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Amber Esseiva (CCS Bard ’15) to Receive CCS Bard Alumni Award

Awardees to be Honored at CCS Bard’s Spring 2025 Gala

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) announces Gridthiya Gaweewong as the recipient of its 2025 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.

Currently the artistic director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, Gaweewong has dedicated her career to championing contemporary Thai artists and developing a curatorial practice addressing the social transformation faced by artists from Thailand and beyond following the Cold War. An independent panel of leading curators, artists, and museum directors selected Gaweewong to receive the annual award, which is accompanied by a $25,000 prize and was launched in 1998 to honor the outstanding achievements of curators who bring innovative thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition-making.

“Gridthiya’s curatorial approach, which subverts institutional narratives in lieu of artist-led and personal perspectives, embodies the innovative contributions to the curatorial field CCS Bard aims to recognize with this award,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

In addition to Gaweewong, CCS Bard recognizes curator and educator Amber Esseiva (Class of ’15) with the 2025 CCS Bard Alumni Award. As Acting Senior Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) and former Curator-at-Large at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Esseiva develops exhibitions that center emerging, mid-career, and underrecognized artists. Established in 2023, CCS Bard awards this $10,000 prize to honor outstanding graduates who demonstrate sustained innovation and engagement with exhibition-making, public education, and research in the field of curation.

Gaweewong and Esseiva will accept their awards at CCS Bard’s Spring 2025 gala celebration and dinner on April 7, 2025. The event, which is chaired by the CCS Bard Board of Governors, will be held in New York City at The Lighthouse at Pier 61.

“I’m deeply honored to receive this award and thank the esteemed committee. This milestone manifests the collaborative efforts of my family, friends, artists, mentors, and vibrant art community in Thailand, the region, and beyond,” said Gaweewong. “It inspires me to curate passionately, trusting art’s power to foster resilience and meaningful societal change."

“It brings me so much joy to receive this recognition from CCS Bard, an institution that has had such a profound impact on my work and career. It was at CCS that I first developed my passion for collaborating with artists and colleagues to produce new works of art,” said Esseiva. “To be acknowledged by so many talented alumni I admire, is both humbling and truly meaningful to me.”

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) announces Gridthiya Gaweewong as the recipient of its 2025 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.

Bard alumna Lotus L. Kang MFA ’15 was included in the New York Times’s list of breakout stars of 2024. Nominated for her sculpture and site-responsive artwork, Kang was included as one of “10 artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans this year.” Kang has taught sculpture at Bard and has exhibited at galleries including the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hessel Museum of Art, and the New Museum.

Kang’s 2024 exhibits included In Cascades at the Whitney Biennial, featuring sculptures made from purposefully exposed film, and Receiver Transmitter, a greenhouse located at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto. The Times reviewed In Cascades last year, calling it “a richly sedimented, beautifully vulnerable installation in a perpetual state of becoming.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/arts/breakout-stars-2024-music-tv-movies.html

The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) and Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching Program (MAT) have been awarded their fourth grant to imbed digitized Library of Congress primary sources into their programming for teachers and students. Bard MAT and IWT are known for their innovative strategies in supporting literacy instruction across disciplines through writing-based, student-centered teaching practices. The latest grant of $74,911, awarded under the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program, supports their collaborative one-year project “Mapping Boundaries: Writing to Read Primary Sources in Middle School Classrooms.”

The Bard MAT/IWT project will make use of the vast archival resources of the Library of Congress in professional development workshops that model how to apply writing-to-read and writing-to-learn strategies to primary sources in ELA, Social Studies, and STEM classrooms. The project will develop a workshop series for teachers, teachers-in-training, and middle school and high school students, focused on an interdisciplinary collection of sources (historical surveys, maps, and representations of the American landscape). The primary goal of the workshops is to offer writing-based strategies to help students delve into texts that might feel daunting and inaccessible and to give them tools to slow down their reading and uncover surprising connections and meaning.
 
Proposed workshops include one-day events during the school year, programming in the MAT summer semester, and an intensive weeklong workshop that will be offered within IWT’s popular and long-running July Weeklong Workshop series. Some workshops will be held in person on Bard College’s campus in New York’s Hudson Valley; some will be held online.

The focus of the project is to revise and expand their current program of Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS)–centered training workshops and pre-service education courses and more fully circulate the materials created in these workshops for educators. IWT’s current Library of Congress–focused workshops will be revised specifically for middle school classrooms, with skills-building exercises in reading and writing critically, and the resources made widely available to middle school educators. Modeling classroom activities that stimulate middle school students’ engagement with language, ideas, and archival sources, these workshops will be held on the Bard campus, online, and in middle schools partnered with Bard MAT. Bard will use its established networks, promotional forums, and targeted advertising to attract middle school teachers as workshop participants. Newly-developed middle school lesson plans and primary source sets will be posted on a new section of the IWT website, as will videos from sixth through ninth grade teachers demonstrating writing-based teaching with primary sources inspired by the Bard workshops they’ve attended. In required laboratory classes, MAT will train education degree candidates in archival literacy instruction for middle school ELA and Social Studies classes. MAT history students will revise the chapter of a textbook, supplemented by a curated set of primary sources and archival materials. These primary source sets will be integral to Capstone Projects by MAT degree candidates, and archived in the Bard Library Digital Commons as searchable Open Educational Resources and cross-posted to the TPS Consortium Created Materials site: https://tpsconsortiumcreatedmaterials.org/
 
To inform this work, participants will draw on Library of Congress sources such as historical city maps, stereopticon photographs of Lower East Side street vendors, abolitionist posters, and 1920s Edison films. Sources might include Army Corps of Engineers maps and surveys of the Mississippi River flood plains, Native American paintings, and photographs of 19th-century utopian communities, for example. Reading primary sources poses particular literacy challenges for students—whether because of challenging language, unfamiliar visual conventions, or simply because (unlike many texts that students encounter in the classroom) primary sources were not written or produced with 21st-century students as their intended audiences. The writing-to-learn and writing-to-read strategies, modeled in the IWT and MAT workshops, help teachers guide students through encounters with challenging texts. Writing-to-learn and writing-to-read strategies are particularly empowering when students use them to navigate and decipher historical and primary sources, helping them to find unexpected layers of meaning and interpret unfamiliar data.

Bard College IWT/MAT have previously been awarded three TPS Regional grants in 2019, 2020, and 2021 for the projects “The World of the Poem: Teaching Poetry through Primary Sources,” “‘If Woman Upset the World’: Reading and Writing Women Activists of the Hudson Valley,” and the four-year “Mapping Unknowns: Writing to Read Primary Sources.” These successful projects operated through the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Regional Grant Program.

A New Day, a cello concerto released in 2021 by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard College, was featured in Times Union. The work, which began as a commission by the Colorado Music Festival, Cleveland Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, was written while Jeff Litfin, her late husband of 50 years, was dying. “I was in real bad shape,” Tower said. “So I decided to write. In fact, all the music I've been writing since then is about him.” The concerto, which will be performed by Albany Symphony in Troy on November 16 and 17, contains four movements: “Daybreak,” “Working Out,” “Mostly Alone” and “Into the Night.” The titles are intentionally simple, allowing for many interpretations of a single day, she told Times Union.
https://www.timesunion.com/music/article/joan-tower-gets-personal-a-new-day-albany-19893271.php

In conversation for Bomb magazine, Bard alumnae and visual artists Adriana Farmiga MFA ’04 and Fawn Krieger MFA ’05, who lectured together at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for nearly a decade and now both teach at the Cooper Union School of Art, discussed Farmiga’s new body of work. The AVATAR series features scaled up wooden plywood sculptures described by Farmiga as masks or protest posters, currently on view at Marisa Newman Projects gallery in New York. “A mask allows an individual to lose or transcend their identity, while protest posters serve to signal one’s belief systems or demands,” Farmiga told Krieger. “Both function as barriers between the individual and the world; both peddle in anonymity and identification. In my hybridized version, the scaled-up form of the protest poster on a stick also assumes the role of a mask or shape of a sentient being.”
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/10/21/adriana-farmiga-by-fawn-krieger/

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

Bard MFA Faculty in Moving Image Tony Cokes has been named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow. Cokes, a media artist, is one of this year’s 22 recipients of the prestigious “genius grant” awarded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In a statement about his work, the MacArthur Foundation says, “Tony Cokes is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks. Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.”

The MacArthur Fellowship is a no-strings-attached award to 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. Fourteen Bard faculty members have previously been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship.

Tony Cokes received a BA from Goddard College (1979) and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (1985). He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. He is a Bard MFA faculty member in the Moving Image Discipline and was a Bard MFA visiting artist in 2022. His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2024/tony-cokes

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

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

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and Bard College’s Human Rights Project announce architect and architectural historian Valentina Rozas-Krause as the 2024–25 recipient of the Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism. The appointment marks a decade since the fellowship was established in 2014 as an annual award bringing prominent scholars, activists, and artists to teach and conduct research on Bard’s campus. To date, the position has supported a diverse roster of artists, poets, theorists, journalists, and practitioners advancing sociopolitical engagement in their respective fields.

Rozas-Krause’s research interests lie at the intersection of the built environment and global cultural practices across the Americas and Europe. An assistant professor in design and architecture at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile, Rozas-Krause has written on strategies of oppression; resistance and memory within varying urban contexts; the absence of women in the global memorial landscape; colonialism’s sustained presence in the built environment; and the social, historic, and political dynamics of place more broadly.

As the 2024–25 Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism at Bard College, Rozas-Krause will work on her book Memorials and the Cult of Apology, which examines the role that memorials play in processes of symbolic and material reparation after political conflicts. Following a series of case studies in Berlin and Buenos Aires, the book builds an empirical and theoretical understanding of multiple aspects of apology and memorialization, their material forms, the actors involved, and the diverse effects that built apologies can produce.

“Valentina’s research unearthing the layers and complex symbols embedded in the built environment enables a deeper reading of the world around us,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. “We look forward to having her on campus, where she will engage students in this critical study of the urban landscape, complementing and building on the rigorous examination of art objects and curatorial practices within CCS Bard’s program.”

“To interpret memorials in all their political complexity requires a combination of aesthetic and historical knowledge that few scholars possess,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard’s Human Rights Project. “Valentina is a remarkable exception to that rule. Her work offers genuinely new insights into a carefully-chosen range of material objects and into the larger question of what can happen at the intersection between human rights and the arts.”

The 10th anniversary of the Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism follows CCS Bard’s announcement this year of a new 12,000-square-foot addition to its library and archives named in recognition of a lead, $3M gift from the Keith Haring Foundation. The new Keith Haring Wing, expected to be completed in late 2025, builds on a longstanding partnership with CCS Bard and the Keith Haring Foundation, including the permanent endowment of the Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism in 2022. More information on previous appointees can be found at ccs.bard.edu.

Artist Brandon Ndife MFA ’20, whose first solo exhibition, Clearance, is on view at Greene Naftali gallery in Chelsea, was profiled in the New York Times. “His art reminds its viewers that nature—even in the face of civilization—has an ultimately ungovernable power,” writes Zoë Hopkins. Ndife’s otherworldly creations fuse forms that resemble domestic objects, such as furniture, with elements derived from the natural world to evoke the sense of wild growth overtaking built environments. “They’re interchangeable to me, the native and the natural,” Ndife said. “There’s a mutiny that can happen in the work. I describe the sculptures as struggling to be, struggling to take hold in their environment. And I think that’s our story as Black people.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/21/arts/design/brandon-ndife-greene-naftali-art.html

Bard alumna Micah Gleason GCP ’21 VAP ’22 was profiled in the New York Times for a piece which for a year followed five students attending the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Gleason is “an easygoing yet fiercely skilled conductor and singer,” writes Joshua Barone for the Times. “On the eve of graduation, Gleason presented a workshop performance of a chamber opera she was developing with Joanne Evans, a former classmate from Bard College and her duo partner.” The Curtis Institute of Music educates and trains exceptionally gifted young musicians to engage a local and global community through the highest level of artistry. Students at Curtis hone their craft through more than 200 orchestra, opera, and solo and chamber music offerings and programs, bringing arts access and education to the community.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/04/arts/music/curtis-institute-music-philadelphia.html

For the fourth year in a row, the MBA in Sustainability Program at Bard College has been ranked as the Best Green MBA in the Princeton Review’s 2024 Business School rankings. This year, Bard's program also ranked no. 1 in the Review‘s Best MBA for Nonprofits, surpassing the MBA programs at Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Stanford. The Review’s rankings follow on the Bard program’s recent no. 4 worldwide position in the Better World MBA global assessment.

The NYC-based Bard MBA has seen strong growth in demand for its unique educational program. Graduates are pursuing careers in both leading for-profit and nonprofit companies, where they are working to solve critical social and environmental challenges. 

“The Bard MBA’s overall focus on steering mission-driven organizations provides a powerful foundation for aspiring nonprofit leaders and managers,” said Unique Brathwaite, who anchors the nonprofit concentration at Bard. “Our graduates emerge with a profound understanding of prioritizing mission, while also ensuring the long-term financial viability of their organizations.”
 
The Review’s honors were based primarily on a survey of more than 20,300 students enrolled at 244 US MBA programs during the past several academic years. The student survey asked students more than 90 questions about their school's academics, student body, and campus life, as well as their career plans. Only 28% the 244 On-Campus MBA Programs appeared in one or more of The Review’s 18 ranking lists: Bard and Stanford were the only MBAs to receive two no. 1 rankings in 2024.
https://leadthechange.bard.edu/blog/bards-mba-in-sustainability-ranked-1-green-mba-for-fourth-straight-year

Jacquelyn Stucker ’13, an alumna of Bard’s Graduate Vocal Arts Program, was reviewed in the New York Times for her role as Delilah in the opera Samson at the Aix-en-Provence festival. Samson, a never-performed opera by Voltaire and Rameau, two of Enlightenment France’s most important cultural figures, was performed as an updated production with pieces drawn from other Rameau works to replace the original score, which was lost some 250 years ago. The Aix production “retains the hypnotic continuity of Rameau’s complete operas, their steadiness and also their variety, veering from festive to soulful, from raucous dances to hushed, hovering arias and radiant choruses,” writes Zachary Woolfe for the New York Times.  “The mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre (Timna) and the soprano Jacquelyn Stucker (Dalila) are both exquisitely sensitive in their floating music.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/08/arts/music/samson-pichon-guth-aix-festival-rameau-voltaire.html

The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College has appointed Pavlina R. Tcherneva as its next president, succeeding Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, who has held the role since its founding in 1986.

“After 38 years as president of the Levy Institute, the time has come to pass the baton to the new generation,” Papadimitriou announced. “I can think of no one better than Pavlina to lead the Levy Institute into its next phase of development in exploring solutions to the economic challenges that lie ahead.” Papadimitriou will remain at the Institute as president emeritus and senior scholar.

Tcherneva, who first joined the Levy Institute in 1997 as a forecasting fellow, has been a scholar at the Institute since 2007, specializing in modern money and public policy. She is a professor of economics at Bard College and founding director of the Bard-OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative. Her book The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity 2020), one of the Financial Times economics books of 2020 and published in nine languages, is a timely guide to the benefits of one of the most transformative public policies being discussed today.

“I am honored and energized to take this new role and am grateful to Dimitri Papadimitriou for building a world-class institution that has influenced economic policy in the US and abroad. I am especially excited to support the work of my colleagues whose research has placed the Levy Institute among the most-cited non-profits in the world,” stated Tcherneva. “My mission is clear: to continue to curate cutting-edge research, grow our graduate programs, and amplify the Institute's impact on policy. We have produced some of the most influential work on financial instability, money, inequality, gender, and employment policy and we will continue to make these impacts and expand the Institute's reach.”

She added, “Our work matters. Financial markets crash. Mainstream theories fail. At the Levy Economics Institute, we will continue to do what we do best: make sense of the senseless, find patterns in the chaos of global economics, and produce actionable policies for a safe, sustainable, and stable economy.”

Since 1986, the Levy Institute and its scholars have reinvigorated heterodox economics, with contributions to macroeconomic theory, modeling, and policy targeting financial and economic stability for the US economy and the rest of the world. The Levy Institute has also developed a distinct research program on the distribution of income and wealth featuring two measures of economic well-being (LIMEW) and time and income poverty (LIMTIP) that will help shift official measures of living standards in the years ahead; is one of few institutions with a focus on gender equality and the economy; and has graduated scholars from its MA and MS degree programs in Economic Theory and Policy, who go on to play significant roles in economic think tanks, international organizations, governments, and the world of finance.