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Joshua Lutz ’97 MFA ’05 Interviewed in Psychology Today
Joshua Lutz ’97 MFA ’05 Interviewed in Psychology Today
Alumnus and former Bard MFA faculty member Joshua Lutz ’97 MFA ’05 was interviewed about photography and mindfulness for Psychology Today. Lutz is an artist and educator who is now associate professor and chair of photography at Purchase College. In the interview, he talked about “contemplative photography,” his name for the practice of using photography to become aware of the world around us. “Photographs are remarkably adept at telling stories,” he said. “They’re grounded in some version of truth, though the fun part of working with images is exploring what that truth actually is.” As far as photography’s psychological benefits, he advises that while photography can be a vehicle for contemplation, it’s important to strike a balance between photographing and being in the moment.
Lutz also spoke about his photobook collaboration with George Saunders, Orange Blossom Trail, which was released in September. As he visited the trail in Central Florida, his photography became “a way not just to document but to tell the stories of this area—through images that speak to both what’s seen and maybe what’s beneath the surface as well.”
Post Date: 11-05-2024
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An-My Lê Photographs in New York Times Op-Ed: “The Price”
An-My Lê Photographs in New York Times Op-Ed: “The Price”
Professor An-My Lê’s photographs are featured in the New York Times Opinion piece “The Price,” which is part of the Times series “On the Brink” about the modern threat of nuclear weapons. “The Price” covers the United States’ $1.7 trillion overhaul of its nuclear arsenal and its impact on American communities. Lê’s photographs show the infrastructure of the US military, including the inside of nuclear facilities and the people working inside them. They illustrate the tension that writer W. J. Hennigan describes: “Congress decided that America needed new weapons… but it’s clear, after I visited these places, that the American people have not.”
Lê is a professor of photography whose work has covered war’s impact on culture and the environment for over 30 years. Her past projects have been exhibited in solo shows at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others.
Post Date: 10-15-2024
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Bard Alumni/ae Rosa Polin ’16 and Ryan Rusiecki ’20 Featured in Cultured Magazine’s List of Young Photographers 2024
Bard Alumni/ae Rosa Polin ’16 and Ryan Rusiecki ’20 Featured in Cultured Magazine’s List of Young Photographers 2024
Bard alumni/ae Rosa Polin ’16 and Ryan Rusiecki ’20, graduates of the photography program, have been featured in Cultured magazine’s Young Photographers 2024, a list highlighting the next generation of image makers who have dedicated themselves to photography as an art form. “I try to use photography the same way I try to live the rest of my life,” said Polin ’16, who blends realism and the uncanny in intimate imagery. “I am trying to find my voice. It’s all a big mixture of shame, curiosity, fear, playfulness, boredom, irony, sadness, lust, humor, and empathy.” For his environmental photography, Rusiecki ’20 has revisited the same subject each year, watching its transformation under imminent threat. “The subject of my practice — the Hudson River estuary — is a globally rare habitat that is under threat by rising sea levels and climate change,” he said. “I have only been able to photograph the estuary after having spent four years of repeated return, and multidisciplinary research, to understand its nuances and visual fragility. I consider the estuary a friend.”
Post Date: 10-07-2024
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Into the Quiet: Photo Book by Bard Alumna Virginia Hanusik ’14 Reviewed in Aperture
Into the Quiet: Photo Book by Bard Alumna Virginia Hanusik ’14 Reviewed in Aperture
A new photo book by Bard alumna Virginia Hanusik ’14, Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana, which documents a decade spent in the coastal region of the state, has been reviewed in Aperture. “Photographs appear alongside an anthology of essays and poetry commissioned for the book,” writes Michael Adno for Aperture. “For Hanusik, architecture is also a clear sign of time passing; buildings, like hands on the face of a clock, float along a canal one year and disappear the next, while others are raised twenty feet up in the air to escape the coming flood.” Hanusik’s photographs and written contributions explore the cultural legacy of weather and storms in coastal areas, the physical and psychological marks left behind by hurricanes, and the privileges afforded to certain communities over others in responses to flood damage. “At the core of the project,” Hanusik writes, “is an effort to encourage thinking of this region—and coastal communities around the country—as an interconnected system rather than as separate and expendable landscapes.”
Post Date: 09-27-2024
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Orange Blossom Trail, a Collaboration between Joshua Lutz ’97 MFA ’05 and George Saunders, Reviewed in the New York Times
Orange Blossom Trail, a Collaboration between Joshua Lutz ’97 MFA ’05 and George Saunders, Reviewed in the New York Times
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.”
Post Date: 09-03-2024
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Bard Professor An-My Lê Interviews Photographer Dawoud Bey for Bomb Magazine
Bard Professor An-My Lê Interviews Photographer Dawoud Bey for Bomb Magazine
An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts, interviewed the renowned photographer Dawoud Bey, her friend and peer, for Bomb magazine’s Oral History Project, which aims to document the stories of distinguished visual artists of the African Diaspora. In conversation with Lê, Bey discusses his experiences as an artist, photographer, and educator, and the journey that has now cemented him within a legacy and tradition of contemporary Black photographers in the United States. “I felt beholden to that piece of the history that I had been responding to,” Bey said. “I wanted to extend that and also apply that history to the Black subject in a way that elevated the Black subject in the photograph, in a way that cut through the stereotypical, more socially pathologically driven representations of African American subjects in photographs. I started out wanting to make work in opposition to those kinds of stereotypical pathology-driven photographs. But as I began working and immersing myself in the work, that receded to the point where my ambition was to make the most honest, clear-eyed, resonant representation of what was in front of me.”
Post Date: 09-03-2024
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Bard College Announces the Creation of The Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression in Photography
Bard College Announces the Creation of The Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression in Photography
Bard College announces the creation of The Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression in Photography. This fund is made possible through a generous endowment from the Schwartz Family to honor their sister, Barbara Ess, a beloved teacher, colleague, mentor, artist, friend, and much-loved family member. The Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression in Photography is an annual award that will cover the cost of course-related materials for a limited number of Bard College photography students on financial aid.
After taking some time to process the loss, Barbara’s sisters, Janet and Ellen, have decided to honor Barbara by creating a special endowment fund at Bard College, The Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression in Photography. This fund will allow students on financial aid to fully participate in photography classes. They believe Barbara would have loved that.
After joining the faculty at Bard in 1997 as a professor in the photography department, Barbara Ess committed herself to inspiring and encouraging her students to be the most interesting artists they could be. She shared her unique perspective and approach to photography and art in a way that connected with her students, demanding only that the work be honest, authentic, and thoughtful. Her students loved and respected her. Many of them have gone on to make impressive art and enjoy successful careers.
According to former student and Co-Chair in Photography at Bard MFA, Megan Plunkett, MFA ’17, “Barbara Ess was an artist of immense power and I continue to be amazed by all that she accomplished in her work. As a teacher, she was abuzz with ideas, energy, and experiments. She gave us the gift of being seen as artists, and the freedom to be ourselves in our studios. She changed so many of her student’s lives, mine very much included. It is my absolute pleasure to speak on behalf of the Barbara Ess Fund for Artistic Expression. In funding materials for photo students with financial need, Barbara’s frenetic, infectious joy for making will continue to thrive in new generations of Bard artists, something I know would bring her immense joy in return.”
To donate to the fund via Bard’s secure website, please click here. For other ways to give to the fund, please click here. Note all contributions are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law. We encourage you to check with your employer to ask if your donation can be matched.
About Barbara Ess
Barbara Ess was born in 1944 in Brooklyn, NY. In 1969 she received her BA in Philosophy and English Literature from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. Ess has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, including at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (1985); High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (1992); and Moore College of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2003). She has also participated in many group exhibitions, including Currents, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (1985); Postmodern Prints, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England, UK (1991); Bowery Tribute, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (2010); and Who You Staring At: Culture visuelle de la scène no wave des années 1970 et 1980, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2023). Ess died in 2021 in Elizaville, NY.
Post Date: 08-13-2024
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Bard Professor Tanya Marcuse Receives American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship for 2024–25
Bard Professor Tanya Marcuse Receives American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship for 2024–25
Tanya Marcuse, associate professor of photography at Bard College, has received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Fellowship for 2024–25. The fellowship, for $5,000, will support her creative arts project Tree of Yggdrasil: Photographing Fragility and Growth, which will focus on Iceland’s vividly contrasting landscapes of treeless expanses and small forest enclaves. In the summer of 2024, she will visit Iceland to create large-scale color photographs foregrounding its extensive afforestation efforts, in affiliation with the Icelandic Forestry Association, one of the oldest environmental organizations in the country. Her project aims to capture the ethereal light on individual trees and barren vistas, symbolizing the balance between life and emptiness, and drawing parallels to Norse mythology’s Yggdrasil tree as a cosmic center, suggesting that every tree, however mundane, can or might be that center.
Post Date: 05-29-2024
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For NPR, Lexi Parra ’18 Photographs Girl Scout Troop 6000, Which Is “Giving Hope” to Migrant Children Whose Parents Are Seeking Asylum
For NPR, Lexi Parra ’18 Photographs Girl Scout Troop 6000, Which Is “Giving Hope” to Migrant Children Whose Parents Are Seeking Asylum
Alumna Lexi Parra ’18 contributed photography and video to an NPR article about Girl Scout Troop 6000, a New York City–based troop composed of the daughters of asylum seekers. Parra’s photos and videos accompany the story of Troop 6000, whose members take part in traditional scouting activities, as well as supporting each other through the traumas associated with migrancy. “This is probably the only sense of stability they have right now,” Giselle Burgess, founder and senior director of Troop 6000, told NPR. The mission of Troop 6000 aligns with the broader mission of the Girl Scouts, said Meredith Mascara, CEO of Girl Scouts of Greater New York. “They will be the ones running the city,” Mascara said. “I’m proud that Girl Scouts are part of that.”
Post Date: 05-15-2024
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Artist Walid Raad Named Professor of Photography at Bard College Beginning Fall 2024
Artist Walid Raad Named Professor of Photography at Bard College Beginning Fall 2024
Walid Raad, currently distinguished visiting professor of photography, will begin his tenured appointment at Bard College in fall 2024 as professor of photography in the Division of the Arts. Raad is an artist whose works include photography, video, mixed media installations, and performances. His works include the creation of The Atlas Group, a 15-year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon, as well as the ongoing projects Scratching on Things I Could Disavow and Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut). His books include Walkthrough, The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead, My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair, and Let’s Be Honest The Weather Helped.
Raad’s solo exhibitions have been featured at institutions including the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza (Madrid), Louvre (Paris), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), ICA (Boston, USA), Museo Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico), Kunsthalle Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland), The Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, UK), Festival d’Automne (Paris, France), Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels, Belgium), The Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, Germany).
His works have also been shown in Documenta 11 and 13 (Kassel, Germany), The Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), Whitney Bienniale 2000 and 2002 (New York, USA), Sao Paulo Bienale (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Istanbul Biennal (Istanbul, Turkey), Homeworks I and IV (Beirut, Lebanon) and other institutions across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. In addition, Raad is the recipient multiple grants, prizes, and awards, including the Aachener Kunstpreis (2018), ICP Infinity Award (2016), the Hasselblad Award (2011), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2007), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2007), the Camera Austria Award (2005), and a Rockefeller Fellowship (2003). Raad was named Harvard University’s Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) 2024 Solomon Fellow and is in residence at AFVS from April 7 to 13, 2024.
Post Date: 04-09-2024
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Xaviera Simmons ’05 Is One of Six Artists to Reflect on the Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance for the New York Times
Xaviera Simmons ’05 Is One of Six Artists to Reflect on the Legacy of the Harlem Renaissance for the New York Times
“The Harlem Renaissance has been a part of my lexicon since birth,” said Bard alumna Xaviera Simmons ’05 to the New York Times. Simmons, along with five other artists, were invited by the Times to reflect on the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance. Recent works by Simmons pay homage not only to artists like Jacob Lawrence, but to those whose contributions were either diminished or erased by history. Simmons’s work They’re All Afraid, All of Them, That’s It! They’re All Southern! The Whole United States Is Southern! elevates and recontextualizes the work done by the artist Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence’s wife, who cowrote the labels that accompany Lawrence’s famous Migration Series. Simmons’s piece recontextualizes Knight’s work and words in order to emphasize that “the text, which you don’t really pay much attention to, is just as critical” as the visuals.
Post Date: 02-20-2024
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Listening to Music Is Better When It’s a Conversation Among Friends, Writes Professor Tim Davis ’91 for the New York Times Magazine
Listening to Music Is Better When It’s a Conversation Among Friends, Writes Professor Tim Davis ’91 for the New York Times Magazine
Listening to music, often a solitary activity, takes on new dimensions among a group of friends who have been meeting for 15 years to encounter songs together. Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91 writes about the Golden Ears and their weekly meetups in Tivoli, New York, and the particular pleasure of gathering to share music. “By now we’re used to listening to music for one another, in a way that privileges adventure over taste,” he writes. “Having a listening group as a sounding board of directors turns the sprawl of music history into a rolling conversation with friends, a renewable resource, an endless delight.”
Post Date: 02-13-2024
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CCS Bard Exhibition Indian Theater and Professor An-My Lê’s MoMA Survey Between Two Rivers Are Included in New York Times Best Art of 2023
CCS Bard Exhibition Indian Theater and Professor An-My Lê’s MoMA Survey Between Two Rivers Are Included in New York Times Best Art of 2023
New York Times cochief art critic Holland Cotter names CCS Bard’s exhibition Indian Theater and An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers among his picks for the best art of 2023. “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art and Self-Determination Since 1969 at the Hessel Museum, Bard College, was, hands down, the most stimulatingly inventive contemporary group show I saw this year,” writes Cotter about the large-scale exhibition curated by CCS Bard Fellow in Indigenous Curatorial Studies Candice Hopkins. Cotter calls the work of photographer An-My Lê, who is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard, “lucid,” and notes that the main subject of Lê’s Museum of Modern Art survey, on view through March 9, is “war as a perpetual reality, nascent or active.”
See the Best Art of 2023 from the New York Times
Read the New York Times Review of Indian Theater
Read the New York Times Review of An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers
Post Date: 12-12-2023
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Professor Larry Fink, Whose Photographs Were “Political, Not Polemical,” Dies at 82
Professor Larry Fink, Whose Photographs Were “Political, Not Polemical,” Dies at 82
Professor Emeritus of Photography Larry Fink—who joined the faculty in 1988 and taught at Bard for three decades—has died at the age of 82. Professor Fink is known for his frank photographs of New York high society and Hollywood stars, as well as his intimate images of rural America. “He treated the classroom like it was the Village Vanguard,” Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91 tells the New York Times. “It was completely improvisatory. A critique would involve mouth trumpet sounds, his own poetic raps and scat singing; maybe at some point he’d pull out his harmonica. On the one hand, it kneecapped the whole idea of art education, and on the other, if you were listening, it was completely profound.”
“He adjusted the emotional temperature in any room,” writes Lucy Sante, who taught writing and photography at Bard for nearly 25 years, for Vanity Fair. “He was countrified, with his suspenders, his work boots, his wild grin and honking laugh, his utter disregard for decorum, but he had the chutzpah of a city boy and was so sophisticated he had no need to prove it. It further enhances any of his pictures to imagine Larry in the act of taking them.”
Mr. Fink was the recipient of two Guggenheim fellowships, in 1976 and 1979. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many other institutions in the United States and abroad. He worked on assignment for numerous publications, including Manhattan, Inc., Vanity Fair, and the New York Times, and was the author of 12 books.Further Reading
Larry Fink, Whose Photographs Were ‘Political, Not Polemical,’ Dies at 82 (New York Times)
A Fond Farewell to Photographer Larry Fink, 82 (Professor Sante for Vanity Fair)
In Memoriam: Bard Remembers the Life of Professor Larry Fink (from President Botstein)
Post Date: 12-05-2023
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Sam Youkilis ’16 Interviewed by i-D and Interview Magazine about His New Monograph, Somewhere, and Finding an Audience on Instagram
Sam Youkilis ’16 Interviewed by i-D and Interview Magazine about His New Monograph, Somewhere, and Finding an Audience on Instagram
“Like so many documentary photographers, I often pick a post or set up a frame and wait for something to happen within it,” Sam Youkilis ’16 said to i-D. “I truly believe in the camera’s ability to will things happening within its frame.” After publishing his debut monograph, Somewhere, Youkilis spoke with i-D and Interview magazine about capturing the mundane, his use of vertical video, and finding a following on Instagram. “I’m lucky that I’ve been able to find success in what I do on Instagram in a really organic way,” Youkilis said to Quinn Moreland ’15 for Interview. “And I am lucky that I’m able to share my work in a diaristic way where it’s very much an insight into my life from morning to the end of the day.” Somewhere, which totals more than 500 pages in length, represents this diaristic practice in a physical format, with the size of the monograph somewhere between the size of a postcard and an iPhone, with a purposeful intermixture of the commonplace and the grandiose. “The point of the book, in a way, is to level any hierarchy across this imagery and present my work democratically so no moment is given more value than others,” Youkilis said.
Post Date: 11-07-2023
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An-My Lê Left Vietnam as a Child. She Returned as a Photographer. Bard Professor’s MoMA Exhibition Is a New York Times Critic’s Pick
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Aperture Magazine Publishes Retrospective on the Late Photographer and Bard Professor Barbara Ess
Aperture Magazine Publishes Retrospective on the Late Photographer and Bard Professor Barbara Ess
Using the occasion of Barbara Ess – Archives, a recent exhibition of the archival materials of the late photographer and Bard professor, Aperture magazine explored Barbara Ess’s artistic legacy. “Words like natural and voyeurism seem germane to the life and work of Barbara Ess,” writes Jesse Dorris. Voyeurism, in particular, was on Dorris’s mind as he explored the exhibit, which featured the contents of Ess’s “excellent binders of this ephemera”—an intimate look into the artist’s life and activism. “All this ephemeral is melancholic,” he writes. “I’m grateful it survived. And I feel I’m somehow eavesdropping.” Among the items included in the exhibition is an assignment Ess gave to Bard students during her two-decade tenure at the College, a list of 25 prompts titled “Tell Us Something About Yourself.” “Use the photograph to bring us closer,” Ess wrote. “Use the photograph as your mother. Use the photograph as your lover. Use the photograph to keep us away.”
Post Date: 10-31-2023
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Q&A with Lexi Parra ’18
Q&A with Lexi Parra ’18
Lexi Parra ’18 is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based between Caracas and New York. Parra will be on campus on Wednesday, November 1. A Conversations and Lunch event will take place in the George Ball Lounge of the Campus Center from noon to 1:30 that day.
By Lauren Rodgers ’27
Q: Tell us a bit about yourself and your background.
A: I am a Venezuelan-American photographer, community educator, and a Bard alum. After graduating in 2018 with my degree in Photography and Human Rights, I began to focus my work on youth culture, migration, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience. I’m the founder of Project MiRA, an arts education initiative based in Caracas, and also a community manager at Women Photograph. I’m bilingual (Spanish and English), and am currently working between Caracas and New York.
Q: What inspired you to pursue photography?
A: I grew up going to my dad’s sets—he is a director of photography in the commercial world—and, even though I didn’t realize it at the time, it set me up to want to be a photographer. I was the kid with a big DSLR camera on my shoulder wherever I went, taking mediocre travel pictures. When I got accepted to Bard, I realized the Photography Program was renowned and thought it was something I should pursue. What has inspired me to make images and tell stories is my obsessive curiosity and want to connect with people. My camera is one of the ways that I do that.
Q: Your photography focuses on youth culture, migration, inequality, and resilience. What inspired you to incorporate activism into your artistic work?
A: Honestly, I don’t know if my work as a photographer / journalist would be considered ‘activism.’ During my time at Bard, I was a community organizer and my senior thesis work had a lot to do with representation and healing, which was my response to our world at the time. That ethos continues to guide me; to make beautiful and dignified images, particularly because I work in places and with people who are going through crises. While I don’t know if an image can have any tangible impact on the world, I do think it matters how we show up and engage. I hope that
in the way I work that it is an interaction, rather than something that is extractive.
Q: Why did you choose to attend Bard?
A: When it came time to make a decision, Bard seemed to be the right fit for me. I had visited the campus and, coming from Minneapolis, was new to the landscape of Northeast private colleges. Bard had a flexibility in its programming that intrigued me. The financial aid package was substantial, too, which I needed to go to a college like Bard. I didn’t have crazy high expectations when I got to campus because I was so out of my element—but the teachers/mentors and friends I made, the experiences I had, absolutely shaped me into the person I am today.
Q: How do you feel your roots in Venezuela and Hispanic culture have influenced your work and photographic perspective?
A: I think living in Venezuela since graduating Bard has shaped my work more so than being Venezuelan. It took going back to my dad’s home country to actually feel those roots. Growing up, I didn’t have strong connections beyond making arepas or visiting my dad’s few Venezuelan friends, who also somehow landed in Minneapolis. In college, I embraced my latinidad but, still, it didn’t have roots yet. Going back to Caracas, though, as an adult shaped my work immensely.
As an insider-outsider, I learned to listen first. Having lived in Venezuela during a part of its years-long crisis, I now feel a deep sense of responsibility to cover the ongoing effects on communities with the focus being on the strength and resilience that people have to create something as everything is on the brink of collapse. That duality, that complexity, has informed how I see the world. My connection to Venezuela has translated into an intimacy with stories of migration, too, which has been both heartbreaking and fulfilling.
Q: Could you tell us about Project MiRA, the arts education initiative you founded?
A: Project MiRA brought me to Caracas after graduating from Bard in 2018. Through the Davis Peace Prize, I went to Venezuela with a bag of old digital cameras to host workshops through the Tiuna el Fuerte cultural park. The idea was to give cameras to people who are living the crisis, to see the reality through their eyes and change the dynamic of photographer-subject during a time of turmoil. After a year of traveling the country teaching groups of kids and adults, I formalized the initiative into Project MiRA (“look” in Spanish). Our methodology brings photography workshops to informal community spaces in remote areas of the barrios of Caracas, collaborating with local community leaders, to work with teen girls. The programming focuses on issues of representation, storytelling and visual literacy. In five years, we have taught over 600 young people, exhibited their work in both Caracas and New York and have been a part of a children’s photography book. The work I do with Project MiRA has been so informative to my person, as well as my work as a photographer, and I am beyond grateful for the community support that makes it possible.
Q: For you, what does it mean to be an active community member?
A: Being an active community member really comes down to being human: someone who has empathy, who shows up. It is so easy, especially in the US, to isolate and think of ourselves in terms of our individual self. When we come together in community and actually understand that we are a part of something bigger, it can be both empowering and reassuring. We just have to show up and offer what we can.
Q: When do you feel your work is most challenging, and when do you feel your work is most rewarding?
A: My work is most challenging when I feel helpless. Hearing someone talk about their journey through the Darien Gap, or holding their hand as they tell me about losing their brother in a police raid ... I can’t do anything tangible to help. My work isn’t going to take their pain away, or make it better. I can be there, and be present with them, but the feeling of not being able to do more is always the worst part of my job. The most rewarding thing is when people see their picture in a newspaper or an article, or hold a print I brought for them. It’s the most rewarding because they feel seen, acknowledged. Similarly, when I’m teaching, I get so excited when a student learns to claim her space, her opinion—when she trusts us enough to really flex. There’s nothing better than that.
Q: You've only been out of college for five years. What are your tips to cultivating a successful career post-grad?
A: I would definitely take advantage of the opportunities that are available at Bard. Go to every conference you can, have coffee with a professor whose work you admire, scour for internships or jobs that can give you some experience and insight while you are still in school. Photojournalism found me after college, and I’m grateful to have had mentors who guided me into this career. While I didn’t study photojournalism, my varied experiences through Bard did set me up with skills that are vital to what I do now. So, I would say be open to any opportunities and use the network to your advantage.
More about Lexi Parra ’18:- lexiparra.com
- As gang, police violence rages, a neighborhood tries to connect (Washington Post)
- Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
- Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects for Peace Prize
Post Date: 10-27-2023
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Photographers on Photographers: Bard Alumna Alice Fall ’22 in Conversation with Artist in Residence Laura Steele in Lenscratch
Photographers on Photographers: Bard Alumna Alice Fall ’22 in Conversation with Artist in Residence Laura Steele in Lenscratch
“I met Laura Steele while studying photography at Bard College,” writes Alice Fall ’22. “Her steadiness, intelligence, wit, and engagement with the world is grounding and immediately magnetic. Laura’s constant reminder to me, both inside and out of school, has been to trust my vision and intuition. I’m thankful for her for bringing me back to myself, again and again.” In this conversation for Lenscratch, the Bard alumna and Bard faculty member talk about the contours of collaboration, the tension between creative work and the imperative to market that work, and how a given tool or artistic process can limit or liberate the art.
Further Reading
Alice Fall ’22 Wins Second Place in Lenscratch Student Awards
Post Date: 08-08-2023
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“My Body Is a Clock”: Sara J. Winston Writes about Life of Chronic Care for the New York Times
“My Body Is a Clock”: Sara J. Winston Writes about Life of Chronic Care for the New York Times
Artist Sara J. Winston, Bard’s Photography Program coordinator, writes about her experience living with multiple sclerosis in an opinion piece for the New York Times. Through her photographs and essay, Winston exposes the realities of life with a chronic condition managed by regular medical treatment. “Rather than orient myself to the cycle of the moon, I orient myself to the cycle of infusion. And it has become a system in my creative work. My body is a clock,” she writes. “Every 28 days, I point the camera toward myself to document my illness and care. I have used my time as a patient in the infusion suite, a place where I sometimes feel powerless, to reclaim my autonomy as an artist and photographer.”
Post Date: 06-30-2023
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Bard Alumna Lisa Kereszi ’95 to Launch Mourning, a New Photo Monograph
Bard Alumna Lisa Kereszi ’95 to Launch Mourning, a New Photo Monograph
Lisa Kereszi ’95, photographer and Bard College alumna, is launching Mourning, a new monograph that explores family grief through photographs. In 2018, Kereszi’s father passed away, less than a year after she lost her grandmother. She asked family members to install a trail camera so she could view her father’s grave plot—after the headstone had tipped over and required re-mounting—which automatically generated photos she could view every day. In this way, she was able to regularly experience visiting her father’s grave through thousands of images taken over a seven-month period, despite being hundreds of miles away. The resulting Mourning is an intimate and lovingly created album, with 112 of those photographs as testimony of her grieving process.
Mourning is available for presale through August 1 at the collaborative publishing platform Minor Matters Books, and will include an essay by curator and writer Marvin Heiferman.
Kereszi, a photography major at Bard, first became interested in visiting cemeteries to make photographs after photographer Stephen Shore showed her Walker Evans’s famous 1936 picture of a desolate grave in Alabama. In publishing Mourning, she is collaborating for the second time with Bard alumna Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95, with whom she worked previously on Joe’s Junk Yard, 2012 by Damiani Books. Marsh founded Minor Matters Books with the aim of creating a publishing platform that makes its audience co-publishers of photo book titles, enabling production support solely through pre-sales, rather than through traditional means.
Post Date: 05-23-2023
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Walid Raad Joins Bard College as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Photography in the Division of the Arts
Walid Raad Joins Bard College as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Photography in the Division of the Arts
Bard College is pleased to announce the appointment of Walid Raad as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Photography in the Division of the Arts for the 2023–24 academic year. Raad is an artist whose works include photography, video, mixed media installations, and performances. His works include the creation of The Atlas Group, a fifteen-year project between 1989 and 2004 about the contemporary history of Lebanon, as well as the ongoing projects Scratching on Things I Could Disavow and Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut). His books include Walkthrough, The Truth Will Be Known When The Last Witness Is Dead, My Neck Is Thinner Than A Hair, and Let’s Be Honest The Weather Helped.
Raad’s solo exhibitions have been featured at institutions including the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza (Madrid), Louvre (Paris), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden), ICA (Boston, USA), Museo Jumex (Mexico City, Mexico), Kunsthalle Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland), The Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, UK), Festival d’Automne (Paris, France), Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels, Belgium), The Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, Germany).
His works have also been shown in Documenta 11 and 13 (Kassel, Germany), The Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy), Whitney Bienniale 2000 and 2002 (New York, USA), Sao Paulo Bienale (Sao Paulo, Brazil), Istanbul Biennal (Istanbul, Turkey), Homeworks I and IV (Beirut, Lebanon) and other institutions across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. In addition, Raad is the recipient multiple grants, prizes, and awards, including the Aachener Kunstpreis (2018), ICP Infinity Award (2016), the Hasselblad Award (2011), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), the Alpert Award in Visual Arts (2007), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2007), the Camera Austria Award (2005), and a Rockefeller Fellowship (2003).
Post Date: 05-11-2023
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2023 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to Three Bard College Faculty Members and Four Bard Alumnae
2023 Guggenheim Fellowships Awarded to Three Bard College Faculty Members and Four Bard Alumnae
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships to three Bard faculty members and four Bard alumnae. Felicia Keesing, David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, Laura Larson, cochair of photography at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Jordan Weber, visiting artist in residence at Studio Arts, artist Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20, photographer Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10, artist Jessica Segall ’00, and artist Martine Syms MFA ’17 have been named 2023 Guggenheim Fellows.
Chosen through a rigorous review process from nearly 2,500 applicants, Keesing, Larson, Weber, Nguyen, Phyars-Burgess, Segall and Syms were among a diverse group of 171 artists, writers, scholars, and scientists to receive a 2023 Fellowship. Keesing was awarded a Fellowship for her research on the ecology of infectious diseases, Larson for her work in photography, Weber for his work in the arts, Nguyen for her work in the arts, Phyars-Burgess for her work in photography, Segall for her work in the arts, and Syms for her work in the arts.
“Like Emerson, I believe that fullness in life comes from following our calling,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “The new class of Fellows has followed their calling to enhance all of our lives, to provide greater human knowledge and deeper understanding. We’re lucky to look to them to bring us into the future.”
In all, 48 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, 72 different academic institutions, 24 states and the District of Columbia, and two Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 31 to 85. Close to 50 Fellows have no current full-time college or university affiliation. Many Fellows’ projects directly respond to issues like the lasting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, democracy and policing, scientific innovation, climate change, and identity.
Created and initially funded in 1925 by Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon Guggenheim, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought since its inception 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 nearly $400 million in Fellowships to over 18,000 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 great range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program. For more information on the 2023 Fellows, please visit the Foundation’s website at gf.org.
Felicia Keesing’s research focuses on the ecology of infectious diseases in New York's Hudson Valley and in the savannas of central Kenya. She holds a Bachelor of Science from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Keesing was awarded the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2000), and has been the recipient of grants from National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, among others. She was coeditor of Infectious Disease Ecology: Effects of Ecosystems on Disease and of Disease on Ecosystems (Princeton University Press, 2008), and has also contributed to articles such as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecology Letters, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Ecology, BioScience, Conservation Biology, Trends in Ecology & Evolution, Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, and Canadian Journal of Zoology.
Laura Larson’s work looks to the history of photography as a documentary practice to tell personal and sociocultural narratives. From 2002-2019, she was represented by Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York, where she presented four one-person exhibitions, including Complimentary (2002), Apparition (2005), and Electric Girls and the Invisible World (2009). Larson’s work has been featured at a variety of institutions, including Art in General, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Centre Pompidou, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Hyperallergic, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and TimeOut New York. Larson is also the author of two books, Hidden Mother (2017), and City of Incurable Women (2022), both of which feature her research into 19th century photography.
Jordan Weber is a New York- and Midwest-based regenerative land sculptor and activist who works at the crossroads of social justice and environmental racism. He has been an inaugural Harvard LOEB/ArtLab Fellow, a Blade of Grass Fellow, and an Iowa Arts Council Fellow, and has held residencies at Yale University’s inaugural Environmental Humanities, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and Washington University’s Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (CRE2) in St. Louis. He has been the recipient of multiple awards, including the 2022 United States Artists Award, Creative Capital Award, Joan Mitchell Award, Tanne Arts Foundation award, and African American Leadership Forum Grant. Weber is also working with Bard College on plans for a public art project, details of which will be announced later this year.
Diane Severin Nguyen MFA ’20 is an artist who works with photography and time-based media. Her solo and two-person exhibitions include IF REVOLUTION IS A SICKNESS at SculptureCenter, New York, and The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Between Two Solitudes at Stereo, Warsaw; Tyrant Star at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Minor twin worlds, with Brandon Ndife, at Bureau, New York; Reoccurring Afterlife, at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong; and Flesh Before Body at Bad Reputation, Los Angeles. Nguyen has also been featured in multiple group exhibitions, including Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York; Metabolic Rift at Berlin Atonal, Berlin; Made in L.A. 2020: a version at Hammer Museum and The Huntington, Los Angeles; and Bodies of Water: 13th Shanghai Biennale, at Power Station of Art, in Shanghai. Her work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, and The Escalette Collection of Art at Chapman University.
Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10 was born in Brooklyn, New York to Trinidadian parents and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She is interested in using photography education as community empowerment, and her first monograph, Untitled, explores the African diaspora around the world.
Jessica Segall ’00 is an artist who uses hostile and threatened landscapes as the sites for her work. While embedded in these sites, she plays with both the risk of engaging with the environment and the vulnerability of the environment itself. Segall's work is built on a foundation of research that often includes cross-disciplinary collaboration and collaboration with scientists, activists and non-human beings. Her work has been featured internationally, including at COP 26, The Fries Museum, the Coreana Museum of Art, the Havana Bienal, the Queens Museum of Art, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the National Museum of Jewish American History, the Inside Out Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, the National Gallery of Indonesia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Croatia, the Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery and the National Symposium for Electronic Art. Segall has also received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the Harpo Foundation, the Virginia A Groot Foundation, the FST Studioprojects Fund, the Puffin Foundation, the Arts Envoy Program and Art Matters. Her work has been featured in Cabinet Magazine, the New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Mousse Magazine and Art in America. Her work is in the collections of the Museum de Domijnen and the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
Martine Syms MFA ’17 is an artist who has earned wide recognition for a practice that combines conceptual grit, humor, and social commentary. Her work has been shown extensively, including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and ICA London. She has also done commissioned work for brands such as Prada, Nike, and Celine, among others. She is a recipient of the Creative Capital Award, a United States Artists fellowship, the Tiffany Foundation award, and the Future Fields Art Prize. She is in a band called Aunt Sister and hosts Double Penetration, a monthly radio show on NTS. Syms also runs Dominica Publishing.
Post Date: 04-11-2023
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F-Stop Magazine Interviews Photographer Emily Allen ’22
F-Stop Magazine Interviews Photographer Emily Allen ’22
Photographer Emily Allen ’22 talks with F-Stop magazine about her inspirations, creative practice, and current project “Sit Tibi Terra Levis,” which originated as her Senior Project and was recently featured in the magazine. “With this portfolio, I hope to draw attention to photography as a process and an object and its humanity–its connection to death, to life, and to memory,” said Allen, who studied photography, classics, and medieval studies at Bard. “I used the techniques we use to attempt to preserve ourselves throughout history to preserve my images.” The photographic prints in her book were created using processes humans have historically used on our bodies after death. Some were brushed with oil according to ancient Greek rites, others soaked in honey as the Babylonians did, some were processed in simulation of modern American chemical embalming, and others incompletely fixed so they continue to degrade and decompose over time. In this project, Allen was fascinated by the kinds of similarities and subversions these processes had when used on photographs versus on our bodies.
Self Portrait © Emily Allen
When looking at images, Allen doesn’t have one strict definition of what a photograph can be, rather she looks for resonance. “Literally the word photograph means ‘light drawing’–to me anything made using light sensitive materials and light is a photograph whether it is representative of our physical world or not . . . A good photograph convinces me of the reality in the world within the boundaries of the paper–I have to believe in it. I love when photographs feel like bubbles, each containing their own little universe,” she says.
Post Date: 03-07-2023
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The New Yorker Interviews Stephen Shore: “How America’s Most Cherished Photographer Learned to See”
The New Yorker Interviews Stephen Shore: “How America’s Most Cherished Photographer Learned to See”
As part of the 2023 Interviews Issue, the New Yorker published an interview with Stephen Shore conducted in 2021 by the late Peter Schjeldah. Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts and director of the Photography Program, spoke about his artistic practice and how it has changed during the course of his career. “While I may have questions or intentions that guide what I’m interested in photographing at a particular moment, and even guide exactly where I place my camera,” Shore says, “the core decision still comes from recognizing a feeling of deep connection, a psychological or emotional or physical resonance with the picture’s content.” Speaking to the difference between photography mediated by a viewfinder versus digital photography viewed through a screen, Shore sees more similarities than differences. “You don’t look through the camera but at a ground glass,” he says. “There is an awareness of looking not at the world but at an image of the world.” For his own practice, Shore says he values experimentation and newness. “I’ve gone through many phases over the years,” he says. “If I find myself repeating myself or if a visual strategy has devolved into a convention of my own making, I know it’s time to move on.”
Post Date: 02-21-2023
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Bard Alumna Lisa Kereszi ’95 Wins Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award
Bard Alumna Lisa Kereszi ’95 Wins Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award
Photographer Lisa Kereszi ’95 has won a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation biennial competition award for $20,000 granted to dedicated artists whose work shows promise of further development. Kereszi is among 20 artists selected by the foundation for the 2022 biennial competition. The monetary grant is intended to give artists the opportunity to produce new work and to push the boundaries of their creativity. By doing so, it seeks to make a difference in the lives of the recipients at a moment in their career when they need it most. The awards, accompanied with the prestigious recognition, enhance the visibility and stature of artists in the art world.
Artists who work in painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, video, and craft media are eligible for the award. Approximately 50 designated nominators from throughout the United States recommend candidates to be considered. Nominees are then reviewed and vetted by a jury of seven individuals. Nominators and jury members are artists, critics, museum professionals, and members of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees.
Lisa Kereszi was born in 1973 in Pennsylvania and grew up outside Philadelphia with a father who ran the family auto junkyard and a mother who owned an antique shop. In 1995, she graduated from Bard College with a BA in photography and literature/creative writing. In 2000, Kereszi went on to earn an M.F.A. in photography from the Yale School of Art, where she has taught since 2004 and is now Senior Critic in Photography and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art. She recently was a MacDowell Fellow and a Gardner Fellowship Finalist. Her work is in many private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Study Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Her publications include: The More I Learn About Women (2014), Joe’s Junk Yard (2012), Fun and Games (2009), Fantasies (2008), Governor’s Island (2004), and Lisa Kereszi: Photographs (2003). She has two books coming out later this year, including one published by Minor Matters, the photobook imprint run by fellow Bardian, Michelle Dunn Marsh ‘95.
About the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
Established in 1918 by L.C. Tiffany, son of Charles Lewis Tiffany who founded the New York jewelry store Tiffany & Co., the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation is the earliest artist-endowed foundation in the United States, and is the first created by an artist during his or her lifetime. In 1946 the Foundation changed its program from the operation of an artists’ retreat to the bestowing of grants to artists. These grants were awarded annually through a competition in painting, sculpture, graphics, and textile design; a range of categories reflecting Tiffany’s manifold talents and interests. Each year applicants sent examples of their work to the National Academy of Design, where it was exhibited and judged. The Foundation also supported a plan by which artworks were purchased and donated to institutions, an apprenticeship program enabling young craftspeople to work with masters, and a program of direct grants to young painters and sculptors. In 1980, the grant programs were consolidated into a biennial competition. Today, the competition grants $20,000 awards to artists selected for their talent and individual artistic strength. Since 1980, the competition has granted $9,534,000 in awards to 491 artists nationwide.
Post Date: 02-08-2023
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Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse SR ’81 Awarded MacDowell Fellowship for Work on Her Most Recent Project Book of Miracles
Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse SR ’81 Awarded MacDowell Fellowship for Work on Her Most Recent Project Book of Miracles
Tanya Marcuse SR ’81, artist in residence in the Photography Program at Bard, has received a MacDowell Artist Residency Fellowship for spring/summer 2023. Marcuse’s fellowship will support work toward the completion of her project, Book of Miracles, to be published by Nazraeli Press. This project, in direct conversation with the 16th-century Book of Miracles, a compendium of biblical, astronomical, and apocalyptic miracles, aims to visualize phenomena that seems to defy the laws of nature, using fire, paint, and the staging of fantastical scenes. Photography often walks a thin line between fact and fiction, or dwells in a realm where the two cannot be distinguished; the proposed work takes part in this pendulum swing between belief and doubt.
MacDowell Fellows’ applications are reviewed by a panel of esteemed professionals in each discipline. These panelists make their selections based on applicants’ vision and talent as reflected by a work sample and 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. Marcuse was previously a MacDowell Fellow in 2018.
Post Date: 02-07-2023
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Previously Unpublished Photos of Andy Warhol and Friends by Steve Schapiro ’55 Published Posthumously in New Book
Previously Unpublished Photos of Andy Warhol and Friends by Steve Schapiro ’55 Published Posthumously in New Book
In 1965, Life hired photojournalist and Bard alumnus Steven Schaprio ’55 to photograph the then-ascendant Andy Warhol for the magazine. Life never published the photo series, and only now are they being published posthumously after Schapiro’s death in 2022. Rolling Stone featured a series of photos from Andy Warhol and Friends: 1965–1966, which “includes many never-before-seen documents of a pivotal time in Warhol’s life as he helped shape popular culture for decades to come.”
Post Date: 01-10-2023
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For Vogue, Visiting Artist in Residence Jasmine Clarke ’18 Photographed Jon Batiste at White House State Dinner
For Vogue, Visiting Artist in Residence Jasmine Clarke ’18 Photographed Jon Batiste at White House State Dinner
“Jon Batiste is not afraid of a jazzy suit,” writes André-Naquian Wheeler for Vogue. Photography by Visiting Artist in Residence Jasmine Clarke ’18 accompanies Wheeler’s article, showing Batiste preparing for his first performance at the White House. Batiste, who performed “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and France’s national anthem “La Marseillaise,” requested that his family be in attendance, and especially his wife, the writer Suleika Jaouad, who has written about her diagnosis of an aggressive form of leukemia. “Seeing Suleika step out for her first public outing in a year after her cancer treatment meant a lot,” Batiste said. Batiste’s 89-year-old grandfather, an activist, also in attendance, commented on the symbolism of Batiste’s inclusion in the state dinner. “Discussing with [him] how the original builders of the White House were enslaved Americans whilst walking into the State Dinner as honored guests was quite a moment,” Batiste said. Clarke’s photography captures Batiste and guests preparing for the event, the musician’s excitement clear from Clarke’s vulnerable candids and striking portraits.
Post Date: 12-20-2022
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MoMA Retrospective Exhibition of Professor An-My Lê’s Work to Open in November 2023
MoMA Retrospective Exhibition of Professor An-My Lê’s Work to Open in November 2023
In November 2023, the Museum of Modern Art will present the first exhibition of Professor An-My Lê’s powerful photographs alongside her forays into film, video, textiles, and sculpture. “For 30 years, the photographs of artist An-My Lê have engaged the complex fictions that inform how we justify, represent, and mythologize warfare and other forms of conflict,” reads MoMA’s announcement of the exhibition. “Lê does not take a straightforward photojournalistic approach to depicting combat. Rather, with poetic attention to politics and landscape, she meditates on the meaning of perpetual violence, war’s environmental impact, and the significance of diaspora.”
An-My Lê: Between Two Rivers will include ever-before-seen embroideries and rarely shown photographs from her Delta and Gabinetto series, which explore the relationship between mass media, gender, labor, and violence. And an immersive installation created especially for the exhibition attests to the artist’s long-standing consideration of the cinematic dimensions of photography and war.
An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College. She is a recipient the MacArthur Fellowship (2012), New York State Foundation for the Arts grant (1996), and Guggenheim Fellowship (1997). She has been a member of the faculty since 1998.
This exhibition is organized by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography; with Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.
Post Date: 12-09-2022
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Stephen Shore Interviewed on the Podcast A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers
Stephen Shore Interviewed on the Podcast A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers
On the podcast A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers, Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts and director of the Photography Program at Bard, discusses his recently published book, a memoir, Modern Instances: The Craft of Photography, with the host, fellow photographer, Ben Smith. In the interview, Shore talks about the nature of the visual medium of photographs, the flow state of capturing images with a camera, his teaching practice, and the three stages of mastering the discipline of photography, among many other topics. “Photography does something else that words can’t do. It’s not a limitation. It is what the medium is,” he says about the adage: a photograph is worth a thousand words.
Post Date: 12-01-2022
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Bard Alumna Lexi Parra ’18 for the Washington Post: As Gang, Police Violence Rages, a Caracas Neighborhood Tries to Connect
Bard Alumna Lexi Parra ’18 for the Washington Post: As Gang, Police Violence Rages, a Caracas Neighborhood Tries to Connect
On January 7, 2021, Venezuela’s Special Action Forces raided the La Vega neighborhood of Caracas, leaving 23 people dead in what the community calls the “La Vega massacre.” The special police unit has been accused of targeting working-class neighborhoods, criminalizing young men for where they live as it attempts to root out gang activity. As part of an ongoing project supported by the Pulitzer Center and a Getty Images Inclusion Grant, Bard alumna Lexi Parra ’18 gets to know the women of La Vega who are maintaining their community and pushing back against state and gang violence.
Lexi Parra majored in human rights and photography at Bard College.Further Reading
- As gang, police violence rages, a neighborhood tries to connect (Washington Post)
- Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
- Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects for Peace Prize
Post Date: 10-18-2022
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Professor Lucy Sante on “Writing with the Back Brain” for LitHub
Professor Lucy Sante on “Writing with the Back Brain” for LitHub
Originally published in LitHub’s “The Craft of Writing” newsletter, Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante’s article explores her writing process and how her most recent book, Nineteen Reservoirs: On Their Creation and the Promise of Water for New York City (illustrated by Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91), “stemmed from a strong initial emotion” about the place she’s lived for the past 22 years, and took shape intuitively, without a predetermined structure or result in mind. “Going into the writing I like to cultivate a particular juncture between knowing and not knowing—having all the facts but remaining uncertain how they fit together. It’s a delicate balance, because if you know too little what you write will be halting and opaque, and if you know too much it will be dead on the page, a mere transcription after the fact,” writes Sante. “In any case, whatever ideas and speculations may occupy the writer’s head, writing does not begin with an idea; it begins with a sentence.”
Post Date: 08-16-2022
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Photographs by Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 “Are Shedding New Light on How Fireflies Interact with the World,” Says NPR
Photographs by Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 “Are Shedding New Light on How Fireflies Interact with the World,” Says NPR
Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 says his photographs of fireflies can range from “a spa for the eyes” to “almost pure chaos.” For NPR, Lara Pellegrinelli spoke with Mauney, who has spent almost a decade photographing fireflies in the Hudson Valley, using Photoshop to painstakingly compile hundreds of timed exposures into a single image. The images, Pellegrinelli writes, are catching the eye of artists and scientists alike, sparking the interest of researchers pursuing “new evidence that firefly swarms can synchronize their flashes.” Mauney is now a part of a group of volunteers helping collect data for computer scientist and biophysicist Dr. Orit Peleg of the BioFrontiers Institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Still, for Mauney, the images, and the process of composing them, are the primary thing. “I never get tired of it,” Mauney says. “And I never get tired of the challenge and the puzzle of trying to construct the images — and trying to construct a good image, because it’s not enough for me to let the bugs do the heavy lifting.”
Post Date: 08-15-2022
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Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
Venezuelan-American Photographer Lexi Parra ’18 Named Recipient of a 2022 Getty Images Annual Inclusion Grant
Lexi Parra ’18, who majored in human rights and photography at Bard, has been selected as one of eight photojournalists from around the world to be collectively awarded $40,000 in grants from Getty Images, a preeminent global visual content creator and marketplace. Parra is a Venezuelan-American photographer and community educator based in Caracas, Venezuela. Her work focuses on youth culture, the personal effects of inequality and violence, and themes of resilience.
The annual Getty Images Inclusion Grants aim to support emerging editorial talent within underrepresented groups, offering aspiring photojournalists the creative means and solutions to pursue education that will enable careers within the industry. Eight grants of $5,000 each were awarded to editorial photographers and videographers from different professional specialties, including News, Sport, Arts & Entertainment, and Multimedia. Parra was selected for her work in news photography. Recipients were selected by an esteemed panel of judges comprising accomplished professionals from the fields of photography and journalism and convened by Women Photograph, a non-profit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists; Diversify Photo, a community of photographers, editors, and visual producers working to diversify how people interact with media; and Getty Images.
Post Date: 08-02-2022
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Alice Fall ’22 Wins Second Place in Lenscratch’s 2022 Student Prize Awards
Alice Fall ’22 Wins Second Place in Lenscratch’s 2022 Student Prize Awards
For her “lyrical and haunting” Senior Project, I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, Alice Fall ’22 won second place in Lenscratch’s 2022 Student Prize Awards. “In Alice Falls’s I Went Back to Sit in the Sun, images are alive, the still photographs aren’t still,” writes Alexa Dilworth. Fall will receive $750 as well as a mini exhibition on the Curated Fridge as part of the prize package. In an interview with Lenscratch, Fall described her process and artistic philosophy. “When I am in tune with my body and emotion and the way I physically respond to an image—whether I am making work or engaging with images I’ve already made, my vision is sharpest,” she said.
Post Date: 07-26-2022
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American Mythology: Theo Wenner ’09 on the Year He Spent Photographing the NYPD’s North Brooklyn Homicide Squad in Interview
American Mythology: Theo Wenner ’09 on the Year He Spent Photographing the NYPD’s North Brooklyn Homicide Squad in Interview
The detective, as a figure, looms large in the “American mythology,” says Theo Wenner ’09, speaking to Interview about his new book of photography, Homicide. “It’s like a Western, or baseball,” Wenner says. “I wanted to see what it looks like now. Does it actually exist like you think it does? The way they dress, the way they talk?” In creating Homicide, which visually documents a year spent alongside the NYPD’s North Brooklyn Homicide squad, Wenner says his studies with Stephen Shore at Bard informed his approach to this work of photojournalism. “It’s not one single thing that Shore imparts on you. You start to realize the importance of objects,” Wenner says. Objects, Wenner says, can be more true than a portrait, which captures a projection of how someone wishes to be seen. Objects, by contrast, are “unbiased,” especially when it comes to the grim subject matter of Homicide. “You’re staring at the person’s face and it’s like they got caught mid-sentence, the eyes open and looking off into wherever, there’s like a yellow M&Ms wrapper next to the victim,” Wenner says. “Those little details take on so much significance.”
Post Date: 06-28-2022
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Bard College Appoints Lucas Blalock ’02 as Assistant Professor of Photography in the Division of Arts
Bard College Appoints Lucas Blalock ’02 as Assistant Professor of Photography in the Division of Arts
Bard College’s Division of Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Lucas Blalock ’02 as assistant professor of photography. His tenure-track appointment begins in the 2022–23 academic year.
Lucas Blalock ’02 is a photographer and writer whose work explores the potentials of mannerism in photography. He has been included in exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Malmo Kunsthall. He has also staged solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Museum Kurhaus in Kleve, Germany as well as in galleries in the US and in Europe, including Ramiken Crucible, White Cube, Eva Presenhuber, and Rodolphe Janssen.
Blalock’s books include, Towards a Warm Math (Hassla, 2011), Windows Mirrors Tabletops (Morel, 2013), Making Memeries (SPBH, 2016), A Grocer’s Orgy (Primary Information, 2018), Figures (Zolo Press, 2022), and Why Must the Mounted Messenger Be Mounted? (Objectiv, 2022). Oar Or Ore, an expansive survey of the artist’s work since 2013 as seen through the lens of recent exhibitions will be published by Museum Kurhaus later this year.
Blalock, originally from Asheville, North Carolina, holds a BA from Bard College (Class of ’02), attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received his MFA from UCLA. He is represented by Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich and New York and by Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels.
Post Date: 06-16-2022
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Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with Bard Alum Nick Zinner ’98 on Guitar, Return with Riffs, Risks, and Radical Optimism
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with Bard Alum Nick Zinner ’98 on Guitar, Return with Riffs, Risks, and Radical Optimism
The platinum-selling rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, with Bardian Nick Zinner ’98 on guitar, has released their first new music in nine years. Writing for the Guardian, Hermione Hoby observes a “sense of revelation thrums through their triumphant fifth album, Cool It Down,” due out in September. In an interview with the three musicians, Zinner says simply, “Performing with this band is the greatest thing in the world.”
Zinner majored in photography at Bard College and is also an accomplished photographer.
Post Date: 06-07-2022
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Interview: Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse in Truth in Photography
Interview: Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse in Truth in Photography
Bard College Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse constructs painstaking sets for her photographs, using found materials from the natural world to create “a kind of living and dying diorama.” With large custom frames set under a canopy in her backyard, she arranges dense and detailed settings for her photographs with plants, skulls, decomposing fruit, and animals to create fantastical images. “[G]iving the viewer an immersive sense of wonder is paramount,” says Marcuse.
In 2005, she embarked on a three-part, 14 year project, Fruitless | Fallen | Woven, moving from iconic, serial photographs of trees in Fruitless to lush, immersive, allegorical works in Fallen and Woven. The photographs in Woven are as large as 5 x 13 feet.
Tanya Marcuse is an alumna of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, AA ’81. She teaches in the Photography Program at Bard College and has been a member of the faculty since 2012.
Post Date: 05-17-2022
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New Red Order, the Indigenous Art Collective Cofounded by Bard Alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14, Will Both Curate and Produce Work for Counterpublic Triennial
New Red Order, the Indigenous Art Collective Cofounded by Bard Alumni Adam Khalil ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14, Will Both Curate and Produce Work for Counterpublic Triennial
Bard alumni Adam ’11 and Zack Khalil ’14, cofounders of the Indigenous art collective New Red Order, worked with Counterpublic on their upcoming triennial, which will run May 15 to August 15, 2023, “pulling double duty as both participating artists and curators,” writes Taylor Dafoe for Artnet. The triennial will be installed along a six-mile stretch of Jefferson Avenue in St. Louis, Missouri. New Red Order will produce work focusing on “what is locally referred to as Mound City, partnering with the Osage Nation to make a film documenting the tribe’s efforts to repatriate the landmark.” Alumna Diya Vij ’08 will also curate the exhibition.
Post Date: 05-03-2022
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Professor Tim Davis’s Photographs of Mailboxes Capture American Housing and Civic Space
Professor Tim Davis’s Photographs of Mailboxes Capture American Housing and Civic Space
Bard professor and alumnus Tim Davis ’91 has created a “composite portrait of American housing, civic space, and civil service, photographed one mailbox at a time.” So writes Frances Richard in an essay in Places exploring Davis’s images, most of which were taken in upstate New York. “They say a lot about housing,” Davis observes. “Most Americans don’t own their own homes and these mailboxes, often overlain with multiple residents’ names, show the amazing diversity in our country. … They tell you who lives there in a way that is fairly shockingly revealing, in a time when anonymity is so prized; they represent a sense of porousness between the invisible interior of a home and the public.” Tim Davis is an associate professor of photography at Bard College. He has been a member of the faculty since 2003.
Post Date: 05-03-2022
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Two Bard College Seniors Win Prestigious Watson Travel Fellowships
Two Bard College Seniors Win Prestigious Watson Travel Fellowships
Bard College seniors Ashley Eugley ’22 and Andy Garcia ’22 have been awarded prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowships, which provide for a year of travel and exploration outside the United States. Continuing its tradition of expanding the vision and developing the potential of remarkable young leaders, the Watson Foundation selected Eugley and Garcia as two of 42 students to receive this award for 2022-23. The Watson fellowship offers college graduates of unusual promise a year of independent, purposeful exploration and travel—in international settings new to them—to enhance their capacity for resourcefulness, imagination, openness, and leadership and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community. Each Watson Fellow receives a grant of $36,000 for 12 months of travel and independent study. Over the past several years, 24 Bard seniors have received Watson fellowships.
Ashley Eugley ’22, from South Bristol, Maine, will challenge the hegemony of conventional, top-down scientific approaches by exploring community science initiatives in across four continents. She will work directly with communities and nonprofit organizations, seeking to learn how participatory science efforts diverge from the paradigmatic model and how they are leveraged to monitor change, combat environmental injustice, enhance resilience, and bolster agency. An Environmental and Urban Studies major with a focus on economics, policy, and global development, Eugley says: “Environment is everything: it is a determinant of health, happiness, and agency. Unfortunately, communities across the world lack access to clean air, potable water, and uncontaminated soil, factors that are essential to environmental security and justice. Rather than passively enabling environmental inequality to persist, communities can use participatory science to monitor hazards and leverage their findings to advocate for justice. This approach diverges from the mainstream paradigm of institutionalized science by empowering non-experts to use accessible scientific approaches to enhance their knowledge, resilience, and agency.” She will spend her Watson year in South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and Ireland
Andy Garcia ’22, from New York City, will visually theorize, through a photographic lens, what the present and future of the African diaspora would be if colonization and slavery had not occurred. Using using their 23andMe results as an itinerary, Garcia will confront the sinister colonial history that has caused fractures and gaps in the understanding of identity in African diasporic descendants. A photography major, Garcia says: “African diasporic people have ended up in these places as a result of immigration, expatriation, and slavery. In creating a visual Afro-futurist media grounded in my lens as a person whose identity has been fractured by colonialism and slavery, I will materialize theories on the future of the African diaspora. This engagement with my ancestral history will enable me to rethink notions of identity beyond just connections to land in a global history marked by forced and coerced immigration.” They will spend their Watson year in Spain, France, Nigeria, Senegal, Egypt and, hopefully Pakistan.
A Watson Year provides fellows with an opportunity to test their aspirations and abilities through a personal project cultivated on an international scale. Watson Fellows have gone on to become leaders in their fields including CEOs of major corporations, college presidents, Emmy, Grammy and Oscar Award winners, Pulitzer Prize awardees, artists, diplomats, doctors, entrepreneurs, faculty, journalists, lawyers, politicians, researchers and inspiring influencers around the world. Following the year, they join a community of peers who provide a lifetime of support and inspiration. More than 3000 Watson Fellows have been named since the inaugural class in 1969. For more information about the Watson Fellowship, visit: https://watson.foundation.
Post Date: 04-05-2022
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These Wry, Eye-Popping Photos Are a Love Poem to the Streets of Los Angeles: Washington Post Reviews Professor Tim Davis’s New Book
These Wry, Eye-Popping Photos Are a Love Poem to the Streets of Los Angeles: Washington Post Reviews Professor Tim Davis’s New Book
“Photographer Tim Davis’s latest book, I’m Looking Through You, (Aperture, 2021) is a welcome respite from all the chaos and clamor unleashed in the world right now. It’s a book about the unbridled joys of ‘seeing’ with a camera. It’s also a love poem to the crazy, freewheeling streets of Los Angeles,” writes Kenneth Dickerman for the Washington Post. Tim Davis ’91 is associate professor of photography at Bard College. He has been a member of the Bard faculty since 2003.
Post Date: 02-06-2022
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On Becoming Lucy Sante: The Bard Professor Writes for Vanity Fair on Coming Out as Transgender at 67
On Becoming Lucy Sante: The Bard Professor Writes for Vanity Fair on Coming Out as Transgender at 67
Lucy Sante—writer, critic, and Bard faculty member—pens an intimate personal essay for Vanity Fair tracing her journey as a trans woman, from the carefully repressed feelings of her adolescence to finally coming out last year. “Now I am aware that I live, as we all do, in a cloud of unknowing, where certainties break down and categories become liquid,” she writes. “None of us really knows anything except provisionally. Now, as Lou Reed put it, ‘I’m set free/ to find a new illusion.’” Lucy Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1999.
Post Date: 01-26-2022
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Professor Lucy Sante Reviews the Work of Annie Leibovitz, Harry Gruyaert, Gilles Peress, Catherine Opie, and More for the New York Times
Professor Lucy Sante Reviews the Work of Annie Leibovitz, Harry Gruyaert, Gilles Peress, Catherine Opie, and More for the New York Times
In a thorough exploration of recent photography books for the New York Times, Lucy Sante, visiting professor of writing and photography, reviews works by Annie Leibovitz, Harry Gruyaert, Catherine Opie, and more, as well as a new book by Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing. Sante calls the physical mass of Gilles’ new work “intimidating,” going on to say that the book is nothing less than “capacious.”
Documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, these “two enormous volumes of plates, the size of 19th-century ledgers, and an accompanying almanac” provide the reader with something unique, Sante writes, “not a timeline but a series of existential crises that recur like rituals, that also play out in headlines, TV news footage and, above all, graffiti, rises in waves and recedes into choppiness, as capacious as a 19th-century novel but as indeterminate as an ocean.” Gilles’ photos are “never at rest,” she writes, with violence “always imminent if not present.”
Sante goes on to review a bevy of books by other “masters of the form,” including new work by Annie Leibowitz and Catherine Opie. Calling Opie “a portraitist of unusual poise,” whose subjects are often “trans people, butch lesbians, [and] fetishists of diverse sorts,” Sante writes that Opie’s “stately presentations have done much to infuse dignity into their public perception.” Later, reviewing work by Mitch Epstein, who “works like a nonfiction writer,” Sante notes his skill as a sort of aesthetic documentarian. “His photographs are always lucid and eloquent,” she writes, “and often very beautiful despite their grim subjects.”
Post Date: 12-07-2021
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East Village Author, Bard Professor Lucy Sante Weaves Together Fiction and Memoir in New Collection of Essays
East Village Author, Bard Professor Lucy Sante Weaves Together Fiction and Memoir in New Collection of Essays
“Author Lucy Sante is at an interesting point in her life, looking backward and forward simultaneously,” writes Bob Krasner for the Villager. “With the release of her latest book, a collection of essays entitled Maybe the People Would Be the Times, she has gathered together pieces that form a kind of memoir—even in the fiction that weaves in and out of the examinations of music, art, tabloids, photography and her life in the East Village many years ago. Between the creation of this book and its actual publication, Sante has entered a new phase of her life [...] In her mid-60’s, Sante has recently come out as transgender, changed her name and is happily living her life with a new set of pronouns.” Lucy Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College. She has been a member of the faculty since 1999.
Post Date: 11-09-2021
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Bard College Photography Program Faculty and Alumna Shortlisted for Aperture Photobook Awards
Bard College Photography Program Faculty and Alumna Shortlisted for Aperture Photobook Awards
Aperture has announced the shortlists for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, which include Bard alumna Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10 and Photography Program faculty members Farah Al Qasimi and Gilles Peress. Phyars-Burgess is listed in the First Book category for Untitled (Capricious Publishing, 2021). On the Photobook of the Year list, Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography Farah Al Qasimi was selected for Hello Future (Capricious Publishing, 2021) and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress was chosen for Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Steidl, 2021). Initiated in 2012, the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards celebrate the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography. The jury reviewed more than 800 submissions this year and selected only 35 books. A final jury will select winners next month.
Post Date: 10-05-2021
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Stranger than Paradise: Luc Sante on the Collages of Jim Jarmusch
Stranger than Paradise: Luc Sante on the Collages of Jim Jarmusch
“Jim Jarmusch’s small, eerie collages are all about faces,” writes Sante in the Paris Review. “And about the bodies attached to those faces. And about what happens when faces get switched off onto other bodies. You could say that Jarmusch, ever the director, is engaging in exploratory casting. He wants to see Stanley Kubrick in the role of a golfer, and Nico as a Vegas crooner, and Jane Austen winding up on the mound, and Albert Einstein as a rock star, and Bernie Sanders as a dog. Andy Warhol, meanwhile, just goes ahead and casts himself in every role, turning all of them into ‘Andy Warhol.’” Luc Sante is visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard College.
Post Date: 09-14-2021
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What Gilles Peress Saw on 9/11: Looking Back on Capturing an “Inconceivable Event”
What Gilles Peress Saw on 9/11: Looking Back on Capturing an “Inconceivable Event”
Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress, who has chronicled war and its aftershocks all over the world, was at home in Brooklyn on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he got a call from his studio manager, telling him to turn on the TV: a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. “I looked at it, and it was evident that it was not only a major incident but that it was not an accident; it was an attack,” Peress recalled in the New Yorker.
Post Date: 09-14-2021
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Ink: Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse Talks to Jon Feinstein About Her Latest Book Project
Ink: Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse Talks to Jon Feinstein About Her Latest Book Project
Ink showcases an unusual body of work by Tanya Marcuse that came about serendipitously after her young son insisted on trying nocturnal squid fishing one summer in Maine. Unlike the majority of the photographer’s large-scale, elaborate works, these images—of squid arrayed on newsprint—were made with an iPhone camera, a more spontaneous and versatile tool.
“I loved the interplay between the abstraction of the black ink leaking from an uncanny underwater creature and the pages of the NY Times, with its own collision of image and text, reportage, and advertising,” says Marcuse. “I was initially struck by the simple uncanny confluence of newspaper fact and primordial ooze, but as the work unfolded that relationship became more complex and less obvious. Over time, the squid became more and more lyrical to me, and less grotesque. I got more and more interested in the ink with and without the squid’s bodies, the way the bodies of the squid and their ink could ‘draw’ with a kind of intention and gesture, both obscuring and elucidating the newspaper images and text.”
Post Date: 08-10-2021
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Interview: Louisiana Photographer Virginia Hanusik ’14 Aims to Portray Climate Change without the Disaster
Interview: Louisiana Photographer Virginia Hanusik ’14 Aims to Portray Climate Change without the Disaster
“Having not lived in this area for most of my life, I’ve seen the visual narrative of New Orleans and South Louisiana being dominated by aerial imagery of the coast, demonstrating how much land is being lost, or of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Those are the iconic images that are used to communicate Louisiana's environmental challenges. It’s not to say that those images aren’t important and documentary photography isn’t needed. But I think that there’s so much more room to visually explore these issues in a way that engages people more rather than relying on the fear tactics to encourage people to act.”
Post Date: 08-03-2021
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Review: Tim Davis’s Latest Book Is “a visual poem celebrating Los Angeles”
Review: Tim Davis’s Latest Book Is “a visual poem celebrating Los Angeles”
Driven by a desire to “do everything differently,” in 2017 Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis dropped his ongoing projects and spent two years traveling to Los Angeles, resulting in I’m Looking Through You, an expansive monograph published by Aperture.
Post Date: 07-13-2021
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A Shared Past in an Unfolding Present: A Conversation with Bard Professor, Photographer An-My Lê
A Shared Past in an Unfolding Present: A Conversation with Bard Professor, Photographer An-My Lê
The photographs of An-My Lê play with assumptions about photographic truth and narrative, questioning how we process mediated information. Whether by capturing confederate monuments removed from their pedestals, war reenactments, or American soldiers training in 29 Palms, California, Lê reframes American history and its myriad legacies. She chooses viewpoints that, in her words, “speak to experiences of a shared past in an unfolding present.” In this live conversation, Lê speaks with Getty Museum assistant curator Mazie Harris about her experience traveling across the United States to make photographs.
Post Date: 05-11-2021
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Conversation: Bard Professor An-My Lê and Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen Discuss the Influence of Their Experience as Vietnamese Refugees on Their Work
Conversation: Bard Professor An-My Lê and Writer Viet Thanh Nguyen Discuss the Influence of Their Experience as Vietnamese Refugees on Their Work
“When a book of Lê’s work was published in 2005, I wrote about one particular photograph in which she herself appears, playing the part of a Viet Cong guerrilla about to ambush American soldiers. That photograph gestures at wartime images and Hollywood fantasies about the deadly natives, which, when I was growing up as a Vietnamese refugee, were the only depictions I ever saw of people who looked like me. Its humor and self-awareness really drew me in,” writes Nguyen in the New York Review of Books. An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College.
Post Date: 03-09-2021
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Photographer and Musician Barbara Ess, a Longtime Photography Professor at Bard, Remembered in Artforum, New York Times
Photographer and Musician Barbara Ess, a Longtime Photography Professor at Bard, Remembered in Artforum, New York Times
“Ess was most widely known for her large-scale photographs made using a pinhole camera, a rarity in the art world but a device she used to great effect, producing blurred, haunting images that evoked variously dreamy anxiety, shattered romanticism, and the stuttering disquiet of the late twentieth century,” writes Artforum. “‘I think of my work as an investigation and it’s always concerned with the same question,” she told the LA Times. “Exactly what is the true nature of reality?’”
READ MORE
Barbara Ess, 76, Dies; Artist Blurred Lines Between Life and Art (New York Times)
Barbara Ess (1948–2021), Artforum
Barbara Ess: A Remembrance from the Magenta Plains Gallery
Post Date: 03-08-2021
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Buddy Enright ’84 Receives Golden Globe Nod for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Buddy Enright ’84 Receives Golden Globe Nod for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Bard College alumnus Buddy Enright ’84 was the executive producer of the Golden Globe Award–winning feature comedy hit, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, which was released in October 2020 on Amazon Prime. The film won at the Golden Globes for Best Picture – Musical/Comedy, Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical/Comedy (Sacha Baron Cohen), and Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical/Comedy (Maria Bakalov).
Enright was also nominated for the 2020 Emmy Award for best comedy series, Dead to Me (Netflix). He produced seasons 1 and 2, and is preparing season 3 for release this year.
Post Date: 03-07-2021
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Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Photography Luc Sante and Photography Professor Tim Davis Explore New York City’s Reservoirs in Upstate New York in Four-Part Photo Essay Series in Places Journal
Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Photography Luc Sante and Photography Professor Tim Davis Explore New York City’s Reservoirs in Upstate New York in Four-Part Photo Essay Series in Places Journal
“The trauma imposed by these land seizures is still felt, even as nearly nine million people depend daily on the water system,” the series introduction states. “New York’s reservoirs exemplify the social compact that undergirds ambitious public infrastructures, while the stories of their making emphasize divisions between city and country, wealth and poverty, the potentials and risks inherent in large-scale environmental intervention.”
Post Date: 01-27-2021
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Speak, Reenactment: Poet Hai-Dang Phan on Professor An-My Lê’s Photography
Speak, Reenactment: Poet Hai-Dang Phan on Professor An-My Lê’s Photography
“As equipment for life and art, An-My Lê’s exemplary work suggested to me that one way forward might be back—into the tangles of memory and history, onto the contested terrain of the past,” writes Hai-Dang Phan for the Baffler. An-My Lê is the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College.
Post Date: 01-25-2021
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Night Sky Time-Lapse Photographs by Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 Exhibited at Quad City Airport
Night Sky Time-Lapse Photographs by Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 Exhibited at Quad City Airport
Time-lapse photographs of airplane arrivals and departures by Bard alumnus Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ‘00 are on view through March 1 as part of A Trip Back in Time at the Quad City International Airport in Moline, Illinois. The exhibit comprises Mauney’s photographs, Drew Morton’s digital drawings of airport runways around the world, and a selection of mid-century modern artifacts. For this series, Mauney camped out in select locations for hours at a time with his camera aperture open to capture the light emitted from airplanes and stars as they moved through the night sky. Pete Mauney lives and works in Tivoli, New York. He received his BA and MFA in photography from Bard College.
Post Date: 01-21-2021
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Cultured Magazine Profiles Artists Felix Bernstein ’13 and Gabe Rubin ’14 as Part of “Young Artists 2021” Series
Cultured Magazine Profiles Artists Felix Bernstein ’13 and Gabe Rubin ’14 as Part of “Young Artists 2021” Series
“‘We’re trying to work against the flatness of video as a medium and embed it in sculpture in new ways,’ Gabe Rubin says of an installation he and Felix Bernstein have been tinkering with,” writes Tina Shrike. “It’s the latest project in their multidisciplinary practice, which has unfolded, Rubin says, like an ‘endless slumber party’ over the past decade. ‘It’s a conceptual struggle too, against the flattening of everything in life,’ Bernstein is quick to add.”
Post Date: 12-04-2020
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The Guardian Spotlights Work by Recent Grad Jasmine Clarke ’18 in Photo Vogue Festival 2020
The Guardian Spotlights Work by Recent Grad Jasmine Clarke ’18 in Photo Vogue Festival 2020
The fifth edition of the Photo Vogue Festival, entitled All In This Together, includes works by an international group of 30 photographers. Of her own work in the exhibition—the portrait Marissa—New York–based artist and Bard alumna Jasmine Clarke ’18 says, “When I look in the mirror, I want to believe that what I am seeing is an extension of myself even though I know that it isn’t. I’m seeing a reflection (an illusion) of me and my world. I can never quite trust a mirror; a picture creates a similar false sense of reality.” The exhibition will be available for viewing online beginning November 12.
Post Date: 11-10-2020
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Professor An-My Lê’s Four-Year Photographic Road Trip of the United States
Professor An-My Lê’s Four-Year Photographic Road Trip of the United States
“Many of my photographs are made out of a profound sense of powerlessness but also out of a desire to locate power and authority in unexpected places: in the natural world, in a solitary border patrol officer or in the intimacy and strength of a family under a bridge that connects the United States to Mexico,” writes Lê in the New York Times. “These images are reminders to me that our American landscape and the communities within it transcend this cultural and political moment.”
Post Date: 10-23-2020
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Interview: Theo Wenner ’09 Discusses His First Book, Jane, Featuring Photographs of His Mother over the Course of One Year
Interview: Theo Wenner ’09 Discusses His First Book, Jane, Featuring Photographs of His Mother over the Course of One Year
“I think it’s really important to photograph what you know, otherwise the work will feel insincere. That philosophy can be applied to anything you’re photographing. Somehow what you’re shooting has to relate back to you for it to work, in my opinion,” Wenner tells W. “The more time I’ve spent with my mother over the years, the more complex of a character she’s become for me. She really is one of the most mysterious, surprising people I know. Over time, it just became obvious to me that this was what the book should be about.”
Post Date: 10-21-2020
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Aperture Profiles New Series of Photographs, Tokens from an Unled Life, by Gus Aronson ’20
Aperture Profiles New Series of Photographs, Tokens from an Unled Life, by Gus Aronson ’20
“I began to see objects as vessels and people as fortune-tellers,” Aronson says of his photographs, mostly taken in and around Yonkers, upper Manhattan, and the Upper West Side. “Photographing in a world so divided and isolated, it was important to remind myself that we are, in many ways, still connected.”
Post Date: 09-29-2020
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Photographer and Filmmaker Gus Aronson ’20 Showcases Work in Elle Feature Exploring Fall Fashion through the Eyes of 2020 Photography Graduates
Photographer and Filmmaker Gus Aronson ’20 Showcases Work in Elle Feature Exploring Fall Fashion through the Eyes of 2020 Photography Graduates
“My practice, for the most part, centers around the convergence of information, fiction, and history,” says Aronson, who photographed his friends Aurora and Henry near Bard’s campus, crediting the lush landscape and rich history as a source of inspiration. “I believe that pictures don’t depict history or a moment in time, but rather challenge it. They act as a road map for the future. They are tarot cards in a sense, informing how we subsequently see the world and the next [set of] pictures.”
Post Date: 09-09-2020
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New York Times Highlights Luc Sante’s Exhibition of Collages at James Fuentes Gallery as One of Three Shows to See Right Now
New York Times Highlights Luc Sante’s Exhibition of Collages at James Fuentes Gallery as One of Three Shows to See Right Now
“Whether on reclaimed ledger paper or vintage picture postcards, the images he constructs are something like found details themselves—singular and mysterious, if occasionally a little on the nose,” writes Will Heinrich.
Post Date: 08-25-2020
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Photographer, Bard Professor An-My Lê on How Pictures Can Help Us Keep Up with a Rapidly Changing World
Photographer, Bard Professor An-My Lê on How Pictures Can Help Us Keep Up with a Rapidly Changing World
Professor An-My Lê’s ongoing series of photographs Silent General speaks to the current political and cultural moment: packed protests, fallen monuments, and anti-Trump graffiti echo the images filling TV screens and social media. “It’s eerie to see how some of the issues that unfolded when I started Silent General [in 2016] are now back at the forefront in an even more urgent way,” says Lê. “History doesn’t move through time in a straight line.”
Post Date: 06-08-2020
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Bard Students and Alumni/ae Awarded Prestigious Scholarships and Fellowships
Bard Students and Alumni/ae Awarded Prestigious Scholarships and Fellowships
The number of Bard College alumni/ae and students receiving prestigious fellowships and scholarships for 2020 continues to increase weekly. Read about our winners below.
Two Bard College alumnae have been awarded Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation. GRF provides prospective and current graduate students with a three-year annual stipend, a cost of education allowance, and opportunities for international research and professional development. The program counts among its alums 42 Nobel laureates and more than 450 members of the National Academy of Sciences.
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships
Congratulations to Marisol Dothard ’17, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in microbiology at Boston University, and Madeleine Breshears ’18, who will do a PhD in nanochemistry at the University of Washington. Madeleine received a Fulbright Scholarship to Ireland last year.Fulbright Awards
More about the Fulbright Recipients
Madison Emond ’18, a photography major from Barrington, Rhode Island, has won a Fulbright Scholarship to New Zealand, where she will pursue a photography project, initially developed as her Bard College Senior Project, Nature as Artist: Visualizing the Personhood of the New Zealand Landscape.
Michelle Jackson-Beckett, a Ph.D. student in the Bard Graduate Center, won a Fulbright Scholarship to Austria to conduct research on “Vienna’s Other Modernism: Design and Dwelling 1918-1968.” Jackson-Beckett has accepted a faculty position at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in lieu of the Fulbright scholarship.
Three Bard seniors have recently been awarded Fulbright English Teaching Assistant grants: Marlaina Yost ‘20 (Belgium), and Mitchell Levinson ’20 and Andres Meraz ’20 (Russia).
Medora Jones ’18, who graduated from Simons Rock in 2016, has been named an alternate for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Morocco.Watson Travel Fellowships
More about the Watson Fellows
Each Watson Fellow receives a grant of $36,000 for 12 months of travel and independent study. Bard College seniors Hattie Wilder-Karlstrom ’20 and Sabrina Slipchecnko ’20, have been awarded prestigious Thomas J. Watson Fellowships, which provide for a year of travel and exploration outside the United States.
Wilder-Karlstrom will explore the ways that structured play, including but not limited to soccer and music, functions as a form of humanitarian aid, especially in refugee communities, in Kenya, Greece Germany, Canada, Chile, and Colombia.
Slipchecnko, a Bard College Berlin senior, will spend the year in Austria, Greece, Ukraine, Argentina, and Turkey, where she will explore crossovers of queerness and Orthodoxy in Jewish social life, to connect history to the present, to rediscover mystic enchantment, and will make a series of animated movies from her investigations.Davis Projects for Peace Prize
Read more about Peace Okoko's award
Bard College student and photography major Peace Okoko ’21 won a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant. This grant offered her the opportunity to spend the summer in Kenya, where she would work to increase homeless women’s access to proper sanitary supplies and facilities.Goldwater Scholarship
Hadley Parum ’21 has won a Goldwater Scholarship. The Goldwater is widely regarded as one of the nation’s most prestigious undergraduate STEM scholarships. It is awarded annually to about 300 sophomores and juniors nationwide who plan to pursue careers in science or mathematics. Hadley a joint major in psychology and music.
Post Date: 04-08-2020
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Troubled Turf: The Photographs of An-My Lê
Troubled Turf: The Photographs of An-My Lê
From war enactors to America’s southern border, An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts at Bard College, blurs the boundaries between photojournalism and fiction. Her work is currently featured in the “revelatory” career survey On Contested Terrain, at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art through July 26. (While the museum is temporarily closed because of the coronavirus, a video tour and selected images are available online at cmoa.org.)
Post Date: 04-08-2020
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How Are the World’s Great Photographers, Including Professors Tim Davis and Stephen Shore, Responding to the Coronavirus?
How Are the World’s Great Photographers, Including Professors Tim Davis and Stephen Shore, Responding to the Coronavirus?
Bard Photography Program faculty members Tim Davis and Stephen Shore, and other great photographers, are turning to Instagram to cure “corona claustrophobia” or to show how life has changed. “Pictures remind us that life does go on, and that there are spring snow storms,” says Shore, “for better or for worse.
Post Date: 04-08-2020
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Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects For Peace Prize
Bard College Student Wins Davis Projects For Peace Prize
Bard College student and photography major Peace Okoko ’21 won a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace grant. This grant offered her the opportunity to spend the summer in Kenya, where she would work to increase homeless women’s access to proper sanitary supplies and facilities. In its 14th year, the Davis Projects for Peace program invited undergraduates to design grassroots peace-building projects to be implemented during the summer of 2020 and selected the most promising and feasible projects to be funded. Although all 2020 Projects for Peace have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is the foundation’s hope that circumstances will permit them to roll these grants forward to 2021.
Okoko’s project proposed providing reusable sanitary products (either cloth pads or menstrual cups) to homeless women in Nairobi’s slums. She plans to work with an organization ‘Bank on Me’ that distributes pads to girls and help extend their demographic reach. Her project would educate women on how to create their own clothing pads in hopes to foster future sustainability. Through Bank on Me’s network of local tailors, they would provide a one-day training on how to create the clothing pads. “Lack of access to menstrual hygiene products or sanitation facilities is dehumanizing, strips a person of their dignity and robs them the opportunity to have a peaceful existence with themselves and the community around them,” writes Okoko. “In 2020, access to sanitary products should not be a privilege but rather commonplace.”
Projects for Peace was created in 2007 through the generosity of Kathryn W. Davis, a lifelong internationalist and philanthropist who believed that today’s youth—tomorrow’s leaders—ought to be challenged to formulate and test their own ideas.#
Post Date: 03-31-2020
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Bard College Students Win Prestigious Fulbright Awards
Bard College Students Win Prestigious Fulbright Awards
Two Bard College students have won prestigious Fulbright Awards for individually designed study/research projects and one student has been selected as an alternate. During their grants, Fulbrighters meet, work, live with and learn from the people of the host country, sharing daily experiences. The program facilitates cultural exchange through direct interaction on an individual basis in the classroom, field, home, and in routine tasks, allowing the grantee to gain an appreciation of others’ viewpoints and beliefs, the way they do things, and the way they think. Bard College is a Fulbright top producing institution.
Madison Emond ’18, a photography major from Barrington, Rhode Island, has won a Fulbright Scholarship to New Zealand, where she will pursue a photography project, initially developed as her Bard College Senior Project, Nature as Artist: Visualizing the Personhood of the New Zealand Landscape. “My photographic practice sets out to question traditional landscape imagery and how it affects the viewer’s relationship to the environment. Still images of nature can estrange us from knowing the Earth as a living, shifting, unruly being, locked in a process of steady, often violent, transformation. No matter how moving or dramatic a photograph of nature is, it often speaks only to the vantage point of its maker standing outside of it. Rather than making images of the landscape I make images with the landscape. What I mean is this: all my works are made through the interaction of photosensitive materials, the natural world, and moonlight – and nothing else,” says Emond. Emond has chosen New Zealand because it was one of the first nations in the world to grant legal personhood to landforms. In 2014, Te Urewera, a national park, was granted legal personhood. Three years later, the Whanganui River was granted this same status. Emond’s project has a cross-cultural component. “The United States has a passion for the natural beauty of its land and I believe its people have the capability to recognize a similar alternative relationship between its human and “natural” citizens. With that belief in mind, I plan to explore how legal personhood could benefit landforms in the United States.”
Michelle Jackson-Beckett, a Ph.D. student in the Bard Graduate Center, won a Fulbright Scholarship to Austria to conduct research on “Vienna’s Other Modernism: Design and Dwelling 1918-1968.” Jackson-Beckett has accepted a faculty position at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in lieu of the Fulbright scholarship.
Medora Jones ’18, who graduated from Simons Rock in 2016, has been named an alternate for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Morocco.
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program is the largest U.S. exchange program offering opportunities for students and young professionals to undertake international graduate study, advanced research, university teaching, and primary and secondary school teaching worldwide. The program currently awards approximately 2,000 grants annually in all fields of study, and operates in more than 140 countries worldwide. Fulbright U.S. Student alumni populate a range of professions and include ambassadors, members of Congress, judges, heads of corporations, university presidents, journalists, artists, professors, and teachers. Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose, actor John Lithgow, composer Philip Glass, opera singer Renee Fleming and economist Joseph Stiglitz are among notable former grantees.
Post Date: 03-30-2020
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Stephen Shore’s Unorthodox Photography Teaches Us to Celebrate the Everyday
Stephen Shore’s Unorthodox Photography Teaches Us to Celebrate the Everyday
Bard College professor, acclaimed photographer Stephen Shore “has made an indelible impact on photography, teaching his viewers—and generations of students at Bard College—a different way to see.” Artsy highlights four fundamental aspects of his work that have influenced the field.
Post Date: 02-10-2020
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Tanya Marcuse and Francine Prose in Conversation at New York Public Library
Tanya Marcuse and Francine Prose in Conversation at New York Public Library
Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse and Writer in Residence Francine Prose were in conversation at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library on the evening of Monday, December 16. The event celebrated Marcuse’s new book Fruitless, Fallen, and Woven, published by Radius Books. This stunning three-volume set traces the arc of 14 years of Marcuse’s work, from the iconic trees of Fruitless to the lush, immersive photographs of Fallen and Woven. Her work features elaborate tableaux of flora and fauna suggestive of the abstract, large-scale paintings of Jackson Pollock and the symbolism of medieval tapestries. She discussed the creative process with Francine Prose, award-winning writer and best-selling author of more than 20 works of fiction.
Post Date: 12-16-2019
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Bard Professor Stephen Shore Receives 2019 Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art
Bard Professor Stephen Shore Receives 2019 Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art
Bard professor and acclaimed photographer Stephen Shore was honored with The 2019 Lucie Award for Achievement in Fine Art at the annual Gala Awards ceremony on Tuesday, October 22 at Carnegie Hall in New York. The awards are part of the Lucie Foundation’s mission to honor master photographers, discover and cultivate emerging talent, and promote the appreciation of photography worldwide. Since 2003, the foundation has paid tribute to more than 135 of the most important figures in contemporary photography through the Lucie Awards.
Professor Shore’s work has been widely published and exhibited for the past 45 years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, 40 years earlier. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. More than 25 books have been published of Professor Shore’s photographs. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.
Post Date: 10-22-2019
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Bard College Names New Chairs and Distinguished Professorships
Bard College Names New Chairs and Distinguished Professorships
New Faculty Chairs and Distinguished Professorships include Susan Aberth in Art History, Valeria Luiselli in Written Arts, Kelly Reichardt in Film and Electronic Arts, and An-My Lê in Photography
Bard College has appointed four new chairs and distinguished professorships across disciplines this fall. In the Division of the Arts’ Art History and Visual Culture Program, Susan Aberth has been named Edith C. Blum Professor of Art History. This chair was formerly held by Jean French. In the Division of Languages and Literature’s Written Arts Program, Valeria Luiselli has been named Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor in Languages and Literature. In the Division of the Arts’ Film and Electronic Arts Program, Kelly Reichardt has been named S. William Senfeld Artist in Residence. In the Division of the Arts’ Photography Program, An-My Lê has been named Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts. This chair was formerly held by Peter Hutton.
Susan Aberth is an art historian whose area of specialization is surrealism in Latin America. Aberth’s teaching interests focus on Latin American art, African art, Islamic art, and other religious art and practices. Additional interests include African religious practices in the Americas, and the art and iconography of Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and the occult. In addition to her 2004 book Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries), she has contributed to Seeking the Marvelous: Ithell Colquhoun, British Women and Surrealism (Fulgur Press, 2020), Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Phoenix Art Museum, 2019), Surrealism, Occultism and Politics: In Search of the Marvelous (Routledge Press, 2018), Leonora Carrington: Cuentos mágicos (Museo de Arte Moderno & INBA, Mexico City, 2018), Unpacking: The Marciano Collection (Delmonico Books, Prestel, 2017), and Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as to Abraxas: International Journal of Esoteric Studies, Black Mirror, and the Journal of Surrealism of the Americas. She received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles; MA from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; and PhD from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Aberth has been at Bard since 2000.
Valeria Luiselli is an award-winning writer of fiction and nonfiction whose books are forthcoming and/or published in more than 20 languages. A 2019 recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she is the author of the novels Lost Children Archive (2019); The Story of My Teeth (2015), named Best Book in Fiction by the Los Angeles Times and one of the best books of the year by the New York Times, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist; and Faces in the Crowd (2014), for which she received a National Book Foundation “5 under 35” prize, among other honors. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Question, a nonfiction work published in 2017, won the American Book Award and was a National Book Critics Circle and Kirkus Prize finalist. Other nonfiction publications include “Maps of Harlem,” in Where You Are; and Sidewalks, a collection of essays that was named one of the 10 best books of 2014 by New York. Recent journal, newspaper, and radio work has appeared in the New York Times (“The Littlest Don Quixotes versus the World”), Guardian (“Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry”), Outlook Interview Series, BBC World Services (“Undocumented Central American Minors”), Harper’s Trump special (“Terrorist and Alien”), and NPR’s This American Life (“The Questionnaire”), among others. Honors also include an Art for Justice Fellowship (2018–19) and residencies at Under the Volcano, USA-Mexico; Poets House, New York City; and Castello di Fosdinovo, Italy. She previously taught at Hofstra University, City College, the New York University MFA Writing Program in Paris, and Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program. Luiselli founded the Teenage Immigrant Integration Association at Hofstra in 2015, a program that offers continuous support to immigrant and refugee teens through one-on-one English classes, soccer games, and civil rights education. She is a member of PEN America and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She received her BA from UNAM in Mexico, and her MA and PhD from Columbia University. She has been at Bard since 2019.
Kelly Reichardt is a filmmaker whose latest film, Certain Women—starring Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart, and Lily Gladstone—premiered in 2016 at the Sundance Film Festival and won the top award at the London Film Festival. Her other films include: Night Moves (2013), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy (2006), and River of Grass (1994). Her film First Cow is currently in postproduction. Reichardt has received the United States Artists Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and Renew Media Fellowship. Her work has been screened at the Whitney Biennial (2012), Film Forum, Cannes Film Festival in “un certain regard,” Venice International Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and BFI London Film Festival. She has had retrospectives at the Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Museum of the Moving Image, Walker Art Center, and American Cinematheque Los Angeles. Reichardt received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University. She has taught at Bard College since 2006.
An-My Lê is a photographer who was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1960, but left that country during the final year of the war in 1975 and subsequently found a home as a political refugee in the United States. She received an MFA from Yale University in 1993. Her film and photography examine the effects and representation of war and have included the documentation of (and participation in) Vietnam War reenactments in South Carolina. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, and has had exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and MoMA PS1. An-My has been teaching at Bard since 1999.
Post Date: 10-16-2019
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Tanya Marcuse among Featured Artists in 2019 LightField Arts Festival
Tanya Marcuse among Featured Artists in 2019 LightField Arts Festival
The 2019 LightField Arts exhibit, Photo + Synthesis, features Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse among seven artists selected to make or exhibit work focusing on the Hudson River Valley and climate change. The exhibition will be on view at Hudson Hall in Hudson, New York, October 12 to December 21, 2019.The show draws a geographic line around the Hudson River Valley. In part this is to prompt a fresh look at the mythology of the Valley’s art, ecology, and history, but through the lens of our Anthropocene era. Works on exhibit include contemporary landscape photography, mid-19th century landscape painting, and data visualization art about tree ring science.
Participating artists contribute newly commissioned and existing work. The roster includes: Sarah Bird, Christopher Griffith, Genevieve Hoffman, Tanya Marcuse, Daniel McCabe, Laura Plageman, and paintings by Hudson River School artists. Alongside these works, LightField exhibits the art produced in its annual Young Photographers Workshop.
Post Date: 10-05-2019
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Work by Recent Bard Photography Graduates Paired with 20th-Century Masters in Exhibition Curated by Professor Stephen Shore
Work by Recent Bard Photography Graduates Paired with 20th-Century Masters in Exhibition Curated by Professor Stephen Shore
BARD x HGG
Curated by Stephen Shore
June 20 – August 29, 2019
Photographs by Recent Bard College Graduates Paired With Work by Dave Heath, Frederick Sommer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lisette Model, Joseph Sudek, Minor White
New York—Last winter the legendary photographer Stephen Shore received an unusual request from Howard Greenberg Gallery: Would he be interested in curating an exhibition that included his students from the renowned photography program at Bard College? The answer was, “yes,” and the resulting collaboration, Bard x HGG, pairs work by seven of Shore’s recent graduates with photographs by historic 20th century artists from the Gallery’s vast archives. The exhibition will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from June 20 through August 29, 2019. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, June 20, from 6:00-8:00 p.m.
“Stephen Shore is a bridge connecting contemporary photography with the history of photography,” said Howard Greenberg. “As a contemporary figure and an important part of photo history, he is in a unique position to be able to connect a new generation of photographers and viewers.”
“I think of myself as both a photographer and a teacher and am delighted to have this opportunity to show my student’s work,” said Stephen Shore, Program Director & Susan Weber Professor in the Arts at Bard College. “Each of the recent graduates (from 2017 and 2018) is represented by a series of pictures so you can get a sense of their thought process and artistic practice.”
Works by the Bard graduates—Jasmine Clarke, Madison Emond, Briauna Falk, Vanessa Kotovich, Jackson Siegal, Naomi Zahler, and Ying Jing Zheng—are paired with photographs by Dave Heath, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lisette Model, Frederick Sommer, Stephen Shore, Joseph Sudek, and Minor White from Howard Greenberg Gallery’s extensive holdings.
Shore noted that the pairings vary from artist to artist, often highlighting an aspect of the recent graduate’s work. For the work by artists from the Gallery, Shore selected images by many photographers with whom he has personal connections: “David Heath was a friend to me when I was 14 and taught me about printing, and I was in a 10-day workshop run by Minor White when I was at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut.”
Providing a gateway to the exhibition, work by Don Donaghy will be presented within the context of Bard x HGG. “While going through the Gallery’s archive, I came across Donaghy’s work and thought it would be wonderful to show,” said Shore. “His work was considered cutting edge in the 1960s. Yet, his photographs disappeared from public view despite the important role they played in the development of contemporary photography.”
About Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore's work has been widely published and exhibited for the past 45 years. He was the first living photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, 40 years earlier. He has also had solo shows at George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective spanning Stephen Shore's entire career. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970s sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary work. More than 25 books of Shore’s photographs have been published. His work is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers, London, Berlin, and Los Angeles, where his work will be on view from June 19–August 30, 2019. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.
About the Photography Program at Bard College
Bard College’s Photography Program, led by Program Director Stephen Shore, is widely recognized as having one of the strongest faculties in the country. It is noted for its traditional grounding in photographic techniques, and the range of aesthetic approaches of its students. Bard College, a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences, is located 90 miles north of New York City on nearly 1,000 parklike acres in the Hudson River Valley. It offers bachelor of arts, bachelor of science, and bachelor of music degrees, with majors in nearly 40 academic programs; graduate degrees in 11 programs; nine early colleges; and numerous dual-degree programs nationally and internationally. Building on its 159-year history as a competitive and innovative undergraduate institution, Bard College has expanded its mission as a private institution acting in the public interest across the country and around the world. The undergraduate program at the main campus in upstate New York has a reputation for scholarly excellence, a focus on the arts, and civic engagement.
About Howard Greenberg Gallery
Since its inception over 35 years ago, Howard Greenberg Gallery has built a vast and ever-changing collection of some of the most important photographs in the medium. The Gallery's collection acts as a living history of photography, offering genres and styles from Pictorialism to Modernism, in addition to contemporary photography and images conceived for industry, advertising, and fashion. Howard Greenberg Gallery is located at 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406, New York. The gallery exhibits at The ADAA Art Show, The Armory Show, The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, Photo London, Art Basel, Paris Photo, and Art Basel Miami Beach. For more information, contact 212-334-0010, [email protected] or visit www.howardgreenberg.com.
Post Date: 06-04-2019
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DeCordova Presents Exhibition of Iconic Photographs by Bard Professor Larry Fink
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Artist and Educator Shannon Ebner ’93 Named Chair of Pratt Institute’s Photography Department
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The Fisher Center Presents Woven: In Process, an Exhibition of Works by Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse
The Fisher Center Presents Woven: In Process, an Exhibition of Works by Bard Artist in Residence Tanya Marcuse
The Fisher Center presents Woven: In Process, an exhibition of 5 x 10 foot photographs by Tanya Marcuse, courtesy of the Julie Saul Gallery in New York City. Marcuse, an artist in residence at Bard, meticulously arranges natural elements in an intricate tableau of a lush yet decaying forest of fauna and flora, where a detailed still life weaves into a medieval tapestry. The exhibition features the artist’s studio proofs, giving the audience a look into the artist’s process of making these elaborate photographs. Marcuse presents the unity of the work in its "opulence which verges on excess." The exhibition takes place in the LUMA Theater Weis Atrium of the Fisher Center. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday, from 12 to 5 p.m., and will extend until curtain call on performance evenings at the Fisher Center. During regular gallery hours, visitors may enter through the Fisher Center parking lot entrance. The exhibition runs from July 7 to November 20, with an opening reception on Friday, July 29 from 6 to 8 p.m. There will be an artist talk moderated by Professor Daniel Mendelsohn on October 18 at 6:30 pm, free and open to the public.
Post Date: 07-18-2016
Photographer An-My Lê Interviewed on Louisiana Channel
An-My Lê, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts, was interviewed for a feature on Louisiana Channel, the YouTube channel of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark with weekly videos on art and design. Lê spoke about her project Silent General and also about her experiences photographing military technology and the aftermath of war. “A good picture is one that is surprising,” she said.
Alum Daniel Terna ’09 ICP ’15 Named in Artsy Artist’s “On Our Radar” and Reviewed in the New York Times
Daniel Terna ’09 ICP ’15 was profiled in Artsy Artist’s “Artists On Our Radar,” an editorial series featuring five artists who made an impact in the past month through exhibitions, gallery openings, and other events.The Terrain was also reviewed by the New York Times, which writes that Terna's photography contains “narrative restraint... [it] keeps admitting how hard it is to really know another human being.”Alum Daniel Terna ’09 ICP ’15 Named in Artsy Artist’s “On Our Radar” and Reviewed in the New York Times
Terna has exhibited at the BRIC Arts Media Biennial, MoMA PS1’s film program, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, among others, and will exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery in May 2025. His photography is focused on intergenerational relationships, combining personal narratives with his outside perspective on current events. Of Terna’s 2023 photo Monastery, taken near the Dachau concentration camp where his father was imprisoned, Artsy writes, “The peaceful scene is transformed by its context, invoking the weight of memory and survival.”
Post Date: 11-12-2024
Tanya Marcuse Photos Accompany New York Times Opinion Piece “Against Panic: A Survival Kit”
Associate Professor of Photography Tanya Marcuse contributed her photography to the New York Times op-ed “Against Panic: A Survival Kit” by Margaret Renkl. Renkl describes her “Panic Abatement Plan” for the 2024 election, as well as her reflections on how she hopes to preserve democracy and pluralism in the future. Marcuse’s photograph of a natural scene, a single tree framed by mountains, drives home Renkl’s focus on the solitude of grief and the benefits of nature.Tanya Marcuse Photos Accompany New York Times Opinion Piece “Against Panic: A Survival Kit”
Marcuse started her photography career as an early college student at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. Since 2012, she’s been a faculty member at Bard teaching courses in photography. Her previous work includes her 14-year project Fruitless | Fallen | Woven and her most recent book INK.
Post Date: 11-12-2024
Photography Events
2024 Past Events
- Thursday, November 14, 2024
- Saturday, August 31, 2024
- Friday, August 30, 2024
- Wednesday, August 28, 2024
- Saturday, May 11, 2024
- Thursday, April 4, 2024
- Wednesday, March 6, 2024
- Wednesday, February 28, 2024