that offers immediate, project-based assistance of this kind to artists living and working anywhere in the United States, for projects occurring in the US and abroad.

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

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

Read the Conversation in Lenscratch

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

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

Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts Joan Tower discusses more than 60 years of composing music, her inspirations (including visitations from dead composers), the changing landscape for women in composition, and her long tenure of teaching music at Bard with NPR’s music producer Tom Huizenga. When asked to describe her music, Tower confesses that it is hard to know one’s music but she can describe what she cares about. “My music is about rhythm, predominantly, the rhythm of ideas. And it's also organic, and it has a large-scale narrative. Usually, I only write in one movement, so I try to create an overall architecture for that one moment. It's also very important for me to be clear: I don't think my music ever gets complicated enough that you don't hear everything,” she says.

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, will represent the United States at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte in 2024. Gibson, who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is one of the first Indigenous artists to represent the country at the Biennale. The Biennale Arte 2024 is being curated by Adriano Pedrosa, who received this year’s CCS Bard Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. Gibson told the New York Times: “The last 15 years of my career have been about turning inward and trying to make something I really wanted to see in the world. Now I want to expand the way people think about Indigeneity.” According to the Times, the artist’s Hudson Valley studio is working on a multimedia installation and performances that will open in April 2024 and be titled “the space in which to place me,” referring to a poem by Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation.

“[W]ell staged and excitingly sung, Henri VIII revealed itself as a grand and compelling, often thrilling work that deserves a more frequent spot on stages,” writes Zachary Woolfe in his critic’s pick review for the New York Times. “The piece has been treated lovingly at Bard, in a vibrant but restrained staging by Jean-Romain Vesperini.” Popular in its day but rarely performed now, Saint-Saëns’s 1883 opera focuses on Henry’s break with the Catholic Church, the end of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and his love for Anne Boleyn. The production opened last Friday at the Fisher Center as part of the 20th anniversary SummerScape season. Performances run through Sunday, July 30. 
 

On Friday, August 4, the Bard Music Festival returns with an intensive two-week exploration of “Vaughan Williams and His World.” In 11 themed concert programs, the festival’s 33rd season examines the great but frequently misunderstood English and Welsh composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of the 20th century’s preeminent symphonists, contextualizing the composer among his fellow Victorians, Edwardians, and Moderns (Weekend One: August 4–6), and exploring his role in creating what may be considered A New Elizabethan Age? (Weekend Two: August 10–13). Complemented by two special events in nearby Rhinebeck, these concerts take place in the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts on Bard College’s idyllic Hudson River campus. New Yorkers can take round-trip bus transportation to the final concert (see details below), and home audiences around the world can enjoy livestreams of Programs 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, and 11 on Upstreaming, the Fisher Center’s virtual stage. A centerpiece of the 20th Bard SummerScape festival, the Bard Music Festival also represents a highlight of the Fisher Center’s landmark 20th anniversary season, “Breaking Ground.”

“One of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture” (NYC Arts, THIRTEEN/WNET), festival founder and co-artistic director Leon Botstein is music director of both the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra, The Orchestra Now (TŌN). For his first, livestreamed ASO appearance, Botstein leads two late Vaughan Williams symphonies – the darkly atmospheric Seventh (“Sinfonia Antartica”), a work scored for vast forces, and the award-winning, vividly orchestrated Eighth – as well as music by Jean Sibelius, William Walton and Vaughan Williams’s woefully underrated student Elizabeth Maconchy [Program 9]. Botstein and the ASO also give a livestreamed performance of Vaughan Williams’s Shakespearean comic opera, Sir John in Love, starring bass-baritone Craig Colclough as Falstaff alongside sopranos Brandie Sutton and Ann Toomey, mezzo-sopranos Lucy Schaufer and Sarah Saturnino, tenor Joshua Blue, and the Bard Festival Chorale in a rare, semi-staged production by Alison Moritz [Program 11]. The director explains:

“In creating a concert staging of this bucolic comedy for Bard, I wanted to lean into the festival atmosphere of Bard in the summertime. … The gentle humor in this lyric comedy of manners comes from misunderstandings between the sexes and between classes, and I wanted to make sure that these themes would be immediately enjoyable by today’s audiences. So, instead of setting the story in Elizabethan Windsor, we have created a summer holiday inspired by English humorist P.G. Wodehouse’s classic Blandings countryside – filled with tea and crumpets, lawn games, cocktail parties, savvy servants, and plus-fours.”

Botstein conducts TŌN in performances of Vaughan Williams’s famed Tallis Fantasia and neo-classical D-minor Violin Concerto, featuring Naumburg Competition winner Grace Park [Program 1], as well as three of the composer’s mature orchestral works: Job, A Masque for Dancing; the seldom-programmed, blisteringly uncompromisingly Fourth Symphony; and the C-major Piano Concerto, in a two-piano arrangement showcasing festival favorites Danny Driver, a Gramophone Award nominee, and Piers Lane, for whom “no praise could be high enough” (Gramophone) [Program 3]. Led by James Bagwell and Zachary Schwartzman, TŌN also gives livestreamed accounts of music by British composers Frederick Delius, Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Peter Warlock, and Grace Williams, together with Vaughan Williams’s Five Variants of “Dives and Lazarus” for harp and strings; The Lark Ascending, featuring violinist Bella Hristova, “a player of impressive power and control” (Washington Post); and the seldom programmed Flos Campi, the composer’s sensuous, wordless setting of erotic verses from the biblical Song of Solomon, with Tokyo Competition winner Luosha Fang as viola soloist [Program 7].

The festival’s chamber highlights include accounts of both Vaughan Williams’s Second String Quartet [Program 8], and Samuel Barber’s Serenade [Program 10] by the Grammy-winning Parker Quartet. The Horszowski Trio – “the most compelling American group to come on the scene” (New Yorker) – performs “Per aspera ad astra,” the tightly constructed Third Piano Trio by Vaughan Williams’s teacher Charles Villiers Stanford, and the Cleveland Quartet Award-winning Ariel Quartet joins Grammy-nominated clarinetist Todd Palmer for the Clarinet Quintet by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whom Stanford considered his most gifted pupil [Program 2]. With Danny Driver, members of the group also undertake Herbert Howells’s Piano Quartet, one of the great masterworks of British impressionism [Program 5]. “One of New York’s finest organists” (New York Times), Renée Anne Louprette plays the newly renovated organ of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in nearby Rhinebeck, where the festival makes its first foray off-campus with two special programs of “Music for School, Parish, and Home.”

As in previous seasons, all choral works showcase the Bard Festival Chorale and James Bagwell. Hailed as “one of the high points of every Bard Festival” (New York Arts), this season’s annual choral program also represents the second special event at Rhinebeck’s Episcopal Church of the Messiah. Surveying 350 years of English choral music in the ecclesiastical environment for which it was written, “The Anglican Choral Tradition” features composers ranging from William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons to Howells and Benjamin Britten, interspersed with organ works by Vaughan Williams and Ethel Smyth.

Soprano Katherine Lerner Lee, mezzo-soprano Hailey McAvoy, tenor Maximillian Jansen, and baritone Tyler Duncan trace the evolution of a uniquely British sound in “Heirs and Rebels: British Art Songs,” a concert with commentary by Scholar-in-Residence Byron Adams [Program 4]. Similarly, soprano Ann Toomey, mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, tenor Martin Luther Clark, and baritone Theo Hoffman offer an entertaining and wholly original tour through half a century of British light music, in a concert with commentary by award-winning author Christina Baade [Program 6]. Other vocal highlights include a rendition of Vaughan Williams’s beloved song cycle On Wenlock Edge by three-time Grammy-nominated tenor Nicholas Phan, “one of the world’s most remarkable singers” (Boston Globe) [Program 5].

Supplementary events and companion book
Besides the eleven concert programs and two special events, there will be two free panel discussions – “Composer and Nation” and “The Artist in Time of War” – and a series of informative pre-concert talks, all free to ticket-holders, by scholars including Christina Bashford, Michael Beckerman, Daniel M. Grimley, Imani Danielle Mosley, Philip Rupprecht, Eric Saylor, Tiffany Stern, and Richard Wilson. SummerScape and ASO also present the first major American production of Saint-Saëns’s Henri VIII, a French grand opera set in Tudor England (July 21–30). Edited by Bard’s 2023 Scholars-in-Residence Byron Adams, a contributor to both the Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams and Vaughan Williams Studies, and Daniel M. Grimley, Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, the companion book Vaughan Williams and His World is published by the University of Chicago Press.

Round-trip bus transportation from New York City
Chartered coach transportation from New York City is available for the festival finale, Program Eleven (August 13). This may be ordered online or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900, and the meeting point for pick-up and drop-off is at Lincoln Center on Amsterdam Avenue, between 64th and 65th Streets. More information is available here.

SummerScape tickets
Tickets for mainstage events start at $25 and livestreams are $20. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.

Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Ashley Tata’s production of “Farming,” a choral work by composer and Pulitzer finalist Ted Hearnes, was featured in NPR and reviewed in the New York Times as a Critic’s Pick. The nine-part song cycle, performed by the vocalists of the Crossing chamber choir, explores issues of colonialism, marketing, and consumption, and addresses food supply in the US, the business of big agriculture today, and the country’s Indigenous farmers. “The libretto pulls not only from Jeff Bezos and William Penn, but also the social media feed of Uber Eats and the FAQ page for a startup called Farmer's Fridge,” says Nate Chinen for NPR. “The direction, by Ashley Tata, really leaned into the surreal—the singers wore bright neon costumes and the lighting cues and choreography all played up this idea of a complex machine gone totally haywire.”

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) is pleased to present Stage Presence, the thesis exhibition of the Class of 2024. The exhibition brings together 23 distinct practices from candidates in the disciplines of film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. Stage Presence will be on view from July 15 through July 23 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook, New York, and evening presentations of time-based works—such as performances, readings and screenings—will be held at several locations on Bard’s campus. An opening reception will also be held on July 15, from 1 pm to 4 pm. For more information about exhibition hours, presentation locations, and accessibility, please visit bard.edu/mfa/thesis.

In its standard usage, the phrase “stage presence” refers to a performer’s capacity to command the attention of a room. The phrase was also used by art critic Michael Fried in 1967 to condemn minimalist artists’ rejection of modernist artistic values of autonomy and absorption. In Fried’s account the minimalists instead embraced “the situation” in which an art object and viewer existed together, reflexively confronting an audience with their relationship to viewing. Following Fried’s essay, the phrase has had many more lives within artistic contexts, from a postmodern reclamation to a contemporary embrace of its more commonplace associations.
 
When taken together, the distinct artistic practices of the Bard MFA Class of 2024 resonate with issues of stage presence. Experimentation with display structures; activations of text in space; investigations into mapping and absence; disruption of voice and conventional notions of authorship; emphasis on the scale of the body; and integration of theatrical techniques such as props or backdrops are just a few of the strategies by which these artists explore modes of presence, viewership, and relationality.

The Bard MFA thesis exhibition features works by MFA candidates Kaur Alia Ahmed, June Canedo de Souza, Francesse Dolbrice, Camonghne Felix, Christina Graham, Tallulah Haddon, Lara Carmen Hidalgo, Sam Lasko, Khan Lee, Lotte Leerschool, Eli Benjamin Neuman-Hammond, Mira Putnam, Anna Roberts-Gevalt, Natalia Rolón Sotelo, Francie Seidl Chodosh, Sydney Spann, Allie Taylor, Lauren Tosswill, Nora Treatbaby, Marty Two Bulls Jr., Sam Wenc, Alexa West, and Drew Zeiba.

Stage Presence is coordinated by Marina Caron (MA ’23), a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Caron is a curator, writer and researcher based in New York City. Her thesis exhibition, Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass, focused on the work of the prolific and under-recognized artist Bettina Grossman (b. New York, 1927; d. New York, 2021).

Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, is showcasing works in several exhibitions this summer, including solo shows at the Aspen Art Museum and Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco. He is also featured in Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, a standout group show at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. His exhibitions are among a number of shows highlighting Indigenous American artists this summer. “These shows, as well as several thematic group exhibitions, create a moment of recognition for contemporary Indigenous art, providing historical context for the work being made today,” writes Annabel Keenan for Artsy. “I am glad to see a greater recognition that all Indigenous artists are unique and come from different cultural perspectives,” said Gibson, who is Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee. “I see an increase in the understanding of Indigenous makers, their intentions and their cultural perspectives, but there is so far to go. I’d like to think that these artists are being treated more as individuals rather than representative of a large and more general Indigenous community.”

The Fisher Center at Bard has become an incubator for commercially promising new work like Justin Peck’s Illinois, while holding tight to its experimental roots.
For the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler visits Bard’s Fisher Center in its 20th anniversary season, on the heels of a sold-out, extended run of Illinois, to talk with Fisher Center Artistic Director Gideon Lester, Illinois director Justin Peck, choreographer Pam Tanowitz, President Leon Botstein, and others about the Fisher Center’s past and future. “Since opening 20 years ago,” she writes, “the center’s Frank Gehry building has emerged as a hothouse for the creation of uncompromising, cross-disciplinary, and sometimes hard to describe hits.”

The Fisher Center at Bard (Gideon Lester, artistic director and chief executive; Aaron Mattocks, chief operating officer) today announces that, in partnership with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA), it has received a $2,000,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support the work and livelihood of Tania El Khoury, a commissioned artist and guest cocurator at the Fisher Center, founding director of CHRA, and a distinguished artist in residence at Bard’s Theater & Performance Program. El Khoury’s live art engages the audience in close encounters with narratives drawn from the political realities of borders, displacement, and state violence. The grant will support her live art production and touring, her scholarly and artistic research, and her curatorial work at the Fisher Center and CHRA.

Over the next three years, the Fisher Center and El Khoury will re-imagine the collaboration between an institution and an artist and will develop ways in which an institution becomes a holistic home for an artist. El Khoury’s relationship with Bard began in 2017, when Gideon Lester, the Fisher Center’s Artistic Director and Chief Executive, invited her to co-curate Where No Wall Remains, the 2019 edition of the institution’s biennial festival, which focused that year on the subject of borders and comprised eight new interdisciplinary artworks commissioned by El Khoury and Lester. El Khoury created a new work of her own for the festival, Cultural Exchange Rate, a multi-sensory performance installation that invites the audience to follow her own family’s relationship to borders and migration across a century of time. Cultural Exchange Rate continues to tour internationally in various languages, as do several other works by El Khoury.
                                                                                               
While developing Where No Wall Remains, El Khoury and Lester began to imagine a longer collaboration. Their work on the biennial led them, along with Tom Keenan, Director of the Human Rights Program at Bard, to envision a center that explores art practices that intersect with human rights advocacy through public programming and an international low-cost MA Program in Human Rights & the Arts. In 2021, the three of them, along with scholar Ziad Abu-Rish, founded the Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA), which is funded by the Open Society University Network (OSUN). El Khoury directs CHRA while continuing to pursue her artistic practice and teaching.  
             
Lester and El Khoury have continued their curatorial work together with a second joint edition of the biennial, Common Ground: an international festival on the politics of land and food, produced by the Fisher Center in two installments: October 2022 and May 2023. In this festival, El Khoury premiered her work Memory of Birds, an interactive sound installation in the trees around the Fisher Center that evoked the imprint of political violence on contested lands. Common Ground also included three international editions, curated by artists in Palestine, Colombia, and South Africa, all of which were funded by CHRA.

Tania El Khoury said, “This generous grant from Mellon Foundation comes at a time when the live performance industry is experiencing a fundamental restructuring due to the recent pandemic and major shifts in public and private funding streams. The grant will allow me to further pursue my artistic and curatorial practices, deepen my experimentation with new models of collaboration and institution-building, and reflect on my trajectory as an artist working at the intersection of politics and research.”

The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant makes it possible for the Fisher Center and CHRA to offer El Khoury tangible resources to develop and disseminate ambitious, forward-thinking work, of her own and by other artists. This new model of artist-institution engagement follows the Fisher Center awarding Pam Tanowitz an ongoing residency in which the institution has taken over touring (of work including Four Quartets and Song of Songs, which the Fisher Center commissioned and premiered to immense acclaim) and other administrative support for her company, including a salary for Tanowitz. The Mellon grant helps the Fisher Center become an artistic home for El Khoury, providing resources in three key areas:

• Practice
• Infrastructure
• Livelihood

Gideon Lester says, “We are delighted to be partnering with Mellon to develop a new, comprehensive model of support for Tania that will allow her not only to create and disseminate her work, but to live an artist’s life with dignity. Tania is a visionary artist, curator, and thought leader, and it’s an honor for us to be able to help steward her creative practice and research. Institutions of higher learning have an essential role to play in the country’s artistic infrastructure. Mellon’s visionary philanthropy will help deepen and extend the Fisher Center’s commitment to long-term, holistic support for artists’ practice, infrastructure, and livelihood.” 

The $2,000,000 Mellon Foundation grant comes amid a banner 20th anniversary year for the Fisher Center. The institution is currently producing its 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, including the 2023 Bard SummerScape festival, which also celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The season culminates in a groundbreaking ceremony, on October 21, for The Fisher Center’s new 25,000-square-foot performing arts studio building, designed by Maya Lin, which will offer artists at all stages of their careers vastly expanded room to explore as they build works from the ground up. 

About Tania El Khoury
Tania El Khoury creates interactive and immersive installations and performances that reflect on the production of collective memory and the cultivation of solidarity. Her work is activated by tactile, auditory and visual traces collected and curated by the artist and her collaborators, and they are ultimately transformed through audience interaction.

El Khoury’s work has been translated to multiple languages and shown in 33 countries across 6 continents in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She is the recipient of the Herb Alpert Award, the Soros Art Fellowship, the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award.

El Khoury is a Distinguished Artist in Residence at the Theater and Performance Program and Founding Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College. She holds a PhD in Theater Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. El Khoury is a co-founder of Dictaphone Group, a research and live art collective in Lebanon, and is associated with the Forest Fringe collective of artists in the UK.
taniaelkhoury.com
instagram.com/taniaelk