News and Events

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.

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

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents Off Site, the Class of 2025 thesis performances and exhibition, which brings together the culminating work of third-year MFA candidates in the disciplines of moving image, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. This year, the exhibition will be split between two galleries in Hudson, New York: Basilica Hudson and Time & Space Limited (TSL). The show is curated by Mary Fellios. The opening weekend of events will begin with a catered reception from 7–8 pm to open the Music/Sound student performances at Basilica Hudson on Thursday, July 11, 8–11 pm, as part of Basilica’s Jupiter Nights, a series of summer performances. Thesis projects in various disciplines will be on view in the galleries at Basilica Hudson and Time & Space Limited, opening on Friday, July 12 with opening receptions from 5–8 pm held concurrently at both locations. Film screenings and readings will be presented at TSL on Saturday, July 13, 1–4 pm, followed by a reception from 4–6 pm. The TSL galleries will be open during the reception. The gallery exhibitions will be on view through Sunday, July 21.

Off Site presents the work of Bard’s MFA Class of 2025. The title references the nature of this year’s exhibition as both a logistical reality and resilient methodology in which art activates pathways between malleable pasts and potential futures. Off Site marks a new era of openness for the program as this is the first Thesis Exhibition to occur off campus. It is staged across two venues in Hudson, New York, Time & Space Limited and Basilica Hudson.

Disruptions around the source of the authorial voice; the destabilization of boundaries separating real and artificial space; and forms of perceptual mapping are among the concerns that spark connections between the works on view. Off Site showcases 19 artists working across a variety of mediums—from painting to sound installation—alongside two nights of performances.

The Class of 2025
Jasmine Amussen (Writing)
Michaela Bathrick (Sculpture)
Erin Hoffstetter (Photography)
Jenny Jisun Kim (Painting)
Kinlaw (Music/Sound)
Alima Lee (Moving Image)
Matthew Li (Sculpture)
Tyler Little (Writing)
Carolyne Loreé Teston (Photography)
A. Mac (Sculpture)
Alina Maldonado (Music/Sound)
Chantal Michelle (Music/Sound)
Cherry Nin (Moving Image)
lucia reissig (Sculpture)
Will Stovall (Painting)
geetha thurairajah (Painting)
Taryn Tomasello (Sculpture)
Aynsley Vandenbroucke (Writing)
Grace Villamil (Music/Sound)

Mary Fellios is a curator who received their MA in Curatorial Studies from CCS Bard. They have completed research and worked on programs with Textile Arts Center (New York, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (San Diego, CA), Brooklyn Museum (New York, NY), Performa (New York, NY), and Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy, NY).

Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student — serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist-student engages with accomplished faculty members while developing their individual studio practice. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography and music/sound. Bard MFA is a low-residency program that takes place over two years and two months. Students are on campus for three consecutive eight-week summer sessions and off campus for two independent study sessions completed during the intervening winters.

For more information, please contact the Bard MFA Office at (845) 758-7481 or [email protected].

Off Site
Class of 2025 Bard MFA Thesis Exhibition
July 14–21, 2024

Basilica Hudson: Student Performances
Thursday, July 11, 2024: Reception 7–8 pm, Performances 8–11 pm

Opening Receptions at Basilica Hudson and Time & Space Limited
Friday, July 12, 2024: Reception 5–8 PM at both locations

Time & Space Limited: Student Performances and Screenings
Saturday, July 13, 2024: Performances 1–4 pm, Reception 4–6 pm

Basilica Hudson and Time & Space Limited Gallery Hours:
Monday–Friday, 11 am–5 pm | Saturday & Sunday, 1–5 pm
Basilica Hudson will be closed on Saturday, July 13

Basilica Hudson
110 Front Street, Hudson, NY 12534

Time & Space Limited
434 Columbia Street, Hudson, NY 12534

Hudson, New York is a 30-minute drive from the Bard College campus. Amtrak trains from New York City and points north stop at the Hudson Amtrak station. Please check Amtrak for schedules. The train station is a short walk to Basilica Hudson and about a 20-minute walk to Time & Space Limited.

Both Basilica Hudson and Time & Space Limited will be open during Upstate Art Weekend on Friday, July 21, 11 AM–5 PM, and Saturday & Sunday, 1–5 PM.

Please contact the Bard MFA Office at (845) 758-7481 or [email protected] for any questions or requests regarding accessibility, including audio or film descriptions.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship to Adam Shatz, visiting professor of the humanities at Bard College. Chosen through a rigorous review process from 3,000 applicants, Shatz was among 188 scholars, photographers, novelists, historians, and data scientists to receive a 2024 Fellowship. Bard MFA faculty and alumna Lotus Kang MFA ’15, and alumnae Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 and Ahndraya Parlato ’02 were also named Guggenheim Fellows for 2024. 

“Humanity faces some profound existential challenges,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The Guggenheim Fellowship is a life-changing recognition. It’s a celebrated investment into the lives and careers of distinguished artists, scholars, scientists, writers and other cultural visionaries who are meeting these challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so.”

In all, 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 84 academic institutions, 38 US states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in the 2024 class, who range in age from 28 to 89. More than 40 Fellows (roughly 1 out of 4) do not hold a full-time affiliation with a college or university. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to timely issues such as democracy and politics, identity, disability activism, machine learning, incarceration, climate change and community.

Created and initially funded in 1925, by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.” Since its establishment, the Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2024 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.

Adam Shatz, who will be working on a book about jazz throughout his Fellowship, is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and The Nation, among other publications. He is the author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) and Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso, 2023). He is also host of the podcast Myself with Others, produced by the pianist Richard Sears. His political reporting and commentary have covered subjects such as Trump and the white supremacists in Charlottesville, mass incarceration, Israel’s Putinization, the deep state, and Egypt after Mubarak. Published profiles and portraits include Franz Fanon and Michel Houellebecq (London Review of Books), Nina Simone (New York Review of Books), saxophonist Kamasi Washington (New York Times Magazine); French cartoonist Riad Sattouf (New Yorker); and jazz great Charles Mingus (The Nation). Shatz previously taught at New York University and was a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars.

Lotus Laurie Kang MFA ’15 works with sculpture, photography and site-responsive installation, exploring the body as an ongoing process. Combining theory, poetics and biography, her work takes a regurgitative approach rather than a prescriptive or reiterative one. Kang considers the multiplicitous, constructed nature of identity and the body and its knots to larger social structures through sculpture, architectural interventions and material innovations, and an expansive approach to photography where materials are often left in unfixed and continually sensitive states. Notable group exhibitions include Hessel Museum of Art, The New Museum, SculptureCenter, Cue Art Foundation, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Art Gallery of Ontario, Franz Kaka, Cooper Cole, Toronto; Remai Modern, Saskatoon; Misk Art Institute, Riyadh; Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana; and Camera Austria, Graz. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Mercer Union, Gallery TPW, Franz Kaka, Toronto; Oakville Galleries, Oakville, and Helena Anrather, Interstate Projects, New York. Artists residencies include Rupert, Vilnius; Tag Team, Bergen; The Banff Centre, Alberta; Triangle Arts Association and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; and Horizon Art Foundation, Los Angeles.

Katherine Hubbard MFA ’10 uses photography, writing and performance to plumb photography’s continuing significance. Considering analog photography as a mimesis of the body, Hubbard asks how its procedures might be called upon to investigate social politics, history, and narrative. In her photographs, the physical positioning of one’s body has an essential relationship to how one processes images, exploring this encounter as a time based experience. Hubbard’s writing practice forms the core of her performances, culling the malleability of vision to frame a politics of looking, bridging the imaginary with the familiar. She is currently Associate Professor and MFA Director at Carnegie Mellon University School of Art.

Ahndraya Parlato ’02 is an artist based in Rochester, New York. She has published three books, including Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, (Mack Books, 2021), A Spectacle and Nothing Strange, (Kehrer Verlag, 2016), East of the Sun, West of the Moon, (a collaboration with Gregory Halpern, Études Books, 2014). Additionally, she has contributed texts to Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Shoot (Aperture, 2021), and The Photographer's Playbook (Aperture, 2014). Parlato has exhibited work at Spazio Labo, Bologna, Italy; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Aperture Foundation, New York, New York; and The Swiss Institute, Milan, Italy. She has been awarded residencies at Light Work and The Visual Studies Workshop and was a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts Joy of Photography Grant recipient.

“I’m very interested in how truth and belief are created,” Kite, aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, told the Times Union. In a profile of Kite, published in conjunction with her inclusion in the 81st Whitney Biennial, Times reporter Michelle Falkenstein asked Kite about her artistic practice and pedagogy, including her embrace of AI in the creation of art. “We’re making art with dreams and AI,” Kite said. “I move and the computer translates that movement into sound.” Kite also spoke about her life in the Hudson Valley, including her teaching at Bard and her involvement with the Forge Project. “It’s made it wonderful to live here,” Kite said.

To celebrate the 81st edition of the Whitney Biennial, the New York Times sent three critics to report “on the highs and lows of the exhibition everyone will have an opinion about.” Their consensus? Bard faculty and alumni/ae are ones to watch. Jason Fargo called Lotus L. Kang MFA ’15 “an artist of rare precision,” calling her work, In Cascades, a “richly sedimented, beautifully vulnerable installation in a perpetual state of becoming.” Fargo went on to praise the film In Her Time by Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’19, calling it “a vibrant case study of digital-political bafflement and the hazards of projecting the present onto the past.” Travis Diehl, meanwhile, asks, “Should art comfort?” Reviewing Toilette by Bard alum Carolyn Lazard ’10, “a small maze of chrome medicine cabinets standing on the floor,” the answer, for Diehl, is a resounding no. “The piece addresses you, the viewer, as someone with a body,” Diehl writes. “These works ask, ‘Are you comfortable?’ and don’t expect you to say yes.” Paloma Blanca Deja Volar/White Dove Let Us Fly by Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12, a “block of shifting, pre-fossilized amber, embedded with plants and even typewritten documents,” was named one of the best works in the show by Martha Schwendener. The 81st edition of the Whitney Biennial is now open to the public and runs through August 11, 2024.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Sarah Hennies; New Red Order, an Indigenous art collective whose core contributors are Bard alumni Adam Khalil ’11 (Ojibway) and Zack Khalil ’14 (Ojibway); and Trisha Baga MFA ’10 have received 2024 United States Artist (USA) Fellowships in the disciplines of Music and Visual Arts. Hennies, New Red Order, and Baga are among this year’s 50 awardees, encompassing artists and collectives spanning multiple generations, who are dedicated to their communities and committed to building upon shared legacies through artistic innovation, cultural stewardship, and multifaceted storytelling. USA Fellowships provide $50,000 in unrestricted money to artists across 10 creative disciplines. In addition to the award, current fellows have access to financial planning, career consulting, legal advice, and other professional services as requested. 

Sarah Hennies is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer and trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought.

New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit) that collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. 

Trisha Baga is a Filipino-American artist working in stereoscopic 3D video installation, paint, clay, consumer grade electronics, and community performance. Compelled by an interest in what they call “the stuff that makes things stick together,” Baga recombines objects and images into scenarios that address issues related to the environment, technology, and identity.

Representing a broad diversity of regions and mediums, the USA Fellows are awarded through a peer-led selection process in the disciplines of Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing.

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.