ON AND OFF CAMPUS: CCS 30TH ANNIVERSARY

CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES’ 30TH ANNIVERSARY

Marieluise Hessel and Leon Botstein, photo by Susan Stava

On August 26, the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) announced a landmark donation of $25 million from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation in honor of CCS Bard’s 30th anniversary. The donation, part of Bard’s $1 billion endowment challenge campaign (see page 2), will be matched dollar for dollar by a commitment from investorphilanthropist George Soros, resulting in the creation of a $50 million endowment for CCS Bard. The endowment will enable the Center, cofounded in 2009 by Marieluise Hessel, to continue its work in perpetuity. The yearlong celebration of 30 years of CCS programming included the exhibitions Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection and With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985.

Look Away! Look Away! Look Away!, Kara Walker, 1995, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, photo by Susan Stava

Look Away! Look Away! Look Away!, Kara Walker, 1995, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, photo by Susan Stava

Closer to Life: Drawings and Works on Paper in the Marieluise Hessel Collection, an exhibition of drawings and works on paper by more than 50 artists, tracked a lifetime of collecting by philanthropist Marieluise Hessel, who cofounded the Center for Curatorial Studies in 1990. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that documents the entire collection of some 300 works on paper, the exhibition presented highlights that reverberate with questions of gender, sexuality, race, and politics.

1972-1985 at Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art was the first full-scale scholarly North American survey of the groundbreaking yet understudied Pattern and Decoration (P&D) movement. Often described as the first contemporary art movement made up primarily of female artists, P&D defiantly embraced forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and therefore considered inferior to fine art. P&D artists adopted motifs, color schemes, and materials from the decorative arts, freely appropriating floral, arabesque, and patchwork patterns and arranging them in intricate and sometimes purposefully gaudy designs.

One of the most remarkable artists in With Pleasure, Jane Kaufman, whose magnificent Embroidered, Beaded Crazy Quilt graces the cover of the 328-page catalogue (Yale University Press in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), died on June 2 at 83. Kaufman came to Bard in 1972, and was one of the College’s first female art professors. Kaufman later became a member of the Guerrilla Girls, the feminist activist artists group that practices “creative complaining” to expose “gender and ethnic bias as well as corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture.” Kaufman was one of the only members who used her real name; most adopted a dead female artist’s moniker, a nom de guerrilla, if you will. Art writer Elizabeth Hess ’74 told the New York Times, “She was famous for telling her female students, ‘You are all brilliant and you are all going to end up at the Met.’” As Hess went on to note, however, Kaufman’s fame did not extend to mainstream art circles. “She was an artist who floated under the radar. She was underacknowledged, though she had curated the first Pattern and Decoration show. Her work came out of her interest in women’s labor, but I think the real revelation to me about Jane’s work was its sumptuousness and beauty.” With Pleasure has gone a long way toward bringing the work of Kaufman and others in the P&D movement the recognition it deserves.

Constantina Zavitsanos, photo by Allison Harris

Constantina Zavitsanos has been named the 2021–22 recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism from the Center for Curatorial Studies and Bard College’s Human Rights Project. Zavitsanos, who works in sculpture, performance, text, and sound, addresses the material reproduction of debt, dependency, and means beyond measure in their art. Their work has been exhibited in New York City at the Brooklyn Museum, New Museum, Artists Space, and The Kitchen, and internationally at Arika in Glasgow, Scotland; Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany; and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. With Park McArthur, they coauthored “Other Forms of Conviviality” in the journal Women & Performance (Routledge, 2013) and “The Guild of the Brave Poor Things” in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017). Zavitsanos received the 2021 Roy Lichtenstein Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. They hold an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a BFA from Millersville University. The annual Haring Fellowship, which brings a prominent scholar, activist, or practicing artist to teach and conduct research on Bard’s campus, is made possible by the Keith Haring Foundation and embodies the shared commitment of the College and the foundation to imaginatively explore the complex connections between sociopolitical engagement and artistic practice.