Bardian - Summer 2022

QUIET AS IT’S KEPT

The 2022 Whitney Biennial featured faculty members Nayland Blake ’82, professor of studio arts and director of the Studio Arts Program, and Artist in Residence Dave McKenzie; alumni/ae Rindon Johnson MFA ’19, Duane Linklater MFA ’13, Lucy Raven MFA ’08, and WangShui MFA ’19; and recent MFA faculty Raven Chacon and Adam Pendleton. The Whitney Biennial is the longest-running art exhibition of its kind; Quiet as It’s Kept, the Biennial’s 80th edition, opened April 6, 2022 and ran through September 5, 2022.

A selection of panels from An island is all surrounded by water In the morning foreboding Quickly solved by dripping A shower, you know A slow crawl to the park Wait first meat A coffee A hill A roundabout A breeze on the lake A larking body of water, once screaming once babbling, once running A sleeping family A white child with A water gun A tall tree A tunneling A horn Another A too small blanket, you in my mind and next to me A wind in my ears, my basement look what I found, leave the lights on A sigh A tie on a rooftop A still flooding Another horn All in the flight path An immovable object A clapping of leaves A certainty, it is seven feet deep One boy watches the other A horn, 2022.

Crayon, indigo, Vaseline, stone, ebonizing dye (coffee), gouache, and leather, one of eight panels. Collection of the artist; courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles and New York

Lucy Raven MFA ’08

Still from Demolition of a Wall (Album 1), 2022 Video, color, quadrophonic sound, looped; 20:58 min. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, New York, and Shanghai. ©Lucy Raven

Still from Three Songs, 2021

Still from Listed under Accessories, 2022

Two-channel digital video installation, color, sound; 34:12 min.

Courtesy the artist; Vielmetter, Los Angeles; and Barbara Wien Gallery, Berlin

Still from Ruby Nell Sales, 2020 22

HD video, color and black-and-white, sound; 61:03 min.

Courtesy the artist

Adam Pendleton

Dave McKenzie

Raven Chacon

Three-channel video installation 6:51 min.

Courtesy the artist

Rindon Johnson MFA ’19

SUMMER OF LAB

During the 2022 Bard Summer Research Institute, Martha Pasatiempo ’25 worked on a study to test whether fungal pathogens found in soils tend to kill many species of plant seeds or are “specialists” and kill only one or a few species. A fungus that kills only its host plant species and does not harm others could play a role in maintaining plant diversity by preventing the host species from dominating plant communities.

Photo by Karl Rabe

Ah, the summer job. For some of us it was about beer money, for others it was how next semester’s tuition got paid. After four months in classrooms, art studios, and science labs, it was a breath of (not always fresh) air to be painting houses, picking fruit, or mowing lawns. I loved working for Buildings and Grounds, and got pretty good at navigating the mower along the steeply sloped terraces overlooking Blithewood Garden. A day’s work there was incredibly satisfying, not least for the bracing bliss of slipping into the fountain at the end of a long, hot shift.

Students like math major Rose Xu ’23, however, are less likely to be bagging rays than to be conducting Xray spectral and image analysis as part of the Bard Summer Research Institute (BSRI). She spent the summer working with Assistant Professor of Physics Shuo Zhang studying the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced sadge-ay-star). Xu analyed X-ray observations coming from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with the goal of detecting variability of Sgr A*. The information will inform future experiments using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)—a virtual Earth-sized telescope made up of eight radio observatories around the world—which detects high-energy Xray light and studies some of the most energetic objects and processes in the universe. Last May, the first direct image of Sgr A* was released by EHT, and Zhang, who is a coauthor on six papers about Sgr A*’s Event Horizon Telescope results, recently received a $91,933 grant from NASA to support her investigation “Joint NuSTAR and EHT Probe of Sgr A*: Flares, Black Hole Shadows, a New Hard X-Ray Source.” Part of the grant will support the training and involvement of next summer’s cohort of three Bard undergraduate research assistants.

The majority of the 59 students working in this year’s BSRI spent long days, mostly in the lab, mostly on their feet, mostly doing the kind of repetitive work that makes up so much of graduate work in the sciences. All told, there were projects overseen by Bard faculty in chemistry, biology, physics, environmental science, math, and psychology. Another aspect of BSRI that resembles graduate school is that students publish papers with their professors, an achievement that is unusual for an undergraduate.

says. He went on to earn a PhD at University of Massachusetts Medical School and he is now a research scientist at Tessera Therapeutics, where, he says, he is “enjoying gene writing.”

Raed Ibraheim ’13 worked with Associate Professor of Chemistry Swapan Jain as an undergraduate. Ibraheim came to Bard with the singleminded goal of going to medical school, but his work in the lab opened up a new world to him. “I loved it,” says Ibraheim. “It was a great challenge to think of a scientific hypothesis, troubleshoot experiments, and interpret results.” In 2012, his work led to coauthorship on the paper “Syntheses, characterization, density functional theory calculations, and activity of tridentate SNS zinc pincer complexes based on bisimidazole or bis-triazole precursors,” which was published in the advanced inorganic chemistry journal Inorganica Chimica Acta. “I decided to hold off on med school and work in labs to gain more research experience,” Ibraheim

More recently, Craig Anderson, Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Professor of Chemistry and director of undergraduate research in the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, was the corresponding author on “Photophysical Properties of Cyclometalated Platinum(II) Diphosphine Compounds in the Solid State and in PMMA Films,” with coauthors including Bardians Belle Coffey ’21, Lily Clough ’23, Daphne D. Bartkus ’23, Ian C. McClellan ’21, Matthew W. Greenberg ’15 (visiting assistant professor of chemistry), and Christopher N. LaFratta (associate professor of chemistry). The paper, which was published in the American Chemistry Society’s journal ACS Omega, was a continuation of a 2020 study, “Platinum Complexes from C–H Activation of Sterically Hindered [C^N] Donor Benzothiophene Imine Ligands: Synthesis and Photophysical Properties” that was also published in ACS Omega, with Bard coauthors Coffey, Leslie Morales ’22, Greenberg, Matthew Norman ’14, Michael Weinstein ’13, and Garrett Brown ’20.

Sage Saccomano ’23 found the BSRI experience invaluable. “I hadn’t had much lab time previously," she says. "BSRI allowed me to get much more comfortable with techniques, concepts, ideas, and the process of publishing a paper.” Saccomano hopes to be part of the program again next year, possibly continuing the work she did this summer running experiments on the enzyme dihydrofolate reductase, under Jain’s supervision, with the goal of finding a new anticancer drug. Some of us have seasonal gigs ridding a garden of weeds, others are working to rid the world of cancer.

—James Rodewald ’82

Sagittarius A* Image: EHT Collaboration

STUDENT HIGHLIGHTS

Vala Schriefer ’23, a student in Bard College Berlin’s Humanities, the Arts, and Social Thought program, has won this year’s €1,000 DAAD Prize, which is conferred annually by the German Academic Exchange Service for outstanding achievements of international students studying at German universities.

Ashley Eugley ’22 and Andy Garcia ’22 have been awarded Thomas J. Watson Fellowships for the 2022–23 academic year. Eugley will spend the year in South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and Ireland challenging “the hegemony of conventional, top-down scientific approaches” by exploring community science initiatives. Working directly with communities and nonprofit organizations, she “will learn how participatory science efforts diverge from the paradigmatic model and how they are leveraged to monitor change, combat environmental injustice, enhance resilience, and bolster agency.” Garcia plans to spend the year in Spain, France, Nigeria, Senegal, Egypt, and (hopefully) Pakistan, where they will “theorize about what the present and future of the African diaspora would be if colonization and slavery had not occurred.” Using 23andMe results, they will “confront the sinister colonial history that has caused fractures and gaps in the understanding of identity in African diasporic descendants and visually theorize about a Black future free from the reigns of slavery and colonialism.”

United States Artists awarded Marty Two Bulls Jr. MFA ’24 a USA Fellowship in Traditional Arts. Two Bulls, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, studied printmaking and ceramics at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and teaches art at Oglala Lakota College. USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their careers.

Photo by Nour Annan HRA ’23

Sydney Oshuna-Williams ’24 has been named a 2022–23 Newman Civic Fellow by Campus Compact, a national coalition of colleges and universities working to advance the public purposes of higher education. In her first semester, Oshuna-Williams founded the Me In Foundation to increase artistic education opportunities for underrepresented youth through year-round social and cultural awareness programming. The organization works with more than 150 K-12 students in Upstate New York and Atlanta. The Newman provides a year of learning and networking opportunities that emphasize personal, professional, and civic growth as well as pathways to apply for exclusive scholarship and post-graduate opportunities.

Elisabeth Sundberg ’22 won a Davis Projects for Peace prize for her proposal Tracing the Turnrow Web: Appalachian Rising. She will receive $10,000 to facilitate a series of collaborative art projects across the Turnrow Appalachian Farm Collective network in West Virginia. Working with farmers, artists, activists, and students, Sundberg aims to “strengthen connections between the organizations within Turnrow and those between food producers and customers, and celebrate the work that the different parts of the Turnrow food hub are doing, including education, food access, and strengthening local food landscapes.” Davis Projects for Peace encourages students to develop innovative, community-centered, and scalable responses to the world’s most pressing issues.

Art history and Italian studies major Francesca Houran ’23 (left) and biology major and premed student Emma Tilley ’23 were awarded Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the U.S. Department of State. Houran received $5,000 toward her studies at University of Trento in Italy, where she was the first to participate in a newly established tuition exchange program with Bard. Tilley was awarded $4,500 to study via Bard’s tuition exchange program at University College Roosevelt in the Netherlands.

Photo by Nour Annan HRA ’23

Photo by Nour Annan HRA ’23

FACULTY RECOGNITION

The New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) awarded $10,000 to Thurman Barker, professor of music, in support of a new jazz composition for chamber orchestra. In his proposal to NYSCA, Barker writes, “I feel compelled to write a piece of music, which I am naming ‘Mr. Speedster,’ that expresses the speed of our lives but also the duality of needing to slow down. . . . As I reflect on speed and slowing down, I am aware of how the pandemic forced us to slow down and made us aware of how fast we were moving.”

Poet, essayist, and memoirist Dawn Lundy Martin, Distinguished Writer in Residence, is a 2022 USA Fellow. Martin is the author of A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering; Discipline, a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize; Life in a Box Is a Pretty Life, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; and Good Stock Strange Blood, which won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2019. USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at any stage of their career.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 2022 Guggenheim Fellowships to John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Written Arts Program Dinaw Mengestu, for his work in fiction; Richard B. Fisher Professor of Literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock Peter Filkins, for his work in biography; and incoming Hannah Arendt Center Senior Fellow and Visiting Professor of Humanities Thomas Chatterton Williams, who will begin teaching at the College in spring 2023, for his work in general nonfiction.

Rolling Stone named Visiting Instructor of Music Franz Nicolay’s Someone Should Pay for Your Pain one of the Best Music Books of 2021. The novel follows singersongwriter Rudy Pauver, whose career is in the doldrums. When his sister’s daughter, a teenage runaway, turns up asking to join him on the road, he has to come to terms with the limits of his ambition and the nature of his obligation to family.

Nicolay, once named punk’s preeminent accordionist, knows a thing or two about the life of a touring musician, and his exploration of the nature of creativity and popular success, artistic and ethical influences, and the pathos of the middle-aged artist is wise, brutal, and very funny.

Felicia Keesing, David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, is the first Bard faculty member to be elected as a 2021 fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Photo by AnnAnn Puttithanasorn ’23

Photo by Nour Annan HRA ’23

Photo by Susan Lirakis

Levy Economics Institute Senior Scholar and Professor of Economics

L. Randall Wray won the 2022 Veblen Commons Award, the highest honor given annually by the Association for Evolutionary Economics. The award recognizes significant contributions to evolutionary institutional economics.

Associate Professor of Psychology Sarah Dunphy-Lelii received a $6,000 Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society in support of her project Stories Across Species: Public Writing from the Ngogo Chimpanzee Field Site, Uganda. DunphyLelii will return to the remote site in Kibale National Park, where she conducted field observation for five months in 2016, for an additional eight weeks of first-person observation “with the goal of creating distinctive, public-facing writing that unites the fieldscientist and nature-writing traditions with short-form creative prose.” After the grant period, Dunphy-Lelii will write a series of journal-based blog posts on human interpretations of chimpanzee behavior for Psychology Today as well as a collection of placebased prose poetry and flash nonfiction.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded Shai Secunda, Jacob Neusner Professor in the History and Theology of Judaism, a $40,000 fellowship in support of his project The Formation of the Talmud in Sasanian Babylonia. Secunda is preparing a monograph on the circa sixth century CE formation of the Babylonian Talmud, the foundational Jewish text comprising the diverse traditions of rabbinic Judaism. The NEH award will enable Secunda to work in situ in Israel, primarily in the Literary Lab at Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Renée Anne Louprette, assistant professor of music, has received a Fulbright US Scholar Award to Romania for the 2022–23 award cycle. The goal of Louprette’s project, Extant Historic Pipe Organs of Transylvania: A Case for Preserving a National Treasure, is to document a select number of artistically significant Transylvanian pipe organs and to assist Transylvanian organ builders in their quest for funding and public support.

Associate Professor of Literature Alys Moody and coeditor Stephen J. Ross were awarded the 2020 Modernist Studies Association (MSA) Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection for Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology. The MSA said the book would be “integral to future scholarship and teaching” and called it “a groundbreaking anthology that will have an immeasurable impact.”

Associate Professor of Anthropology Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s book Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press) won the 2021 Julian Steward Award, sponsored by the Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association, and the 2021 Middle East Section Book Award, sponsored by the American Anthropological Association.

Photo by Nour Annan HRA ’23

Photo by AnnAnn

Puttithanasorn ’23

NEW TRUSTEES

Kimberly Marteau Emerson is a lawyer, civic leader, and human rights advocate. She has worked with the US Embassy and independently on projects to promote German integration efforts related to the refugee crisis and to address throughout Germany the issue of bringing women to the economic and political decisionmaking table. Marteau Emerson previously worked in the Clinton Administration as a senior political appointee and spokesperson for the US Information Agency. She has served as a member of the board of governors of Bard College Berlin since February 2019 and been chair since May 2020, is on the board of directors of Human Rights Watch and the advisory boards of the Thomas Mann House and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. Marteau Emerson has been an election observer in Nigeria, and worked on relief projects in Lesbos, Greece, during the 2015 refugee crisis; Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami; and New Orleans post-Katrina. She holds degrees from UCLA (BA), UC Hastings College of the Law (JD), and l’Université de droit d’AixMarseille (DESU). She lives in Los Angleles.

Geoffrey W. Smith is founder and managing partner of Digitalis Ventures, a venture capital firm that partners with entrepreneurs, inventors, and scientists across all stages of venture investing to back technology-driven solutions to complex problems in health. He represents Digitalis as a director of GRO Biosciences and Terray Therapeutics and is also a cofounder and general partner of Ascent Biomedical Ventures, a New York City–based venture capital firm focused on early-stage life sciences investments. Smith represents Ascent on the boards of directors of Azevan Pharmaceuticals, BlinkBio, and Orchestra Biomedical; serves as a trustee of the Jackson Laboratory; and is a member of the scientific advisory board for Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is former Bard Early College chair, and was founding director of the Mount Sinai Institute of Technology and a professor in the Department of Population Health Science and Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Smith received a BA (with honors) from Williams College and a JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Anne Hunnell Chen, who specializes in the art and archaeology of the late Roman world, has joined the Division of the Arts as assistant professor of art history and visual culture. Chen recently received a $350,000 NEH grant for the Reassembling and Recontextualizing Ancient Cultural Heritage Project, which uses Linked Open Data to create a digital archive of materials related to the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, Syria, a multicultural center of the ancient world that has been threatened in recent years by looting and conflict. Chen earned her BA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her PhD in art history and archaeology from Columbia University. She previously taught at Yale, Brown, and Hofstra Universities.

Groundbreaking computer scientist Valerie Barr has been named Margaret Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, and director of the Bard Network Computing Initiative. Barr recently completed four years as chair of Mount Holyoke College’s computer science department.

Beate Liepert, visiting professor of environmental and urban studies and physics, is a climate scientist at NorthWest Research Associates in Seattle, Washington, and an adjunct research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. Her pioneering work on global dimming (the observation that air pollution can dim sunlight and mask global warming) was featured in the BBC documentary Dimming the Sun. Liepert’s more recent work focuses on solar power and alternative energy use.

Hua Hsu has joined the Division of Languages and Literature as professor of literature. He is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press, 2016), the memoir Stay True (Doubleday, 2022), and is working on an essay collection titled Impostor Syndrome. Hsu is a staff writer at the New Yorker; a previous contributor to Artforum, Slate, the Village Voice, and The Wire (UK); and his scholarly work has been published in American Quarterly, Criticism, PMLA, and Genre

CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) named Valerie Cassel Oliver the recipient of the 2022 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. Cassel Oliver, the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, curated The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse—called one of the best exhibitions of 2021 by the Los Angeles Times—which is traveling to venues across the United States through January 2023. Since 1998, the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence has celebrated the achievements of a distinguished curator whose lasting contributions have shaped the way we conceive of exhibitionmaking today. The award, which comes with a $25,000 prize, reflects CCS Bard’s commitment to recognizing individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice.

CCS Bard continues to showcase the work of new curatorial voices, underrecognized art histories, and major exhibitions of video art at the Hessel Museum of Art. Martine Syms: Grio College, curated by Lauren Cornell, chief curator of the Hessel Museum of Art and director of the Graduate Program at CCS Bard, features an expansive selection of the work of Martine Syms MFA ’17, including her now iconic installation on gesture and femininity, Borrowed Lady (2016). The piece was recently acquired by the Marieluise Hessel Collection, adding to the remarkable assembly of art across discipline, movement, and tendency, which is housed at CCS Bard. Grio College is also accompanied by a screening of Syms’s first feature film, The African Desperate (2022), and premieres related new photographic works and drawings. Cornell also organized Dara Birnbaum: Reaction, the first retrospective of Birnbaum’s work in the United States. Including works from 1975 to 2011, Reaction charts the indelible contribution Birnbaum has made not only to American art but to the international movements of conceptual, performance, and appropriation art. Grio College and Reaction are both on view through November 27, 2022. Black Melancholia, curated by CCS Bard Associate Professor and Luma Foundation Scholar Nana Adusei-Poku, brings together the work of 28 artists of African descent and expands and complicates the notion of melancholy in Western art history. The exhibition, which will be up through October 16, 2022, includes new commissions as well as painting, sculpture, film, photography, works on paper, and sound works, from the late 19th century to the present day

Photo by Travis Fullerton.

©Virginia Museum of Fine Art

Black Melancholia , photo by Karl Rabe

BARD FICTION PRIZE

Author Lindsey Drager has received the Bard Fiction Prize for her novel The Archive of Alternate Endings. Since 2001, the annual Bard Fiction Prize has awarded one promising writer $30,000 and a onesemester appointment as writer in residence, without the expectation of having to teach traditional courses. Drager’s residency at Bard College is for the fall 2022 semester, during which time she will continue her writing, meet informally with students, and give a public reading. Drager, associate fiction editor of the literary journal West Branch and an assistant professor in the creative writing program at the University of Utah, has published three novels.

BARD GRADUATE CENTER IRIS FOUNDATION AWARDS

This year’s Iris Foundation Awards honored Deborah and Philip English (Outstanding Patrons), Helen C. Evans (Outstanding Lifetime Achievement), Anne Lafont (Outstanding MidCareer Scholar), and Barbara Israel (Outstanding Dealer). The Iris Foundation Awards were established in 1997 by Susan Weber, Bard Graduate Center founder and director, to recognize scholars, patrons, and professionals who have made outstanding contributions to the study and appreciation of the decorative arts, design history, and material culture.

GRADUATE VOCAL ARTS PROGRAM

The Bard College Conservatory of Music’s unique Graduate Vocal Arts Program (VAP) balances a respect for established repertory and expressive techniques with the flexibility and curiosity needed to keep abreast of evolving musical ideas. VAP’s recent staging of Leoš Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen, a century-old work that is striking for its currency, gave master of music students ample room to show off their talents. Opera News heaped praise on “Doug Fitch’s handsome, inventive production and James Bagwell’s assured musical direction” as well as “the performers’ youthful energies.”

P hoto by Chris Kendall ’82

Photo by Allan G. Borst

Photo by Karl Rabe

DOCTOR OF HOOPS CHRISTINA KISER

On that autumn day in 2018, like so many days before and so many to come, Christina Kiser ’22 was shooting a basketball in Bard’s Stevenson Gym. But something seemed off. There was nothing wrong with her shot. It was butter.

A smooth blend of technical precision and effortless flow, her catch-and-shoot 18-footers repeatedly found the net. No other result even seemed possible.

Then suddenly it became clear: it was 1965 redux, with Kiser in the role of the young Bill Bradley and Bard College in place of Princeton University. The question New Yorker writer John McPhee asked Bradley needed only slight modification: what was she doing here?

The brilliant athlete was on full display, but who was this person, and how did she end up a Bard Raptor?

A few months earlier, Kiser believed her athletic career was over. At 18, having already won multiple championships at La Salle Academy in Providence, Rhode Island, she knew the thrill of athletic success, but also its cost. She feared playing college ball might thwart her aspirations for medical school and, ultimately, a career as a surgeon.

Kiser started playing hoops when she was only three, encouraged by her thentween sister Stephanie, whom Christina idolized (and who would later set her own

scoring records at Providence’s Lincoln School). Frank Kiser home-coached both girls, and later helmed Christina’s Amateur Athletic Union team. Along the way there were basketball camps, multiple youth leagues, and a thirdthrough-seventh grade coach named Armand Batastini, who was fond of offering up 301-level, koan-like maxims such as “The best play is a broken play” and eventually switched Kiser from point guard to shooting guard.

By the time she was 16, Kiser’s high school coach had given her a steady green light to shoot from anywhere, and she used that freedom (and responsibility) to hit two late three-point baskets to seal the win in a tense state championship game. But college basketball was serious business, and as much as she loved the sport, her priorities were elsewhere. So recruiting calls went unreturned and academic scholarships were explored. Then Kiser visited Annandale, where she met with Casi Donelan, head coach of the women’s basketball team.

During a subsequent telephone call, Bard’s paucity of wins came up. Coach Donelan never sugarcoated the competitive reality, Kiser says, but invited her to help “build something” at Bard. Ultimately, Kiser was sold on Bard’s lovely

campus, rigorous curriculum, and an “incredible basketball family” that would always place academics first.

While victories in the Liberty League continued to prove elusive during her time in Annandale, the net result was a kind of winning by losing. Kiser was able to play the game she loves stress-free, had an “absolutely amazing” mentor and Senior Project adviser in Associate Professor of Biology Brooke Jude, and— for her project—found joy hunting phages (“host-specific viruses that kill bacteria”) in the Annandale soil. And her on-court excellence did not go unnoticed: at the end of this season, Kiser became the only two-time Academic All-American in Bard College history.

For those lucky enough to watch her play, the perfection of her shot won’t soon be forgotten. But what truly stands out is Kiser’s toughness and indefatigable spirit. It’s exhausting to be a great player on a losing team, and being the main target of your opponents’ defensive efforts—and the accompanying hard fouls—can be physically painful. But Kiser says she has no regrets, other than a few victories that got away. To the true amateur, a thing done out of love is its own reward.

MIMI GROSS ’61

BETWEEN DIMENSIONS

New York City–based painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and costume designer Mimi Gross ’61 grew up surrounded by art and artists. Born in 1940 in the South Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, her father was the renowned modernist sculptor Chaim Gross—whose works can be seen in several public spaces in New York City—and her mother, Renee Gross, was a great supporter of artists and established the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation in Greenwich Village.

Mimi Gross first heard about Bard from Rudi Stern ’58, a friend she met in Provincetown, Massachusetts, who was then an art student and later founded the gallery Let There Be Neon and the video collective Global Village. Gross came to Bard in 1957, studied with artists Louis Schanker and Stefan Hirsch, and also took courses on philosophy with Heinrich Blücher and poetry with Theodore Weiss. While at Bard, she modeled for art classes, made posters for campus events, and had a woodcut on the cover of the Spring 1959 Bardian, which also included her short story “Clown Mountain I: Dr. MacFlower is Dead.” Gross remembers reading the piece aloud at Bard and being complimented by writer Saul Bellow, who was in the audience.

The Road to Tivoli, 1957 Oil on Masonite 38” x 18”

Photo by Chris Kendall ’82

In 1958, Gross had her first exhibition at City Gallery, which was cofounded by artist Red Grooms (she later collaborated with Grooms on multiple projects and was married to him from 1963 to 1976). In the summer of 1959, she participated in the prestigious Skowhegan summer residency program for emerging visual artists in Maine and then went to Europe with friends, studying at the Salzburg International

Summer Academy of Fine Arts with the Austrian expressionist Oskar Kokoschka.

An exhibition of Gross’s works— spanning the years she was at Bard to the present—was on view at Stevenson Library from April 18 through July 29, 2022. Since 2010, the library has hosted more than 50 exhibitions curated by Bard faculty, alumni/ae, students, library staff, and outside parties. With the motto “no budget, all volunteer,” the exhibition

program has featured shows of local interest, Bard history, and internationally known artists.

The intimate grouping in this exhibit—which ranges from college ephemera to sculptural and collaged reliefs, woodcuts, and landscape vignettes—displays Gross’s mature character studies and her ever-evolving relationship to abstracted figuration. At Bard, Gross mastered the flattened figure and landscape in woodcuts and oil crayon drawings and later developed a hybrid form she referred to as “2 1/2 D.”

Remaining in between dimensions, these shifting compositions of painted wood, metal, or paper comprise interlocking shapes with bold and expressionistic color palettes, becoming pop-up-like silhouettes. Signifying a connection with her subject is paramount for Gross, and with a direct approach through her use of varying media and spatial dimensions, she reifies fleeting moments, capturing people in their natural environment.

Gross met artists and made lifelong friends during her time at Bard, and this exhibition captures those formative years and her development as an artist. “One of the great things I learned [at Bard],” says Gross, “was how to study for yourself.”

—Fiona Laugharn ’12

Left: Mimi Gross ’61 in her studio

Photo by Christian DeFonte ’12

Top: Northeast landscapes made between 1957 and 2021, photo by Chris Kendall ’82

ALUMNI/AE ACCOLADES

The first solo museum show in the United States of the work of artist and writer Carolyn Lazard ’10 opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on February 12 and runs through December 11, 2022. Carolyn Lazard: Long Take co-commissioned by the Walker, Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and Nottingham Contemporary—is anchored by a sound installation made of a recorded reading of a dance score, the sound of a dancer’s movement and breath, and an audio description. The gallery floor is covered with dance-studio mats, and there are benches that the artist has altered with cushioning, backrests, and height adjustments to accommodate access needs. The exhibition continues Lazard’s exploration of the social and political dimensions of care at the intersection of race, gender, and disability, encouraging us to think about ways that artworks are, and are not, made accessible, as well as the often-unseen networks of care, labor, and friendship that make collaborative endeavors possible.

Mneesha Gellman ’03, associate professor of political science in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College and founder and director of the Emerson Prison Initiative, has been named a 2021–22 IIE Centennial Fellow. Gellman and three other Fulbright alumni/ae received $25,000 awards in recognition of work that embodies “values of mutual understanding, leadership, global problem solving, and global impact.”

Kalina Konstantinova ’07 is Bulgaria’s deputy prime minister for effective government. She joined the coalition cabinet voted into office on December 13, 2021. In early January, Bulgaria’s prime minister, Kiril Petkov, along with the president and senior ministers, went into precautionary selfisolation after a participant at a security meeting they attended tested positive for COVID-19.

Konstantinova took over Petkov’s non-remote duties during his quarantine.

And the Grammy goes to: Sō Percussion, which includes Bard Conservatory of Music faculty Eric Cha-Beach and Jason Treuting, and founding artistic director of the Conservatory’s Vocal Arts Program Dawn Upshaw performed on Caroline Shaw: Narrow Sea, the winner for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Julia Bullock VAP ’11 sang on To The Edge Of Longing, which won Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals. Also earning nominations were Conservatory violin faculty Gil Shaham (Best Classical Instrumental Solo) and Sophia Burgos VAP ’16 (Best Opera Recording). This year’s Grammy Awards recognize recordings released between September 1, 2020 and September 30, 2021.

Five recent Bard College graduates won Fulbright Awards this year. Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Awards went to Paola Luchsinger ’20, who will teach English to elementary through secondary students at Athens College in Greece; Lance Sum ’21, who will teach English in Taiwan; and Jordan Donohue ’22, who will serve as an English teaching assistant in Brazil. Fulbright Special Study/Research Awards went to Maya Frieden ’22, who will pursue a master’s in design culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; and Mercer Greenwald ’22, who will work in Austria as an English teaching assistant and conduct independent research on the Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann and the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector.

Photo by Joop Reubens

Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10 (above) is the winner of Aperture’s First PhotoBook Award for Untitled (Capricious Publishing), which artist and writer Carolyn Lazard ’10 describes as being about “the persistence of Black life; pointing us to look at what is still here: moments of care, embodiment and leisure; just being here, or maybe just being.”

Touch, Northampton, Pennsylvania, 2017 Sasha Phyars-Burgess ’10, from Untitled

Artist and filmmaker Adam Khalil ’11 was one of 10 artists selected by the Herb Alpert Foundation to receive a 2021 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, which comes with an unrestricted grant of $75,000 and a residency at California Institute of the Arts. He was chosen “for generating a space for new forms by and for Indigenous filmmakers through his collaborative filmmaking, mentoring, and assertive position toward institutional politics.” Choreographer Beth Gill, who has taught at Bard and was a Live Arts Bard Choreographic Fellow, was also among the recipients.

Marie Schleef ’14, a theater director and multimedia artist, is one of 10 winners of a Chanel Next Prize, which carries a cash award of €100,000 ($113,000). The new biennial award was founded in March as part of the Chanel Culture Fund, established in the wake of the pandemic to expand the luxury label’s backing of the arts. Schleef’s work centers the female experience and challenges notions of the male gaze.

Brothers@ received a $50,000 grant from the NBA Foundation. Cofounded by Dariel Vazquez ’17 and Harry Johnson ’17 as a student initiative, Brothers@ is a dualbeneficiary high-school retention and college persistence organization with the mission of improving the academic and social-emotional outcomes of young men of color. The money will be used to begin statewide expansion efforts.

ART ARTISTS’ SAKE

As a kid growing up on the Lower East Side and then in the South Bronx, James Fuentes ’98 sought out his own art education. He found ways, such as taking a retail job in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s gift shop, to immerse himself in the art, poetry, and music of the city. “My family’s from Ecuador but I was born in New York City,” says Fuentes. “I always felt like a bit of an outcast wherever I was. When I visited Ecuador I was an outsider. Here, I was an outsider. But somehow through art I felt I could connect with people in a place that transcended where I was from.” Bard was a natural fit for his sensibilities. “Even before I arrived at campus for my first interview, that drive on River Road sealed the deal for me,” Fuentes recalls. “I just knew this was where I wanted to be.” The College offered him a generous financial aid package, and his family dedicated a large portion of their income toward sending him to Bard. “I’m grateful they prioritized my education.”

Fuentes felt embraced by the Bard community and found his people right away. He played in a campus band—The Fantastic Fuentes and The Flowers—and formed lasting bonds with peers and professors. “I was very fortunate to find myself in an environment that nurtured me and wasn’t judgmental,” he says. “Being from the South Bronx wasn’t a strike, but a significant point of curiosity from my peers. They wanted to visit where I was from.” He remembers a resonant moment during President Leon Botstein’s welcome speech to the first years: “He told us to look around at the people sitting next to us because they would be defining our education as much as, if not more than, what we learn in the classroom.”

Fuentes majored in integrated arts, with a focus on anthropology and film.

His closest mentor was the late Adolfas Mekas, who founded the Film Program and directed the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. “He taught us film through his personal journey—a journey that included living in Nazi forced labor camps, having no electricity in his village, and a story about his first encounter with electricity,” says Fuentes. “A traveling film truck came through his village and

through osmosis. To be 19 years old and to recognize curating as a discipline was quite impactful.”

When Fuentes graduated, he moved back to New York City. He rented a storefront apartment that had once been a gallery space. Just months out of college, having again gotten a job at the Met, this time as a security guard, he opened his first gallery. “I had so many friends who were artists, and I thought I understood what curating was about,” he says. “I put up a show to help pay the rent and basically never looked back.” His first show included three Bard alumni: Aaron Diskin ’95, Nicholas Zinner ’96, and Jonathan Chick ’96. “I found it a little daunting to suddenly be in the midst of owning a gallery,” Fuentes recalls. “I’m not a networker or a schmoozer. Zinner pointed out that I already had a network of artists from Bard and I could build from that. My Bard community was a force field in the big city through which I could navigate social and professional life.”

projected a movie on the side of the truck. He and his brother Jonas were convinced it was magic. Adolfas empowered, encouraged, and deeply affected me.”

Fuentes also immersed himself in the space and culture of the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard). “I loitered at the CCS building, took advantage of their library, study spaces, exhibitions, and events,” he says. “I had a thesis cubicle all to myself. It was a small program at the time with such a welcoming environment. I absorbed CCS

Initially, he called it the Small Gallery, but Diskin encouraged him to give himself more credit, so he changed its name to the James Fuentes Gallery. “Bard comes into my business and discussion every day,” he says. “Stephen Shore [Susan Weber Professor in the Arts] and Amy Sillman MFA ’95 [MFA faculty and cochair in painting] advise on shows. My former professor Tom Wolf [professor of art history] lives right around the corner from my gallery, as did Barbara Ess [associate professor of photography] until her death in March. It’s a continuation of the neighborhood feeling of Bard.” Early on, Sillman advised Fuentes to think critically about what it means to put an artist out into the world. It’s a big step for artists to expose themselves in the public sphere. “She gave me real talk because you could be encouraging the bird to fly

too early from the nest,” says Fuentes. “I realized I needed to be considerate of that. Her advice has been a guiding principle and has contributed to my longevity in the field.”

When presented with an opportunity to work at a high level for a top New York City gallery, Fuentes closed his original space and began a sort of professional apprenticeship until he decided to reopen in 2007 in Chinatown. “I asked myself that hard question: Does New York need another gallery?” he recalls. “Then I thought about the artists that I wanted to advocate for like Alison Knowles [a founding member of Fluxus] and Jonas Mekas [godfather of American avantgarde cinema]. This field is ageist, sexist, racist, and elitist. The artists whom I would represent go against that predisposition. This inspired me to go ahead with the project—to fight for underserved voices and perspectives.”

His current gallery celebrated its 15th year in January 2022. It was a trailblazer in establishing the Lower East Side as a gallery district. The gallery has placed work by its artists in every major New York City museum, including the Whitney, Guggenheim, and Museum of Modern Art, as well as museums nationally and internationally. In response to the lockdown in 2020, he also launched an online exhibition platform.

“This is the most innovative and complex sphere that I didn’t see coming,” he says. “I’m super-excited about the possibilities to take more risks, be experimental, and to curate for the medium itself. I always have a hundred ideas for how an artist can do an exhibition. This gives me a new platform.” In a New York Times review of a James Fuentes Online exhibition of collages by Lucy Sante (visiting professor of writing and photography at Bard) Fuentes said, “Our online platform can’t

replace our brick and mortar. It’s an expansion.”

Fuentes exhibits artists who were flying under the radar but have a lifelong commitment to their practice. “What they do is essential to their disposition,” he continues. “They would be making art show or no show, market or no market. Our artists also have a humane intent and voice embedded in the work that I find compelling.” Although he gets frustrated with -isms in the field, it’s exciting for him to see the evolution in contemporary art. “My dad comes from a blue-collar background,” says Fuentes. “He was a bus driver for the MTA. For me, the excitement is that we can turn the dial on the cultural canon. When we sell art to a major museum, or get a New York Times review, it makes me think we’re on the right path.”

—Jennifer Strodl

Izzy Barber ’11 at James Fuentes Gallery

Izzy Barber ’11 has had two solo exhibitions at James Fuentes. The most recent, Crude Futures, showcased a new series of paintings bearing witness to life in New York City. Barber majored in studio arts and human rights at Bard, and went on to earn her MFA from the New York Studio School. In addition to her previous solo exhibition at James Fuentes, Maspeth Moon, and online presentation, Last Call and Chinatown Paintings through JamesFuentes.Online, Barber’s work has been exhibited at Galleria Franco Noero, Turin, Italy; David Zwirner Platform; New Orleans Art Center; and in the 2012 Brucennial. James Fuentes Press published #3 Izzy Barber in 2021. Barber is from Brooklyn, New York, and lives and works in Queens.

Chinatown Optical, 2020 oil on canvas 15” x 15”

JEANNE LEE’S TOTAL ENVIRONMENT

Interviewing singer Jeanne Lee ’61 in 1979, critic Roger Riggins suggests that she seems to use her voice—“one of the most original voices that jazz has produced”—as a kind of organic “instrument.” At this point in her career, Lee was already known, to those in the know, not only for her ability to utterly transform a standard (including those she and Ran Blake ’60 recorded on their 1962 album, The Newest Sound Around) but also for her work in freejazz ensembles, where she pushed nonverbal vocal improvisation beyond established forms of scat singing and into a stunning range of tonal, percussive, and textural effects.

So Riggins’s comparison of voice to instrument is intuitive. But in response, Lee hedges, reflects. She agrees that she has learned some of her most important lessons from instrumentalists: “[Thelonious] Monk’s sense of timing, for example, is like a whole world of knowledge in itself.” At the same time, she suggests that the comparison risks deflecting from the question of “what the voice is in itself.” And part of Lee’s answer is that the act of singing entails unique forms of circulation between body and world, artist and audience: “I look at myself as already an environment, the environment is there and it comes through me in sound,” she says. “In turn the music is created as a total environment to the audience.”

Lee’s wide-ranging career makes it difficult to situate a statement like this within any single artistic or intellectual tradition. Over four prolific decades as a singer, composer, writer, and teacher, she collaborated with Bay Area sound poets; with Black Arts Movement writers and musicians; with Fluxus artists; with everyone from Archie Shepp to Pauline Oliveros, Bobby McFerrin to Ntozake Shange.

Yet her idea of the “total environment” of musical experience does reprise some elements of one specific source: Lee’s own Senior Project in psychology. “The Influence of the Mother-Child Relationship on the Early Social Behavior of the Child” argues for the developmental benefits of a fine-tuned reciprocity between individual and social environment. (Historians of psychology may hear the midcentury influence of Kurt Lewin’s field theory of socialization.) In the project’s opening lines, Lee describes the “give-and-take relationship” between a “socialized being” and “environmental forces.” The “integrated” personality takes in the “mores and ideas” of a social environment and then, Lee writes—in a description of “expressive behavior” that never mentions music but that will echo strongly in her later reflections on the voice—“return[s] them in their ‘person-integrated’ form.”

This connection (and others like it) between Lee’s early studies and her later career provided a point of departure for a Fall 2021 class in Bard’s Literature Program. Titled Jeanne Lee’s Total Environment, the class took her multidisciplinary approach to music as a portal into larger artistic, intellectual, literary, and social histories. Some parts of the story of Lee’s career had to be built from the ground up; she is an iconic figure in some circles, but there’s no definitive biography to rely on. So students scoured liner notes, reviewed old course catalogs, read archived student newspapers, and

interviewed Bard alumni/ae and others who could shed light on Lee’s life and music. Jess Belardi ’22 and Zoe Stojkovic ’23, for instance, spoke with Erica Lindsay, artist in residence in Bard’s Music Program, who noted that Lee “stuck to her authentic voice, and played with musicians who were more open and not as commercialized”—perhaps leading to fewer opportunities for a broad audience

Improvisation (called Third Stream when he and Gunther Schuller founded it in 1972), he spoke with the class in November 2021 over Zoom. The late 1950s were a dynamic time for jazz at Bard; in 1958 Blake initiated a “jazz lab” that met in Kappa House, then a campus social club, offering free music lessons not only to Bard students—Guy Ducornet ’60 played alto saxophone with the ensemble—but also to community members from Red Hook, Rhinebeck, Tivoli, and the Ward Manor retirement community. At the 1959 Bard Jazz Festival, Blake and Lee performed separately. He played with a quartet, while she was accompanied by Martin Siegel ’61—receiving “thunderous applause,” Ducornet wrote in his memoir Annandale Blues: A Journey in Ralph Ellison’s America (2012). Soon after graduating, though, Blake and Lee came together in 1961 in a series of appearances at the Apollo Theater that would turn out to be pivotal. Lee’s daughter Cavana Hazelton related the story to Kevin Cohen ’22 and Elizabeth DeGeorge ’22: at Bard, her mother had still felt “ambivalent about whether she was going to commit to a career as a singer”—but this ambivalence faded after she and Blake took first place at the Apollo’s storied Amateur Night several weeks in a row.

during her lifetime. “I really hope that people find out about her more.” To that end, students produced a show dedicated to Lee’s music that aired in November 2021 on WGXC (the community radio station based in Greene and Columbia counties, part of the Wave Farm arts organization codirected by Galen JosephHunter ’96 and Tom Roe).

A formative element of Lee’s college years was her friendship and collaboration with pianist Blake. Now chair emeritus of the New England Conservatory’s Department of Contemporary

Shortly thereafter, RCA released The Newest Sound Around, and some tour dates would follow. But the audiences were much more enthusiastic in Europe than in the United States, and the album, however revered now, did not immediately launch anybody’s career. In the mid-1960s, Lee moved to California with her first husband, the sound poet D. R. Hazelton. While performing in San Francisco jazz clubs—with a recurring Monday night spot at the Jazz Workshop that earned her a glowing profile in the Oakland Tribune—she also immersed herself in the Berkeley poetry and

performing arts scene, staging experimental readings and concerts at the short-lived Open Theater while helping Hazelton edit the magazine Synapse, which published poets including Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, and Jackson Mac Low. Around this time her sense of singing as a fundamentally poetic practice seems to have crystallized. “Poetry was very dear to her,” recalled bassist William Parker (interviewed by Aleda Rosenblum Katz ’24 and Ethan Haapala ’23), her close friend since the early 1970s; central to her experiments with vocalization was “the idea that a word is a word but also a sound, and it has a meaning but it also has a musical tone to it.”

In the short essays she submitted when applying to moderate in 1958, Lee remarks that literature and psychology are closer than often assumed: “One seeks to translate people into terms of ideas and ideals. The other deals with the people as immediate substance.” She also mentions that her plans had originally included teaching. “I am still considering working with children,” she writes, “but I see a larger realm of possibilities in connection with them.” She kept these possibilities

alive, and not only in the singing lessons that Parker remembers her offering out of an East Village apartment (shared with her second husband and frequent musical collaborator, Gunter Hampel). In the early 1970s, she earned a master’s degree in education at New York University. And in 1985 she reached out to Richard Lewis ’58, founder and director of Touchstone Center for Children.

They had crossed paths at Bard, perhaps through the Dance Program, where Lee took several courses and where Lewis—as he recalled when interviewed by Leëta Damon ’24 and Bennett Wood ’23—accompanied classes on piano. A quarter century later Lee got back in touch, proposing to introduce a program for elementary students that incorporated poetry, music, and improvisatory play. It was a perfect fit for the arts-based pedagogy that Lewis was developing at the Touchstone Center, in partnership at that time with the Henry Street Settlement. When Lee began working with students at PS 110 on the Lower East Side, she immediately “got everybody out of their seats and they started moving . . . You think, well, what’s so great about it?

But we have to remember the life of a public school. You didn’t have the opportunity of standing up and just moving.” From there, Lee would bring the students into drumming, chanting, writing, dancing, and drawing, creating what Lewis called an “entry point into a multi-dexterous expressive world.”

When Lee died of breast cancer in 2000 at 61, she was, in some ways, “just beginning to move forward,” Parker reflected. Her recordings with pianist Mal Waldron in the 1990s were pushing into new territory, and she had just published a book: a history of jazz written for young readers. Titled Jam! The Story of Jazz Music, it includes an eight-word author’s bio that is both perfectly simple and, knowing her work, the furthest thing from it: “Jeanne Lee is a jazz singer and poet.”

—Alex Benson, assistant professor of literature at Bard College

Moving between free jazz, standards, and even pop, Lee and Blake inject a freshness into classic jazz compositions like Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” and revisit the popular songs that soundtracked the ’60s as well. With tracks like ”A Hard Day’s Night” and “Mister Tambourine Man,” Lee and Blake interrupt the familiarity of these well-known songs, offering a new and adventurous perspective on musical traditions. The songs on The Newest Sound You Never Heard were recorded on tours in Belgium in 1966 and ’67, and only discovered in 2019 in the archive of a Belgian broadcasting studio. Lee passed away in 2000 (Blake still performs), but the force of their musical collaboration endures. Blake’s piano, playful and taunting at times, operates as a partner and provocateur to Lee’s voice; she never shies from its tone but builds on it and leans into it. Though Lee was not formally trained, she learned to wield the power of low notes early on, as you can hear in The Newest Sound Around, the album Lee and Blake released in 1962 after they won the Amateur Night at the Apollo contest. In the following years, Lee collaborated with West Coast avant-garde artists before reconvening with Blake in 1966 to play in Europe. By then, the pair had gained a more expansive skill set, and the musical connection had deepened, leading to the creative masterpiece that is The Newest Sound You Never Heard. More than a half century later, it’s still new, and you still have got to hear it.

Left: Gunther Hampel, Jeanne Lee ’61 (and her son Rumi), and Galaxie Dream Band, Livorno, Italy, Summer 1976, photo by Enrico Romero

Page 14: Jeanne Lee ’61, Amsterdam, Netherlands, October, 1984, photo by Frans Schellekens/Getty Images

The Newest Sound You Never Heard by Jeanne Lee ’61 and Ran Blake ’60

A downpour couldn’t dampen the spirits of the class of 2022, or those from the previous two graduating classes, but it did send them inside Stevenson Athletic Center to line up for the procession.

Commencement photos by Samuel Stuart Hollenshead

“

We need more people in leadership positions across the board who understand the struggles that people face. We need leaders who understand persistence and know what it means to be fierce in the face of adversity. It’s why representation matters. It’s why I’m so impressed by the work Bard does to ensure the doors of opportunity are open to a broad group of students who bring their whole selves to this institution—their experiences, perspectives, and struggles.”

—Deb Haaland, US Secretary of the Interior

“I could not come up here and not articulate these powerful, unnecessary, brutal, neverending traumas. Just to get on solid ground in order to speak, I had to say their names: Sandra Bland. Breonna Taylor. Trayvon Martin. Mariupol. Karkiev. Kiev. I had to stop and breathe and compose myself to compose, acknowledging that others could not breathe. Like a meditation, I had to let these realities come forcefully. Like a meditation, I had to let the preciousness of breath come. I had to breathe in the preciousness of this moment today: your graduation. I had to breathe in the visceral memories of why we are here: to celebrate all y’all’s collective achievement.”

—James Chambers ’81, Chair, Bard College Board of Trustees

“Only by fostering a shared level of excellence in education can we reclaim our sacred humanity, our individual autonomy, freedom from fear, mutual suspicion and vulnerability to unseen conspiracies that elude proof and then proceed to defeat the brute use of force, exercised either through the dictates of arbitrary laws or the barrel of a gun. Your alma mater is dedicated to the expansion of knowledge and search for truth and we invite you as alumni to join us in embracing that mission as you join the fight for freedom, justice, and democracy.”

—Leon Botstein, President, Bard College

HONORARY DEGREES

US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary; Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction; Eric L. Motley, deputy director of the National Gallery of Art; and Hannah Arendt scholar Jerome Kohn received honorary doctor of humane letters degrees. Computer scientist Jennifer Tour Chayes, whose recent work focuses on applications of machine learning in cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision making, and climate change, earned an honorary doctor of science degree. An honorary doctor of divinity degree was awarded to Joseph M. McShane, president of Fordham University in New York City. Zeena Parkins ’79 (see page 26), an electroacoustic composer and improviser, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Music at Bard College Marcus Roberts, a jazz pianist, composer, and educator, accepted honorary doctor of fine arts degrees.

James Chambers ’81, Chair, Bard College Board of Trustees (left), and Leon Botstein, President, Bard College (center)

HEART STRINGS

In April 2020, electro-acoustic composer and improviser Zeena Parkins ’79 participated in a series of quarantine concerts arranged by Chicago-based nonprofit Experimental Sound Studio. These events, which provided a way for artists to share their work during a time when most live performance opportunities had been canceled due to COVID-19, allowed her to perform new and improvised pieces that could be streamed, watched, and replayed from anywhere. Parkins, whose discography is as wide and varied as her approach to the process of sound production, has always been selfdriven and interested in the possibilities of music. The intimacy of these sessions offers a rare view of the artist at work. In a solo context, in her own studio, accompanied only by her electric harp and the various pedals connected to it, her hands translate the physicality of the instrument into sound. Knowing that she essentially invented the tools she is using only deepens the sense of connection.

Before coming to Bard, Parkins was training to be a classical pianist. She initially enrolled at University of Michigan, but quickly realized that she was, as she

says, “in a situation where experiences were limited.” She describes her decision to transfer to Bard as almost instinctual. “When I made the turn onto River Road, it was like a magnet pulling me,” she recalls. “Everything that Bard was at the time seemed idyllic to me.”

Combining the discipline from her previous studies with the freedom Bard offered gave Parkins the control she needed to refine her craft and discover the artist she would come to be. “I could indulge in this single-focused pursuit,” she says. Grabbing a coffee at Kline right before it closed, working and practicing late into the night, being surrounded by like-minded peers and collaborators, all paved the way to pioneering her own playing techniques.

“I think it’s important to understand why I play harp,” says Parkins. “It’s not an instrument that I chose to play.” While studying classical piano at Cass Technical High School in Detroit (also alma mater to Diana Ross, Donald Byrd, Regina Carter, Jack White, Ron Carter, Alice Coltrane, and many other great musicians), the school decided to socialize the solitary pianists into the orchestra by assigning

each student a new or additional instrument. “I was assigned the harp!” Parkins recalls. “ Once I started playing the instrument, it was clear that I just had some special connection to it—to the physicality of it. I really related to the [harp’s] complexities.”

Parkins’s openness to the harp’s possibilities may have contributed to her sensitivity to its potential for nuanced techniques and contemporary compositions. Playing the instrument combined aspects of dance and music that she knew and loved, and she could feel the enormous possibility that it contained. Parkins, who recieved an honorary doctor of fine arts degree this year, has designed a series of electric instruments that have allowed her to transport the harp from its usual role in classical music to the fields of experimental and avant-garde sound making. By leaning into the physical limitations of the instrument, Parkins says, “[the harp] continues to surprise and inspire me in its freshness and astounding capabilities as a sound-making device.”

BARD COLLEGE AWARDS CEREMONY

George F. Hamel Jr., founder and managing partner of Inclusive Capital Partners; trustee of Bard College; board vice chair and past president and former board member of North Beach Citizens, a San Francisco nonprofit aiding the homeless; and co-owner with his wife, Pamela Hamel, of Hamel Family Wines in Sonoma Valley, California, was awarded the Bard Medal. The John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science went to Chidi Achebe ’92 (see page 28), a physician and executive with more than 25 years of health-care experience who is chairman and CEO of African Integrated Development Enterprise (AIDE), an organization that works to bring together international companies and expertise to create sustainable, integrated delivery of

medical care on the African continent. Artist R. H. Quaytman ’83, whose work has been featured at documenta 14, the 54th Venice Biennale, and the 2010 Whitney Biennial, received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in Arts and Letters. Zach Korzyk MAT ’07 (see page 29), founder and CEO of DeltaMath, an innovative, online mathlearning platform he designed to help his own high school students, received the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service. The Mary Mccarthy Award went to Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry; finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and author of 14 books of poetry as well as works with numerous collaborators in theater, dance,

music, and the visual arts. Bryan Billings, director of global outreach at Bard College; Aselia Umetalieva, director of the International Students Office at the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan; and Omar Waraich, a writer and journalist who is a human rights advocate at the Open Society Foundations, earned the inaugural László Z. Bitó Awards for Humanitarian Service. Bardian Awards, which are given by the Bard College Alumni/ae Association to honor the service of longtime members of the Bard community, went to Marcia Acita, Thurman Barker, Norton Batkin, Daniel Berthold, Ken Buhler, Jean Churchill, Randy Clum Sr., Richard H. Davis, and Joseph Santore

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Photos by Chris Kayden

Dr. Chidi Achebe ’92 is changing the world’s healthcare systems—using investor-driven development of vital services—one continent at a time, starting with Africa. Achebe is chairman and chief executive officer of the African Integrated Development Enterprise (AIDE), a forprofit investment company whose goal is to improve health care in Africa at every level, and support sound agricultural practices, up-to-date telecommunications, and clean energy. The organization has a not-for-profit arm through which it can accept donations in support of programs, but the primary thrust is capital investment for profit.

In Africa, the need for affordable medicine is dire. While the world is facing the threat of COVID-19, African countries are also tackling the ongoing spread of fatal illnesses such as Ebola, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, sleeping sickness, and scores of other highly infectious diseases that could be controlled with adequate public access to care.

Achebe says that one of his inspirations was his father, the Man Booker International Prize–winning novelist Chinua Achebe, who was Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages

and Literature at Bard from 1990 to 2009. He died in 2013. Chidi recalls his father saying, “So you are a medical doctor. You belong to Nigeria and to the United States, a citizen of both countries. You have a master’s in public health. What are you going to do with that education?”

“My father would play thrilling mind games with me,” Achebe says. “He was always laying out the next challenge, even if I was still struggling with the current one, whether it was my medical residency or graduate school.” After earning a master’s in public health from Harvard, Chidi went on to earn an MBA at Yale School of Management. His father again asked him, “You have had the best education in the world. What are you going to do with that?”

Chidi Achebe is now combining his knowledge of medicine and public health with a Wall Street–style, investment-based approach to providing the highest quality medical service to Africa. This is an enormous undertaking, which is being backed by a consortium of German banks and other private investors, some from the United Arab Emirates. AIDE will ultimately build 18 health facilities on the African continent, beginning in Nigeria,

where AIDE is about to roll out a $200 million initial investment in infrastructure, financial oversight, and staffing. “Nigeria has a population of 200 million people, most of whom are unable to access basic medicine,” Achebe says.

Achebe has stopped practicing handson medicine so that he can focus on AIDE, which is at a critical point and will need full-time guidance through the early development stages. “In order to build confidence among our investors,” he says, “it’s very important that we have tight financial oversight and transparency, and that we show stress-proof plans to address any investor’s concerns.”

Achebe, who received the John and Samuel Bard Award in Medicine and Science at this year’s Bard College Awards, says his father was a great proponent of the sentiment “go big or go home.” Even for a man of his many strengths and talents, the challenges he is confronting will require a massive effort. But this, he can tell his father, is what he is going to do with the world’s best education. BIG! ACHEBE

Left to right: Chinua Achebe Jr., Zeal Achebe , Chidi Achebe ’92, Nnamdi Achebe, and Maureen Achebe

Photo by Chris Kayden

MATH BYTES ZACH KORZYK MAT ’07

As part of Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program (MAT), students are asked to work in New York City schools for at least four years. Zach Korzyk MAT ’07 had studied computer science and math as an undergraduate and knew that he wanted to teach in those areas. Bard’s MAT Program helped make that possible.

“Taking Real Analysis and Abstract Algebra at Bard with [Continuing Associate Professor of Mathematics] Japheth Wood challenged me mathematically with rigorous proofs,” Korzyk says. “I remember being amazed at how much progress I was able to make in that class.” Around the same time, he started teaching 11th-grade Algebra 2 at Manhattan Village Academy in New York City. “Once I felt comfortable managing the class, I started to think about how to use my programming skills to help my students learn,” Korzyk says.

He noticed that his students had certain weaknesses in common. “I was giving homework assignments on paper, and many students would come to class saying that they didn’t know where to begin,” Korzyk says. “Some would copy from others, so they would get credit, but they were not actually learning how to solve the problems. One of the things

I taught was the quadratic formula, a basic algorithm that my students were consistently making mistakes with. I knew that every single one of my students could master that algorithm if given the tools to focus on the problem.”

That thought inspired Korzyk to create an online portal where students could practice problem solving. In a few days, the first version of DeltaMath was ready for his students to access. “I made that basic program available, and the students’ results were available to me online.” Korzyk could see students’ process of learning and track how many times they repeated certain problems before they found the correct solution. “Everybody got that first DeltaMath assignment right!” Korzyk recalls. “The practice problems pointed them directly to their weaknesses and each student eventually got there.”

Over a few months in 2009, Korzyk developed problems for the DeltaMath portal covering about 50 other basic mathematical skills needed in Algebra 2. The following summer, he rewrote the entire program, adding the ability for any teacher to adjust the assignments to their needs. “In 2010–11, I had about 100 teachers signed up. It spread by word of

mouth,” he says. At that time, most of the teachers using DeltaMath were in New York City, where Korzyk was teaching.

“In a math classroom at that level, the first part of each day’s class is usually focused on teaching the concepts and the later part on practicing,” says Korzyk. “With DeltaMath supporting their progress at home, I could spend more time in class developing students’ understanding.”

DeltaMath was free to users until 2020, but with two million students and tens of thousands of teachers using the portal, it became necessary for Korzyk to make some adjustments. “I was the only person working on it,” he says. “I knew I had to dedicate myself full time to DeltaMath and hire some people for programming, support for teachers, and other aspects of the business.” Korzyk left his teaching position three weeks before COVID-19 closed down most of the country. The need for online learning became intense, and DeltaMath was there to fill the need. Bard honored Korzyk with the 2022 John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service at the Bard College Awards Ceremony.

Left

Photo

BY LUCY SANTE

Gilles Peress, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing from the chapter “The Last Night”

Gilles Peress, who came to Bard in 2008 and is now Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography, has been a front-line photographer his entire working life. He joined Magnum Photos in 1971, when he was 25, and has since served the cooperative twice as president and three times as vice president; his page on the agency’s website still lists him as “Available for work.” He has published 11 books, of which his most recent counts as two, although maybe it should be three or four: the two massive volumes of Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (Steidl, 2021), his chronicle of the Troubles in the North of Ireland, and the equally stout companion volume of historical and geographical reference, Annals of the North.

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing constitutes one leg of his ongoing series Hate Thy Brother (the first, Farewell to Bosnia, came out in 1994, followed by The Silence: Rwanda a year later). Peress went to Derry in 1972, and right away he witnessed the British Army’s massacre of 14 civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. Within a year he had embedded himself so thoroughly that his photographs were often called upon as evidence in court. He developed many local ties, sometimes deep and sometimes tragic; one of his closest Republican friends turned out to be an informer and was killed by the Irish Republican Army. It is clear from the work—the title comes from the IRA’s “Green Book”—that Peress left a part of his soul in Ulster.

The plates are not organized chronologically but in 22 chapters that represent thematic “days”—“Day of Internment,” “Day of Roses,” “Prison Days”—spanning the better part of two decades. The “Prod” (Protestant) and “Taig” (Catholic) sides are represented evenly; Peress gives a clear measure of the ways the two seem to share a culture as well as being irreconcilably warring states. The pictures are immersively horizontal; they appear cinematic by virtue of their dimensions, size, and at least implied action. Peress’s photos are never at rest; violence is always imminent if not present, and people are typically all headed in different directions; even his gravestones seem to be in motion. The vast sequence of images—representing not a timeline but a series of existential crises that recur like rituals, and also play out in headlines, TV news footage, and above all graffiti—rises in waves and recedes into choppiness, as capacious as a 19th-century novel but as indeterminate as an ocean.

So many elements of Peress’s style have been echoed or imitated by others that they have become part of the vocabulary of photo reportage, particularly his wide-angle condensation of scenes, his radically edited framing to expose the bones of a scene, his collage-like stackups of contrasting planes. But his own use of those approaches is inimitable, because of the way he uses them—sometimes almost subliminally—to convey the emotional fog that hangs invisibly in the air above a scene. His individual images are brilliant and memorable, but his sequences are of a whole other order, documenting events urgently and somehow kaleidoscopically. His way of seeing, forged from crisis, is stark and blunt and immediate, and chiseled and classical and lapidary.

Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante has been at Bard since 1999.

BOOKS BY BARDIANS

The Herods by Bruce Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion

The Herodian dynasty’s control of Judea (the region surrounding Jerusalem as well as the northern stretch once known as the kingdom of Israel) on behalf of Rome was crucial to the development of Judaism and Christianity. As Chilton shows, the religions were shaped by the fraught relations between various groups of early Jews as well as by the political dynamics of the period.

Wealth by Yuval Elmelech, associate professor of sociology Elmelech presents a dynamic sociological framework of wealth attainment that illuminates the effects of cumulative advantages and disadvantages over the course of an individual’s life and across generations. He explains why personal wealth has become increasingly important to our understanding of social mobility and stratification.

Hugh Lenox Scott, 1853–1934 by Armand S. La Potin ’62

In the wake of the Little Bighorn debacle, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry was seeking to subdue the Plains tribes and confine them to reservations. Second Lieutenant Hugh Lenox Scott adopted the role of negotiator and advocate for the Indian “adversaries.” This is the first book to tell the full story of this self-avowed “soldier of peace,” whose long career reflected profound historical changes.

The Intellectual Property of Nations

by Laura R. Ford, assistant professor of sociology

Tracing the development of intellectual property as a new type of legal property in the modern nation-state system, Ford reflects on the role of intellectual property in contemporary political communities and societies; on the close relationship between law and religion; and on the extent to which law’s obliging force depends on ancient written traditions.

Birthing a Movement by Renée Ann Cramer ’94

Framed by gripping narratives from midwives across the country and drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic and archival research to examine the interactions of law, politics, and activism surrounding midwifery care, Cramer’s latest book parses out the often-paradoxical priorities with which midwives must engage: seeking formal professionalization, advocating for reproductive justice, and resisting statecentered approaches.

The All-Consuming Nation by Mark H. Lytle, Lyford Patterson and Mary Gray Edwards Professor of History Emeritus

In his 1958 “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon argued that the freedom to consume defined the American way of life. Lytle investigates the environmental and sociocultural costs of the consumer capitalism framework set in place in the 20th century, shedding light on the consequences of a national identity forged through mass consumption.

Please Wait to Be Tasted by Carla Perez-Gallardo ’10 and Hannah Black

The tropical comfort food at Lil’ Deb’s Oasis, in Hudson, New York, is incredible. And the place itself is equally fabulous, because the people are as spicy and delicious as the cooking. Now—if you’re willing to open your heart and your palate—you can create their “hot, sticky, juicy, moist fever dreams of flavor” in your own kitchen.

The Power of the Downstate by Sara Mednick ’94

Mednick, a renowned sleep expert and UC Irvine professor of cognitive science, explains the “downstate,” which is the key to rest and rejuvenation on a cellular level. The book lays out a customizable, four-week, evidence-based program that encompasses all the most up-todate findings from autonomic, sleep, circadian rhythms, exercise physiology, and nutrition research.

Modern Instances by Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts

The essays, photographs, stories, and excerpts in this memoir document the rich and surprising touchstones that make up more than half a century of groundbreaking work. Drawing on decades of teaching, this is an essential handbook for anyone interested in learning more about mastering one’s craft and the distinct threads that come together to inform a creative voice.

Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead by Ahndraya Parlato ’02

The birth of Parlato’s children and her mother’s suicide are at the heart of an expansive project exploring the contradictory and complex conditions of motherhood. The text and images weave the political and historical with the deeply personal, bringing together narratives from across genres and generations to create a nuanced and compelling work.

Broken Promises by Bonnie Suchman ’80

Suchman pieces together the history of her father-in-law’s family, whose business played a role in the development of Germany as an industrial power. They were driven to succeed, strongly patriotic, and believed the German government’s promises to provide Jews with the same rights enjoyed by other German citizens; they were repaid by either having all of their property stolen or by being murdered in the Holocaust.

Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought by Kristin Waters ’73

This work of recovery tells a crucial, almost-forgotten story of African Americans of early nineteenth-century America, including that of Maria W. Stewart, who said to a gathering at the African Masonic Hall on Boston’s Beacon Hill in 1833, “African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States.”

Dear Bardians,

Congratulations to the Class of 2022 on your achievements, and a hearty welcome to the Bard College Alumni/ae Association. We are so pleased to have you in our ranks! This year marked Bard’s 162nd Commencement, and a number of incredible milestones have been reached. As a former Trustee Leader Scholar (TLS) project leader myself, I’m very excited to see the TLS program reach its 25th year. Kudos to Paul Marienthal and all the staff.

In some of our biggest news to date, we are thrilled with the progress that has been made toward meeting the $500 million challenge grant from George Soros and the Open Society Foundations. Ensuring the secure footing of the College, this incredible gift and all the contributions toward the challenge will allow Bard to continue to be the leader in higher education with a focus on social justice. That so much has been accomplished is a testament to the people who work and study in Annandale and elsewhere in the Bard universe. I can’t wait to see what else the College can achieve with this formidable base of funding in place.

This issue of the Bardian features a number of remarkable stories, including a portfolio of photographs by Distinguished Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Photography Gilles Peress with text by Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante; a piece on jazz singer, poet, and composer Jeanne Lee ’61 written by Alex Benson, assistant professor of literature; and an appreciation of one of the greatest Raptors to ever thrill a Stevenson Gymnasium crowd, Christina Kiser ’22.

As our newest Bardians head out into the (crazy) world, the alumni/ae association looks forward to meeting them in all corners of the globe. If you have internships available, are interested in mentoring fellow Bardians, or would like to participate in other alumni/ae association events, please be in touch—we would love to have you join us in building affinity and interaction for Bardians of all eras.

Yours in idealism, activism, curiosity, and inquiry! Bardian and Proud

KC Serota ’04, President, Board of Governors, Bard College Alumni/ae Association alumni@bard.edu

KC Serota ’04 (left), and Mollie Meikle ’03, vice president and development committee cochair of the board of governors of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association, at the Bard College Awards Ceremony, 2022

P hoto by Chris Kayden

CLASS NOTES

2021

Cecily Rosenbaum was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to do PhD work in chemistry.

2019

Martin Katzoff received a stipend from the William C. Mullen Memorial Fund to support his work in the exhibition Fata

Morgana: UBC Master of Fine Arts Graduate Exhibition 2021, which was on view at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia from April 30 to May 30, 2021.

Mána Taylor and Telo Hoy cofounded The Documentarian magazine in May 2020 and have

recently published their fifth issue. Since its inception, the magazine has featured work from Bard classmates including Natasha Ayaz, Nicholas Benning, Morgan Bielawski, Nathaniel Carlsen ’18, Paige Eckensberger, Shiraz Fazli, Graham Nau, Eric Raimondi, Janine Rogers, Franklin Savulich, Nina Tanujaya, Melina Young, and Alex Zondervan documentarianmag.com

2018

Hasani J. Gunn is the new pro gram director of Friday Night Supper Program, a Boston-based nonprofit community meal pro gram dedicated to hunger relief. He had been supporting the City

of Chicago’s COVID-19 mass-vac cination operations, working with the mayor’s office to develop two large-scale, sector-specific vac cine distribution and equity plans to guide the city’s mass vaccina tion efforts, and serving as the vaccination operation center point of contact and lead planner for the manufacturing and food and agriculture industries. Following his disaster-response work in Chicago, Hasani, who is a member of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors, accepted an offer from Harvard University to pursue his master of public policy degree. As part of his graduate studies at Harvard, he will serve as a public policy and international affairs fellow at the

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

2017

Nathaniel Sullivan performed in the chamber music concert

Songs for the Earth—a collabo ration between Fordham University’s Voices Up! series and musicians from the ensemble Contemporaneous—in Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in February 2022. Nathaniel also sang in two world premieres for baritone and chamber ensemble: “Lemur” by Joshua Groffman and “Ecospheres” by Lawrence Kramer (husband of Bard profes sor emerita Nancy Leonard),

Reunion photos by Brennan

Memory Poem

obsolete against the snowless pavement to love again beholden to a fragment of distress spoken through the image of a boyish breast when Jane was my solace beamed in through padlocked digital doors glowering on the fire escape the leakage of someone else’s living and the brackish boy through the familiar grate at the end of the aisle someone happened but the doors are gated now in all my young lust I forgot and thought I was santa agata standing in the rain and couldn’t say myself enough out of that room now the sky is so blue everyday the sliding mask of winter even the traffic and the birds keep going agoraphobic days reaching over the years were never single split in sunlight nothing fades the brushing skin when imagined skinless out of being catch the brakes that vehicle has gone too far again and all I want is back those moonbeamy nights on the roof or to quiver with the branches that could be the free crown of another sky violence proclivity shuddering and the afternoon languor I’d wait up for an idea of heaven never left for dead

which both featured texts by poet Elisabeth Frost; and in Julius Eastman’s “Stay On It.” It was an absolute dream team; he felt deeply fortunate to perform with David Bloom ’13 and Contemporaneous (a Bardfounded group of wildly skilled musicians).

2016

Photographer Jessica Chappe is thrilled to have recently relocated to the Hudson Valley. She is the author and photographer of “A Look inside Poughkeepsie’s Witchcraft District” in the Albany Times Union and “Inside a 22Person Pandemic Pod in a Hudson Valley Hotel” on Curbed. jessicachappe.com

2015

Sophie Lazar is a research assis tant on a study of smoking cessa tion rates among HIV-positive smokers, while working on her master of public health degree (with a concentration in epidemi ology) at the Brown University School of Public Health. Prior to attending Brown, she worked for three years as a project coordi nator at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program in Boston, Massachusetts. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine (2016–17) and an Open Society Foundations Fellowship to Kyrgyzstan (2015–16).

Sylvia Gorelick ’13 is a poet, writer, and translator based in New York City. She graduated from Bard with a BA in philosophy and is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she is focusing on transnational feminisms. Her translation of Mallarmé’s The Book was published by Exact Change in 2018 and her translation of Marc de Launay’s Nietzsche and Race is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.

Poetry selection by Kostas Anagnopoulos MFA '99.

Jackson Rollings is senior com munications manager at SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design studio, working on climate adaptation projects across the United States. SCAPE was featured last year in the New Yorker and on CNN.

2014

Amanda Blohm has released a women’s contemporary fiction novel under her pen name, Caroline Frank, called In for a Penny. Based on her experiences while completing a public policy MA at King’s College London, the story is a coming-of-age dramedy that follows none other than Penny, a young woman from New York City, who is forced to recon sider who she is as a person and what she wants in life. She goes all the way to London, where she

finds an amazing group of friends who will rally together to get her through anything. Penny goes through heart break and hookups, battles bulimia and sexual assault, puts herself out there and finds new love. Amanda is working on her second novel.

2012

On December 1, 2021, Jeremy Beliveau began work as public art project manager for the city of Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture. Jeremy will be managing projects funded by Seattle’s 1% for Art program, which fosters tem porary and permanent public art installations throughout the city.

Lola Kirke released her sec ond album, Lady for Sale (Third Man Records), which she describes as ’80s Dolly [Parton] hanging out with ‘Stand Back’ Stevie [Nicks] at Donna Summers’s birthday party, which is being held in

Tanya Tucker’s RV.” The first music video from the album, “Better Than Any Drug,” was directed by Alex O Eaton ’14

2011

Kit Schluter received a grant from the William C. Mullen Memorial Fund, which he will use to translate three books by Bruno Darío, a young Mexican poet, the first of which, feast, fright, will be published by Ugly Duckling Press next year. Schluter’s translation of Mexican author Rafael Bernal’s 1947 work of proto-ecofiction, His Name Was Death (New Directions), is out now, as is his trans lation, from the French, of Montreal author Olivia Tapiero’s recent novel Phototaxis (Nightboat Books). Schluter’s first book of poetry, Pierrot’s Fingernails, was published by Canarium Books in 2020. But wait, there’s more: kitschluter.com.

2007

Howard Megdal has been back on campus, doing com mentary on the livestream of men’s and women’s basket ball games for Bard Athletics. His latest book, The Baseball Talmud, a position-by-posi tion guide to Jewish baseball players, was released by Triumph Books in May. Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez ’16 recently completed an overseas tour, playing in Paris, Barcelona, and London. She performed music from her debut album, If They’re Mine, produced by Jake SokolovGonzalez ’13. The album also features performances by Luke McCrosson, who plays bass in Raina’s band. The tour finished with a homecoming show at the Sultan Room in Brooklyn, New York. You can stay up to date on her Instagram, @rainasokolovgonzalez, or her website, rainasokolovgonzalez.com.

2003

Candice B. Hopkins contributed an essay to Nicholas Galanin: Never Forget (Minor Matters, 2021).

2001

Jenny Riffle is coauthor with Molly Landreth of It’s Raining. . . I Love You: Self-Portraits by Molly Landreth and Jenny Riffle, which was featured on the Boston Globe’s Love Letters podcast, among other local and national press.

1999

Laura Chipley is a New York City–based multimedia artist who recently became an associ ate professor in the American Studies department at SUNY Old Westbury. Her recent art projects include Newtown Creek Armada, an interactive boat pond created in a New York Superfund site, and Appalachian Mountaintop Patrol, an initiative that works with West Virginia environmental activists to use drones and other surveil lance technology to chronicle the effects of mountaintop removal coal mining. Laura received a 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Projects for the Public Discovery grant for her forthcoming project, Virtual Aquapolis, a VR documentary that explores the relationship between human history and underwater ecosystems in New York Harbor. She lives in a creepy old house in Queens, New York, with her husband, Pierre, daugh ters Sylvie and Tula, and their dog, Angela.

Dave Valdini ’06 (far right) married Shannon McGregor in a very small ceremony on April 8, 2021, in Durham, North Carolina. The union was officiated by a friend of the bride and witnessed by Nsikan Akpan ’06

A much larger celebration will be held at a later date, and attended by many more Bardians!

Em Sauter’s ’05 second book, Hooray for Craft Beer!, was published in April, by Brewers Publications. Em is an award-winning cartoonist, holder of an Advanced Cicerone certificate, public speaker, and international beer judge. She publishes daily visual beer education graphics on her website, Pints and Panels. pintsandpanels.com

1995

Michelle Dunn Marsh recently published Seeing Being Seen: A Personal History of Photography (Minor Matters). The text-based memoir is punctuated by images by some of American photography’s master practitioners—including Susan Weber Professor in the Arts and Director of the Photography Program Stephen Shore, Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor in the Arts An-My Lê, Professor Emeritus of Photography Larry Fink, and Lisa Kereszi ’95—that were gifted to Dunn Marsh, obtained through trade, or purchased in support of nonprofit arts organizations. Portraits of the author by Shore, Fink, Sylvia Plachy, Will Wilson, and others punctuate a loosely chronological narrative exploring her evolution of seeing, the influences of family, education, geographies, mentors, and photography itself on that process, and her commitment to the printed book as a vessel of future histories. In an interview with Humble Arts Foundation—a pioneering hub for new photography and an international resource for photographers, art professionals, collectors, and the public that was cofounded by Jon Feinstein ’03—Dunn Marsh said of the book’s title, “There is, of course, a bit of wordplay—I have made a living seeing, and have definitely served in very public roles. Has my being always been seen? Well, no. But in this third decade of the 21st century, there seems to be a bit more effort in some spaces to try and work on accepting people in their totality, regardless of the boxes we often, even in the creative sector, try to squish people within.”

1993

Danielle Woerner writes from the Bold Coast of Maine: Exciting news—my first book is out! I Never Promised You a Cherry Orchard: Japanese Short-Form Poetry, Served with a Twist, pub lished July 2021 by Sunrise Song Press, was a gleam in my eye for about a decade. The chapbook of haiku, senryu, tanka, and photohaiga, illustrated throughout with my photos, loosely traces a life journey from New York City through the Mid-Hudson Valley to scenic Maine. It’s available on Amazon and also directly from me, and I continue to work on get ting it into independent stores. daniellewoerner.com

1987

L. Syd M. Johnson is a professor in the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at Upstate Medical University. She recently pub lished The Ethics of Uncertainty: Entangled Ethical and Epistemic Risks in Disorders of Consciousness with Oxford University Press.

1986

Flutter, the new film by Mark Street, was shown at the Paris International Short Film Festival and the Seoul International Short Film Festival.

1978

Vladimir Cubano retired from dentistry in 2018 and is in Florida, happily working the stock market.

1976

Walter Holland’s fourth book of poetry, Reconstruction, was pub lished in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. His novel, The March, was published by Hard Candy Book in 1996, and a revised edition came out in 2011 from Chelsea Station Editions. His essays, book reviews, journal articles, short fic tion, and poetry have appeared in many fine journals and anthol ogies. After earning his BA from Bard in dance and English, he danced in New York City for sev eral years before becoming a physical therapist, while simulta

neously earning a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. Walter taught English literature with a focus on American poetry for 10 years as an adjunct profes sor at the New School. He retired from physical therapy in 2015 and now lives in New York City with his husband, Howard Frey. For more information, visit walterhollandwriter.com.

1963

Phyllis Chesler has published 11 books in the 21st century, includ ing The New Anti-Semitism (2003), An American Bride in Kabul (2013), A Politically Incorrect Feminist (2018), and Requiem for a Female Serial Killer (2020). Her work has been trans lated into many European lan guages, and into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Hebrew. Phyllis spent 2021 working with a small team of European and American feminist activists engaged in the “digital Dunkirk” rescue of endangered educated Afghan women. She has pub lished many articles about this

work as well as about antiSemitism, terrorism, cancel cul ture, Israel, free speech, censorship, opera, and honor kill ing. Based on her four studies about honor killing, Phyllis has submitted affidavits on behalf of women who are seeking political asylum. She appeared on AriaCode to talk about the opera Lucia di Lammermoor with the great Natalie Dessay and Rhiannon Giddens. Phyliss’s work has been published in venues such as Achgut, American Thinker, Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence, Fohla de S. Paulo, FrontPage Magazine, The Investigative Project on Terrorism, Listy z Naszego Sadu, Tablet Magazine, and 4W (Fourth Wave). Her work is archived at her website, phyllis-chesler.com.

MILTON AVERY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE ARTS

2019

Sculptor Brandon Ndife had four pieces in the New Museum 2021 Triennial, Soft Water Hard Stone His work, described by the New Yorker as “otherworldly amal gams of the man-made and the organic,” was perfect for an exhi bition whose aim was to “explore states of transformation, calling attention to the malleability of structures and the fluid and adaptable potential of both tech nological and organic media.”

2009

Julia Klein, founder of Soberscove Press, recently pub lished Wolf Tones, in which Maximilian Goldfarb, Nancy Shaver (sculpture faculty), and Sterrett Smith present “an orchestrated cacophony of their distinct artworks and the source imagery from which they draw inspiration.” The text is by Stan Allen, Charles Curtis, Pradeep Dalal ’05, Stacy Wakefield Forte, Anna Friz, Klein, Ann Lauterbach (David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature), Catherine Lord, Matana Roberts, and David Levi Strauss (writing faculty). “In the contributors to this book,” writes Klein, “I see a reflection of the genre-blurring, inquisitive, con vention-challenging, and gener ous nature of the MFA Program itself. Members of the Bard MFA community are embedded in the fabric of Soberscove in endless ways.”

BARD GRADUATE CENTER

2020

Laura J. Allen (MA) won a Founding Presidents Award from the Textile Society of America for a paper investigating artistic and social aspects of a unique 19thcentury Tlingit textile. In addition, the Montclair Art Museum has named her curator of Native American art, a position funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. At the museum, Laura is working to build strong relationships with Native communities and revital ize exhibitions and presentations of Native North American arts.

2019

Rebecca Sandler Perten (PhD) has been appointed by the Jewish Theological Seminary to the position of assistant dean, Kekst Graduate School and List College.

2017

Michael H. Dewberry (MA) used his time in quarantine to record and launch a new podcast called Artroverted. Each week he speaks with leaders and changemakers in the arts, from artists to museum directors and everyone in between. He’s excited to share it with the world and looks for ward to inviting fellow BGC grads to appear on future episodes. Head over to his website at artorverted.buzzsprout.com to listen and subscribe.

Congratulations to Darienne Turner (MA), assistant curator of Indigenous art of the Americas at the Baltimore Museum of Art, on

the exhibition Stripes and Stars: Reclaiming Lakota Independence, which explored the multifaceted meanings of the American flag through nine beaded artworks created by Lakota women in the early Reservation Period.

2016

Fashion, Society, and the First World War (Bloomsbury Visual Arts), a publication edited by Maude Bass-Krueger (PhD), offers a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the war on the ways that the fashion industry functioned in a global wartime economy as well as on the ways that women and men negotiated this new world.

2015

Debra Schmidt Bach (PhD), curator of decorative arts at the New-York Historical Society, was featured in the New York Times article “What We Found in Robert Caro’s Yellowed Files,” on acquir ing the archives and records of the journalist and author. A per manent Caro exhibition opened last fall. nyhistory.org

Claire McRee (MA) curated last year’s exhibition New Century, New Woman at the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania. The show explored American women’s new personal and politi cal freedoms at the turn of the 20th century through the lens of fashion.

2013

Arpine Konyalian Grenier MFA ’98

The Lilly Library of Indiana University, Bloomington, has acquired the archive of Arpine Konyalian Grenier. Born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, Grenier worked in cardiovascular research, human resources development, and regulatory finance while writing—first music, then poetry—during lunch breaks and on weekends. She has published three books of poetry, numerous scientific and literary papers, and literary translations

ral fellowship in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the Met’s Costume Institute to study women’s visual and material experience of dress during the 1970s through the cross analysis of surviving garments, image, and oral history. Her first book, Prêtà-Porter, Paris and Women: A Cultural Study of French Readymade Fashion, 1945-68, came out in August.

2004

Michelle Hargrave (MA), executive director of the Figge Art Museum, was featured in an article in the Quad-City Times in which she discussed how the museum adapted to the pan demic and how it prepared for its exhibition For America, featuring more than 90 paintings by American artists from 1810 through 2010, drawn from the collections of the National Academy of Design in New York.

In April, Irene Sunwoo (MA) joined the Art Institute of Chicago as the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator, Architecture and Design. Irene comes to the Art Institute from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where she had been curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery and director of exhibitions since 2016.

Sophie Pitman (MA) is the Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and research director of the Center for Design and Material Culture in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is working to further the devel opment of the center’s textiles collection through curatorial research and programming, teaching and educational pro grams, and outreach to users both on and beyond campus.

2010

Alexis Romano (MA) was the 2020–21 Gerald and Mary Ellen Ritter Memorial Fund Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was awarded this postdocto

CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES

2021

Bernardo Mosqueira is the ISLAA Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum, where he was part of the curatorial team and con tributed to the catalogue for the Fifth New Museum Triennial, Soft Water Hard Stone (October 28, 2021 – January 23, 2022). He also curated the exhibitions

Screens Series: Aline Motta (August 24 – November 3, 2021), Daniel Lie: Unnamed Entities (February 17 – June 5, 2022), and, with Margot Norton, Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca: Five Times Brazil (June 30 –October 9, 2022). In addition to his fellowship at the New

Museum, Mosqueira is artistic director at Solar dos Abacaxis (since 2015) and director of Premio FOCO ArtRio (since 2011), both in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.

2020

Rachel Vera Steinberg, curator and director of exhibitions at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York, has joined the Fashion Institute of Technology as a parttime faculty member, teaching a professional practices class in the Fine Arts program.

2019

Dain Oh is curator at Barakat Contemporary in Seoul, South Korea. She has also been working as a coeditor of the publication and production manager for artist Chung Seoyoung’s upcoming semi-retrospective at Seoul Museum of Art.

2017

Lian Ladia has been curator of exhibitions and programs at the David Ireland House at 500 Capp Street, in San Francisco, California, since October 2020. With a commitment to mentor ships, public engagement, and accessibility, she has established an artist residency program, an education program, and built an archive team.

2016

Humberto Moro is deputy direc tor of programs at the Dia Art Foundation, where he oversees the Curatorial, Exhibition Design and Installation, Learning and Engagement, and Publications departments. Moro will play a key role in determining Dia’s future development and direction as it looks toward its 50th anniver sary, in 2024, and beyond.

2014

Last year, Nicola Ricciardi was appointed artistic director of miart, the international modern and contemporary art fair of Milan, Italy. More than 140 gal leries from 21 different countries come together to exhibit master pieces from the early 20th cen tury as well as creations of the latest generations of artists.

2011

Natasha Marie Llorens, profes sor of art and theory at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, was awarded a two-year curatorial research grant to develop a proj ect on the Algerian government’s political and architectural “1000 socialist villages” initiative with contemporary artist Massinissa Selmani.

2010

In March, Sohrab Mohebbi took over as the director of SculptureCenter in Long Island City, New York. He had been curator-at-large there while serv ing as the curator for the 2022 Carnegie International, the oldest biennial-style exhibition in the United States, which will run through April 2, 2023

2006

Erica Battle (née Fisher) has been promoted to John Alchin and Hal Marryatt Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

2004

Tairone Bastien cocurated the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, What Water Knows, The Land Remembers (March 26 – June 5, 2022), and he joined the Faculty of Art at Ontario College of Art and Design as an assistant pro fessor in criticism and curatorial practice.

2003

Ingrid Pui Yee Chu recently com pleted the fourth edition of BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair as associate curator at Tai Kwun Contemporary, including curated projects with Jun Yang and others. Chu also curated an independent project, Breaching Sanctum, as a Design Trust Feature Grant recipient at Tai Kwun Contemporary, and her writing appears in Tokens from Time (Hatje Cantz, 2022) by BMW Art Journey winner Leelee Chan through Art Basel, where Chu is a contributing writer.

2001

Ilaria Bonacossa has been picked to lead a new digital art museum in Milan, Italy. She will serve as director of the Museum of Digital

Art, which is expected to open in 2026. According to Italy’s culture minister, Dario Franceschini, the museum will play “a strategic role in the contemporary cultural scene, which is increasingly digi tized, connected, and globalized.”

1998

In 2021, Sarah Cook was a Mellon-funded senior academic fellow on the research project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum, at Tate in London. She continues to teach museology, exhibition development, and “curating lively practices” at University of Glasgow.

1996

Gilbert Vicario, the Selig Family Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art at Phoenix Art Museum, is cocurating the California Biennial along with Elizabeth Armstrong and Essence Harden at the Orange County Museum of Art, opening October 8, 2022. Vicario is also cocurat ing an exhibition with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill titled Xican-a.o.x. Body for the American Federation of Arts in New York City, opening spring 2023.

CONDUCTORS INSTITUTE/ GRADUATE CONDUCTING PROGRAM

2005

Elizabeth Askren returned to Dallas, Texas, in November 2021 to collaborate with the Dallas Opera and Dallas Symphony Orchestra to foster leadership and inclusivity in classical music. Elizabeth continues to be fea tured as a master teacher at Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute, a groundbreaking program designed to address the extreme gender imbalance of leadership in opera. She also appeared as a guest speaker for Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Women in Classical Music symposium, which featured performances, networking events, talks, and panel discussions on topics rel evant to women in classical music. elizabethaskren.com

IN MEMORIAM 1943

Henry Chandler Jr., 100, died October 26, 2020.

1947

Edison J. Nuñez Jr., 98, died July 21, 2021. Nuñez was accepted into the Army Specialized Training Program at Bard, where he studied with economist Franco Modigliani, winner of a Nobel Prize in 1985. Nuñez is survived by his children Diane, Edison III, and James. His wife, Louise, died in 2012.

1948

Susan (Wender) LowensteinKitchell, 95, died January 8, 2022. She began her studies in music, dance, and composition at Bard after the Army Specialized Training Program ended in Annandale and Bard became coeducational. She was a found ing member of the Abortion Rights Fund of Western Massachusetts and a strong sup porter of Tapestry Health, which is dedicated to reproductive rights and HIV prevention. She was predeceased by her first hus band, Jerold Lowenstein, and her second husband, Peter Kitchell.

Nina Green Rosenfield, 94, died September 9, 2021. After gradu ating from Bard, Green Rosenfield earned her teaching credential, specializing in early child devel opment, from the Bank Street School for Education and taught nursery school in New York City. In 1961, she and her family moved from Long Island, New York, to Chico, California, along with 12 other families. There they founded a health food store, and launched Chico-San, the first macrobiotic food manufacturing company in the United States, whose rice cakes soon became ubiquitous. From 1966 to 1975, she lived with her family in Synanon, where she also taught children. After leaving the contro versial group, she joined KPFK radio in Los Angeles and she later became a researcher for the Los Angeles Times. Green Rosenfield is survived by her daughter, Nora; son, Adam; stepdaughters Jeanne and Carolyn; and stepson, David.

1949

Lila Scherl, 93, died July 27, 2021. Lila was a proud graduate of the second class of women admitted to Bard College, and a beloved elementary school teacher in New Rochelle, New York. She is survived by her chil dren: Ellen, Nancy, and David.

1950

Barbara Sue Italie (née Markel) died May 1, 2021, one day shy of her 93rd birthday. After gradu ating from Bard, Italie earned master’s degrees in political science from Columbia University and library science from Pratt Institute. She is survived by her husband of 68 years, Ralph, and children Grace, Michael, and Hillel.

Lewis J. Silvers Jr., 92, died November 7, 2021. Silvers gradu ated from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and majored in English at Bard. He earned an MA in elementary and art education at New York University and later settled in Palo Alto, California, where he taught 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-grade classes for 28 years. He was a talented and prolific art ist, working in pastels, watercolor, and acrylic gouache. Silvers is survived by his twin brother, Willys, and sister, Myra.

1951

Judith Bennett, 93, died October 11, 2021. After her third daughter, Betsy, was diagnosed as severely mentally challenged, Judy became an early and tireless advocate for the importance of bringing mentally challenged people into the community. She cofounded Episcopal Group Homes and served on its board from 1977 to 2017. She is sur vived by her daughters, Susan, Kathy, and Betsy.

Elizabeth “Betty” Haviland, 92, died October 29, 2021. Betty met Douglas Haviland ’50 at Bard, and after they were married she sup ported his work as an Episcopal priest, while raising eight children. An ardent Democrat, Betty was a member of the League of Women Voters and the Story County (Iowa) Democrats. Betty is sur vived by her children Susan, Bruce, Andrew, Margaret, David,

Stephen, and Mark; sister, Karen Mitchell, and brother, Ralph Bauer.

1953

Joanne (Pines) Hersh died October 21, 2019. Joanne was for 57 years the wife of Judge Jerome J. Hersh, who died in 2009. She is survived by her sister, Doris Pines Markoff, and children John, Richard, and Anne.

1955

Richard Durant Rice, 88, died October 3, 2021. Rice majored in biology at Bard, studied library science at the University of Rhode Island, and served in the Army Medical Corps from 1956 to 1958. A skilled graphic designer, Rice drew illustrations for children’s books and took courses at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Michael Rosse died May 22, 2021.

Photojournalist Steve Schapiro, 87, died January 15, 2022. Though Schapiro’s origin story dates his interest in photography to summer camp at age 9, at Bard he focused on writing. He studied with Saul Bellow, moved to Paris after graduation to work on his novel, and returned to his native New York City having discovered he was not the next Bellow. In France he also discovered Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, one of the most impor tant and influential photobooks of the 20th century, and in 1961 he studied with celebrated photogra pher W. Eugene Smith at his “Jazz Loft” on Sixth Avenue and 29th Street. Schapiro embarked on a project documenting migrant workers in Arkansas, which led to assignments for Life magazine, and a lifelong commitment to activism. Schapiro is survived by his wife of 39 years, Maura Smith; sons Theophilus Donoghue and Adam Schapiro; and daughters Elle Harvey and Taylor Schapiro.

1956

Lynn Bach, 86, died September 28, 2021. After graduating from Bard, Bach earned a master’s in social work from Simmons University and a master’s in edu cation from Columbia University,

and became a skilled psychother apist. She is survived by her hus band, Victor; son, Jonathan; and daughter, Elizabeth.

Marvin Flicker, 86, died July 17, 2021. Marvin earned his MD at Chicago Medical School, and completed his residency at the Menninger School of Psychiatry. He was on the faculties of the Psychoanalytic Center of California, California Graduate Institute, and the New Center for Psychoanalysis. He is survived by his wife, Carol-Ann; and daugh ters Briar, Laura, and Amy. He was predeceased by his brother Ted Flicker ’52; his brother Robert died in January 2022.

1958

Tobey Titus, 85, died January 28, 2022. Tobey was a photographer and painter, and worked as an assistant to legendary photogra pher Richard Avedon. She spent many summers in Woodstock, New York, and moved to Bearsville in 1975. She is survived by her brother, Tad Crawford.

1961

Thomas Dengler died December 22, 2021. He was a supporter of Bard’s Human Rights Program (HRP), including HRP student internships and scholarships, and the Bard College Fund. He trans ferred after his second year, but kept Bard, the beauty of Blithewood Garden, the people, and his professors—including Robert Koblitz and Heinrich Blücher—in his heart and mind. He admired the Bard Music Festival and its exploration of underappreciated composers. Hans Pfitzner was his favorite, and he most enjoyed programs that included his compositions.

Patricia Goodheart died June 17, 2021. She was 82. Along with her late husband, David Landreth Van Vactor, she was a founder of Canto, a literary quarterly, and Van Vactor & Goodheart, a pub lisher. Her novel The Translator was widely praised; and she translated and promoted The Words to Say It, Marie Cardinal’s fictionalized account of her psy choanalysis. In her later years, Goodheart turned to painting,

interior decorating, and operating her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home as a bed and breakfast. She is survived by her brother, Jon Somer; her children, Eric Goodheart, Jessica Goodheart, and Nicholas Van Vactor; and her stepson, David Van Vactor.

1962

Charles Richard Haun, 86, died November 26, 2021. After serving with the US Army in Germany, Haun attended Bard, where he was feature editor for the student newspaper and met and married Carol Kimball ’60. Haun taught English at the Park School of Buffalo, was a newspaper reporter for the North Adams Transcript (which later merged with the Berkshire Eagle), and ran the nonprofit Community Action Committee of Cape Cod & Islands. He cofounded and was vice president of Citizens Energy with Joseph P. Kennedy II. Haun was predeceased by Carol, his brother, Robert, and sisters Elizabeth Palm and Nancy Hoffman. He is survived by his sons Christopher, Geoffrey, Jonathan, Nicholas, and David; and sisters Mary Frances Salley and Susan Blondino.

Stephen A. Hurowitz, 80, died November 27, 2021. Hurowitz was a graduate of Bronx High School of Science, and at Bard majored in chemistry. In 1958, he helped res urrect the student newspaper (The Bardian). He became editor in 1960, and the periodical was soon renamed the Bard Observer A year after college, Hurowitz was drafted into the US Army and assigned to Ft. Lee, Virginia, where he produced course materi als in logistics to train troops on their way to Vietnam. After his honorable discharge, he worked for Abraham & Straus, Hecht Company, Syms Corporation, and Sperry Univac. Hurowitz is sur vived by his wife, Holly Roth; brother, Don ’65; sister, Laurie; and sons, Peter and Aaron.

1964

Casi Kushel, 77, died January 3, 2021. “My mother loved strong women, justice, cultural and racial diversity, and stories of tri umph over adversity,” Casi’s

daughter Devin Grayson ’91 writes. After Bard, Casi earned a marriage, family, and child coun seling license at California State University, Hayward, and studied further at University of California, Berkeley. She built a decadeslong private practice, worked with immigrants at Jewish Family Services East Bay, and trained and supervised staff and lead diversity and anger-management programs for companies and law enforcement. In 2003, Casi joined a team to visit orphanages in Afghanistan, where she trained workers in a PTSD protocol she developed to help war orphans. In addition to Devin, Casi is survived by her husband, Frank Nagelmann; daughter Jessi; son, Max; and sister, Bree James.

1965

Michael Lawrence, 78, died November 26, 2021, on the Greek island of Hydra, where he lived, painted, sculpted, and wrote for the last 30 years. Michael was born in Los Angeles, went to Beverly Hills High School, and had the good fortune to live as a child in Italy and London with his sister, Toni; mother, Fanya Foss, a screenwriter, poet, and novelist; and father, the actor Marc Lawrence, when Marc got jobs abroad. Michael’s world travels influenced his art, as did his years at Bard, which were formative. He published several books, and his work is in many private collec tions and museums around the world. He is survived by Toni. For a portfolio of Michael Lawrence’s work, see the Winter 2018 issue of the Bardian.

Louis Proyect, 76, died August 25, 2021. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up in the Borscht Belt Catskills. At 16, he enrolled at Bard, where he stud ied with Heinrich Blücher. Proyect was a member of the Socialist Workers Party for 11 years, was active in the struggle to end the war in Vietnam, gave technical support to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the African National Congress in South Africa, was a steadfast supporter of the Cuban Revolution, and fought against racism, sexism, homophobia, and the oppression

of transgender people. Proyect is survived by his wife, Mine.

1966

Ann Ilan-Alter died September 7, 2021. Ann was a teacher, labor activist, historian, dancer, curator, consultant, and always the most fashionable. After Bard she earned her MA and PhD at Rutgers, and went on to teach there as well as at St. Lawrence College, New York University, Adelphi University, and the Bard College Clemente Program in New York City. She is survived by her husband, Herb; son, Mio; and sister, Jole Carliner.

1968

David Eric Rosenthal, 74, died June 21, 2021. David supported himself at Bard by selling sand wiches to students and delivering them to dorms at any hour. He earned his PhD from Yeshiva University, worked for the state of New Jersey at various psycholog ical institutions, and became an early advocate of telehealth psy chology. He turned family vaca tions during the 1990s into trips to Native American community colleges, such as Salish Kootenai College in Montana, where he met with local leaders about how to support students struggling with depression. David is survived by his wife, Tammy, and stepdaugh ter, Heather.

1978

Pastor Laura Gonzalez-Lowery, 65, died May 1, 2021. Laura earned her BA from Bard and a master’s in social work from New York University. In 1986, she mar ried Leonard Victor Lowery; four years later, they were ordained into the ministry and founded Love Oasis Christian Center.

Pastor Laura hosted The Oasis, a weekly radio program that aired on four continents, and taught extensively. She is survived by her husband and their children, Nathanael and Grace

1979

Marianne Harkless, 63, died May 12, 2021. Marianne trained with José Mateo Ballet Theatre, Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, and International Afrikan American Ballet. She performed with Danny

Sloan Dance Company, Boston Dance Collective, Spirit of Africa, and Impulse Dance Company, among others. She was codirecter of Benkadi Drum and Dance, a founder of Racines Black Dance Festival, assistant professor of dance at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and dance instructor at Wellesley College. She is sur vived by her father, James Harkless; husband, Sory Diabate; sisters Suzanne Harkless and Claire Thomas; and brothers Charles Harkless and Guy Harkless.

1981

Lisa Morris, 61, died July 12, 2021. After earning her BA in photography at Bard, Morris worked as a photo editor for eminent photographers and Teen People magazine in New York City. There she joined the World Seido Karate Dojo, fighting in tournaments in New Zealand and other countries and earning her black belt. Twenty years ago, Morris returned to the Hudson Valley, carving out a living doing construction, catering, and dog boarding, which allowed her to go on horseback-riding tours in Cappadocia, Costa Rica, Spain, Italy, and Ireland. Morris is sur vived by her mother, Gitta, and sister, Kristin.

1983

David Micah Korn died June 15, 2021. He loved ice cream, the Yankees, movies, and puppies. David was opinionated, paced back and forth when he talked, never left the house without a book or the New Yorker in his back pocket, and was known to correct poor grammar and mis spelled words on public signs. He is survived by his wife, Claire Surovell ’84, and mother, Rita Rowan.

1984

Kim E. Hoffman, 59, died January 18, 2022. Hoffman majored in psychology at Bard and played on the women’s bas ketball and softball teams. She went on to earn master’s degrees in biochemistry from University of Massachusetts, social work from University of Connecticut, and integrative health at the

Graduate Institute for Holistic Studies. She was a social worker at Conard High School in West Hartford, Connecticut, for 28 years and head tennis coach at the school for 14. Hoffman’s 8 1/2-year struggle with ovarian cancer led her to become an out spoken advocate for medical aid in dying. She is survived by her wife, Joy Cipollo; stepsons Tom and John; father, Herbert; and brother, Barry. Her mother, Ludmila, died in 2006.

1985

Terrence John “TJ” Ozorio, 58, died July 1, 2021. Born in Washington, DC, he moved with his family to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1977. After high school, Ozorio studied theater at Bard and earned a postgraduate degree from Mountview Theater School in London, England. He is sur vived by his brother, Edmund, and his sister, Claire.

1988

Kevin Begos died June 19, 2021. He was 63, and in his second year as mayor of Apalachicola, Florida, where he moved in the mid–1990s to begin a career as a journalist with the Apalachicola Times. His groundbreaking, fivepart series on forced sterilization in North Carolina, published in 2002, led to the first legislation to compensate American victims of eugenics, brought an apology from the governor, and won awards for the Winston-Salem Journal, where he was Washington correspondent. Begos won a Knight Science Journalism Program Fellowship at MIT, reported from countries around the world, and wrote a book on the science and history of wine, Tasting the Past, before running for and winning office. He is survived by his mother, Jane Richardson, and sister, Cassandra. For a profile of Kevin Begos, see the Winter 2019 issue of the Bardian

David M. Chontos, 56, died February 28, 2022. He was a technical theater artist for more than 30 years, working as a cos tume designer, wardrobe supervi sor, dresser, stagehand, and production manager—all skills he

alums.bard.edu

learned at Bard working with his mentor and friend Natalie Lunn, Bard technical theater director from 1972 to 1999, who died in 2013. Dave was omnipresent at Bard reunions, and his enthusi asm for Bard was infectious. He came back to campus as much for the opportunity to revel in his classmates’ lives as for the new people he would meet and the friends he would make. Dave was predeceased by his parents, Joan and Steve, and is survived by his brother, Christopher, and sister, Deborah.

2002

Walter A. Johnston, 42, died January 12, 2022. Walter earned his MA in 2007 and his PhD in 2021 from Princeton University. He taught literature, philosophy, and art from antiquity to the present at Princeton, New York University, Barnard College, Cooper Union, Williams College, and Al-Quds Bard College (AQB). Walter joined the AQB faculty in August 2020, teaching remotely, and served as director of AQB’s Academic Resource Center. In fall 2021, he assumed the additional role as head of the Core division. To honor his memory, faculty, friends, and family have set up the Walter A. Johnston ’02 Prize in Critical Theory, awarded to the best Senior Project displaying a theoretical approach to literature, aesthetics, politics, or human rights.

2005

Betsaida Alcantara, 38, died February 18, 2022. Betsaida came to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a child. While still in high school, she helped write legislation intro duced in New York and Texas that called for migrant students to be able to call one state their home residence, enabling them to pay in-state tuition. Betsaida worked tirelessly on the Justice for Farmworkers Campaign, which was led by her father, Aspacio Alcantara, and created the SHARED (Students Have a Right to Education Dollars) campaign, a precursor to the Dreamers cam paign. These efforts helped earn her a full scholarship to Bard, where she continued to push for

farmworker justice. She helped create the Bard Migrant Labor Project, joined the board of direc tors of Rural & Migrant Ministry (RMM), and became a lifelong mentor to young leaders who fol lowed her in RMM’s Youth Arts Group—which she founded— including four who matriculated at Bard. Betsaida worked with Senator Hillary Clinton and later on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. After the election, President Obama named her assistant secretary for public affairs at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. She went on to serve as com munications director at the General Services Administration, press secretary at the US Environmental Protection Agency, and vice president, com munications and digital at the Anti-Defamation League. Betsaida was blessed with an amazing voice (her band once opened for George Clinton), and in 2012 she joined with her hus band, Zac Decker, and Pete Seeger in a benefit concert for RMM in New York City. From that concert came a CD, Voices of Hope. Bard honored Betsaida in 2017 with the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service. In addition to Zac, Betsaida is survived by her mother, Carmen Aspacio Ayala; her sister, Yeni; and her brother, Abi. The Betsaida Alcantara Scholarship, will be given in her memory to an incoming student from the Latinx community who shows outstand ing dedication to creating strong and open societies.

2008

William Lanier, 35, died May 15, 2021. Will studied literature at Bard, went to work for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential cam paign, spent almost a year doing field work for the Working Families Party, was campaign manager for Kris Boevingloh’s run for the Missouri House of Representatives, and was field director for Adam Schiff’s 2010 run for Congress. He then spent 18 months as a chef in New York City before starting a career in community development finance. In 2017, Will moved from New York to Los Angeles and took a

job at JP Morgan. He soon moved to Bank of America, where he was a vice president.

2010

Jason Bermudez, 51, died August 18, 2021. He was an alumnus of the Bard Prison Initiative and had established a career in the recy cling industry, most recently as a regional environmental health and safety manager at SA Recycling in Huntsville, Alabama.

2011

Casey Stewart, 45, died July 30, 2021. Casey excelled in math ematics and computer science as a student in the Bard Prison Initiative, where he tutored his fellow students. In 2018, Casey returned home to the Capital Region of New York, where he established a himself as an entre preneur, starting a variety of suc cessful businesses. Casey’s survivers include his wife, Tracy; son, Jeremy; and parents, Charles and Theresa Feathers.

2013

William Allen Giles Tesdell, 32, died January 8, 2022. Tesdell was born and raised in New York City, graduated from Brooklyn Friends School, and studied elec tronic music at Bard. He became a teacher after college and was pas sionate about equality in educa tion. He is survived by his wife, Macayla Donegan, whom he mar ried in June 2021; his parents, Sherry Giles and Kerwin Tesdell; stepparents Diana Tesdell and Glenn Hudak; and siblings Annika, Evan, Nicole, and Ben.

2014

Richard Gamarra, 33, died January 27, 2022. Rich was an alumnus of the Bard Prison Initiative, where he began his study of public health. After returning home, Rich earned a master’s in public health from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He was among the first cohort of BPI Public Health Fellows and was working as data analyst in the CoResponse Unit at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. For a profile of Richard Gamarra, see the Fall 2017 issue of the Bardian

2021

Artist and curator Jenni Crain (CCS) died December 16, 2021. She was 30. According to her New York City gallery, Gordon Robichaux, the cause was compli cations related to COVID-19. Crain received her BFA in sculpture from the Pratt Institute in 2013 and her work has been shown at Octagon in Milan, Italy; Artist Curated Projects in Los Angeles; Baba Yaga in Hudson, New York; and Kansas Gallery, Y Gallery, 321 Gallery, and Gordon Robichaux in New York City. As a curator, she organized exhibitions devoted to painter March Avery (daughter of Milton and Sally Avery, longtime friends of the College); lesbian feminist photographer and writer Tee Corinne; and bisexual feminist author and activist Kate Millett, whose 1972 installation Terminal Piece Crain rigorously reinstalled in her CCS thesis exhibition. Crain is survived by her mother, Allison Boyd; father, Bryan Crain; and sister, Lauren Crain Mangino. For information on the Jenni Crain Foundation, visit gordonrobi chaux.com.

Staff

Teresa Vilardi, who retired from Bard in 2012 after 35 years of service, died September 5, 2021. Vilardi came to Bard in 1977 to work in the Dean of Students office and served as assistant dean until she shifted to the Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT), where she served from 1984 to 2012 and was director from 2001 until her retirement. She then continued to work with the Master of Arts in Teaching Program as well as continuing as a consultant to IWT. At Bard, she taught First-Year Seminar and history, and was vital to the development of both IWT and the Language and Thinking Program. She was a close and devoted col league of the late Paul Connolly, the first director of IWT, with whom she collaborated on two books. Teresa is survived by her husband, Lou Amaru, and four stepchildren.

Board of Governors of the Bard College

Alumni/ae Association

KC Serota ’04, President

Mollie Meikle ’03, Vice President; Development Committee Cochair

Gerry Pambo-Awich ’08, Secretary/Treasurer

Beth Shaw Adelman ’74

Robert Amsterdam ’53

Hannah Becker ’11

Brendan Berg ’06

Jack Blum ’62

Connor Boehme ’17

Hannah Byrnes-Enoch ’08, Strategic Planning Committee Chair

Matthew Cameron ’04

Kathleya Chotiros ’98, Development Committee Cochair

Charles Clancy III ’69, past president

Peter Criswell ’89, past president

Nicolai Eddy ’14

Nolan English ’13

Randy Faerber ’73, Events Committee Cochair

Gianna Fenaroli ’16

Andrew F. Fowler ’95

Jazondré Gibbs ’19

Eric Goldman ’98

Hasani Gunn ’18

Alexander Habiby ’18

Boriana Handjiyska ’02, Career Connections Committee Cochair

Nikkya Hargrove ’05

Sonja Hood ’90, Nominations Committee Cochair

Miriam Huppert ’13

Maud Kersnowski Sachs ’86, Communications Committee Chair

Kenneth Kosakoff ’81

Jacob Lester ’20

Darren Mack ’13

Peter F. McCabe ’70, past president

Emily Melendes TŌN ’20

Ryan Mesina ’06, Nominations Committee Cochair

Steven Miller ’70

Anne Morris-Stockton ’68

Anna Neverova ’07, Career Connections Committee Cochair; Bard Music Festival Junior Committee Cochair Karen G. Olah ’65, past president

Claire Phelan ’11, Young Alumnx Cochair

Dan Severson ’10

Levi Shaw-Faber ’15

Genya Shimkin ’08, Diversity Committee Chair George A. Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochair

Thoko Soko ’20

Lindsay Stanley ’12

Geoffrey Stein ’82

Walter Swett ’96, past president Paul Thompson ’93

Zubeida Ullah-Eilenberg ’97 Kristin Waters ’73

Brandon Weber ’97, past president Ato Williams ’12 Nanshan (Nathan) Xu ’17

Emeritus/a

Claire Angelozzi ’74

Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63

Naomi Bellison Feldman ’53, past president

Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56

Cathaline Cantalupo ’67

Arnold Davis ’44, past president

Michael DeWitt ’65, past president

Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95, past president

Robert Edmonds ’68, past president

Kit Ellenbogen ’52, past president

Richard Gerber ’71, past president

R. Michael Glass ’75

Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60

Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68

Dr. Ann Ho ’62

Charles Hollander ’65 Maggie Hopp ’67

Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65

Rev. William Lowe ’66, past president Susan P. Playfair ’62

David E. Schwab II ’52, past president Roger N. Scotland ’93

Mackie Siebens ’12, past president

Dr. Toni-Michelle C. Travis ’69

Paul Weinstein ’73, past president John Weisman ’64, past president Barbara Crane Wigren ’68

Board of Trustees of Bard College

James C. Chambers ’81, Chair

Emily H. Fisher, Vice Chair

George F. Hamel Jr., Vice Chair

Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary; Life Trustee

Stanley A. Reichel ’65, Treasurer; Life Trustee

Fiona Angelini

Roland J. Augustine

Leonard Benardo

Leon Botstein, President of the College, ex officio 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

Kimberly Marteau Emerson

Robert S. Epstein ’63

Barbara S. Grossman ’73, Alumni/ae Trustee Andrew S. Gundlach

Matina S. Horner, ex officio Charles S. Johnson III ’70

Mark N. Kaplan, Life Trustee George A. Kellner

Mark Malloch-Brown

Fredric S. Maxik ’86

Juliet Morrison ’03

James H. Ottaway Jr., Life Trustee

Hilary Pennington

Martin Peretz, Life Trustee

Stewart Resnick, Life Trustee

David E. Schwab II ’52, Life Trustee

Roger N. Scotland ’93, Alumni/ae Trustee

Annabelle Selldorf

Mostafiz ShahMohammed ’97 Jonathan Slone ’84

Geoffrey W. Smith

Alexander Soros

Jeannette H. Taylor, ex officio James A. von Klemperer

Brandon Weber ’97, Alumni/ae Trustee

Susan Weber

Patricia Ross Weis ’52

WHERE THERE’S A WILL . . .

We can all use a little self-care these days. By taking care of yourself you can also take care of Bard. With a will you can secure your future and support Bard.

Bard College has partnered with FreeWill, a free, online resource that guides you through the process of creating a legally valid will in just 20 minutes. This opportunity allows you to secure your future, protect your loved ones, and create a legacy that will inspire curiosity, a love of learning, and an ongoing commitment to the link between higher education and civic participation. Get started by visiting freewill.com/bard.

All donors who support Bard through a planned gift become members of the Margaret and John Bard Society.

For more information, please contact Debra Pemstein, Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs pemstein@bard.edu or 845-758-7405. All inquiries are confidential.