Bardian BARD BARD COLLEGE COLLEGE SUMMER FALL 2018 2019
Dear Bard Alumni/ae, Family and Friends: I am honored to take the helm as President of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors. It was a particular honor to lead my first meeting this May, coinciding with my own 15th reunion. My husband, Luis, and I traveled from New Mexico for commencement and were thrilled to connect with many of our Bard friends and family. Mollie Meikle ’03, is joining me as vice president and Lindsay Stanley ’12 will stay on as secretary. We have big plans to help our board be as productive as possible. And, we are hoping that you, our fellow alumni/ae, will join us in helping Bard stay Bard by remaining connected with the College and your classmates, and by contributing. Brandon Weber ’97, did a fantastic job leading the Board of Governors the last few years. He originally stepped in for Mackie Siebens ’12, who is now director of admission at the College. I have worked closely with both of them through the last few terms on our executive committee and want to thank them both for providing such great leadership. They have set the bar high.
KC Serota ’04 photo Karl Rabe
Bardians are doing amazing things, I’ve been awed recently to see alumni/ae winning Tony Awards; fighting for social justice; starring in TV shows; earning PhDs; publishing books, articles, and poems; showing art; releasing albums; working wonders in medicine; and doing everything in between. In March, I attended a preview and celebration for the upcoming documentary series College Behind Bars, executive produced by Ken Burns, about the Bard Prison Initiative. Tune into PBS in November to see the final cut. I hope you’ll be as moved and proud watching the documentary as I was. The action continues in every corner of the extensive Bard Network. In Annandale there is a new Bard Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water, which combines research and community-based science to tackle environmental issues, and in the fall a new undergraduate Architectural Studies Program will be launched. In May, Bard College Berlin held the opening ceremony for a new student residence dedicated to Henry Koerner, a Jewish-Viennese artist who escaped to the United States from Vienna in 1938. With all of the amazing work happening on campus in Annandale and in all the Bard programs around the world, your support is more crucial than ever. I have made my own pledge to help Bard by hosting events, meeting alumni in cities I travel to, and by giving as generously as I can to help the College continue its innovative mission. Please join me in contributing to Bard—and reach out to me if you have ideas or suggestions for the alumni/ae board. Bardian and Proud! KC Serota ’04, President, Board of Governors, Bard College Alumni/ae Association
board of governors of the bard college alumni/ae association KC Serota ‘04, President Mollie Meikle ‘03, Vice President Lindsay Stanley ’12, Secretary/Treasurer Robert Amsterdam ’53 Hannah Becker ‘11 Brendan Berg ’06 Jack Blum ’62 Matthew Cameron ‘04 Kathleya Chotiros ’98, Development Committee Chair Charles Clancy III ’69 Peter Criswell ’89 Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95 Nicolai Eddy ‘14 Randy Faerber ’73, Events Committee Cochair Andrew F. Fowler ’95 Kate Nemeth Fox ‘11 Jazondré Gibbs ‘19 Eric Goldman ‘98 Boriana Handjiyska ’02, Career Connections Committee Cochair Nikkya Hargrove ‘05, Diversity Committee Chair Sonja Hood ’90 Miriam Huppert ’13 Maud Kersnowski Sachs ‘86 Kenneth Kosakoff ‘81 Darren Mack ‘13 Peter F. McCabe ’70 Steven Miller ’70 Anne Morris-Stockton ’68 Anna Neverova ’07, Career Connections Committee Cochair; Bard Music Festival Junior Committee Cochair Karen G. Olah ’65 Gerry Pambo-Awich ’08 Claire Phelan ‘11 Dan Severson ’10 Levi Shaw-Faber ‘15, Communications Chair
Genya Shimkin ’08, Young Alumni/ae Advisory Council of the Center for Civic Engagement Cochair Barry Silkowitz ’71 Danielle Sinay ‘13 George A. Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochair Geoffrey Stein ’82 Walter Swett ’96 Paul Thompson ’93 Zubeida Ullah ‘97, Nominations Committee Chair Brandon Weber ‘97 Ato Williams ‘12 Nanshan (Nathan) Xu ‘17 Emeritus/a Claire Angelozzi ‘74 Dr. Penny Axelrod ‘63 Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ‘56 Cathaline Cantalupo ‘67 Arnold Davis ‘44 Kit Ellenbogen ‘52 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ‘60 Diana Hirsch Friedman ‘68 R. Michael Glass ‘75 Dr. Ann Ho ‘62 Charles Hollander ‘65 Maggie Hopp ‘67 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ‘65 Susan P. Playfair ‘62 Roger N. Scotland ‘93 Dr. Toni-Michelle C. Travis ‘69 Barbara Crane Wigren ‘68
board of trustees of bard college Charles P. Stevenson Jr., Chair Emeritus James C. Chambers ’81, Chair George F. Hamel Jr., Vice Chair Emily H. Fisher, Vice Chair Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary; Life Trustee Stanley A. Reichel ’65, Treasurer; Life Trustee Fiona Angelini Roland J. Augustine Leon Botstein+, President of the College Stuart Breslow+ Mark E. Brossman Jinqing Cai Marcelle Clements ’69, Life Trustee The Rt. Rev. Andrew M. L. Dietsche, Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61, Life Trustee Robert S. Epstein ’63 Barbara S. Grossman ’73, Alumni/ae Trustee Andrew S. Gundlach Sally Hambrecht Marieluise Hessel Maja Hoffmann Matina S. Horner+ Charles S. Johnson III ’70 Mark N. Kaplan, Life Trustee George A. Kellner Fredric S. Maxik ’86 James H. Ottaway Jr., Life Trustee Hilary C. Pennington Martin Peretz, Life Trustee Stewart Resnick, Life Trustee David E. Schwab II ’52 Roger N. Scotland ’93, Alumni/ae Trustee Jonathan Slone ’84 Jeannette H. Taylor+ James A. von Klemperer Brandon Weber ’97, Alumni/ae Trustee Susan Weber Patricia Ross Weis ’52 +ex officio
office of development and alumni/ae affairs Debra Pemstein, Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405, pemstein@bard.edu Jane Brien ’89, Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7406, brien@bard.edu Steven Swyryt, Assistant Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7084, sswyryt@bard.edu Carly Hertica, Program Associate, Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7089, chertica@bard.edu 1-800-BARDCOL alumni@bard.edu annandaleonline.org #bardianandproud @bardalumni @bardcollege ©2019 Bard College Published by the Bard Publications Office bardianmagazine@bard.edu Printed by Quality Printing, Pittsfield, MA
above Graduates of the Bard Prison Initiative and Bard Microcollege Holyoke, Commencement 2019. photo Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00 cover, Patrick Vaill ’07 in Oklahoma! (see page 2). photo Cory Weaver
Bardian SUMMER 2019 2
From Bard to Broadway
4
Live Stream
8
The Bard Reading Initiative
10
Conducting a Quantum Orchestra
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Toward an Ethical Imagination
14
Making Things Interesting, By Making Interesting Things
Longtime Bard employees (and parents of Tony Kristic ’10) Zdenka Kristic (left) and Josip Kristic (right), who are retiring, with President Botstein on Commencement weekend. photo Karl Rabe
18
Community Organizing in the Heartland
20
159th Commencement
24
On and Off Campus
36
Class Notes
41
Books by Bardians
patrick vaill ’07
from bard to broadway by Jennifer Wai-Lan-Huang and James Rodewald ’82
Oklahoma!, directed by Daniel Fish and starring Patrick Vaill ’07 as Jud Fry, earned eight Tony nominations, and won best musical revival and best featured actress. Its Broadway run has been extended through January 19, 2020 and a national tour will begin in fall 2020.
Twelve years ago, JoAnne Akalaitis, director of the Theater Program, invited Daniel Fish to direct a student production. Patrick Vaill ’07 recalls Akalaitis telling Fish he could choose any play he wanted. “Over time it was revealed that the show would be Oklahoma!” says Vaill. “There was a lot of excitement. People were surprised.” The surprising choice, in Fish’s hands, meshed perfectly with the ethos of the Theater Program under Akalaitis. “She fostered an incredibly vibrant, hardworking, interested group of students who just loved doing this work together,” says Vaill. “It was thrilling to be a part of.” Fish reimagined the patriotic, upbeat 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein original as a morality tale for our time. Three-quarters of a century ago, America was at war, and it responded to the musical’s celebration of pastoralism, the charm of country folk, and the idea that “Everythin’s goin’ my way.” Since then, our tribes have become less homogeneous, the tension between the haves and the have nots continues to increase, and guns are less icons of the frontier than instruments of violence and terror. The realism, the immersion, and the sensitivity of the acting in Fish’s Oklahoma! give modern audiences—who hear the very same words and tunes—a very different experience than theatergoers of the ’40s had. Auditions for the student production were held just before winter intersession. Vaill had hoped for the part of the handsome cowboy, Curly, who gets his sweetheart, Laurey. He was cast instead as Jud Fry, the brooding farmhand, whose own desires for Laurey are violently thwarted. “The idea was that we were all—the audience, the actors— in a room together to hear and to tell this story,” says Vaill. “When we performed it in Theater Two [now LUMA Theater] at the Fisher Center in 2007, with an all-student cast, it was clear to me and to those who saw it that we were involved in something very special.” Vaill was raised in Manhattan, and his parents often took him and his sister to the theater. “I fell in love with it as a child and harbored a secret desire to pursue acting,” he says. “It was a magic trick that was completely amazing to me, breathing the same oxygen as the people doing that.” He had a similar instant connection with Bard. On his first visit to the campus, Vaill felt a deep kinship with the College. He applied Early Action, was accepted, and never considered another option. “I felt this was the place I had to be. I am very pleased to say I was correct. I flourished.” Vaill’s decision to major in theater was a less straightforward process. “Moderation loomed over me. I couldn’t be cavalier about my major. I tried on many different possibilities—religion, Victorian studies, literature, art history—until I finally realized that theater was the only major I was passionate about. It was during Parent’s Weekend, after Vaill took his parents to Akalaitis’s production of the Euripides drama Orestes at the Fisher Center, that he told them about his decision. “There’s something very personal about telling someone that you want to be an artist, so I was very nervous about it. They said they absolutely understood my decision after seeing the play we’d just seen.” After graduation, Vaill went on to act in several off-Broadway shows in New York City and with the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., working on stage professionally for three years before pursuing his MFA in acting from New York University’s Tisch
photo Teddy Wolff
School of the Arts. The first role Vaill landed after graduate school was on the Lincoln Center stage in Shakespeare’s Macbeth directed by Jack O’Brien and starring Ethan Hawke as the Scottish king. “It was an incredible experience. I played Graymalkin, one of the witches’ familiars. I leaned very heavily into the supernatural and played those scenes as a demonic being.” Vaill then played Ernst Ludwig in the Roundabout Theatre’s national tour of the Broadway revival of Cabaret directed by Academy Award winner Sam Mendes. Then, eight years after performing it as an undergraduate, Vaill learned that Gideon Lester, Fisher Center artistic director for theater and dance and director of Bard’s Theater and Performance Program, had commissioned a professional production of Fish’s Oklahoma! for the Fisher Center’s 2015 Bard SummerScape season. “I sent Daniel an email about how exciting it was and that I would love to audition to play Jud again if they were holding auditions,” says Vaill. “He wrote back that day saying he had already given my name to the casting director as someone whom he wanted to see.” Vaill auditioned and was cast as Jud. “As a senior at Bard, I was largely going on impulse. There was something about the character that I absolutely understood instinctively. Over the years, with more training and experience, I have found the tools to express it.” The production, Vaill believes, developed in a similar way. “I think it had distilled in Daniel’s mind. His understanding of the material and what he wanted to do with it is more purposeful, more fully realized. The student production was the kernel of what came later.” In his review of the 2015 SummerScape production, New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley described Vaill’s Fry as “a paranoid but oddly understandable stalker.” Most earlier portrayals presented the character as muscular, brutish, and simple; a caricature of the marginalized working stiff. Vaill played him, in Brantley’s words, as a “pale, weedy man with the kind of grudge that lands sociopaths on the front page and in prison.” The complexity Vaill brings to the role, and the empathy he evokes, are crucial to the success of the reimagined musical. The immersive, groundbreaking production garnered rave reviews, and Fisher Center executive director Bob Bursey and his staff began working to bring it to New York City. In fall 2018, the Fisher Center production transferred to St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, where it had a sold-out six-week run, and it opened on Broadway at Circle in the Square Theatre in April. “We knew that something special was happening again,” says Vaill. A hallmark of Fish’s production is the absence of any preconceived notions about Oklahoma!—seeing the play for what it is, and revealing the script’s deeper meanings. “Jud is often played as a very scary, mean brute of a man,” says Vaill. “What Daniel and I have tried to do is look at the words on the page with fresh eyes to see who this person really is. Not to judge him before he speaks. If you look at Jud’s song ‘Lonely Room,’ it is about dreams. He has dreams, wishes for things. Beautiful words and images come out of him. It’s not what you’d expect to come out of the mouth of a ‘dirty farmhand.’ He expresses this desire to be seen, this desire to be loved, and this desire to be held that is incredibly human. When you strip him bare, what you’re left with is someone who just wants love so badly. And who hasn’t experienced that?”
from bard to broadway 3
the saw kill: bard’s water source
live stream by Sheila Buff; Lindsey Drew CEP ’20, Bard Water Lab manager; and Marco Spodack ’17, community lab technician
The beautiful Saw Kill, like the college whose campus it flows through, has always punched above its weight. A small stream—only 14.3 miles from its origin in Milan, New York, to its mouth at the Hudson River—it runs through a watershed that has been inhabited for millennia, first by Native Americans and then by the European colonists who displaced them starting in the 17th century. After meandering through the flat areas of Red Hook, the Saw Kill begins to drop sharply as it approaches Bard. Near the Annandale triangle, the stream, which separates main campus from the Montgomery Place Campus and ultimately ends in South Tivoli Bay, drops in a series of three waterfalls and numerous cascades. The strong flow at these spots made them ideal for water-powered mills. By the early 1800s, several sawmills were strung along its banks, giving the stream its name. The specter of rapid industrial development along the Saw Kill (and the factory laborers it would bring) disturbed Louise Livingston, owner of Montgomery Place on the south side of the ravine that channels the stream near its mouth. Robert Donaldson, her neighbor to the north at Blithewood, was similarly concerned. To preserve the scenic beauty of the area, they entered into a joint agreement in 1841 to buy the ravine, vowing never to develop it for industrial uses. Going one step further, they purchased land at the mouth of the Saw Kill and tore down an existing mill. The Saw Kill agreement is considered one of the earliest scenic land preservation pacts in the United States. It was an important model as scenic preservation and conservation grew into a larger national movement. It may even have sparked Teddy Roosevelt’s passion for land conservation: as a young boy in 1868, Teddy summered at the Barrytown home of his relative John Aspinwall and explored the Saw Kill and Tivoli Bay. Even if he was unaware of the details of the landowners’ pact, he experienced firsthand how it benefited the environment. Donaldson sold the 95-acre Blithewood estate to John and Margaret Bard in 1853, and seven years later they donated 18 acres for the founding of St. Stephen’s College. In 1951, the estate, which had grown to 865 acres, was donated to the College (by then renamed Bard) by Christian Zabriskie, the heir of the family that had owned Blithewood since 1899. In 1986, the remaining Livingston descendants sold the 380-acre Montgomery Place estate to Historic Hudson Valley (HHV), a nonprofit group that owned several other properties in the region. HHV opened the Montgomery Place Mansion House
photo Sebastian Grimm CEP '21
to the public, conducting tours and hosting events, until 2016, when the propery was sold to Bard. For the first time, the land on both sides of the Saw Kill ravine—and the duty to preserve it—was in the hands of a single owner. As a result of the Montgomery Place purchase, Bard is responsible for two historic dams on the stream. The Lower Saw Kill Dam was originally part of the old sawmill dismantled in the 1840s. In the 1920s, a hydroelectric power plant was installed to provide electricity for Montgomery Place and the hamlet of Annandale. Although all that remains of the power plant (active through 1965) are some old foundations, the dam is still in place. Upstream is the Mill Road Dam. This dam is privately owned; decisions about its future are up to the owner. Even farther upstream is the Upper Dam at Montgomery Place, also called the Annandale Dam. Dating back to the late 1800s, and modified in the early 1900s, the dam created an impoundment used to provide irrigation water to the Montgomery Place orchards and fresh water to the mansion. Today, the impoundment has partially filled in and is a three-acre wetland. Dams have been crucial for economic development and continue to be important for flood control, but they have environmental costs as well. Today, many of the old dams on streams such as the Saw Kill have outlived their purpose. Removing them would help restore fish and wildlife habitat, but each dam is different. Before a dam is removed, the pros and cons, including the cost and the environmental impact, must be carefully assessed. The Saw Kill and other freshwater streams that drain the Hudson River watershed are of crucial importance to the migratory American eel (Anguilla rostrata). The eels are born in the warm, salty Sargasso Sea, more than 1,000 miles from the Hudson. While still very young, the juvenile eels slowly make their way north and unerringly find their way to rivers along the Gulf Coast and Eastern seaboard, including the Hudson. They swim up into the streams, where they stay for years until they reach full maturity. At that point, they reverse their journey, swim back to their birthplace in the Sargasso Sea, mate, and die. Dams, culverts, and other obstructions are significant obstacles to the young eels, preventing or hindering their passage upstream. To learn more about the impact of the Lower Saw Kill Dam on the eels, in 2003 researchers at Bard’s Ecology Field Station set up a monitoring program. Three years later, in conjunction with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) Hudson River Estuary Program, Bard researchers installed a ladder
live stream 5
that allows eels to wriggle up into a fyke net, a cone-shaped bag mounted on rings. The net is checked every day at low tide by students, community volunteers, or DEC representatives. After being counted and weighed, the eels are then released above the dam to continue their journey upstream. Bard has received several grants to conduct research on the Lower Saw Kill Dam. A recent grant, awarded in 2019, from the DEC will further study dam removal, which has the greatest potential to improve eel habitat and fish movement to upstream areas. The Annandale Dam is being studied, too. Bard was one of three colleges awarded a prize from NYSERDA through its Reforming the Energy Vision (REV) Campus Challenge to study installing microhydropower plants. The Bard Office of Sustainability has led this project. Other possibilities reviewed included removal of the dam. Any action would have to consider potential impacts on the Bard water supply, which comes directly from the Saw Kill. The intake pipe for drinking water is located between the Lower Saw Kill Dam and the Annandale Dam. Effluent is discharged back into the stream below the lower dam. Changes to the Annandale Dam have to take into consideration the downstream water supply and other environmental impacts. Discussion of many other Saw Kill issues takes place under the auspices of the Saw Kill Watershed Community (SKWC), which brings together people from Milan, Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Annandale who live and work in the Saw Kill watershed. SKWC’s mission is to protect the watershed and its ecological, recreational, and historic resources through hands-on science, education, and advocacy. (For more information, visit sawkillwatershed.wordpress.com.) SKWC’s active program of science and education for the watershed includes the revival, in 2016, of a water-quality monitoring project that operated between 1975 and 1982. Once a month, community volunteers and Bard students use buckets and dippers to collect samples from 14 sites along the Saw Kill in Red Hook and on the Bard campus. Two original participants in the earlier study, Sue Ellis and Sheryl Griffiths, returned as volunteer water samplers in the current program. So far, results from the sampling show good news: the Saw Kill is in good condition, though with room for improvement. Analyzing the water samples from the Saw Kill (and also from a similar program managed by the nearby Roe Jan Watershed Community) is done in the Bard Water Lab, based in the David Rose Science Laboratories. The samples are analyzed for sewage-indicating bacteria, turbidity, chlorophyll, temperature, conductivity, and other water-quality indicators. The lab also maintains an archive for SKWC that houses historic water-quality data, maps, and a collection of the relevant scientific literature. Begun in June 2015 as a project of the Environmental and Urban Studies (EUS) Program, the Bard Water Lab has created a unique intersection of community, science, and research that aims to inform community members, decision makers, and Bard students about the importance of source water protection. The Bard Water Lab works with Bard’s Center for Civic Engagement’s Citizen Science Outreach Program, for example, to bring in students from local school districts for hands-on lab experience. 6 the saw kill: bard’s water source
The Bard Water Lab’s FlowCam VS-4, a compact, high-tech machine that automatically photographs, measures, and counts tiny particles and organisms, such as pollen and rotifers, in water samples is a valuable advanced tool for monitoring microbial communities. The FlowCam is used during the school year as part of water monitoring and for research projects. One recent student project used the device to classify the algae and cyanobacteria found in a small, manmade pond with a serious scum problem. The goal of the project is to discover exactly which organisms are present and if any pose a health threat to the community. In the summer, the FlowCam gets to leave the Bard Water Lab and go on adventures funded by the National Science Foundation. In 2019, the FlowCam will travel on two different biological oceanography vessels in collaboration with researchers from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Bard students aboard will operate the FlowCam for researchers and also work on their own projects. One trip will take the FlowCam from Barbados to the mouth of the Amazon River and back; the other will take it from Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico. In both cases, the FlowCam will be used to support research into microbial diversity and how it relates to phytoplankton blooms such as red tides. These trips are an opportunity for students and faculty to engage in global science using expertise they’ve gained in the Bard Water Lab and by studying the Saw Kill. The data the students bring back will be analyzed in oceanography classes. SKWC is also pursuing other areas of importance to the watershed. Mapping studies by students, for instance, have revealed that the Saw Kill has at least 17 tributaries—but only one has an official name. An unnamed stream is an unprotected stream. Plans to work with the community to name the streams are in progress. Surprisingly, the Saw Kill is currently classified by the DEC as a Class B stream, meaning its best usage includes swimming and other water recreation, but not as a source of drinking water. SKWC has completed the application to reclassify the Saw Kill as a Class A stream, the designation for waterways used for drinking water, which would strengthen the protections that apply to the stream. In a watershed, everyone lives downstream; everything that affects the watershed affects everyone. In 2018, Bard recognized the interdisciplinary aspects of watershed study by creating the Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water (CSLAW). M. Elias Dueker, assistant professor in the EUS and Biology Programs and program director of EUS, was appointed director. The new center connects Bard faculty, staff, and students with grassroots efforts to protect the watershed. As Dueker explains, “The center offers students opportunities to work in an interdisciplinary way. The EUS program is the academic component. The center is where students engage. It’s a place to put into practice the community engagement approach we teach not only in EUS but across the Bard campus.” CSLAW addresses a variety of challenges through research and tools that include the social sciences, humanities, and the arts. “At the center, we plan to develop accessible, applicable, community-centered solutions to local and regional environmental problems,” says Dueker.
Collecting water samples at the Saw Kill (left to right): Bri Alphonso Gibbs ’22, Violet King ’22, Tess Noble-Strohm ’21
“We already tackle these problems through the EUS Program, the Saw Kill Watershed Community’s activities, and through faculty-directed student research projects. We’re planning more ways to create community-driven solutions. We’re working on creating new labs, similar to the Water Lab, for land, air, and sustainable solutions.” The Land Lab, for instance, will use microbial approaches to discover connections between watershed land-use decisions and the microbial ecology of water and air. In the Air Lab, students are building “air buckets” to be used in an air sampling program similar to the current water sampling program. Soon after SKWC was formed, it was approached by Riverkeeper, a watchdog organization dedicated to defending the Hudson River and its tributaries, and asked to participate in its Source Water Protection Scorecard program. The scorecard helps watershed communities understand how effectively their water supplies are protected and identifies areas where protections need to be modified or increased. Based on preliminary results from the scorecard, the Red Hook Town Board asked SKWC for recommendations on how to better protect source water. A set of four key recommendations was presented to the Town Board in March 2019. In 2018, SKWC completed a major document, “The State of the Saw Kill,” the result of a two-year effort in fulfillment of a grant from the Hudson River Estuary Program. The report is a comprehensive photo Sarah Wallock ’19
look at the current state of the stream, including sewage contamination, nutrient levels, the impact of road salt, flood mitigation, and drinking-water safety in the Saw Kill watershed. SKWC’s work on the State of the Saw Kill report and the Riverkeeper scorecard have identified streamside buffers as a critical concern in the watershed. Working with environmental conservation group Scenic Hudson, Bard students, and the local community, SKWC has implemented tree and shrub planting to improve streamside wildlife habitat, prevent erosion, and preserve and improve water quality. In fall 2016, for example, 20 volunteers planted 120 trees and shrubs to improve and protect 300 linear feet of shoreline at Rose Hill Farm in Red Hook. Going forward, the Saw Kill Watershed Community is focused on carrying out the scorecard recommendations, continuing the water monitoring program, and finding new ways to connect water research at Bard with the larger community. As Karen SchnellerMcDonald, SKWC leadership team chair, points out, “Source water in the Saw Kill watershed right now is in good shape, but it’s also under pressure from development. Our work with the community and Bard is one way to keep the water clean for the future. Preservation is often easier and cheaper than remediation.”
live stream 7
a book is a machine to think with
the bard reading initiative by Deirdre d’Albertis
Clockwise from upper left: Eric Trudel, associate professor of French; Deirdre d’Albertis; Sven Anderson, associate professor of computer science; Marisa Libbon; Jim Keller; Nathan Shockey; and Erica Kaufman, director, Institute for Writing and Thinking
What does it mean to be a “reader” in a world seemingly overrun with images and texts, media and networks? How do we hear the call to “take up and read,” and how do we sustain attention long enough to give ourselves over to this most intensely personal experience? What role do colleges play in teaching students to engage with ideas uniquely accessible through technologies of reading, especially those who may have grown up as “digital natives” and find themselves faltering when it comes to concentrating on Plato’s Republic or Ellison’s Invisible Man? Has reading become more of a challenge for all of us? And if so, why? These are some of the questions that gave rise to the Bard Reading Initiative (BRI) in spring 2017. Now in its second year of intensive study, investigation, and innovation, BRI has undertaken its mission with the support of a deeply committed anonymous donor dedicated to the proposition that Bard can make a difference in this critical conversation by fostering a culture of reading not only among undergraduates studying in Annandale-on-Hudson but also among diverse populations across higher education in the United States and beyond. As Derek Furr, BRI member and director of Bard’s 8 a book is a machine to think with
Masters of Art in Teaching Program, notes, one of the group’s goals is “to find a way to extend this conversation into the K–12 teaching community that is part of Bard: the Bard High School Early Colleges, the partner school districts of the MAT Program, and Institute for Writing and Thinking. Maybe around the simple question ‘How do I teach/read a novel when everyone is on the phone?’” BRI brings together faculty from the humanities and the sciences to consider how both cognitive science and digital liberal arts can and should inform pedagogical practice in the classroom. In its first two years, the group has focused on a few key objectives: to support active student engagement with a culture of reading, develop a set of pedagogical best practices informed by cutting-edge brain science and educational research, and create new curricula to showcase these practices. A good example is Director of College Writing Phil Pardi’s experimental seminar Poetry and Attentiveness, which convened during the spring semester every Friday for seven hours straight (without electronic devices) to train deliberate, mindful attention to texts through a fully immersive experience of reading.
photo China Jorrin ’86
Nathan Shockey, BRI member and assistant professor of Japanese, posits that if Bard is “A Place to Think,” then “we and other liberal arts colleges should embrace our role as places where students can think with books and come to understand how their selves and their world can be transformed through reading.” But, he continues, “given how rapidly books, reading technologies, and ways of thinking are changing at present, if we want Bard to continue to be a place to think in the 21st century, we also need to consider how we think with and through new media as well as traditional books.” Toward this end, the Bard Reading Initiative has partnered with Experimental Humanities (EH), Bard’s homegrown answer to digital humanities scholarship in the academy, cosponsoring notable speakers—such as Duke University’s N. Katherine Hayles—who are situated at the intersection of science, literature, and technology. The digital turn is being leveraged by EH faculty across all four divisions at the College to enhance interdisciplinary collaboration and teaching, particularly through events like the “unconference” Arts of Attention that took place in April. Technology and reading, in other words, should not be viewed as antithetical to each other. “Educating as many of tomorrow’s citizens as possible to be careful, reflective, and even technologically astute writers, readers, and performers within more and more technologically complex spaces is more important than ever,” asserts BRI member and Bard Learning Commons Director Jim Keller. Echoing this thought, Assistant Professor of Literature Marisa Libbon notes that she joined BRI this semester because she is “excited about creating a campus culture where physical books are omnipresent, where the binary between literary culture and digital culture is bridged through creative practices, and where there are more and more opportunities for language to surprise us.” Drawing on research of cognitive psychologists Daniel Willingham and Maryanne Wolf, as well as writing-to-learn pedagogies of Bard’s own Institute for Writing and Thinking, BRI seeks to identify and cultivate habits of mind necessary for students to embrace reading both as a deeply personal pursuit and as a civic skill they take with them out into the world after they graduate. Foundational to the initiative has been a quest to move reflective practices of reading beyond the confines of a course syllabus and into what Libbon identifies as “a third space . . . not when you’re bored and on the internet, and not when you’re in the classroom.” Creating that third space has become an increasingly urgent priority. In spring 2019, the Bard Reading Initiative announced a call for studentorganized reading groups and circles. The concept is simple: each group selects a text, secures at least three members and a faculty sponsor, and commits to four meetings. Groups whose proposals are approved are provided with copies of the book, snacks, and a comfortable space in which to meet. Response has been overwhelming: 17 groups formed in a matter of weeks. More than 75 students are currently taking part in the program. Authors selected include Søren Kierkegaard, Cao Xuenqin, Herman Melville, Gabriel García Márquez, Junot Díaz, Octavia
Butler, Adrienne Rich, Roxane Gay, Natasha Ngan, Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, and, of course, J. K. Rowling. As one first-year student wrote in her application, she longs to introduce Love in the Time of Cholera to her group because “this book will inspire and teach readers about love, politics, family, and the Latin American experience.” The desire to share imaginative worlds, explore old favorites, and tackle difficult new books in community with others motivates students to participate in the program. “It’s been so wonderful to see the student-formed reading groups get excited about and work to develop this third space,” notes Libbon. “In addition to attentiveness, I think that giving students confidence to have an unmediated relationship with a text—any kind of text, in the classroom and outside of it—is important. Often, a student’s first instinct when faced with a new, strange text is to Google it, rather than to dwell in that strangeness or to go deeper into the text instead of going out to external explanations. Confidence in one’s own ability to read a text is fundamental to active citizenship and to having a voice in the way the world works.” Drawing on his own research, Shockey has been particularly committed to jump-starting the student groups at Bard. “My push was inspired by the culture of reading groups in Japan, called dokushokai, which are sites for all kinds of people—from young children to factory workers to students and teachers to the retired— to institutionalize communal reading,” he says. “In the 20th century, dokushokai were important for the production of many literary, artistic, and political movements. One of my undergraduate Japanese teachers, who is now retired, belongs to a reading group that has been meeting biweekly for 25 years!” Looking forward, BRI plans to continue collaborating with a range of experts such as Andrew Piper, author of Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times and director of .txtLAB, a laboratory for cultural analytics at McGill University; Alberto Manguel, director of the National Library of Argentina and author of the classic A History of Reading; and Rutgers Professor of English Richard E. Miller, author of On the End of Privacy: Dissolving Boundaries in a Screen-Centric World, all of whom have visited campus this past year. From Augustine’s Confessions to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, reading has been seen as a sacred act that affords individuals—under certain circumstances—privileged, even mystical access to forms of knowledge beyond ordinary comprehension. The Bard Reading Initiative joins with the mysterious voice that Augustine wrote about, “chanting, and oft repeating, ‘Take up and read; Take up and read.’” Interpreting the call as a directive from heaven, he picked up his book, opened it at random, and after reading one sentence, “immediately all the gloom of doubt vanished away.” Deirdre d’Albertis is professor of English and dean of the College.
the bard reading initiative 9
natia frank ’87
conducting a quantum orchestra by Diana Crow ’13
When Natia Frank ’87 was a student at Bard, she would often head over to Security around midnight. She’d say hi to the officers on duty and ask to borrow the keys to Bard Hall. Then she’d walk down the hill, let herself in, and practice on the Steinway piano until past one in the morning. Those late-night practice sessions and the freedom that Bard offered turned out to be formative. Today, Frank is an organic chemist at the University of Victoria in Canada, but her study of music and fascination with instruments has informed her career. In fact, music theory helped her master one of the headiest topics in science. “Understanding quantum physics intuitively came from my knowledge of music theory and being able to bridge the ideas,” she says. Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of fundamental subatomic particles, which operate by a set of rules that many people find counterintuitive. Quantum particles like electrons can become “entangled” and mirror each other across vast distances, or they can exhibit “superposition,” where the particle is in two different states at the same time. These quantum states are usually expressed in terms of math, but Frank sometimes thinks of them as akin to musical intervals, the distances between two notes. Just as a song progresses through a series of notes and intervals, information can be encoded through a series of transitions between quantum states. “If you think about different intervals on a piano, how they all sound different and convey different bits of information, they’re really just different transitions between different states,” Frank 10 natia frank ’87
says. But, she realized, musicians have an advantage over physicists, because musicians have instruments that allow them to generate musical notes and control the intervals. “That made me think, Wow! Could we have molecules that do that?” she says. Frank isn’t the first researcher to contemplate building “instruments” for “playing” specific quantum states. Researchers have been trying for decades to invent materials that allow them to control transitions between quantum states. Many of these quantum instruments take the form of quantum bits or “qubits,” which are tiny devices that control a particle’s ability to toggle between two different states. “Once you can control those transitions between discrete states, you can get outputs that are more than just a zero or one bit,” Frank says. “And so it opens up this huge world of new states that you can produce, and new ways of encoding the information.” Frank’s team has been experimenting with specially designed molecules that can act as qubits. In their most high-profile project, they use green light to change a quantum property called spin in one of their molecule’s electrons. “We’ve developed a metal that has a big organic molecule attached to it. And when light hits that organic molecule, it changes the spin state of that metal. And so it is a qubit,” Frank says. She calls this technique light-induced random access memory, or LI-RAM. The eventual goal is for the molecule to be used in chips that can function like traditional RAM chips in today’s computers. Frank says the technology, though still in the experimental stage, has Natia Frank ’87 (right) with PhD student Aiko Kurimoto. photo UVic Photo Services
the potential to make quantum computing possible in everyday devices like laptops, cell phones, and cars’ onboard computers, which is why it has attracted quite a bit of attention from quantum computing researchers and industry partners. The key is to line up a large number of the molecules on a surface, like electronic transistors lined up on a standard RAM chip. “You could pack a whole bunch of them onto a chip, and you’d have an ability to create lots of different intervals,” Frank says, continuing her music analogy. “And so you could make an orchestra on a chip!” Her father was a painter and her mother was an ethnomusicologist, dancer, and pianist, but Frank’s fascination with science and math took root well before college. As a kid growing up across the Hudson River from Bard in Stone Ridge, New York, near Kingston, Frank had her sights set on becoming a very different type of scientist; she wanted to be a marine biologist. “Math I used to do for relaxation,” she recalls. “Because it was so methodical, working through proofs.” Ironically, she didn’t know much about Bard when she started looking at colleges. She was one of the first women to apply to Columbia after it went coed in 1983. While researching Columbia, she found out that it used to have an upstate campus, which went on to become a liberal arts college in its own right. That college was Bard, so she decided to apply there as well. Frank didn’t take her first chemistry class until Bard, but she quickly became hooked on the intellectual challenge. Bard Professor Emeritus of Chemistry Hilton Weiss remembers her as a “very bright” and “very motivated” student. “She had a good idea of what she wanted to do and how she wanted to do it,” he says. After Bard, Frank went straight into the graduate program at University of Wisconsin–Madison, which is widely considered one of the top 10 graduate chemistry programs in the country. “By the time I graduated from Bard, I absolutely loved chemistry and was sure that I wanted to move forward in it,” she says. But she felt the culture shock of moving to a large, state-school program almost immediately. Bard only had two chemistry professors at the time, and there were several areas of chemistry that Frank simply hadn’t encountered before. “My first year, I had to pull a lot of all-nighters just to catch up on the knowledge base,” she says. “But what I had that a lot of the other students didn’t have was the ability to put ideas [from different disciplines] together.” She credits Bard for that quality, because the College encourages students to pursue courses in multiple disciplines. After receiving her master’s degree, Frank enrolled in the PhD program at University of California San Diego, where her research continued to focus on molecular structures and bonds. “At that point, I wasn’t very interested in applications,” she says. “I was more interested in the intellectual challenge associated with chemistry. But by the time I got my PhD, I felt I wanted to learn a little bit more about what electrons do in molecules and how you can control dynamic processes.” In 1996, shortly after completing her doctorate, Frank moved to Bordeaux, France, for a postdoc in the lab of prominent mag-
netochemist Oliver Kahn at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). During this period she began formulating the ideas that would lead to LI-RAM. Some of her CNRS colleagues were working on molecules that could change their spin state in response to light and temperature. Those materials only worked at extremely low temperatures, but Frank began to wonder whether there might be some carbon-containing compounds that could manage the same trick at a higher temperature. After deepening her expertise in magnetism, she started a second postdoc in 1998 at California Institute of Technology, where she studied how electrons move within altered DNA molecules. She was still broadly interested in molecules that exhibited interesting magnetic and electronic behaviors. One topic that she investigated at Caltech was magnetoreception, the sensory ability that allows geese to fly toward the North Pole. During this time, Frank also applied for faculty positions. In her portfolio of research proposals, she included her idea of using a light-sensitive carbon compound as a qubit. The response she usually got was “that it would never work,” she says. Nevertheless, she found a position as an assistant professor at University of Washington in Seattle. Five years later, after the birth of her son, she moved to University of Victoria in Canada, where her lab has been working ever since on molecules that change their structure in response to light and magnetic fields. Developing LIRAM has taken years of trial and error. Her lab tried dozens of combinations of light-sensitive molecules and metal core atoms before finally arriving at spirooxazine with a cobalt core. The molecule isn’t the first material researchers have made that can act as a qubit, but it’s one of the most convenient identified so far. Since most spin-state-switching qubit materials only work at ultracool temperatures, using them in a laptop or phone would require the inside of the device to be more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit below room temperature. But Frank’s LI-RAM system works at room temperature and therefore could be used in everyday devices. “What’s nice about our system is that it uses visible light,” Frank says. “The green light we have experimented with is really low energy and easy to put into a device.” Frank’s lab has estimated that LI-RAM uses 10 percent less energy than the current industry standard transistor. If implemented on a large scale, it could significantly drive down the overall energy consumed by computing devices. Though Frank started out her career as a liberal arts graduate interested in intellectual challenges, she has gradually come to focus on projects with potential real-world uses. “As I started working with companies and individuals who were interested in more practical applications, I became more motivated to work in areas where there would be some real-life benefit to the kind of research we were doing,” she says. “And now I would say that I’m much more interested in carrying out research that will lead to some societal impact.” Diana Crow ’13, a freelance science writer based in Providence, Rhode Island, has written for Scientific American, NOVA Next, Method Quarterly, and The Atlantic, among others. conducting a quantum orchestra 11
Workers at the Montgomery Place Conservatory (detail), by A. Watson. Albumen stereoscope print, 1861. photo Bard College Montgomery Place Collection Right: Vine Deloria Sr. ’26. photo Bard College Archives Below: Class of 1889. photo Bard College Archives
gilsonfest
toward an ethical imagination by James Rodewald ’82
Bard College is committed to the conviction that, for racial justice and equity to be attained in the United States, higher education must play a role in cultivating an ethic that places equal value on all human lives and emphasizes human interdependence. A recent expression of that commitment is the extremely wide-ranging (even for Bard) multidisciplinary project entitled “Building an Ethical Imagination: Illuminating the Invisible and Reviewing the Visible through Inclusive Community Histories.” The project engaged faculty, students, artists, and community members in the creation of public art, signage, monuments, built environments, performances, and interactive pedagogical theater. Funded by a $50,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation’s Fund for Racial Justice and Equity, the project was spearheaded by Myra Young Armstead, Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies and vice president for academic and inclusive excellence, and former Dean of Inclusive Excellence Ariana González Stokas ’00. Some of the grant money went toward initiatives at Bard High School Early Colleges in Baltimore and Cleveland, but the main site of the project is in and around Annandale, and at its heart is Alexander Gilson. Born a slave, Gilson stayed on as head gardener at Montgomery Place after New York State ended slavery in 1827. After Gilson retired in 1885, he opened a nursery in Barrytown and bought a house in the village of Red Hook. Armstead, who has written about gardening as a vehicle of upward mobility for manumitted slaves, has brought this rich local history to her course The Window at Montgomery Place. The class uses portions of the 380-acre estate, which Bard acquired in 2016, as a historical laboratory for understanding social hierarchies, social roles, cultural practices, and the evolving visions of the nation and “place” during the 19th century in the United States. Students collaborated on new signage, place names, memorials, community gardens, murals, exhibits, plays, dance performances, and websites. Three storyboards prepared by students in Armstead’s fall 2018 Inclusion at Bard class, part of a series of Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences courses at Bard sponsored by the Center for Civic Engagement, have been installed around campus. One, outside Aspinwall Hall, highlights John Lloyd Aspinwall, an early benefactor of St. Stephen’s College, Bard’s first incarnation. Like many antebellum donors to the nation’s colleges and universities, Aspinwall owed
a significant portion of his wealth to commercial ventures that profited from slavery in the Americas. A second, near the library, is dedicated to Vine Deloria Sr. ’26. Deloria was an exceptional athlete at St. Stephen’s whose life and work were defined by a proud Native American cross-culturalism. He became the Episcopal archdeacon of Indian parishes in South Dakota and a vocal advocate for tribal governments. (His grandson Philip J. Deloria, professor of history at Harvard, received an honorary degree from Bard in 2019.) The third, near the Chapel of the Holy Innocents, honors Matthew McDuffie, a member of the class of 1889. Born a slave in South Carolina, he was literate by the age of five. Thanks to the efforts of his parents, McDuffie was able to take advantage of opportunities for blacks that opened up after the Civil War. He was one of four African American students to integrate St. Stephen’s in 1884. McDuffie experienced discrimination from his classmates, but he persisted in his education without protest and went on to become the first resident priest of St. James Episcopal Church in Tampa, Florida. Additional placards centered around the history of Montgomery Place—and likewise aimed toward the goal of engaging community practices of public memory, recognition, and forgetting—are in the works. The culmination of “Toward an Ethical Imagination” was Gilsonfest, a collaboration among Bard, Historic Red Hook, Dutchess County Historical Society, and Red Hook Quilters, which took place over Memorial Day weekend. It kicked off in Red Hook with the opening of an exhibition, Alexander Gilson: From Property to Property Owner, put together at the Historic Red Hook Annex by Window at Montgomery Place students. The event included a quilting demonstration and a presentation on historic garden artifacts and plants (Gilson developed two plant varieties, a begonia and an amaranth, that are named for him). The program concluded with a lecture by Armstead at the Montgomery Place Coach House about the history of Memorial Day. Then, in conjunction with Gilsonfest, came the final concert in this spring’s Montgomery Place Salon Series: a saxophone quartet performance that included pieces by Newburgh, New York, composer Ulysses J. Alsdorf, whose grandfather was a freed slave. The Gardener of Montgomery Place and the Composer of Newburgh reprised music played during the 1909 Henry Hudson– Robert Fulton Celebration, when a steamboat traveled from Manhattan to Albany, stopping in Newburgh. toward an ethical imagination 13
bard by design
making things interesting, by making interesting things by James Rodewald ’82
Everywhere we look, Bardians are engaged in creative pursuits, and many are producing astonishing works of wearable art. The four designers featured here—makers of bespoke footwear, bodacious handbags, intelligent bling, and whimsical womenswear—are just the tip of the amazing iceberg. Email alumni@bard.edu to let us know your favorite Bardian designer! (Yes, it can be you.)
shoes and boots One path ends, another begins. Or, if you’re Amara Hark-Weber ’05, you make a new path. And you blaze it in boots you made yourself. After earning her BA in Africana studies from Bard, Hark-Weber enrolled in Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and received a yearlong fellowship to work in Greece, where she explored the impact of migration from the African continent. “It felt like the whole country was upside down,” she recalled recently from her studio in St. Paul, Minnesota. With the goal of better understanding issues around travel, trade, migration, and identity, Hark-Weber enrolled in the economic development program at the London School of Economics and earned her MS. “In many ways, that was a continuation of my work at Bard,” she says. Ready to share the stories of her experiences, but wanting to add to her writing and photography skill set so that she could have more control over their creation and dissemination, Hark-Weber entered the visual communications and design program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). But while working toward her MFA there, she was in a car accident. “I lost memory from most of my life and had difficulty with language, both spoken and written,” she says. “It was about two years before I could read an adult book. Luckily the human body is incredibly resilient, and having a problem with memory really allows you to move forward in a positive way because you can’t remember why you shouldn’t!” Hark-Weber signed up for a shoemaking class at SAIC and was smitten. “I had been making books and running a letterpress shop for years before that,” she says. “Making a book and making a shoe are remarkably similar—they’re both about covering a form seamlessly.” She went on to study Western boot making in the high desert of eastern Oregon; hand-sewn shoes in northern Sweden and Savannah, Georgia (with a Hungarian); and high heels in Hollywood. Making shoes may not have been Hark-Weber’s initial career goal, and to the outside observer her route may look rocky and random, but for her it’s all very connected. “My research at Bard was in trade in the diaspora from the 1500s to 1830s, with a focus on printed cloth and how cloth and clothing became a means of communication across cultures,” she says. “I use the research skills and critical thinking I learned at Bard in my work now, and many of the conceptual questions I was grappling with in college—like complex trade and the signifiers we use to mark ourselves and others—continue to churn my interests today. As a shoemaker, I am actively participating in this act of marking, and I try to be as conscientious about it as possible.” photos Mark LaFavor
Amara Hark-Weber ’05, amaraharkweber.wixsite.com/harkweberstudio
bags From an early age, Brandon Blackwood ’13 was a maker. “Starting when I was about 8 years old, I would go through my mothers closet with a pair of scissors and cut up all her old clothes,” he recalls. “I’d sew new clothes out of the fabric and host a fashion show in the living room with my cousins and have them model the whole ‘collection.’” When he’d exhausted his mother’s former wardrobe, he would go to the fabric store and make bags as gifts for his friends. But it wasn’t just wearables he created; Blackwood also had a section in the refrigerator reserved for his science experiments. That competition between STEM and hems played out again when it came time to choose a college. Blackwood had his heart set on going to a design school, but his parents had other ideas “I come from a pretty old-school Jamaican family, and I was told from a young age that I had to be a doctor or lawyer to be worth anything,” he says. “I visited Bard and fell in love with the campus and culture. I applied Immediate Decision and was accepted.” Blackwood, who is Jamaican-Chinese and was raised in Brooklyn and Tokyo, started his studies as a biology major, with a strong interest in neurobiology. About halfway through, however, making things interesting, by making interesting things 15
he realized that the classes he was most pasWe’re still accepting funding and supplies sionate about were in American Studies, so and working with shelters to make life just he switched his major. One professor in a little easier for homeless youth.” particular, Donna Ford Grover ’80, was instrumental. “I don’t even think she knows this, but she was my biggest support system when it came to exploring fashion,” says Alison Chemla ’10 grew up in New York Blackwood. “ She was the only adult I could City speaking English and French. She had confidently talk to about fashion, and at her bat mitzvah in Tunisia, where her that point in my life one of the few people father, Alexandre, was born. He and her who made me feel like my opinions on the mother, Lori—who is a member of the subject were valuable. I always left our Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) meetings feeling confident and proud. board of governors—founded and run one She’s so graceful, smart, funny—and so of the world’s largest travel management unapologetically herself.” companies, so the family has seen the Though Blackwood wrote his Senior world. Her older sister, Alexandra, created Project on legendary designer Diane von ArtBinder, a game-changing app for art galFurstenberg, famed for her iconic wrap leries. And her younger sister, Lili ’14, dress, he continued to hedge his bets. “I started a clothing company, Liana, that wasn’t convinced that fashion would work makes casual, comfortable clothes with out for me, so I applied to a radiation proa sophisticated spin. The richness of Brandon Blackwood ’13, brandonblackwood.com gram as a back up,” he says. “But after I was Chemla’s background makes it unsurprisaccepted we had a ‘test’ day, where we foling that she, too, would put things of lowed around the radiologist and technibeauty into the world. What might be a bit cians. It was the most depressing thing I’ve unexpected is that her first collection was ever done. Zapping patients all day with based on emojis. radiation—from children to the elderly— “I always wanted to be a jewelry I just didn’t have the heart for it.” So, somedesigner,” says Chemla, who majored in art what to the chagrin of his family, he took a history at Bard. “But I knew that the only job at a large thrift store in Williamsburg, way I could do it was if I found a niche idea Brooklyn, saved his money by walking to that hadn’t been done before.” While rumiwork and eating tuna fish sandwiches for nating on a text-versation with a friend, she lunch, and, with the help of family and says, “A light went off in my head and I friends (and lots of Googling), launched a started drawing out the seven emojis that I four-bag collection in 2015. It immediately ended up launching with.” Chemla was took off. Blackwood’s lack of formal design working in marketing in Manhattan at the training might seem like a handicap, but time, and her office was near the jewelry being self-taught had its advantage as well. district, so she was able to have samples “Learning to do it on my own allowed me made and tweaked during her lunch hour. to make my own rules,” he says. “I think my It took about a year and a half of trial and blind leap into fashion is what helped set error before she was ready to launch her me apart.” company, Alison Lou. Her first series, Even with his tremendous success and the ever-increasing Emoticore, took off immediately. Turns out, 14K rose gold pile-ofdemands of running a small business, Blackwood still designs every poo stud earrings with black diamond eyes are quite . . . poopular. piece. He also recently began a collaboration with the Whitney Beyond the aesthetic advantages bestowed by her polyglot parMuseum to design a collection of “art-object accessories” for them. ents and assorted world travels, Chemla gained valuable experience Early this year, he launched the Blackwood Project (brandonblackduring an internship the summer of her sophomore year at Bard, wood.com/the-blackwood-project), a nonprofit that is working to when she worked at Finn, a high-end jeweler in Manhattan. “I learned raise money for homeless youth in New York City. “The fact that a lot about running a business, and some tricks of the trade,” she says. 60,000 people are without basic necessities is ridiculous,” says After graduating, she went to work at House of Waris, the luxury Blackwood. “The goal is to provide hygiene supplies, basic necessities, brand started by actor/jewelry designer/tea connoisseur Waris increased access to counseling and therapy, job training, and more. Ahluwalia (he was in Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited, Grand
jewels
16 bard by design
photo (top) Xavier Scott Marshall
tices, artistic methods, and traditions combined with the artistic methods and subject matters brought over from Catholic medieval Europe to create the unique visual and cultural traditions we see in colonial Latin American painting,” she says. Her Senior Project, “The Colonial Convent of Santa Monica Puebla: Naughty Nuns Breaking the Rules,” is a fascinating investigation of those nuns’ use of art to communicate piety and devotion to the church at a time when the male hierarchy was considering greater oversight of their order. Starn is currently working on her master’s degree at Hunter College, and has expanded the scope of her inquiry to 19th-century-to-modern Latin American art. The same insight and creativity Starn brings to art history informs her fashion line, Paris 99. “The initial inspiration always comes from imagery,” says Starn. “My fall-winter ’19 collection, which hits stores Alison Chemla ’10, alisonlou.com in August, was inspired by two works I encountered for the first time at Bard: the 15th-century Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry and Hunters in the Snow by Budapest Hotel, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, among other Bruegel the Elder.” films). The Finn and Waris brands share a can-do, DIY ethos and Though the influence of Gothic illustrated manuscripts or exquisite sense of style that can be seen in Alison Lou as well. Northern Renaissance landscapes might not be obvious to the average Even with all her gallivanting, some of Chemla’s fondest memsmock shopper, Starn’s love of food should be. The Paris 99 summer ories are of college. “Bard was amazing,” she says. “I loved my expe’18 collection included mouth-watering cherry buttons, and she conrience from start to finish. The friends I made inspire me to this day, structed several of the garments so that the trim can be used to loosen and the classes were incredible. And who wouldor tighten the garments along the n’t want to go to school in one of the most beauneckline, bust, and waist, the tiful places in the world?” Considering the same way trim is used on an source, that’s a lot of s. apron. “Cooking has always been a place for me to test out my ideas and express myself,” says Starn, who used her culinary talents to her advantage during The freedom to explore one’s interests is a rare an internship in high school gift. Rarer still is the opportunity to exercise with fashion retailer Opening those interests with the guidance of a brilliant Ceremony, bringing in baked and supportive mentor. On her second day at goods for her coworkers. She was Bard, Paris Starn ’16 met Susan Aberth, associate soon given a food column on the professor of art history. “I entered my first company’s website (with a little Language and Thinking class in a completely digging, the recipes can still be ridiculous outfit—four-inch platform heels, found under the Mini Martha denim pants, a denim crop top, and a massive rubric). Five years after her hat,” recalls Starn. “At the end of that week, internship, her first collection— Professor Aberth gave me a large book, which I of clothing, not pastry—debuted still have, on fashion from the ’70s.” She also at Opening Ceremony. gave Starn permission to take seriously the “The creativity I feel when Paris Starn ’16 in the Paige dress, paris99.design things that mattered to her—mainly, she says, cooking definitely influences my fashion, art, and food—and was her faculty design process,” says Starn. “But cooking is my creative relaxation. adviser for four years as well as her Senior Project adviser. Fashion is my creative business. And art history allows me to be creStarn’s primary academic focus at Bard was colonial Latin ative academically.” She can have her cake and think about it, too. American art. “I often looked at how pre-Columbian religious prac-
clothes
photo (bottom) Nathan Bajar/The New York Times/Redux
making things interesting, by making interesting things 17
solidarity on stage
community organizing in the heartland by Jesse Myerson ’08
A Jewish Marxist from upper Manhattan could be expected to feel out of place amid the rolling farmland and hardscrabble towns of southern Indiana. And I probably would have, had I not studied theater at Bard College. I’d gone to Indiana on a political mission. My response to the terror of an ascendent fascist movement and its victory in the 2016 election was to run into the burning building. I wanted to move to one of the heartland states that had flipped from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. Luckily, the perfect opportunity quickly arose: a mutual friend introduced me to Kate Hess Pace, a grassroots organizer and fifth-generation Hoosier (there is no such thing as an “Indianan”) who was determined to start a base-building organization and needed a deputy. I eagerly accepted her invitation to serve in that capacity through the 2018 midterms. In April 2017, we started Hoosier Action from scratch. Dedicated to building the power of everyday, working-class people through fights against wealthy interests over health care, addiction treatment, housing security, contaminated soil, and other pressing issues, Hoosier Action grew into the most formidable organized base in the area by the time November 2018 rolled around. The election resulted in no seismic upsets, but the grassroots leadership development we accomplished will bear fruit for years to come. As part of our Project Midterm, hundreds of members contributed thousands of hours knocking on doors, staging direct actions, organizing town halls, and more; Hoosier Action came out of the election with a highly skilled core of leaders who had gained an aligned strategy for transforming Indiana’s political landscape. My commitment fulfilled, I decamped after the election to figure out how to scale up that work to a regional or national configuration. Reflecting on my time in Indiana, it strikes me that, though I was on a political mission, I reached back not for politics seminars on the European Enlightenment in Olin classrooms but theater rehearsals in Fisher Center studios, where I learned to build a character from the page to the stage. The “one-on-one visit,” in the jargon, is an organizer’s primary tool of the trade. Essentially, it amounts to getting coffee with someone and trying to get to know them on as deep a level as possible. A good one-on-one is an hour long, takes place face-to-face
18 solidarity on stage
in public, and focuses not on opinions or tastes but personal stories and deeply held values—what a person truly cares about enough to take action on. The idea is that people are motivated by their own self-interest, and everyone’s self-interest is bound up in the self-interest of everyone else facing similar struggles. Everyone wants to get free from something, no one can get free from much of anything without courageous collective action, and hardly anyone is ever invited to be part of an organization that provides ongoing opportunities for such action. One-on-ones are ways to uncover a person’s self-interest, to agitate them to take action with others with aligned self-interests, and to provide them with the opportunity to attend a meeting, join a canvass, conduct a direct action, take on a leadership role, or any of a hundred other things. For this process to work, the most important attribute for an organizer to cultivate is nonjudgmental curiosity. However different the opinions, attitudes, and biases of the people across the table, it is an organizer’s job to probe for their deepest self-interests, to dignify their struggles, and to invite them to imagine a different vision for themselves, their families, their community, their state, their country. This attribute is also central to the pedagogy of my adviser, Jonathan Rosenberg, artist in residence in Bard’s Theater and Performance Program. He taught me that, in each scene, a character is motivated by a discrete intention, the pursuit of a particular need that another character in the scene can meet. Perhaps a character’s intention is to extract from a foe a piece of information that will be the key to solving the mystery, or to obtain permission from a superior to set a plan in motion, or to woo a romantic interest into a commitment of marriage. By the end of the scene, either a character has achieved her intention, seen his intention frustrated, or, owing to the emergence of some more pressing circumstance, adopted a new intention altogether. Paramount to constructing a compelling performance is unlocking the character’s intentions. This exercise can be very difficult when the character’s choices are vastly different from the ones the actor would make if faced with a similar situation. Rosenberg once turned me down for a role in Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youth on the grounds that my audition portrayal did not embrace the
character’s sadistic, malicious treatment of his scene partner. I had been trying to bend the character to resemble me, in order to avoid connecting with the character deeply enough to bend myself to portray him. An actor confronting a text must adopt a community organizer’s nonjudgmental curiosity, empathize with the character as written, develop a backstory that justifies the character’s inclinations and orientations, see and grasp the ethic motivating the character’s actions, and fully inhabit the stakes of the drama driving the character to take the course the playwright mapped. Even Euripides’s ruthless Dionysus, even Shakespeare’s treacherous Iago, even Brecht’s stonecold Mother Courage have justifiable reasons for their decisions, and if the roles are to be performed with honesty, grace, and power, the actor has to approach the script the way a community organizer approaches a one-on-one. Take Linda, as I’ll call her, who lives in Martinsville, Indiana. In Bloomington, the NPR-listening college town 20 miles south, it is ubiquitously, though incorrectly, believed that Martinsville was once the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. (Only New Jersey rivaled Indiana for Klan activity in the 1920s.) Morgan County, of which Martinsville is the seat, favored the Republican congressional candidate over the Democrat by a spread of 46 percentage points in the 2018 election. I am confident Linda is a Trump supporter, but not certain; I never asked. Our conversation never touched on Trump, Russia, or the deficit, staying instead on the rampant drug crisis and the loved one it had taken from her, first to the penitentiary and then to the morgue. Linda knows that shame and stigma are incompatible with healing, she knows how difficult it is to obtain mental health services or addiction treatment, and she knows that so many kids stay home, play video games, and do drugs because it beats the nothing else there is to do in a town devastated by farm consolidation in the 1980s, industrial offshoring in the 1990s, and the housing crash of the 2000s. The key to defeating not just Trump but Trumpism is in how we approach Linda and the thousands of people like her. At present, the common approach in elite, liberal society is incurious judgment. The comments section for any New York Times article on West Virginia miners losing their pensions or Indiana mothers bearing infants with rare blood diseases is filled with schadenfreude and resentment. Simply living in “Trump country”—so construed as not to conjure, say, Suffolk County, Long Island—makes another’s misfortunes ripe for crowing over. This approach is self-defeating. The moment calls for its antithesis, non-judgmental curiosity. Taking courageous, collective action builds the sort of mutual trust and accountability that alters people’s perception of who their teammates are, and who their opponents; whom they will seek reasons to warm to, and whom to sour on. Getting someone into a fight for their own liberation alongside the objects of their uncharitable views is the best way to change their opinions, attitudes, and biases.
photo China Jorrin ’86
The assertion that drama, a study of artifice and imagination, can better illuminate the path toward political change than political studies, a field ostensibly grounded in data and deduction, might seem dubious. But politics, like theater, is all about action. We have to put our bodies in motion if we are to achieve a more free and democratic government and society; we have to stand in line at the polls, march in the streets, run for office, give what money we can to the campaigns and organizations we support, canvass door-to-door, commit civil disobedience in the halls of power, and have one-onone conversations with others. People only do these things under the influence of great propulsive feelings—outrage, fear, compassion, heartbreak—which are only brought on by deeply resonant symbols communicated through videos, speeches, slogans, or personal stories. Powerful symbols, profound feelings, bodies in motion—the raw currency of politics is the province not of the lecture hall but of the theater.
Jesse Myerson ’08 is the director of Heartland Rising, which is organizing Midwestern expats living in coastal cities to support base-building in their home states.
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commencement 2019
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photo by Pete Mauney ’93, MFA ’00
COMMENCEMENT 2019
On May 25, New Orleans mayor LaToya Cantrell addressed Bard College’s 159th Commencement, recounting her work as president of the Broadmoor Improvement Association (BIA) following Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures that put her neighborhood under 10 feet of water. She thanked Stephen Tremaine ’07, whom she met when he was volunteering at First Presbyterian Church in Broadmoor. “He stood up at one of our neighborhood meetings and said, ‘I know students who would love to volunteer. Do you think they can come down for spring break?” The “yes” came quickly, and Tremaine organized hundreds of Bard students to assist in the rebuilding efforts. He went on to found the Bard Early College in New Orleans and now leads the network of Bard Early Colleges, overseeing strategy, partnerships, finances, and program quality. Cantrell thanked others, including Emily Wolff ’10, who took over volunteer logistics after Tremaine graduated and later became executive director of the BIA. Wolff is now the head of the New Orleans Office of Youth and Families. They were all instrumental in bringing Broadmoor back; in the city’s recovery. But what do all these people, including Cantrell, have in common? An unwillingness to accept the status quo or take “no” for an answer. Cantrell forged partnerships with people and organizations with similar values, and the “unconventional leadership” abilities they all shared overcame the entrenched bureaucracy and the naysayers. “Unconventional leadership Leon Botstein and LaToya Cantrell means being committed to doing what is right even if it may be politically unpopular,” Cantrell said. “Bard established education programs in prisons and set up the first dual-degree program with a Palestinian university. The College has received criticism and political blowback for these actions, but this hasn’t stopped it from stepping out and doing what’s right when it’s the right thing to do.” President Botstein, whose own unconventional leadership has established Bard as an institution committed to the connection between education and social justice, also addressed the importance of independent thought, adding the admonition to “be aware of our own fallibility.” As misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies compete with their opposites for our limited attention, “we must be restrained by humility,” Botstein said to the graduates. “The skills of critical thinking, reasoned argument, careful listening, close interpretation, and receptivity to new evidence and ideas are at the heart of the education you have received at Bard; they are the core of the achievement represented by the diploma you are about to receive. But these very skills will, from time to time, prove you wrong, forcing you to shed a cherished beautiful belief for an ugly fact.” 22 commencement 2019
Like Cantrell and Botstein, James Cox Chambers ’81, chair of the Board of Trustees of Bard College (and unconventional in almost every regard), pointed to the opportunities presented by a Bard education, and to the responsibilities that come along with them. “We— all of us here in this enclave of stunning, bucolic grandeur that is Annandale, and by extension into the Bard Network around the globe—have been given refuge to think big, dream bigger, and aspire epically to make this world better. It will not be simple,” Chambers emphasized, “but somebody’s got to do it. Welcome to the show.” HONORARY DEGREES
Cantrell also received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree, as did V. Kofi Agawu, William J. Barber II, Philip J. Deloria, and Richard Taruskin. Other honorary degree recipients were Herbert A. Donovan Jr. ( Doctor of Divinity); Margaret Heafield Hamilton (Doctor of Science); and Steven Holl and Carolee Schneemann ’59 (Doctor of Fine Arts). AROUND THE GLOBE
Graduates on campuses of the Bard network, nationally and internationally, reflect the diversity of cultures that Bard represents. Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences will hold graduation ceremonies at its East Jerusalem campus on August 28. Some 169 students received Bard BA degrees at American University of Central Asia during its June 1 commencement at its campus in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Nearly 170 students graduated— more than one-third earning bachelor of arts degrees and the rest receiving associate in arts degrees—at the 50th commencement ceremony of Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on May 18. Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University also held ceremonies for 50 BA graduates from 27 countries on May 18. Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) Baltimore celebrated its commencement on June 1; BHSEC Cleveland also awarded AA degrees on June 1; and BHSEC Manhattan, Queens, and Newark held their commencement on June 26. The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) celebrated its 18th commencement on May 29 at Taconic Correctional Facility. On June 29, the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny College) of St. Petersburg State University held its graduation ceremonies in the campus’s main building; 197 received BA degrees, 15 earned MA degrees in curatorial studies, and 9 were awarded master of arts degrees in curatorial, critical, and performance studies. At Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 92 students graduated, 72 with master of music degrees on May 11.
photos Karl Rabe
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BARD AWARDS CEREMONY 1 George A. Kellner, financial analyst and educational philanthropist, received the Bard Medal, the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s highest honor. The John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science went to 2 Tatiana M. Prowell ’94, oncologist and assistant professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Actor, comedian, author, and producer 3 Alexandra Elliott Wentworth ’88 earned the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters. 4 Sonja Brookins Santelises, chief executive officer of Baltimore City Public Schools, accepted the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service. 5 Marya Warshaw ’73, founder of Gowanus Arts Exchange, was honored with The John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public
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12 Service. Author 6 Judith Thurman (left) received the Mary McCarthy Award. The Bardian Award, recognizing longtime members of the Bard community, was given to 7 Ken Cooper (center), director of security since 2000; Bard College Conservatory of Music Director of Studies in Music Theory and Practice and Carol Werner (far left), who retired this year as office manager for Bard’s Center for Student Life and Advising. 8 John Halle; 9 David Kettler, a member of the political studies faculty for nearly 30 years; 10 Robert Martin (center), who founded and directed the Conservatory and was professor of philosophy and music; 11 Alice Stroup (far right), History Department faculty at Bard College since 1980; 12 Dawn Upshaw, who conceived, founded, and led the Bard College Conservatory of Music Vocal Arts Program.
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On and Off Campus Who’s New Author Valeria Luiselli joined the Bard faculty this spring as a research associate and will teach as a writer in residence in the Division of Languages and Literature starting in the fall semester. Until the publication this year of her remarkable novel Lost Children Archive, her first written in English, Luiselli was most widely known for her 2011 book Los ingrávidos (Faces in the Crowd), which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. La historia de mis dientes (The Story of My Teeth) was pub- Valeria Luiselli lished in 2015 and won the Los Angeles Times photo Diego Berruecos Prize for Best Fiction, the Azul Prize in Canada, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Best Translated Book Award. It was also named one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2015. In 2014, she was named one of the “5 Under 35” by the National Book Foundation. Luiselli, a native of Mexico City who grew up in South Africa, has seen her work translated into more than 20 languages. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and the New Yorker, among other publications. She received her PhD in comparative literature from Columbia University. Kathryn Tabb joins the faculty this fall as an assistant professor of philosophy. Tabb received her PhD in history and philosophy of science and MA in bioethics and health law from the University of Pittsburgh, her MPhil from the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Cambridge, and BA from the University of Chicago. She is interested in philosophy of science and medicine and in history of philosophy, particularly early modern philosophy. Her historical research focuses on philosophical debates
Levy Conference Looks at Financial Stability
James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis photo Karl Rabe
24 on and off campus
Kathryn Tabb photo Nathania tenWolde
Rebecca Yoshino (center) with EUS strudents. photo China Jorrin ’86
over psychopathology and irrationality, especially among 17th- and 18thcentury British empiricists. Tabb is working on a book, Agents and Patients: On Locke’s Ethics of Thinking, about John Locke’s theory of the association of ideas. Since 2015, Tabb has been an assistant professor in Columbia University’s Department of Philosophy. Rebecca Yoshino is the new manager of the Bard College Farm. Yoshino grew up on Hawthorne Valley Farm in Columbia County, New York. Her background in agriculture is extensive: over the last decade she has worked as an organic grower, farm manager, and organizer in the sustainable food sovereignty movement in Minnesota, where she was director of Wozupi Tribal Gardens, a 40-acre certified organic farm and education center owned by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. In 2017, she joined forces with the Hmong American Farmers Association, working with immigrant farmers on a 155-acre incubator farm and food hub dedicated to increasing market access, training, and community wealth building for marginalized immigrant communities.
The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College marked the 100-year anniversary of Minsky’s birth when it hosted its 28th annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, “Financial Stability, Economic Policy, and Economic Nationalism,” at Blithewood in April. As the U.S. economy enters what appears to be a historically long postcrisis expansion, with increasing signs of deceleration against the backdrop of a looming global recession, the conference highlighted the possibility of increasing financial instability and the challenge of developing policies to meet the rising risk of recession. Speakers from government regulatory bodies, the private sector, and academia sought to shed light on conditions in the United States and Europe, with special emphasis on the impact of the current administration’s policies with regard to a possible repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. The highlights of the conference were presentations by James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Ron Feldman, first vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Panicos Demetriades, former governor of the Central Bank of Cyprus, focused on European conditions, while private sector analysts from hedge funds and policy think tanks assessed the potential for current economic policies to confront the challenge of prolonging the recovery. The increasing stock of private corporate debt and rising house prices, which in the United States and Europe have reached levels similar to or higher than those seen before the Great Recession, were other areas of emphasis at the conference.
From the U.S. Capital to the Capital of Kyrgyzstan Andrew Kuchins is the new president of the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Kuchins was senior fellow and research professor at the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and former director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “I am very excited and grateful to have the opportunity to be the next president of the American Andrew Kuchins University of Central Asia,” says Kuchins. “It will be a challenge to lead AUCA to even greater achievements, but one I am eager to take on with the support of its excellent board of trustees, faculty and staff, and generous donors.”
Bard College Berlin The Philipp Schwartz Initiative of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded a grant funding a two-year research stay for scholar at risk Aysuda Kölemen at Bard College Berlin (BCB) . A political scientist whose current research focuses on populism and democratic backsliding in Turkey, Kölemen was one of more than 2,000 signatories of a declaration that called for an end to the armed conflict in Turkey. She lost her job at Istanbul Kemerburgaz University (now Altinbas University) and was sentenced to two years and three months in prison for “propagandizing for a terrorist organization.” In May, BCB held the opening ceremony for a new student residence dedicated to Henry Koerner (1915–91), a Jewish-Viennese artist who escaped to the United States from Vienna in 1938. Speakers included Bard President Leon Botstein, artist Tracey Emin (a donor to BCB’s Program for International Education and Social Change), art historian Joseph Koerner (Henry’s son), and Syrian filmmaker Orwa Nyrabia. Artist Alfredo Jaar gave the keynote address. Designed by Atelier Kempe Thill of Rotterdam, Henry Koerner Hall was funded by Arcadia, a Charitable Fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin.
photo Jared Ames
Documentary Focuses on Bard Prison Initiative Award-winning filmmaker Lynn Novick has directed and produced a new documentary series, College Behind Bars, that reveals the transformative power of higher education through the experiences of incarcerated men and women. The four-hour series, also produced by Novick’s longtime collaborator Sarah Botstein (The Vietnam War, Prohibition, The Civil War, Jazz) and executive produced by Ken Burns, will air on PBS November 25 and 26. Distilled from nearly 400 hours of cinéma-vérité footage, the series explores the lives of a dozen incarcerated men and women as they earn degrees through the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), one of the most rigorous and effective prison education programs in the country. College Behind Bars is not a story of nonviolent drug offenders, false convictions, or exonerations; all the BPI students featured in the film are serving time for serious, often violent offenses. In wrenching, deeply personal interviews, they describe their childhoods and family backgrounds, reveal why they are incarcerated, express profound remorse as well as hope for redemption, and share their worries about what life will bring after release from prison. BPI students—most of whom did not finish high school—are held to the same high academic and intellectual standards as undergraduates at Bard’s Annandale campus. In classrooms, their cells, the library, and the yard, they wrestle with difficult texts, analyze complex data, and, over time, master a wide range of disciplines.
Upcoming Arendt Center Events
Henry Koerner Hall ribbon cutting ceremony (left to right): Leon Botstein, president of Bard College; Peter Baldwin, cofounder of the Arcadia Fund and member of the Board of Governors of Bard College Berlin; André Kempe, cofounder and partner at Atelier Kempe Thill; Florian Becker, managing director of Bard College Berlin; and Sören Benn, mayor of Berlin-Pankow. photo Irina Stelea
The Arendt Center, along with Bard Farm; Bard EATS; Center for Civic Engagement; and Center for the Study of Land, Air, and Water, is hosting a symposium, “Reimagining Human Health: The Microbiome, Farming, and Medicine,” September 19–20. Bringing together leading scientists, medical practitioners, farming experts, and philosophers, this interdisciplinary gathering will address 21st-century health concerns posed by the threat to the human microbiome. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that political antisemitism is more than “Jew-hatred.” Rather, it is a pseudoscientific ideology seeking to prove that Jews are responsible for all evils of the world. Racism, too, offers a pseudoscientific justification for violence. “Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world, and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization,” she posited. The Arendt Center’s 12th annual conference, “Racism and Antisemitism,” October 10–11, will explore these often-avoided concepts in Arendt’s work in the context of a contemporary political moment marked by antisemitic and racist violence. on and off campus 25
Awards and Honors The Heinrich Böll Foundation named Roger Berkowitz, professor of political studies and human rights and founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center, winner of its Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought. Berkowitz shared the 2019 award with Jerome Kohn, trustee of the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust. Robert Cioffi, assistant professor of classics, has been awarded Harvard University fellowships from the Center for Hellenic Studies and from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation for work on his scholarly monograph “Narrating the Marvelous: The Greek Novel and the Ancient Ethnographic Imagination.” Mark Danner, James Clarke Chase Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities, received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Laura Kunreuther, associate professor of anthropology, received two grants, a $10,500 Multi-Country Research Fellowship from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers and a Post-PhD Research Grant for up to $20,000 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in support of travel to Switzerland, Kenya, and Nepal for her research project “Translating Voices, Interpreting in the Field.” Michael Martell, assistant professor of economics, and his cocollaborator Ian Burn of the University of Stockholm, were awarded 98,000 SEK ($10,500) from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ Stiftelsen Torsten Amundsons fund for their research project “Discrimination against Homosexuals in the Labor Market: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies.” Jennifer Murray, director of the Institute for International Liberal Education, received a Fulbright Scholar grant and participated in a Fulbright U.S. International Education Administrators seminar in South Korea. Kelly Reichardt, artist in residence of film and electronic arts, joined the Cannes competition jury at the 72nd Cannes Film Festival in May. Bruce Robertson, associate professor of biology, has been awarded a two-year United States Geological Survey grant of $112,301 as well as additional funding from Western EcoSystems Technology (WEST), for his project “Explore the Visual Basis for Attraction by Birds to Photovoltaic Solar Panels.” Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Studies David Shein has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant and will participate in the 2019–20 Fulbright U.S. International Education Administrators seminar in Germany in October. Shein, as chair of Bard’s Scholarships and Fellowships Committee, recruits and works with students who are interested in applying for competitive undergraduate and postgraduate opportunities and has helped move the College into the category of a “Fulbright top-producing institution.” Robyn Smyth, visiting assistant professor of environmental and urban studies, received a five-year, $15,000 award from the National Science Foundation for the collaborative project “Will increases in dissolved organic matter accelerate a shift in trophic status through anoxia-driven positive feedbacks in an oligotrophic lake?” Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, was awarded the League of American Orchestras’ highest honor, the Gold Baton, at its 74th National Conference this June. Restoration Grant for Montgomery Place Bard was awarded $300,000 to begin restoration of the Montgomery Place Mansion House exterior through New York State’s 2018 Regional Economic Development funding from the Environmental Protection Fund Grant Program of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation. Landmark Award for Fisher Center’s First Choreographer in Residence Pam Tanowitz has been appointed the Fisher Center’s choreographer in residence, underwritten by a $1.2 million grant from dance philanthropists Jay Franke and David Herro. The Fisher Center, which produced and premiered Tanowitz’s acclaimed Four Quartets, will commission three new works by the choreographer, facilitate her work with Bard students, and develop a digital archive of her body of work. 26 on and off campus
Support for BPI The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) recently launched the Women’s College Partnership (WCP) at the Indiana Women’s Prison in Indianapolis with the support of a three-year, $1.5 million grant from an anonymous donor. BPI, partnering with Bennington College, also received a $140,610 grant award from the National Science Foundation to provide support for a community of formerly incarcerated computer programmers living in New York City. The project, called Restart, is headed by BPI alumnus Ornell Caesar ’16. Awards for Bard’s Early Colleges The New York State Education Department awarded $687,185 to develop and implement a new Smart Scholars Program focusing on computer science at Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) Manhattan. The Clark Foundation awarded a $350,000 grant in general support of Bard Early Colleges in New York City. The Cleveland and Gund Foundations each granted $130,000 in support of BHSEC work in Cleveland. New Schools Venture Fund approved a grant of $53,000 toward design of a model of the Bard Early Colleges that could be scalable nationwide. And in support of BHSEC DC, opening in September 2019, private funding totaling $3 million was made possible by DC Education Fund and its philanthropic partners, including the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, Education Forward DC, and CityBridge Foundation. IWT Receives Grant from the Library of Congress The Institute for Writing and Thinking, with support from Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program, received a $20,000 Teaching with Primary Sources grant from the Library of Congress for “The World of the Poem: Teaching Poetry through Primary Sources,” which will create a series of workshops for high school and college educators in the greater Hudson Valley. Bard MBA in Sustainability Powers Up The MBA in Sustainability program at Bard won a competitive bid from the New York Power Authority (NYPA) to deliver an on-site, low-residency graduate business degree to a cohort of NYPA employees. Courses will be taught at NYPA’s offices in White Plains one weekend a month and online two evenings a week. Local Support for Trustee Leader Scholar Program (TLS) Bard received a $10,000 grant award from the Thomas Thompson Trust for TLS outreach and educational activities in Rhinebeck. Backing for Brothers at Bard The William R. Kenan, Jr. Charitable Trust awarded $400,000 over four years to Brothers at Bard (BAB), a character development and academic enrichment mentorship program for young men of color from underserved communities founded by Harry Johnson ’17 and Dariel Vasquez ’17. BAB also received a $21,000 grant from the Helen’s Hope Foundation for a weeklong summer academy on the Bard campus. Grants for Bard Graduate Center Bard Graduate Center received a $10,000 grant from the Graham Foundation to support its forthcoming exhibition, Eileen Gray: Designer—Architect. A $25,000 grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation will support a weeklong summer school for conservation students, early-career conservators, and conservation scientists, designed to acquaint participants with a variety of approaches to scholarship on, and interpretation of, material culture. A $10,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation will support three public conversations devoted to exploring the question of how different kinds of creative people—scholars, artists, performers—conduct research.
Bardians in the Whitney Biennial
Above left: Lucas Blalock ’02, The Nonconformist, 2017-19. Archival inkjet print mounted on aluminum. Image courtesy the artist; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, NY and Zurich; and Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels Above right: Suspended from ceiling, Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson’s Whitney Biennial installation People Like Us, 2019 (left); and Stand Your Ground, 2019 (right). photo Ron Amstutz
The 2019 Whitney Biennial is focused, according to curator Rujeko Hockley, on “the mining of history in order to reimagine the present or future, a profound and sustained consideration of questions of equity along financial, racial, and sexual lines, a concern with climate change, and explorations of the vulnerability of the body.” Among the 75 artists included in the exhibition, which runs until September 22, are a remarkable number of Bardians: Lucas Blalock ’02; Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence since 2012; Madeline Hollander MFA ’19; Adam Khalil ’11; Zack Khalil ’14; Christine Sun Kim MFA ’13; Carolyn Lazard ’10; Tiona Nekkia McClodden, 2018–19 Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism at Bard College; Paul Mpagi Sepuya, MFA faculty; Martine Syms MFA ’18; and Kyle Thurman MFA ’16. Two organizations are also participating in the 79th edition of the biennial: Forensic Architecture, for which Thomas Keenan, director of the Human Rights Project and associate professor of comparative literature, is a research fellow; and Paper Tiger Television, an open media collective of which Adrienne Silverman ’02 has been a member since 2002.
Alumni/ae Photographers in Gallery Exhibit
Vanessa Kotovich ’17, Plate V, 2017
Photographer Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts, has had solo shows from Dusseldorf to Los Angeles to Paris—and in 1971 he was the first living American photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective of Shore’s work. But a request from Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City to curate an exhibition pairing images made by recent Bard graduates with photographs by 20th-century artists from the gallery’s vast archives has proved as fulfilling as any public recognition of his own work. “I think of myself as both a photographer and a teacher and am delighted to have this opportunity to show my students’ work,” says Shore. The exhibition, Bard x HGG, features series of images by Jasmine Clarke ’18, Madison Emond ’18, Briauna Falk ’18, Dave Heath, Vanessa Kotovich ’17, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lisette Model, Shore, Jackson Siegal ’18, Frederick Sommer, Joseph Sudek, Minor White, Naomi Zahler ’18, and Ying Jing Zheng ’17. “Stephen Shore is a bridge connecting contemporary photography with the history of photography,” says 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.” The show opened June 20 and will be on view through August 29. on and off campus 27
Students Win Awards
From top row left: Eric Raimondi ’19 Marion Adams ’19 photo Jannis Berger Corrina Gross ’19 Getzamany Correa ’21 photo Allegra Tsao Robinson ’21 Elizabeth Thomas ’20
History and Middle Eastern studies major Eric Raimondi ’19 won a $10,000 Davis Projects for Peace Prize in support of his work with refugees and asylum seekers on the island of Samos, Greece. Raimondi’s project aims to establish a multigenre language curriculum at the Samos refugee camp. In its 12th year, the Davis Projects for Peace program invited undergraduates to design grassroots peace-building projects to be implemented during the summer of 2019 and selected the most promising and feasible projects to be funded. Several Bardians received competitive Fulbright scholarships for the 2019–20 academic year. Alexa Frank ’15, Sofia Hardt ’18, and Marion Adams ’19 won Fulbright Study/Research Awards. Frank, who graduated with a dual degree in film and electronic arts and Asian studies, will pursue her graduate studies at Waseda University in Tokyo. Hardt, an economics and human rights major, will interview beneficiaries of Argentina’s Universal Child Allowance to see how universal basic income could change the way people think about labor. Adams, a German studies and philosophy major, will travel to Austria to teach English and study how Jewish museums there negotiate their country’s role in commemorating traditional and stimulating contemporary Austrian-Jewish culture. Asian studies majors Corrina Gross ’19 and Kerri Anne Bigornia ’19 won Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Awards to Taiwan, where they will teach English to primary and middle school students. Two students, global and international studies major Getzamany Correa ’21 and biology major Elizabeth Thomas ’20, received prestigious Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships through the U.S. Department of State to spend a semester abroad. Correa studied in the Department of International Relations at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. Thomas did research at University College Roosevelt in Middelburg, Netherlands. Correa and Thomas were two of 844 American undergraduate students from 335 colleges and universities across the United States to receive the congressionally funded Gilman scholarship, which provides up to $5,000 to American undergraduate students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad.
Bard Swimmer Makes a National Splash In a swimming career packed with highlights, senior Dio Tzortzis ’19, an economics major from Athens, Greece, might have to rate a 25th-place finish near the top. And though he out-swam dozens of competitors on his way to three Liberty League Championships in 2018 and three more in 2019, it may have been a race against the clock—alone in the pool—that was his crowning athletic achievement. With swimmers and divers from other Liberty League programs cheering him on, Tzortzis turned in a 3:56.16 time trial in the 400-yard individual medley to earn Bard’s first invitation to a National Collegiate Athletic Association Division III Swimming and Diving Championship. Though he didn’t qualify for finals in any of the three events in which he competed at nationals, he swam a personal best in the preliminaries of the 200-yard back, finishing 25th. He may have fallen short of his goal of a top-eight finish, which would have earned him All-American honors, but Tzortzis will graduate as the most decorated student athlete in the history of Bard College. 28 on and off campus
Dio Tzortzis ’19. photo d3photography.com
Sydney Menees ’12: Environmental Law As an attorney for the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the Environment and Natural Resources Division, Sydney Menees ’12 represents the United States in complex civil litigation that falls under a broad range of environmental statues. She handles two different types of cases: enforcement actions relating to environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and defense cases on behalf of the United States against challenges to cleanups at superfund sites. Remarkably, just six months into her job at DOJ, she was part of a team that went to trial. “It can be hard to get trial experience as a young lawyer,” she says. Menees represented the federal government before an Arizona judge, asking to limit taxpayer liability for cleanup costs at 19 retired uranium mines on Navajo Nation land, arguing that El Paso Natural Gas Co., the corporate successor to the mining company that extracted the material, should bear some of the responsibility for the contamination. “At the trial, I examined a witness,” she recalls. “I also announced for the record as ‘Sydney Menees for the United States,’ which was a memorable experience.” Menees was an accomplished violinist and did not expect to end up in law when she enrolled at Bard. “I was looking for a small school with a low studentto-faculty ratio. I was very interested in classical music, and the College president being a conductor made an impression on me.” During First-Year Seminar, Menees was introduced to thinkers, writers, and ideas she hadn’t explored before. “The students are the best part about Bard,” she says. “They are passionate people who advocate around issues. They don’t hold back, but they are also nice people.” Menees majored in music while also delving into a wide range of other academic subjects. “After graduation, I knew I wanted to pursue something in the public interest,” she says. “All of my studies at Bard geared me toward making a positive impact in the world.” She went to work for AmeriCorps, helping to rebuild Greensburg, Kansas, after a tornado devastated the city. Greensburg took advantage of the opportunity to become a totally sustainable “green city” with 100 percent wind and solar power, green roofs, and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified buildings. “I realized I enjoyed working in the environmental field and thought it would be good to pursue a law degree because it lends itself to policy.” Menees was offered a scholarship to Georgetown University Law Center, where she would be close to the Environmental Protection Agency and
Sydney Menees ’12
Capitol Hill. “I tailored my law education toward climate and environmental law. I took internships in the Department of Justice, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and got a look into environmental law, energy law, and policy.” In 2016, Menees was offered a two-year Presidential Management Fellowship, which serves as a pathway to federal employment, and worked in the energy policy office in the White House. “We were working on a big report to Congress called the Quadrennial Energy Review. We reported and provided recommendations on threats and opportunities related to energy systems.” She also worked on federal energy regulation to reduce greenhouse gases. After the 2016 election, policy priorities changed and Menees decided to explore litigation. She joined the DOJ through the Attorney General’s Honors Program, which brought in a class of seven entry-level federal lawyers. Her office has 50 attorneys, two of whom are her mentors. “It’s been great to see how the statutes that are intended to protect the environment work in practice. Policy is often made from a 10,000-foot view. It’s hard to see how it plays out in real life. When you’re working on a case, it’s easy to see how policy affects real life and how you can have a lasting impact.”
The All-Seeing Eye In his new book, Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All, Arthur Holland Michel ’13, codirector of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, traces the development of the one “disquieting” technology that, he says, has “haunted my dreams.” That technology is wide-area motion imagery (WAMI), which also goes by other names, but Holland Michel calls “the all-seeing eye.” The story starts with a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California rushing home to call his program manager after watching the 1998 movie Enemy of the State, in which a giant video-surveillance satellite is able to track and record subjects on the ground in vivid detail. “‘I have a great idea,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Call me.’” What follows is, as Sharon Weinberger, a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and an expert on defense and security issues, writes in Nature, “a deeply reported and deftly written investigation that seeks to understand both the implications of a technology and the motivations of its creators.” It often seems that privacy is under siege, but Holland Michel writes of WAMI that “it still isn’t too late to define, concretely and proactively, how it should and shouldn’t be used.” Far from advising us to don tin hats or retreat to lead-lined bunkers, he calls for civic engagement. We need, he writes, “to demand transparency from our own overwatchers and those who overwatch others.” And, he concludes, “Always keep an eye on the sky.”
Arthur Holland Michel ’13. photo Lee Harris
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Ronald Chase ’56. photo Marc Olivier Le Blanc
Ronald Chase ’56: Bringing Art into Teenagers’ Lives Oklahoma-born artist Ronald Chase ’56 studied dance, set design, and theater directing at Bard. He began his career performing in the dance group of his Bard mentor, Jean Erdman, then toured Europe with the José Limón Dance Company. Later he enjoyed success in painting, opera design, independent filmmaking, and photography. “I have been one of the most fortunate people in the world because I live with the arts,” says Chase. “If nothing has interfered with your ability to do that, you are incredibly privileged.” Now, at the age of 84, his real work is in education. “Toward the end of your life, all of those ambitions get shifted over until you realize what’s important to you. One of those things is that you have gained a great deal of knowledge that you can impart, and it’s your duty to share that.” In 1993, Chase founded San Francisco Art & Film for Teenagers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the arts a constant and inspiring presence in young people’s lives. SF Art & Film started with Chase taking 18 kids to visit a
gallery or watch a serious film every week. The organization, which celebrated its 25th anniversary last year, now serves 700 students annually and hopes to increase that number to 1,000. Chase developed SF Art & Film in a grassroots way, responding directly to what the kids wanted to do. Over the years, he has experimented with diverse programs, from taking a group of students to Europe for three weeks to staging a weeklong Shakespeare film festival. His organization currently offers Bay Area middle school, high school, and college students weekly Friday night screenings of classic, foreign, and art films introduced by guest speakers and followed by discussions at the San Francisco Art Institute; bimonthly Saturday art gallery or museum tours; and weekly tickets to a range of cultural events including the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, and other theater, film, and music events in the city. Supported by donations and grants, all programs are free and open to anyone who signs up. The only selective and fee-based program is Chase’s film workshop, which teaches professional filmmaking and lets students build a portfolio of work and develop a foundation of skills—looking, seeing, thinking, doing—that can help get them into film school. Chase has not slowed down and works as hard as ever on behalf of his organization. Outreach is focused on getting classroom teachers who can inspire or even require students to participate in SF Art & Film events. With the pressure of testing requirements and the general overburdening of both teachers and students, participation can be a difficult task. For kids who do show up, however, the results are transformative. “When young people, who are so alienated from this culture that they act like you’re being hostile when you bring up classical music, sit in the front row of the symphony for the first time and hear Mahler’s Fifth, let me tell you, they will have a reaction,” says Chase. “I’ve had kids shaking, literally in a daze, because they have been so moved and never before realized music could do such a thing.” As arts funding in public schools has dried up, Chase has found a way to connect students to the rich cultural life of San Francisco and to broaden their sense of possibility. “We keep going with SF Art & Film to put that word ‘beauty’ back into their vocabulary.”
President Leon Botstein and “investigative comedian” Adam Conover ’04 engaged in a lively conversation, organized by the Bard College Alumni/ae Association with the assistance of the Office of Admission, in April at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles. “Why,” Conover asked, “would anyone want to be a college president?” To which Botstein replied that he wasn’t qualified (at 23) to do anything else. Botstein called Conover’s statement that Bard was the first place that ever took him seriously “ the best compliment a college president could get.” The audience of alumni/ae, parents, and newly accepted students heard why college is like a supermarket (it has to offer a variety of goods regardless of their popularity) and why Bard is proud to see something in a high school student that the student may not yet have seen in themself. “Bard is here to help students learn to improvise, imagine, and adapt,” said Botstein. “That is what is needed most now.” Go to annandale.org to see video from the event.
photo Sebastian Nicolau '16
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Left to right: Stuart Schwam, Wendy Davis Schwam ’70, David Alan Basche, Alysia Reiner, Livia Basche, Arnold Davis ’44, Nicole Schwam, Stuart Manitsky, Gail Davis, Cortney Britton Schwam, Simon Schwam. photo Chris Kayden
Arnold Davis ’44: Forever Young Arnold Davis ’44 was born in 1924 and started at Bard at 16 years old. “I went to an unorthodox kind of school for gifted children so I didn’t have a real elementary education.” His father, a politician, was involved in the Mohegan Colony, an intentional community founded by anarchists in the 1920s in Westchester County, New York, as a utopian attempt to provide an egalitarian way of living and raising a family. The colony also established its own school, part of the Modern School movement, which emphasized self-directed and unstructured learning. Because he progressed at his own pace, he ended up entering—and graduating from—Peekskill High School two years early. “I was a fiddle player. So when I was applying to colleges, I only thought of schools like Oberlin that specialized in music. My violin teacher, Guido Brand, who had escaped the war in Germany, taught in the music department at Bard and invited me to visit the College.” Davis’s parents could not afford the tuition, but Bard offered Davis a full scholarship with room and board, and he enrolled. “During freshman orientation after we had finished our day’s courses, everyone would go to the bar at the Annandale Hotel [before it became Adolph’s] but I couldn’t order a drink because you had to be 18 years old. So my friends ordered for me,” he remembers fondly. “It was an all-boys school back then.” Davis worked campus jobs to earn spending money. During his time at Bard, he was a switchboard operator, librarian, and headwaiter in the dining hall at Preston. “In the evening, everyone had to wear a jacket for dinner. We had a fine dining room with white tablecloths. When the army came in, all that completely changed. The dining room became a cafeteria.” As America became involved in World War II, Davis remembers soldiers coming to live and train on campus, soldiers taking classes, and the College building new wooden dormitories for them. “I was called up, but they wouldn’t take me because I had asthma,” he says. “It really was an interesting and exciting time at Bard. We had a water tower on campus and everyone took turns sitting there to watch that no enemy planes were coming overhead.” Davis played violin in the Bard orchestra and studied with Brand, as well as with Paul Schwartz, who was the head of Bard’s Music Program. He also studied psychology with Werner Wolff, another German émigré scholar who joined Bard’s faculty during this era. Wolff was one of the first psychologists to
introduce existentialist psychology to the United States. “His wife was pianist Kate Wolff, and she and I used to play together,” remembers Davis. “I used to play violin seriously and I was good. My hands are not able to play anymore— but I still have a fabulous German violin.” The Astor family, which owned a large estate near Bard, would invite Davis to play for its guests at dinner parties and other soirées in his undergraduate days. “I didn’t have a car, so they would pick me up and give me a couple bucks,” he laughs. “Not much. Just enough for candy. I did a lot back then to make a little money.” One evening, while he was playing for the Astors, Davis’s roommate went to a local farmstand where he met two women from Hunter College. It was summertime and they were in Tivoli picking strawberries for the army soldiers. One of the women was Seena, who would become Davis’s wife. “Seena lived in the Bronx and I used to take the train to go see her,” he recalls. “We got married after college. She was an artist who went to the National Academy of Design.” In 1944, Davis was one of two people in the graduating class and Bard’s youngest graduate. His diploma bears the signature of Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University and 1931 Nobel Peace Prize Winner. It was the last year Bard was affiliated with Columbia. After getting a master’s degree in library science from Pratt Institute and heading up Juilliard’s music library, Davis began to work in Seena’s family’s real estate business. He built a long and successful career in New York City real estate and has been a longstanding trustee at Bard, dating back to when President Leon Botstein was hired. He and Seena, who passed away in 2011, had two daughters, three grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. With his wife, Davis traveled Europe extensively and amassed a collection of Old Masters paintings that have been loaned to exhibitions all over the world, including a show this summer in the Fisher Center’s Weis Atrium. Davis acquired an English title, Lordship of Barnham Broom in Norfolk, at auction from the Manorial Society. “Having a title gave me connections with lords. I used to sit in Parliament in London,” Davis says. As lord and lady, he and Seena donated money for prizes at the local school and church and hosted a big dinner party for everyone in Barnham Broom. Davis looks back on his life with joy. “I remember playing the fiddle in the countryside in Italy. We saw someone playing and I asked if I could play. All the villagers were so happy and shocked that I could play the fiddle. Seena and I had wonderful times in Europe,” says Davis. “And I have wonderful memories of Bard.” on and off campus 31
Stephanie Blythe
Tan Dun conducts A Martial Arts Trilogy, a film with live orchestra performance featuring excerpts from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; and The Banquet. photo Parnassus Productions, Inc.
New Leadership at the Conservatory Opera singer and recitalist Stephanie Blythe is the new artistic director of the Bard College Conservatory of Music Graduate Vocal Arts Program (VAP), succeeding founding director Dawn Upshaw. One of the most critically acclaimed artists of her generation, Blythe, a mezzo soprano, has performed in the most renowned opera houses in the United States and Europe, and recently won the Dallas Opera’s Maria Callas Debut Artist of the Year award. “I have dreamed of joining the academic world for some time, but assuredly, becoming part of Bard is beyond my wildest dreams. I look forward to continuing the legacy created by Dawn Upshaw—to upholding the musical and educational values of the VAP, while looking ahead to the future development of this marvelous and singular program,” says Blythe. Bard President Leon Botstein says, “Bard is privileged to have a singer of Stephanie Blythe’s accomplishments, skill, and creativity leading our Conservatory’s Vocal Arts Program. The spirit and excellence established by our outstanding founding director will continue to flourish under Blythe’s leadership.”
In July, world-renowned conductor and composer Tan Dun joins the Bard College Conservatory of Music as its new dean. While building synergy between Eastern and Western music studies, Tan Dun will guide the Conservatory in fulfilling its mission. “The language of music is universal and can connect all kinds of people from diverse cultures, languages, and with different dreams,” he says. “I look forward to working with the students of Bard’s Conservatory of Music in imagining and reimagining their careers as artists and helping them become even more connected to our growing world and widening musical soundscape.” Born and raised in a rural Hunan village in the People’s Republic of China, Tan Dun has made an indelible mark on the world’s music scene with a repertoire that spans classical music, multimedia performance, and Eastern and Western traditions. He is a UNESCO Global Goodwill Ambassador and winner of honors including a Grammy Award, Academy Award, Grawemeyer Award, Bach Prize, Shostakovich Award, and Italy’s Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement. Botstein says, “We are delighted that Tan Dun, an artist whose work bridges cultures and genres and embraces a wide definition of music, will lead Bard’s Conservatory of Music.” Robert Martin, founding director of the Conservatory, is stepping down from that role, but will continue as a member of the faculty, teaching at Bard College Berlin. Frank Corliss succeeds Martin as director.
China and America—Unity in Music
From left: Han Mei, Wu Man, and Edward Perez perform during the “Tradition and Discovery” conference. photo Karl Rabe
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The second annual China Now Music Festival will celebrate milestones in the history of U.S.–China relations through music. Highlights include the world premiere of a symphonic oratorio by Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Zhou Long honoring Chinese workers on the 150th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, and a multimedia musical portrait of renowned diplomat Wellington Koo. World-famous musicians such as Huang Ying, Shen Yang, and Zhu Dan will perform. The festival, which also includes the world premiere of a string quartet by Peng-Peng Gong, will take place at Bard College, Carnegie Hall, and Stanford University from September 28 to October 6, 2019. In March, the US-China Music Institute of the Bard College Conservatory of Music presented “Tradition and Discovery: Teaching Chinese Music in the West,” its second annual conference at Bard, in partnership with the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing; Music Confucius Institute of the Royal Danish Academy of Music; and Center for Chinese Music and Culture at Middle Tennessee State University.
Bard Music Festival: Three Decades of Rediscoveries The Bard Music Festival (BMF) is celebrating its 30th season with an in-depth exploration of the life and career of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), the underappreciated yet hugely influential composer whose lush Romanticism and distinctive compositional voice revolutionized film music, winning him two Academy Awards along the way. Two weekends of themed concert programs, preconcert talks, panel discussions, expert commentary, and movie screenings bring “Korngold and His World” to the world (August 9–11 and 16–18). Among the highlights are a special showing of the 1943 film The Constant Nymph on August 16, followed by a panel discussion, and a semistaged production of Korngold’s most-loved opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City), on August 18, featuring the Bard Festival Chorale; The Orchestra Now (TŌN), conducted by Leon Botstein, music director; and a strong cast of soloists.
The World of Graz· yna Bacewicz Bard Music West’s Third Festival Bard Music West, a new generation of the Bard Music Festival, presents “The World of Graz·yna Bacewicz,” October 18–19, 2019, in San Francisco, California. The festival will celebrate the Polish composer and virtuoso violinist and pianist, whose music ranges from pure virtuosic fun to moving statements on humanity. Bacewicz studied composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and violin with André Touret and Carl Flesch. In the 1930s, she was concertmaster of the Polish Radio Orchestra. During World War II, she continued to compose, and gave secret underground concerts in Warsaw. Bacewicz won numerous awards for her compositions and spent the last 15 years of her life devoted solely to writing music. Her more than 200 compositions include chamber music, virtuosic solo showpieces, concerti, and works for chamber orchestra and large-scale orchestra. The festival, whose artistic codirector and executive director is Allegra Chapman ’10, provides a rare opportunity to dive into the life, music, inspirations, and contemporaries of this neglected artist through a series of concerts, talks, and panel discussions.
Speaking of TŌN, the master’s degree program founded by Botstein in 2015, that group of vibrant young musicians from across the globe will once again be thrilling audiences this fall, starting with concerts in Annandale featuring Copland and Strauss at the Fisher Center on September 14 and 15 and Sibelius and Shostakovich on October 19 and 20. In New York City, TŌN will present The Last Knight: Strauss’s “Don Quixote” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on October 27, presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I. Go to theorchestranow.org to see additional events and to buy tickets. Below left: Erich Wolfgang Korngold (at piano), with Charles Boyer and Joan Fontaine (to his right), on the set of The Constant Nymph. photo Courtesy of the Korngold estate Below right: The Bard Music Festival (BMF) and The Orchestra Now (TŌN) joined forces to celebrate the BMF’s 30th season at a joint gala at City Winery in New York City on April 23. Left to right: Leonardo Pineda TŌN ’19 and Yurie Mitsuhashi TŌN ’20, violin; Batmyagmar Erdenebat TŌN ’21 and Lucas Goodman TŌN ’21, viola; Kyle Anderson TŌN ’20 and Lucas Button TŌN ’21, cello. photo Matt Dine
LAB Work The third Live Arts Bard Biennial, “Where No Wall Remains,” organized by Artistic Director of Theater and Dance Gideon Lester and Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Tania El Khoury, starts from an interest in the notion of borders—physical borders, political borders, borders of the body—and how we might, in time, transcend them. The biennial includes a weeklong series of student and public programs, academic courses, film screenings, and artist commissions, culminating in a performance festival at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts in November. The title, inspired by a Rumi poem that calls for reaching out to the other’s soul, offers a reimagination of a world in which no wall remains, figuratively or physically, to separate us. “Where No Wall Remains” seeks to explore the distinct situation in the United States, where the current administration demonizes migrants in an effort to drum up support for a southern border wall, as well as the interconnectedness of global policies, conflicts, and conditions. Artists will include El Khoury, Mirna Bamieh/Palestine Hosting Society, Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Emilio Rojas, Ali Chahrour, and Rudi Goblen, among others. The program is made possible with generous support from the Ford Foundation. on and off campus 33
The Bard Graduate Programs proudly congratulate everyone who earned a Bard degree in 2019. From Berlin to Brooklyn, from Annandale to Bishkek, from Los Angeles to St. Petersburg—Bard launches futures! annandale-on-hudson
cambridge, massachusetts and los angeles
Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Bard Center for Environmental Policy Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture Master of Arts in Teaching Program Graduate Vocal Arts Program Graduate Conducting Program Levy Economics Institute Graduate Programs in Economic Theory and Policy The Orchestra Now
Longy School of Music of Bard College Master of Music and MAT in Teaching
bishkek, kyrgyzstan American University of Central Asia Master of Arts in Teaching
abu dis, east jerusalem Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences Master of Arts in Teaching
st. petersburg, russia new york city Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture International Center of Photography–Bard Program in Advanced Photographic Studies Bard MBA in Sustainability
Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University (Smolny) Music Curatorial, Critical, and Performance Studies Art Criticism and Curatorial Studies
budapest, vienna, and new york Central European University and Bard College Joint Certificate Program in Inequality Analysis
For information about Graduate Programs visit bard.edu/graduate. Just One Word: Plastics
Governor Andrew Cuomo and Jeremy Cherson CEP ’16. photo Bard CEP
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New York recently became the second state in the nation to ban single-use plastic bags, a tremendous victory for the health of local waterways, wildlife, and the global environment. Two alumni/ae and a past employee of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy (CEP) helped make it happen. Jess (Schug) Fowler CEP ’15, senior budget analyst for the New York State Senate, and Jess Scott, Empire State Fellow and former director of Bard’s C2C Fellows Workshop, were involved in drafting the bill, and Jeremy Cherson CEP ’16, legislative advocacy manager at Riverkeeper, “held our feet to the fire and provided muchneeded feedback and validation,” according to Scott. California was the first state to ban plastic bags, in 2014, and Hawaii has a de facto ban (all its most populous counties prohibit nonbiodegradable plastic bags at checkout). In March 2017, Governor Andrew Cuomo created the New York State Plastic Bag Task Force and charged it to investigate the issue and develop a comprehensive policy solution. The statewide ban was discussed as part of budget talks in 2018, but efforts stalled. Finally, on March 28 of this year, Cuomo and state lawmakers reached an agreement on the 2020 budget that includes the ban. Just one more example of Bard CEP graduates doing big things to advance the cause of sustainability.
CCS Bard Presents The first solo museum shows in the United States of artists Leidy Churchman and Nil Yalter are on view through October 13 at the Hessel Museum of Art. Leidy Churchman: Crocodile includes more than 60 paintings and features a newly commissioned large-scale floor painting. This exhibition captures the voracious and seemingly boundless range of subjects and approaches in Churchman’s work—ranging from figurative representation to gestural abstraction, monumental landscapes to intimate portraits, and the recasting of visual iconography from divergent religions, cultures, and philosophies. Yalter, a pioneer of socially engaged art, was one of the first artists in France to use video as a medium. Nil Yalter: Exile Is a Hard Job focuses on the artist’s prolific period from the late ’60s to the early ’80s. Originating at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Yalter’s first major retrospective charts a path from her abstract paintings, made in the late 1960s, through her pivotal, socially engaged works and groundbreaking experiments with video and performance. On view through December 13 in CCS Bard Galleries, Acting Out takes its prompt from Leigh Ledare’s “The Task,” a single-channel film of a three-day group-relations conference organized by the artist. Building upon this gripping portrait of current social dynamics and discontents, the exhibition also includes works by Larry Clark, Lyle Ashton Harris, Nan Goldin, Boris Mikhailov, Lorraine O’Grady, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence.
Nil Yalter, Le Chevalier d’Éon, 1978 (detail). photo Nil Yalter
Leidy Churchman, Untitled, 2018. Collection of Milovan Farronato. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London/Piraeus. photo Lewis Ronalds
Left to right: Jeffrey Munger; Alessandra Di Castro; Meredith Linn, assistant professor, BGC; Deborah Krohn, associate professor and dean of masters studies, BGC; Peter N. Miller, dean and professor, BGC; Laurie Wilkie; Susan Weber, founder and director, BGC; Nancy Druckman, BGC board chair; Leon Botstein, president, Bard College; Marina Kellen French. photo PhotoBureau Inc.
Bard Graduate Center For 23 years, the Iris Awards have honored outstanding contributions to the decorative arts. This year’s recipients were: Outstanding Patron Marina Kellen French, vice president of the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, president of the Marina Kellen French Foundation, a managing director of the Metropolitan Opera, and a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Carnegie Hall, and American Academy in Berlin, among others; Outstanding Lifetime Achievement honoree Jeffrey Munger, curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2000–17, faculty of the Cooper Hewitt and Smithsonian Design Museum, and president and chairman of the board of the American Ceramic Circle; Outstanding Mid-Career Scholar Laurie Wilkie, professor of archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley; and Outstanding Dealer Alessandra Di Castro, who hails from a family of highly regarded Italian antique dealers whose gallery in Rome specializes in Italian decorative and fine arts that evoke the grandeur of Roman classicism and also exhibits 20th-century Italian avant-garde art and design. On view from September 5, 2019 to January 5, 2020 at BGC Gallery, French Fashion, Women, and the First World War is an unprecedented examination of the relationship among fashion, war, and gender politics in France during World War I. Through detailed research and loans from major fashion houses and museums, curators Maude Bass-Krueger and Sophie Kurkdjian have assembled a collection of wartime uniforms, mourning dresses, and hats that will be exhibited alongside fashions by Chanel and Lanvin making their first appearance in the United States. Right: from French Fashion, Women, and the First World War, Anor Marvel Bertuleit, U.S. Army Nurse Corps, c. 1918. Silver gelatin print. photo Courtesy Hollis Barnhart
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Class Notes
REUNIONS 2019 2014, 2009, 2004, 1999, 1994, 1989, 1984, 1979, 1974, 1969, 1964, 1959, 1954, 1949, 1944
Photo by Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00
photos.annandaleonline.org
Congratulations to the Class of 2019, and welcome to the Bard College Alumni/ae Association. You will always be a Bardian. Stay in touch: annandaleonline.org, facebook.com/BardCollege, @bardalumni This year we recognized reunion classes from 1944 to 2014, and we offer special thanks to all Bardians who served on their reunion committees:
1994
2004
2009
2014
Cynthia (Gross) Dantzic
Ina Calver Nicole de Jesús Mark Feinsod Lisa Gentile Jonah Kraus Aimee Majoros-Cook Lisa Mareiniss-Gunta John Stevens
Martha Hart Ridaa Murad Sarah Murad KC Serota Joe Vallese
Alysha Glenn Anna Henschel Christian Lehmann Danny Lewis Amanda Naseem Olga Opojevici Sarah Paden Dan Wilbur Dexin Zhou
Lucas Baumgart Nicolai Eddy Kate Edery
1969 Charles Clancy Toni Chapman Travis
1974 Beth Shaw Adelman Claire Angelozzi Stephen Berman Jessica Kemm Jeannie Motherwell
1979 Arthur Carlson Robert Barry
1984 Anne Canzonetti David Hartheimer Kim Hoffman Sheila Moloney
1989 Sally Bickerton Jane Andromache Brien Noah Rubinstein Adam Snyder
1999 Sara Handy Kale Kaposhilin Terence O’Rourke Nathan Reich
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Robert Lear
1945 196 1985 5 199 0
1964
15
1954
0 1 20
0 8 19
5 0 20
195 0
5 5 5 9 9 0 1 9 1 7 9 1 E A / I N N 0 6 M 0 9 0 0 1 2 5 7 19 O U I AL U N END20 RE EEK–24,20 WMAY 22 Make plan
s early and
get involve d
. alumni@
bard.edu
SATURDAY SOCIAL WITH PAPA’S BEST BATCH ’18
’16
Joy Al-Nemri volunteered with and conducted research on recently arrived Arabic-speaking refugees and immigrants in New Britain, Connecticut, in 2018. She presented her findings at this year’s American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting, with support to travel there from the Alumni/ae Affairs Office. Joy went on to represent the country of Jordan in the 2019 Miss Arab USA pageant, where she won the People’s Choice Award, placed among the top five contestants, and raised more than $9,000 for the nonprofit Arab American Festival organization.
Ashley Sheppard-Quince graduated in fall 2018 with her master’s degree in entertainment and communication management from University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication. While at USC, Ashley interned at BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, NBCUniversal Television, and the arthouse film companies Focus Features and Fox Searchlight Pictures. She recently finished internships in television development at HBO and the independent film company A24. Ashley is looking forward to pursuing a career in television development for filmmaker-driven, prestige television.
’17 Nora Cady joined The Wing more than a year ago and now oversees the opening of all its new spaces. The company, founded by Audrey Gelman BHSEC ’05, plans to open additional women-only coworking and event spaces in Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, and London by the end of this year.
’15 Caia Diepenbrock recently art directed an independent film called The Infiltrators that won both the Audience Award: NEXT and the NEXT Innovator Prize at Sundance Film Festival in January. It also screened at Miami Film Fest and South by Southwest. The film is a hybrid of
photos Brennan Cavanaugh ’88
narrative and documentary footage that tells the true story of a group of undocumented youth— Dreamers—who deliberately get detained by Border Patrol in order to infiltrate a shadowy forprofit detention center. The Infiltrators continues to resonate as migrants continue to be arrested at the border.
’14 Lucas (Baumgart) AB is a musician living and working in New York City. His most recent music video, for “Maloja” from his 2017 EP Maybe, was released in April by VMAN. He had a great time seeing fellow Bardians at the 2019 Alumni/ae Reunion and looks forward to many reunions to come! | Eszter Ficsor lives in Budapest and teaches flute and Kindermusik. She also volunteers at MigHelp, an organization helping legal residents of Hungary learn job skills, and at orphanages, where she brings a little spark to orphan children’s lives through music. She assisted with the organizing of the 2019 Center for Civic Engagement Get Engaged
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Conference in Budapest last March. | Virginia Hanusik wrote an opinion piece for Domus about the connections between architecture, photography, and climate change. Work from her most recent project, A Receding Coast: The Architecture and Infrastructure of South Louisiana, has been featured in exhibitions internationally, including Humboldt University in Berlin and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. She previously worked as manager of climate change initiatives at the Architectural League of New York and now produces public programming focused on the future of design for Metropolis magazine.
he studies self-organized patterns in nature. His current research centers on collective behavior in swarming locusts as they eat their way across agricultural fields. Outside the academy, Jasper recently married Claire Martin and they are looking forward to canoeing their way through another beautiful Minnesota summer.
nonprofit and municipal development, and the arts.
| Carla Perez-Gallardo, co-owner of Lil’ Deb’s Oasis in Hudson, New York, was nominated for a James Beard Award for Best Chef: Northeast. Carla, along with her business partner, Hannah Black, have been operating the restaurant, which they consider to be an ongoing restaurant/ installation/performance project/community space, for three years. Lil’ Deb’s Oasis is proud to be continuing a legacy of women-powered business, intending to move forth in the spirit of matriarchy.
’07 ’13 Lolita Cros has been an independent curator since she graduated, organizing shows in various venues, from a 26-foot truck to a construction site. Most recently she has been working with New York City– based coworking space/social club The Wing, curating their spaces in New York; Washington, D.C.; and San Francisco, and soon will be doing the same in L.A., Chicago, Boston, London, and new locations in New York. All the pieces in the spaces are by emerging and established female-identifying artists, and all are for sale. Works by Jenny Holzer, Nancy Spero, and Lorraine O’Grady are hanging with art by Bard alumnae like Tschabalala Self ’12, Louise Parker ’12, Emma Ressel ’16, Lana Barkin ’12, and Izzy Leung ’17. Cros continues to organize talks and one-night-only events with legendary artists such as Peter Saul, Tina Barney, and Daniel Arsham, with the latest being a video series featuring artists in their studios; the first episode is with photographer Erin O’Keefe. Cros’s work has been published in Vogue, ARTnews, i-D, Observer, and W Magazine, among others. | Arthur Holland
Adriana Johnson ’12 and Samuel Wendel ’12
’12 Samuel Wendel and Adriana Johnson were married in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 2, 2018. Bardians in attendance included Deven Connelly ’13, Abigail Shiman ’11, Ben Long, Kim Larie, Stergios Mentesidis, Taylor Deltz, Melissa Longiaru, Jacob Hartog, and Brieze Levy.
Emma DeCorsey is working on her second album with her band I Am The Polish Army while trying to stay financially afloat in New York City (not easy!), living happily with her partner, Turner Stough, and their dog, Gabe, in Brooklyn. If any fellow Bardian owns a record label and would like to release her next album, she can be contacted at emmadecorsey@gmail.com. | Benjamin Schaefer’s short story “Lizard-Baby” was selected by editor Sheila Heti for inclusion in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt last October.
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James E. Folsom III recently became director of development for Tennessee Riverkeeper in Nashville. After studying photography at Bard, James graduated from Loyola University New Orleans College of Law and is a member of the Alabama State Bar. His diverse professional background includes political consulting, law, tech,
Nikhil John works at Social Alpha, a social sector incubator, leading the Entrepreneurs for Impact program. The program identifies entrepreneurs and equips them with technology, immersions, and practitioner-led workshops to enable them to go from ideation to product to creating a social enterprise that attempts to solve India’s
Michel, codirector of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, was a featured speaker at the TRANSAD workshop “Technology, Security and Warfare,” sponsored by Peace Research Institute Oslo and held at University of Bath. His presentation was titled “A Killing by Any Other Name: Weighting Technology in Our Ethical Calculus of Targeted Strikes.” | David A. Nagy and Noémi Sallai ’16 performed as soloists in the Budapest Spring Festival, Hungary’s largest arts festival. | In addition to earning his undergraduate degree at Bard, János Sutyák also completed the Bard College Conservatory Advanced Performance Studies program in 2015 and is now in his second season as one of the principal trombones of the Hungarian State Opera. | Jasper Weinburd will be a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow this fall at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. He is finishing his PhD in mathematics at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where Left to right: Anna Callner ’02, Ava Fedorov ’02, Claire Michie ’02, Megan Savage ’98, Jessica Jacobs ’02
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socioeconomic and environmental challenges. He lives in Bangalore, India, with his wife and 2-year old daughter. Nikhil wishes he could have returned to campus for the reunion but sends his classmates his regards.
’03 Mneesha Gellman was awarded a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Fellowship for Spring 2020. She will do research on language access and identity politics with indigenous youth in Oaxaca, Mexico. Gellman was recently promoted to associate professor of political science at Emerson College, where she is the founder and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative (epi.emerson.edu). | Elizabeth Haigh lives in Kentucky with her family and is freelancing in music, dance, and visual arts. Projects include poster and pattern design, classes and choreography for college students, and a theater directing debut in late 2019.
Books by Bardians Filmmaking against the Current: Notes about Making a Film “For the Blinds” by Ozan Duru Adam ’99 CreateSpace Adam’s film For The Blinds (fortheblinds.com), produced under difficult circumstances and on a nonexistent budget, won a Special Jury Mention award at the 2016 Indian Cine Film Festival. His memoir about the making of the movie includes autobiographical stories documenting the arduous process as well as observations on life, art, and cinema.
Samsón, A vadon fia (Samson, the Son of the Wilderness) by László Bitó ’60 Noran Libro Bitó returns to his first love, fiction, in his ninth novel—the seventh in a series of retellings of biblical stories. Here he humanizes Samson, starting with his birth, and makes the legendary strongman an instrument of just vengeance. As always with Bitó, the storytelling and language are gripping and enthralling.
’02 Claire Michie married Benjamin Sternthal in Portland, Oregon, on November 3, 2018. Bardian Megan Savage ’98 officiated and Bardians Anna Callner, Ava Fedorov, and Jessica Jacobs were in attendance.
’99 Paige Taylor teaches photography online through University of New Mexico. She recently moved back to the East Coast (North Carolina) with her husband, son, and two dogs.
’98 Miciah Bay Gault is looking forward to the release of her debut novel, Goodnight Stranger (Park Row Books), this summer. She offers her endless thanks to the writing teachers at Bard for guidance and coaching so many years ago, particularly Mona Simpson, Peter Sourian, and Brad Morrow. | Chrys Margaritidis welcomed Bardians from the 2019 Center for Civic Engagement Get Engaged conference to Central European University, where he serves as dean of students.
’95 Phuc Tran sold his book proposal to Flatiron Books last year. SIGH, GONE, his coming-of-age memoir, will be published in 2020. By day, he is finishing up his 22nd year of inflicting ancient syntax and vocabulary on teenagers as a Latin teacher. His wife, Sue Tran (Larsen) ’96, spends her days at Maine Public as the director of corporate support and special projects producer. By night, Phuc and Sue run their tattoo shop in Portland, Maine, Tsunami Tattoo, now in its 16th year. Through it all, their two young daughters, Phoebe and Beatrix, are surviving childhood in an overbooked and overachieving household.
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories by Raphael Bob-Waksberg ’06 Knopf This offbeat collection of love stories shares the whimsical dark humor and punchy cultural commentary of Bob-Waksberg’s Netflix series BoJack Horseman. A woman maps her history of romantic failures in New York City, a dog observes the ups and downs of a human relationship, and a pair of lonely commuters eternally miss their connection.
Tikkunim (Corrections) by Jesse Bogner ’10 CreateSpace From Trump to anti-Semitism to Israel, Bogner writes about politics and the spiritual roots of a world in crisis. Rational systems cannot cope with an irrational world and the seemingly irrational nature of the creatures that inhabit it. The earth cries out for correction and, for Bogner, Kabbalah is the tool.
Do What Feels Good: Recipes, Remedies, and Routines to Treat Your Body Right by Hannah Bronfman ’11 Harper Wave Beauty and wellness entrepreneur Bronfman offers recipes, real talk, and expert insight for getting in touch with your own needs. She shares her story as a woman of color who grew up watching a close family member struggle with an eating disorder, and shows how she forged her own path to health and holistic hedonism.
The Riddle of Jael: The History of a Poxied Heroine in Medieval and Renaissance Art and Culture by Peter Scott Brown ’97 Brill The biblical heroine Jael betrayed and killed the tyrant Sisera in the Book of Judges by hammering a tent peg through his brain as he slept under her care. Jael’s representations in medieval and Renaissance art offer fertile moral paradox and insight into key religious, intellectual, and social developments of early modern culture.
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photo Brennan Cavanaugh ’88
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Buddy Enright has been busy producing features and scripted series for Netflix. Dead to Me came to Netflix this spring, and then he headed to Pittsburgh to produce another Netflix series, I Am Not Okay with This, with the team of the critically acclaimed series The End of the F***ing World. He looks forward to meeting up with alumni/ae somewhere! | After working as a federal investigator for two decades, Bill Hamel is now pursuing his passion by operating Hamel20, a firm devoted to acquiring and selling modern design objects. He was featured in the December issue of Maine Antiques Digest, a major trade publication, and operates a website (hamel20.com), an Etsy shop (Hamel20), and a space in Kingston, New York, at the Kingston Consignments and Antiques Center. He is also a regular exhibitor at the spring and fall Rhinebeck Antiques Fair.
Melodie Strain is teaching English as a Second Language and art in Costa Rica, picking her own coffee and bananas, couldn’t be happier, and, of course, is still singing!
Bill Averbach moved to the Texas Gulf Coast after 10 years in Charlotte, North Carolina, performing with his musical groups throughout the country playing jazz, blues, klezmer, and worldbeat. He has recorded several albums of his own music, written a ballet, received grants to compose pieces, and developed a pickle business. Since moving to Texas, he has built a mini-farm that was then rebuilt after a direct hit from Hurricane Harvey, rescued 25 chickens, and still performs and composes music. Visit his web page for photos and more: bamusic.net | Bruce Wolosoff’s new recording, “The Astronomer’s Key,” has just been released. It was inspired by the art work of Milton Resnick and is performed by the Montage Music Society. There is also a documentary about the making of the piece. Both are available on his website, brucewolosoff.com.
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’79 Charles Moore retired from NBCUniversal in 2017 and began a new chapter as a creative director and music producer. As a student he helped resurrect Bard’s radio station, along with Arthur Carlson, Ken Kosakoff ’81, Tom McMahon ’81, Jack Terpning ’80, and Dan Williams ’81. Despite problems with budgets and trying to broadcast through tapped telephone wires, people could eventually hear WXBC across the river in Kingston, with only one transmitter fire to speak of. The radio station was a huge sensation on campus, and Moore’s experience at the station helped him secure his first job at NBC. He credits his music composition skills to his time at Bard, and his songs are heard on television shows to this day.
’76 Peri Mauer had a performance of her string quartet Shadow Lake at Little Church Around the Corner in New York City. Her trio Afterwords, for clarinet, cello, and piano, was performed by Great Noise Ensemble in Bethesda, Maryland, and An Autumn Passing, a new work for English horn and piano, is premiering at National Opera Center in New York along with a new set of pieces for violin and piano.
North of Dawn by Nuruddin Farah, distinguished professor of literature Riverhead Books Farah’s novel tells the story of Gacalo and Mugdi, who have lived a peaceful, largely assimilated life raising their family in Oslo, Norway. Driven to jihadism by feelings of alienation, their beloved son Dhaqaneh kills himself in a suicide attack in Somalia. The couple offers a haven to their son’s widow and children, with life-altering consequences.
H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds
’74 Claire Angelozzi serves as an operations team member at BAYADA Home Health after a long career in banking.
’73 Paul Diamond was recently at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema introducing The Chicken Chronicles (1977), a film he wrote based on a much-rewritten version of his Senior Project. Paul and his wife, Shelley, have lived in the same Sherman Oaks, California, home since 1987. She teaches writing to female inmates of Los Angeles County’s juvenile hall, while Paul works on a variety of projects for screen, television, and what used to be called “new media.” He is currently editing the unpublished memoir of his late father, screenwriter I. A. L. Diamond.
by Peter Filkins, visiting professor of literature Oxford University Press Adler came of age in the cosmopolitan Prague of the 1920s, witnessed the Nazi menace of the 1930s, and suffered through the full gamut of atrocities found in the camps. Filkins, whose translation of Adler’s Shoah trilogy helped establish his literary genius, here tells the story of a major voice and intellect neglected for too long.
West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics, and the Cold War, 1965–1974 by Carole Fink ’60 Cambridge University Press By the late 1960s, West Germany and Israel were moving in almost opposite diplomatic directions in a political environment dominated by the Cold War. Drawing upon newly available sources from their first decade of formal diplomatic ties, Fink reveals how shared security concerns, personal bonds, and recurrent evocations of the GermanJewish past connected the two countries.
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Art Matters: Because Your Imagination Can Change the World
Charles S. Johnson III was appointed vice president for external affairs and general counsel at Tuskegee University. He retired from global law firm Holland and Knight earlier this year.
by Neil Gaiman, professor in the arts; illustrations by Chris Riddell William Morrow This call to arms features four of Gaiman’s most beloved writings on art: “Credo,” on free expression; “Make Good Art,” his 2012 Philadelphia University of the Arts commencement address; “Making a Chair,” a poem about the joys of creating something; and “On Libraries,” an impassioned argument for libraries as spaces for daydreamers.
’69 Clarinetist Chester Brezniak recently performed with pianists Yelena Beriyevaat and Malcolm Halliday in Massachusetts. Brezniak can be heard on the Northeastern and Centaur labels (Zemlinsky Trio, Op. 9; Clarinet Now) and in the documentary film The Past Is in the Present: At Home with Gunther Schuller in a 2008 performance of Schuller’s Duo for clarinet and bass clarinet.
’67 A film by Richard Allen has won the Sony Pictures Classics short film award. It can be seen, along with his latest feature, Home Cookin—Over 100 Years in the Making, an official selection of the 2018 Auckland International Film Festival, at vimeo.com/270563363 using the password Bard 1967. | Mack McCune moved to Frederick, Maryland, in 2011 and bought a nice house on the edge of town with Beth, whom he married in 2014 (he was a first-time groom at age 69). He recently sold his landscaping business after 44 years and is planning to travel for a bit with Beth, primarily in Europe for now.
The More We Look, the Deeper It Gets: Transforming the Curriculum Through Art by Nicola Giardina ’02 Rowman and Littlefield This book provides inspiration and practical guidance across all subject areas for teaching with works of art in order to deepen engagement and improve student learning. It introduces the Pyramid of Inquiry, a flexible framework designed to foster connections among students’ lives, academic curricula, and works of art.
Ozark Crows by Carolyn Guinzio MFA ’97 Spuyten Duyvil In her fifth book, Guinzio gives poetic voice to the point of view of a family of crows. In a flight of textual and visual prowess (the birds literally punctuate the verses), the 70 one-page poems collected here elucidate both the strangeness of her protagonists and their uncanny commonality with humankind.
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o’clock” or “six o’clock” so that he could locate his fork, or the bread. Doc did his show: incredible fingerpicking and singing, some great upper-register harp work on a rack during “Coo Coo Bird” and “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains.” And then the stunner of the night. Doc asked us all to close our eyes and went into an a cappella version of “Amazing Grace.” We were in church. His timbre and delivery were transcendent. As the final note faded there was silence. The audience, many still in their teens, sat in reverent appreciation. It was sacred and holds up as one of the performances of a lifetime. We exhaled as one.
’60 László Bitó recently published Samson, A vadon fia, (Samson, the Son of the Wilderness), his ninth novel, and his seventh in a series with a biblical theme. He and his wife, Olivia Cariño, hosted numerous Bardians, including those from the 2019 Center for Civic Engagement Get Engaged Conference and those studying at Central European University last spring, at their home for a joyous celebration with music, song, and delicious food. The Ginger Men, outside the Night Owl Cafe in Greenwich Village (from left): Michael Equine, John Boylan '67, Terence Boylan '70, Rick Smith '65, and Ian Seeburg '68. photo Stevenson Library Digital Collections
’65 Clinical psychologist Rick Smith recently shared some great musical memories. It’s probably good that walls don’t talk, but man they sure can sing! The years I spent in Annandale were rich and had a powerful impact on my life. I pursued my interest in poetry and I learned to play the harmonica. I started getting a few poems published and making a few dollars playing in local bars. And I was part of the committee that hired musical acts to play at the school. We hired Miles Davis’s rhythm section and had them play in the acoustically challenged gym. Imagine Ron Carter, his double bass lines booming off the unforgiving ceiling, ricocheting down to the hardwood floor and into every pocket of space in that building; Tony Williams fencing and flirting with his cymbals; and, of course, Herbie Hancock, a youngster back in 1963, but fresh from his early breakthrough, “Watermelon Man”—he raised the roof. We also brought in Blind Reverend Gary Davis, the Harlem street preacher whose fingerpicking was elegant and precise. Dave Van Ronk, the Holy Modal Rounders, Doc Watson, and Big Joe Williams all came through. Big Joe arrived in a well-worn DeSoto with Missouri plates. He and his driver, Short Stuff John Macon, put on their show in the newly built Sottery Hall. Being a fledgling harmonica player, I imposed myself and got to play with them. Big Joe was patient and accommodating. I wasn’t that good, but he took me under his wing, even urging me to 44 class notes
quite college and join him on the road. “Boy, you’re a musician, come on and see what happens.” In the fall of 1963 we booked Paul Clayton, a dulcimer playing balladeer from Virginia. He was the real deal, with deep roots in mountain music. But the real shocker that night was his driver, a kid steeped in his own genre—storytelling. That kid was Bobby Dylan. Dylan agreed to do an impromptu set. It was so seat-of-the-pants that he had to borrow a harmonica and a rack from the audience. Marty Berman offered up a fine Hohner chromatic, but Dylan waved him off. “I can’t use that.” I knew he used a diatonic and I had one on me. It was the first harp I’d ever owned, a Marine Band in the key of C. I remember he did “The Battle of Hattie Carroll” and three or four others, all acoustic of course. I sat about 10 feet from him in a school desk chair and drank it in. The next year, when I was honing my harp skills in Greenwich Village, I’d run into him at Kettle of Fish, a favorite after-hours hangout for a lot of us playing the basket houses and the more legitimate venues like the Gaslight Café and Café au Go Go. For me it was the basket houses, like the Four Winds, where you’d play a set and then pass a basket around, like in church, hoping for enough to buy a beer and a subway token. By then, Dylan was well on his way to never having to worry about stuff like that. Another fantastic night at Bard we had dinner with Doc Watson before his show. Although he was blind, he seemed to know where everything was on the table. His driver’s only input was to say “three
’56 Eve La Salle Caram’s novella Please, San Antonio! was recently published by Philippine American Literary House. The author of five novels, Eve has taught literature and writing at California State University, Northridge for more than 30 years.
Mona Monroe ’52
’52 Mona Monroe worked as a volunteer three to four afternoons a week at a small public elementary school in East Harlem, most recently teaching computer skills and helping fifth-graders to “publish” their creative writing and research reports. She believes that working with kids has kept her young in energy and outlook. She retired in 2018, but is still in good health.
’48 Nancy Edelstein recently exhibited her work at the Broward Art Guild in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as part of her ongoing displays there.
Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Return to Snakeland
’18 Susanne Kite coauthored the essay competition winner “Making Kin with the Machines” for publication in the Journal of Design Science.
’15 Lia Lowenthal has been appointed visiting professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in the Department of Painting and Printmaking.
’12 Eran Sachs founded a new research program for sound art and experimental music at the Musrara School for Art and Society in Jerusalem. His piece Lascia Vibrare was featured in Dock/Ancien Palais de Justice, a sound installation at Les Brasseurs art contemporain in Liège, Belgium.
by Jason Gusmann ’92, illustrated by Aaron O’Brian returntosnakeland.com Set in the abandoned grain elevators of Buffalo, New York, particularly one notorious teenage party location nicknamed “Snakeland,” this graphic novel sets out to tell a story that had previously lived only in legend and gossip. It is a chronicle of teenage murders, suicides, and Satanism that infected suburban Western New York in the mid 1980s.
The Subtle Knot: Early Modern English Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience by Lianne Habinek, assistant professor of English McGill-Queen’s University Press For 17th-century thinkers, the brain was a wealth of wondrous possibilities—a book in which to read the soul’s writing, a black box to be violently unlocked, a subtle knot that traps the soul and thereby makes us human. Such comparisons, Habinek argues, were integral to early scientific ideas about brain function.
Sara Berman’s Closet
’10 Song of Songs, Sylvie Baumgartel’s debut book of poetry, will be published by Macmillan in September.
’08 Alisha Kerlin was named executive director of Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
by Alex Kalman ’07 and Maira Kalman Harper Design Sara Berman’s closet, filled with her elegant, minimalist, impeccably pressed and folded all-white wardrobe as well as carefully selected objects (from a potato grater to Chanel No. 19), was a sublime space. This family memoir blends narrative with striking visuals by New Yorker illustrator Maira Kalman to create a beautiful, loving tribute to one woman’s indomitable spirit.
Fierce: Essays by and about Dauntless Women
’04 Harry Dodge, MFA sculpture faculty, had a oneperson exhibition, Works of Love, at the Tufts University Art Gallery in Boston. | Adriana Farmiga, associate dean in the School of Art at Cooper Union, was awarded a 2018 MacDowell Fellowship. She was part of a group show, Paper Chase, at Marisa Newman Projects in New York City.
edited by Karyn Kloumann ’92, illustrated by Anna Torbina Nauset Press Thirteen entwined biographies and memoirs explore the lives of “masterless women” in education, entrepreneurship, religion, the armed forces, the arts, adventuring, and activism, celebrating their strengths and achievements while questioning the systems that erased the significance of their global influence and importance. Included are essays by Caitlin Grace McDonnell ’93 and Claudia Smith ’92.
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Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America
Michelle Handelman received a 2019 Creative Capital Award for her new project, Delirium. Michelle is acting chair of the Film and Media Department at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.
by Julilly Kohler-Hausmann ’97 Princeton University Press This book examines how the unprecedented growth of the penal system developed hand in hand with the evisceration of America’s welfare programs. Kohler-Hausmann’s investigation of specific legislative cases offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations away from a commitment to individual rehabilitation and toward systems of punishment, surveillance, and containment.
’99 Hellin Kay BA ’95 photographed and filmed the launch campaign for we+ar TRBL, a wearable tech fashion brand, in Paris. Her short film Anatomy was screened at NewFilmmakers New York in May 2018.
’95 The Camden Arts Center in London, England, presented Amy Sillman’s one-person exhibition Landline, September 28, 2018 – January 6, 2019. An interview with Sillman was published in the December 2018 – January 2019 issue of Brooklyn Rail.
Spell by Ann Lauterbach, Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature Penguin Random House In her 10th collection of poetry, Lauterbach navigates the many meanings of “spell”—from her sense that the world is under a spell from which it must awaken, to spells of passing weather, to her desire to spell out life’s difficulties and wonders, to how single words (and their etymologies) might inform and enlighten our contemporary condition.
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1949 – 1984 BLITHEWOOD REUNION DINNER ’92 Greg Wing is retiring after 28 years in public education. He began his career as an art teacher for the gifted and talented, eventually becoming an elementary school principal. On June 30th, Wing completed his 16th year as principal of Karigon Elementary School in Clifton Park, New York. In 2018, Albany Business Review recognized Karigon as a top-10-ranked elementary school in the Capital Region. Previously, he served on the Open Space and Trails and Riverfront Committee for the Town of Clifton Park. He is a board member of the Albany Area Amateur Astronomers and he has been married to Pier Wing for 29 years. They have three children: Ava, 28; Siri, 25; and Marcel, 21. He looks forward to continuing activities including oil painting, astronomy, and home beer brewing.
’91 Joan Giroux completed eco monopolies in the Commons, a five-month-long Commons Artist Project commission and social practice residency
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at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in October 2018. During an upcoming sabbatical from Columbia College Chicago, Giroux will be in residence at the Squire Foundation in Santa Barbara (October 2019) and Artspace in Raleigh, North Carolina (summer 2020). She was recently appointed chair of the College Art Association (CAA) Services to Artists Committee through 2020 and will be coordinating ARTspace at the CAA conference in Chicago in February 2020.
| Lily Prince, who exhibits her work nationally and internationally, had her first solo New York City show at Littlejohn Contemporary in 2018 (littlejohncontemporary.com/lily-prince). She was in the show Ingenious Prospects at Novado Gallery. Prince was recently profiled in Ann Landi’s arts journal Vasari 21 (vasari21.com/lily-prince) and was accepted into a three-week artist residency at Galerie Huit in Arles, France, where she will plein air draw at some of the same locations where van Gogh painted. Most of her work has been inspired by trips to Italy to draw and paint. Prince is an
photos Brennan Cavanaugh ’88
associate professor of art at William Paterson University of New Jersey. While on sabbatical this coming year, she will embark on a cross-country road trip to draw at some of our national parks in an attempt to connect with the beauty still remaining in our country.
’88 Dan Devine exhibited sculptures and large-scale drawings in his one-person exhibition Impact at Thompson Giroux Gallery in Chatham, New York. Devine is the head of the Sculpture and Design Division at Hofstra University, where he also runs the Rosenberg Gallery.
Bard Center for Environmental Policy ’14 Molly Gilligan was one of the lead authors on “Gender and environment statistics: Unlocking information for action and measuring the SDGs,”
a report prepared through a collaboration between the United Nations Environment Programme and the Global Programme on Governance and Rights of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. | Megan McClellan was named Woman of the Year by the Syracuse-Wawasee Chamber of Commerce for her work expanding and improving the area’s multiuse trail system.
A Finer Future: Creating an Economy in Service to Life by L. Hunter Lovins, MBA in sustainability faculty, et al. New Society Publishers Humanity is in a race with catastrophe, but there is still a chance to thread the needle of sustainability. This book offers an essential blueprint for business leaders, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, politicians, policymakers, and others to create an inspiring regenerative economy that avoids collapse and works for people and the planet.
’13 Jordan Kincaid successfully defended his dissertation at the University of Colorado Boulder on the moral entitlements of and state responsibilities to climate refugees.
’12 Michael Bernstein married Lauryn Muller in November 2018. | Kate Mullarkey Murray recently attended Al Gore’s “Climate Reality” leadership training, and she’s been using it to present on climate issues to students and community members around the Northeast. | Leah Scull joined the Chicago office of CLEAResult Consulting as a program manager. She is responsible for designing and implementing emerging technology–enabled energy efficiency programs on behalf of an electric utility.
’09 Brendan Duprey works for the Truth Hounds human rights organization in Ukraine as an adviser. He has developed a methodology to measure the environmental impact of the war in Eastern Ukraine.
’08 Molly Williams is the residential operations manager at Namaste Solar. She’s based in Fort Collins, Colorado, and married Andrew Wilmot in September 2018.
The Struggle for Recognition in International Relations: Status, Revisionism, and Rising Powers by Michelle Murray, associate professor of political studies Oxford University Press The emergence of China as an economic and military rival of the United States provides a powerful framework for examining how established powers can manage the peaceful rise of new great powers in international relations. Murray argues that power transitions are principally social phenomena whereby rising powers seek recognition on the world stage.
Quo Anima: Innovation and Spirituality in Contemporary Women’s Poetry edited by Jennifer Phelps and Elizabeth Robinson ’85 University of Akron Press This anthology of poems, essays, interviews, and personal statements considers the poetry of contemporary women in relation to spirituality and innovative form. It offers responses to the work of accomplished poets including Brenda Hillman, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Alice Notley, Cole Swensen, and Cecilia Vicuña as well as less widely known, yet significant, women poets.
An Ethnography of Gun Violence Prevention Activists: “We Are Thinking People” by Teal Rothschild ’91 Lexington Books Centered on how gun violence prevention activists see themselves, their groups, and the national movement, this study focuses on two contemporary social organizations that are working on the state level. Although both organizations share similar long-term goals, each prioritizes the path to reducing gun violence differently.
’07 Amy Faust recently moved from Tanzania to Kathmandu, Nepal. She’s in a new consultancy with the Asian Development Bank’s urban and water team, for which she’ll be working on largescale water supply and sanitation projects and sustainable urban infrastructure across Nepal. | Jivan Lee has upcoming solo exhibits of his paintings at galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and Denver. | Kristen Wilson was promoted to director of grants management for the city of Kingston, New York. She manages and seeks funding for projects that are transforming the transportation system and environment in Kingston.
Lux Perpetua by Josephine Sacabo ’67 Luna Press Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th-century Mexican nun, was the inspiration for this series of 34 photographs. Within her cloistered cell, Cruz studied science and philosophy; wrote poems, plays, and music; championed women’s rights to intellectual and spiritual freedom; and created the most renowned salon of her time before being silenced by the Inquisition.
An Interface for a Fractal Landscape by Ed Steck MFA ’12 Ugly Duckling Presse This limited-edition book is an exploration of potential networking between organic life and digitally recreated nature. It features slime molds, cat avatars, organic toads, digital nature, hollow mountains, water textures, archival crawler units, warm baths, interactive maps, inventory management, and poetry.
BLITHEWOOD BARBECUE Center for Curatorial Studies ’15 Since September 2016, Roxana Fabius has been the executive director at A.I.R. Gallery, the first feminist-artists-run organization in the United States. During her tenure she has taken a deep approach to analyzing the gallery’s history and reconceptualized the role of the space in the contemporary art world.
’09 Wendy Vogel was awarded a 2018 Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for short-form writing. The Arts Writers Grant Program was founded in recognition of the financially precarious situation of arts writers and their indispensable contribution to a vital artistic culture.
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’07 Emily Zimmerman, director of Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington School of Art + Art History + Design, is also editor of Monday, a limited-edition journal focused on critical art writing in the Pacific Northwest. The publication, which comes out twice a year, is a platform to support emerging and established critical voices and to help spur new ideas. In 2017, the gallery began hosting a series of gatherings for writers and artists to explore the intersection of theory and practice within contemporary art. Reviews and essays from those gatherings are published for the first time in this new journal. Each volume highlights artists’ writings alongside other diverse perspectives on a particular topic.
’05 Lyra Kilston is an editor at the J. Paul Getty Museum and a freelance writer in Los Angeles. Her first book, Sun Seekers: The Cure of California
photos Chris Kayden and Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00
(Atelier Éditions), looks at three moments in Southern California history and the many eccentric newcomers—from fervent nature-cure healers to modern architects to barefoot vegetarian hermits— who built up the region’s renown as a center for healthy, natural lifestyles long before the 1960s.
’04 Steven Matijcio recently joined the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston as director and chief curator. Previously he was head of the curatorial department at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.
’03 Jimena Acosta Romero cocurated the exhibition I Will What I Want: Woman, Design, and Empowerment at Parsons School of Design (2017) and Muca Roma Mexico City (2018), and cowrote the accompanying book of the same name. She has just been appointed as curator of special projects at Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. She is
married to the designer Emiliano Godoy and they have a beautiful 6-year-old son named Martín. | Ingrid Pui Yee Chu, codirector and curator at Forever and Today in New York City, participated with her codirector, Savannah Gorton, in a residency at de Sarthe Artist Residency in Hong Kong, where they worked with Hong Kong–based artist Christopher K. Ho. Chu also was part of the lead team that organized the inaugural edition of Booked: Tai Kwun Contemporary’s Hong Kong Art Book Fair, which brought more than 60 art-book publishers, artists, and exhibitors from the region and the world to Hong Kong for the first time. | In fall 2018, Kate Green was appointed senior curator of collections, exhibitions, and scholarly programs at the El Paso Museum of Art. Recent projects include the museum’s 2018 Transborder Biennial, After Posada: Revolution with Andrea Bowers and Cruz Ortiz—reviewed by Artforum in its February 2019 issue—and a reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection. Her monograph with William Cordova on their 2017 project at Marfa Contemporary was published by Dancing Foxes Press in April.
In Memoriam
The Pats: An Illustrated History of the New England Patriots by Glenn Stout ’81 and Richard A. Johnson Houghton Mifflin Harcourt This is the first book to tell the complete story of the Patriots dynasty from the team’s earliest days through its five Superbowl championships. Colorfully illustrated, deeply researched, and full of larger-than-life characters, it features archival photos and essays by notable authors and other celebrities.
The Trials of Richard Goldstone by Daniel Terris, dean, Al Quds Bard College of Arts and Sciences Rutgers University Press Terris explores how Justice Goldstone received international acclaim as chief United Nations prosecutor for war crimes committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, leading the first tribunals to try political and military leaders on charges of genocide. He later became a controversial figure in the wake of his investigation of Israel for alleged war crimes in Gaza.
I’m an American Too! by Keena Anthony and Shamfa Tittle MAT ’16 Archway Publishing This picture book celebrates individuality. Written and illustrated by two educators who are both black and proud children of immigrants (one from Guyana, the other from Antigua), it teaches children to embrace differences and value cultural diversity while realizing that being American transcends race, culture, and religion.
’47 Kathryn Carlisle Schwartz, 92, died March 3. She was a professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University and will also be remembered for her seven-year tenure as president and four years as copresident of the League of Women Voters of Delaware County. Schwartz was born in Biltmore, North Carolina, and grew up in Miami, Florida, and Denver, Colorado. In 1947 she married Paul Schwartz, who was professor of music at Bard, and they moved to Gambier, Ohio, so he could teach at Kenyon College. She earned her MA and PhD in English from Ohio State University. She was predeceased by Paul and her daughter Isabel. She is survived by daughters Angela and Julia. Ben Heller, textile manufacturer, real estate developer, and patron of the arts, died April 24 in Sharon, Connecticut. He was 93. Heller was born in Manhattan, attended the Ethical Culture School and then its high school, Fieldston, where he played football, and lettered in basketball and track. He attended Yale for a semester before enlisting in the Army, where he was a Morse code radio operator and sharpshooter, and earned two Bronze Stars. After being discharged, he came to Bard. He wrote a music column, “Baton,” for the College newspaper and graduated with a degree in philosophy. Heller and his first wife, Judith, began buying art shortly after they were married in 1949,
Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson, Language and Thinking Program faculty Ecco Watson charts the rise and fall of the semicolon, which was the trendiest mark in the world of letters until grammatical rules of language usage became simultaneously stricter and more confusing. Her rollicking biography of this infamous punctuation mark refocuses our attention on the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication.
Blockchain: The Next Everything Stephen Williams MBA ’17 Touted as a paradigm-shifting technology, blockchain may revolutionize society as significantly as the internet. In this easy-to-digest guide, Williams explains blockchain technology and why this so-called digital ledger is unhackable; how its distributed nature may transfer central power from banks, government, and corporations to ordinary citizens around the world; and what its widespread use will mean.
Spiritual Gifts: French Quarter Short Stories by Dalt Wonk ’65 Luna Press Set in a dusty piano bar on lower Bourbon Street in New Orleans, these stories center around Brenda Saenz, an elderly woman holding court at the piano. These stories weave together the lives of the quirky, disillusioned, good-hearted people within Brenda’s orbit against the sultry backdrop of the Crescent City.
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and he soon became friendly with many of the most important Abstract Expressionist painters, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Clyfford Still. Judith, a landscape architect, died in a car accident in August 1970. He is survived by his wife, Patricia Rosenwald Sedgwick; his daughters, Patti and Deedy; his son, Woody; his sister, Naomi Heller Rosenbloom; and his stepchildren, Nikko ’88, Rob, and Kyra. Peter W. Josten died February 23. Born in 1922 to composer Werner E. Josten and Margaret F. Josten, he grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts. He served in WWII as a glider pilot in North Africa. Josten was active with the Jewish Agency and worked for a time at Goldman Sachs. He purchased Griggstown Farm, in Princeton, New Jersey, which began raising quail in 1975, supplying fresh poultry to top New York City restaurants. In 1979, he and Stephen Spector opened Le Plaisir, their short-lived but star- and toque-winning nouvelle cuisine restaurant. He is remembered for his quiet charm, unfailing courteousness, sense of humor, and generosity. Josten was predeceased by Spector, his companion of 25 years; Raphael Aninat, his companion of 10 years; and his sister, Eileen Josten Lowe. He is survived by his husband, Sam Trower.
‘50 John E. Deimel, 92, died September 23, 2018, at his home in Glencoe, Illinois. Deimel was a loyal Bardian who often came back to reunions to reminisce with classmates at Manor. He ran his own successful electronics marketing consulting company for 42 years. He was predeceased by his wife, Alice, and is survived by daughter Jane and sons Thomas and Peter.
’52 Constance Kaplan, 88, died at home March 19. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, she later relocated to Manchester, Connecticut. Long active in civic affairs, she was a strong supporter of Israel and Temple Beth Sholom (now Beth Sholom B’nai Israel), which her father cofounded. She was a passionate lover of music, opera, and the arts and an accomplished pianist who also loved to play the ukulele. She possessed a lively and unique personality, and an enlightened and lively sense of humor. Kaplan was an avid tennis player and fan, a voracious reader, and a consummate bridge player. She is survived by her husband, Seymour; daughter, Ashara; and sons Richard and David. Robert Milton Ladd, 90, died November 22, 2018. After graduating from Bard College and serving in the U.S. Army he earned his MA in education from
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Trinity College, taught at Hallowell High School, and received his DEd from the University of Virginia. He then worked for the Florida State Department of Education as well as the Department of Educational Studies at Oxford University in England and, following his retirement, returned to Maine. He was a longstanding trustee of Skidmore College. Bob was predeceased by his wife, Virginia Lewis Ladd; son Robert D. Ladd; and brother George Ladd III. Survivors include his brother Lincoln; a daughter, Betsy; and his two sons J. Scott and Jackson S. Lida Smith, 88, died on January 1. After Bard, Smith enrolled in the graduate studies program at Sarah Lawrence College and received a master’s degree in dance. She then moved to New York City, where she studied with American modern dance pioneer Charles Weidman and later became a member of and solo performer with the May O’Donnell Dance Company. Smith was also an instructor in modern dance at Hunter College in New York City and assistant professor of dance at West Chester University. She is survived by her son, Edmund. Robert (Bobby) Stempel, 89, died on January 8. Stempel grew up in Great Neck, New York, and attended Choate School before coming to Bard. He worked at McKettrick Williams, his father’s garment manufacturing company, then went on to run Bowlerama in Somerville, New Jersey. He was predeceased by his first wife, Lois, and his grandson Harrison James Dunnett (aka Subversive). He is survived by his second wife, Rae Feldman; his children, Mark, Neil, and Gail; and grandchildren Joe, Jordan, Daniel, Mathew, Emily, and Jacqueline.
’53 Joel Fields died on January 23. He had a long and distinguished career as a psychiatrist, teacher, and scientist. In 2008 he was awarded the John and Samuel Bard Medal in Medicine and Science and was commended for his humanistic care of severely ill patients. Joel entered Bard in 1949 and roomed with his lifelong friend Roger Phillips ’53, who remembers him for his kindness, compassion, and deep friendship. He is survived by his wife, Barbara, and children Lisa ’80, Jon, and Joe.
’59 Carolee Schneemann, 79, one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century, died at her home near New Paltz, New York, on March 6. Her father was a doctor, and as a child she sometimes went with him on patient visits. “There was always physicality around us,” she recalled in a conversation with artist Carl Heyward. “Leaking, spilling out of boundaries, wounded farmers with bleeding
limbs, broken bones, hemorrhages, infections, bodies that were not intact. No fantasy of the sanitized body in this household.” As a child, Schneemann loved to draw and paint. But her parents were not supportive of her artistic interests. Nonetheless, she persevered. No woman in her family had ever gone to college; her father wanted to send her to typing school. A sympathetic high school teacher told her, “Your parents won’t want you to go to college, but you have to go.” The teacher wrote three names on a piece of paper: Antioch, Goddard, and Bard. Against her father’s wishes, Schneemann applied to Bard. As she recalled in an interview in 2017, Bard’s admissions director, Buzz Gummere, came to her school, asked why her father wouldn’t fill out the necessary paperwork, and offered her a full scholarship. Schneemann described coming to Bard as “revelatory.” Although she was able to pursue her varied interests and continue to make art in Annandale, this was the 1950s, and women—particularly beautiful young women—were often trivialized and objectified. If we have come a long way, and despite recent evidence to the contrary there can be no doubt that we have, it is in no small part because of the kind of boundary pushing Schneemann engaged in. No amount of reasoned debate is going to teach an old dog new tricks. Seismic shifts sometimes require a shock to the system, and Schneemann’s work was often high voltage. In fact, an image she made at Bard may have provided an early lesson in the power of her art. Though the details of the story remain a bit murky, a nude self-portrait with her legs spread seems to have been the catalyst for her expulsion junior year. “I realized only recently that my transgression must have been the sequence of anatomically explicit nude self-portraits I was painting in my room,” she said in 2017. “Bard had no life drawing at the time and I was anxious to study a human form.” She recalled that the charge against her was “moral turpitude” and that her sentence was to shift her studies to the Columbia School of Painting and Sculpture and the New School. (Schneemann did return to Bard to receive her diploma in 1959.) At Columbia she met her future husband and collaborator, composer James Tenney. She quickly became part of the vibrant avant-garde art scene in Manhattan, participating in other artists’ performances and soon putting on her own. In May 1964, she presented Meat Joy at the Festival of Free Expression in Paris. To a score by Tenney, a group of men and women in their underwear rubbed red paint and raw chicken, fish, and sausage all over each other. It was gross, sexy, silly, and subversive. From early on, Schneemann had been exposed to the medicalization of the body; later to its objectification. In her work she asserted control of her body
and its innermost workings (for more on that, see Interior Scroll, among other works). Smart, funny, and totally committed to her art, Schneemann taught in the Bard MFA Program in 1981 and again from 1999 to 2004. In 2011, she collaborated with CCS Bard graduate students on a performance she called a “language activation” for the exhibition CLAP at the Hessel Museum of Art. The following year she received Bard’s Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters. In 2015, she was invited back to campus by the Art History and Film and Electronic Arts Programs and gave a standingroom-only lecture on her life and work. Schneemann was posthumously awarded the alumni/ae honorary degree of doctor of fine arts at the 2019 Commencement.
’61 Michael J. Heinrich, 79, died October 12, 2018. In his junior year, Heinrich began collecting and selling antiques. After graduating, he spent two years in Ghana, Africa, teaching elementary school children and then two years in New York City before returning to the Hudson Valley. He bought Winchell’s Corners, in Boiceville, New York, where he opened an antique store. He was also a prolific “outsider” artist and poet. Heinrich is survived by his son, Dr. Ari Larissa Heinrich, and brother, Kenneth Heinrich.
’64 Joan Schwartz married her husband, Jonathan, in 1962, while both were attending Bard. They spent the first two years of married life in one of the campus “dwelling units,” now long gone. They graduated together. She died a month before their 55th wedding anniversary. For 35 years they lived on a powerboat in Marina del Rey, California. She is survived by Jonathan and their daughter, Jessica.
’70 Virginia A. (Ives) McLevy, 68, died October 17, 2018. McLevy attended Unquowa School and graduated from the Stockbridge School in Interlaken, Massachussets. After Bard she earned her BSN from the Sacred Heart School of Nursing and worked as a nurse at Bridgeport Hospital for 17 years. Together with her husband, Charlie, she owned and operated McLevy Builders in Fairfield, Connecticut, for 40 years. She was predeceased by her husband and is survived by her children, Jennifer, Joshua, and Kimberly.
’73 Janet L. Williams, 66, died September 8, 2018. After earning her bachelor’s degree in biology from Bard, Williams moved to Boston and was employed by the U.S. Postal Service for more than a decade.
In 1996, she moved back to her family’s home in West Gloucester, Massachusetts, to help care for her aging parents and became a parishioner at St. John’s Episcopal Church—a community that would become her foundation and family for the remainder of her life. Williams was known as a woman of wit, candor, engaging curiosity, openmindedness, and deep faith. She is survived by her brother, David.
’77 John P. Hughes, 64, died September 1, 2018, in Ireland. Hughes studied government and economics at Bard. He went on to become a financial journalist, working for many news organizations, including the Asbury Park Press, National Thrift News, Dow Jones, Bloomberg News, and Reuters News Agency. Hughes was predeceased by his parents, Jack and Dorothy, and two brothers, Dennis and Mark. Surviving are his daughters, Emily and Laura, and son, Evan.
’84 Barbara Ward Manui, 57, died December 15, 2018. In the 1980s she founded Evolution, a handmade jewelry design and manufacturing company. She coauthored several works in gaming, most notably the comic Yamara in Dragon magazine and the book Continuum: Roleplaying in the Yet. As producer at Cybersapien, she wrote scripts and learned financing. In 2001, after rising to vice president at Howard Bronson and Company, the first investor relations firm in the United States, she founded her own firm, Blue Future, which became her passion for the rest of her life. Her devotion to her guardian angel Manu never wavered. She is survived by her life companion, Chris Adams ’84.
’87 Nicholas A. Smith, 53, died January 18. Smith earned his BA in political science from Bard and his BS from Marist, and was a paralegal for many years in Manhattan. He met his wife, Sue, in 1997, when they were working at the same Wall Street firm, and they married in 2004. Smith loved music (particularly punk and many obscure bands) and all animals, but especially his chihuahua, Tebow.
’88 Audrey H. Cole, 87, died January 13. Cole attended Russell Sage College in Troy, New York, where she studied social sciences. She left school to work on her family farm, but returned to her education and earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Bard. Cole was a longtime member of Christ Church in Red Hook, New York, sang for many years in the choir, was a member of its women’s group, and devoted many hours to the church thrift
shop. She is survived by her children, Terry, Scot, Daniel, and Rachel.
’95 Dana Rudolph, “den mother” of the late-’70s punk scene in Albany, New York, died November 13, 2018. She was 67. Rudolph went to Albany High School, studied art at Sage Junior College of Albany, and earned her BA from Bard and her master’s from SUNY Purchase. Rudolph opened her first clothing and jewelry store, After the Gold Rush, in a space shared with Lark Beat Records, on Lark Street in Albany. She later opened Rocket Rocket nearby. Her stores became gathering places, as did her bead shop in Troy, New York, which she started in the early 2000s. Rudolph, who was an adjunct art professor at the Sage Colleges, was instrumental in the creation of LarkFest in 1981, now the largest oneday street festival in upstate New York, and Troy River Fest, which started in 2004 as the River Street Festival and is still going strong. She lived the last 10 years of her life in southwest Florida, where she created jewelry, sold beads, and made new friends. She is survived by her mother, Virginia Rudolph; her sisters, Beth Rudolph Keller, Mavis Rudolph, and Ann Rudolph; and the large and wildly diverse communities she impacted.
’96 Malcolm Little died February 16. His friend Andrew McIntosh ’97 (DJArm 18) recalls him as “a true blue Renaissance man, a travelin’ man, a sci-fi afro punk artist in residence, perpetually on the move, like a rolling stone, but who most often called Staten Island home. He owned a kinetic intellect— for Malcolm, theories and experiences were one in the same. Mal, Moods, Public Speaker, Chase, IndyMal, MalArts . . . by any name he possessed the gift of gab, the poetics of a statement as significant as the idea. Malcolm expressed loyalty by pushing you to be more, encouraging you to remix yourself as much as possible in order to produce, create, innovate on a higher level. We would find comfort in our skin if we continued to shed it.”
’12 Mark Fletcher, 28, died in February. Mark majored in literature and was a talented writer, but he was also an excellent singer and spent much of his time at Bard studying voice with Rufus Müller and Arthur Burrows. His advisers for his Senior Project, “Between Artifice & Authenticity: A Study of Postmodern Song Lyrics,” were Elizabeth Frank and Luc Sante. He also was also very close to Professor of Art History Tom Wolf. Mark loved his time at Bard, the faculty, and the friends he made there. He is survived by his mother, Cecilia FletcherLieberman.
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’13 Tobin (Toby) Williams, 28, died from injuries sustained in an electrical accident. A classics major, he was planning to begin graduate work in archaeology at University of New Mexico next fall. Williams had been working as a mechanical structural apprentice for the City of Santa Fe since last September.
’14 Erica Imbasciani, 26, died March 22. She was struck by a hit-and-run driver. Imbasciani was a talented artist and writer with a passion for social justice. She began drawing and painting at a very young age and was an honor student throughout her academic career. She was a gymnast and played soccer. Imbasciani attended Staten Island Technical High School, where she became fluent in Russian. She played saxophone in the jazz band, was a member of the literary club, and an LGBTQ advocate. After earning her BA in art history, she interned at Christie’s in the Russian Arts Department, worked for Equator Productions, and was learning the business side of the art world. Imbasciani is survived by her mother, Lisa; father, Robert; sister, Brittany; and grandmother, Maria Maccarelli.
in painting from Bard. In 2014, after he was prescribed painkillers by a doctor who eventually prescribed him hundreds of pills, Sammy began to struggle with opioid addiction. He was in and out of rehab a half dozen times and had overdosed just about as often. Even in the midst of his own despair, he would reach out to others dealing with addiction and try to help them recover. Sammy is survived by his parents, Jay and Lisa, and brother, Alex Rosenblatt.
’21 Christopher Nanneman, 20, died February 7, 2019, at his home in Lambertville, New Jersey. He was an avid reader and writer, enjoyed listening to music, and had an enviable collection of graphic novels. He had planned to pursue a PhD in literature and teach at the collegiate level. An accomplished unicyclist, saxophonist, and athlete—he held high school records in track and cross-country and had recently taken up rock climbing—Nanneman loved the outdoors and animals (he became a vegetarian at age eight), and was deeply committed to social justice. He is survived by his parents, Ann Osborne and Tim Nanneman, and his sister, Emily.
Faculty ’15 Xavier S. Moxley, 48, suffered a fatal heart attack at Woodbourne (New York) Correctional Facility on December 14, 2018. He was from Rochester, New York, and had been incarcerated since he was 20. Moxley was among the first Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) students at Elmira Correctional Facility, where he had been a central figure in the effort to create informal learning communities in the absence of college, which had been eliminated in 1995. He was moved from Elmira to Eastern New York Correctional Facility, where he earned his BA in 2015. His Senior Project, completed with adviser Ellen Lagemann, was titled “African-American Dropouts: An Analysis of Urban Public High School Systems, Reform, and the Persistence of Low Achievement.” He went on to earn a master’s degree at Sing Sing. Moxley also helped establish the BPI Debate Union.
’17 Samuel Harrison Rosenblatt died March 16. Sammy was raised in an art- and music-filled home, and he was always engaged in creative pursuits—drawing, painting, pottery, and eventually his passion, photography. His early work helped him earn acceptance into Bard, a shining moment for him, especially because his mother, Lisa Pressman MFA ’84, received her graduate degree
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Keith Botsford, professor in the Languages and Literature Department, died Aug. 19, 2018, in London. He was 90. Though perhaps best known as novelist Saul Bellow’s “sidekick” (a title Botsford said he found “perfectly honorable”), Botsford was described by the New York Times as a “globe-trotting, multilingual, and multifaceted man of letters.” He first met Bellow at a cocktail party at Bard when both were on the faculty in the early 1950s, and they remained close friends and collaborators to the end. Botsford was born in Brussels to an American father and an Italian mother. He started college at Yale but enlisted in the Army and earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa. He returned to Yale for a master’s in French literature, went on to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music, Japanese at Columbia University, and law at the University of Strasbourg in France and at Holborn College in London. In addition to his wide-ranging writing, Botsford was an editor, translator, teacher, and composer of chamber and choral music. He is survived by his children, Aubrey, Clarissa, Joshua, Flora, Gianni, Matthew, Polly, and Thomas. Jean M. French, Edith C. Blum Professor Emeritus of Art History, who was a member of the Bard faculty from 1971 until her retirement in 2011 and
spearheaded the establishment of art history as a major, died in April. French earned a BA from Seton Hall University and PhD from Cornell University. One of the only women on the faculty when she came to Bard and the only full-time art historian, French was a distinguished medievalist, but she was also deeply engaged in contemporary art and helped forge links between the study of art history and the making of art. In the mid-1980s, she was able to show, using a technique called neutron activation analysis, that nine Romanesque reliefs dispersed among four museums on the Eastern seaboard came from the same stone source in a small area of the Dordogne. This discovery was described in the New York Times as “one of the great success stories of interdisciplinary study.” An award in French’s name is given annually to a rising senior or seniors for travel in the service of the Senior Project. Binyavanga Wainaina, director of Bard’s Achebe Center from 2009 to 2012, acclaimed Kenyan author, and one of the most prominent Africans ever to publicly identify as gay, died May 21 in Nairobi. He was 48. Wainaina was founding editor and publisher of Kwani?, a leading African literary magazine based in Kenya. He won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing, and was known for his works How to Write about Africa (2006) and One Day I Will Write about This Place: A Memoir (2012). Named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2014, he was an outspoken gay rights activist who worked tirelessly to destigmatize homosexuality in Africa.
Staff Claude Potts, 93 of Tivoli, New York, died December 2, 2018. A lifelong resident of Tivoli, Potts was a life member of the Tivoli Fire Department and a member of the Dutchess County Farm Bureau, Dutchess County Agriculture Extension, Ulster and Columbia County Cornell Cooperative Extensions, Dutchess County Firemen’s Association, Monumental Masonic Lodge in Tivoli, and the Tri-Po-Grotto Masonic Lodge. He drove a bus for many years for the Red Hook Schools and Bard College, and worked his 80-acre family farm, which was established in the mid-1880s. Potts is survived by his daughters, Margaret Adeigbo, Annamarie Finney, and Claudia Stickle. He was predeceased by his wife, Margaret. Ish Thomas, longtime Chartwells staff member, died April 2. He worked in Kline for 23 years in both the dish room and the faculty dining room.
Friends Robert L. Bernstein, 96, died May 27. Bernstein worked his way up from office assistant to sales manager at Simon & Schuster, and moved to Random House in 1957, where he became chairman, president, and chief executive officer in 1975. At Random House, he championed writers whose work could not be published in their own countries, including Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner, Vaclav Havel, Jacobo Timerman, and Wei Jingsheng. Bernstein explained in his memoir, Speaking Freely, that his interest in and advocacy for those struggling under totalitarianism were sparked by a 1973 trip to Moscow with the Association of American Publishers. His deep commitment to human rights led him to found the groups that would merge in 1988 into Human Rights Watch, the largest United States–based human rights group. Bernstein established, as a birthday present to his wife, Helen ’48, a scholarship to enable two students from countries outside the United States to study at Bard—with preference given to deserving students with an interest in the performing or fine arts, or literature—as well as a fund to enable international students to attend concerts, plays,
museums, and other cultural events during their time at Bard. Robert and Helen were also supporters of the Institute for International Liberal Education, and Robert was a founding member of the board. He received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Bard in 1998. In addition to Helen, he is survived by his sister, Barbara Rosenberg, and children, Peter, Tom, and Bill. Annemarie “Mimi” Gratzinger Levitt, patron of the arts, died January 6. She was 97. Levitt served on the board of directors of the Bard Music Festival from 1998 to 2013. In 2006, she received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters in recognition of her longstanding support of the Festival. Levitt supported opera workshops in the Bard College Conservatory’s Vocal Arts Program, helped commission one-act operas, and funded scholarships for Conservatory students. Levitt emigrated from Vienna to the United
She met clothier and Custom Shop founder Mortimer Levitt at a Manhattan art gallery opening, where they had a spirited debate over a painting (she favored abstraction; he preferred realism). Following a brief courtship, they married on June 18, 1948, and together became philanthropists supporting youth music programs, performing arts organizations, and educational institutions. In 1963, the couple formed the Mortimer Levitt Foundation (renamed the Mortimer & Mimi Levitt Foundation in 2012 in honor of her contributions). Following her husband’s passing, in 2005, Mimi became president of the foundation. In 1995, the Levitts donated 564 acres of wildlife habitat near Half Moon Bay to the Peninsula Open Space Trust in Marin County, California, providing an invaluable boost to ecological conservation efforts dedicated to preserving the beauty and character of the region’s natural resources. Mimi Levitt was a member of the Mayor’s Commission on Drug
States with her mother at the outbreak of World War II. A linguist fluent in five languages, Levitt was one of the translators at the Nuremberg trials. In 1947, she accepted a position as senior assistant to Alfred Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Addiction under Mayor Koch, and a former trustee of the Town School in Manhattan and the Branch Libraries of the New York Public Library. She also was a children’s literacy volunteer in Harlem. Levitt is survived by her daughter, Elizabeth “Liz” Levitt Hirsch of Los Angeles, and her son, Peter Levitt of New York.
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BARDSUMMERSCAPE OPERA • THEATER • DANCE • MUSIC • FILM • SPIEGELTENT • BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL
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KORNGOLD AND HIS WORLD FISHERCENTER.BARD.EDU Captain Blood, 1935. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. ©Warner Bros./Photofest