Bardian 2004 Spring by Bardian archives

Bardian Bard College Spring 2004

American Imperialism and Iraq Christian Marclay: Portfolio Taking Liberties? BGC Celebrates First Decade

djTRIO, with Christian Marclay (center), Toshio Kajiwara (left) and Marina Rosenfeld (right) in performance at the Sosnoff Theater of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College on November 19, 2003. The performance was presented in conjunction with the exhibition Christian Marclay at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum (see page 12). Photographed by Stephanie Berger. COVER

THIS AND FACING PAGE

Alumni/ae Holiday Party (see page 34). Photographed by Enrico Ferorelli.

Dear Fellow Bardians

Last September I participated in the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Walk with a team from Bard College. We were a diverse group that included graduates from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Our team also included two breast cancer survivors, one spouse, and one daughter of an alumna. I mention it here as one more example of the benefits you can enjoy as an active member of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association. Not only did our group bond for a cause we all cared about, but also we experienced a sense of camaraderie that is not easy to describe. We wore our Bard T-shirts with pride. We cheered when the Bard team was announced over the public address system. And we held hands in support and friendship. By now, each of you has received the most recent alumni/ae events calendar. I’m sure there is something in it that interests you. Take a moment to

reflect upon your time at Bard and the life lessons you took away with you. Pick up the phone and call an old school chum. Go online and register to be a mentor. Sign up for an event, or plan a gathering in your hometown. Write a check in support of scholarships or program enhancements. Put Bard in your will. The Bard family is relatively small. Everyone counts. Everyone matters. You can do a lot to help Bard. And being an active member of the alumni/ae association will put a smile on your face and bring you rewards beyond measure.

The Bard team that participated in the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Walk last September in New York City included Judith Arner ’68, Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68, Rebecca Granato ’99, Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65, Jen Novik ’98, Amy Paulsen ’83 and her daughter, Nora Nalle, and Hans Steiner ’96. Missing from the photograph are Leslie Long ’96 and Shana Ehrlich ’98.

Sincerely,

Judith Arner ’68 President, Board of Governors Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association

Photographs, this page: courtesy Hans Steiner ’96; facing page: Enrico Ferorelli

Bardian

Spring 2004 Contents Features

Departments

American Imperialism and Iraq

Alumni/ae Notebook

Christian Marclay: Portfolio

Books by Bardians

Taking Liberties?

On and Off Campus

BGC Celebrates First Decade

Class Notes

A Bedrock for Learning

Faculty Notes

Utopian Blues

The Anatomy of Loneliness

Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association

Judith Arner ’68, President Michael DeWitt ’65, Executive Vice President Andrea J. Stein ’92, Vice President Maggie Hopp ’67, Secretary David B. Ames ’93 Linda Anderson ’81 Claire Angelozzi ’74 David Avallone ’87 Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Cathy Thiele Baker ’68, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Belinha Rowley Beatty ’69, Class Notes Committee Cochairperson Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Jack Blum ’62 Carla Bolte ’71 Erin Boyer ’00 Randy Buckingham ’73, Events Committee Cochairperson Reginald Bullock, Jr. ’84 Cathaline Cantalupo ’67, Bard Associated Research Donation (BARD) Committee Cochairperson Charles Clancy ’69, Development Committee Cochairperson Peter Criswell ’89, Events Committee Cochairperson Wendy Cuesto ’02 John J. Dalton, Esq. ’74, Commencement Liaison Arnold Davis ’44, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Michael DeWitt, Recruitment Committee Chairperson

Dominic East ’91, Class Notes Committee Cochairperson Kit Kauders Ellenbogen ’52 Joan Elliott ’67 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Cormac Flynn ’90 Connie Bard Fowle ’80, Career Networking Committee Cochairperson Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 R. Michael Glass ’75 Sibel Alparslan Golden ’88 Rebecca Granato ’99, Young Alumni/ae Committee Chairperson Tracy Gregorowicz ’88 Charles Hollander ’65 Dr. John C. Honey ’39 Rev. Canon Clinton R. Jones ’38 Deborah Davidson Kaas ’71, Oral History Committee Chairperson Chad Kleitsch ’91, Life After Bard Committee Cochairperson Richard Koch ’40 Erin Law ’93 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Dr. William V. Lewit ’52 Carolyn Mayo-Winham ’88 Peter F. McCabe ’70, Nominations and Awards Committee Cochairperson Steven Miller ’70, Development Committee Cochairperson Abigail Morgan ’96 Julia McKenzie Munemo ’97 Ngonidzashe Munemo ’00

Brianna Norton ’00 Jennifer Novik ’98, Class Notes Committee Cochairperson Karen Olah ’65, Alumni/ae House Committee Chairperson Leslie Phillips ’73 Susan Playfair ’62, Bard Associated Research Donation (BARD) Committee Cochairperson Allison Radzin ’88, Career Networking Committee Cochairperson Elizabeth Reiss ’87 Penelope Rowlands ’73 Roger Scotland ’93, Men and Women of Color Network Liaison Benedict S. Seidman ’40 Maro Sevastopoulos ’00 Dr. Ingrid Spatt ’69, Life After Bard Committee Cochairperson William Stavru ’87 Walter Swett ’96 Kwesi Thomas ’00 Jill Vasileff MFA ’93 Marji Vecchio MFA ’01 Samir B. Vural ’98 Barbara Wigren ’68 Ron Wilson ’75

Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs Debra Pemstein Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405 pemstein@bard.edu Jessica Kemm ’74 Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7406 kemm@bard.edu Stella Wayne Associate Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7407 wayne@bard.edu Robyn Carliss ’02 Administrative Assistant, Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7089 carliss@bard.edu Jennifer Kloes Director of the Annual Fund 845-758-7505 kloes@bard.edu

MARK YOUR CALENDAR! NINTH ANNUAL YOUNG ALUMNI/AE CITIES PARTY Friday, April 2 For information, contact Rebecca Granato ’99, Young Alumni/ae Committee Chairperson; e-mail: rebeccagranato@yahoo.com

REUNIONS 2004, MAY 21–23 AT BARD Friday, May 21 President’s Dinner Bard students perform with the American Symphony Chamber Orchestra Saturday, May 22 Commencement exercises Receptions for each reunion class and friends Commencement/Reunion dinner, dance, and fireworks

Sunday, May 23 Alumni/ae Faculty brunch

Photographs, this and facing page: Enrico Ferorelli

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM AND IRAQ

A conversation between James Chace and Mark Danner On September 30, one day after participating in a panel discussion on U.S. imperialism and the Spanish-American War, Bard’s James Chace and Mark Danner sat down for a one-onone conversation about U.S. foreign policy today. They examined the impact of 9/11 on America’s vision of its role in the world, recent interventions in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the evolution of U.S. foreign policy from the Cold War to the war on terror. Chace is the director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program and the Paul W. Williams Professor of Government and Public Law and Administration. He is the author of many books on international affairs, including the prizewinning biography Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World. He has served as the editor of World Policy Journal and managing editor of Foreign Affairs, and is currently at work on a book about the 1912 American presidential election. Danner is the Henry Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard and a professor at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Named a MacArthur Fellow in 1999, Danner is a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War and forthcoming books on Haiti and the Balkans. His writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and the New York Times. MARK DANNER (at right in photograph) The Somalia intervention in 1992 led to a number of important policy decisions. We went in under the first President Bush, who had already lost the 1992 election, with the idea that it was a humanitarian action. There was no attempt to secure the support of the American people, no discussion in Congress. When, under President Clinton, we encountered difficulties, when 18 Americans were killed in Mogadishu in 1993, there was no support for keeping Americans there, and we withdrew precipitously. At almost the same time, we were about to land peacekeeping troops in Haiti, but after a demonstration by Haitian irregulars, the United States decided to withdraw, rather than risk an intervention. A year later, in Rwanda, when the White House saw a burgeoning genocide there, it decided that any operation to stop it would be too risky, that it could be another Somalia.

Another side of Somalia is also interesting. We know now that the militiamen who shot down our helicopters there were trained by Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden and his organization drew from what happened in Somalia in ’93 the same lesson they learned from Beirut in 1983, when the United States withdrew after 241 Americans were killed in the barracks bombing, and from Vietnam in 1974: the United States can be attacked and defeated. It’s present in the thinking of our adversaries now in Iraq: if the U.S. is hit hard enough, it will be forced to withdraw. JAMES CHACE I think the American people do have staying power if they believe in the rationale for the intervention. We stayed the course throughout the Korean War—and we’re still there 50 years later. We were in Vietnam for 10 years. When things go wrong, it’s usually because we’ve been lied to, we haven’t been told why we’re there, or the administration itself is confused about the rationale for its policy. DANNER It’s interesting, when you raise that question, to look at the wars we’ve fought with Iraq. The reasons for entering the first Gulf War in 1991 were described rather clearly by Bush senior. One, countries should not be able to invade and annex their neighbors. Two, there was the oil reason, as enunciated by then Secretary of State James Baker under the slogan “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” It was a statement he was embarrassed to make, but one, I believe, that Americans understood. Finally, Bush called Saddam worse than Hitler and talked about the risk of his acquiring a nuclear weapon. What’s important to remember is that the first President Bush made an effort over many months to build up public support for the war. His son also made a strong effort over several months to build support for the second Gulf War. The problem is that the reason for intervention his administration leaned on most heavily— Saddam’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction—was the one reason that was falsifiable. CHACE Backing up a bit, remember what happened first under Bush II. He came in, like Clinton, not interested in foreign policy.

DANNER That’s right. He argued for a “humble America,” if you remember. CHACE Exactly. Both he and Clinton came in with domestic agendas. Bush’s agenda was to lower taxes, and there was some lip service paid to education. For this reason, 9/11 was an incredible shock. It was the first time the continental United States had been attacked since the War of 1812, when the British burned Washington, and it had the same effect: we were shocked by our vulnerability. Especially given the disparity of military power. Even when Clinton cut the defense budget by about a third in the 1990s, we still had an enormous defense budget. And once we became involved in the Balkans, there were no more cuts. Then 9/11 happened and, despite its military prowess, America was vulnerable. Everything changed. DANNER I agree that you can’t understand current policy without appreciating the severe shock that 9/11 constituted. It laid the groundwork for an enormous increase in military spending, an enormous increase in the responsibilities of the United States worldwide, and a major change in how the U.S. government views its role in the world. For a decade—from the end of the Cold War to the beginning of the war on terror—the United States essentially lacked in its foreign policy the kind of ideological underpinning that had been provided by the Truman Doctrine for 50 years. In a sense, 9/11 gave policymakers what they’d been looking for—an ideology, a reason to act in the world. CHACE You see again and again that the United States has to have this larger, moral view: to make the world safe for democracy, to, as Thomas Jefferson said, erect “an empire of liberty.” While Jim Baker cited oil as one of the reasons we went into the first Gulf War, the president’s defense of his actions at that time was almost wholly ideological. This was aggression; this was 1939 all over again. It was mobilizing America as a crusader. DANNER If you look at the speeches of President Bush since 9/11, you see a methodical effort to set out a view of the world that is as clear and definitive as that set out by Harry Truman or Woodrow Wilson. For Bush, the world is divided in two—the good, civilized people and the terrorists, and you’re either with them or with us. It’s a Manichaean view of the world, which together with the notion of American exceptionalism—America as a city on the hill, separate, uncorrupted—has always been at the root of how

Americans think of themselves. The Bush administration has done a very thorough job of creating and shaping that kind of ideology. The question is whether the ideological foundation will prove strong enough to support the military policies derived from it. CHACE In Afghanistan the initial response wasn’t quite as ideological. It was “Al Qaeda is located in Afghanistan, and we’ve got to clean it out.” We therefore got up a posse. And

that seemed to be fairly successful in the sense that we toppled the government, which was supporting Al Qaeda, and we got Al Qaeda on the run. What probably should have been done was to get more troops in there for reconstruction and spend the money, time, and effort to rebuild Afghanistan so that the terrorists wouldn’t return. We didn’t do that. And that’s when the reasons for American intervention in the Middle East began to change to a much broader, ideological response. Bush’s explanation for Iraq—we’re going to change the region, we’re going to build a model democracy—almost exceeded what Woodrow Wilson said when he talked about making the world safe for democracy. As you say, after 9/11 they discovered an ideology that allowed them to act in this way. And I think they believe it. DANNER Yes, I think they do believe it. Of course, we say they, as if this is one group of people who value the same things. This administration, despite its vaunted discipline, is more riven by rivalries and disagreements than most. From the beginning, a strain of the administration opposed nation building in Afghanistan. They think the military is there to fight wars, not accompany children to school, as

they did in Bosnia. So it’s a problem, after the U.S. military has fought the wars, when these places refuse to calm down. We’re finding that the United States can be a military giant and a political dwarf; that is, the political tasks of reconstruction are much harder— consuming more time and resources—than the wars themselves. CHACE That’s true, and there’s another, deeper thing going on, which is neoimperialism. It has happened overtly under

The difficulties being seen in Iraq, as we speak, may in the end weaken the influence and power of those neoconservatives in the administration who believe in the strongest sense that the region can be remade as a model for democracy in the Middle East. CHACE Absolutely right, Mark. But if you have more terrorist attacks elsewhere, which I’m afraid is more rather than less likely, then the imperial spirit will expand.

“. . . the present struggle over internationalizing Iraq is really a struggle about much more than Iraq. It’s about how the United States is going to deal with—make use of— its power in the world.”

the second Bush administration, but the imperial structure was there already. The first great imperial thrust of the United States was at the turn of the last century with the belief that we should acquire territory beyond our continental boundaries for security purposes because we felt threatened. During the Cold War there was a kind of informal empire, what one scholar called “an empire by invitation.” We didn’t even come up with the idea of NATO—the British did. They were fearful that we wouldn’t defend Europe and wanted to have an alliance in peacetime. Within a decade, there were bases all over the world. There was an enormous military, a navy that even today remains at least as large if not larger than it was during World War II. So the panoply of empire existed, but it wasn’t perceived as an empire. I think this has changed. Once you go into the Middle East with the notion not just to clean out terrorists, but also to change a region of the world and imprint it with American values that will be a model for other Arab states, it is certainly . . . DANNER . . . an imperialist mission. The interesting question is whether the United States has the will to carry it out. I think we’re already seeing the mission being downsized.

DANNER It’s interesting that when the United States responds to provocation by intervening on a large scale, it is, according to the ideology of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, fulfilling its role as colonizer of the Islamic world. To them, we’re becoming more and more like their caricature of us as an imperial power. We are, essentially, painting their recruitment posters. That, of course, is no reason not to act, but it does mean that a dynamic is being established in which we respond strongly to provocation and do their political work for them. CHACE The only way you can get out of this conundrum is to embrace a kind of internationalism that we have not promoted since the post–World War II period of NATO, the World Bank, and other organizations. Instead, you have the likelihood of the United States avoiding and perhaps destroying international institutions. There is the feeling that we have to act unilaterally in most cases. I’ve seen this in these discussions with the United Nations. We want help from other countries, and especially from the U.N., but we want help that is subject to American direction. Most countries— not just France—simply aren’t willing to undergo that.

DANNER We think the advantage of acting this way is that we call the tune completely without exception, without authority, without having to compromise our plans. But there’s also a great disadvantage, which is that we lose the cover of international legitimacy. This makes us politically vulnerable, and makes us assume that caricature of the imperial power. CHACE The other great powers, such as France, Germany, Russia, and China, want a multipolar world. But Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, not long ago said that multipolarity was dead. If it’s dead, what then? The implication, of course, is unipolarity. In other words, your job is to work with us, follow along. DANNER In the early and middle years of the Clinton administration and the last years of the first Bush administration, there was a quest for multipolarity. CHACE The New World Order. DANNER Yes. The New World Order, as sketched out by the first George Bush, was a vision for a strong United States acting under the cover of its alliances and the United Nations to enforce world order and international law on the world. It’s interesting that we’ve seen the evolution, between the first George Bush and the second George Bush, of a new multilateralism to a new unilateralism. There was movement in that direction under Bill Clinton, but certainly the major change has occurred since 9/11. CHACE People always bring up the Marshall Plan when they talk about remaking the Middle East. But General Marshall’s view was that his plan had to be a uniquely European initiative. We would back it up, but they must decide what they wanted. His view of internationalism was: “How can we help you?” That’s completely different from the tone coming out of Washington today. DANNER Which makes the point that the present struggle over internationalizing Iraq is really a struggle about much more than Iraq. It’s about how the United States is going to deal with—make use of—its power in the world.

Photographs, page 6, 8, 9: Enrico Ferorelli

Report from Baghdad by Mark Danner Mark Danner spent two weeks in Iraq last fall as a consultant for CBS News and correspondent for the New York Review of Books. Upon his return, he spoke at Bard about his experiences. A sampling of his impressions, observations, and opinions follows. CONCRETE AND CONFUSION I had intended to fly from Amman to Baghdad, before I asked the Royal Jordanian representative about missile attacks, and she said, “Well, there have been 10 or 12 firings at our planes, but the general consensus is that these guys aren’t very good yet. The time to start worrying is in about three weeks.” Baghdad is a tan city, dusty brown. It looks fairly normal, until you start to approach, say, a hotel. Suddenly you find yourself stopped by an enormous concrete barrier. After a second barrier, about 12 feet tall, you have to drive through a very tight cordon and then you have to stop. Four or five security guards coalesce around your car and pull you out. They use a mirrored instrument on wheels to look under the car. They open the hood, they open the trunk, they search your bags, and then your person. It’s a routine I got very used to, as it happens 30 times a day if you go to hotels or U.S. installations. By the end of a few days you realize that you don’t know what the hell is going on. And by the end of about 10 days you realize that nobody knows what the hell is going on. CULTURAL DISCONNECT I met a young woman who was the head of governance for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). She was in her early 30s, had worked at a think tank in Washington, D.C., and now she essentially ran the project to put an Iraqi constitution together. She was very smart, very aggressive, and very self-sacrificing, because she was basically living in barracks conditions at the CPA headquarters in one of Saddam’s former palaces. She lived behind incredible security procedures, she had little access to Iraqis, and she was trying to put together the Iraqi government. Not surprisingly, the Iraqis on the Governing Council, who are mostly men in their 50s and 60s, don’t think they should be taking orders from her. I found this to be the case in a lot of areas of Iraqi life: young, ambitious Americans trying to order experienced Iraqis around, and the Iraqis resenting it rather forcefully.

While I was in Iraq I was consulting for CBS, but I was wearing a press tag that said “New York Review of Books.” This became a running joke with my CBS colleagues until we went to a base near Fallujah. A major shook all of our hands, looked at my tag, and said, “New York Review of Books—that’s my favorite magazine.” The CBS people nearly keeled over. It turned out he had a Ph.D. from Oxford and had written a book on counterinsurgency warfare. FIRST ON THE SCENE I was driving to interview an intelligence officer and, suddenly, BOOM, the car lifted up on its wheels and I could hear this very distinctive sound—a sound I remember from Sarajevo—of the windows along a street tinkling in their frames. It was clearly a huge explosion. I was first on the scene, a completely hellish scene of flames 12, 14 feet high, and the frames of two SUVs outlined in these flames. An inky black curtain of smoke utterly obscured the building behind it, which turned out to be part of the International Red Cross compound. I couldn’t get that close, because of the heat, so I was reduced to counting the ambulances— they arrived quickly; a hospital was nearby—to get some idea of the number of bodies. That day 43 people were killed—a horrible thing, but to the military, not a significant engagement. It is absolutely true, as American officials say, that covering the war in Iraq by simply showing the violence gives a distorted view of what’s going on. There are large areas of Iraq that are not violent, where there are no attacks. On the other hand, the capital and the area in central Iraq that you would think would be absolutely necessary to secure in order to say that the country was secure, is the center of guerrilla activity. At this time, the number of attacks is going up every day, and the area in which the attacks take place is growing. This last point is deeply ambiguous. Does it mean that the resistance is gaining more and more support? Or does it mean that groups of guerrillas—“active service units,” as the IRA calls them—are moving around the country to give the impression that the insurgency is spreading? The answer is, we don’t know. WHO IS THE ENEMY? I spent a lot of time in Fallujah, and as far as I could see, the American strategy was to send out patrols and wait until they were attacked. I interviewed an American major in Baghdad who was responsible for planning these convoys and patrols. He was a very smart, very educated guy, who talked to me about civil affairs and all these things the

Americans were doing, like putting together neighborhood councils and using Iraqi forces to guard the electricity grid. Then I asked him about the enemy’s center of gravity—a term familiar to the military. He seemed surprised: he hadn’t been thinking about the enemy in those terms at all. I had the clear impression that this is not a war the Americans had been trained or organized to fight. At the moment, they don’t really know what they’re doing on the ground. Their intelligence isn’t good. They have defined the enemy as something other than what they’re actually facing. I think this will change over time. The question is whether the American public will have the patience to let them learn. Because the other question I asked him was, “What, to the enemy, is the American ‘center of gravity’?” He said, “It’s the American will. That’s what they’re attacking. That’s our center of gravity.” I think this is true, which is why the press is so important. Who is the opposition in Iraq? After talking to a lot of people, my impression is that most of the opposition is being run by mid-level intelligence people who were part of Saddam Hussein’s government. Even though a lot of local stuff is going on, you have this overlay of Baathist intelligence people who are using unemployed military people— there are several hundred thousand of those—and funneling bodies in from Al Qaeda. WAR IS WAR One day, when we were stopped at a roadblock, there was an incident during which a number of Westerners in fourwheel drive vehicles were killed. It turned out that American soldiers had shot them. I interviewed a number of these soldiers. They were very admirable people, really. I was impressed with them. They were very frank about what they had done. They basically said, “These people were next to us, they had guns in the car”—their security people did have AK47s—“one of them had a walkie-talkie, and we thought they were calling in this attack.” An officer involved with this incident told me later, “War is war. They shoot at us, we shoot at them, and sometimes people get caught in the middle.” This man was killed in an ambush a few days after I spoke to him. The most positive thing I can say is that the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein is gone. The question is, what follows? People in the administration are fond of saying, “Well, nothing can be worse than Saddam.” The one thing I’ve learned in 25 years of writing about politics is that there can always be something worse.

CHRISTIAN MARCLAY PORTFOLIO In 1996 Christian Marclay was commissioned to create a work for Sonambiente, a summer festival of sound art organized by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Responding to the city’s particularly rich musical heritage—the vibrant underground pop scene, the strong musical presence of Turkish and Eastern European minorities, and seven symphony orchestras and three opera companies based within the city—Marclay printed 5,000 posters as blank sheet music and pasted them up alongside the hundreds of other posters advertising various musical events on the walls of Berlin, as an invitation to its citizens to participate in a citywide musical project entitled Graffiti Composition. Playing on the inherent participatory nature of musical composition (a piece of music, generally written for performance by others at a later date, is shaped by the degree of compositional control given or taken by composers, conductors, and performers at each realization), Marclay gave it a resolutely utopian spin. He sidestepped issues of authorship, traditional musical genres, and social hierarchies to engage the racial and political tensions around immigration and reunification in post–1989 Berlin, using the aesthetic of collage as a social paradigm and music as its fabric. Graffiti Composition created fleeting opportunities—in kiosks and urinals, at bus stops and street corners across the city—for people to contribute, often without realizing it, to a remarkable, momentary self-portrait. Every second day over the course of the monthlong festival, Marclay and his poster crew roamed the city, monitoring the status of the sheets they had posted, replacing those that had been torn down or covered over, and photographing them in situ as they accumulated the various accidental marks and deliberate annotations of passersby. In Graffiti composition, which covers 150 loose pages in no particular order, doodles become musical notes, words stand in for music left unwritten, and music notation assumes the role of social interaction. What began as a project determined largely by the brief life span of a poster now exists as an edition of 150 indigo prints selected from 800 original photographs taken by Marclay and his assistants to document the composition on

the streets of Berlin. With this set of images, the artist has also made the score available to anyone who wishes to perform it, in any form or order, complete or in part—adding another layer, this time of sound, to the silent pages. Although Graffiti Composition is not one of Marclay’s better-known works, partly because of its ephemeral state, it is wholly characteristic of the artist’s practice and concerns. It reflects his interest in the temporal, in the role music plays in the collective unconscious and social fabric, and reveals an implicit awareness of the cultural and political landscape in which we live. It also deftly demonstrates Marclay’s talent for crossing lightly between genres with a uniquely human mix of gravity and whimsy. Elizabeth Fisher

Christian Marclay work s has been presented in recent solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2002); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2000); and Kunsthaus Zurich (1997). The first major U.S. survey of Marclay’s work opened at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, last summer and was on display at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum from September to December 2003. Marclay lives in New York, where he is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery. Elizabeth Fisher earned an M.A. degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies in 2002. She is currently the postgraduate curatorial assistant there. Porfolio photographed by Enrico Ferorelli

Photographs, left and right: Don Hamerman; center: Keith Skelton/Black Star

TAKING LIBERTIES? Three Bardians respond to the USA Patriot Act The process of framing the Constitution of the United States was fraught with passionate controversy. When the first elected United States Congress convened, it drafted the Bill of Rights, a document of protective promise that would prove, over the years, to be no less fractious than the Constitution itself. Today, many questions regarding both documents are focusing on the 342-page USA Patriot Act (USAPA), which passed both houses of Congress, with extraordinary bipartisan support, approximately one month after 9/11. The bill increased the government’s ability to use wiretaps, search warrants, subpoenas, and the like, in the war against terrorism. While some Americans accept the USAPA as a necessary tool in our turbulent times, others consider it nothing short of an attack upon basic civil liberties. Three Bard alumni/ae whose professional lives bring them into almost daily contact with issues of law, privacy, and terrorism were approached for their opinion on this matter. James B. Fishman ’76 (above left) concentrated in political science at Bard. His Senior Project took as its topic the fourth amendment, which protects “against unreasonable searches and seizures” and contains wording that “no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath and affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” 20

Fishman, an attorney whose practice comprises consumer and tenant law, is extremely familiar with privacy issues. He deals often with situations in which landlords, in their eagerness to gain access to tenants’ records on past utility bill payments, eviction proceedings, bankruptcy, and the like, obtain credit reports improperly. Over and above objections based on privacy, in numerous instances the accessed records are flawed. Individuals with similar names or Social Security numbers can be mistaken for one another. “There’s real failure in the credit reporting system,” says Fishman. “Matches can be off by as many as four digits in the Social Security number. It’s not necessarily the same last name, or first name. Our systems are not set up to distinguish between people.” The advent of DNA technology has also revealed identity errors within the criminal system. “Who knows how many people have been falsely imprisoned?” says Fishman. “Every time I hear someone say, ‘I’m glad the government is stepping up its surveillance, I have nothing to hide,’ it doesn’t make me feel better.” There are no firm figures on the number of individuals detained as a result of powers granted by the USAPA. Some of those individuals, including American citizens, are being held incommunicado, without benefit of counsel and without being formally charged. Opponents of the USAPA claim these circumstances violate, variously, the fifth, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth amendments. Fishman, expressing his own

displeasure with the detentions, notes, “It’s what we’ve always pointed to in totalitarian states. There’s always been a large segment of government that wants to get more information about people, and 9/11 provided a cover for that.” The USAPA permits “sneak-and-peek” warrants that allow premises to be searched without immediately notifying the person(s) involved. In the past, prompt notification was an accepted component of fourth-amendment rights. The USAPA also provides federal agencies access to the records of libraries, Internet service providers, and booksellers. The agencies are excused from revealing the identity of the person whose records have been subpoenaed and can, for example, forbid a library from notifying the person in question. Nina David (Posnansky)’61 (center), who graduated Bard with a concentration in psychology, is now the manager for the Los Angeles Public Library in Carson, California. “Libraries stand for first amendment rights,” she says. “That’s what we’re all about. There is a deep, deep, concern because the Patriot Act impacts what we stand for.” Thus far, David’s objections have not been tested. “We’ve had no federal request for information,” she says. “If we do receive one, we’ve been told to refer it to county library headquarters. The California Library Association has issued a resolution supporting privacy and calling for an amendment to the Patriot Act.” The USAPA is not the only control issue affecting libraries. Carson’s board of supervisors has demanded that area libraries employ a “filtering” system to eliminate certain sites (such as pornography sites) from their computers. But the filtering system is crude. A chicken breast recipe will be filtered out on the basis of the word breast; so will information on sex education. “The Patriot Act is more devastating, but filtering affects us on a day-to-day basis,” David says. “The public-access computers for children are automatically filtered, even though The American Library Association and the California Library Association take the view that it isn’t the library’s place to determine what children can see. That’s the parents’ responsibility.” Carson’s “adult” computers run on a card-driven system that provides access to filtered or unfiltered sites. “But that means people can be identified on the basis of which sites they visit,” says David, “and that intersects with the Patriot Act.” In response to these concerns, Carson, like many other library systems throughout the United States, has become more careful in its record keeping. “We ‘wash’ the public computers each night,” says David. “I don’t know how much of the record can be retrieved after that process. We can’t purge computers after agencies request information.

That would be shredding evidence. But it’s legal to purge before a request.” Equal care is taken with book records. “Now, when you return a book to the library, it is removed from your record,” says David. Ken Stern ’75 (right), an attorney and author, concentrated in government and political science at Bard. For the past 14 years, he has worked with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), where his current title is specialist on anti-Semitism and extremism. In 2001 he received the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service from Bard. “As an agency, the AJC is concerned about the Patriot Act,” Stern says. “But there are those who want to operate as if September 11 never happened. That’s a denial of security concerns. Some aspects of the Patriot Act are long overdue.” Citing one example of needed change, Stern notes that, in dealing with the American militia movement, the government was not permitted to use the Internet on the principle that such use would deny reasonable expectation of privacy. “I could use the Internet to track the militia movement, but the government could not,” says Stern, “even though there was talk on the Internet of shooting government officials. That’s one aspect of surveillance laws that I think could be changed, reasonably. On the other hand, some aspects of the Patriot Act are troubling. Denying access to counsel is reprehensible. We have to find things that preserve the liberties of this country but still protect us. Where, precisely, the balance is, I’m not wise enough to say.” Stern feels that some of the reaction to the USAPA is overstated. When informed that a Chicago alderman drew similarities between the USAPA and the civil liberties abuses that preceded the Holocaust, Stern reacted vehemently. “It’s a distasteful comparison and a form of Holocaust denial,” he says. “The Patriot Act is, arguably, a giving up of civil liberties, but to compare it to the Nuremberg Laws is obscene. The Holocaust was a whole other beast.” Stern also warns against concentrating overly on the USAPA. “People tend to see law as a magic bullet,” he says. “The law is a small piece of the puzzle. The real issue is how to make policy decisions that help provide security. At one point we propped up bin Laden because we shared an enemy. The law can’t solve these problems. Our belief that terrorists are losers, that all we need to do is provide money and economic development, is not accurate. Many members of the Islamic jihad come from stable social situations. It’s the ideas! How do you deal with these ideas? Legal stuff can become a black hole that draws energy away from more significant issues.” Ren Houtrides 21

BGC CELEBRATES FIRST DECADE The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York City kicked off its 10th anniversary celebration last November with the exhibition Marimekko: Fashion, Fabric, Architecture and an array of related programs and special events. The comprehensive retrospective of the Finnish design company marked the second collaboration between the BGC and the Design Museum of Helsinki—one of many such partnerships the Center has forged in the last decade. The exhibition showcased more than 150 examples of the exuberant fabrics, revolutionary clothing designs, interior furnishings, and utopian architectural plans that defined Marimekko’s modern living ideology. It was also the focus of a gala benefit at which guests were treated to a fashion show of the company’s latest designs. A related public forum on Finnish design featured speaker Vuokko Nurmesniemi, whose bold color combinations and loosecut, unisex clothing became hallmarks of the Marimekko 22

look. And Annika Rimala, the premier Marimekko designer of the 1960s, provided a special tour of the exhibition for students, faculty, and staff. Marimekko has flourished for more than 50 years under the leadership of two visionary women: founder Armi Ratia and current president Kirsti Pakkaanen. Ratia encouraged her early designers, also women, to experiment with avant-garde influences in art and design while she looked beyond mere patterns to formulate a vision of the modern woman and her needs. Marimekko’s freer, casual designs reflected that vision, as well as Ratia’s design philosophy of balancing innovation and tradition, past and present. Ratia’s belief in the power of art and design to enhance everyday life, and her commitment to design integrity made Marimekko a fitting subject for the anniversary celebration. As BGC founder and director Susan Weber Soros notes in her forward to the exhibition catalogue, Marimekko’s longevity is in part the result of a philosophy “based on individual creativity and the connection between design and everyday life.” That connection is central to Soros’s mission to establish “a new field of historical study that sees in the remains of everyday life—from works of the greatest virtuosity to the most commonplace and ephemeral—a significant form of social, cultural, and artistic enquiry.” The BGC is unique in taking a scholarly approach to the studies of design and culture. “We’re the only program of this kind to study international cultures, and our curriculum ranges from ancient civilizations to 2003,” says Soros. “I think we have contributed to a new awareness and recognition of the decorative arts and their importance in cultural studies.” Soros is proud of how far the BGC has come in 10 years, and a little bit amazed by it. “In 1993,” she says,

“I never dreamed we would have a highly successful Ph.D. program, or that our exhibitions would receive international attention, or that our public programs would be attended by thousands of people each year. But all of that—and more— has happened.” In addition to Marimekko, 10th-anniversary celebrations included a daylong festival that featured free admission to the BGC gallery, special tours, artist-led demonstrations, musical entertainment, and a hands-on workshop for families. Other initiatives include an ongoing collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art; a three-day conference, “The Age of Antiquaries in Europe and China”; the annual Seminar in Cultural History that this year featured Leon Botstein as the opening speaker; “Conversations on American Art and Culture,” a series in which eminent scholars examine significant issues of American material life; and several career development workshops. It is the BGC’s success in launching careers that Soros finds most satisfying. “I’m truly proud of our students and what they have accomplished,” she says. “There are BGC graduates working in museums from Los Angeles to New York to Boston to London. We have graduates in the great auction houses and house museums. In short, it’s hard to find a decorative arts area that doesn’t have a BGC scholar.” This variety of interest and expertise is also reflected in the exhibitions and programming the BGC has championed over the last decade. The Center is committed to focusing

on under-recognized areas of inquiry as well as to pursuing consistent themes. Marimekko, for example, is among a series of exhibitions on Nordic design, including 2002’s Utopia and Reality: Modernity in Sweden, 1900–1960. Other exhibition subjects have included Japanese folk ceramics, women designers in the United States between 1900 and 2000, Roman glass, graphic design in Germany between 1890 and 1945, and Hungarian ceramics from the Zsolnay Manufactory. A number of exhibitions have also examined in depth the work of influential architects and designers, such as Le Corbusier, William Beckford, and Thomas Jeckyll, a tragic, little-understood figure of the Victorian design reform movement. What’s ahead in the next 10 years? Says Soros, “I’d like to have more fellowships and scholarships develop. Right now we have some financial aid for about 80 percent of our students. I’d like to see that grow to 100 percent. I’d also like see further expansion in our faculty, including the addition of an Islamic expert and an African scholar.” The BGC has already expanded its course selection— there are now more than 140 master’s degree and doctoral courses, plus courses at affiliated institutions—and this year’s class of M.A. and Ph.D. students is the largest yet at 32. With the success of its academic programs and the popularity of exhibitions like Marimekko, the BGC’s future has never looked brighter. Ellen Liebowitz

Photographs, this and facing page: Enrico Ferorelli

A BEDROCK FOR LEARNING Workshops in Writing and Thinking at Bard High School Early College The morning sunlight divides the walls of the building opposite into sections of yellow and shadow. The students, sitting around a long table, pull out their pads and quietly write, looking up from time to time. The hum of the air conditioner fills the room. The girls’ handwriting is smaller than the boys’. One girl has a big streak of blue in her hair; another wears a sari. A boy beside me scrawls over the pages of his notebook. The teacher, Amy Hondo ’01, says, “Draw it to a close,” and one by one, we finish our sentences and the freewrite is over. The scene is a classroom at Bard High School Early College (BHSEC) in New York City, early last September during the first week of school. BHSEC offers a curriculum that encompasses high school and the first two years of college in a four-year program. All BHSEC students begin the school year with a weeklong Writing and Thinking workshop. For the group of ninth-graders that Hondo is leading, starting the day with a five-minute freewrite has become a familiar exercise by midweek. After the freewrite, the students take turns reading their homework, this time a detailed observation of something they experienced recently. Malcolm Halle, 14, shares his description of the people in the subway car he took home. Emily Schrynemakers, also 14, offers a meticulous catalogue of her grandmother’s cluttered storage room. Hondo next asks the students to add sounds and other sensory impressions to their observations. “Ask your observation five questions,” she says. Notebooks open, and the students begin to write again.

The Writing and Thinking workshops parallel the Workshop in Language and Thinking required of all new students at Bard College. At BHSEC, the workshops introduce the idea that “students can take risks with a text and no one will laugh at them,” says Ray Peterson, the school’s principal. “They give students the confidence to speak out.” Underlying the workshops is the belief that writing itself is a learning process. “Students don’t memorize and regurgitate here; we want them to question, to take an active role in their own education,” says Hondo, who is also director of BHSEC admission and who has taught Writing and Thinking at the school for two years. The students at BHSEC, which is part of the New York City public school system, come from all over the five boroughs. Some, like Schrynemakers, commute from as far away as Queens, spending more than two hours a day on a subway. Since the students must apply for admission and go through an interview screening process, most are aware of the amount of writing the curriculum entails. “In my old public school, Wagner, we had language arts,” says Halle. “Here the emphasis is more creative. I like that we start the day writing about anything, then go on to write in different styles, that our opinions matter, that we get to share and discuss.” As the workshop continues, Hondo hands out a poem by Margaret Atwood called “Against Still Life.” Its opening line is “Orange in the middle of a table.” Hondo puts one there. She divides the poem into different voices and actions, with some of us saying only the words “I” or “you,” whenever they occur, others reading the entire poem out

loud, line by line, and some making up an “orange dance.” She asks Umer Alizai, 13, if he will carry the orange around the room while several students follow him and the rest of us stand in a circle and perform our roles. I am part of the team saying the word “you,” which becomes a rhythmic accusation when we say it in unison. The result becomes an impromptu performance piece, with the students’ reactions to the poem infusing an exuberant reading, while Alizai and his entourage weave in and out. “The workshops not only introduce writing techniques, but also establish a sense of community,” says Peterson. For the ninth graders, who are new to the school, that process has added meaning. Even though they will meet other ninth graders once their class schedules start, each Writing and Thinking group, which numbers about 15, will begin every day together, giving the students a sense of continuity in a new environment and providing the closest the school offers to a homeroom. At the same time, the workshops are creating a bedrock for BHSEC’s entire approach to learning. “One purpose is to show students that writing isn’t just a product to be handed in, but a way of delving more deeply into texts,” says Peterson. “We need to have a dialogue with an author, and part of the workshop’s purpose is to give the students the authority to ask questions.” The next part of Hondo’s workshop illustrates that principle. The orange is returned to the center of the table. “What did we just do?” Hondo asks. “There’s no right answer. Look in your head—it’s all there.” The students pick up the discussion quickly. Interpretations range from “there’s more to an orange than you think” to a profound identification with the poet’s attempts to communicate. Hondo explains the homework for the next day: take the observations that were written the previous night and developed in the workshop, and turn them into a poem. To help everyone get started, she asks the students to pick out favorite lines in each other’s work. They do this enthusiastically, sometimes choosing several at a time. The choices fill up more than a page. Many sound very like Atwood’s opening line: “City kids don’t cloud-watch”; “There is so much that my grandma hides away”; and, perhaps most appropriately, “If I keep going, there will be so much more.” Hanna Rubin Hanna Rubinis a writer based in New York City. She participated in BHSEC’s Writing and Thinking workshops in early September 2003.

Emily Schrynemakers A ninth-grade student at BHSEC A poem based on an observation I step into this new room And what do I see? Little Vanessa staring back at me I take a seat on the floor Expecting nothing more But I look up and see memories Memories of the generations of my family That I long to live over Sure my grandma had weird stuff But for her a little just wasn’t enough Room full of piles Books and bags Unreturned clothes Still with their tags And still in the room Is the closet beyond Brass handle, locked door I wonder what’s inside? I will try another day For there is so much my grandmother hides away . . .

Umer Alizai A ninth-grade student at BHSEC An excerpt from a dramatic monologue It was 5 am in the morning. All night people had been walking passed me. There are many shops when you enter my house. I live in the subway where trains stop and go after every 5-10 minutes. I wasn’t that talented in math so I asked this polite guy once and he said, “the trains go after every three hundred seconds or so.” I didn’t believe him at first, but then I’m like he must be a scholar, I should just believe him. I sit on my chair most of the day; the chair is a carte box which I found in the big dumpster in front of the subway entrance. My bed is made up of a cardboard that cost me one dollar so I must use it till death. Everyone who goes by me stares at my clothing since it’s all ripped as if I was attacked or was raped. I don’t have a penny in my pocket I’ve been living in this subway for a long time now, maybe two days. I will die, die and only die here.

Photograph: In class at Bard High School Early College; Enrico Ferorelli

UTOPIAN BLUES Paul Chan’s digital visions and political actions are all of a piece

It was the genius of Henry Darger—the quintessential “outsider” artist—to document his surpassingly strange, paradisial fantasies in 12 volumes of prose and accompanying illustrations, while he supported himself for more than half a century through menial employment. Charles Fourier, born in 1772—two centuries before the year of Darger’s death—was also an isolated visionary. It was Fourier’s genius, during the bleak ascendancy of the Industrial Revolution, to prophesy an “Eden of joyous labor,” in which men and women would live happily ever after in self-sustained communities.

Images, this and facing page: courtesy Paul Chan

Paul Chan, MFA ’03, is neither an outsider nor a prophet. But it was Chan’s particular genius to discern the affinities between Darger and Fourier, and to wed their utopian visions in an animated video that the New York Times called a “brilliantly imagined work” when it was exhibited last July as part of a group show at Greene Naftali Gallery in Manhattan. (Chan will have a solo exhibition at the gallery in September 2004.) “What binds Darger and Fourier, like all worldbuilders, is a grand sense of desperation,” says Chan, who lives in New York City. “They don’t want reform. They have turned their backs on the world—its language, its way of doing things, its very gravity. They’re ready to reach escape velocity, to jettison the baggage of cruel earth to create and live anew. So their desperation connects them, and [also connects them to] me, because I’m very moved by desperate people and their ideas.” Titled Happiness (finally) after 35,000 years of civilization, Chan’s digital video animation has a running time of 17 minutes, 20 seconds, and took nearly four years to make. It derives its imagery from the episodic adventures of Darger’s “Vivian Girls”—an idyllic landscape bountiful with flowers and overspread by fluffy clouds, in which the girls are attended by winged guardians and menaced by uniformed men—and its formal structure

from Fourier’s writings, with each video sequence roughly corresponding to a section in the “Table of the Social Progress of Movements.” Although spot-on in its evocation of Darger’s intensely personal cosmos, Chan’s video does not appropriate specific images from the artist, whose recondite chronicles were not discovered until after his death. Rather, according to Carol Greene of Greene Naftali Gallery, Chan drew “what he thought Darger would draw and animate if he were still alive and had Internet access and a knowledge of contemporary art and photography.” The gamins that Darger “drew” by tracing the images of models in clothing catalogues have been replaced in Chan’s video by girls that echo the figures of Goya, Diane Arbus, and Hans Bellmer, along with those of Japanese pornographers and the anonymous designers of the U.S. Department of Defense website. In addition to its imagery, the video also echoes Darger in several of its technical aspects. When it was shown at Greene Naftali, it was projected onto a paper screen that was pieced together like a puzzle. The segmented screen was an homage to the indigent Darger, who typically had to tape several pieces of paper together until he got the size he wanted for his scroll-like landscapes. And, since Darger used both sides of the paper for his illustrations, the design of the screen, of sparkle vellum, enabled gallerygoers to view the video on either of its sides. Chan, who says he was drawn to Bard’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts by “freedom, the film and video

faculty, and ice cream at Holy Cow,” has more than a mere intellectual kinship with such “impossibilitians” as Darger and Fourier. Utopian visions for a better world have played a defining role in his life. From December 2002 to January 2003, Chan lived in Baghdad as a member of the Iraqi Peace Team, a project of Voices in the Wilderness, a Chicago-based activist group that has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. His Baghdad Snapshot Action, a suite of photographs of ordinary Iraqi citizens, is posted on his website, nationalphilistine.com. “There is nothing more moving and funny and pleasurable than to be with people who believe they can do stupid, absurd, impossible things, like stop wars,” says Chan, whose Baghdad in No Particular Order, a video essay of life in the Iraqi capital prior to the U.S. invasion, premiered at the Museum of Modern Art on December 13. “There is a wonderful slogan that students spray-painted everywhere during the 1968 global protests: Be realistic—demand the impossible. I’m drawn to impossibilities like a moth to flames.” Mikhail Horowitz

Editor s note: Paul Chan is not the only Bard artist to have drawn inspiration from Henry Darger and his work. John Ashbery, Charles B. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, based a book-length poem, Girls on the Run (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), on the picaresque adventures of Darger’s “Vivian Girls.”

THE ANATOMY OF LONELINESS A talk by John T. Cacioppo

John T. Cacioppo, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, addressed the Bard community on October 25, 2003, at the first annual Andrew Jay Bernstein ’68 Memorial Lecture. Cacioppo is a pioneer in social neuroscience, a discipline that explores how the social world affects biology and how behavior connects an individual’s thoughts and feelings to measurable changes in brain activity and in overall health. He was part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mind-Body Interactions. An adaptation of Cacioppo’s talk follows. We are fundamentally social organisms, our mythic rugged individualism notwithstanding. We are born into the most prolonged period of abject dependency of any mammal. Even once grown, we’re not particularly splendid physical specimens. Our survival depends on our collective abilities, not our individual might. When asked what is necessary for happiness, most people say that relationships with friends and family are most important. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that individuals who reported having contact with five or more friends in the prior six months were 60 percent more likely to consider their lives very happy. Ostracism and solitary confinement are among the hardest forms of human punishment across cultures and across time. Studies clearly establish a relationship between social isolation and broad-based morbidity/mortality. This relation-

ship, involving factors such as social status and behavior, has an adverse effect on baseline health that is comparable in strength to smoking, high blood pressure, and obesity. It remains an unexplained relationship, and that’s why we took on the study of loneliness about 10 years ago. First, what is loneliness? We started with the UCLA Revised Loneliness Scale, which lists 20 beliefs that best differentiate a group known to be highly lonely from a group that’s not at all lonely. With this scale, we’re understanding something about the feelings that characterize loneliness. The first is a feeling of social isolation. The kinds of descriptions people respond to on the survey are “I lack companionship, I feel left out, I’m unhappy being so withdrawn.” The second factor we called feelings of relational integration—a feeling of connection when you talk to someone. While people have always assumed this relational connection is with another person, we are now examining the extent to which pets, God, or even TV characters can assume parasocial relationships that help fill in what would otherwise be an empty life. The third facet is feelings of collective connection, the feeling of being in a community. For example, the students here are identified with Bard College. Loneliness is about half genetic and half environmental. In 1957 Francis Crick articulated what’s called the central dogma of molecular biology: we each have a set of master genes that are thought to activate the DNA necessary to produce appropriate proteins for development and

behavior. The architects of this construction were thought to operate over millennia, whereas the builders of that structure and the underlying proteins for behavior operated within each cell or from the reaches of the social environment. The result is DNA being constituted by environmental forces, and that’s where the social world matters. For example, take the child of a genius and the child of an idiot and put them both in a dark box. If 20 years later I take them out, neither one is going to score very high on an intelligence test. If, instead of the box, I give each an enriched environment, over time both will show much better intellectual development and performance, but there will be a reaction range that will allow the child of the genius to achieve greater heights than the child of the idiot. How does the social environment affect proteins in the brain? Kip Williams in New South Wales, Australia, has looked at social rejection. He takes three people, two of whom are unknown to the subject as being confederates to the study. Say I’m the subject. I throw the ball to you; you throw it to the third person. Then the two of you start throwing the ball back and forth, leaving me out. It’s painful. I feel rejected. Those individuals who were no longer a part of that triad showed evidence that they were essentially in social pain: the same part of the brain was active. As you can deduce, the brain is geared to look for threats. It directs a wave that starts to emerge in about 300 milliseconds and peaks at around about half a second, during which you recognize and can categorize what you just looked at. Lonely individuals see the world as a threatening place; they show more of this threat surveillance. To cope with it, they’re more likely to be passive and to hunker down, compared to nonlonely people, who are much more likely to see other people as friends, seek support, and actively cope under stress. People in these studies were not selected for loneliness; they were put in conditions that made them lonely. There’s a social paradigm called the “prisoner’s dilemma.” If you cooperate on Trial 1, I cooperate on Trial 2: a tit-for-tat strategy. If you defect on Trial 3, I defect on Trial 4. It’s not apparent to you, but you’re the determinant of my behavior. At the start, lonely and nonlonely individuals are equally cooperative for a very short while. But in any social relationship, there are always little betrayals. The lonely person sees these as, “Ah, I knew that was coming.” Cooperation plummets. The nonlonely person decides, “That’s the give-andtake in a relationship,” and remains highly cooperative. The differences in social cognition lead lonely individuals to protect against what they expect as punishment from another

person. These dispositions in turn activate neurobehavioral mechanisms that may contribute to the association between loneliness and health. How does social environment affect protein translation? We looked at cortisol, a stress hormone, in lonely and nonlonely individuals. The lonelier people felt, the higher their baseline cortisol. Cortisol helps break down carbohydrates, which give energy to fight stressors. Cortisol can ravage the body. The brain has receptors that shut down the system that introduces cortisol. If cortisol is repeatedly at high levels, however, the receptors in the brain start to down-regulate, that is, they become less sensitive to cortisol in the system and shut it down less, which results in increased baseline levels of cortisol. What’s left? DNA-to-RNA transcription. If any process could be insulated from the social world, this was it. To test whether the social world could affect DNA-to-RNA transcription, we looked at messenger RNA for growth hormone in lymphocytes, which are white blood cells that help defend against infections. The growth hormone in lymphocytes fosters immune functioning, while decreases in growth hormone makes these cells less effective in defending the body against attack. We studied women caring for spouses with Alzheimer’s disease. These women were primary caregivers for eight years on average and had minimal interactions with others during that time. When we compared the messenger RNA growth hormone in the lymphocytes of the caregivers with that in the lymphocytes of age-and-gender-matched controls, we found the levels in caregivers to be greatly reduced. That lonely individuals lead a life filled with stress and strain may not be surprising. But our study found something that really surprised me, a physiological aspect we didn’t see initially. When we sleep at night, we increase what in physiology is called the anabolic process, the repair and maintenance aspect of metabolism. If you and I are equally stressed, but I have connections with others and feel loved, do I sleep a more restorative sleep? The sleep of lonely individuals is characterized by more microawakenings and restlessness than the sleep of nonlonely individuals. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that the body’s restorative processes are less efficient in individuals who feel socially disconnected. Our studies of loneliness show that we need a multilevel science, and a multidisciplinary perspective, to understand these complex behaviors. This is an exciting time, in which the social and the biological sciences are two important arms in our fight to understand complex social problems.

ALUMNI/AE NOTEBOOK

Allison Radzin: Helping Bardians Make Career Connections One of Allison Radzin’s favorite classes at Bard examined the American West through film, fiction, and history. Professors Mark Lytle and John Pruitt taught Radzin how to look at a subject from a variety of angles—a lesson that has served her well throughout her career and in her work for the Alumni/ae Association. After graduating from Bard in 1988 with a concentration in English, Radzin (Villone) worked in creative services and marketing for MTV, USA Network, and Lifetime Entertainment Services. Four years ago she joined the Guild Group, a White Plains–based marketing and communications agency. As vice president and creative director, Radzin develops concepts and programs for clients who want to promote a particular service or product. Three years ago Radzin was elected to the 70-member Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association. The board meets four times a year to plan programs and activities aimed at strengthening the connection between alumni/ae and the College. Board members also work on committees dedicated to particular alumni/ae concerns. Since early 2003, Radzin has cochaired the Career Networking Committee. “A lot of what the Board of Governors does is designed to keep people interested in Bard by reinforcing what they learned there,” Radzin says. “We hope to generate awareness, increase participation, and raise money to make Bard better.” Radzin and fellow committee chair Connie Bard Fowle ’80 worked with the Office of Career Development to coordinate a career networking event for Bard’s fall 2003 and spring 2004 graduating classes. The event, which was held

November 15 at Bard Hall in New York City, was hailed as a huge success. Students were able to meet alumni/ae and ask questions about various career choices during structured, 30-minute interviews. In preparation for the event, Radzin, Fowle, and April Kinser, director of career development, recruited alumni/ae whose careers correspond to Bard’s academic divisions. More than a dozen alumni/ae were on hand to share their insights into such fields as law, the performing arts, epidemiology, public administration, entertainment, publishing, public relations, and finance. Radzin hopes to follow up with a networking event for alumni/ae who are already working and interested in meeting others in their field. She is also looking for new ways to promote the College’s career website, which is accessible to students and alumni/ae who wish to become or find mentors, search for employment opportunities, or post a job. Radzin’s responsibilities with the Board of Governors keep her in touch with Bard friends, introduce her to alumni/ae from other classes, and reinforce the lessons she learned when she was a student. “The more you interact with Bard, the more likely you are to contribute to the College in some way, whether by attending an event, participating on a committee, or making a donation,” Radzin says. “Connecting Bard to your current life is important and rewarding to both alums and the College.” It is not necessary to be a member of the Board of Governors to volunteer for one of its 13 committees. For information, please contact Jessica Kemm ’74, director of alumni/ae affairs, at 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu. To register for Bard’s career website, go to www.collegecentral.com/bard and follow the prompts. For further registration instructions and the mentoring password, call the Bard Office of Career Development at 845-758-7539 or e-mail careerdev@bard.edu.

Roundtable photographs: Doug Baz

ABOVE Penelope Rowlands ’73 (left) and Christopher Shaw ’71 (center) met Bard students in a writers roundtable on October 21. Along with John Katzenbach ’72 (right), they discussed writing as “more than an art,” offering tips on marketing “ideas, writing, and yourself” to editors and publishers. Rowlands is the author of Weekend Houses and a freelance writer for Vogue and Architectural Digest. Shaw wrote about his travels in Mexico and Guatemala in Sacred Monkey River: A Canoe Trip with the Gods. Katzenbach is the author of several successful crime novels, including Hart’s War. The program was presented by the Parents’ Leadership Council and the Office of Career Development.

ABOVE Bardians got together in New York City on October 18 for a literary walking tour of Greenwich Village led by Manhattan historian Joyce Gold. RIGHT Barry Silkowitz ’71, Cheryl Davis ’72, and Cheryl’s husband, Jeff Noe, were the winning team in the Raptor Classic Golf Tournament, which took place on September 20 at the Thomas Carvel Country ABOVE A hardy band raised bumbershoots for the October 4

Club in Pine Plains, New

alumni/ae tour of Art Omi, the art center and sculpture park north of

York. Silkowitz, Davis, and

Bard in Ghent, New York. Present were (left to right) Scott Schenk ’03;

Noe shot one under par on

Robyn Carliss ’02; Sean Scheinfeld; Sean’s mother, Marcy Brafman

the 18-hole course to tri-

’72; and Art Omi curator Peter Frank. “It was fun, in its weird, wet

umph over a field of

way,” reports Brafman, “and the tour was followed by a tasty lunch at

approximately 24 golfers.

Foster’s [in Rhinebeck], which hadn’t changed a bit.”

JOHN BARD SOCIETY NEWS when he was three years old and settled outside Sonoma, California. He was an honor student at Sonoma Valley High School and now plans to concentrate in political studies. Si Shi and her family moved to the United States from China when she was a small child. She grew up in Flushing, New York, and attended Benjamin N. Cardozo High School, where she led a reading program for children at a local elementary school. At Bard she plans to pursue her interest in creative writing and continue her commitment to community service as a member of the Trustee Leader Doug Baz Scholar Program. With Segal’s bequest, Bard’s Investing in the Bequest Helps New Generation Scholars Future Campaign now stands at more than $138 million. You can participate in this campaign to build Zelda E. Segal wanted to help young people whose Bard’s endowment and support capital projects with families were new to this country to realize their either a straight contribution or a planned gift such as dream of a liberal arts education. Segal, who entered a bequest. Bard with the Class of 1952, loved the College and Creating a bequest to Bard in your will is a simple credited her success as a writer to Bard. More imporprocedure. The next time you review your estate plans tant, her experience at Bard instilled in her a desire to or your will (which you should do every few years or continue learning. She received a bachelor’s degree, whenever you experience a major life event—marriage, two master’s degrees, in social work and special educachildren, or retirement, for example), ask your attorney tion, and took many writing classes. to include a bequest to Bard. You can restrict the Through a bequest, Segal established the Zelda E. bequest for a particular project, as Segal did, or leave Segal New Generation Scholarship. Her generosity the bequest for the general operation of the College. makes it possible for at least two students every year to Bard’s Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs receive full scholarships to Bard. The citation reads as can provide sample language to you or your advisers. follows: Scholarships endowed by Zelda E. Segal, who For more information, return the envelope in the midentered Bard College with the Class of 1952, are awarded to dle of this issue of the Bardian or contact Debra incoming students who demonstrate intellectual curiosity, Pemstein, vice president for development and enthusiasm, and a commitment to excellence, and whose alumni/ae affairs. parents were born abroad and emigrated to the United All inquiries are confidential. States within the past 20 years. Last fall Bard welcomed Alejandro Heredia-Santoyo This description is for general information purposes only. and Si Shi, the first two recipients of the Segal scholarFor specific information on your personal situation, please ships. Born in Mexico, Heredia-Santoyo is the first consult your legal and financial advisers. person in his family to receive an education beyond elementary school. His family moved to the United States

THINKING ABOUT A CAREER CHANGE OR RETURNING TO SCHOOL? Find a mentor or talk to an alumnus/a in a different field Office of Career Development 845-758-7539, careerdev@bard.edu Or just connect with a fellow alumnus/a

Responding to Environmental Challenges

BARD CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY • Innovative Program • Dual Degrees • Unique Curriculum • Internships

Phone: 845-758-7073 E-mail: cep@bard.edu Website: www.bard.edu/cep

SPRING 2004 ALUMNI/AE EVENTS For more information or to make reservations, call Robyn Carliss ’02 at 1-800-BARDCOL or e-mail carliss@bard.edu

Thursday, April 1 The Devonshire Inheritance: Five Centuries of Collecting at Chatsworth 6:00 p.m. The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture 18 West 86th Street, New York City Enjoy a special tour of The Devonshire Inheritance, which showcases works of fine and decorative art from one of the greatest private collections in the world. The treasures of Chatsworth, an English country house that has been the primary residence of the Cavendish family (including various earls and dukes of Devonshire) since the 16th century, include cabinet paintings, Old Master drawings,masterpieces by the great silversmiths, gems and jewelry, natural curiosities, scientific instruments, early photographs, and books and manuscripts. The exhibition opens on March 18 and runs through June 20. Reservations required. Fee $5.

Saturday, May 8 Edith Wharton’s American Home

THE MASTER OF ARTS IN TEACHING PROGRAM AT BARD COLLEGE

10:45 a.m. The Mount, 2 Plunkett Street (southern junction of Routes 7 and 7A), Lenox, Massachusetts. Meet at the stables adjacent to the ticket booth.

• A new graduate program that prepares teachers who will lead efforts to change and improve public high schools throughout the United States • A one-year program leading to a master of arts degree in teaching and a teaching certificate in adolescent education in English, history, mathematics, or physics • Integrated Curriculum • Teaching Internships • Partnerships with Public Schools

Visit The Mount, Edith Wharton’s 42-room mansion and its three acres of formal gardens. Wharton, who called herself a better landscape gardener than novelist, based the design of the 1902 home on the principles outlined in The Decoration of Houses, the influential book she coauthored with architect Ogden Codman Jr. The Mount combines elements of English, French, and Italian design and has been extensively restored, with almost $9 million invested to bring the house and gardens back to life. This icon of American architecture and landscape design is one of only a handful of National Historic Landmarks dedicated to women.

Phone: 845-758-7776 E-mail: mat@bard.edu Website: www.bard.edu/mat

Reservations required. Fee $14.

HOLIDAY PARTY 2003 Approximately 160 Bardians braved the biting winds and stinging snow of a record-breaking December 5 nor’easter to attend the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association’s annual Holiday Party. The exterior of the National Arts Club glowed in the snow that had fallen all day, softening the city’s hard edges and muffling Manhattan’s sounds. Inside the high-ceilinged, graceful rooms, Bardians mingled for two warm hours, a piano and upright bass providing background accompaniment. News from some of those who attended: Elijah Vanaver ’01 has been performing, nationally and internationally, with the Vanaver Caravan, a company that fosters appreciation for dance and music idioms from throughout the world. John Waddell ’59 remembered fondly Bard’s seminars, progressive pedagogy, and the chance to share the 1950s campus with the likes of Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison. Brooklynites Alisdair MacRae MFA ’03 and Michelle Handelman MFA ’01 crossed paths at the party. MacRae continues his sculptural pursuits. Handelman teaches at New School University and creates public art. Arthur Hughes ’67 is involved in a project to digitalize the works of Malcolm X, Trotsky, Guevara, Castro, and others, ensuring that these texts remain in print. Kwesi Thomas ’00 recently edited four episodes of the Dr. Phil Show. He and two other Bardians, Tyrone Copeland ’01 and Hector Anderson ’02, are shopping a screenplay (based on Anderson’s Senior Project) to potential producers. The cheerful cacophony of the evening’s conversations said it all: Bardians are a stalwart bunch, defying the elements to enjoy one another’s company. Photographs: Enrico Ferorelli

BOOKS BY BARDIANS

Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature by Susan E. Davis ’83 and Margo Demello LANTERN BOOKS

From Peter Cottontail to Playboy Bunnies, rabbits have been ubiquitous in the art, religion, and folklore of cultures the world over. Susan E. Davis, a journalist and editor in Alameda, California, and Margo Demello, president of the House Rabbit Society, present a comprehensive look at wild and domestic rabbits, dismissing a warren of misconceptions about them. Among the topics that the authors nimbly treat are the increasing popularity of rabbits as pets, rabbits as cultural icons (would any respectable magician pull a woodchuck out of his hat?), and rabbits as revenue (in the meat, fur, and vivisection industries as well as the pet trade). Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German History edited by Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian ’83 STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Germany in the 20th century was unique in its experience of the full range of governments—imperial, democratic, dictatorial, and socialist—and also ran the gamut from enormous trauma (both suffered and inflicted) to great hope and economic promise. Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian have drawn a picture of Germany’s extremes during the tumultuous century from specialists writing on urban and welfare policy, medicine, childbirth, and nostalgia, among other topics. Eghigian is an associate professor of modern European history at Pennsylvania State University. Educated Guess: A School Board Member Reflects by Howard Good ’73 SCARECROW PRESS

After serving six years on the board of education in Highland, New York, several of them as president, Howard Good has collected his experiences and suggestions with honesty and humor. He considers a range of issues, from the proper parameters of a school board’s responsibilities to the public perception of board members, and also muses on school violence, internal board conflicts, and what constitutes a good teacher. Good is a professor of journalism at SUNY New Paltz. Courtesans at Table: Gender and Greek Literary Culture in Athenaeus by Laura K. McClure ’82 ROUTLEDGE

By the time of Athenaeus, who wrote in the late second century C.E., courtesans and prostitutes were presented in Greek literature as emblems of an idyllic past. Laura McClure points to the courtesans of Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae, characterized as comic figures who appeared naked at religious festivals and even in courts of law. She shows how the erudite harlots of Athenaeus differed from real prostitutes, who suffered under slavish conditions. McClure is a professor of classics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

To Music by Megan Pruiett ’97 ETHERDOME PRESS

Megan Pruiett’s spacing of poetic words on the page echoes various musical figures and passages. As in musical notation, some words are placed above or below horizontal lines. This collection blends prose poems with other forms of poetry; pieces are often highlighted through juxtaposition with contrasting words or images. Pruiett lives in San Francisco. Ash St. by Brandon Smith ’01 XLIBRIS

Many of the more than 20 short stories in this volume are spoken by first-person narrators haunted by death, by misfortunes such as burglary, or by their own or another person’s insanity. One protagonist overcomes the world’s most powerful wizard; another suffers hallucination and possible madness on a commuter train. The collection also includes three novellas and a section called “Bonus Tracks,” containing words to songs by Smith’s alternative country/folk-rock band The Beams, lyrics that are referred to in the text. Smith lives, writes, and plays guitar in Philadelphia. Awake in the Heartland: The Ecstasy of What Is by Joan Tollifson ’70 TRAFFORD

The nature of reality, the self, and living in the present moment are major topics in Joan Tollifson’s writing. In this book of essays she approaches the attributes of acceptance and happiness as inextricably linked to letting go of the notion of what should be. The volume is full of anecdotes and “awakenings” from Tollifson’s life and teachers, and she encourages the reader to realize, in the words of one observer, “that there is absolutely nothing to attain.” The Poethical Wager by Joan Retallack THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

In this collection of speculative essays, Joan Retallack, Bard’s John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities, engages contemporary poetry and proposes a “poethics”—that is, a practice of poetics informed by ethical considerations—to effectively navigate the relationship between art and life in an increasingly complex world. “The most pressing question for me is how art, particularly literature, helps form the direction and quality of attention, the intelligences, the senses we bring into contact with contemporary experience,” Retallack writes. Among her themes are a consideration of surprise as a positive aesthetic value and the “masculinist” bias of mainstream literary traditions.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

Bard Goes to the MAT for Public School Education In June 2004 Bard will add to its 143-year tradition by instituting a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) Program whose graduates will be qualified to teach English, mathematics, physics, and social studies to grades 7 through 12. Maximum enrollment will be 15 graduate students per discipline; over time, the program will expand to include additional subjects. Bard’s goal is to create professionals willing to make a long-term commitment to public schools (especially “high needs” schools). “We expect our graduates to become teacherleaders and see themselves as pushing for change,” says Ric Campbell, director of the MAT Program. “This isn’t just training to fit into an existing job slot.” A number of public schools will serve as MAT training areas, defining their own needs and priorities. “One principle of the program is that we move as openly as possible into the public school environment,” explains Campbell. Students entering Bard’s 12-month, full-time program must have a bachelor’s degree in the discipline they plan to teach (rather than a degree in education). They will continue studies in their discipline and complete a “final research project” within that field, in addition to taking education courses. Courses will combine a seminar format with “laboratory” time, during which MAT students will work “in the field”

under the guidance of “master teachers” from public schools. The graduate students will establish research questions (e.g., “How can I improve the level of participation in my public school class?”), develop theoretical solutions to the questions, and test and modify the solutions in actual teaching environments. “One goal is to tie the program directly to practice from the very beginning,” says Campbell. During summer months, MAT students will tutor public school students, one-on-one. From September through June they will work in schools, where they will gradually transition from participant-observer status to carrying full teaching loads of 25 to 30 students per class. “You mix the concerns of individuals and the group,” says Campbell, a public school teacher with more than 25 years’ experience. “You design assignments to accommodate different learning styles. You don’t necessarily teach from the front of the room.” In order to evaluate success levels, the MAT placement office will maintain contact with graduates and their employers for approximately 10 years. “Any college anywhere in the country should be working with local communities to improve public school education,” Campbell stresses. “The partnership is key. The transformation of schools happens in the classroom.”

On View at the BGC The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture will present two exhibitions over the next few months. For more information, call 212-501-3000 or visit www.bgc.bard.edu. The Devonshire Inheritance: Five Centuries of Collecting at Chatsworth surveys the collections of Chatsworth, one of Britain’s most remarkable country estates and home to one of its oldest and most distinguished private art collections. March 18 to June 20. Vasemania—Neoclassical Form and Ornament: Selections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the first exhibition resulting from an initiative in which BGC faculty and students work with Metropolitan curators on an aspect of the museum’s collections. The exhibition explores the revival of classicism in the 18th century as exemplified by the vase motif. July 22 to October 17. View of Chatsworth from the west. Photo courtesy of Mike Williams/Chatsworth House Trust.

Vietnamese-American Writer Wins Bard Fiction Prize Monique Truong has been selected to receive the annual Bard Fiction Prize, which consists of a $30,000 cash award and appointment as writer in residence at the College for the spring 2004 semester. Truong’s first novel, The Book of Salt (Houghton Mifflin, 2003)—about a gay Vietnamese chef who cooks for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as he tries to navigate the strangeness and dislocation of his life in Paris—was widely praised. The San Francisco Chronicle suggested that, like Marguerite Duras, Truong “conveys character emotions through charged language—not ornate, overblown language, but the right word at the right time.”

Truong was born in Saigon in 1968 and came to the United States at age 6. She graduated from Yale University and the Columbia University School of Law, going on to specialize in intellectual property law. Her fiction has appeared in several anthologies, including Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing (Rutgers, 2001). Established in 2001, the Bard Fiction Prize is awarded annually to an emerging writer who is an American citizen aged 39 years or younger at the time of application. This year’s selection was made by three professors in the Division of Languages and Literature, Mary Caponegro, Robert Kelly, and Bradford Morrow.

Jamison Stoltz

Bard Offers New Enticements to the Study of Science Used to be, if a student was planning to concentrate in science at Bard, he or she would begin by taking Introduction to Biology, Introduction to Chemistry, and all the other traditional prep courses. That approach doesn’t necessarily apply anymore, according to Ethan Bloch, who chairs the Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Along with his colleagues, Bloch is working to formulate new courses that are designed to provide alternative entries to the study of science. The “flagship” of these courses, says Bloch, is The Environment and Disease, a class conceived and organized by Michael Tibbetts, associate professor of biology, that made its debut in the fall of 2002. Two features distinguish this course: one, it is team-taught by Tibbetts and nine other science faculty, who alternate as guest lecturers covering the full spectrum of scientific disciplines, and two, it is geared to students who are interested in science but undecided as yet whether to make it their concentration. “If a nonscience major is attracted to one of these new courses, we’re already happy,” says Bloch. “But if that student

says, ‘Gee, the chemistry in here is really interesting,’ and goes on to become a science major, that’s great.” At least one student has decided to switch her concentration to science as a result of having taken the class, reports Tibbetts. Two more team-taught interdisciplinary courses are in the planning stage: one focusing on cognitive science, the other on alternative energy. Happily, the expansion of the science curriculum will soon be matched by a corresponding expansion of classroom, office, and laboratory space. The College has contracted with Rafael Viñoly Architects PC, a Manhattan-based firm, to design a new building to adjoin the existing science facilities. The estimated cost of the building is $20 to $25 million, and the groundbreaking is scheduled for spring 2005. “If we want to expand the science programs, a new building is crucial,” says Bloch. The new space, he explains, will make possible a better configuration of labs, classrooms, and offices, allowing for increased interdisciplinary collaborations in science and more flexible teaching methods. 39

SummerScape Expands in Second Season Even as Frank Gehry’s rolling steel roof was being juxtaposed for the first time, and to startling effect, with the reddening maples and bronzing oaks of late October, plans were already under way for an expanded summer season at The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Buoyed by critical acclaim for both the building and the programming, as well as the enthusiasm of the sell-out crowds, the Fisher Center staff plans to extend the run of Bard SummerScape to eight weeks in 2004—twice the length of the festival’s inaugural season. “When we opened the Fisher Center for the summer, I was prepared for the gasps of appreciation from the audience as they approached the building,” said Jonathan Levi, the Center’s director. “But the greatest thrill of our first Bard SummerScape was watching how completely the building inspired the artists who performed on its stages.” Slated to run from July 1 to August 29, SummerScape 2004 will organize its programs to complement those of the Bard Music Festival (August 13–15 and 20–22), whose theme this year is “Shostakovich and His World.” Among

the events that will amplify the works of the Russian composer will be a production of his musical, Cherry Orchard Towers; an opera by Mel Marvin (with a libretto by Levi), Guest From the Future, about the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; and a full orchestral production of Shostakovich’s opera The Nose, based on a marvelously strange story by Nikolai Gogol. A Shostakovich film festival will consist of major films for which the composer wrote the scores. Also planned is a production of Gogol’s The Inspector General, a scathing satire of pompous, incompetent officials and the toadies who fawn over them. SummerScape will also feature Ballet Flamenco Sara Baras in four performances of Mariana Pineda. Long considered the doyenne of Spanish flamenco dancers, Sara Baras is scheduled to perform with the Three Tenors and to dance at the Spanish royal wedding in the months leading up to SummerScape. The festival will conclude with four intimate, solo performances by as many acclaimed theater artists in its last week.

Photographs: Doug Baz

New Faces on Campus Bard’s Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Goldie Milgram (left), is encouraging a spirited Jewish community on campus through dancing, meditation, communal meals, and other programs. Milgram, who has taught internationally, holds a rabbinical degree from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, a doctorate from New York Theological Seminary, and a master’s degree in social work from Yeshiva University. Geneva Foster (center), assistant dean of students and director of multicultural affairs, wants to create vibrant ways to share different cultures at Bard. Foster’s

first career was in television production, but later she followed her interest in “educating the whole person.” Before arriving at Bard, she was multicultural affairs director at Defiance College in Ohio. Tarah Greenidge ’98 (right) was named director of HEOP (Higher Education Opportunity Program), a New York State initiative that offers a fully funded education to students from historically disadvantaged areas. The Brooklyn native, who is also the director of multicultural recruitment, has worked in the Admission Office since graduating with a degree in American studies.

More Building Blocks Coming to the Bard campus: a new home for the Film and Integrated Arts Programs, a hefty addition to the building that houses the Music Program, and another eatery. Renovation of the Milton and Sally Avery Center for the Arts will transform the space that previously held the Theater and Dance Programs into a majestic venue for movies, video, and integrated arts. The 25,000-square-foot building will feature three screening rooms: a 110-seat theater, an integrated arts space for multimedia performance and films, and a classroom for small screenings. Studios, computer labs for film and digital processing, classrooms, library and archives, and faculty offices will complete the scene. Simultaneously, the Music Program’s Edith C. Blum Institute is acquiring a three-story, 15,000-square-foot addition, which will be connected to Avery and comprise a recording studio, practice rooms, jazz band rehearsal space, and

faculty studios. In the courtyard, an amphitheater will have stadium seating for several hundred. A projection window in Avery will face a blank outer wall of the Blum building for outdoor film screenings. The entranceways to both buildings will be joined by a curved, tentlike canopy of glass fabric. The entire project is expected to cost $6.7 million, with the film center to be completed in June and the music building by September. The project designer is Peter Reynolds with Ashokan Architecture and Planning. At Ward Manor residence hall, the Manor Café is open to the campus community and to audience members from the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. Financed by a generous gift and loan from Chartwells Food Service, which serves the campus, the café consists of a grill, buffet, and private dining area.

WXBC Turns FM Loss into Net Gain The 56-year history of WXBC is nothing if not bumpy. In 2000, just as the student-run station was set to switch from its lowly 5-watt AM signal to a full-fledged FM band, the Federal Communications Commission imposed a moratorium on new licenses. Undeterred, the radio team found another way to broaden its broadcast base: the Internet. In 2002–2003, two years after the FCC setback, the station enjoyed its first full year of broadcasting seven days a week, from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. Four webcasting streams opened up the audience to anyone with a computer. WXBC also produced a news and variety program, The Outside World, which was distributed to other colleges. Interest in the station was higher than it had been in decades. Then, all regular programming had to be suspended last fall when construction fell behind on the station’s new home in the basement of Ward Manor. Not to mention the flood that destroyed its stored furniture. Renovations were completed for the spring semester, and the 70 student disc jockeys had high hopes for a full slate of music, comedy, and talk shows. The new space was designed specifically for radio and contains a broadcast studio, production booth, and music library. The station also has a new system for remote broadcasts, such as Raptor basketball play-by-play, and the deejays are creating a digital library by putting their personal CDs on the computer, as well as the best of the station’s collection. General manager

Nick van der Kolk has also organized a core team of students that can carry the station into the future. When the FCC reopens applications, WXBC will be ready to pick up where the process left off. Until then,WXBC can be heard online at http://student.bard.edu/wxbc/. Special thanks to Ed Coster ’54 and the Class of 1954, which will celebrate its 50th reunion in May, and to the Class of 1979, which will mark its 25th reunion. Their class gifts will help support WXBC.

Student Kudos Bard students in undergraduate and graduate programs continue to glean honors. Elena Grigorescu ’04 has received honorable mention in the prestigious Alice T. Schafer Prize competition. The annual prize honors excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman. Grigorescu participates in Bard’s Distinguished Scientist Scholars Program and carries a double concentration, in math and computer science. Wynne Greenwood MFA ’05 has had a work selected for inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Renovating the Bobrinskiy Palace for Smolny College The 18th-century St. Petersburg home of Count Aleksei Grigorievich Bobrinskiy is known as the Bobrinskiy Palace, despite the fact that three-quarters of it currently serves as office space. Today the building is undergoing renovation to become the nonresidential campus of Smolny College, Russia’s first liberal arts college. Smolny is a joint project of Bard College and Saint Petersburg State University. Portions of the threestory, 45,000-square-foot palace that have been preserved include a formal cobblestone courtyard, grand staircase, pavilion, cupola, library, reception room, ballroom, and billiards room, as well as porticos, statuary, gardens, balconies, drawing rooms, dining rooms, ceiling frescoes, molded cornices, a brocade wall covering, chandeliers, an elaborate entrance gate, and some original furniture. Smolny College is designed to contribute to the democratization of Russian higher education. Its graduates receive a B.A. in liberal arts and sciences from Bard and a B.A. in arts and humanities from Saint Petersburg State University. This past June, Smolny celebrated its first Commencement. Susan Gillespie, director of Bard’s Institute for International Liberal Education, describes the palace as

“ideal for the campus of a liberal arts college.” The facility requires structural work, however. Roofs and electrical and mechanical systems must be revamped and foundations resealed. Renovations are necessary to create classrooms, a library, faculty offices, and spaces for student activities and visiting scholars. The bill for the renovation and repairs is estimated at $6 million over the next two years. The goal is to create something that Bard students consider axiomatic, but which is new to Russia: a campus that encourages student-to-student and student-to-faculty encounters outside the classroom—dialogues crucial to liberal education. Other aspects of liberal arts education have already been introduced, including greater responsiveness to students and the option of pursuing individual and cross-disciplinary academic interests. These components have not existed in Russia’s previously highly specialized, top-down educational system. The Smolny experiment is attracting a lot of interest and support, says Gillespie. “It works because the faculty and students like the freedom and flexibility it gives them and because it prepares students for life in contemporary society.” The Russian Federal Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Education have provided initial funding for the renovation project. The Higher Education Support Project of the Open Society Institute, which is a major donor to Smolny College, has also promised its support. Individual donors, including Selma Ertegun, a member of the Smolny College Board of Overseers; James H. Ottaway Jr,. a member of the Bard College Board of Trustees; and alumnus Laszlo Bito ’60 generously enabled Smolny to undertake the planning and design work necessary to make the project a reality.

Family Weekend Offers Autumnal Abundance

Photographs: Doug Baz

Bard’s annual Family Weekend drew almost 400 people on October 24–26, a significant increase over past years. They enjoyed a variety of programs that ranged from the serious—a Distinguished Scientist Lecture in which Dr. Devra Davis discussed her book, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle against Pollution—to the simple, such as Family Trivia Night, in which families formed teams to address the question: “Think You Know the ‘70s?” The Parents’ Leadership Council, which works on behalf of Bard students, held its annual meeting, and 10 professors offered classes in their fields. Families toured The Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, and had the opportunity to hear the American Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leon Botstein, in concert in the Center’s Sosnoff Theater. In between activities, students and their guests had time for leisurely meals and exploring the Bard campus and the Hudson Valley.

The Pavlich Connection Raptor varsity teams enjoyed a second strong fall season, winning two Hudson Valley Athletic Conference (HVAC) titles and three tournament championships. Two of those title teams have coaches named Pavlich—’99 Bard graduate Jason and his father, Fred. Jason led the women’s soccer team to its fourth straight Hudson Valley Athletic Conference (HVWAC) tournament crown, and third under his watch. The squad (6-8) overcame a tough schedule and a lot of turnover to peak at tourney time and defeat Purchase 1-0 in the championship game. Pavlich, who captained the men’s soccer team in his junior and senior years at Bard, credits seniors Anna Raupp (the tournament MVP), Hannah Schrock, and Jessica Case for keeping their teammates upbeat and involved. Under Fred Pavlich, the men’s and women’s crosscountry teams raced to first- and second-place HVAC championship finishes, respectively, a reverse of last year’s standings. Pavlich came to Bard in 2001 from New Paltz High School, where he had the state’s longest winning streak, and has built a strong cross-country program from the bottom up (his first team meeting drew two runners). His campus recruitment included grabbing joggers and convincing basketball players, boxers, and ballerinas that cross-country was a great way to keep their legs in shape.

By season’s end, he had a full women’s squad that finished second in the league. The next year they won it, and the men finished second. His motto at Bard is: “Enjoy what you do and you’ll do it better!” It also helps to have a coach named Pavlich.

Doug Baz

Raptors on the Rise Highlights of Bard’s fall varsity campaigns Men’s Cross Country HVMAC champions. Valon Xharra ’04 (Prishtina, Kosovo) finished first at conference championships and was Bard’s first runner to compete in the Atlantic Regional, where he placed 74th. Team had best-ever finish in the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) championships (23rd). Women’s Cross Country HVWAC second place. Team’s 23rd-place showing in the ECAC championship meet was its best ever. Bridget Curran ’07 (Sea Girt, New Jersey) was the first woman runner from Bard to crack the top 100 at the ECACs, finishing 66th. Men’s Soccer HVMAC tournament champions for third consecutive year. Forward Stewart Wagner ’07 (Brookline, Massachusetts) named Tournament MVP with three goals and one assist. Wagner also named Athlete of the Month for October by prestigious Association of Division III Independents.

Women’s Soccer HVWAC tournament champions for fourth straight year. Anna Raupp ’04 (Long Valley, New Jersey) named Tournament MVP. Women’s Tennis HVWAC regular season and tournament champions; undefeated in conference play. Tournament singles winners include Ketaki Pant ’05 (Bombay, India), Hannah Timmons ’07 (New Orleans), and Rebekah Nelson ’05 (Harwich, Massachusetts); doubles win for Pant and Timmons. Women’s Volleyball Fourth place HVWAC regular season and tournament. Veta Allen ’04 (Los Angeles) and Sarah Davies ’04 (Westfield, Massachusetts) named to All-Conference Team.

CLASS NOTES

Robert Mac Alister ’50 Robert Mac Alister studied international relations at Bard, but his interest in the field began even earlier, during his Navy tour of duty in World War II. He was curious about the people and places he saw en route to the Pacific, and his experiences at Okinawa made him wonder what “we could learn that would help us make this a more peaceful world,” he recalls. Mac Alister has since worked all over the world for such organizations as the International Rescue Committee, the Peace Corps, and USAID. He viewed each new assignment— India, Vietnam, the Ivory Coast, and Zaire, to name a few—as an opportunity to learn about other cultures and ways of life. Posted to India not long after its independence, he experienced the caste system firsthand, heard Jawaharlal Nehru speak, and learned about the region’s many religious traditions. Interacting with other cultures in this way and understanding that “we do not have a monopoly on wisdom,” Mac Alister contends, is critical to building a better and more peaceful future. Mac Alister still works as a consultant and recruiter for international nongovernmental organizations. He provides direction and helps fill key staff positions from an extensive network built over 50 years. He also takes advantage of targeted websites, including Bard’s careers and mentoring board. Mac Alister, who received the John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service from Bard in 2000, currently lives in Maryland, close to the Hill, where he once worked for Senator Claiborne Pell. Though he finds himself discouraged by the strident atmosphere in Washington today, where “the parties do not seem to understand that they are ‘opponents, not enemies,’ to quote Bob Dole,” Mac Alister remains politically active and was involved in drafting General Wesley Clark to run in the 2004 presidential race. Photograph: courtesy of Robert Mac Alister

’34 70th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: John Honey, 845-876-0608 Staff contact: Stella Wayne, 845-758-7407 or wayne@bard.edu

’39 65th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: John Honey, 845-876-0608 Staff contact: Stella Wayne, 845-758-7407 or wayne@bard.edu

’44 60th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Arnold Davis, 914-472-3256 Staff contact: Stella Wayne, 845-758-7407 or wayne@bard.edu Arnold Davis celebrated his 80th birthday at the National Arts Club in New York City on November 16, 2003. Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Anthony Hecht celebrated his 80th birthday at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on September 29, 2003. Fellow poets Nicholas Christopher, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Brad Leithauser, J. D. McClatchy, and Elizabeth Spires took part in a reading of his works, and Hecht read “The Book of Yolek,” his poem about the Holocaust.

’48 Nancy Edelstein presented her sculptures in stone and wood during two open studio events at the Tarpon River Art Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on November 21, 2003, and February 6, 2004.

’49 55th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Floyd Parkman, 603-778-1514 Staff contact: Stella Wayne, 845-758-7407 or wayne@bard.edu

’54 50th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Ed Coster, 772-334-3753 or gran_bear@webtv.net Cynthia Maris Dantzic (Gross), 718-488-3350 Miles Kreuger, 323-934-1221 Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Judy Heimann (Zinman) had a solo show of her art at Villa Julie College in Maryland from October 10 to November 8, 2003.

’64 40th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Kathi Frank, frankj@matrix.newpaltz.edu Arthur Wineburg, 202-775-9880 or awineburg@pillsburywinthrop.com Staff contact: Stella Wayne, 845-758-7407 or wayne@bard.edu

’68 Judi Arner was appointed vice president for major and planned giving at the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

’69 35th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Belinha Beatty, 703-323-0928 Charlie Clancy, 973-605-5046 or cbclancy@aol.com Bill Gottlieb, 212-431-8073 or peairs@erols.com Marilyn Salkin Lindenbaum, 303-761-0519 or marilynsl50@yahoo.com Anne Phillips, peyton64@yahoo.com Ingrid Spatt, 631-424-0356 or puckerett@aol.com Carla Sayers Tabourne, tabou001@umn.edu Toni Travis, ttravis@gmu.edu Staff contact: Jessica Kemm, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu

’70 Gary Haber has become a grandfather. The healthy baby is named Esther Anna Miller.

Bob Edmonds ’68 Bob Edmonds, an active volunteer for the Bard Music Festival and the College’s Planned Giving Committee, was a student at Bard during one of the most tumultuous times in U.S. history, “Graduating in 1968 was eerie,” says Edmonds, an attorney who has headed his own firm since 1983. “The academic year had been punctuated by student strikes, and it closed with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The world felt then much as it did after 9/11—a dangerous place where something in the overall scheme of things was very wrong.” It was also a decade full of contrasts, and at Bard, Edmonds discovered “an amazing place that gave me the sense that new paths were always possible and the job was never done.” Edmonds has served on the Board of Directors of the Bard Music Festival since the festival began in 1990, and he now chairs that board. One of his goals for the festival is to bring it closer to financial self-sufficiency. “These are difficult times for fund-raisers,” he says, “but for those who have attended festival events, it is clear that they are worth a special effort.” A former president of the Board of Governors of the Bard–St. Stephen’s Alumni/ae Association, Edmonds would also like to see more alumni/ae involved with the College at all levels—whether through financial contributions, volunteer time, or granting job interviews to new Bard graduates. He acknowledges that small actions may feel insignificant to some. But having come of age during the 1960s, he’s quick to point out that “change begins at the most basic level.” After years of volunteer work for the College, Edmonds has learned that “when alumni/ae show their support for Bard and assume a role of any kind in promoting the interests of the College, the effect is huge.” Photograph: Kevin Bothwell

Elliott Sharp ’74 In a parallel universe, Elliott Sharp might have had a distinguished career in philosophy, or fractal geometry, or anthropology. In this world, though, he chose music, and has carved out a singular niche as a musician and composer for whom the term “niche” is meaningless. Although he made his bones with his improvisational guitar work in New York City’s dynamic downtown scene of the late 1970s, Sharp has explored and achieved fluency in a myriad of musical styles and genres, and on an equally impressive number of instruments. When reached this past fall in Germany, where he was working on a music-theater piece at Theater Bonn, he was typically engaged in a plethora of projects. “I’ve just completed the score to [Guatemalan writerdirector] Rodrigo Rey-Rosa’s first feature film, Lo Que Soño Sebastian,” said Sharp. “In addition to composing and performing on various stringed instruments and writing ersatz Latin bordello pop, I processed location recordings from the Guatemalan jungle of indigenous birds, insects, and frogs to create hyperreal textures and soundbeds.” He was also in media res with two more music-theater projects: Binibon, a collaboration with the sci-fi author Jack Womack, and Hortus Conclusus, a “dramatization of the last day of Walter Benjamin’s life at the border between France and Spain in 1940.” Two CDs to add to Sharp’s considerable catalogue were also on the verge of release: Racing Hearts/Tessalation Row/Calling, which features his first two works for symphony orchestra, and The Velocity of Hue, consisting of works for solo electro-acoustic guitar based on a “personal sonic vocabulary of textures, densities, and groove, filtered through the string traditions of the music of central Asia, India, and North Africa, country blues, and the ‘American primitive’ strain of John Fahey and Robbie Basho,” said the musician-composer, who signs his name “E#”. Photograph: Andreas Sterzing

’72 Catharin Dalpino teaches Southeast Asian politics at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. She will have two books published this year: Watersheds and Wakeup Calls: The Political Consequences of the Asian Economic Crisis and Second Front, Second Time: U.S. Policy in Southeast Asia after September 11. In April 2003 she published an article in the online magazine Slate titled “The Other Vietnam Syndrome.”

’74 30th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Beth Shaw Adelman, 239-659-4277 or adelbeth@aol.com Claire Angelozzi, 954-966-3034 or cangel152@hotmail.com Laurie Berman, 843-886-8634 or lberman@clearstarcorp.com Steve Berman, 843-886-8634 or sberman@clearstarcorp.com John Dalton, jdalton@ulster.net Richard Frank, 617-432-0178 or frank@hcp.med.harvard.edu Richard Gladdys, 508-747-5641 or rgladdys@bondbrothers.com Gregory Ralph Hurst, 858-780-2769 or hurst.greg@sd.sysco.com Donald Kahn, 413-624-3951 or srf030@aol.com Susan Mernit, 408-287-5210 or mernit@aol.com Bill Stone, 617-243-0782 or william.stone@rcn.com Lynn Tepper, 352-567-8761 or ltepper@co.pinellas.fl.us Staff contact: Jessica Kemm ’74, 845-758-7406 or kemm@bard.edu Don Kahn won the 2003 North Atlantic Road Racing Championship in his Spec Racer Ford. The series of 13 races at Lime Rock, Pocono, and New Hampshire International Speedway (NHIS) racetracks began April 13 at NHIS and concluded September 27 at Lime Rock. Don’s season included wins at Lime Rock and NHIS, and fastest race laps at all three venues.

’75 Fred Greenspan premiered his new show, The Tragical Comedy of Punch and Judy, at Muscoot Historic Farm in Katonah, New York, on Easter Sunday 2003, in two performances before a combined audience of more than 700 people. Fred performed the show throughout 2003 at many venues,

including the Waldorf-Astoria, Old Westbury Gardens, Scarsdale Historical Society, Monmouth County Fair, and Sands Point Medieval Festival. The show, which was developed to celebrate Fred’s 20th year of performing Punch and Judy, uses a new set of professionally hand-carved wood puppets based on a beautiful 19th-century set. Fred offers performances of four other Punch shows, all of which incorporate puppets of his own creation. He also continues his pursuits in still photography and serves as co-president and membership chairman of the Valley Artist Association in Peekskill, New York, where he regularly exhibits his prints in the association’s group shows. Visit http://home.earthlink.net/~greenspan/ to find out more about Fred’s puppetry.

’76 Richard Caliban’s work in progress Performance Piece #27 was presented at the HERE Arts Center on November 3–4, 2003. His play Days on Earth was given a staged reading at the Cherry Lane Theatre on November 5. Both venues are in New York City.

’77 Mark Peters lives in the Canary Islands, where he is principal cellist in the Tenerife Symphony. He performed Bloch’s Schelomo as the first string soloist to inaugurate the new Tenerife Auditorium, designed by Santiago Calatrava. He would welcome news from any old friends.

’78 Val Cubano is a dentist in Albany, New York. He says hello to friends from the class of ’78.

’79 25th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Art Carlson, 845-757-4462 Daniel F. O’Neill, 603-968-7377 or pso@cyberportal.net Marcy Porter, 201-692-0506 or aporter@fpmtlaw.com Scott Porter, 201-692-0506 or aporter@fpmtlaw.com Staff contact: Stella Wayne, 845-758-7407 or wayne@bard.edu Nancy Amis attends the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where she is pursuing an M.F.A. degree in painting. She is also working on a documentary based on her book The Orphans of Normandy: A True Story of World War II Told through Drawings by Children, which was published by Atheneum Books for Children in 2003.

Nancy Soriano ’81 Nancy Soriano (Mernit) lives her present in the future tense. As editor in chief of Country Living magazine, she is always projecting, planning issues a year and two years ahead. When she is dealing with the here and now, her days include back-to-back meetings about schedules and budgets, or confronting the unfortunate exigency of, say, someone on a shoot breaking a valuable antique. “The worst part of the job is that there isn’t enough time in each day to get everything done,” she says. The best part is targeting people where they live, literally: “Home is the dearest thing at heart to most people.” An art history major at Bard, Soriano had a varied career that included designing the props for the original production of Sam Shepard’s True West. She landed at Country Living as an administrative assistant, and has now worked there for 10 years. “I love the way this work is collective and collaborative,” she says. “It’s about hiring the right people to make a piece dramatic and effective.” Being in charge of the largest home-oriented magazine in the United States—Country Living’s circulation is 1.7 million—requires “tremendous passion,” Soriano says, adding, “We must be immensely curious about the world and the reader.” Soriano lives in Riverdale, part of the Bronx, with her husband and son. Photograph: Carol Friedman

’84 20th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Reginald Bullock, 718-624-4253 or rbullock@nshs.edu Anne Jennings Canzonetti, 703-807-1962 or acanzonetti@artsusa.org Gina Gonzalez Colleluori, 908-713-1186 or blithewood@earthlink.net Claire Litteral, 845-339-2632 or cslitteral@aol.com Staff contact: Stella Wayne, 845-758-7407 or wayne@bard.edu Claire Surovell Litteral is a fund-raiser for a nonprofit group in Kingston, New York, her first job since her daughter was born 10 years ago. She writes, “Love to hear from folks.” Mallory Catlett ’92 Maybe you’ve heard of Aphra Behn, the wildly successful Restoration playwright who happened to be a woman, but what about her 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century successors, such as Susanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Joanna Baillie? Mallory Catlett bets you haven’t. Catlett is codirector of a series of staged readings called The First 100 Years: The Professional Female Playwright, focusing on the works of these women. The plays—ranging from bawdy and witty to socially astute and even tragic—were produced over the course of a year by Juggernaut Theater Company in New York and performed for free by representatives of 20 theater companies, including the Classical Theater of Harlem and the Hispanic company Teatro Pregones. “I’d known for years that there were a lot of women Restoration playwrights, and I thought it would be great to structure a series through which the community could have access to their works and sense their joys and challenges,” says Catlett, a freelance dramaturge who also is coartistic director of Restless Productions in Vancouver, B.C., and artistic associate of Juggernaut. “What you get in these plays is women in dialogue with each other about their world.” Discussions with the audience followed each reading. Inevitably, people asked why the playwrights, each successful in her day, have been forgotten. “This period in English theatrical literature has not been particularly well preserved,” Catlett says. “Also, once the Victorians came in, these playwrights—especially Behn—were considered risqué, though they were certainly no more so than the men.” Photograph: Andrew Denton

’85 Roger Deutsch’s feature film Suor Sorriso (Sister Smile), which opened commercially in Italy this past fall, has been invited to 20 film festivals worldwide. The film is a fictional account of the life of a real nun, Soeur Sourire (“Sister Smile”), who attained international pop stardom when her song “Dominique” topped the charts in 1963. Roger has also finished Sancti Spiritus, a feature-length documentary shot in Cuba. He was honored, along with Werner Herzog and Amos Gatai, with a retrospective tribute at the Batik Film Festival in Perugia, Italy, in October 2003. He is working on Feel the Moment, a film dedicated to Robert Kelly, Bard’s Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature. He will return to Cuba this year to direct for both stage and screen his adaptation of Othello, titled The Handkerchief. Those interested in obtaining more information on his upcoming films and screenings are invited to visit www.homepage.mac.com/rldeutsch.

’89 15th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Jane Andromache Brien, 845-758-7604 or brien@bard.edu Peter Criswell, 646-831-0016 or pcriswell@hudsonriverheritage.org Tabetha Ewing, 845-758-7548 Elizabeth Felicella, 212-662-8039 or efelicella@nyc.rr.com Staff contact: Stella Wayne, 845-758-7407 or wayne@bard.edu

Samantha Adams, her husband, Wesley, and their children, Emily and Noah, have relocated to Maine. They look forward to seeing everyone during Bard’s Reunions 2004. Jen Ferguson displayed new paintings in her studio on October 18 and 19, 2003, as part of the Dumbo Arts Festival in Brooklyn. Kimberly O’Flaherty writes of Bard Reunions 2004, “I can’t wait to see everything new, catch up with old friends, and show off my two beautiful girls.” Julia Williams (Todd) enjoys living in Brattleboro, Vermont, with her husband, George, and daughter, Evelyn, age three. She is the director of Vermont Technical College’s School of Nursing on the Brattleboro campus.

’90 Charlotte Mandell Kelly’s translation of Maurice Blanchot’s Faux Pas shared the 2003 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for a Translation of a Scholarly Study of Literature, sponsored by the Modern Language Association. Faux Pas was published by Stanford University Press in 2001. Brenda Lee Rogers and her husband, Scott, are proud to announce the birth of their second child, Jack Blackwood Montgomery Rogers, on August 16, 2003. She writes that Jack “came into the world a little early, but was strong and healthy nonetheless.” Brenda and her daughter, Evelyn, are enjoying their exploration of a whole new part of California since the family’s move from San Jose to Los Angeles, where Scott accepted a job designing video games.

’91 For the past three years, Bart Calendar has run Calendar Communications, a boutique writing and marketing firm, from his base in Montpelier, France. While 75 percent of the work is commercial, the firm spends 25 percent of its time helping out nonprofit organizations, including Votewatch.com and CandidateWatch.com, both dedicated to improving the U.S. election process. After five years in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Bill Dechand returned to New York City, where he is musical director for the Riverdale-Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture. He also released his fourth CD, Hold On, on Muss My Hair Records. His song “Sometimes Why,” an appeal for critical thinking in journalism, was featured on NPR’s All Songs Considered.

Sheila Westman ’94 Sheila Westman, who majored in chemistry at Bard, is now the manager of the W. M. Keck Facility at Yale University. The biotechnology laboratory is a service provider for physicians doing clinical research, and one of Westman’s jobs is to derive genetic information from tissue samples, such as those taken from cancerous tumors. Many cancers are associated with particular genetic patterns. Westman, in profiling those patterns, gleans information that can be useful in determining treatment courses. After Bard, Westman attended the Cornell University Graduate School of Medical Sciences, graduating with a master’s degree in pharmacology. She worked in the private sector before concluding that she was “more comfortable in academia.” She joined the Yale facility three years ago. Westman describes the laboratory systems she uses as “robust.” It can take days and several conversions of RNA before the resulting information is displayed. Westman notes, “We provide researchers with a massive amount of information.” In addition to its usefulness in guiding treatment decisions, the information generated by the Keck Facility has diagnostic significance. “Where this technology is going is related to disease markers,” says Westman. “A lot of diseases are boiling down to a single nucleotide polymorphism that indicates a predisposition to a certain disease.” She is aware of concerns surrounding the release of such information to insurance carriers. “Fortunately, there are branches in the sciences that deal with ethics,” says Westman. “There are definitely watchdogs.” Sheila’s brother, Neil Westman ’97, was featured in “Alumni/ae in the Military,” an article that appeared in the Summer 2003 Bardian. Photograph: Don Hamerman

James Wiley ’96 and Maggie Oyen When the World Trade Center collapsed, Maggie Oyen and James Wiley responded to their grief productively. They created the September 11, 2001 Children’s Fund to assist children whose parents or guardians were killed or permanently disabled at Ground Zero or the Pentagon, or on United Airlines Flight 93. The tax-exempt, not-for-profit fund accepts direct or in-kind donations and supports its beneficiaries’ educations from preschool through college. Because of those extended goals, Oyen and Wiley are committed to keeping the fund in existence until 2021. Thus far, the fund has aided more than 300 children. Bard College has stepped forward, offering five scholarships per year to qualified students who apply through the fund. Wiley works in New York for Bear Stearns, in the field of emerging markets. Oyen spent eight years as a commercial airline pilot and currently heads a Red Hook–based business that plans events such as weddings. The impact of 9/11 on her business provided the impetus for the fund. “I count on airplanes to bring me flowers,” she explains. “Suddenly, there were no planes. All I had were ribbons. I started making red, white, and blue ribbons. Then James came up and made ribbons. Clients were paying $50 for them. I didn’t want to send the money just anywhere.” Oyen describes the fund as “money in, check out. We don’t draw salaries and we don’t have a formula.” In one instance they helped when a fireman had a second, ‘unofficial’ family not entitled to benefits. In another, two men adopted a baby, and one of the men died. “We can pick up on nuances that larger corporations can’t,” says Wiley. Oyen agrees: “There were 4,500 children affected, 80 percent under the age of 11. We’re aware of the commitment we’ve made to a six-year-old.” Wiley adds, “You make that promise, you hold yourself responsible.” The September 11, 2001 Children’s Fund, Inc. is located at 98 Elizabeth Street, Red Hook, NY 12571. Phone: 845-7580911. E-mail: help@911childrensfund.org. Photograph: Doug Baz

Benjamin Goldberg lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he enjoys life with his wife, Amy (Karkowski) ’90. They have two sons, ages six and one, who keep them entertained and exhausted at the same time, and a cat. He writes, “Working at the Williamsburg Regional Library continues to be rewarding. If you want to see a world-class public library, come visit us.” Chad Kleitsch, Pete Mauney ’93/MFA ’00, and Matt Pokoik ’00 participated in a show at Upstate Art in Phoenicia, New York, titled Inside/Outside? Observations in Nature, from October 11 to November 2, 2003. In February, Chad’s work was also part of a show at the Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, New York. Jonathan Manitsky married Beth Applebaum on October 11, 2003, in New York City. Jonathan has worked as director of creative services and account manager at OMD, a global media agency in Manhattan, for the past three years. Blanche Norman received a master of arts degree in arts administration from Columbia University. Her thesis, titled “New York City and Theater Audiences: Past, Present and Future—A Goal of Diversity,” strengthened her growing interest in programs that educate young people in the performing arts. She works as administrative director of Youth Theater Interactions, Inc., a program that provides free performing arts classes to underprivileged youth in Yonkers, New York.

’92 Chidi Achebe, who received his M.D. from Dartmouth Medical School in 1996, completed his course work and graduated from the Harvard School of Public Health with a master’s degree in public health. He intends to work with an international health organization that serves neglected, indigent children the world over, and particularly in Africa. Elizabeth Champ still lives in New York City, where she is completing her psychoanalytic training. Stacy Lewis moved to Seattle in 1992 and has been a cookie baker, necklace maker, cocreator of the ’zine synapse, assistant to a childbirth educator and activist, production manager at an independent book publishing company, and technical writer and editor. In 2002 she married Rom Impas at her parents’ house on Lummi Island, Washington, in a ceremony officiated by their good friend, Laura

Eastman ’92. On August 2, 2003, Stacy and Rom became the proud parents of Orlando Solomon Day Impas, born at home. Stacy can be reached at SML2470@hotmail.com. Mark Steiner performed as part of the Iceland Airwaves Festival in Reykjavik on October 15, 2003. Following that, he appeared live at CB’s 313 Gallery in New York City on October 20. He resides with his cat, Barnabus, in Oslo, Norway, where he is recording a solo album to be released on Stagger Home Records: http://www.StaggerHome.com.

’94 10th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Mark Feinsod, feinsodville@mac.com Molly Northrup, 917-309-0316 or molly@mollymac.net Peter Ulfik, peter01@webjogger.net Staff contact: Stella Wayne, 845-758-7407 or wayne@bard.edu Mark Feinsod writes that his film After an Autumn Day that Felt Like Summer was listed in Film Threat magazine’s “Top 25 Hot Shorts” in August 2003. The film continues to play at festivals and theaters around the country. Dickson Jean, a resident at Beth Israel Medical Center, is happy to be back in the New York area. Alisoun Meehan curated Five Sublime, an exhibition of abstract paintings by five artists, which ran from October 9 to 25, 2003, at White Box @ The Annex in Chelsea in New York City. Alisoun also curated three shows for winter and spring 2004. She exhibited her own work in a group show about food at A Taste of Art in Tribeca in November. Contact her at alisoun@earthlink.net for more information. Sharon Becker Oldham still loves her increasingly crazy job as an animal adoption administrator at the Humane Society of Greater Dayton in Ohio, where she helps to develop policies and place animals from throughout Ohio and Kentucky. She can’t wait to catch up with everybody at the reunion in May. Amu Ptah works as a public health policy and harm reduction consultant, focusing on HIV/AIDS prevention and drug policy reform.

’95 Kick Stand Dance (KSD), an artists collective run by Cary Baker, Abby Bender, Layla Childs, Anna Luckey, and Sonya Robbins ’96 that has produced original work in New York City and beyond since 1998, continues to expand. KSD premieres in 2003 included Baker’s Mimesis, an evening-length project that incorporated both sculpture and movement, and Bender’s Monsters and Mirrors: Heavy at Play, which enjoyed a six-night, sold-out run. KSD and Triskelion Arts, a community workspace founded by KSD in 2000, held their annual fund-raiser on December 6, 2003. Both Childs and Robbins will present their collaborative work at Triskelion Arts in March, while Luckey’s Other Hours, Separate Doors will debut in April. Triskelion Arts is available for rental as both a rehearsal space and theater. For more information about Triskelion Arts or Kick Stand Dance, call 718-599-3577. Malia Du Mont invites anyone interested in international affairs and foreign policy, particularly in China and Central Asia, to visit her new nonprofit organization’s website at www.chinaeurasia.org. Mary Catherine Ferguson finished her second master’s degree, in art history, at the University of Southern California and works as the grant specialist for the San Diego Repertory Theatre. She curated two shows at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California: Intimate Viewing: Reading Other People’s Mail and Artistic Exchange: Works by Mexican and Californian Artists. She continues to teach undergraduate English and literature classes within the California university system. Tereza Topferova is a graduate student at Portland State University in Oregon, pursuing a master’s degree in education with endorsements in secondary (high school) level language arts, speech, and ELL (English Language Learner). Prior to enrolling in the Graduate Teacher Education Program, Tereza taught English to teens and adults at the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO). For two years, she coordinated the Community Art Share, a showcase of Portland artists, which she founded and for which she received a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. She has promoted concerts and organized House Art Shares, which presents art and performances in people’s homes. Since 1997 she has been involved with No Limits for Women in the Arts, a national support organization for women artists. In August 2003 she married Tim Bottman, her partner of seven years.

’96

’99

Krista David, M.D., is in her fourth year of a psychiatry residency in Madison, Wisconsin. She and her husband, Len Lantz, enjoyed camping with their two dogs in Montana over the summer. They plan a move to Montana after they complete their training in Wisconsin in 2005.

5th Reunion: May 21–23, 2004 Contact: Rebecca Granato, 917-541-5317 or rebeccagranato@yahoo.com Sara Handy, 718-284-2816 or handysara@hotmail.com Devon White, 773-875-5415 or devon@thegreatwork.com Staff contact: Stella Wayne, 845-758-7407 or wayne@bard.edu

Anne Palmer married Simon Marcus ’97 in a beautiful ceremony in West Virginia in August 2002. Many Bard alumni/ae were in attendance, including Aaron Diskin ’95, Mike Guy, Seth Prouty, Molly Northrup ’94, Sonya Robbins, Matt Porter ’98, Matt Moran, Zoe Wolff, Layla Childs ’95, Joshua “Jabe” Bloom ’95, Alex Chesler ’95, Kristin Schattenfield ’98, Abe Rein, Erika Hughes ’97, Jonathan Hooper ’98, and the groom’s mother, Susan Marcus ’64. The wedding seems to have sparked more Bard unions: Rein and Schattenfield were married in May 2003; Hughes and Hooper were married in July 2003; and Northrup and Bloom will be married in June 2004. Prouty found love off Bard campus and will marry Bo Lee in September 2004.

’97 Kerstin Costa performed as part of 88 Keys: A Celebration of the Piano, the opening event of the World Financial Center Arts and Events Program in New York City on September 25, 2003. Featured as the centerpiece of this event was a concert for 21 pianos in the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden. Twenty-one concert-size grand pianos adorned the steps of the Winter Garden for the U.S. premiere of Italian composer Daniele Lombardi’s Sinfonia Nos. 1 and 2 for 21 Pianos, and the world premiere of Lombardi’s Threnodia for 21 Pianos, which is dedicated to the victims of September 11. Costa writes, “I am especially grateful for the opportunity to be involved in an event that aims to bring the public back into the neighborhood. And I am humbled to be joining colleagues in the performance of a piece that pays homage to the victims of the September 11 attacks.” Priya George and Godric Shoesmith celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary in June 2003. Godric graduated from St. John’s University School of Law in June and works at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York City. Priya has worked for WNYC-New York Public Radio for the past two years and is also production assistant for the station’s Brian Lehrer Show. On weekends they can be found at the grill on their deck in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

Abigail Loyd attends graduate school in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Minnesota. Devon Hawkes Ludlow has traveled the world since graduating. He lived in New Zealand, where he worked peripherally (as an “orc”) on The Lord of the Rings films, as well as on sailboats and sheep ranches. Following that, he lived in Mexico, specifically in Mazatlan, San Miguel de Allende, and San Cristobal de las Casas, working with small local theater groups. In Portland, Oregon, Devon met up with fellow Bard alumni Luis Moreno ’00, John Leo ’97, and Nicolaas Bodkin ’97 to form the Nod Theatre Company. While there, he also studied with master puppeteer Tim Giugni. He subsequently toured Eastern Europe, South America, and Utah with the Portland-based puppetry and mask troupe Il Teatro Calimari. In addition, he studied with graduates of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre, learning such skills as mime, new cirque, new vaudeville, mask, and various styles of puppetry. He now lives in Washington Heights in New York City. Jeff Lewonczyk ’98 directed Devon’s solo show Fallout Follies at the Brick Theatre in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in October 2003.

’01 David Homan coordinated “The First Annual 25th Birthday Concert of Works by David Homan and Others,” which took place on February 12, 2004, at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City. The chamber music concert featured world premieres of works for flute, oboe, clarinet, string quartet, and piano, vocalists, and an actor. Among the works premiered was David’s five-movement suite All Our Yesterdays, a meditation on old age and Alzheimer’s disease that employs selected text from Shakespeare. Composer John Coyne ’00 also contributed to the concert. John’s Scene and Aria “attempts to encapsulate a type of movement and a range of emotions that are intrinsically operatic, without using words or, for that matter, even a precise story,” according to Homan. The work is scored for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. Contact David at homanmusic@hotmail.com for a

free compact disc compilation of his chamber works from the last seven years. David Landy wrote on October 2, 2003, “I have grown a moustache, but only as a joke. I’ve had it for five days. I’m going for seven.” In the end, he made it to two whole weeks. He can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~david.landy.

Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts

’84 Lisa Pressman’s recent works were exhibited at the Pierro Gallery in South Orange, New Jersey.

’87 Maddy Rosenberg’s annual trip to Europe proved quite successful in 2003. In March, the Hansi Huber Project—an international work in progress that Maddy created with two other artists, Emily Puetter and Susan Rowe Harrison— made its debut at Sanzspace in Madrid, Spain, with an installation that used documentary materials and various visual media “to comment on the disturbing implications of the proliferation of touristic hyperrealities throughout the world.” The ongoing, evolving project, which Maddy describes as a “slyly ironic exploration of the devaluing of intrinsic cultures,” will travel to numerous venues and countries, with a website and related collectibles to come. In London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate Gallery, and London School of Printing acquired additional artists’ books by Maddy, while the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh College of Art, Glasgow School of Art, and Museum of London became new collectors. A selection of her books can be seen at the Eagle Gallery and thebookartbookshop, both in London. In May, Maddy presented a lecture on her artists’ books at the London College of Printing, and gave a talk about her paintings at L’Ecole Supérieure des Arts Appliqués Duperré in Paris.

’91 Steve Careau’s work was exhibited at McCoy Gallery at Merrimack College in North Andover, Massachusetts.

Sean Callanan ’03 Sean Callanan, who concentrated in mathematics and computer science at Bard, is a graduate fellow in Stony Brook University’s Ph.D. program. He was drawn to Stony Brook because it encourages graduate students, as he describes it, “ . . . to combine knowledge rather than follow in the adviser’s footsteps. You could become an expert in an area that no member of the faculty is expert in. I want to do something with operating systems. How can we get CPUs to talk to one another, or connect them in a multiprocessor machine?” This research would have an impact on the speed with which information is transmitted. “Electrons start at one source inside a microprocessor and spread out. That takes time,” says Callanan. “If we shrank microprocessors, messages could travel faster. It takes a couple of seconds to get information from one side of the world to the other. That’s an eternity in computer time.” With Callanan on the prowl, it pays not to be attached to the forms computers take. “I have a concept of computers that are dynamically created,” he says. “Relatively soon we’ll be able to create computer monitors that can be sprayed onto a surface. Instead of painting your wall, you could cover it with light-emitting diodes that would set up a network with software fed in from outside. This is an exhilarating idea for me, along with the prospect of multiple nanocomputers working together. Graduate school has given me a lot of things to think about. But my way of thinking about this cornucopia, I got from Bard.” Photograph: ©Lisa Quinones/Black Star

’95 Amy Sillman has had work accepted in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Other Avery graduates who will be represented in the biennial are Taylor Davis ’98 and Julianne Swartz ’02.

’98

Maria Fragopoulou BGC ’02 After completing studies in Italian Renaissance decorative arts and earning a master’s degree, Maria Fragopoulou accepted a position at the Jewish Museum of Greece as a cataloguer of its newly created modern art collection. The Greek-born Fragopoulou, who says she has always been fascinated by the ways in which “different cultures meld with each other for the creation of something new and original,” worked at the museum in Athens during the winter of 2002–2003, cataloguing oils, watercolors, and drawings by modern and contemporary Greek-Jewish artists. Among the most unusual and highly prized works in the collection are those by Gulio Caimi (1897–1982), a major figure of modern Greek Judaism who was perhaps better known as a scholar, writer, and translator than as a painter. “He lived a life in the shadows, and was very poor but independent, neglecting daily needs,” says Fragopoulou. “It is very characteristic that many of his remaining works were made in tavernas and cafés with cheap materials, often offered instead of payment for his food. Caimi never exhibited his work and rarely sold his paintings, but donated them to friends and pupils.” When she finished her stint at the Jewish Museum, Fragopoulou moved on to Athens’s Zoumboulakis Gallery, where she works in the Department of Prints and Editions. Her goal, she says, is to help cultivate a generation of future collectors by “creating a market of art at affordable prices—small original works, silkscreens, etchings, miniature sculpture, imported decorative objects— and promoting art to a general public, not only the elite.” Photograph: courtesy of Maria Fragopoulou

Jonathan Berman continues to create independent documentaries. After The Shvitz, his film about the Russian baths, he completed My Friend Paul, a film he had been working on while at Bard, about his bipolar childhood friend. The documentary, which was made with help from the Independent Television Service, played at a number of film festivals, including the Slamdance Film Festival and the Amsterdam Film Festival. It won Best Film from the American Psychological Association, and was shown on the Sundance channel. Jonathan is in the midst of completing Commune: The Black Bear Experiment, a documentary about the triumphs and excesses of 1960s idealism from the perspective of members of a wilderness commune. After Commune, he intends to teach film, write screenplays, and finally settle down. He would love to hear from old classmates, progressive philanthropists, and fellow media makers. He can be reached at jnb@fivepointsmedia.com. Stephen Clair was chosen by Brooklyn Information & Culture (BRIC) to represent Brooklyn at CultureFest 2003. He subsequently performed on the main stage in Battery Park in lower Manhattan on September 20. In November he celebrated the release of his short story collection My Understanding, published by Pressed Wafer, with a book launch party at Fez, a New York City club.

’02 Voss Finn’s site-specific installation, PREPOSITIONAL, was exhibited at the Weston Art Gallery, Aronoff Center for the Arts, in downtown Cincinnati. Carrie Moyer and Mary Beth Reed, along with Suzanne Joelson, a member of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts faculty, participated in a group exhibition, Immersion, at the Interfaith Center of New York. Tara Ruth helped curate the show.

’03 Paul Chan’s film The Show was awarded a Festival Director’s Award at the Black Man Film Festival in Atlanta. The film, which Paul had presented in his Bard crit, was also an official selection for the Deep Ullum Film Festival; Festival De Cine Internacional De Barcelona, Spain; Woodstock Film Festival; and Taos Talking Pictures, among several other film festivals. Works by Chan and Terri Dewhirst ’02 were included in Newworks, a Fine Arts Faculty at Penn exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

Ben Coonley and Lisa Oppenheim ’02 were included in a show titled Good Words and Credentials: Contemporary Comments on the Art of the ’60s and ’70s at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery at Columbia University. A work by Isaac Diggs, A.I.M. 23, was exhibited by The Bronx Museum of the Arts. After a few months of traveling and a few more of unemployment, Sarah Schendel became an Americorps*VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) worker at the Public Service Center at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Her new e-mail address is sjs79@cornell.edu.

’04 Amra Brooks had her work exhibited at China Art Objects Galleries in Los Angeles. Live Free or Die, an exhibition by Marc Swanson, took place at Bellwether Gallery in Brooklyn. Ho Tam won the Grand Marnier Video Fellowship (a prize given by the Film Society at Lincoln Center). He also completed a short video about SARS in Toronto.

Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture

’96 Ron Labaco is assistant curator of decorative arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He will curate a retrospective exhibition on the Italian designer-architect Ettore Sottsass, scheduled to open in November 2005. Jeanne-Marie Musto is in the second year of a Kress Fellowship, conducting research for her dissertation at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Through a Fulbright travel grant she has also been enrolled at the University of Karlsruhe and TU-Berlin, which is to say that she’s been traveling extensively, but can be easily reached at jmusto@brynmawr.edu. She would love to hear from other BGC people passing through Germany (or not!).

’98 Grace Jeffers is writing a book on modern materials for Thames and Hudson, a publisher in London. She is also working with 1980s superstar painter Kenny Scharf to develop his concepts into design products.

Bethia Waterman GSES ’91 Bethia Waterman received her master of science degree as part of the first graduating class of Bard College’s Graduate School of Environmental Studies (GSES). The program has since evolved into the Bard Center for Environmental Policy. The aptly named Waterman is now the information officer for the Hudson River Estuary Program. The fact that the GSES syllabus addressed the Hudson Valley prepared Waterman for her present work. “GSES used the local environment,” she notes. “Olana, the Shawangunks, James Baird State Park.” Waterman’s ecological interests are long-lived. “My mother was a self-taught naturalist,” she says. “When I went to college [Wellesley], environmental studies wasn’t an option. If it had been, I probably would have majored in it. I’d done some paleo-Indian archaeology in Wyoming, on a Harvard-organized expedition.” That experience proved useful. “Chris Lindner [currently Bard’s archaeologist in residence] was teaching at GSES,” Waterman explains. “He encouraged me to study the archaeology of Tivoli Bays, one of the richest sites in this region. South Cruger and Magdalen Islands were heavily used by Native Americans and had been excavated in 1939 or 1940. And local pothunters had been digging there for years. The sad thing is that things are removed and there are no notes.” Today, Waterman participates in protecting the Hudson and its tidal wetlands. “I work on letting people know the state of the Hudson, what we’re spending money on, so they can understand the research. The other thing I feel strongly about is public access. The Hudson shouldn’t be some exclusive estate.” Photograph: Doug Baz

’99 Judith Gura is working on a book about period design styles, to be published by Harry N. Abrams in 2005. She curated the exhibition and wrote the catalogue for Harvey Probber: Modernist Furniture, Design, and Graphics at the Mishkin Gallery of Baruch College in New York City. She is also on the advisory board for an exhibition on Dunbar furniture, being planned for 2006 by the Indiana State Museum.

’03

Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy CCS ’00 Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy could show a juggling act a thing or two, judging by the number of projects she handles simultaneously. Hernández is curator and programs manager at Art in General, a nonprofit organization in downtown Manhattan that encourages resident artists to create work in the public eye so that visitors can observe works in progress. Hernández reviewed the organization’s open-call application process—the basis for several art exhibitions each year—to streamline admission guidelines. She now oversees artist residencies while deciding on shows that she wants to curate. She edited a book collection of the work of artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, published by the Americas Society, where Hernández was associate curator before joining Art in General. (Hernández also included works by Allora and Calzadilla in her Center for Curatorial Studies thesis exhibition.) The publication is the first to document Allora and Calzadilla’s projects, many of which are ephemeral installations, actions, or time-based activities in a gallery or public space. Concurrently, Hernández acted as program manager for AS A SATELLITE, an arts program at the Americas Society that concluded in January with the Brooklyn residency of Rés de Chão, a collective in Rio de Janeiro founded by Edson Barros. A Williamsburg loft acted as home to Barros and other artists in the program, as well as office and performance and exhibition space. “I’ve learned about working with artists, since each has his or her own aesthetic strategies and ways of thinking,” Hernández says of her multifarious experiences. Photograph: Juanelo, 2003

During the spring 2004 semester, Margaret Steward Campbell will present lectures on the history of jewelry in a History of Adornment course at the Maine College of Art. She has also been asked to evaluate some jewelry belonging to the Portland Museum of Art, in order to determine if any of it should become a part of its collection. Miranda Pildes graduated from the Gemological Institute of America in July, and is interning at Sotheby’s Jewelry Department.

Center for Curatorial Studies

’97 Rachel Gugelberger, associate director of the School of Visual Arts Galleries and Museum, curated Systematic Structures at Westside Gallery last August. Brian Wallace, director of exhibitions at the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, curated ÖDE: a project by Sarah Beck at Moore College in September.

’98 Anne Ellegood, formerly the associate curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, is now curator at the Norton Family Office in New York City. This past fall, she was the guest curator of the exhibition Marco Brambilla: Halflife. Malgorzata Lisiewicz, director of the Center for Contemporary Art (“Laznia”) in Gdansk, Poland, curated the exhibition a body/a ciao with works from the Laznia collection.

’99 Alejandro Diaz, artist and independent curator, joined Victor Zamudio-Taylor, curator and independent scholar, at the Whitney Museum of American Art last November for a discussion of how art practices are informed by globalism, cultural specificity, and the American scene. He will participate in the next Havana Biennial. Denise Markonish, gallery director and curator at Artspace in New Haven, Connecticut, curated Vistas: Interventions in a Mediated Landscape, an outdoor sculpture exhibition at Mount Ida College in Newton. She also will curate the public art exhibition Past Presence: Contemporary Reflection of Lower Merion at the Main Line Art Center in Haverford, Pennsylvania. This exhibition, which involves the commissioning of large-scale temporary public works and was awarded a grant from the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, will open in April.

’00 Mercedes Vicente wrote the catalogue text for the exhibition FLIGHT, an installation by Argentinian artist Lucia Warck Meister.

’01 Jennifer Gray is a curatorial assistant at the Department of Photography and Contemporary Art, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida.

Jill Winder is in Europe, working as an independent curator. She is also assisting curator Maria Hlavajova in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Bard High School Early College

’03 Yevgeniya Bulayevskaya is majoring in psychology at Stony Brook University, with a minor in child and family studies and a concentration in sociology. She plans on doing research in adolescent psychology. Olga Carmona is attending Bard College, where she works at the nursery school and in the Trustee Leader Scholar Program office. Wilfred Estrella attends Adelphi University, where he says he enjoys his music classes. He works at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Jacob Gross is an undergraduate at Cornell University. He is a member of Cornell’s only sketch comedy troupe, the Skits-O-Phrenics, whose alumni include writer Eric Garcia, whose book Matchstick Men was made into a movie. Jacob has performed with the Skits-O-Phrenics in New York City as part of the Big Red Comedy Festival. The group has plans for further shows in New York and other locations.

’02 Cassandra Coblentz, formerly curatorial assistant at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philidelphia, is now in charge of academic initiatives at UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. As a curatorial fellow in the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, she curated Surface Tension, which opened last August. Kristen Evangelista left the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art for a position as gallery and program manager at Southern Exposure, a nonprofit artists organization. As winner of the 2002 Ramapo Curatorial Award, Sandra Firmin curated Counterparts: The Self-Portraiture of Joan Semmel and John Coplans, which was exhibited in the Kresge Gallery at Ramapo College of New Jersey from November 12 to December 18. She is associate curator at the University at Buffalo Art Gallery.

Keesha Melbourne says she will never forget her time at BHSEC. “The bonds I made, with both fellow students and faculty, are rare.” Lenina Mortimer attends Stony Brook University, where she studies biology. She plans to attend medical school, and to have a career in sports medicine. Cynthia Mothersil attends Bard, where she is the leader of the Bard Step Team. Her roommate is Olga Carmona. David Wiacek writes: “Although I miss the craziness of BHSEC, I couldn’t be much happier than I am at Wesleyan University. I’m still undecided as to what field of study I want to pursue, and I’m fine with that! At Wesleyan I write poems sporadically, roll down Foss Hill, study sociology, psych, and bio, and draw naked people in art class. Life is great.”

In Memoriam

Staff

’28

Joel Tomson, 54, the College’s director of athletics and recreation from 1979 until 1995, died in Rhinebeck, New York, on December 12, 2003. During his tenure as athletic director, Tomson also coached the men’s and women’s soccer teams and the men’s tennis team and served as the director of Bard’s summer soccer camp. He was the chief engineer of the athletic program’s expansion from recreation-based activities to full membership in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division III. He participated in the design and implementation of the Stevenson Gymnasium and recruited full-time and adjunct staff of a sufficient quality to attract an ever larger percentage of students into athletic activity. He also opened the athletics program to the neighboring community. He served as chairman of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics District 31 and also held positions on NAIA national committees. His survivors include his wife, Darlene, and two children, Erin and Devon.

Cazlyn G. Bookhout died on August 4, 2003. He held a Ph.D. degree from Duke University and retired from Duke as a professor of zoology and marine biology. His wife, Elizabeth, predeceased him. His survivors include a son and a daughter.

’39 Donald Emmet Worcester died on September 21, 2003, in Fort Worth, Texas. He was 88. Following Bard, Dr. Worcester received a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940. After serving on active duty in the Naval Reserve during World War II, he earned a doctorate at Berkeley in 1947. He taught at the University of Florida from 1947 to 1963, serving as chairman of the History Department from 1955 to 1959. In 1963 he embarked on a long career at Texas Christian University, where he started the doctoral program in history, taught for more than 30 years, and chaired the History Department for nine years. Having spent the early part of his career focusing on Latin American history, Worcester spent the last three decades concentrating on the American Southwest. He wrote numerous articles, and he wrote, coauthored, and edited many books, including three western novels and eight children’s books. His writing was honored on several occasions: he won the Western Writers of America Spur Award in 1977, 1979, and 1999; the Southwest Book Award in 1979; the C. L. Sonnichsen Book Award in 1985; and the Western Writers of America Saddleman Award in 1988. Worcester served as president of the Western Writers of America from 1973 to 1974 and of the Western History Association from 1974 to 1975. He was a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and Texas State Historical Association. Worcester spoke fondly of Bard in the Spring 1999 issue of the Bardian, recalling, “So I went to Bard, and it was the best thing I ever did. I hadn’t been a student, but I became one. Most of the classes were tutorials, so there was no foolishness—I couldn’t get away with anything.” His survivors include a son, a daughter, a sister, and five grandchildren.

’43 John K. Shapiro died in Boca Raton, Florida, on August 10, 2003. A native of Boston, he moved to southern Florida in 1990. His survivors include two daughters, one son, and six grandchildren.

Lost or Missing Alumni/ae Sought for Their Reunions The Office of Alumni/ae Affairs has lost touch with the alumni/ae listed below and would like to contact them about their reunions in 2004 and 2005. If you know how to reach any of the following alumni/ae, or if any of them are the spouses of alumni/ae already on our mailing list, please call the Alumni/ae Office at 1-800-BARDCOL or 845-758-7089, or e-mail alumni@bard.edu. For Reunion 2004 Class of 1969 Phillip Adams Dale Aquino Gary Bennett Chester R. Brezniak Jr. Ann Brownlow Emily Buckley Rebecca Carlson Cynthia S. Carpenter Tucker Catlin Pamela Chait Jane Coelen Daniel B. Cole Michele David Robert Eadie Talbert Eisenberg Michael Elswit Stephen Fairbairn Peter A. Falvey Richard Feinberg Jon M. Fine Michael R. Franklin Mona Freilich Michal Garbe Graham P. Gibson Diana Godwin Bernice Goetz Leslie Golob Janice Granofsky Stuart Green Ilene Hearn John Hockersmith J. S. Hoffman Rexford Hudson Cheryl Hunter Susan Hyche Ph.D. Lieth Ilchuk Peter Jefferys Kathryn Joseph Alan Just

Langton Kamukosi Susan L. Kasper Andrew Knapp Christian Komp Lauren Kusmider Jaime Lacayo Jr. Dale Legum Ann Lenney Roy Levin Michael E. Martin Robbin S. Mattison Edward Maurer Cherry McLaughlin Frank Meltzer Lawrence Meyer-McEferon Kim Miller Jill Overton Henri-George Polgar Jennifer Quick Tamara J. Rails Rita Reagon Bruce Redlien Julie Reichert Joseph Ribar Susan Rosenbaum Suzanne Rosenthal Ronni Rothbart Jeffrey Rothstein Richard Rubacha Jane Rubenstein Justin Sabiti Bernard P. Sampson Sandra Saska James Schaeffer Marianne K. Schulman Michael Schuman Andrea Selkirk Susan Shepard Brooke S. Shute Gay E. Silverberg John Simonton Joseph Siragusa

Kathie Sirkin Sherry Slotoroff Nancy Smart Keith Smith David Spry Meredith Stanford Gary J. Suhowatsky Malorie Tolles David Underwood Karen M. Vitry Gladys Wheeler Peter Wilcox Kirk V. Williamson Ken Wood Jane Yokim

For Reunion 2005 Class of 1955 Joy Bergman Dan N. Butt Barbara L. Davis Alexander Gross James D. Harder Caroline Herz Joan Z. Kosman Ela H. Kyle John H. Livingston Donald McComb Bjarne R. Netland Sandra Nisson Violette J. Petit Walter Randel Jacob Rosenblum Batja Sanders Sonia Y. Simmons Armand Spanglet Judith Vogel Richard Wilson Marilyn Wright

Class of 1980 Eladio Abreu Carolyn Baron Anthony Briskin Bruce A. Collins-Huber Brian M. Donohue Julie Edelstein Joseph Giramma Russell Gorden Elisha M. Gummere Adina Gwatkin Daniel Haas Terri L. Hardin Joel Harrison James Henley Hannah Lanin-Morrow Anita Logan Amy Lustig Pamela L. McCreadie-Karas Maureen McGrath Stephanie Mezey Sylvia Robinson Evan Sheppard Claudia Staniszewski Jeff Taylor Christopher Wangro Class of 1995 Melissa N. Bierstock Christopher M. Capozzoli Michael C. Davidson Sara E. Forrest Jason A. Foulkes Eleanor S. Guldbeck Kelly Jones Farrukh Khan Glen St. Jean Benjamin W. Sears Monica Sirimarco-Degonz Steven R. Sommers Douglas Young

FACULTY NOTES

John Ashbery, Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature, had poems published in the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books in England. French translations of his poetry appeared in the magazines Arsenal, Gare Maritime, and Vacarme; two volumes of his poems were published in Spanish translation by Visor Libros and Random House Mondadori. Four musical settings of his work by Ned Rorem were performed as part of the New York Festival of Song, and EMF issued a CD, Last things, I think, to think about, a song cycle by Roger Reynolds with text by Ashbery. He was one of three poets whose work was examined in Angus Fletcher’s book, A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Harvard University Press). Mary Backlund, vice president for student affairs and director of admission, gave a presentation on postsecondary education in the United States to visiting German rectors at the Institute for International Education, based at the United Nations. Susan Bernofsky, assistant professor of German, translated The Trip to Bordeaux, a novel by Ludwig Harig (Burning Deck Press) and Celan Studies by Peter Szondi (Stanford University Press). She published an interview with the late novelist Angela Carter in Conjunctions and an article, “A Note on Szondi, Celan, Suicide, and Eden,” in New German Critique. Celia Bland, visiting assistant professor of First-Year Seminar and director of college writing, read from her upcoming book, Soft Box, and led a poetry workshop at Iona College. Ethan D. Bloch, professor of mathematics; Lauren Lynn Rose, associate professor of mathematics; and Jeffrey A. Suzuki, visiting assistant professor of mathematics and Quantitative Program director, addressed the northeast sectional meeting of the American Mathematics Society. Bloch spoke on “The Angle Defect for Odd-Dimensional Simplicial Manifolds,” Rose on “Graphs, Syzygies, and Multivariate Splines,” and Suzuki on “Using Online Quizzes: A Report on the Efficacy of a ‘Repeat until

Satisfied’ Model of Using the Internet to Enhance Mathematics Education.” Benjamin Boretz, professor emeritus of music and integrated arts, is the subject, along with J. K. Randall, of a twovolume anthology, Being about Music: Textworks 1960–2003, published by Open Space. Leon Botstein, president of the college and Leon Levy Professor in the Arts and Humanities, gave a lecture, “The Arts in the University,” at Rutgers University, where he also held seminars, addressed forums and discussion groups, and rehearsed the Rutgers University Orchestra, all as part of Phi Beta Kappa’s Visiting Scholar Program. He conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Franz Liszt’s Eine Symphonie zu Dantes Divina commedia (“Dante Symphony”) and “Tasso, lamento e trionfo” on a new compact disc from Telarc and conducted the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra at Henry Crown Hall in Jerusalem. He contributed an article, “The Future of Conducting,” to The Cambridge Companion to Conducting. Tim Casey, studio art faculty member at Bard High School Early College, presented a paper, “Painting What’s Left of the Landscape: Thoughts on Wounded Beauty,” during the College Art Association annual conference in February in Seattle. Jennifer Cordi, a member of the science faculty at Bard High School Early College, published Engaging Knowledge: The Inference of Internet Content Development and Its Meaning for Scientific Learning and Research (Scarecrow Press). Laurie Dahlberg, associate professor of art history and photography, led a session titled “Photography and the Abject” at the College Art Association annual conference in Seattle in February. Lydia Davis, former writing faculty member at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, received a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Taylor Davis MFA ’98, faculty member in sculpture at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, has had work selected for the 2004 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Jennifer Day, assistant professor of Russian, coauthored a paper, “The Elegiac Treatment of Space in the Modern Petersburg Poetic Tradition, 1890–1980,” which was presented during a literature panel at a conference on St. Petersburg at Duke University. Erik de Jong, associate director and professor of garden history and landscape studies at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, has accepted the newly established Clusius Chair from the University of Leiden, the oldest academic institution in the Netherlands. Created by the Clusius Foundation, which has ties to the Leiden Botanical Garden (founded in 1590), the position entails teaching and organizing research in garden history and landscape studies. Michèle D. Dominy, dean of the college and professor of anthropology, wrote “Postcolonialism and Ecology in Aotearoa New Zealand,” published in Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies (Hong Kong University Press). Barbara Ess, associate professor of photography, had solo shows at the Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, where she also gave a presentation about her work, and Burden Gallery in New York as part of traveling exhibition organized by the Aperture Foundation. Eloise and Ray, a play by Stephanie Fleischmann, visiting lecturer in theater, received a reading at San Francisco Stage and Film. Another play, The Street of Useful Things, was developed in a miniworkshop at the New Georges Theater Company and received readings at New Dramatists in New York City and New Theater in Miami. Joanne Fox-Przeworski, director of the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, participated in a panel about global markets and pollution at a conference on “Progressive

Lawyering” at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston. She lectured at Central European University in Budapest on the topic “Globalization and the Social, Economic, and Political Impacts of International Environmental Treaties.” Stephen Frailey, faculty member in photography at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, organized an auction at Christie’s to benefit photographic education in Afghanistan. The auction raised funds to endow a photography department at the University of Kabul and provided the program with a visiting faculty of American photographers. Frailey’s photographs were included in the auction, as were pieces by Barbara Ess, Avery faculty member Marco Breuer, and Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Soros Professor in the Arts. Susan H. Gillespie, director of Bard’s Institute for International Liberal Education, presented “Meaning =/= Meining: Theodor W. Adorno and the Problem of Translation” at a conference organized by the Villa Aurora Foundation for European-American Relations in Pacific Palisades, California. At “Crafting a New Future,” the second strategic conference on U.S.–Russia education exchange, sponsored by the New Horizons Project with the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, she spoke about Smolny College on a panel addressing educational and professional training in a market-driven Russia. Richard A. Gordon, professor of psychology, presented a paper, “The Emergence of Bulimia Nervosa and the Obesity Epidemic: Historical Coincidence or Causal Relationship?” at the annual meeting of the Eating Disorders Research Society in Ravello, Italy. Donna Ford Grover ’80, visiting assistant professor of literature, presented “Revisions of War, Manhood, and Blackness in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” at the Modern Studies Association annual conference in Birmingham, England.

Peter Hutton, professor of film, presented his film Two Rivers, a study of the Hudson River in New York and the Yangtze (Chang) River in China, at Vassar College. He also showed a program of his short films at Binghamton University, State University of New York. His most recent work, Skagafjördur, was selected for the 2004 Whitney Biennial in New York. Michael Lobel, assistant professor of art history, received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution and a research support grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He published “Sign Language: James Rosenquist in Retrospect” in Artforum and “Pop Art according to Lichtenstein” in the catalogue for the exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: All about Art at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, and the Hayward Gallery in London. Robert L. Martin, vice president for academic affairs, dean of graduate studies, and professor of philosophy and music, performed with the Bard Festival String Quartet at Market Square Concerts in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in November, and at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, in February. Thomas Martin, a member of the art history faculty at Bard High School Early College, published “Giovanni Caccini’s Bust of Baccio Valori” in Burlington Magazine, a review of Debra Pincus’s The Tombs of the Doges of Venice in Renaissance Quarterly, and “New Discoveries and Old Problems in Alessandro Vittoria’s Terracotta Busts” in Sculpture Journal. Steven V. Mazie, a social studies faculty member at Bard High School Early College, presented a paper on liberalism in Israel at the Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting and another on the Amish practice of Rumspringa at the Western Political Science Association annual meeting. He coauthored an article in Field Method and received the 2003 American Political Science Association Best Paper Award in the religion and politics section for “Political Liberalism and Public Religion: The Lesson from Israel,” which he delivered at the American Political Science Association conference in 2002. Bradford Morrow, professor of literature, Bard Center Fellow, and founding editor of the literary magazine Conjunctions, was awarded a 2003 O. Henry Prize for his short story “Lush,” published in the Ontario Review in its

Fall/Winter 2002–2003 issue. The O. Henry Prize, awarded to 20 authors this year, is an annual award for the best short stories published in literary magazines. Elizabeth Murray, visiting professor of studio art, participated in the New York Times Arts & Leisure Weekend, held at CUNY Graduate Center in New York on January 9. In a program titled “For the Love of Painting,” she discussed her work with Michael Kimmelman, New York Times chief art critic. Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, executive vice president of the college, Jerome Levy Professor of Economics, and president of the Levy Economics Institute, published “The State of the U.S. Economy” in Analyst, the journal of the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India. He presented a paper, “Government Deficits and Growth,” at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability conference at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and conducted radio interviews on Streettalk Live in Houston and on Business America Radio. The work of Judy Pfaff, Richard B. Fisher Professor in the Arts, is the subject of a book, Judy Pfaff, by Irving Sandler (Hudson Hills Press). She has received a grant for digital media from the Nancy Graves Foundation. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, professor and director of the Garden History and Landscape Studies Program at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, delivered the keynote address at the 2003 annual meeting of the Garden Club of America in Rye, New York. She spoke on “Building and Rebuilding Central Park: Is Olmsted’s ‘English’ Vision Still Viable?” at the Fourth Waddesdon Manor Symposium, organized in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Frank M. Scalzo, associate professor of psychology, has been elected president of the Neurobehavioral Teratology Society, an international organization of scientists studying behavioral and physical alterations in the nervous systems of developing organisms. The one-year position begins in June. David H. Serlin, a member of the history faculty at Bard High School Early College, published “Crippling Masculinity: Queerness and Disability in Military Culture,

1800–1945” in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. He coorganized a two-day symposium, “Visual Culture and Public Health,” at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Sarah B. Sherrill, editor of Studies in the Decorative Arts at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, published “East-West Design Metamorphosis in 16th-Century Spanish Wreath Carpets: Conservative or Subversive?” in Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies. She presented “Ghost Story: Vestiges of a Vanished Turkish Carpet Design Seen in Some 16th- and 17thCentury European Embroidered and Pile Carpets” at the Tenth International Conference on Oriental Carpets, in Washington, D.C. Susan Weber Soros, founder and director of The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, coauthored Thomas Jeckyll: Architect and Designer (Yale University Press and Bard Graduate Center). She was honored by the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society and received an award for cultural leadership from the American Federation of Arts. Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts, was the featured composer in concerts at the Oberlin Conservatory and Cleveland Museum of Art. Carnegie Hall presented an evening of her work in January with the Tokyo Quartet, Ursula Oppens, Melvin Chen, Paul Neubauer, and Richard Woodhams. Her composition Incandescent was performed by the Emerson Quartet, cocommissioners of the work, at South Mountain Concerts in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The Kalichstein/Laredo/Robison Trio will premiere a new trio in March; an all-Tower program is planned for the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in June. Eric Trudel, assistant professor of French, has been named director of GLOBE, an international journal of Quebec studies. He is the editor of Accessoires: La littérature à l’épreuve du dérisoire (Nota Bene), in which he published “Patients travaux: Expérience et récit de l’événement chez Jean Paulhan.” He presented “Chris Marker ou l’invention du commentaire” at an international conference, “Cultural Memory in France,” at Florida State University and spoke at a symposium organized by Columbia University on the French painter Jean Fautrier.

Marina van Zuylen, associate professor of French and comparative literature, published “Maghreb and Melancholy: A Reading of Nina Bouraoui” in Research in African Literature and “The Importance of Being Lazy” in Cabinet magazine. Stefanie Walker, faculty member, The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, published an article on “The Banquet for Maximilian of Bavaria and His Brothers in 1593 in Rome: A Meeting of Different Forms of Etiquette” in the Rudolstädter Studies in Palace Culture series. She wrote “Tessin, Schor, and Roman Baroque Decorative Arts” in Konsthistorisktidskrift and “Schor’s Pegasus and the Banquet of the Princess” in Proporzioni: Annali della Fondazione Roberto Longhi and spoke on “The Vase in Neoclassical Europe” at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York. Stephen Westfall, faculty member in painting at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, exhibited paintings at the Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in New York and works on paper at the Bruno Marina Gallery in Brooklyn. His work was highlighted in the “Art in Review” column in the New York Times in October.

SEEKING STUDENTS OF RALPH ELLISON Arnold Rampersad, the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, is researching a new biography of writer Ralph Ellison. He would like to contact Bardians who studied with Ellison during his years at Bard (1958–61). For more information, please contact Jessica Kemm, director of alumni/ae affairs, at kemm@bard.edu or 845-758-7406.

Peter Hutton

Published by the Bard Publications Office Ginger Shore, Director; Debby Mayer, Editorial Director; Mary Smith, Art Director; Mikhail Horowitz, René Houtrides MFA ’97, Ellen Liebowitz, Cynthia Werthamer, Editors; Diane Rosasco, Production Manager; Michael Elrod, Ben Fishman, Francie Soosman ’90, Kevin Trabucco, Designers ©2004 Bard College. All rights reserved. Correction Raman Frey graduated from Bard in 1997, not in 1998, as reported in Class Notes in the Fall 2003 Bardian.

www.bard.edu

Peter Hutton

Images, this and facing page, from Skagafjรถrdur, a 33-minute silent film in color and black and white by Peter Hutton, director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program. This landscape study of a region in northern Iceland was commissioned by the Icelandic Film Center, Icelandic Immigration Center, with additional support from the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is presenting the film as part of its 2004 biennial exhibition.

REUNIONS COMMENCEMENT 2004 May 21â&#x20AC;&#x201C;23 Reunion classes: 1934, 1939, 1944, 1949, 1954, 1964, 1969, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999 Would you like to help contact classmates? Please call Stella Wayne at 845-758-7407 or e-mail wayne@bard.edu. Don Hamerman

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