Bard High School Early College Hosts Public Conversation with Painter Amy Sherald and Poet Elizabeth Alexander
Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today to be Held on October 31 Followed by a Lunch Hour Talk on November 1
Poet and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Elizabeth Alexander and painter Amy Sherald have both produced works critical to marking and reflecting on recent periods of political and social change in the United States. Alexander wrote and recited the poem “Praise Song for Our Day” to usher forward the presidency of the first black American president, Barack Obama, and Sherald painted the official portrait of the First Lady, Michelle Obama, one of two works to mark the end of the Obama Presidency. Moderators BHSEC literature professor Brittney Edmonds and Bard Associate Professor of History Christian Crouch will ask Alexander and Sherald four contextualizing questions around the process of patronage and collecting in the arts, artistic practice and black feminism, how their work speaks across artistic media, and how their work engages with the image of body.
“This event, the first of a series, is inspired by an ongoing dialogue within Bard’s Africana Studies Program surrounding race and diversity and social engagement in the visual and performative arts. We hope to create the opportunity for public dialogue around creative artistic practice and the humanities, and how artists engage their audience and broader community,” says Director of Africana Studies at Bard and Assistant Professor of Africana and Historical Studies Drew Thompson.
This event is co-sponsored by Humanities New York, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard Center for Civic Engagement, Bard Undergraduate Program in Africana Studies, Bard High School Early College, and Bard American Studies Program.
On Thursday, November 1, from 12:45pm to 2:00pm, Amy Sherald will be in conversation with curator Thelma Golden at Bard at Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), the first New York City Microcollege, at 10 Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. In this inaugural Bard at BPL Lunch Hour Talk, Golden and Sherald discuss an understated aspect of the creative process, the relationship between curator and artist. Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, has presided over exhibitions in which painter Amy Sherald’s works were included and was involved in the selection of Sherald to paint the portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. The event is free and open to the public. It takes place at BPL Central Library, Dweck Center, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn. Preregistration is required. To register, go to: bklynlibrary.org/calendar/bard-bpl-lunch-hour-talks-central-library-dweck-20181101.
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About the Artists
Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, memoirist, and scholar. She is president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Dr. Alexander previously served as Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department. In 2015, she joined the Ford Foundation as Director of Creativity and Free Expression. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and serves on the Pulitzer Prize Board, the Obama Foundation’s Storytelling Committee, and chairs the advisory council for Art for Justice. She has mentored a constellation of academics and poets including MacArthur Fellows and Pulitzer Prize winners. Notably, Alexander composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 and is author or coauthor of fourteen books, most recently a memoir, The Light of the World, which was released in 2015. She has been a lifelong student of and advocate for black art.
Amy Sherald (American, b. Columbus, GA 1973) received her MFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art (2004) and BA in painting from Clark-Atlanta University (1997), and was a Spelman College International Artist-in-Residence in Portobelo, Panama (1997). Known for her stylized portraits of African Americans, Sherald in 2016 became the first woman to win the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition; an accompanying exhibition, The Outwin 2016, was on tour through August 2018. In February 2018, Sherald unveiled her official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama, commissioned for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Sherald has had solo shows at venues including Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, IL (2016); Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, MD (2013); and University of North Carolina, Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Chapel Hill, NC (2011). A solo exhibition of new and recent works first opened at Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, MO in May 2018 and will travel to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK, and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA. Recent group exhibitions include Southern Accent, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC (2016), which traveled to Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, KY (2017); and Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture, California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2017). Residencies include Odd Nerdrum Private Study, Larvik, Norway (2005); Tong Xion Art Center, Beijing, China (2008); Creative Alliance, Baltimore, MD (2016); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New Orleans, LA (2017). Sherald’s work is held in the public collections of the Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; and Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC. Sherald is represented by Hauser & Wirth, New York.
About Bard High School Early College Manhattan
Bard High School Early College Manhattan is a four-year public school that provides students with a two-year, tuition-free college course of study in the liberal arts and sciences following the 9th and 10th grades. Students graduate with a high school diploma and up to 60 college credits and an associate's degree from Bard College.
About Bard College
Founded in 1860, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is an independent, residential, coeducational college offering a four-year BA program in the liberal arts and sciences and a five-year BA/BS degree in economics and finance. The Bard College Conservatory of Music offers a five-year program in which students pursue a dual degree—a BMus and a BA in a field other than music. Bard offers MMus degrees in conjunction with the Conservatory and The Orchestra Now, and at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bard and its affiliated institutions also grant the following degrees: AA at Bard High School Early College, a public school with campuses in New York City, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Newark, New Jersey; AA and BA at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and through the Bard Prison Initiative at six correctional institutions in New York State; MA in curatorial studies, MS and MA in economic theory and policy, and MS in environmental policy and in climate science and policy at the Annandale campus; MFA and MAT at multiple campuses; MBA in sustainability in New York City; and MA, MPhil, and PhD in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Internationally, Bard confers dual BA and MA degrees at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, Russia (Smolny); dual BA and MAT degrees at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem; and dual BA degrees at American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University.
Bard offers nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions. Total enrollment for Bard College and its affiliates is approximately 6,000 students. The undergraduate College has an enrollment of more than 1,900 and a student-to-faculty ratio of 10:1. In 2016, Bard acquired the Montgomery Place estate, bringing the size of the campus to nearly 1,000 acres. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.
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Website: https://www.bard.edu/news/releases/pr/fstory.php?id=3079
This event was last updated on 10-09-2018
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