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Executive Director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Hannah Barrett’s current exhibition at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, features paintings of “dandy monsters”—sartorial nongendered creatures from the artist’s imagination set in both bureaucratic and fantastical scenery. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven Barrett’s painting for over a decade, leading to their current portraits of these whimsical monsters. “Barrett’s monsters subvert the gender binary by combining masculine dandy finery with high femme elements; the paintings serve up a new representation of the nonbinary (as in both ‘not subscribing to binaries’ and ‘my gender is none of your business’),” writes Shelley Marlow for Hyperallergic.  

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, an experimental documentary by filmmaker and Bard MFA alumnus Todd Haynes, showcased a very different type of Barbie narrative from the Greta Gerwig film now topping the box office. “To a certain slice of the Gen X cognoscenti, ‘the Barbie movie’ will always and forever refer to a very different film, one both notorious and barely seen,” writes Jessica Winter for the New Yorker. Made in the summer of 1985 when he was still a student at Bard, Haynes used Barbie dolls to portray the life of musician Karen Carpenter, from her rise to fame as part of the successful duo the Carpenters and throughout her descent into anorexia and her death at age 32. The film “begins as a droll prank and then tilts, almost imperceptibly, into surreal domestic nightmare and, finally, authentic tragedy,” Winter continues. “It was sui generis in both its execution and, arguably, its reception.”