News and Events

Bard College announces the appointment of Hannah Barrett as director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Prior to this appointment, Barrett, an award-winning artist and educator who has taught, lectured, and exhibited widely, was the international program coordinator at Bard College Berlin. Barrett succeeds Arthur Gibbons, who served as director of the Bard MFA program since 1990. Gibbons will continue teaching at Bard as professor of sculpture in the College’s Division of the Arts.

“I am delighted that Hannah Barrett has accepted the appointment as the new Director of the MFA program, one of Bard’s most distinguished graduate programs and one of the finest MFA programs in the country,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “She has been a terrific colleague and is uniquely suited to take this vital task on. She follows the remarkable, long, and distinguished tenure of Arthur Gibbons, who led the MFA to achieve its international renown. I thank Hannah and the faculty in the MFA program for their cooperation in finding a path to continue the excellent and innovative work of the MFA in this challenging time.”

Hannah Barrett is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based artist. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven her painting for over a decade, which has led to the current exploration of dandy monsters in domestic space. Recent exhibitions include a 2020 retrospective at Childs Gallery, Boston, a two-person invitational in 2019 at La MaMa Galleria, and a solo at Yours Mine and Ours Gallery in 2018. Selected group shows include Spring Break 2020, Platform Project Space, Dumbo NY, Kate Werble and Calicoon galleries in NYC, Mother Gallery, Beacon NY, and September Gallery in Hudson NY. Museum Shows include the Decordova Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her work has been written about in Art Forum, Time Out New York, and Modern Painters. Barrett is on the curatorial staff of Soloway Gallery in Williamsburg. Barrett is also the illustrator of a vegan and lesbian themed children’s book “Nuts in Nutland”. Prior to coming to Bard, Barrett taught painting and drawing for 18 years and was on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Pratt Institute Brooklyn. Barrett holds a BA in studio art and German literature from Wellesley College and an MFA in painting from Boston University.

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 students engage with accomplished faculty members, while developing their individual studio practices. 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.

Christine Sun Kim and Xaviera Simmons are among the 35 artists and designers who are making works to display across digital screens throughout New York City, Boston, and Chicago in recognition of the continued service of essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. Organized by Times Square Arts, For Freedoms, and Poster House, the public art campaign aims to “encourage a sense of community and pride among New Yorkers, and give artists the opportunity to express their gratitude and optimism through the power of art.”

“I am always pushing and pulling against aspects of the political inside my practice, with politics as clearly foundational,” says Simmons. “I think it’s really important to consider new ways of seeing and new ways of living, new ways that can become politically tangible should we act as a group with compassion and creativity.”

Bard MFA alumna Luba Drozd has been working around the clock to make face shields for New York City hospitals in dire need of protective equipment during the COVID-19 emergency. With the help of a team of volunteers for distribution, she has been able to get nearly 200 masks to health care professionals in the city.

Bard MFA alumna Christine Sun Kim performed the national anthem and “America the Beautiful” in American Sign Language at the opening of the Super Bowl, alongside singers Demi Lovato and Yolanda Adams. It was an act of both patriotism and protest. And it brought both joy and frustration. Christine Sun Kim Writes for the New York Times

Malik Gaines, former Bard MFA faculty member, presents new drawings by Kim in ArtForum.

Interview with Kim in Artnet

“Notwithstanding the conservatism of the opera business,” writes the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, “many top houses offer a world première every season or two.” Chaya Czernowin’s Heart Chamber, which premiered at the Berlin Deutsche Oper in December, is a case in point: “Heart Chamber, for which Czernowin wrote her own libretto, tells of a contemporary love affair infiltrated by anxieties and hesitations. In an early scene, the soprano sings, ‘Hey! Pick up your phone! Are you home? Later, the baritone sings, ‘You can’t just suddenly close up like that.’ The feeling is less of two souls being joined in eternal love than of two individuals negotiating the intersection of their separate lives. 

“At first glance, Czernowin, an Israeli native who teaches at Harvard, is an unlikely composer for such a project. Much of her work has tended toward images of primordial upheaval and elemental change. Her previous operas, Pnima and Infinite Now, conjured scenes of 20th-century catastrophe: the Holocaust in the former, the First World War in the latter. She avoids familiar harmonic signposts and is inclined toward spectacularly vivid eruptions of instrumental and electronic sound. The wonder of Heart Chamber is how she uses her radical sonic palette to evoke the stream of consciousness beneath the surface of ordinary life.”

The world premiere of Bard alumna Chaya Czernowin’s new opera Heart Chamber at the Deutche Oper Berlin on December 6 is one of the year’s top 10 notable performances, says New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, and her “engulfing” war requiem Infinite Now (2016–17) is one of the reasons the it has been a “chaotically great decade for new music.” Czernowin, who studied with composers Elie Yarden and Joan Tower while at Bard, is currently Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Composition at Harvard University.

In film after film, including his latest, Dark Waters, the director Todd Haynes asks viewers to contend with ambiguity, writes John Lahr in the New Yorker: “Dark Waters subverts by taking the legal thriller—a form that traditionally concludes with the triumph of good over evil—into areas of psychological complexity and ambiguity. All investigative stories, he told me, when we met in Los Angeles in June, have the burden of revealing a truth. ‘What I love so much about the genre,’ he explained, ‘is the cost of revealing the truth. The drama of that, and what it does to people. That is the part that kills you.’

Mueller, who teaches painting at Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, talks to Art in America’s Steel Stillman about the evolution of her work in video, audio, performance, and alternative ways of painting. “I came to understand that the trajectory for my work was to move deeper into the studio and toward painting as a receding horizon,” says Mueller. “At the same time, I was beginning to feel overly safe and in control. I’d become fairly good at negotiating the processes and decisions involved in making the drawings that became enamel paintings and rugs. What would happen if I removed some of that mediation and started to use a brush? I wanted to challenge myself, to operate across a fuller spectrum.”

Sillman’s The Shape of Shape at the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art in New York City is “among the most valuable of the inaugural shows.” Sillman “ranges throughout the collection, across media, generations and styles, seeking out overlooked or excluded artists and unfamiliar works. Her effort parallels the approaches at work in the permanent collection galleries, but reflects a relatively robust visual appetite — the artist’s unfettered eye — that the museum needs more of.  The show’s dense installation encourages surprising connections …”
 

On Friday, October 18, nearly 100 middle school students from Miller Middle School in Kingston, New York, spent the day at Bard College working with undergraduates from the course Pedagogy and Practice in Civic Engagement, an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences offering that is crosslisted between Bard’s undergraduate and master of arts in teaching programs. This course is cotaught each year by Bard MAT visiting faculty member Mary Leonard and BHSEC Newark faculty member Michael Murray. The course is designed for Bard undergraduates who are working in one of the College’s many educational outreach programs and who are committed to the idea of civic engagement. Guided by readings in education, the class considers the interpersonal, cultural, social, and ethical issues that arise in the context of civic engagement in schools.

In its review of the Freehand New York, Business Insider points to the hotel’s abundant art—commissioned from students and alumni/ae of Bard College for its public spaces, corridors, and all 395 guest rooms—as its not-to-be-missed feature. “Take time to explore,” their critic writes, “and appreciate the fact that you’re practically living in a gallery.”

For over 30 years, Bard MFA chair and Bard College alum Nayland Blake '82 has been a critical figure in American art, working between sculpture, drawing, performance, and video. No Wrong Holes marks the most comprehensive survey of Blake’s work to date and their first solo institutional presentation in Los Angeles.

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents Say Ever Moves, the class of 2020 thesis presentation, which brings together works by MFA candidates in the disciplines film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. The exhibition will be on view from July 21 through July 28 at the Bard College Exhibition Center / UBS Gallery, 29 O’Callaghan Lane, Red Hook, New York.

An opening reception takes place on Saturday, July 20, 1–4 p.m. Evening presentations of time-based works, including performances, readings, and screenings, will be held at several locations on the Bard College campus during the week of July 22. All presentations are free and open to the public.

The Bard MFA thesis presentations feature works by Luis Arnias, Georgian Badal, Jobi Bicos, Lauren Burrow, Gwenan Davies, Omari Douglin, Carolina Fandiño Salcedo, Carolyn Ferrucci, Marco Gomez, Colleen Hargaden, Evie K. Horton, Christiane Huber, Rachel James, Jamie Krasner, Nawahineokala'i Lanzilotti, Dani Leder, Isabel Mallet, Carla Jean Mayer, Lee Nachum, Brandon Ndife, Diane Severin Nguyen, Miko Revereza, Alicia Salvadeo, Robert Sandler, Jaxyn Randall, Estelle Srivijittakar, Jordan Strafer, Daniel Sullivan, Christopher van Ginhoven Rey, Jessica Wilson, and Alex Zandi. The exhibition is coordinated by Marisa Espe ’20, a graduate student at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard).

The Bard College Exhibition Center will be open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m., and Saturday/Sunday, 1–5 p.m. For the opening reception, a return shuttle service will be offered from Rhinecliff Amtrak station. Schedules, accessibility information, and more are available below. Parking is available in the Saint Christopher’s Church lot at 7411 South Broadway or on Garden Road.

Bard MFA alumnus Fitz Patton won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Play for Choir Boy.

The annual award provides $10,000 in unrestricted funding to a visual artist who has lived or worked in New York City for at least two years.

Ginzburg, who was raised in Saint Petersburg, Russia, talks about the range of possibilities inherent in the movement and transition between one place and another: “The experience of immigration . . . makes you aware of how perception and self-awareness shift with displacement (both geographical and cultural).”

Bard MFA professors Hong-Kai Wang and Bill Dietz are leading a monthlong project in Philadelphia called “Singing is what makes work possible.” Participants learn songs people sing during work in different languages and cultures, in collaboration with a sound art gallery called Remote Viewing.

The yearlong residency program is open to alumni/ae of the Bard MFA program and affiliated artists of Live Arts Bard. This year’s winners: artists William Lamson, Caitlin MacBride, and Tania El Khoury, visiting assistant professor of theater and performance at Bard; and pianist Courtney Bryan.

Revereza’s first feature documentary tracks his journey by train from his home in Los Angeles to Rhinecliff, New York, and ultimately grad school at Bard.

Handelman will receive up to $100,000 to develop her multichannel video installation Delirium.

Tsang “is recognized as much for being an innovator in the medium of documentary film ... as she is for being a powerful, searing voice among nonbinary artists.”

Interdisciplinary artist Alisha Wormsley MFA ‘19, whose work is inspired by the collective memory of African American culture, will receive a $15,000 prize with the award.

Bard MFA Music/Sound faculty member Jace Clayton will present his latest video, The Jacob Lawrence of Jacob Lawrence, at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center on October 19.

By James Rodewald ’82
In the Bardian

If, during your time in Annandale, you lived in a dorm full of extremely creative people (or napped in one of the art studios) you may have had the good fortune to wake up to great Bard art. If not, you now have your chance. All you have to do is check in to the recently opened Freehand New York hotel, where all 395 guest rooms have murals on the walls—a few even have them on their ceilings—hand-painted by Bard students and alumni/ae. You’ll also see one of those murals in the ground-floor lobby, surrounded by beautifully restored original millwork. That conversation, between the building’s history and young artists’ creativity, continues throughout the property.

The newly renovated building, on the corner of 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, began life in 1929 as the George Washington Hotel. Over the years it has been home to writers, musicians, and artists as diverse as W. H. Auden, Dee Dee Ramone, and Keith Haring, who lived in the building when it served as a School of Visual Arts residence hall. Andrew Zobler, a member of the Fisher Center advisory board and CEO and founder of Sydell Group, which also owns Freehand hotels in Chicago, Miami, and Los Angeles, wanted to cultivate an ongoing artistic community in New York City, so he partnered with the Fisher Center, the Bard MFA Program, and the Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs to commission original artworks for the public spaces and guest rooms.
 
“The challenge in New York, given the size of the project, was to make sure it remained true to the Bohemian spirit of Freehand,” says Zobler. “I think using the building as a blank canvas for young artists was the perfect way to give life to that spirit.”

The first Freehand, which opened in an art deco building in Miami in 2012, sought to capture the ethos of a hostel, where social interactions are more frequent and less predictable, while still providing a high-quality hospitality experience. “The culture of the hostel remains core to the Freehand in New York,” says Zobler. “The idea is to create places for people to mix and get to know each other and exchange ideas. Art and performance help stimulate that interaction.”

A panel made up of the hotel’s designers, Roman and Williams, and representatives of Freehand New York and Bard chose the artists after an extensive application process and blind portfolio review. The hotel’s guest room mural painters were Marty Abbe-Schneider ’14, Hannah Berger ’16, Kira Buckel ’16, Lukas Geronimas MFA ’11, Martin Katzoff ’19, Elizabeth Marshall MFA ’14, Isabelle Sigrid Marshall ’18, Louise Smith ’13, Scott Vanderveen ’16, and Rowan Willigan ’15. Leslie Fry MFA ’93, created sculptures for the Mezzanine Gallery, Lia Lowenthal MFA ’14 made framed tile panels as well as a piano installation, Vanderveen also painted the colorful gym mural and a mural on the ground floor, while Katzoff did a mural leading to the bar from the elevator on the roof. Several of those artists, along with Jordan Segal ’14 and Sarah Bastacky ’19, have framed pieces scattered throughout the hotel. Photographer Isaac Diggs MFA ’03 documented the project, which was managed by Zia Affronti Morter ’12 and Sean Leo ’14. 
 
Berger painted murals in some 45 rooms, an experience that has changed her attitude toward her own work. “More than anything, this project has taught me to step away and let go of my work after it’s complete,” she says. “Doing so many murals in such quick succession forbids attachment to any one of them. I hope to carry this impact into my personal studio practice.”

The artists had to deal with logistical issues imposed by the spaces—furniture placement, windows, corners—but there were few specific guidelines for the artwork itself (no neon colors, not too much red, murals should have a gestural quality). “Constraints can be helpful,” says Berger. “I imposed more constraints upon myself—limiting the palette to one color, using one brush size—than anyone from the design team at Freehand did.”

A visitor might experience a slight shock upon walking into a crisp, clean room and seeing unmistakably handmade markings on the walls. No matter how lovely the images, all those years of being told to keep that crayon on the coloring book makes its own mark. For Berger, however, that didn’t present a problem. “I’ve definitely drawn, painted, and stuck wads of gum onto plenty of walls and ceilings,” Berger admits. “But holding a brush up to a pristine hotel room wall still felt like an unfamiliar thing to do. With all the other construction going on throughout the hotel, however, it seemed less invasive and strange.”

Handing over the keys, not to mention the bare walls, to a group of young artists shows a level of trust that perfectly reflects the Freehand culture. There’s a refreshing optimism to embracing the unknown, giving up control, and encouraging artistic freedom. Such an attitude goes hand in hand with trusting that people who are attracted to a place that seeks to go beyond the ordinary will want to interact with others who feel similarly.
 
Each hotel has its own identity, and they all have a mix of room styles, from bunks to sprawling penthouse suites. They also share variety in their eating and drinking establishments. Freehand New York includes two restaurants from the king of the West Village, Gabriel Stulman; a rooftop bar that is an outpost of the phenomenal Broken Shaker, whose Miami location has made the World’s 50 Best Bars list four years running; the third location of Smile to Go from the owners of popular Bond Street café the Smile; and the George Washington Bar (also run by Stulman), in the former library room, where another remarkable piece of art can be seen: a portrait of our first president that was commissioned for the original hotel and has somehow survived the Great Depression, bankruptcy, the wounding and capture by F.B.I. agents of a fugitive on the most-wanted list, a drug raid in the early ’80s, and even the threat of demolition (averted with the help of a local historical society). Zobler says they considered introducing new art into that bar, but decided against it. “We wanted one space where you would really connect with the history of the building without modification. I think that room makes you feel rooted, and that is a good thing.”

Iconic architecture from New York City’s history—with significant and playful modification—is on display on the same floor as the bar. Fry installed plaster sculptures in arched niches in the Mezzanine Gallery. “I meld forms from architecture, human anatomy, and plants,” Fry explains. Each sculpture is around four feet tall. In one, a classical male bust with a condensed cityscape atop his head is supported on a column covered in a whir of modes of urban transport, from bikes to VW bugs to high heels. In another, a large plant grows out of a heart cradled in human hands and is topped by that icon of the New York City skyline the Chrysler Building. “Some of the other architectural references are the Empire State Building, Guggenheim Museum, Washington Square Arch, and the hotel building itself,” says Fry. “The sculptures depict transformation, growth, and energy.” Much like the pulsating city itself, not to mention the kinds of guests the hotel will attract.

One other ingredient in the hotel’s cultural stew is the Freehand Fellowship. Zobler’s Sydell Group engaged Live Arts Bard—the Fisher Center’s residency and commissioning program—and the Bard MFA Program to create an ongoing fellowship for multidisciplinary artists in residence at the hotel. The residencies offer alumni/ae of the MFA program and affiliated artists of Live Arts Bard a paid, yearlong fellowship; three months’ use of the hotel’s 520-square-foot rooftop studio; accommodations at the hotel; and opportunities to curate public programs and exhibitions in the hotel’s public spaces. Four fellowships will be awarded each year.
 
Abraham McNally ’97 MFA ’03, one of the first fellows, incorporates into his work fabric from worn-out clothes that belonged to his three young children and poplar from trees he cut with his father on the family Christmas-tree farm in northern Vermont. “Both the wood and fabric are pieces of history, reminders of time past,” he says. “The materials are naturally distinct and often hard for me to control. My history and personal associations with these materials are critical, pulling me into an active conversation with the material, the past, and the present.” The other inaugural fellows are composer, pianist, and singer Dane Terry; performance artist Miguel Gutierrez; and installation artist Fawn Krieger MFA ’05.

Zia Affronti Morter ’12, who administers the partnership, says it “brings the creative force of Live Arts Bard and Bard MFA to New York City by providing artists the time and space to create—a rare luxury in our current cultural climate—and a unique environment in which to share and workshop new work.”

For discounted room rates, Bardians can go to freehandhotels.com/newyork and enter promo code BARDCOLLEGE.

Read the Spring 2018 Bardian

The exhibition, featuring a new group of paintings titled + x, Chapter 34, opens October 12.

The Block Museum of Art is devoting its first-floor gallery to Chan’s media work Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization.

The Bard MFA presents the Class of 2019 thesis exhibition, titled Setup, on view from July 21 through July 28 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook.

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents Setup, the Class of 2019 thesis exhibition, at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook. Opening reception on Saturday, July 21.

Long Soldier received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her poetry collection Whereas, “a brilliantly innovative text that examines history, landscapes, and identities.”

The Freehand New York, which features commissioned works by students and alumni/ae of the Bard Studio Arts and MFA Programs, will offer artists’ residencies in partnership with LAB beginning later this year. 

Artist Anna Sew Hoy will be the first Martha Longenecker Roth Distinguished Artist in Residence, noted for "expanding the field of art, celebrating material and craft, and engaging with students and the public."

Duane Linklater's Wood Land School creates site-specific exhibitions of works by indigenous artists—most recently an ambitious, yearlong project at Montreal’s SBC Gallery.

Unspecified Promise, a sculpture and performance art piece by Guillermo Calzadilla MFA '02 and Jennifer Allora, speaks to the personal aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

The Hunter College MFA in Studio Art announces the appointment of painter and writer Carrie Moyer MFA '02 as the new director of Hunter’s nationally ranked graduate studio art program.

Adriana Farmiga, a Bard MFA alumna who has taught at the Cooper Union School of Art since 2011, has been appointed assistant dean at the school.

Bard MFA alumna Colleen Brown '11 and nine other selected artists explore art and civic life in Vancouver through events, installations, and residencies.

Professor Emeritus John Ashbery passed away last month. Here, Ann Lauterbach shares her 2011 introduction of the poet upon receipt of his National Book Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

A. L. Steiner is among the 21 scholars, writers, and artists awarded Berlin Prizes—semester-long fellowships in Berlin—by the American Academy in Berlin for 2017–18.

The Stedeliik Museum features Carlos Motta’s video portraits of LGBTQI refugees seeking asylum to escape repression.

Bard is credited with starting the first low-residency MFA program, with students gathering for eight-week summer sessions that split up their independent study.

The multi-part exhibition links two projects "Plot" and "Cadere/Rose" which explore the condition of invisibility in Premnath's experience as an Indian immigrant.

On October 20, ISSUE will celebrate the work of pioneering French composer Éliane Radigue, where MFA Professor Laetitia Sonami will perform Radigue’s 2013 piece OCCAM IX.

“We need art to give us as much knowledge of the larger world...as possible.” The 40 works in No to the Invasion bring the modern Arab world into vivid focus.

The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) presents the Class of 2018 Thesis Exhibition July 22–30 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery at 29 O’Callaghan Lane in Red Hook, New York, with an opening reception on Saturday, July 22, from 1 to 4 p.m. The exhibition brings together candidates’ culminating work in film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. Performances, readings, and screenings of time-based works will take place on the Bard College campus during the evenings of July 24–28.

Swartz is attempting to reveal something that is inside all of us—a dynamic, expressive, intimate feeling felt through the shape of sound.

Bard's MFA Program is named among the 25 Best MFA Programs by College Choice, a leading authority in college and university rankings and resources, in its recently published 2017 rankings.

Bard alumnus Duane Linklater's show at NYU's 80WSE gallery engages with questions about the under- and misrepresentation of indigenous artists in galleries and museums.

Multidisciplinary artist Christine Sun Kim was born deaf, and she uses sound in her work to challenge and disturb the norms of the hearing world.

Actor Robert De Niro has named R.H. Quaytman as the winner of the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize, which is given to an artist "devoted to the pursuit of excellence and innovation in painting."