Bardian - Spring 2023

Bardian BARD COLLEGE SPRING 2023

Seed keeper and Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network Distinguished Artistic Fellow Vivien Sansour led participants in a conversation and lecture performance through the Bard College Farm and the wild landscape that surrounds it as part of the 2022–23 Fisher Center LAB Biennial’s Common Ground.

(See page 18.) Photo by Chris Kayden Cover: Performing arts studio building.

Maya Lin Studio with Bialosky New York.

Courtesy Maya Lin Studio ©2022.

(See page 2.)

OFFICE OF DEVELOPMENT AND ALUMNI/AE AFFAIRS Debra Pemstein Vice President for Development and Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7405, pemstein@bard.edu Jane Brien ’89 Director of Alumni/ae Affairs 845-758-7406, brien@bard.edu

OFFICE OF ADMISSION Mackie Siebens ’12 Director bard.edu/admission admission@bard.edu 845-758-7472

issuu.com/bardian 1-800-BARDCOL alumni@bard.edu alums.bard.edu #bardianandproud @bardalumni @bardcollege

©2023 Bard College. Published by the Bard Publications Office. A good-faith effort has been made to supply complete and correct credits; if there are errors or omissions, please contact bardianmagazine@bard.edu.

Printed by Quality Printing, Pittsfield, MA Due to an editing error, the Commencement story in the Summer 2022 issue of the Bardian omitted the name of one award recipient and misspelled the name of another.

We regret the errors. A corrected version can be seen at issuu.com/bardian.

Bardian SPRING 2023

For the first time, the Fred Pavlich Invitational cross-country race was held at Montgomery Place on the south end of Bard’s campus. Eleven teams competed in last fall’s event, which was renamed for the longtime Bard track and cross-country coach upon his retirement in 2018. Photo by Karl Rabe

FEATURES MAYA LIN DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE 2 RHODES WARRIORS 4

SPATIAL EDUCATION 28 NINETEEN RESERVOIRS 34 25 YEARS OF TLS 40

A PLACE TO RETHINK 30

From left to right: An Incomplete City by Gabriel Braunstein ’20, Colin Brundege ’20, Adel Elkafas ’20, Aidan Galloway ’21, Darcy Groves ’20, Thevi Jean-Louis ’23, Henry Levin ’21, Zen Lynch ’23, Sam McVicker ’23, Abe Shenk ’23, and Addy Treadwell ’23 used Olafur Eliasson’s permanent outdoor installation parliament of reality on the north end of campus to investigate spaces beyond the building for Ross Adams and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco’s class Architectural Nature(s) of the Hudson Valley. (See page 28.)

Jana McIntyre (Aminta), Harold Wilson (Sir Morosus), and Edward Nelson (The Barber) in the Bard SummerScape 2022 production of Richard Strauss’s The Silent Woman. (See page 25.)

Photo by Stephanie Berger Screenshot from The Bard Space Program, directed, shot, and edited by Jean Pesce ’03, which documents the legendary Trustee Leader Scholar project of the same name. (See page 40.)

ON AND OFF CAMPUS 6 BOOKS BY BARDIANS 42 CLASS NOTES 47 IN MEMORIAM 55

ALUMNI/AE PROFILES MOTHER OF INTERVENTION 7 Mneesha Gellman ’03 LIGHTING FOR THE EARS 12 Jonathan Tunick ’58 BARD’S HOMER 17 Howard Megdal ’07

MAYA LIN

DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE This year, the College is embarking on the first two of a series of exciting new building projects, including a new residence hall complex with some 300 rooms to be built in the open space southwest of Robbins Annex on a site that was once occupied by two temporary dormitory structures—Catskill and Hudson. But the first new building to break ground, this fall, will be a performing arts studio building designed by Maya Lin. In her senior year at Yale University, Lin submitted the winning design in a national competition for the Vietnam Veterans

2

fishercenter.bard.edu

Memorial in Washington, DC, now one of the most visited public memorials in the world.

She went on to graduate school at Yale, where she was told by one of her teachers, “Don’t worry about deciding between art or architecture, just keep doing what you’re doing.” That teacher was Frank Gehry. Which makes it all the more appropriate that her performing arts studio building will be situated in meadows overlooking woodlands and the Catskill Mountains to the west of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester calls the

building, “a generational and stylistic dance” between Lin and Gehry, who designed Bard’s spectacular Fisher Center.

In 2017, Lin presented the Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities at Bard College— “The ‘Memory Works’” and “At the Intersection of Art and Architecture.” Her career as an artist, designer, and environmentalist epitomizes that intersection.

As Lin writes in Boundaries (Simon & Schuster), “I see myself existing between boundaries, a place where opposites meet; science and art, art and architecture, East and

West. My work originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings.”

The new 25,000-square-foot, highperformance, energy-efficient, low-carbon building, which is projected to cost $42 million, will provide studios for the center’s dance, theater, opera, and orchestral performances as well as a home for Fisher Center LAB, the acclaimed residency and commissioning program for professional artists. LAB has developed and premiered internationally celebrated productions such

as Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets and Daniel Fish’s Tony Award–winning production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

The Fisher Center is both a professional performing arts center and home to several academic programs in the performing arts, and the need for additional space has become critical. Beyond the new building’s indoor studio spaces, the sloping semicircular design creates an amphitheater that will house outdoor public performances, and the grasstopped roof will integrate the structure into the landscape. In keeping with Lin’s commitment to the environment, most of the

Performing arts studio building. Maya Lin Studio with Bialosky New York. Courtesy Maya Lin Studio ©2022

trees that are cleared from the site will be used in the building’s construction.

“Bard is honored and proud to have Maya Lin as the designer of its new performing arts studio building,” says Bard College President Leon Botstein. “Her artistry will enhance the beauty of the Hudson Valley and offer a remarkable complement to Frank Gehry’s Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.”

arts.bard.edu

3

ON THE Bard College students have won many of the academic world’s most prestigious awards and honors, but the Rhodes Scholarship has been elusive. Many have applied, and a few have been named finalists, but Sonita Alizada ’23 became the first to earn that fully funded award for postgraduate study at the University of Oxford while still an undergraduate. (Ronan Farrow ’04 won a Rhodes in 2012.) Alizada, who was born in Herat, Afghanistan, is one of only two applicants to receive a 2022 Global Rhodes, which is available to students from the approximately 170 nations that are not members of established Rhodes constituencies.

In addition to being an outstanding scholar and deeply engaged in the Bard community, Alizada is an outspoken human rights advocate, artist, and rapper. As a child, she and her family left Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, walking hundreds of miles to Iran. She grew up, as she describes it, “an impoverished, undocumented, refugee street child in Tehran.” At 10, she was sold into a forced marriage, but that contract fell through. She was unable to attend school until a local nongovernmental organization that provided basic education to undocumented Afghan children offered assistance. She learned to read and write, and developed an interest in music.

Her family tried again to sell her when she was 16, in order to raise funds for her brother to buy his bride, but rather than return to Afghanistan to meet her future husband, she recorded a song, “Daughters for Sale,” and uploaded a music video to YouTube. The video helped change her family’s mind, and it has been viewed more than 1.5 million times since she first posted it.

Alizada moved to the United States in 2015, and she has continued to advocate for change, addressing the United Nations; working with organizations such as Girls Not Brides, Global Partnership for Education, and Global Women’s Empowerment Network; and founding Arezo, a Trustee Leader Scholar–initiated project that raises money to support impoverished children in Herat.

sonita.net

Sonita Alizada ’23, photo by Michael Friberg

RHODES At Oxford, Alizada will pursue graduate study in public policy. “I want to make real change,” she says. “And that comes from changing the laws. Now it’s time for me to really take action by working with policymakers.”

Nawara Alaboud BCB ’23 became the first Bard College Berlin student to receive a Rhodes. She was awarded one of two Rhodes Scholarships—in partnership with the Saïd Foundation—for students from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine.

Alaboud is working toward her BA in humanities, the arts, and social thought, with a concentration in ethics and politics, through the Program for International Education and Social Change, a scholarship program for students from areas of crisis and conflict. She is interested in the processes of war termination, peace building, and democratization in post–civil war countries, especially in the Middle East region. Her Senior Project traces the effects of peace agreements on the success of democratic transitions. Alaboud, who was born in Syria, graduated from Woodstock School in India, and studied on an Erasmus exchange program at Sciences Po in France, plans to pursue an MPhil in politics (comparative government) at Oxford.

“The prospect of joining the wide community of previous Rhodes scholars, and the chance to join the outstanding academic community at Oxford, is incredibly exciting,” says Alaboud. “It is not lost upon me what a rare privilege this is; so many gifted young Syrians deserve such an opportunity but are hindered from receiving it by the severest of circumstances. I hope to be able to make the most of my time at Oxford and to contribute something of value to the field of post-conflict studies, especially for the people who suffer the consequences of war everywhere.”

Nawara Alaboud BCB ’23

berlin.bard.edu

5

GILMAN WINNERS GO FAR

BEIJING BOUND From a pool of nearly 3,000 applicants, three Bardians have been named Schwarzman Scholars. Each will have the opportunity to attend a one-year, fully funded master’s program in global affairs at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Evan Tims ’19 grew up in coastal Maine, where he developed an early interest in the relationship between narrative, social justice, and environmental change. He earned a joint BA in human rights and written arts, received the Bard Written Arts Prize and the Christopher Wise ’92 Award in Environmental Studies and Human Rights for his Senior Project, and is founder and director of the In 100 Years Project, an organization focused on building environmental dialogue through creative workshops. Tims is particularly focused on the social challenges of water in the 21st century.

As a 2021–22 Henry J. Luce Scholar, he lived in Nepal and conducted research in the hydropower sector while leading climate engagement projects. Edris Tajik ’23 came to Bard from Afghanistan and is completing his Senior Project in politics. Tajik has trained 240 students in Model United Nations and 120 students on peace-building initiatives as well as implemented six community-based projects. He is a Generation Change fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and is interning with the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He intends to pursue a career in international relations. Michael Nyakundi ’23, a student at Bard College Berlin, is a Kenyan national studying economics, politics, and social thought who is interested in criminal justice reform through public policy and law. He previously interned at State House Kenya analyzing the impact of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Big 4 agenda, and has volunteered with the Kenya Red Cross and Plan International on youth-police arbitration projects.

Recently, Nyakundi led a team of more than 500 to address police brutality in the Soweto slums of Nairobi.

Clockwise from top left: Asyl Almaz ’24, Azriel Almodóvar ’24, Grant Venable ’24, photos by AnnAnn Puttithanasorn ’23; Nandi Woodfork-Bey ’23, photo by Lamphone Souvannaphoungeun

Four Bard College students were awarded Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships by the US Department of State. Computer science and Asian studies joint major Asyl Almaz ’24, from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, used her $4,000 award to attend Waseda University in Tokyo for the fall 2022 semester. Philosophy major Azriel Almodóvar ’24, from Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, received $3,500, with which he attended Bard’s Italian Language Intensive program in Taormina, Italy, during summer 2022. Theater major Grant Venable ’24, from Sherman Oaks, California, spent fall 2022 at Bard College Berlin with the help of a $5,000 Gilman-DAAD scholarship. Music and Asian studies joint major Nandi Woodfork-Bey ’23, from Sacramento, California, was awarded $3,500, which she put toward study at the American College of Greece in fall 2022. The Gilman Program is sponsored by the Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and is supported in its implementation by the Institute of International Education.

6

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

PROJECTING CHANGE Two student-led initiatives shared the Margarita Kuchma Project Award.

Half of the $10,000 prize went to the team of Anna Schupack ’22 and Sarah Soucek ’22 for the Columbia Collective, a multimedia arts mentorship project designed to give incarcerated artists the opportunity to define their own voices. The other $5,000 went to Michael Nyakundi ’23 and Abdullah Naseer ’23 from Bard College Berlin for Project MA3: Masanse Na Mayouthman (From Violence to Co-existence), which focuses on community engagement as a working solution to police brutality in Soweto slums in Embakasi, Nairobi. Organized by Bard’s Human Rights Project, the award was created in honor of Margarita Kuchma, who was a graduate of Smolny College, a Program in International Education student at Bard, and a member of the first cohort of the Center for Human Rights and the Arts’ MA in Human Rights and the Arts Program. Kuchma was a talented artist and activist with a passionate commitment to making real change in the world, and the prize in her name was conceived as a living memorial to encourage Bard students and recent graduates to emulate her commitment to political and social engagement.

gilmanscholarship.org

schwarzmanscholars.org

MNEESHA GELLMAN ’03

MOTHER OF INTERVENTION Mneesha Gellman ’03 was on her own when it came time to decide where to go to college.

Sitting at her kitchen table in Eureka, California, she laid out her college acceptance letters, mixed them up, closed her eyes, and let her finger drop. It landed on Bard. “After confirming my financial aid packet, and that I could defer for a year—I had plans to backpack through Mexico and Guatemala for nine months—I signed the forms,” she says.

Once those travels were over, Gellman bought a one-way ticket to New York. Arriving in Annandale as a motivated activist, she soon found herself in a class taught by Omar Encarnación, a political studies professor who helped Gellman channel her outrage into academic research and writing. Four years later, while waiting outside his office as he and two other professors discussed her Senior Project, about the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on the political economy of organic corn farming in Oaxaca, Mexico, she stood close enough to the door to hear Encarnación say, “I think she has the makings of a scholar.”

This was not an option Gellman had considered; no one in her family was an academic. But Encarnación’s words encouraged her to pursue an MA and then a PhD. Gellman’s time at Bard—including a yearlong study abroad program her junior year in which she traveled through England, Tanzania, India, the Philippines, and Mexico meeting grassroots activists, making friends, and learning how to analyze the sociopolitical world while navigating comfort and discomfort—put her on the path to her current position as an international comparative politics professor at Emerson College.

Mneesha Gellman ’03, photo by Joop Reubens

Converting negativity into something positive has been a recurring theme in Gellman’s life.

Though she had an undergraduate punk-rock music phase as a singer and songwriter in the Electra Complex—the May 22, 2000, Bard Observer described the band’s music as “political hardcore songs, which incorporate feminist and earth-friendly lyrics”— that particular artistic expression has not found an outlet in her adult life, except in helping her identify with the rage and rebellion of her students. But much of the rest of her Bard experience has. As a first-year student with an

incarcerated family member, Gellman was apprehensive of people’s judgments. But serving as a volunteer with the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) at Eastern and Beacon Correctional Facilities helped her transform what she calls “the baggage of my family experience” into a public good, and later led Gellman to start the Emerson Prison Initiative (EPI). “Max Kenner ’01, Daniel Karpowitz, Jessica Neptune ’02, and many other BPI staff provided critical technical assistance in the early days of creating EPI, and still serve as mentors,” says Gellman.

“Emerson College is a member of Bard’s Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison, and I think of EPI as a sister program of BPI,

emerson.edu/epi

bpi.bard.edu

ascribing to the same best practices of bringing the rigor and integrity of the traditional campus degree behind prison walls.”

Broadly speaking, Gellman’s work is about human rights and democratization, with a strong focus on minority rights. Her primary research has been on Indigenous and minority cultural survival, and particularly how historically marginalized communities in the Global South have organized and advocated for cultural rights. Most recently, she has been analyzing how access to Indigenous language classes and culturally relevant curricula in high schools in Mexico and the United States empowers Indigenous students to resist assimilation while boosting healthy youth identity. Gellman has also worked on behalf of Latinx wellbeing, specifically in asylum proceedings. She has served as an expert witness in nearly 100 asylum cases in US immigration courts, analyzing the risks of violence toward people from Mexico and El Salvador based on their identities. Additionally, she has engaged with Latinx immigrant youth in California to find ways for schools to better support them through education policies. Another area of focus is the politics of incarceration and education. What unites these activities, says Gellman, “is a commitment to support the rights and wellbeing of historically and contemporarily marginalized people. When states don’t respect people’s rights, intervention is necessary.” Gellman sees her work in education policy, expert witnessing, and EPI as such interventions. “When my life is helping make someone else’s better,” says Gellman, “the labor feels worth it.”

—Hattie Wilder Karlstrom ’20, HRA ’23

ALUMNI/AE PROFILE

7

MACARTHUR FOUNDATION FELLOWS

Above: Sky Hopinka Left: Paul Chan MFA ’03 Photos ©John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Sky Hopinka, Sherri Burt Hennessey Artist in Residence, and Paul Chan MFA ’03 have been named MacArthur Fellows for 2022.

An unrestricted award of $800,000 accompanies this distinction.

Hopinka was selected on the strength of his film, video art, and photography. His work explores Indigenous identities and representation, often blending traditional documentary-style footage with abstract layers of imagery and sound. This creates a sort of visual poetry, offering a unique cinematic perspective that questions the

walkerart.org

dominant cultural expectation of linear storytelling. Hopinka joins nine other distinguished faculty members who have received MacArthur fellowships: poet Ann Lauterbach; artists Jeffrey Gibson, An-My Lê, and Judy Pfaff; journalist Mark Danner; filmmaker Charles Burnett; and novelists Valeria Luiselli, Norman Manea (emeritus), and Dinaw Mengestu.

Chan is an independent artist and writer whose multidisciplinary work probes politics, culture, and the nature of art itself. Chan received the Charles Flint Kellogg Award in

skyhopinka.com

film.bard.edu

Arts and Letters from Bard College in 2021.

He has staged Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the streets of New Orleans, founded a small press, and created detailed digital animations. His latest project, Breathers (at Walker Art Center through July 16, 2023), plays with a new kind of moving image: inflatable fabric figures whose motion can be choreographed to evoke certain emotions.

“I found myself in art because it was the field that allowed me to do things wrong and still have it matter,” says Chan. “That freedom allows me to explore what else is possible.”

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

9

FACULTY RECOGNITION

Felicia Keesing (center), flanked by Fujio Mitarai, chairperson EXPO ’90 Foundation (left), and Kazuo Oike, chairperson of the International Prize Committee (right).

Photo courtesy EXPO ’90 Foundation

David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing Felicia Keesing has been awarded the 2022 International Cosmos Prize. Established by the Expo ’90 Foundation in Osaka, Japan, the prize recognizes scientists who study the relationship between nature and humankind through an integrated, holistic lens. Keesing was selected for her research on species conservation and the spread of pathogens, which suggests that areas with high levels of biodiversity provide more protection against zoonotic disease. The Foundation also commended Keesing on her dedication to accessibility and inclusion in the field, noting her efforts to advance science literacy among young adults through collaborations with Bard and other organizations. The prize includes a monetary award of 40 million yen (about $300,000).

10

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

Bard undergraduates working in the Keesing Lab conduct research on how ecological communities respond to changes in biological diversity, with a particular focus on how human risk of exposure to infectious diseases is affected by changes in the environment. Keesing has studied how the loss of large mammals affects the ecology of African savannas, and how changes in the diversity and composition of ecological communities influence the transmission of pathogens, particularly tick-borne diseases in the eastern United States. Students in the lab are also involved with a number of other projects, including studies of the invasive plant garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata), the nontarget effects of the fungal pathogen Metarhizium anisopliae, and the distribution of mammals in response to land use in Dutchess County, New York. “Over the years,” Keesing says, “my approach in the classroom has been transformed by my learning how to teach so that students practice doing rather than just listening.”

Two Bard professors secured National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grants for innovative projects that aim to preserve and expand access to scholarly resources. NEH awarded a $150,000 grant to Bard Graduate Center Associate Professor Aaron Glass in support of “The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’s Pioneering Ethnography,” a project he codirects with Judith Berman at the University of Victoria. Glass and his team will work to digitize anthropologist Boas’s landmark 1897 monograph on the Kwakwaka’wakw culture of the Pacific Northwest Coast, enhancing the original text with archival material from collections all over the world.

Anne Hunnell Chen, assistant professor of art history and visual culture, received $350,000 for the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive, a collection of materials related to the archaeological site of DuraEuropos, Syria. Chen will collaborate with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Bard College Berlin to create an extensive, multilingual archive that will help democratize scholarship related to this rare historical resource. NEH also honored Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature, with a Public Scholar Award in the amount of $60,000 for his book project, Brunelleschi’s Children: How a Renaissance Orphanage Saved 400,000 Lives and Reinvented Childhood.

The grant will support his research into the Hospital of the Innocents in Florence, Italy, an institution that offered revolutionary care and education to abandoned children for more than four centuries.

Daniel Mendelsohn Photo by Matt Mendelsohn

Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities Daniel Mendelsohn has won the 2022 Malaparte Prize, Italy’s highest honor for foreign writers. Mendelsohn was selected for his body of work in literary criticism, translation, and narrative nonfiction. In its citation, the Malaparte jury singled out the themes of exile, displacement, and memory in Mendelsohn’s three major memoirs, especially The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, an investigation into the deaths of six relatives who perished during the Holocaust in what is now Ukraine. He accepted the prize at an awards ceremony held on the island of Capri at the beginning of October.

Jenny Xie, assistant professor of written arts, is a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in literature. Xie is the author of two poetry collections, Eye Level (Graywolf Press) and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press), both of which were National Book Award finalists. The fellowships are for early-career artists based in Minnesota and New York City, and come with a $50,000 award split over two years to support the creation of new work, advancement of artistic goals, and/or promotion of professional development. “I strive to create work that demonstrates the vital force unassimilated language can have, of the power and charge that can pulse through words when they behave differently, against rules and convention, and against forces that collude to render language more utilitarian, more homogenous, and free of nuance and rich complexity,” Xie writes.

Professor of History and Asian Studies Robert Culp and Assistant Professor of Chinese Lu Kou have received Scholar Grants from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation in support of their scholarly humanities book projects. Culp’s book, Circuits of Meaning: Book Markets and Knowledge Production in Modern China, 1900-1965, will explore how changing systems of book distribution in modern China shaped reading communities and knowledge production. Ku will examine political communication strategies among rival states in War of Words: Courtly Exchange, Rhetoric, and Political Culture in Early Medieval China.

Peter L’Official, photo by Liz Munsell

bard.edu/faculty

Jenny Xie, photo by Robert Bredvad

Peter L’Official, associate professor of literature and director of the American and Indigenous Studies Program at Bard College, has won a Rabkin Prize of $50,000 for his work in visual art journalism.

Candidates for the award are nominated by a group of 16 anonymous arts professionals, who are asked to identify “the essential visual art journalist working in your part of the country,” and final winners are selected by a jury.

L’Official’s next book project will explore the intersections of literature, architecture, and Blackness in America.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

11

JONATHAN TUNICK ’58

LIGHTING FOR THE EARS

When Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street began previews on Broadway in late February, it was the first time since 1980 that the Stephen Sondheim musical was revived there with its original orchestration by Jonathan Tunick ’58.

Tunick has spent his career transforming vocal and piano scores into fully realized orchestrations for woodwinds, brass, percussion, and strings. Look in the credits of any musical or film and you’ll usually find an orchestrator listed somewhere after the composer. Tunick’s success in this often-unheralded art has made him the only Bardian to achieve the extremely rare EGOT quadfecta: winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony award.

Born in New York City in 1938 and raised on the Upper West Side, Tunick was introduced to Bard as a 12-year-old at summer camp, where his cabin counselor was 19-year-old Bard music major Darius “Ted” Thieme ’51.

With just a little prior experience on the clarinet, Tunick was inducted into a Dixieland jazz band alongside Thieme and his older friends. A few years later, still entranced by stories about Bard, Tunick applied and enrolled as a composition major.

of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. They discussed a new project over a whisky-soaked lunch before going to Sondheim’s home to read through it. “I sat next to him on the piano bench as he played and sang through the score of Company, growling out the words an octave below pitch,” Tunick remembers. “Imagine the thrill of hearing these songs for the first time, right from the source.”

“Bard was very small when I went there, only 300 students, and we all knew one another,” Tunick says. “It was a very cozy place.” He studied chamber music with Emil Hauser, founding violinist of the Budapest String Quartet, and took theory, harmony, and counterpoint with Clair Leonard, a student of the famed Parisian pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. But his most influential teacher was composer Paul Nordoff. “He taught that music should be well-built, like a sound building, but first and foremost it should be beautiful,” Tunick says. “This put him at odds with the established order of contemporary composers, academics, and critics, and his music was pretty much ignored by them.”

Nordoff eventually moved to Europe, where he started a new career as a music therapist.

Tunick turned to musical theater, which he found more congenial than the midcentury contemporary classical music world.

Like lighting, the orchestra can create different degrees of warmth and cold, darkness and brightness.

He had already composed for plays, dance concerts, and student musicals at Bard, collaborating on the last with Steven Vinaver ’58. “Steven was quite ambitious and managed to get a few of our songs placed in the revue Take Five,” Tunick recalls, “establishing me as a performed composer in New York at the age of 19—the first of a series of false starts.” After graduation, he went on to Juilliard for a master’s degree.

In 1968, Tunick orchestrated Burt Bacharach’s Promises, Promises, his first Broadway success. The following year, he was introduced to Sondheim, whom he knew as the lyricist of West Side Story and composer

Jonathan Tunick ’58, photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

Sondheim created a new style of musical theater with freer structures and more complex harmonies than most popular songs. This offered Tunick an intriguing challenge. “When the piano accompaniment doesn’t follow well-recognized patterns, then the orchestrator can’t use the well-established orchestral patterns, so new ones have to be devised.” He rattles off some of the classical scoring techniques he has turned to: imitation, inversion, retrograde, onomatopoeia, and leitmotiv.

In addition to Company and Sweeney Todd, Tunick worked with Sondheim, who died in 2021, on Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, Into the Woods, Passion, Putting It Together, and The Frogs. “One of the reasons I think he’s the best orchestrator for the theater is he has a sense of drama, of what’s going on on the stage,” Sondheim said in a 2020 interview.

“He isn’t just interested in the sounds. He is interested in enhancing the play.”

After meeting with the composer, Tunick would watch cast rehearsals, accompanied by

music.bard.edu

piano, to get a sense of the show’s staging and direction as well as the range and timbre of the voices. He recalls once asking the lighting designer how a scene would be lit to help understand how to orchestrate it. Like lighting, the orchestra can create different degrees of warmth and cold, darkness and brightness. “It can also provide subtext,” Tunick explains. “It can hint at unspoken secrets, and can say things the characters don’t say, or don’t want to say, or don’t even know.”

An orchestrator’s work is never quite finished. New productions may require revisions, and Tunick has orchestrated Sweeney Todd a dozen times now, including the score for Tim Burton’s 2007 film and a large-scale version for symphony orchestras and opera houses. But part of the excitement for the Broadway revival is the return of his 26-instrument original. Tunick is serving as a consultant for the production, which stars Josh Groban. He also worked on Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast with Emma Watson. And for the first time in years, he is focusing on his own compositions—he has published several choral works and his Serenade for Strings was recently performed and recorded.

“When I was a kid and didn’t know anything about music, I heard children’s records, like Peter and the Wolf and Tubby the Tuba, which gave me the notion that musical instruments could play characters and tell stories,” Tunick says. “This idea became an obsession which has dominated my life.”

—Benjamin Pesetsky ’11 Composer and writer Benjamin Pesetsky ’11 earned his BM in composition from the Bard College Conservatory of Music and his BA in philosophy from Bard College. He serves on the staff of the San Francisco Symphony.

Jonathan Tunick ’58 received an honorary doctor of fine arts degree from the college in 2013.

ALUMNI/AE PROFILE

13

RAGE AND REASON This fall’s Hannah Arendt Center conference tackled “Rage and Reason: Democracy Under the Tyranny of Social Media.” Presented in partnership with the Open Society University Network and the Center for Civic Engagement, the event traced the fraught and sometimes surprising relationships between big tech, free speech, and intense emotion. Attendees considered whether or not anger is compatible with rationality, hearing arguments from Bard professors as well as guest speakers like PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel and Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. In March, the Arendt Center will present a two-day conference, “Judgment, Pluralism, and Democracy: On the Desirability of Speaking with Others.”

“Facebook, Twitter, and the Danger to Public Reason” featured Frances Haugen (right) in conversation with Dylan Sparks ’19. Hannah Arendt Center 2022 conference, “Rage and Reason.”

LECTURES BY LUMINARIES Former 60 Minutes producer Chris Whipple, an acclaimed author, political analyst, documentary filmmaker, and Emmy and Peabody Award winner, and Brian Dumaine, cofounder and editor in chief of the media company High Water Press and contributing editor at Fortune magazine, presented “From the Oval Office to the Corner Office: What Chris Whipple We Have Learned about Presidents and Plutocrats,” as part of Bard’s John J. Curran ’75 Lectures in Journalism series. Whipple and Dumaine were introduced by Ethan Porter ’07, author of The Consumer Citizen and associate professor of media and public affairs and of political science at George Washington University. The October talk, which was free and open to the community, was supported by the President’s Office, Office of the Brian Dumaine Dean of the College, Office of Development and Alumni/ae Affairs, and the Written Arts Program.

John J. Curran ’75 Lectures in Journalism honor the memory of a proud Bardian whose dedication to ethical reporting in journalism informed a trusting readership for over a quarter of a century and promoted a culture of honesty, integrity, and truth.

14

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

hac.bard.edu

The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities featured Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips with faculty hosts Marina van Zuylen, professor of French and comparative literature; Adhaar Noor Desai, assistant professor of literature; and Gideon Lester, Fisher Center artistic director and chief executive. Greenblatt, a Stephen Greenblatt Shakespearean scholar, literary historian, and author, is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.

He won the National Book Award for The Swerve in 2011 and the Pulitzer Prize in 2012.

Psychoanalyst and writer Phillips, formerly principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, is a visiting professor in the department of Adam Phillips, photo by Jerry Bauer English at the University of York, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The November lecture series, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, included Greenblatt’s “Shakespeare’s First Chance” and Phillips’s “Freud’s First Chance” and “Second Chances: For and Against” in Annandale, and “Shakespeare’s Second Chances” by Greenblatt at the Morgan Library in New York City. The Hecht Lectures, which honor preeminent poet and former Bard faculty member Anthony Hecht ’44, were established in 2007. Each lecture series is published by Yale University Press.

NEW FACULTY

Left to right: Renata Salecl, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Allison Stanger, and Mike Cosper at the Hannah Arendt Center 2022 conference, “Rage and Reason.” Photo by Karl Rabe

Writer and cultural critic Thomas Chatterton Williams will begin teaching at the College in Spring 2023 as Hannah Arendt Center senior fellow and visiting professor of humanities. Williams is the author of Losing My Cool and Self-Portrait in Black and White, and a contributing writer at the Atlantic. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and New Yorker, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. His forthcoming book, Nothing Was the Same: The Pandemic Summer of George Floyd and the Shift in Western Consciousness, will be published by Knopf. In 2022, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow for his work in general nonfiction.

Lucas Blalock ’02, photo by Gertraud Presenhuber. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/New York

The Bard College Conservatory of Music has appointed Jessie Montgomery and Missy Mazzoli to the faculty as composers in residence. Violinist, composer, and educator Montgomery, Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year, has received numerous accolades for her work, which interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness. She has been commissioned by organizations around the world, including Bard’s own SummerScape Festival, which premiered her collaborative piece I was waiting for the echo of a better day in 2021. Mazzoli, whom the New York Times called “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York,” was one of the first two women to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, in 2018, and was nominated for a Grammy award in the Best Classical Composition category that same year. In January 2023, the American Academy of Arts and Letters named Mazzoli a winner of the Marc Blitzstein Memorial Award.

Lucas Blalock ’02 joins Bard as assistant professor of photography. Originally from Asheville, North Carolina, Blalock holds a BA from Bard and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His work, which explores the potentials of mannerism in photography, has been exhibited at major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, and Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has also staged solo exhibitions throughout the US and Europe, including at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, which represents him in New York City and Zurich, and Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, which represents him in Brussels.

bard.edu/faculty

Jessie Montgomery, photo by Jiyang Chen

Missy Mazzoli, photo by Marylene Mey

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

15

BESTIES

TŌN TUNES If music were wine, 2022 would have to be counted as one of the great vintages for Bardians.

And it’s not just us saying so.

National Public Radio (NPR) included Walking in the Dark by Julia Bullock VAP ’11 on its list of the “10 Best Classical Albums of 2022,” calling her “a keen curator” with “a singularly expressive voice” and highlighting songs that showcase her “fiery side” as well as her “elegant phrasing” and “sense of social justice.” NPR chose Trans Feminist Symphonic Music by Gavilán Rayna Russom ’97 as one of the “11 Best Experimental Albums of 2022.” The 71-minute work, “expresses as much information as a novella . . . legibly investigating the futility of binaries through the spooky actions of sound. . . . The whole is greater than the sum of its alreadymagnificent parts—its conclusion, which is objectively correct, is that there are no right answers when it comes to the act of human being.”

The New York Times got into the act as well, naming the Angelica Sanchez Trio’s Sparkle Beings one of the “Best Jazz Albums of 2022.” The Times calls Sanchez, who joined the Bard faculty in fall 2022 as assistant professor of music, a “stalwart avant-garde pianist” who here “steers a new all-star trio.” The “melodies explode in her hand.”

16

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

music.bard.edu/jazz

The Orchestra Now (TŌN), the visionary orchestra and master’s degree program founded in 2015 by Bard College president, conductor, educator, and music historian Leon Botstein, continues to produce recordings of both wellknown and less familiar repertoire. Recent releases include Classics of American Romanticism, featuring the first-ever complete recording of George Frederick Bristow’s “Arcadian” Symphony; Piano Protagonists, an album of piano concertos by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Frédéric Chopin (both on Bridge Records); and the soundtrack to the feature-length documentary Forte, which explores the notion of success through the lens of three female musicians (Sorel Classics).

ton.bard.edu

HOWARD MEGDAL ’07

BARD’S HOMER Boosterism is an occupational hazard for all sports announcers. They have been known to gaze upon roiling, wine-dark seas and report back descriptions of rosy-fingered dawns. So Howard Megdal ’07—“the Voice of Bard Athletics”—could be forgiven his ardently sunny outlook on the future of Raptor teams.

But there’s a catch. He really believes it. “I’m very optimistic about what I see here,” Megdal says, as he drives north under a Hudson River School sky to cover a weekend of women’s soccer in Annandale.

of a literature degree he would complete in 2007). Undeterred by the prospect of joining an industry beset by consolidation, layoffs, and woeful earnings forecasts, Megdal became a newspaper reporter at the Hudson Register-Star. Not because it was the sensible thing to do, but because, he confesses, “I did not want to do anything else.”

Athletic competition is always an expression of hope, and the prerequisite for hope is uncertainty. The race does typically go to the swiftest, but everyone is even at the start line (unlike in so much of life). It’s no wonder that a lifelong New York Mets fan like Megdal would be so relentlessly optimistic about Bard’s 200 or so varsity athletes. In the words of Mets reliever Tug McGraw, “You Gotta Believe!”

A close follower of Bard sports for nearly 25 years, Megdal’s vision goes deeper than the wins and losses that inevitably stand as proxies for the merits of any program. “We have a chance to take what’s best about today’s intercollegiate athletics and incorporate that into what has always made Bard a great place to be,” he adds.

Around the turn of the millennium, in one of the old Ravine House dorm rooms now lost to time, Megdal listened (via RealAudio and a dial-up connection) to Vin Scully calling Los Angeles Dodger games from Chávez Ravine, and wondered why Bard’s basketball games were not broadcast on the college’s radio station. Why? led to Why not?, which led to an Athletic Department office with a view of the basketball court and a landline. Megdal could then call the radio station from that office, run to the station (in the basement of Manor House), answer the phone and place the receiver next to an open mic, then hustle back to the gym before tip-off. Voilà! Sports broadcasting at Bard was born.

This can-do spirit has served Megdal well since leaving Bard in 2002 (a few credits shy

Howard Megdal ’07, photo by Karl Rabe

envisions “The IX” as part of a “new infrastructure that will help tell the stories that need to be told” about women athletes.

“The Next,” a women’s basketball newsroom, is also part of that infrastructure. “I love women’s sports because they are so passionate about it,” he says. “The stakes are higher for them because they are pushing back on stereotypes and changing the way we think about women and sports.”

—Bob Barry ’79 In addition to feeding his obsessions, Megdal’s oeuvre reveals a belief that sports inhabits a crucial place in the broader culture, particularly when it can push back against stereotypes and received wisdom. The canard that certain peoples are not terribly athletic led to the 2009 publication of The Baseball Talmud, Megdal’s position-by-position guide to baseball’s greatest Jewish players.

You can hear Megdal singing Raptors’ praises on live streams throughout the year at bardathletics.com.

More recently, his frustration with what he calls “the yawning gap between how men’s and women’s sports are covered” prompted Megdal to launch a website/newsletter called “The IX” (as in Title IX, the landmark 1972 law prohibiting discrimination by sex at any school receiving federal funds). Megdal

theixsports.com

thenexthoops.com

ALUMNI/AE PROFILE

17

LAB-GROWN CULTURE

The Fisher Center has gone global with Common Ground, the fourth edition of the Live Arts Bard (LAB) Biennial festival. In partnership with the Open Society University Network’s Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA) at Bard, Common Ground brings together artists from all over the world to explore the relationship between food, land, and politics. Three of the biennial’s four programs are taking place abroad, with a series of commissions from artists in Colombia (curated by Juliana Steiner), Palestine (curated by Emily Jacir), and South Africa (curated by Boyzie Cekwana). Funding from CHRA will allow these artists to dive deeply into issues of importance to their local communities, with projects focused on reviving Indigenous agricultural traditions, responding to the loss of specific food cultures and ecosystems, and mapping the various ways that humans have shaped and interacted with their environments.

The final series brought questions of sustainability and climate action back to Annandale with the first of two four-day festivals curated by CHRA Director and Distinguished Artist in Residence Tania El Khoury and Gideon Lester, Fisher Center artistic director and chief executive.

From October 13 to 16, 2022, the program celebrated the harvest with two world premieres from artists renowned for their work on food systems and conservation.

Cooking Sections’ When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]] invited viewers to a trio of performance installations examining the impacts of salmon farming on the culture and ecology of the surrounding communities.

Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network Distinguished Artistic Fellow Vivien Sansour’s The Belly is a Garden led participants on a site-specific guided walk of the Bard Farm, encouraging them to appreciate the biodiversity of the campus landscape, trace the connections between all living things, and explore the ways that we can nurture each other’s growth and strengthen our necessary interdependence.

From May 4th to May 7th, 2023, Common Ground will mark the beginning of the growing season in the Hudson Valley with a second festival featuring world premieres by Kenyon Adams and Chef Omar Tate, Tara Rodríguez Besosa, El Khoury, Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, and Jordan Weber. A series of digital and in-person talks about art, activism, and food politics will take place throughout the year-long program, providing a broad range of perspectives and possible solutions to the disconnect between our food systems and the natural world. As the seasons change, participating artists and scholars will continue to collaborate across borders and oceans, asking difficult questions about ownership, preservation, and collective action, and working together to imagine how our choices can shape a more equitable and renewable future.

Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe perform in Cooking Sections’ When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]]. Photo by Chris Kayden

18

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

fishercenter.bard.edu

A SUSTAINABLE NOTE The US Department of Energy (DOE) recently recognized Bard for its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least half within 10 years. Bard is one of the 50 organizations that have joined the DOE’s Better Climate Challenge, and the only small liberal arts college in the country that is converting its built environment to carbon neutral as a Better Climate Challenge partner.

The College has already cut energy use on campus through more efficient lighting, HVAC, and insulation retrofits; added solar arrays; and has plans to eliminate fossil fuels by converting buildings to geothermal. The goal is to use only renewable energy through a combination of on-campus solar and microhydropower and the purchase of off-site renewable electricity.

On the academic side, Bard launched the Worldwide Teach-In on Climate and Justice last March. Organized by the Graduate Programs in Sustainability, with support from the Open Society University Network, the teach-in brought together climate-concerned educators and students at universities and high schools from around the globe for conversations about changing the future.

Teach-in organizers hope to engage 1,000 colleges, universities, and other institutions this year, targeting at least 100,000 participants worldwide.

Students are also leading the charge, particularly when it comes to food. BardEATS (Education, Advocacy, Transparency, and Sustainability), a collaborative partnership among Bard students, dining services, faculty, and staff, is working to make campus food systems more sustainable and equitable. The organization coordinates pre- and postconsumer composting systems on campus, which has resulted in roughly 230 pounds of food per day being diverted from landfills.

That number is likely to go way up thanks to entrepreneur and investor Christopher R. Lindstrom SR ’01, who this summer donated a High-solids Organic-waste Recycling System with Electrical Output (HORSE).

Khadija Ghanizada ’23 spent last summer researching the biodigester and its potential contribution to Bard’s efforts to reduce its

bos.bard.edu

carbon footprint. “Based on our calculations, from 960 pounds of food waste per week we can produce 139 kilowatts of electricity,” she wrote. Ghanizada, who is on the women’s lacrosse team, noted that the digester would be able to supply enough electricity to power the lights on the Lorenzo Ferrari Soccer and Lacrosse Field for 10 hours a week.

“Furthermore,” she added, “the fertilizer can be used on the Bard Farm and sequester an additional portion for the emitted CO2 through improved plant growth.”

Since 2013, Bard College Farm has sold more than 136,000 pounds of fresh produce to Bard’s dining services, and many more at the seasonal Thursday farmstand, where sales have more than trebled since 2019. Every growing season is a challenging one, but in 2022 the dedicated students who work on the 1.25-acre farm, not to mention Bard Farm Manager Rebecca Yoshino, endured drought, searing heat, torrential downpours, and bonechilling harvests in the mud to provide the community with access to fresh, local, seasonal, and therefore sustainable produce.

Another food-waste reduction effort took place during Bard’s Family and Alumni/ae Weekend last October, with members of the Bard Sustainability team and Center for Civic Engagement leading students and parents in apple gleaning—the harvesting of leftover apples—at Greig Farm. The fruit was later distributed to the local community through Red Hook Responds.

In happy news for insects, a Bard-owned field that has previously been used to grow corn will soon be transformed into a pollinator meadow. The project came out of a spring 2022 Open Society University Network class, Leading Change in Organizations Practicum, which was “a collaborative, cross-institution course in leading change in organizations where student teams develop and advance proposals for organizational innovation within the university.” With a little cooperation from mother nature—and a bit more funding— Route 9G just north of the Montgomery Place Orchards farm stand will soon be just a bit more flower-filled.

bardfarm.org

gps.bard.edu

CAREERS IN CHANGE These are some of the remarkable recent alumni/ae of Bard’s Graduate Programs in Sustainability who are working in the sustainability field.

Michelle Aboodi MBA ’21, global sustainability analytics product manager, Converse Sam Brundrett MBA ’18, impact and sustainability manager, Etsy Aly Criscuolo MBA ’19, sustainability and corporate social responsibility director, New York Road Runners Rob Kimmich MBA ’21, strategic projects and sustainability manager, Siemens Kat Malek-Hood MBA ’22, responsible sourcing manager, Estée Lauder Companies Kendra Martz MBA ’19, manager of sustainable new project development, Construction Specialties Jill Metzger MBA ’22, senior director, sustainability and organizational development, RF|Binder Zoe Mitchell MBA ’22, sustainability manager, Clark Construction Sam Monkarsh MBA ’19, COO and sustainability manager, Corsa Co. Chelsea Mozen MBA ’15 (see Bardian, Winter 2019), director of sustainability, Etsy Tessa Rainbolt MBA ’22, sustainability analyst – sports and entertainment, WM Whitney Smith MBA ’21, director of sustainability, Cosentini Associates Liam Vita MBA ’22, procurement and sustainability development program, Anheuser-Busch Jason West MS CSP ’19, director of sustainability, City of Albany Dan Wojciechowski MBA ’20, environmental sustainability specialist, IDEXX Katie Yoder MBA ’22, environmental sustainability analyst, Hershey Company Bard undergraduates who are motivated to jumpstart a high-impact environmental career have the unique opportunity to enroll in an accelerated master’s program. Students can combine their pursuit of undergraduate and graduate degrees and gain value professional internship experience—all in 5 years.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

19

ART AND ACTIVISM In 1981, Tom Wolf, professor of art history and visual culture, invited a young artist from New York City named Keith Haring to Bard to speak about his practice and his ideas about graffiti art.

Even before giving his talk, Haring left his mark: he drew a group of his signature crawling babies on the wall of Wolf’s office. During a phase of construction and expansion in the Fisher Studio Arts Building, the portion of the wall with Haring’s drawing was carved out and moved to Wolf’s new office. Wolf plans to retire in 2023, and the wall piece will be transferred from the Art History and Visual Culture Program to the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard), where it will undergo conservation in preparation for its permanent installation in the CCS Bard Library.

The preservation of this piece of art history comes on the heels of the endowment in perpetuity of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism, an annual faculty position that brings a prominent scholar, activist, or practicing artist to teach and conduct research within CCS Bard’s graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program. The $3.2 million endowment is made possible by a grant from the Keith Haring Foundation and matching funds from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and benefactor George Soros. Writer Haytham el-Wardany was named the 2022–23 recipient of the fellowship and will be in residence on campus during the spring semester to teach and conduct research. El-Wardany brings a deep knowledge of philosophy, critical theory, aesthetics, history, and literature with a focus on social movements in the Middle East and around the globe. The fellowship, which was launched in 2014, embodies the shared commitment of the College and the Keith Haring Foundation to imaginatively explore the complex connections between sociopolitical engagement and artistic practice.

Haytham el-Wardany

Keith Haring with Senior Project sculpture by Rita McBride ’82 Photo courtesy Hugh Crawford ’78, who donated a print of the image to CCS Bard

20

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

ccs.bard.edu

As it turns out, Haring’s history with Bard goes deeper than the Wolf wall piece, as Hugh Crawford ’78 recounted recently. “I met Keith, soon after I graduated, at Danceteria when he was working there as a busboy,” Crawford wrote in an email. “Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong” —called “the Lewis and Clark of rock video” by the New York Times—“were working there as VJs and screened a video that impressed me. They said, ‘Oh, the guy that did it is standing right over there.’” The day of Haring’s talk at Bard, Crawford, who was living nearby, went to the Rhinecliff train station along with Nayland Blake ’82 and Rita McBride ’82—both of whom would go on to have successful careers as artists, educators, and arts administrators—to pick up Haring. After a stop at A. L. Stickle Variety Store in Rhinebeck, where Haring bought a small American flag sticker that he affixed to his motorcycle jacket, they drove to campus. There Haring graffitied McBride’s Senior Project sculpture with five crawling babies and a barking dog. A few weeks later, Crawford was at a party where Haring told the story of his first college lecture. “He said a woman wanted him to do a drawing on her sculpture,” Crawford continued. “Keith thought it was beautiful and worried that he had ruined it.”

Untitled wall drawing, c. 1981, Keith Haring artwork ©Keith Haring Foundation

HISTÓRIAS MAKER

Adriano Pedrosa, photo by Daniel Cabrel

Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), will receive the 2023 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College on April 3, 2023. The award, which is accompanied by a $25,000 prize, recognizes the achievements of a distinguished curator whose innovative thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service has made a significant contribution to the landscape of exhibition making.

Since joining MASP in 2014, Pedrosa has redefined the institution’s program. His inventive curatorial approach has catalyzed thought-provoking, layered narratives that put the past in dialogue with contemporary issues. His pioneering exhibition series Histórias launched in 2016 with the theme of childhood, and has gone on to explore sexuality (2017), Afro-Atlantic histories (2018), women (2019), dance (2020), and Brazilian histories (2022).

Pedrosa has a law degree from Rio de Janeiro State University, and a master’s degree in art and critical writing from California Institute of the Arts.

ccs.bard.edu

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

21

VISUAL—AND VICTUAL—CULTURE On view at Bard Graduate Center (BGC) from February 17 through July 9, 2023, Shaped by the Loom is an exhibition of Indigenous textiles from the greater American Southwest, including many examples of rarely displayed Navajo weaving on loan from the American Museum of Natural History. Instead of presenting the pieces as art objects divorced from context and culture, curator Hadley Jensen aims to go beyond the traditional gallery experience to reveal the entire interconnected ecosystem of textile production, illuminating the social and cultural perspectives underlying the craft. From the practical considerations of plant dyes and wool harvesting to the songs, stories, and traditions that enhance and inform the art of weaving, the exhibit examines the ways that weavers interact with nature, their communities, and the land. Visitors will also gain perspective on the evolution of specific motifs and techniques that took place as Navajo craftspeople traded knowledge with Hispanic and Pueblo communities. In addition to the physical exhibition on New York City’s Upper West Side, Shaped by the Loom incorporates innovative digital storytelling methods, offering an online gallery with interactive elements that will expand access to anyone with an internet connection. With 360-degree views of Navajo Nation land and audio recordings from the field, the site immerses viewers directly in the landscapes that gave rise to the textiles on display.

Darby Raymond-Overstreet (Diné), The Passage, 2019 Scanned Navajo textiles, canvas print, pine, wool. Courtesy the artist

22

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

bgc.bard.edu

Also in the BGC Gallery through July 9, 2023, Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 explores the dining customs documented in a selection of illustrated handbooks from the 16th and 17th centuries.

According to curator Deborah L. Krohn, associate professor and chair of academic programs at BGC and a leading expert on culinary culture from this period, these volumes provided advice including “instruction on expertly carving meats and fruits, folding napkins into animal forms, performing tableside magic tricks, and creating tablescapes for courtly banquets.” Though the manuals were published in different countries, there is significant overlap in their content, suggesting that norms of etiquette and culinary performance became a shared language circulated across early modern European borders. To help visitors imagine these lavish practices, the exhibition features period examples of tableware and a slate of special events, including demonstrations by a master napkin folder and a sugar sculptor.

Threads of Power, which closed January 1, 2023, followed lace across the centuries, tracing the delicate web it weaves through politics, class, religion, gender, and technology. The exhibition marked the United States debut of more than 150 examples of lace from the extensive collection of the Textilmuseum St. Gallen in Switzerland. In the 16th century, lace was created by trained artisans and upper-class women, who had the time to hone their skills and develop their own patterns as a hobby. Since it was both expensive and relatively rare, lace was used primarily in clothing for elite royals and fabrics for the church, which used finery like velvet and silk to convey divinity. But as the association between lace, wealth, and power grew, so did the textile’s desirability. In response to growing demand, the work of producing lace soon fell to poor and rural women, who labored long hours in harsh conditions for little pay. The advent of machine-made lace in the early 1800s upended the industry, decimating the handmade-lace economies of Britain and France and opening the market up to middle-class buyers. By the end of the century, a new technique called “chemical lace” simplified the process even further, creating cheap and plentiful embellishment at a pace that could respond to shifting trends in fashion. Visitors were able to explore this complex and fascinating history right up to modern day laser-cut and 3D-printed lace and enjoy live demonstrations of lace-making via a collaboration with Brooklyn Lace Guild.

The exhibition catalogue, available online from the Bard Graduate Center Store, was named one of the best art books of 2022 by the New York Times.

Top right: First Lady Michelle Obama’s 2009 Inauguration ensemble Isabel Toledo (Cuban American, 1960–2019), designer, 2008 Felted wool lace, silk radzimir, and silk netting Courtesy Barack Obama Presidential Library Bottom right: Bobbin tape lace, mounted as a collar Italy, 1690-1725 Linen Courtesy Textilmuseum St. Gallen, gift of Leopold Iklé Installation photography by Da Ping Lou Courtesy Bard Graduate Center

bgc.bard.edu

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

23

FROM MOLIÈRE TO MAMAFUNK

Bard Music Festival’s The Miserly Knight. From left to right: Nathan Berg as the Baron, Ethan Vincent as the Duke, and Limmie Pulliam as Albert, photo by Stephanie Berger

In honor of Molière’s 400th anniversary, SummerScape 2022 opened with the world premiere of a new adaptation of his 1665 Dom Juan by director Ashley Tata, with a new translation commissioned from scholar Sylvaine Guyot and Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester. One of the first female directors to take on the French tragicomedy, Tata set the story in a fantasy world where 17thcentury France meets late-1970s America, raising pertinent questions about class, faith, and gender and subverting the play’s traditional patriarchal power structure by casting both the titular libertine and Sganarelle, Dom Juan’s assistant and sidekick, as women. Tata, who is visiting artist in residence in Bard’s Theater and Performance Program, directed the College’s live online production of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest during the 2020 lockdown.

Jordan Bellow and Amelia Workman in Dom Juan, photo by Maria Baranova

After missing two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bard’s authentic Belgian Spiegeltent was back, hosting live music, dancing, and dining throughout much of the summer in the tent of mirrors and stained glass set up near the Fisher Center. Highlights included the return of Black Roots Summer, a celebration of Black roots music curated by Michael Mwenso and Jono Gasparro; roots rocker Martha Redbone; and art-rock new-wave goddess Nona Hendryx with her band Mamafunk.

Louis Cato and Lisa Fischer, photo by Chris Kayden

24

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

The 32nd Bard Music Festival, “Rachmaninoff and His World,” offered a retrospective of the contradictory life and times of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), perhaps the last great representative of Russian Romanticism. Born in Imperial Russia, he spent more than half of his life in Western exile; best remembered as a composer, he made his living primarily as a pianist and conductor; and all too often dismissed by critics as a middle-brow reactionary, he remains adored by audiences for his soaring “big tunes.” The first weekend of the festival traced the complex course the composer navigated between Russia and modernity, and was followed the next weekend by an investigation of his relationship with the new worlds he went on to conquer. The 12 concert programs and panel discussions explored such themes as composition during the Cold War, virtuoso pianists and their public, and America’s ongoing love affair with Rachmaninoff’s music.

Performers included The Orchestra Now and the American Symphony Orchestra under Leon Botstein’s baton and the Bard Festival Chorale led by James Bagwell.

This year’s opera was The Silent Woman (Die schweigsame Frau),

by Richard Strauss, in a rare new production from Christian Räth, the German director responsible for SummerScape 2019’s Das Wunder der Heliane. The New York Times selected The Silent Woman as a Critic’s Pick, with reviewer Oussama Zahr writing, “The witty staging, engaging cast, and efficiently evocative designs made a good opera feel like a great one.” Based on a piece by Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson and set to a scintillating libretto by Stefan Zweig, The Silent Woman is the story of a retired British admiral who craves the quiet life, and of his nephew, his nephew’s wife, and the barber who come between him and his modest aspirations.

The Silent Woman. Jana McIntyre as Aminta (center), with (left to right) Anya Matanovic as Isotta, Jorell Williams as Morbio, Matthew Anchel as Vannuzzi, Federico DeMichelis as Farfallo, and Chrystal E. WIlliams as Carlotta, photo by Stephanie Berger

fishercenter.bard.edu

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

25

SUMMERSCAPE DANCE

The world premiere of Song of Songs, a major dance setting of the biblical love poem, was designated a New York Times Critic’s Pick. The collage of sound, song, and movement reimagined ancient rituals of love and courtship. Created

by Fisher Center Choreographer in Residence Pam Tanowitz with music from Pulitzer Prize– and Grammy-winning composer David Lang, the piece was a “refined, restrained, and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful response to the poem,” according to Times reviewer Brian Seibert.

Pam Tanowitz dancers left to right: Brian Lawson, Victor Lozano, Melissa Toogood, Maile Okamura, Zachary Gonder, Christine Flores, Lindsey Jones.

Photo by Maria Baranova

26

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

fishercenter.bard.edu

SOLVING PROBLEMS ONE STEP AT A TIME Acclaimed choreographer Pam Tanowitz has been the Fisher Center’s choreographer in residence since 2018, when her Four Quartets premiered at the Bard SummerScape festival.

The Fisher Center now manages the administration of her company and supports the development and touring of many of her performances. This September, she and her dancers were in residence in LUMA Theater, creating a new program and interacting with faculty and students. Gideon Lester, Fisher Center artistic director and chief executive, spoke with her at the end of her residency about the experience.

Gideon Lester: What does your relationship with Bard and the Fisher Center mean to you?

Pam Tanowitz: It’s really a unique situation, and I feel immensely lucky. The Fisher Center provides developmental and technical support for my work, manages the logistics of my company, and provides funding, housing, and so on. But it’s much more than that; you also challenge me to think big. I’ve been able to create my largest works here—Four Quartets and Song of Songs. It’s not just about the money, space, and time, but also the invitation to work on the large proscenium stage of Sosnoff Theater and engage with expansive ideas. Beyond that, the Fisher Center tours my work and seeks other opportunities for the dances we’ve spent so much time developing. That’s so unusual. Normally a choreographer is given a week of rehearsal time and a few thousand dollars with which they’re expected to create a full show. After the performances, it’s all over. That’s not the case here.

GL: What were you working on during your most recent residency?

PT: I’ve been commissioned by Penn Live Arts at the University of Pennsylvania to set dances to Alice Coltrane’s music. At first I didn’t know what kind of dance I’d make.

I love jazz, but I’d never think of choreographing to it. A lot of choreographers have gone there before me. Twyla Tharp, Trisha Brown. Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker made a whole evening of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and that gave me hope I could do something interesting. There are two main challenges: Would my movement vocabulary work with the music? Would the dance be identifiable as me? Then I realized, I can’t make something that’s not me. The other challenge is that jazz is based on improvisation, and that seems antithetical to fixed steps. I developed a new process with my dancers; I imagined them playing together like a jazz band. In all my work, the dancers have freedom of performance, but here they have even more agency. The steps are the same, but when they go and how they do it, how fast and how slow, is up to them.

GL: After you presented the jazz pieces, we screened a film at Bard’s Montgomery Place campus that the Fisher Center commissioned you and filmmaker Jeremy Jacob to make in 2021. Can you tell us about that?

PT: It was based on an outdoor dance that we made that summer called I was waiting for the echo of a better day, the first live show we created during the pandemic. We were originally going to premiere Song of Songs that year, but because it was so uncertain whether we could perform indoors, you and I decided to work outdoors in the Hudson Valley landscape. You also commissioned us to film it so we could reach a larger audience.

What I like about it is that it’s not a straightforward documentation of the dance; we really made a film. The choreographic material is the same, but Jeremy created a loose narrative from it, and fitted my steps to his storyline. It was a true collaboration. We made the live dance and the film simultaneously, which was challenging, but I think it turned out beautifully. We were asking the question, What can we do in a film that I can’t do on stage? That was the point.

pamtanowitz.org

arts.bard.edu

GL: Both the jazz pieces and the film show how much you enjoy experimenting with new forms.

PT: All my work is creative problem-solving.

I look for problems that are interesting, that I don’t at first know how to solve.

GL: In September you also taught several classes.

PT: Yes, I taught a small choreography class and I was really able to work with the students and get to know them. I also gave feedback to Dance Workshop, which the whole Dance Program attends, and I visited your Introduction to Contemporary Performance class. I love teaching dance concepts to nonmajors—biology and psychology students—because it’s inspiring to me when they come at dance in a different way. They inspire me, and I get ideas from them.

GL: Is there something in particular you try to teach young choreographers?

PT: I try to impart the value of research. For instance, I’ll ask them to pick their favorite song and choreograph to it, and then when they come to class I’ll take the song away and ask them to perform in silence, which can be disorienting. Then I’ll ask them why they like that song, that artist, and I’ll assign them to do a deep research dive. Which artists does that artist like? And whom do those artists like? I want them to expand their knowledge. I tell them, I’m Gen X, I’m an analog person, I didn’t have Instagram or even the internet or a cell phone when I was beginning. I worked in the studio for many hours. I didn’t work for 20 minutes and upload it to social media.

What I wish for young artists is that they just work. Do the work, build a solid foundation, be patient, and the rest will come.

ON AND OFF CAMPUS

27

SPATIAL EDUCATION Left: Levana Rashba ’23 constructing a full-scale body prosthetic to interrogate ways in which architecture can be more empathetic to nonhuman beings for Assistant Professor of Architecture Thena Tak’s class Tender Thresholds: An Architecture of Animal Belonging.

Below: Sam McVicker ’23, Sage Arnold ’24, and Emily LeCompte ’25 studied Blithewood Gardens in 2021, reimagined the site as it will be in 2100, and proposed adjustments in response to our changing climate for Visiting Lecturer in Architecture Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich’s class Landscape Devices for a Changing Climate.

28

In 2021, Bard College launched its Architecture Program.

Ross Exo Adams and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, assistant professors of architecture and codirectors of the program, were given the latitude to reimagine and challenge the scope of architectural education in a liberal arts undergraduate context. Freed from National Architectural Accrediting Board requirements, they were able to craft a curriculum in keeping with Bard’s pedagogical principles; the result is not a preprofessional program any more than Bard’s Biology Program is premed. But in the same way that medical schools recognize the value of the critical thinking and communication skills that are hallmarks of Bard graduates (roughly 90 percent of Bard alumni/ae who apply to medical school are accepted), graduate programs in architecture value the breadth of experience Bardians bring to their postgraduate studies. The following article—adapted from “Unsettling Architecture’s Commonsense” in Journal of Architectural Education by Adams, Santoyo-Orozco, and Olga Touloumi, assistant professor of architectural history at Bard—provides a window into the questions the program is addressing, and starting points for exploring possible answers. How, they ask, can the status quo—which “asks its constituents to serve as witnesses as opposed to protagonists; its students to regurgitate the canon as opposed to critically estranging it; its projects to exploit sites as opposed to attending to a plurality of ways of living and being in the world; its briefs to promise quick, profitable futures as opposed to opening space for longterm socioecological engagements; its educators to demarcate their disciplinary boundaries instead of actively seeking out transdisciplinary alliances and exchanges”—be unsettled?

What responsibilities should architecture curricula carry, and what is at stake in architectural education more broadly as we enter irreversibly into a time of great uncertainty but also of transformation?

We understand the classroom as a site of social reproduction that actively produces and reproduces cultures of labor and the architectural worker per se. For us, this site of social reproduction feeds into labor modalities and value systems that organize the architectural office, the construction site, and the systems of extraction, planning, and circulation underpinning them. The classroom is where students learn how to work, which attitudes matter, which behaviors are rewarded, which are penalized, and which are ignored altogether. Never a neutral space, the classroom is a site of privilege with the potential to promote toxic, competitive behaviors that at times aim to annihilate the very bodies and psyches that architectural workers need to tend to. For this reason, we seek to unsettle the common expectations of the traditional classroom. We aspire to a classroom that disrupts the current economies of labor exploitation and their social terrain of hierarchies. We support pedagogical practices that invite students to participate in the sharing and making of architectural knowledge.

How can architectural education engage the worlds beyond the dominant professional paths? How can the curriculum speak not only to students wishing to enter the professional field but also to those with no intention of studying architecture? How can the immersive context of a small college allow for an architectural education that confronts the structural injustices of an asymmetrical and broken world?

Free from the constraints of professional schools, liberal arts colleges such as Bard can create a model of architectural education that is not limited to preparing future architects but is also interested in developing a broader spatial literacy. We do this, first and foremost,

by proposing a curriculum that presents architecture as a lens through which to see the world and as a propositional set of tools by which to intervene in it. For us, engaging with architecture in this way means that we must center our curriculum around historical and political thought that can open space for new approaches to design to emerge that don’t solely rely on the process of production typically demanded from a studio-centered program.

In decentering the studio, our curriculum explores architecture across four families of courses. With Critical Cultures of Architecture we are interested in encouraging an approach to the field as one of situated, sociopolitical agency; a field articulated by spatial histories, visual cultures, and critical research methods. Courses under Electives on Space invite students to approach spatial questions through the lenses of anthropology, human rights, and curatorial studies, among others. These courses allow us to explore disciplinary conjunctions and ask what an architecture student can learn from an anthropologist, an economic historian, or an activist, and what responsibilities such exchanges carry. Led by invited guests, Open Practices Workshops offer the most flexible space in the curriculum, dedicated to exposing students to extrainstitutional contemporary practices and modes of thinking. Finally, with Design Studio Seminars we propose a pedagogical triangulation articulated across the following themes: planetary practice, constituencies, and collective futures. Rather than suggesting methods of design or a linear acquisition of knowledge, this agenda offers a nondisciplinary common ground from which architecture can directly engage with present conditions, narrowing the gap between the life in the classroom and that outside of it.

The program culminates with a yearlong project, where the curriculum retreats and students command their studies, launching a research agenda around an issue of sociospatial consequence. Together, the four

families of courses ask students to engage not only with the tools, histories, and methods specific to architecture but also to encounter spatial thinking from the critical perspectives of other fields. This allows for a multilevel engagement with architecture that speaks equally to both aspiring architects and to those curious students with space-adjacent fields of inquiry (e.g., environmental studies, anthropology, human rights).

As a whole, the goal is to constantly reappraise what architecture is and what architecture can do, unsettling a linear pedagogical framework as students are invited to enter the curriculum at several points. In doing so, we seek not only to train architects per se but to open architecture as an analytical tool for other disciplines, pronouncing the importance of spatial literacy in the humanities and beyond. All of this in an effort to cultivate architecture as a world-making practice.

How does architecture’s affinities with neocolonial structures and racist practices contradict the language with which architecture speaks about itself? How does it conceal, participate in, or operate beyond predatory practices of real estate development, unjust economies, and practices of displacement?

We seek to question the inherited tools of architectural evaluation and the pathologies of racism, classism, and sexism they often reify. We strive for a compassionate pedagogy, following bell hooks, wherein the classroom constitutes a shared responsibility among teachers and professors. Following hooks as well, we invite students to become stewards of a new architectural culture with an agenda of social and political liberation—of world making. And, with a commitment to an accessible education, we seek to offer all students, regardless of class or income, the tools, resources, and materials they will need to successfully, and with dignity, complete their course in architecture.

architecture.bard.edu

29

A PLACE TO RETHINK A $25 million endowment gift from the Gochman Family Foundation, combined with a $25 million matching commitment from George Soros and the Open Society Foundations as part of Bard College’s endowment drive, will accelerate the College’s work in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). To more fully reflect continental history and to place NAIS at the heart of curricular innovation and development, Bard’s American Studies Program has been renamed American and Indigenous Studies.

Plans include the establishment of a chair for a distinguished scholar of Native American and Indigenous studies, to be named after a prominent Indigenous woman in recognition of the academic contributions of Native women and educators; recruitment for additional faculty in interdisciplinary fields and Indigenous studies; and library acquisitions and the development of archives dedicated to Native American and Indigenous history and culture, which will amplify this work. This $50 million endowment makes possible College-wide programming initiatives, many in consultation with Forge Project Executive Director Candice Hopkins CCS ’03 (Carcross/Tagish First Nation). Forge Project, a Native-led initiative centered on Indigenous art, decolonial education, and supporting leaders in culture, food security, and land justice, was cofounded by Becky Gochman in 2021 to serve the social and cultural landscape of shared communities through a funded fellowship program for Indigenous culture workers, including those working in food and land justice, law and decolonial governance, and art.

Candice Hopkins CCS ’03, photo by Thatcher Keats

Kite (Suzanne Kite MFA ’18) (Oglala Sioux Tribe) Otakiya Thehpi Chapcheyazala (Black Currant Hide Manyfold), 2019 Silver thread on black leather, 42.5” × 35” Photo by Joerg Lohse Gochman Family Collection

kitekitekitekite.com

forgeproject.com

ccs.bard.edu

31

Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) Drone video still from Mirror Shield Project, 2016 Mirror shields and drone video, dimensions variable. Edition 3/30, two artist’s proofs Photo by Rory Wakemup, Oceti Sakowin camp, Standing Rock, North Dakota, 2016 Forge Project Collection, traditional lands of the Muh-he-con-ne-ok

32

cannupahanska.com

forgeproject.com

ccs.bard.edu

Hopkins, who is curatorial director of the Toronto Biennial of Art and was on the curatorial team for the 2017 Documenta exhibition, in Kassel, Germany, has joined the CCS Bard faculty as fellow in Indigenous art history and curatorial studies. She will curate a major exhibition in 2023 to inaugurate the gift and will teach one course each year focused on themes related to Native and Indigenous art history and curatorial studies, employing the Forge’s collection of contemporary Native art, and engaging in conversations with working artists. Hopkins will lead archival acquisitions in Native and Indigenous exhibition histories to deepen CCS Bard’s efforts in this area, strengthen emphasis on Native and Indigenous curatorial histories and art, and offer greater support to Indigenous students. Brandi Norton (Native Alaskan from the Inupiaq Tribe) joins Bard as curator of public programs from the Center for Indigenous Studies, overseeing programming that will partner with and extend across Bard’s network.

Bard’s expanded commitment to American and Indigenous studies began with Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, part of the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative, steered by an interdisciplinary committee chaired by Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies and associate professor of history and American and Indigenous studies. The Mellon grant offers three years of support for developing curriculum and projects, NAIS programming for the community, and efforts to support the work of emerging NAIS scholars and tribally enrolled artists at Bard. The principles and ideals of the grant flow from meaningful engagement with the College’s 2020 land acknowledgment (right).

The inaugural Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck conference, which took place October 20–22, 2022, “The DRE: Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives,” considered the topic of archives from a range of humanistic perspectives, with keynotes showcasing methods in Native American and Indigenous studies and African and AfricanAmerican studies.

Land Acknowledgment for Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson Developed in Cooperation with the Stockbridge-Munsee Community In the spirit of truth and equity, it is with gratitude and humility that we acknowledge that we are gathered on the sacred homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people, who are the original stewards of the land. Today, due to forced removal, the community resides in Northeast Wisconsin and is known as the StockbridgeMunsee Community. We honor and pay respect to their ancestors past and present, as well as to future generations, and we recognize their continuing presence in their homelands. We understand that our acknowledgment requires those of us who are settlers to recognize our own place in and responsibilities toward addressing inequity, and that this ongoing and challenging work requires that we commit to real engagement with the Munsee and Mohican communities to build an inclusive and equitable space for all.

Conference events included a screening and presentation by multimedia Tsitsistas/Suhtai Nation (aka Northern Cheyenne) artist Bently Spang, which opened the conference; a keynote lecture titled “Buried ‘Without Care’: Social Death, Discarded Lives, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade” by Marisa J. Fuentes, Presidential Term Chair in African American History and associate professor of history and women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University; a second keynote by Elizabeth N. Ellis, assistant professor of history at Princeton University and citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, “Recovering Indigenous Histories of Survival: Enduring Louisiana Nations”; and a closing talk by Oglála Lakȟóta scholar and multimedia artist Kite (aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18), “Makȟóčheowápi Akézaptaŋ” (Fifteen Maps).

The Rethinking Place series emphasizes broad community-based knowledge, collaboration, and collectives of inquiry, and also attends to the importance of considering the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, upon whose homelands Bard sits.

33

LUCY SANTE

As Visiting Professor of Writing and Photography Lucy Sante writes in the introduction to Nineteen Reservoirs (The Experiment, 2022), “New York City became one of the world’s great cities in large part because it is one of the world’s great natural harbors.” But despite being surrounded by water, it had a scant supply of potable water. As the population grew, “the city’s political and financial powers recognized a crisis and understood that water would have to be brought in from outside the city,” Sante continues. “The system that was eventually built comprises six great reservoirs—Ashokan, Gilboa, Rondout, Neversink, Pepacton, and Cannonsville—that were put in place between 1907 and 1967 in the Catskill/Delaware watershed on the west side of the Hudson. They, along with the older and much smaller Croton system of reservoirs on the east side of the river (not all of which still operate), continue collectively to supply the city with more than 1.1 billion gallons of fresh water every day.”

34

The human cost of that achievement, however, was steep. “Twenty-six villages and countless farms, orchards, quarries, and the like were bought for a fraction of their value, demolished, and then submerged, some of them within living memory, leaving broken hearts and fractured communities,” Sante writes. “My purpose here is not to condemn the reservoir system, without which New York City might have faded into insignificance over the course of the 20th century, not only squelching its vast financial powers but aborting its function as shelter for millions of people displaced from elsewhere. I would simply like to give an account of the human costs, an overview of the trade-offs, a summary of unintended consequences.”

Nineteen Reservoirs began as a fourpart series for Places Journal, the final installment of which included a photo essay by Associate Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91. In the book, Davis’s 29 present-day images appose the many historical photos of the places and times Sante explores.

BOOK EXCERPT

NINETEEN RESERVOIRS In 1904, Dutchess County (on the east or “Croton system” side of the Hudson) passed an act banning New York City access to its Ten Mile River watershed or any other source.

The prospect of a similar ban scotched an idea to tap the Housatonic River in Massachusetts, while the perennial notion of drawing on the Hudson itself proved perennially unpopular given the river’s pollution—despite the fact that the city of Albany drank filtered Hudson water.

In 1905, New York City’s Board of Water Supply assembled a crack team of engineers and sent them off to survey the Catskill territory. They recommended a dam on the Esopus watershed in Ulster County. After conducting drilling tests at various points— Cold Brook, Lake Hill, Wittenberg,

Shandaken, Big Indian—they proposed that the main dam be constructed at Bishop Falls in Olive Bridge, which had solid bedrock and would permit the work to be done two years sooner than at rival sites. Ulster County did not possess sufficient political sway or capital to resist.

Bishop Falls was a tourist attraction, a gently curved array of shallow falls in narrowing tiers like a fan, shown in numerous prints and postcards poised between a mill on one bank and a barn on the other, with Catskill peaks in the distance. The area had long been a summer resort for city people who could afford second homes, but had more recently been democratized by the establishment of boardinghouses, where visitors would pay for a bed, perhaps a bath, and three meals taken

Panoramic view of the Hudson River during construction of the Catskill Aqueduct, 1907

communally, and generally spend their time loafing. John Boice, who owned the falls, valued his property at $500,000. Under the relentless terms of the city’s condemnation commissions—the three-person boards that reviewed evidence, heard witnesses, and set final valuations on land the city sought to seize—Boice was eventually given $112,303.18. Bishop Falls now lies at the deepest point of the reservoir. Isaac Whitaker owned the “romantic gorge” below the falls, which was said to be “one of the most sightly places in the mountains” and was constantly subject to offers by prospective hoteliers; it was assessed by the city at less than $5,000.

In those days the Kingston Daily Freeman, the most important newspaper in Ulster County, had correspondents in villages who would

35

Lunch on the Olive Bridge Dam, with fried chicken, apple pie, and an Ashokan cocktail, 1913

36

report primarily on social events in dedicated columns. In March 1905, the paper’s man in Shokan was moved to editorialize: Many Shokanites are wondering at the new and evident opposition on the part of some Kingstonians to the proposed New York City Ashokan reservoir. Why citizens of Olive are and should be, some angry, some terror-stricken, some confused, all can understand. But that Kingston and Ulster County should antagonize the project is more of a puzzle to us. We never dreamed that it was true, as is now heralded abroad, that our little valley contained such a large percentage of Ulster’s taxable property, the most of its fertile land or that our population was so enormous and our trade the chief asset of Kingston’s merchants, and our destruction the greatest calamity that could befall the Empire State.

Mayhap if the water does not come we will hold our heads higher hereafter in consequence of a true

appreciation of our importance, and perchance, if the water does come our residents will be more equitably reimbursed for their loss of homes and seizure of property, since publicity has truly appraised us.

He went on to note that Landon Churchwell was ill with pneumonia, that Mrs. Abigail Markle was visiting her daughter in Brooklyn, and that Miss Inez Dumond had returned safely from a visit to Port Ewen.

Despite such attentions from the newspaper, the Ashokan Valley was not in fact highly regarded in Kingston, the county seat, where more prosperous citizens regarded themselves as urbane, cultured, and educated to a degree that made them equal to their metropolitan cousins and quite unlike the hayseeds of the valley, who were barely capable of subsistence farming and added little to the county’s economic profile. Despite its farms, which seldom produced much to export; despite its bluestone quarries, which for decades had supplied sidewalk paving to the city of New York; and despite its forests, rich in spruce, pine, maple, ash, oak, and hickory—which a

chemical engineer named R. D. A. Parrott dismissed as merely providing material for “chairs, piano bars, roller blocks, clubs, bowls, trays, etc.”—the valley’s principal economic engine was in fact tourism. (Even so, Parrott wrote: “To exclude the boarder and the excursionist from 530 square miles out of 4,121 would not be a public privation.”)

It is fair to say that the valley was taken for granted even by the local powers, who in that time of accelerating industrial progress viewed it as a mere beauty spot, permanently unimprovable. The territory acquired by New York City between 1905 and 1910 was a strip measuring roughly 1 by 12 miles, a total extent of 8,300 acres. Included were the villages of West Hurley, Glenford, Ashton, Olive Branch, Shokan, West Shokan, Boiceville, Brodhead’s Bridge, Olive City, Olive Bridge, and Brown’s Station. Also seized were the tracks and right of way of the Ulster and Delaware Railroad and some parcels of forest preserve owned by the state, which later led to rapid legal adjustments when statutes turned up prohibiting these woods from being flooded. The inhabited area contained 504 private houses, 35 stores, 10 churches,

Top: Ashokan main dam under construction, 1911, photo by Mark Dubois. Historical photos: New York City Department of Environmental Protection

37

Olive Bridge Dam on the Ashokan Reservoir, 2020, photo by Visiting Professor of Photography Tim Davis ’91

38

10 schools, 9 blacksmiths’ shops, 7 sawmills, and a gristmill. The $162 million earmarked for the Ashokan project included the cost of acquiring these properties, along with the construction of the dam, the dike, the waste and dividing weirs, the embankments and roadways, the temporary railroad that served construction, and of course the aqueduct, 92 miles of cut-and-cover, grade tunnel, pressure tunnel, and steel-pipe siphon, traveling under the Hudson near the mouth of the Wallkill River to connect with the Croton watershed at the Kensico Reservoir, back on the east side of the Hudson, outside what is now the New York City suburb of White Plains.

The actual process began in the spring of 1907, when the first of the nine condemnation commissions got to work.

These commissions were formed sequentially, although their actions overlapped. They seized land just before it was needed for the process of demolition and construction, so that, beginning at Bishop Falls on the southern tip, they moved first eastward and then clockwise through the valley, closely followed by the contractors, in a process that would not end until 1911. In the summer of 1907, the New York Times found the doings rustically comical: A farmer told their reporter he wanted the city to pay for rabbits and woodcocks driven away by the commotion; someone else’s cow ate a stick of dynamite and died, for which he was given $100 by the contractors. But, of course, each condemnation revealed a small, specific narrative. The local jumble of small villages

and smallholdings was home to other recurring types—small shopkeepers, boardinghouse keepers, millers and blacksmiths and quarrymen, ministers and schoolteachers. Their connection to the world beyond their own fence lines was, at best, the daily newspaper; few had telephones. The trip to Kingston, no more than 10 miles away, was undertaken by most maybe a couple of times a year. They spent very little money, consuming mostly things they cultivated themselves or bartered with a neighbor. But they weren’t isolated; dense family ties spread across the region, and neighbors had been the same for decades.

They were bonded and pledged and sealed to the land. “There probably are not two properties exactly alike in the entire Ashokan region,” wrote the Kingston Daily Freeman, “and elements and circumstances which enter into one case will be supplanted by entirely different elements and circumstances in the succeeding case.” Recurring names in the newspaper stories show descent from the Dutch, who had arrived in the area around 1614: Boice, Elmendorf, Krom, Van Kleeck, Bogart, Stoutenburgh, Van Wagenen, Palen, Winne, Roosa. “Among some of the people of Ulster County,” an engineer on the Board of Water Supply told the Times, “many deeds are unrecorded and have to be obtained directly from the owners to be copied. In the mountains deeds are handed from one person to another when land is transferred, and so pass through many hands without ever being recorded.”

The first awards in damage cases came in November 1907. The total claimed by Ashokan Valley property owners was $122,610.30; the city’s total valuation was $44,731.49. The court awarded $50,600, with an additional $4,086.18 in counsel and witness fees. The fees racked up by lawyers, appraisers, and expert witnesses, however, were bounteous—so much so that the Freeman and other papers began referring to the proceedings as “shaking the plum tree” and the Ashokan region as “plumland.”

Prices were negotiated per counts of individual trees and vines in orchards, but stalled on usage values for any kind of land, a matter that came down especially hard on owners of the many small bluestone quarries, as well as the proprietors of the boardinghouses, who were compensated only for their buildings’ value and not for lost business. In July 1907, Appraisal Commission No. 2 ruled that property owners could not recover damages to their land—a stratagem apparently meant to compensate for the commissions’ treating all parcels as equivalent whether they held farmland, brush, a quarry, a dump, or a natural prospect—or be remunerated for the loss of business conducted upon it, and the ruling was upheld by the special counsel.

When Commission No. 5 attempted to counteract the ruling, accepting evidence of damage and lost business, the special counsel objected, “declaring, according to the report, that for a man whose property was taken to get damages for his business was ‘absolutely monstrous.’”

lucysante.com

39

TRUSTEE LEADER SCHOLAR PROGRAM AT 25

Bard’s Trustee Leader Scholar Program (TLS) is the College’s formal civic leadership development program for undergraduates.

For a quarter of a century, TLS has supported the liberal arts mission of enlightened citizenship. Dean for Social Action Paul Marienthal created and directs the program, in which students initiate, design, and implement social action projects based on their own compelling interests.

Approximately 50 undergraduates are TLS leaders at any given time, and many more Bard students are volunteers. In a quarter of a century of being involved with these important initiatives, several of which have gone on to have a life independent from the College, Marienthal has learned a few things.

Here are 10 of those lessons.

1 SERVICE ISN’T THE SAME AS LEADERSHIP “Service is different,” says Marienthal.

“TLS is not a service program, it’s a civic engagement program. Engagement creates connection and partnership. TLS is a program for people who are zealots. It’s for people who are bursting with energy, who feel compelled to act—they walk into my office on fire proclaiming, ‘I have an idea!’”

2 SAY YES UNLESS THERE IS A COMPELLING REASON TO SAY NO The initial response when a student walks into the TLS office is always yes: Yes, tell us about your project. Yes, tell us about yourself.

“Every heartfelt idea deserves the best I can give it,” says Marienthal, who has that motto in stained glass in his office. “Another way to say this is ‘Yes and . . . ,’ which means I strive to include everyone who wants to join, especially when I see a real desire to make a difference.” Of course this does not mean never saying no. TLS does not support personal walkabouts. It is for people who contribute to community.

3 SHOW UP Bard takes its students seriously, which creates both expectation and opportunity.

“The way projects really happen in the world is you get in a car, you get on a plane, you walk over, you go and see it,” says Marienthal.

“You can do email from now until the end of time, it doesn’t make connections. The way you make connection is you go there, which was crucial to the start of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI). Max Kenner ’01 and I drove down to Fishkill Correctional Facility and we went to see the superintendent. That’s the way things start: show up.” Kenner is now executive director of BPI and serves as Bard’s vice president for institutional initiatives and adviser to the president on public policy and college affairs.

4 PAY ATTENTION It’s also key that you show up with no agenda.

To accomplish anything that involves other people (and one might argue that those are the only accomplishments that matter), communication is key. “The most important skill that students can learn is how to pay attention to other people,” says Marienthal.

“We spend a fair amount of time with students doing very skill-based work on active listening, the basis for all helping professions. We also explore specific language skills for having challenging, emotional conversations. Human relations matter when it comes to civic engagement.” When Stephen Tremaine ’07 showed up in New Orleans after Katrina, it was not to execute a preconceived project, it was to help. To do that required figuring out what the needs were and whether there was a way for him to mobilize the resources at his disposal (fellow Bardians and TLS chief among them). “Stephen has a deep respect for the points of view of others,” says Marienthal. “He has an innate ability to find and connect with a wide variety of people.

Like many successful TLS leaders, he is able to learn about other people’s kinds of pain and respond empathetically, kindly, and not patronizingly.” Tremaine is now vice president for Bard Early Colleges.

5 REWARD PEOPLE FOR THEIR WORK In the early days of TLS, some students questioned the payment of stipends to TLS project leaders. The presumption was that community service should be voluntary. But the time and effort required to execute a TLS project makes simultaneously holding down a job nearly impossible. “The amount of organizing, the amount of work, and the level of accountability is way more than a moment here or there,” says Marienthal. “And the truth is, none of us are utterly selfless about the world. I sometimes tell my students, ‘You are either hungry or about to be hungry. Selfinterest is involved.’ The key is that creating a fair and just world should be in everyone’s best interest.”

6 DON’T MICROMANAGE; GIVE OWNERSHIP; GIVE PERMISSION Once a student has formed an idea, spent the time and effort to debug their project, and made a compelling case for it to be out in the world, one of Marienthal’s primary responsibilities is to support quietly. “The TLS program is about students forming, making, designing, funding, organizing, and delivering programs on their own,” he says.

“The biggest differences are made by people who have real ownership of their work. I could do these programs, but it’s my job not to. I think my number one skill is not to meddle. I’m good at asking ‘What’s going on?

Where are you stuck?’ At drawing students out. To be a good leader requires deep personal reflection on things like what makes you afraid, and what gives you a thrill. I’m not an organizer, I’m a counselor.”

7 MAKE SURE YOUR SPACESHIP IS ANCHORED FIRMLY TO THE GROUND A corollary to #6, this lesson comes out of the legendary Bard Space Program, a one-shot project that in one sense never got off the ground, but was also one giant step for Bardkind. The elaborate performance piece, in which a 1986 Volkswagen Scirocco was upcycled by Jamie O’Shea ’03 and his colleagues into The Orbiter, attracted huge crowds to the “launch.” O’Shea would go on to cofound BjornQorn, everyone’s favorite sun-popped popcorn, with Bjorn Quenemoen ’03. Both are featured prominently in The Bard Space Program, the mockumentary that was directed, shot, and edited by Jean Pesce ’03. “Jamie was really interested in the power of storytelling, of mythmaking,” says Marienthal. “The Space Program was in the service of community. He invited everybody on campus, harnessed the enthusiasm of the Bard community, and by staying in character always—he never made it a parody—it became a catalyzing event. He created a new myth.”

8 BE INFORMED Emotions often provide the initial inspiration, but the development of a project requires information and critical thinking. “Every project we do that matters involves some situation where there’s pressure and dire historical circumstance, whether it’s in New Orleans or Palestine or with kids in Hudson,” says Marienthal. “There’s always a lot of context and study needed. Critical thinking is about having and evaluating information, it’s not about opinions. Critical thinking is not critique. Critical thinking is utilizing information in a holistic way. Success requires a balance between thinking about the world theoretically and historically.”

9 NEVER ASK ANYONE TO DO SOMETHING YOU’RE NOT WILLING TO DO One of the longest-running projects, and one close to Marienthal’s heart, is the Bard Palestinian Youth Initiative, which had great success engaging young people in the West Bank between 2010 and 2020. Students, including Mujahed Sarsur ’12, organized and taught summer camps, built the first public library for children in Palestine, financed and built a playground, and hosted the first formal trip by Palestinians to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. “We were whitewashing the school in Mas-ha in August,” Marienthal recalls. “It’s really hot there in the summer. But I’m a Californian, a desert person, a tennis player.

I’m durable. We took a lunch break and after lunch I went back to work and finished painting the wall. I found out later that the people who lived there thought I was crazy.

But they’re still talking about it!”

10 TREAT PEOPLE WELL: BE A HUMAN BEING A little kindness can go a long way, especially with people at a disadvantage, people who feel vulnerable, and even people whose sense of authority is threatened by the sudden presence of a stranger in their midst. This should go without saying, of course, but even 25 years of Trustee Leader Scholars changing the world hasn’t made civility a given.

Counterclockwise from top left: TLS reunion barbeque at Commencement 2022, photo by AnnAnn Puttithanasorn ’23; Bard Palestinian Youth Initiative; Nicaragua Education Initiative; Bard New Orleans Exchange; Cuerdas para Cali; The Bard Space Program, photos courtesy TLS

cce.bard.edu/community/tls

41

BOOKS BY BARDIANS Technology and the Common Good

by Allen W. Batteau ’68 Berghahn Books Building on the work of Nobel Prize–winning political scientist Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons), Batteau examines how different shared goods are shaped by technology in a democratic society, and demonstrates how club goods, common pool resources, and public goods are supported, enhanced, and disrupted by technology.

The City We Make Together

by Mallory Catlett ’92 and Aaron Landsman University of Iowa Press Theater director Catlett and theater artist Landsman look at how we make art with communities, how we perform power, who gets to play which roles, and how we might use creativity, collaboration, and rigorous inquiry to look at our structures of democracy anew.

The tools of theater, it turns out, can help us better understand and participate in critical civic processes.

Wings in Time

by Callie Garnett ’06 The Song Cave The four sections of Garnett’s first full-length collection mirror the coming of age of the poet herself.

Her experiences and evocations have been transcribed, recorded, rewound, shared, and edited over emails, and float nearly free of context, full of the desire to touch the immaterial and the dematerialized. The New York Times called it one of the “great pandemic books.”

Reaching for the Heights

by Frederic C. Hof, diplomat in residence USIP Press Ambassador Hof, who spearheaded secret negotiations from 2009 to 2011 to broker a Syria-Israel peace deal, takes readers behind the scenes in Washington, Damascus, and Jerusalem, where President Assad and Prime Minister Netanyahu inched toward a deal to return Israeli-occupied areas of the Golan Heights in exchange for Syria severing military ties with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

42

The Art of Resonance

by Anne Bogart ’74 Methuen Drama Award-winning director Bogart weaves personal stories and reflections from her own adventures—and misadventures— in the theater to illuminate potent philosophical ideas that go well beyond the stage. The book, which will appeal to anyone interested in what it means to be engaged in the artistic process, explores the intersections of performance theory, art history, neuroscience, music, architecture, and the visual arts.

Stay True

by Hua Hsu, professor of literature Doubleday A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu has given us a gripping memoir about friendship, the search for self, grief, the solace that can be found through art, and moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

The New York Times included Stay True on its list of the “10 Best Books of 2022.”

Last Call

by Stephen Kessler ’68 Black Widow Press In this collection, Kessler explores broad topical terrain ranging from aging to Beethoven to COVID-19, recording—with grief and wit, documentary realism and imagination, poignancy, irony, and reflection—a journey through the gains and losses of a lifetime. His emotional honesty, conversational lyricism, and wry melancholy are down-to-earth, heart-opening, consciousness-wrenching, retroromantic, and totally contemporary.

Urban Biodiversity

by Erik Kiviat ’76, executive director, Hudsonia; and Kristi MacDonald Lexington Books This case study will help decisionmakers foster the biodiversity that can thrive in cities and give planners tools to reduce the biological degradation that occurs with urbanization. Based on two decades of data and assessment, the book documents the habitats, biota, and patterns of occurrence of the mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, butterflies, bees, dragonflies, seed plants, mosses, and lichens of the Meadowlands.

Distant Early Warning

by Alex Kitnick, assistant professor of art history and visual culture University of Chicago Press Marshall McLuhan is considered by many the founder of media studies, but he was also an important theorist of art. Kitnick argues that McLuhan was influenced by art, and that his provocative ideas about what art is and what artists should do directly influenced the art and artists of his time.

Flooded

by Peter Taylor Klein, associate professor of sociology and environmental and urban studies Rutgers University Press In 2019, after three decades of controversy, Brazil’s Belo Monte hydroelectric facility was completed. Billions of dollars for social welfare programs accompanied construction, but the damming of the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, also brought extensive social, political, and environmental upheaval to the region. Flooded is a rich ethnographic account of democracy and development in the making.

Driving Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

by Kristina Kohl, Bard MBA in Sustainability faculty Auerbach Publications This book provides a framework for building an inclusive organization as well as a model to engage and support senior and middle management beginning the process of capacity building and systemic change. Kohl guides leaders in creating strategies to redesign organizational processes and systems using tools and technologies for data-driven decision-making.

For the Common Good

by Alex John London ’94 Oxford University Press Not even advancing the common good justifies abrogating the rights of a study’s participants. London’s approach to research would enable key social institutions to effectively, efficiently, and equitably safeguard the basic interests of individuals, and ensure that research is organized as a voluntary scheme of social cooperation that respects its various contributors’ moral claims to be treated as free and equal.

43

Ink

by Tanya Marcuse SR ’81, artist in residence Fall Line Press This unusual body of work came about serendipitously after Marcuse’s young son insisted on trying nocturnal squid fishing one summer in Maine. The images, in which the bodies of squid spread acrobatically across newspaper headlines, fashion advertisements, and marriage announcements, echo the sense of moral warning and impending apocalypse in the broadside backdrops.

Movements After Revolution

by Miles V. Rodríguez, assistant professor of historical studies Oxford University Press The Mexican Revolution of 1910– 20 ended 30 years of dictatorship, but political unrest remained. In the aftermath there arose myriad organizations of industrial workers and agricultural laborers who fought for a vast array of demands and diverse forms of justice.

So what happened to the revolutionary Mexico portrayed in Rivera’s and Siqueiros’s murals?

Why did Mexico instead become a capitalist country ruled by a single party?

Learning the Birds

by Susan Fox Rogers, writer in residence Three Hills The song of a thrush reawakened Rogers, sparking a desire to know the birds that accompanied her as she rock climbed and paddled, to know the world around her with greater depth. Energized by her curiosity, she followed the birds— from the Hudson Valley to Arizona to Alaska—as they drew her deeper into her authentic self, and ultimately into love.

Sex Dolls at Sea

by Bo Ruberg ’07 The MIT Press Ruberg debunks the conventional wisdom of the origins of the commercial sex doll as dames de voyage made to accompany European sailors, and traces it instead to late-nineteenth-century femmes en caoutchouc—“women” made of inflatable vulcanized rubber. They further investigate the web of issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism that come along with this and other sex tech.

44

BOOKS BY BARDIANS

Spirit Things

by Lara Messersmith-Glavin ’98 University of Alaska Press This essay collection examines the hidden meanings of objects found on a fishing boat, as seen through the eyes of a child. MessersmithGlavin blends memoir, mythology, and science as she relates the uniqueness and flavor of the Alaskan experience through her memories of growing up fishing in the commercial salmon industry off Kodiak Island.

Lawful Sins

by Elyse Ona Singer ’10 Stanford University Press Singer argues that while pregnant women in Mexico today have options that were unavailable just over a decade ago, they are also subject to the expanded reach of the state and the Catholic Church over their bodies and reproductive lives. With timely insights on global struggles for reproductive justice, the book reorients prevailing perspectives that approach abortion rights as a hallmark of women’s citizenship in liberal societies.

A Buddhist Sensibility

by Dominique Townsend, associate professor of religion Columbia University Press Townsend investigates the ritual, artistic, and cultural practices inculcated at Mindröling monastery, a key site for Buddhist education founded in 1676, to demonstrate how early modern Tibetans integrated Buddhist and worldly activities through training in aesthetics. The book sheds new light on the forms of knowledge valued in early modern Tibetan societies, especially among the ruling classes.

ununterbrochen mit niemandem reden

by Thomas Wild, associate professor of German studies Verlag: S. Fischer This book on the ethics and political poetics of distinguished Austrian writer and Holocaust survivor Ilse Aichinger offers a constellation of close readings, new archival materials, and theoretical dialogue with thinkers such as Ann Lauterbach (David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature), Jacques Derrida, Édouard Glissant, and Ariella Azoulay reflecting on a contemporary poetics of hospitality.

Homicide

by Theo Wenner ’09 Rizzoli The first photographer to be granted such unlimited access to the New York Police Department’s most prestigious homicide division in Brooklyn, Wenner spent two years capturing the cops up close and behind-the-scenes. In the tradition of photographers like Weegee, he documents their investigative work and its ugly counterpart—murder—within America’s most iconic city.

Death by Landscape

by Elvia Wilk ’10 Soft Skull In a series of interlinked essays, Wilk examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world. She delves into literal and literary world-building projects—medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans—revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.

How to Not Be Afraid of Everything

by Jane Wong ’07 Alice James Books Wong’s second poetry collection explores the ways we articulate and reckon with fear of intergenerational trauma and the silent, hidden histories of families.

What does it mean to grow up in a take-out restaurant, surrounded by food, just a generation after the Great Leap Forward famine? Full of elegy and resilient joy, these poems speak—across generations—of survival.

The Rupture Tense

by Jenny Xie, assistant professor of written arts Graywolf Press The New Yorker called Xie “a magician of perspective and scale,” and in her second collection, she cracks open reverberant, vexed experiences of diasporic homecoming, intergenerational memory transfer, state-enforced amnesia, public secrecies, and the psychic fallout of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Xie voices what remains irreducible in our complex entanglements with familial ties, language, capitalism, and the histories in which we find ourselves lodged.

BOOKS BY BARDIANS

45

DEAR BARDIANS,

Tina Giorgadze ’23, recipient of the 2022 Serota Award in Computer Science, with KC Serota ’04 at the 2022 Margaret and John Bard Society luncheon. The award, in memory of Kevin Daniel Serota, is given annually to a moderated undergraduate in computer science who has shown promise and dedication in using technology to improve the human condition and make a positive impact on society.

Photo by Patrick Arias.

Technical issues have limited our ability to collect Class Notes online in recent months. While the finishing touches are put on the new website, please send your news and updates to alumni@bard.edu.

46

ALUMNI/AE ASSOCIATION

As president of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association Board of Governors, I’ve had the great privilege of representing our alumni/ae in the increasingly wide Bard universe. This fall, personal travels took me to Central Asia, where I had the opportunity to visit one of our partner institutions, the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. I met with the director of development for AUCA, Bermet Tursunkulova, and the head of alumni/ae relations, Dilnoza Kolakova. We toured the campus and saw the construction of their newest building.

AUCA’s main building feels like Bard, from the two-story Bard College banner in the central atrium to the students in the coffee shops on each floor of the building. The AUCA campus is where the largest group of students were housed following the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is also now home to a number of Ukrainian refugee students. As Bardians, we can all be proud of AUCA and its mission to educate students from Central Asia and the wider world. To see the Bard mission at work so far from Annandale-on-Hudson is a pretty incredible thing.

Closer to home, our Board of Governors meeting in October coincided with Bard Family and Alumni/ae Weekend. It was one of those glorious Hudson Valley fall weekends I think we all dream about, particularly after our time

in Annandale. Trees changing color, a slight chill in the air, but beautifully sunny. About 1,200 guests were on campus, which made for a truly festive series of events. At the board meeting we heard from members of the Senior Class Council, who told us about their work bringing school spirit and energy to the campus, a welcome change from the quiet times of pandemic quarantines and isolation. They also mentioned their desire to continue to connect with our alumni/ae out in the world as they move on to graduate schools and into careers. If you are interested in mentoring current Bard students or have internships or jobs that you’re looking to fill, please be in touch with the Career Development Office (bard.edu/cdo). I’ve hired at least six Bardians over my career, and they are always some of my favorite colleagues!

Please get in touch if you are interested in being involved in your Alumni/ae Association. This is your organization and we always welcome our fellow Bardians to host events. We also encourage you to attend alumni/ae performances, screenings, and gatherings, and to be engaged with one of our committees. Please see the list of committees and contact details at alums.bard.edu/board.

Yours in community, compassion, and civic engagement, KC Serota, ’04, President, Board of Governors, Bard College Alumni/ae Association

Does your class year end in a 3 or an 8?

If so, see you May 26–28 for Reunion 2023!

Whatever your year, the Bard College Fund needs your support! giving.bard.edu/bcf development@bard.edu alumni@bard.edu

CLASS NOTES 2022

2019

Joey Carbone has a new role as a paralegal specialist at the United States Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York. He was assigned to the Complex Fraud and Cybercrime unit, where he assists attorneys prosecuting cases involving healthcare fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. He is also studying for the LSAT and preparing his law school applications. Joey has recently joined a soccer team and has been enjoying all that New York City has to offer.

Piper De Palma is a filmmaker and actor based in Los Angeles.

She studied film and theater at Bard and works at Tribeca Productions. Piper made her feature debut in Spiral Farm (2019), which premiered at Slamdance Film Festival in Park City and won best film at Taormina Film Fest. She recently completed her first short, “Carmilla,” starring Avis Zane ’21 and Hannah Eisendrath ’22. The film won the audience award at the Wicked Queer film festival in Boston and has been shown at numerous festivals around the world including Nòt Film Fest, Soho Horror Film Festival, and the Rio LGBTQIA+ Festival de Cinema. “Carmilla” is available for streaming on Kinoscope.

Jonja Merck is in New York City attending the MFA Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program at New York University Tisch School for the Arts. As a composer in the program, he has written more than 15 songs within the first few weeks. He is also a music director, pianist, and conductor for musical theater productions. Jonja is a proud member of MUSE (Musicians United for Social Equity). @jonjamerck Maxwell Toth is working as the principal gifts and campaign management coordinator for University of Massachusetts Amherst, assisting with the logistical side of the university’s advancement division (inclusive of fundraising, alumni engagement, and communications) and ongoing capital campaign—he may be a Minuteman at present, but he’ll always be a Raptor at heart.

During the summer of 2022 he completed an internship in the advancement department of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, an experience that got his feet wet in the world of nonprofit philanthropy. He resides in the Connecticut River Valley with his family and rollicking black lab, Oliver.

2017 Katarina Ferrucci is in her final year of candidacy at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School for her PhD in clinical and population health research, studying quality of care and patient experience among transgender and gender-diverse patients in primary care and mental-health treatment settings. She is also a certified nutrition coach and operates an independent, virtual business: KAF Nutrition Coaching.

Sarah Ghandour (BM) received a Fulbright Research Award to Slovenia, where she will research and learn folk and classical Slovenian music.

Congratulations to Rose Nelis (BM), who joined the Cassatt String Quartet earlier this year.

Acclaimed as one of America’s outstanding ensembles, the New York City–based Cassatt String Quartet was formed in 1985.

Left to right: Ann Starodaj BCEP ’12, Isabelle Coler ’11, Lotte Allen ’10, Bartek Starodaj BCEP ’12, Thea Piltzecker ’11, Clare Conniff ’11, Sarah Lasseron ’11, Adam Kearney ’11, Rachel Heidenry ’11

2016 Ashley Sheppard-Quince began working as a development executive at Paramount+ Originals in February 2022, after previously working at Nickelodeon, Creative Artists Agency, HBO, A24, Focus Features, and Searchlight Pictures.

2013 Danielle Sinay and classmates Michael Anzuoni, Wyatt Bertz, Nolan English, Tuck Gaisford, Miriam Huppert, Imani Jones, Stephen Kovalcik, Ian Smedley, and Emma Thake are getting very excited for the 10th reunion and want you to be there too! The Class of 2013 will be hosting the Annandale Roadhouse on Friday, featuring live music and cocktails —memory lane all weekend long.

Make your plans and follow us on Instagram @bardclassof2013.

2011 Izzy Barber, also a 2008 graduate of BHSEC Manhattan, had a painting exhibition, CRUDE FUTURES, in spring 2022 at the James Fuentes Gallery, owned by James Fuentes ’98, in New York City.

alums.bard.edu

Giampaolo Bianconi became associate curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in October. He came to AIC from Museum Brandhorst, in Munich, Germany, where he was a curator.

Rosie Lopeman has been teaching oil painting at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture for the last three years. She is also privately teaching plein air cityscape painting workshops in New York City.

Thea Piltzecker is a producer for season seven of The Circus on Showtime. The new season began on September 25, tracking the midterm elections, Trump’s legal cases, and breaking political news. The Circus airs at 8 pm on Sundays and is available for streaming. Thea was also married in September and was overjoyed to celebrate with Ann Starodaj BCEP ’12, Isabelle Coler, Lotte Allen ’10, Bartek Starodaj BCEP ’12, Clare Conniff, Sarah Lasseron, Adam Kearney, and Rachel Heidenry.

CLASS NOTES

47

2010 Hannah Sheehan was interviewed in May 2022 by the digital publication Welcome to the Jungle, where she discussed the sociopolitical implications of student loan debt.

2007

SONNET : LEAST SAID Lines of Engagement derived from John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended”

Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford and his collective will be curating and serving as the artistic directors of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

2003

That poems can neutralize hierarchies of value.

Mollie Meikle left her job with the Office of the Mayor of New York City and has been diligently collecting National and State Park Passes. She’s counting down the days until her 20th reunion and can't wait to see everyone.

Mollie and fellow reunion-lovers/ committee members Dumaine Williams, Pia Carusone, Juliet Morrison, JP Kingsbury, Cynthia Conti-Cook, Rebeccah Johnson, Eben Kaplan, and Corey Sullivan encourage everyone in the class of ’03 to make the trip back to Annandale this May—20th y’all! Follow your class on Instagram @bardcollege2003.

That humor in a poem is an aspect of generosity.

2002

That a poem changes information into knowledge differently from other discursive forms.

That a poem’s meaning is an incipience that alters as it gathers.

That thinking with a poem alerts or awakens the sensorium.

That the affective bearing of a poem is carried by its tone as much or more than its subjects.

That a poem discovers its objects and incidents through a syntactical matrix of relation.

That poems are movements in time; they are not an arrest or capture of time.

That the perception of poetic beauty or joy is related to the unexpected.

That clarity can be mysterious.

That anything can happen in a poem is a kind of optimism.

That poems are experiences which, as William James said, are “what I agree to attend to.”

That poems are acts of attention in several registers simultaneously.

That poems are events, perpetually altering the way today becomes tomorrow.

In June, Tate DeCaro published a book, Are We There Yet? An Illustrated Journey of Coping & Creativity During COVID-19, which pairs illustrations by 20 talented artists with “pandemic accomplishments” (from 2020–21) from more than 50 contributors. Learn more at NewYorkTate.com.

2000 Ann Lauterbach, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature and faculty in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, has been at Bard since 1997. Her 11th volume of poetry, Door (Penguin Books), is scheduled for publication in March 2023. Lauterbach’s collection Or to Begin Again was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in poetry and she is the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships.

Julius Masri recently released a solo album, The Arabic Room, under the project name Mephisto Halabi on the German label Unrock. The album has received great press and was featured prominently in such publications as Wire, Pop Matters, and Foxy Digitalis.

Julius is also the recipient of a 2022 University of the Arts Creative Research and Innovation Grant, as well as a summer fellowship at Yaddo. The album can be heard here: mtimusic.bandcamp.com/album/thearabic-room.

1994 Hilary Lopez was named executive director of the Reno (Nevada) Housing Authority last July. Lopez, who has

48

CLASS CLASS NOTES NOTES

writtenarts.bard.edu

more than 20 years of experience in affordable housing finance and policy, was a senior associate at Praxis Consulting Group, structuring financing for affordable housing projects and utilizing federal programs and private financing to help clients build and preserve affordable housing.

Craig Peterson was named president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) last October. He had been vice president for visual and performing arts at the Henry Street Settlement and was previously director of programs for Gibney Dance. LMCC produces the River to River Festival and runs the Arts Center at Governors Island. The organization will celebrate its 50th year in 2023.

1992 Jonah Gensler is chief executive officer of LSA Family Health Service, a leading community nonprofit supporting thousands of low-income and immigrant families in East Harlem. Jonah brings deep experience in nonprofit executive leadership, social services, and community engagement. He previously served as an executive leader at Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement House, Ironbound Community Corporation, Trickle Up New York, and Samaritan House.

Andrea Stein published Typecast: What Happens When Your Ex Writes the Script? in September. The novel follows Callie Dressler, who thought she’d put her past where it belonged— behind her. But when her ex-boyfriend brings their breakup to the big screen, she can no longer deny that their history has been looming over her all along.

1990 Last fall, Laura Muller started as director for STEM and undergraduate education at the Jackson Lab in Bar Harbor,

Maine. One of her responsibilities is directing its Summer Student Program, founded in 1924, which last summer hosted its 87th cohort of students, including Bard student Fuadur Omi ’24.

Margaret Sawyer retired from teaching high school visual arts in New Haven, Connecticut, and has completed a photographic retrospective of those years, published by City School. Now, with the inspiration of her children and grandchildren, she has turned to publishing children’s books.

1984 In 1993, John Noakes received his PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Earlier this year, he was named dean of the school of education and associate provost at Arcadia University, in Glenside, Pennsylvania.

1970 Jane Evelyn Atwood was featured in the New York Times for her photo book Rue des Lombards.

Peter Boffey has published the sixth and final volume of The Three Naked Ladies of Cliffport.

Fifty years in gardening, landscape design, nursery production, and the seed trade in Northern California and Oregon as well as his experiences while traveling—with brief residences— in France, Israel, and Morocco, have deeply informed this fiction.

Now retired after 20 years as a student and teacher of the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education, he enjoys exploring the Pacific states with a focus on flora, fauna, geology, and cultural history. A grandfather, Peter lives with his wife, Ophira, in the San Francisco Bay area, regularly volunteering as a docent at the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek and serving as a roving ambassador at the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley. peterboffey.com

Sarah Sledge and Tom Begich ’82, photo by John Hayes

LEGIS-LATER Tom Begich ’82 was certainly not the only one at his 40th reunion this past summer who was on the verge of a career shift—retirement age looms, after all—but he was certainly the only state senator about to leave politics behind. Begich was elected to the Alaska Senate in 2016, and three years later he was elected minority leader by his caucus, focusing on issues including education, and especially pre-K; alternative energy; social justice; and healthcare. Despite his progressive politics, he was able to work with Republican Governor Mike Dunleavy to get unanimous approval of the Alaska Reads Act from the Republican-controlled Senate. The bill was signed into law by Dunleavy in June. But the resistance Begich faced from Democratic colleagues who didn’t “want to give the governor a win” stole some of the joy from the accomplishment. He waited until after the election filing deadline before making the surprise announcement of his retirement. He was criticized by some in his party for his timing, since it meant fewer of their candidates could enter the race, but his loyalty was to the people, not the party. Just as he considered the Alaska Reads Act a win for Alaskans, rather than some sort of political touchdown, he felt that his aide Löki Gale Tobin would be the best person to succeed him. Tobin, who had worked closely with Begich for three years, told the Anchorage Daily News, “It’s not often that an older white man is going to step aside and say, ‘I think it’s time to make space for a younger woman of color who is as connected and deeply engaged with the community as I am, but may not be given this opportunity because of whatever factors come down societywise.’” In returning to music and storytelling, Begich, who will receive a John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service at this year’s Commencement, hasn’t given up on changing lives. “My goal is to reach people where they live,” he says. “My songs and my poetry speak to that. They reflect a life devoted to our community, and designed to move us further down the road.” So keep an eye out. Begich and his wife, singersongwriter Sarah Sledge, might be coming to a house party near you. To keep tabs on their schedule, go to tombegich.com.

alums.bard.edu

CLASS NOTES

49

OKLAHOMA! IS UK Patrick Vaill ’07 won Best Musical Performance at the 2022 Evening Standard Theatre Awards for his role as Jud Fry in Daniel Fish’s London production of the Tony Award–winning, reorchestrated revival of Oklahoma! The production, which completed a sold-out run at the Young Vic last June, also earned the award for best musical. Vaill originated the role as a senior theater and performance major in Fish’s 2007 Bard staging with students, which had been commissioned by JoAnne Akalaitis, then director of Bard’s Theater Program. In 2015, Fish restaged Oklahoma! with a professional cast for Bard SummerScape, with Vaill again playing Jud. He continued in the role when it opened Off-Broadway, in 2018, and when it premiered on Broadway (where it won a 2019 Tony for best revival of a musical).

The Bard SummerScape production of Oklahoma! will move from the Young Vic to Wyndham’s Theatre, in London’s West End, where it is scheduled to run through September 2, 2023.

50

CLASS NOTES

Photo by Brigitte Lacombe

MILTON AVERY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE ARTS

constellation of artworks is assembled to activate different emotional and psychological intensities.

2019

1997

Ragnhild May (sculpture) was a 2022 DAAD Arts & Media Fellow in residence in Berlin for September and October 2022.

The residency is coorganized by Snyk, the Danish center for contemporary music and sound art, and is part of its Neustart program.

2012 Dawn Cerney (sculpture) is a recipient of the 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, which provides 15 US-based artists with unrestricted funds of $60,000 each, distributed over the course of five years.

2004 Marc Swanson (sculpture) presented his one-person exhibition A Memorial to Ice at the Dead Deer Disco at the Thomas Cole House in Catskill, New York, from July 16 through November 27, 2022, and it was at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, through January 28, 2023.

Nick Tobier (sculpture) received a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Graham Foundation for the Advanced Study of Visual Art grant in 2021 for his project Small(er) Building Types. Nick’s public project Red Crossing was shown at Somerset House in London as part of Now Play This and at the Museum of Textile and Industry in Augsburg, Germany.

BARD GRADUATE CENTER 2013 Amber Winick’s book Designing Motherhood was published by MIT Press. The book is an extension of a written project she started at the Bard Graduate Center.

MFA faculty member Taylor Davis (sculpture) curated Invisible Ground of Sympathy, which is on display at ICA Boston until January 7, 2024. This is the first time an artist has been invited to curate an exhibition from the ICA’s permanent collection. Taylor conceives of Invisible Ground of Sympathy as an open field in which a

2018 Jessica Boyd works in both education and the arts. She recently worked with the New Deal Creative Arts Center on Arsenic and Old Lace, a show that opened on October 21 and was performed through October 30 at the Oakwood Friends School theater in Poughkeepsie.

2005

BARD CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY 1998

CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC GRADUATE PROGRAMS VOCAL ARTS PROGRAM 2022 Joanne Evans won the prestigious Music Academy Marilyn Horne Song Competition this past summer and took first prize in the 2022 Handel Aria Competition. In addition to a cash award of $5,000, winners of the Marilyn Horne Song Competition also have a composer’s work commissioned on their behalf. For 2022, that composer was Tom Cipullo. The winners will premiere the commissions in recital in the Music Academy’s Hahn Hall at the opening of the 2023 summer festival. For each recital, the winners may utilize a $1,000 stipend to produce and present their performances in new ways.

2019 MASTER OF ARTS IN TEACHING

An exhibition by Sue Havens (painting) titled Cull+ displayed a variety of media from painting to sculpture and collage at the Switzer Gallery in the Anna Lamar Switzer Center for Visual Arts at Pensacola State College from August 15 to September 23, 2022. Sue is an assistant professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

1998

Outdoor Writers Association Excellence in Craft Awards, tells the story of the oyster’s unique life cycle as well as of the myriad connections the mollusks create in their habitat. Lisa’s previous books include Oliver’s Otter Phase, Milkweed Matters: A Close Look at the Life Cycles in a Food Chain, The Hidden Life in Streams, and Salmon Matters: How a Fish Feeds a Forest. For more information on her books, and to see some of her lovely watercolors, visit lisaconnors.wordpress.com.

Her work as a racial justice advocate/activist led to Amy Brown-White becoming a 2022 runner-up for a Chronogrammie Award. Her consulting firm, Amy Brown-White Consulting, focuses on building antiracist programs for public and private schools and organizations.

This past June, Sun-ly Pierce made her San Francisco Opera debut in its production of Dream of the Red Chamber, performing the role of Bao Chai.

ADVANCED PERFORMANCE STUDIES 2019 Congratulations to Stephen Jones, who joins the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra as assistant principal bass in the 2022-23 season.

2018 Jong Sun Woo is the recipient of the 2022 Gerald Moore Award for outstanding piano accompanists. She received a prize of £5,000 and the opportunity to play at London’s prestigious Wigmore Hall.

Lisa Connors is at work on her sixth children’s book. Her most recent, Oyster Matters: A Keystone Species Story, which won first place in the book category of the 2022 Virginia

bard.edu/graduate

alums.bard.edu

CLASS NOTES

51

Clockwise from top: Nelson Bragg ’84, Brian O’Sullivan ’84, Peter Buettner, Andrea Cairone ’84, and John Jacobs ’84. Photo by Andrew McDonald ’86 (taken in a Bard squash court, 1984).

52

CLASS NOTES

steelderrickmusic.com

FEEL THE NOISE A significant—and magnificent—piece of Bard music history is being brought back into the light for your dancing and listening pleasure. Thanks to Nelson Bragg ’84, recordings of the incomparable band Big Noise are finally widely available. Falling Underground—The Lost Album, consisting of 11 songs on vinyl, gatefold art with neverbefore-published photos, two 18-by-24-inch posters, and liner notes by Bragg and honorary Bardian Mark Kirby, was released December 9 on Bragg’s Steel Derrick Music label (steelderrickmusic.com). That will be followed in early 2023 by a 52-track, double-CD set with the songs from the LP plus all the band’s demos—including the earliest Bard College recordings (made in the Manor basement)—and the best live performances captured on tape.

“I came to Bard on IDP weekend in 1981, and I got in! I was so happy,” Bragg recalled recently. “That weekend I saw the band Swollen Monkeys. I had never seen or heard anything like that! I was so inspired by their music. I met John and Andrea that weekend and they said, ‘We need a drummer, maybe you should try to play this music.’ My first week at Bard I was in a band! Our first gig was October 3, 1981, in Sottery Hall.”

The band that became Big Noise debuted as Orange Crush. The name was soon changed to Live Short and Suffer, but as the band’s popularity grew, and commercial viability became a possibility, a more user-friendly

moniker seemed appropriate. In addition to Bragg on drums, the players were Brian “Buford” O’Sullivan ’84 on trombone and vocals, Andrea Cairone ’84 on guitar and vocals, John Jacobs ’84 on bass, Peter Buettner on alto sax, and Dave Casey ’78 on tenor sax. They recorded their first single, “College Student,” on Paul Antonell’s Red Hook, New York–based indie label Black Sheep Records (Antonell now owns the renowned Clubhouse recording studio in Rhinebeck), played in New York City clubs such as CBGB and the Cat Club, Maxwell’s in Hoboken, and opened for the B-52s on Long Island and X, Gang of Four, and Quarterflash at The Chance in Poughkeepsie.

Despite the enthusiasm of the band’s fans and excellence of the music, the big break didn’t come for Big Noise before other projects began to exert their pull. By 1988, the musicians had all gone their separate ways. “It’s an amazing story,” says Bragg.

“It’s also a sad story. We left dejected, we went back to our lives, some of us left the Hudson Valley. It was depressing when it was all over.”

The positive always outweighed the negative, though, and so he held on to the music even while he carved out a successful career as a maker of music. Bragg has recorded three solo albums, toured and recorded with Stew and the Negro Problem, Anny Celsi, and many others, and was Brian Wilson’s vocalist and percussionist for 14

bard.edu/bardmakesnoise

years. Meanwhile, the Big Noise treasure trove accompanied him wherever he went.

“I’ve been lovingly saving all those tapes, all those cassettes. I saved everything: posters, newspaper clippings,” says Bragg. “I’ve got the whole history, and now is the time to prove it was a good idea to move all this stuff from apartment to apartment.”

Falling Underground— The Lost Album SIDE 1 1. Virgin’s Delight 2. Tarzan on the Tube 3. I Love My Job 4. High School 5. Murderers and Thieves 6. Jumbotown SIDE 2 1. College Student 2. (Do The) El Coyote Dip 3. 21 (Glad to Be Alive) 4. Reminiscing Girls 5. Dark Ages

A Big Noise celebration will take place on Friday of Reunion Weekend (May 26, 2023), with a Falling Underground listening party, screening of a 1980s student-produced Big Noise music video, and Q&A with band members—moderated by Art Carlson ’79 and Mark Kirby.

alums.bard.edu

CLASS NOTES

53

BACK TO THE GARDEN Imagination defined the remarkable life of László Z. Bitó ’60, who died November 14, 2021 (see Bardian, Fall 2021). Imagination helped him endure forced labor as a teenager in the inferno of a coal mine in Hungary, where he wrote stories and hid them underground. Imagination led him to take a radical approach in his ophthalmology lab at Columbia University, enabling the development of a drug that slows the progression of glaucoma, the second leading cause of blindness worldwide. And after retiring from science at 63, Bitó fully engaged his literary imagination, writing more than 20 books, including six biblical novels. In 2016, he explained his approach to reimagining those defining texts: “These stories are very deep in our subconscious. At the time they were written, the main thing was to present a ruthless God whom everyone was afraid of. The world is different now; it’s time to look at the Bible differently.” (See Bardian, Fall 2016.)

In Eden Revisited, the second of his books to be translated into English, Bitó reimagined the saga of the Bible’s first family. In his telling,

the forbidden fruit has hallucinogenic properties; sexual jealousy incites Abel to violence against his father, Adam; Abel’s brother, Cain, intervenes in the patricide, but the result is fratricide; and the hero of the story—and the great cause for hope for the future—is wise, courageous, passionate Eve. The English edition of Eden Revisited, which was published by Natus Books in October 2022, was translated by Amy Módly and edited

by Bitó’s old friend John Solomon ’58. A launch event was held at Bard during Family and Alumni/ae Weekend. The book is the inspiration for a series of seven on-campus discussions with scholars in the field of biblical studies about the Eden story, moderated by Bruce Chilton ’71, Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Philosophy and Religion and director of Bard’s Institute of Advanced Theology. “In Search of the Once and Future Eden” kicked off on December 1 with an investigation of Adam and his “squandering of power.” The Thursday evening series continues through March 16.

Front, left to right: Enikő Samu TŌN ’25, Eszter Pokai ’25, Gabriella Sperry, Olivia Cariño, Rea Ábel ’23, Nándor Burai ’24, Gréta Varga ’26 Back, left to right: Viktor Tóth ’16 TŌN ’21, David Keringer APS ’24, Peter Antal, Visiting Associate Professor of Music Peter Laki, David Nagy ’13, photo by Karl Rabe

54

CLASS NOTES

IN MEMORIAM 1948 Constance Papastrat Fotieo, 97, died July 26, 2022. She was predeceased by her brother, George, and her husband, Dr. Constantine J. Papastrat ’48.

Connie is survived by her daughters, Demetra and Georgia.

1950 Janet (Zimmerman) Segal, 92, died May 2, 2022. Janet followed her sister, Irene (Zimmerman) Schultz ’48, to Bard, where she studied piano performance and met her future husband, John B. Segal ’50, who died in 2005. Janet raised her family in Larchmont, New York, taught piano part-time, and was active in the local Democratic party. Interested in mental health issues, she studied pastoral counseling at Iona College and received an MS in education. After working at a mental health clinic, she completed an MS in social work at Fordham University. In 1979, she joined the staff of Four Winds Hospital, in Katonah, New York, climbing the ladder for the next three decades as director of social work, director of clinical services, chief operating officer overseeing all clinical and marketing services, and eventually executive vice president emerita. Janet was a loyal Bardian who was involved in planning reunions and often returned to campus. She is survived by her children, John B. Segal Jr., Jeanne Segal, and Joanne Segal Frye.

1952 Norman L. Alling, 92, died March 22, 2022. After graduating from Bard, Norman received his PhD from Columbia University. He devoted his career to mathematical research, publishing four books and more than 40 papers, and taught at universities around the world.

Norman was passionate about nature, skiing, surfing, mountain climbing, astronomy, and history,

and had a lifelong interest in science, art, and music. He is survived by his wife of 65 years, Kina, and his daughters, Eliza and Maggie.

Hannah “Kit” (Kauders) Ellenbogen, 91, died August 4, 2022. Kit was born in Vienna, Austria, but fled with her family during the Holocaust. They spent three harrowing years traveling from country to country before finally settling in Forest Hills, Queens. By the time she was 10, Kit had learned to speak three languages and had developed a fierce sense of justice and a steely determination that would last a lifetime. In college she adopted the name Kit to celebrate this new beginning. At Bard, Kit met her future husband, Saul Ellenbogen ’49, with whom she had two sons, David and Anthony ’82. After studying psychology at Bard, Kit went on to receive her master’s degree in social work from Hunter College, and in 1973 she became a guidance counselor at Glen Ridge High School, where she worked for 17 years. Her nononsense approach to college and career counseling influenced a generation of young adults in profound ways. At 54, Kit entered Rutgers School of Law and went on to put her background in education and knowledge of the law to good use. She began her second career as an attorney, first for the Education Law Center of New Jersey and then with Advocates for the Children of New Jersey. She continued to work as a child advocate lawyer until the age of 80. Kit was also involved with Bard High School Early College Newark, where she funded a lecture series focusing on the issues and circumstances that led to the Holocaust. She received Bard’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service in 2008. Kit is survived by her sons, and grandchildren, Zach, Monroe ’08, and Max ’16.

Joan K. Novick, 91, died September 25, 2022. As a teenager, Joan wrote regularly for the local paper, and at Bard, where she studied languages and literature, she was ideas editor on the student newspaper. She also danced and sang in student productions.

Joan began her career at Women’s Wear Daily and then applied her extraordinary writing talent to advertising copywriting at Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn (BBDO). When her husband, historian Peter Novick, took a job at University of Chicago, Joan transferred to BBDO’s Chicago office. She later cofounded the advertising agency Jerry&Joan Creative, which served national and local corporations for 30 years. Joan was predeceased by her husband and her son, Michael.

She is survived by her sister, Sue Morris.

Dr. Paul F. Vietz, 91, died October 23, 2022. He was inspired to pursue a career in obstetrics and gynecology after his mother passed away at an early age from endometriosis complications. After his father died in World War II, Paul found himself an orphan in war-torn Germany. However, he was an excellent student, and was awarded the opportunity to spend a year at Bard as an exchange student in the early 1950s. He returned to Germany to complete medical school in Berlin and married his high school sweetheart, Sigrid. He helped develop minimally invasive surgery techniques still used today. He is survived by his wife and his children, Michael and Martina.

1953 Roger Phillips, 93, died September 15, 2022. Roger grew up in Woodmere, Long Island, and lived in Larchmont, New York City, and the Hudson Valley much of his life. He was an accomplished artist who made large metal kinetic sculpture and

alums.bard.edu

spent his business career as an insurance broker, partnered with his brother Harry. At Bard, he met his wife, Lorelle Marcus ’57, to whom he was married for 57 years, until her death in 2014. A devoted member of the Century Association, Roger was also an avid reader, a lover of Baroque music, and a lifelong Democrat who enjoyed pickleball and riding his bicycle into his 90s. He was a loyal Bardian who will be remembered at the College for many things—including the donation of his iconic sculpture Three Red Discs in a Rectangle, which is located outside the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

Roger is survived by his companion, Charlene Rosen; siblings Mary and Harry; sisterin-law, Bonnie Marcus ’71; and four children, John, Sarah, David ’87, and Matthew ’08.

Robert A. Ronder, 90, died October 6, 2022. Bob practiced law in Kingston, New York, for many years as part of St. John, Ronder, and Bell, and later opened his own practice. Bob was the bank attorney for Ulster Savings Bank, serving on its board for 30 years and eventually becoming its president. He also proudly served as president of the Real Property Section of the New York State Bar Association. Bob was involved in Temple Emanuel, Israel Bonds, B’nai Brith, Kingston Kiwanis, and served on the Terravita Homeowners Association board. He is survived by his wife, Marjorie L. Ronder; daughters Ilene Schabot and Deborah Pugliese; and stepchildren Tim Kobelt, Tami Terwilliger, and Tracy Kobelt.

1957 Robert Bassler, 86, died August 29, 2022. Originally from California, Bob drove across the country with his family to Bard in 1953 and immediately fell in love with the campus and landscape of the Hudson Valley.

Bob became immersed in the sculpture program and studied

IN MEMORIAM

55

under professor Harvey Fite ’30, who invited Bob to spend a winter field period as an artist in residence in a small cabin on his Opus 40 property. Fite later became a mentor and friend.

Bob was known for his skilled two- and three-dimensional work. Throughout his life he continued to paint Hudson Valley landscapes in the plein air style. For his Senior Project, Bob created a figurative fountain sculpture, Seclusion, for the garden pool at Blithewood Mansion. Referred to on campus as “the Bard Nymph,” the sculpture was cast in bronze and can still be seen in the Anna Jones Memorial Garden beside the Bard Chapel. After receiving an MFA in sculpture from the University of Southern California, Bob began teaching at Occidental College, where he met his future wife, Lynn Allen.

In 1964, Bob became an assistant professor of sculpture at California State University at Northridge, retiring as professor emeritus in 1997. Bob and Lynn made annual trips to Bard and he remained proud and involved with the College. Lynn survives him. His work can be seen at robertbasslerart.net.

Janet Marian Van Sickle died November 8, 2022. She was 86.

Born in the Bronx, Janet studied art and ceramics at Bard, moved to Paris in the 1950s and then to Greenwich Village where she was immersed in the art scene and worked at Café Figaro from 1958 to 1964. In 1971 she moved to Boulder Creek, California, where she learned to split her own wood, grow her own food and flowers, roof a house, pour cement, design the irrigation for a garden, and gained “an appreciation of the wisdom of natural systems design,” as her son, Krae Van Sickle, writes.

After time in El Salvador exploring gardening in the tropics, she taught on a farm at a boarding school in Vermont, conducted a food and water selfsufficiency study for the Heartwood Institute, and taught

56

IN MEMORIAM

organic farming at Evergreen State College in Washington State. Janet lived in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, from 1999 until 2004, when she moved to Montauk, Long Island, where she served on the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee and East Hampton Town’s agricultural, energy and sustainability, and transfer station committees. In addition to her son, she is survived by her brothers, Richard Goldenberg and Michael Freund.

1961 Robert Guilford Kitchel, 82, died June 29, 2022. Guil, as he was known, was a student of history, an early member of the Civil War Hemlocks, an avid reader and gardener, and a collector of antique tractors, radios, model airplanes, and automobiles. He served on the board of the Pope Memorial Library for many years and was devoted to the Danville, Vermont, community. He is survived by his wife, Jane, a Vermont state senator since 2005; son, Nathaniel Royce; brother, Frederick; and sister, Alice.

Jessica Stuart Yudelson, 82, died March 11, 2022. Jessica majored in theater at Bard and spent her junior year studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. In the ’60s, she worked as a fashion and TV model, acted in commercials, and starred in onewoman plays at Café La Mama in New York City (e.g., Mother Was Sober and It Was So Much Fun, 1966). Into the ’70s, she divided her time between New York and Los Angeles, and went on to act in movies and TV dramas. She became a screenwriter and eventually taught acting and speaking voice. She is survived by her husband, Jerry, and her brother, Daniel Marcus.

1962 Stephanie (Cole) Kaylin died April 13, 2022.

1964 Carol Adler died April 4, 2022.

Carol grew up in Los Angeles, with the world-renowned cellist Gregor Piatigorsky as a neighbor and family friend. From an early age, she was exposed to and influenced by great performers of classical music, and after graduating from Bard she followed her passion into that world. Falling in love with classically trained pianist Audrey Jarach, who would be her partner for 23 years, Carol relocated to Northern California and then Portland, Oregon, where she dedicated herself to causes that advanced human dignity, health, education, and music appreciation.

1965 Roxanna Orlando Leone, 81, died May 21, 2022. Roxanna is survived by her husband, Peter, and her daughters, Petra Leone Steriti and Sairey Luterman.

1967 Dickran Toumajan, 76, died April 7, 2022. Dickran studied political science at Bard for one year before transferring to University of New Hampshire, but he remained loyal to Bard throughout his lifetime. He studied Armenian history, culture, and language, and was a lifelong teacher who cared deeply for all of his students.

Dickran is survived by his wife, Anahit, and their three children, Mihran, Armen, and Ani.

1968 Andrew Frank, 75, died April 21, 2022. Andy studied composition with Elie Yarden and Jacob Druckman at Bard, and with George Crumb, George Rochberg, and Richard Wernick at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his master of arts degree. In 1972, he began teaching composition in the Department of Music at the University of California at Davis, becoming a professor emeritus in 2007.

Andy received numerous awards, prizes, grants, and

commissions for his music, including two BMI Awards, two NEA Composer Fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has been performed nationally and internationally by the Kronos Quartet, Da Capo Chamber Players, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Penn Contemporary Players, New York New Music Ensemble, and Debussy Trio, among others.

A consummate artist, Andy was in his music studio until the very end, composing, revising, and revisiting beloved musical, literary, and film masters of the present and past. Andy cherished his years at Bard and the lifelong friendships he made there, in particular with his classmates Paul Smith ’68, Richard Ransohoff ’68, and Donald Fagen ’69. Andy is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Tyler (Ty) Watkins; children, Lily and Christopher; and sister, Elizabeth Frank, Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Bard.

1969 Judith Anne Shepherd, 74, died May 19, 2022. Judy had a long and successful career with the Federal Trade Commission, protecting consumers from fraud. She is survived by her sister, Paula Metzner, and her brother, Richard Metzner.

Lance David Stalzer, 74, died September 7, 2022. Lance graduated from Rhinebeck High School as valedictorian. At Bard, he became interested in the spiritual teachings of Meher Baba, and he remained a dedicated follower for the rest of his life. He worked for the US Postal Service for almost 40 years. Lance is survived by his wife of 27 years, Elaine C. Wiley Stalzer; daughters, Leela Stalzer and Amy Stalzer; stepdaughters, Emily Hittle and Azlyn Wheeldon; and stepson, James.

1970 Steven Allen Levy, 73, died May 27, 2022. He was a veterinarian in private practice until his

retirement in 2008. Steve was nationally known as an expert in tick-borne diseases in animals and was instrumental in the development of the canine Lyme disease vaccine. He published and lectured widely. He is survived by his wife, Diane Seltzer Levy, and his brother, Jeff Levy ’67.

1973 James Jennings, 71, died May 19, 2022. Jim studied sculpture at Bard and he played a significant role in the creation of the College’s film department.

He became a bright star in the microcosmos of experimental film with his mostly silent, 16millimeter, black-and-white works, which are celebrated for their formal compositions, striking reflections and shadows, and fluid camerawork. A 10-year apprenticeship led to a master plumber’s license in 1990, and Jim started his own Manhattanbased company, Time Mechanicals. In 2007, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his contribution to film. He is survived by his wife, Karen Treanor, and siblings, Jack Jennings and Carol Guay.

1974 Susan Joslin, 70, died November 7, 2022. Susan was born and raised in Connecticut.

After earning her BA in dance from Bard, she got an MA in dance education at New York University. During a reverse commute from New York City to her teaching job on Long Island she met John Scott Wilkerson.

They married and had two children, Joslin and Charles. In 1989, after a stay in Central Point, Oregon, they moved to Cape Cod, where Susan worked for the Waldorf School of Cape Cod as administrator and admissions director. John Scott died of malignant melanoma in 1991. In 1998, Susan went to work at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she ran special events and oversaw volunteer activities, and where

she met her future husband, Joe Hayes. In addition to John Scott, Susan was predeceased by son Charles and stepdaughter Aidan Hayes. She is survived by her sisters, Sarah, Eliza Kendall and Caroline Joslin; stepdaughters Viridiana and Felicia; stepsons Connor and Dugan Hayes and John McCluskey; and her daughter Joslin Joel.

1975 Duncan Rathbun Hannah, painter, diarist, heartthrob, collagist, bon vivant, draftsman, cartoonist, and writer, died June 5, 2022. He was 69. Hannah had more than 100 solo exhibitions, starting in 1981, but his art career was set in motion the year before when he was part of the Times Square Show, along with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. As those names suggest, Hannah was part of— and fascinated by—culture and counterculture. “I’ve always been interested in scenes,” he told the New York Times in 2016.

“Even scenes that aren’t mine, like Swinging London, the Beat scene, or Paris in the ’20s. So when I got to New York, I wanted to find the scene or make the scene.” Hannah vividly described that period in 20th Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies (Knopf, 2018), which was drawn from the extensive journals he kept. His painting was representational and cinematic, and he swam against the tide of abstraction. He called his work, “a love letter to art history.” In 1988, Michael Kimmelman wrote in the Times of Hannah’s painting News of the World, “Against a beautiful mauve-pinkgray sky, a boy carries a newspaper through a nearly empty town. The place is at once ordinary and totally unreal. This is the heart of Mr. Hannah’s terrain—a curious, half-dream, half-nightmare landscape just on the edge of no place.” Hannah grew up in the Midwest, but was eager to expand his horizons.

“I’ve been accepted to Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, so it’s the East Coast for me next

fall,” he wrote in his diary. “I’ll put myself in odd situations. I won’t avoid challenges, I will uncover my true grit. I’ll exhaust my resources and keep pushing through.” Hannah is survived by his wife, Megan Wilson, and a sister, Holly Lewis.

1978 Zachary Santiago, 65, died March 6, 2022. In his senior year at Bard, Zac met his future wife, Nancy Lehmann. Zac enjoyed camping in every form; in high school he was a Boy Scout and later became a leader for Cub Scout Pack 12 in Kingston, New York. In 2020, he retired from his job as a caseworker at the Ulster County Department of Social Services.

In addition to Nancy, Zac is survived by his children, Anthony Santiago and Amanda Bradley.

1980 Joseph Mario Giramma, 73, died September 8, 2022. After graduating from Bard, Joseph earned a master’s degree in public administration from University of Washington. He spent many years in San Francisco, where he met and married his wife, Kelly, in 2002.

Joseph traveled to nearly every continent, and lived in Italy, France, and Mexico. He was a prolific artist, and his paintings and sculptures have sold in galleries in San Francisco, New York City, and the Berkshires.

Joseph is survived by Kelly and their children: Robert, Aubrey, Maximillian, Ursula, and Joseph.

1981 John Sypek, 65, died May 3, 2022. John was born in Częstochowa, Poland and came to the United States with his parents at 12. He studied history at Bard, where he was also a star tennis player and coach. In 1982, John moved back to Poland, where he met his wife, Dorota.

They married in 1985. John is survived by Dorota and their sons, Paul and Alex.

alums.bard.edu

1985 Marylin Quint-Rose MFA, 95, died July 20, 2022. An acclaimed sculptor, educator, and mentor, Marylin was a design instructor and artist at the School of the Worcester Art Museum. During her tenure at the University of New England, she founded the local chapter of Maine Women in the Arts.

Marylin received many awards and honors for her art, including a MacDowell fellowship, and has been involved in many exhibitions and competitions worldwide. She is survived by three children: Stephanie Miller, Janis Rose, and Sanford Rose.

1986 Paul Luikart died in January 2022. Paul had recently retired from Williston Northampton School (Massachusetts), where he had taught science since 1997 and coached the judo team.

In his subject area, chemistry, Paul was encyclopedic, but his interests and life experience revealed a Renaissance scholar’s breadth of knowledge, and he was an absolutely devoted mentor to his students and advisees. Paul is survived by his daughter, Bella.

1990 August Armstrong, 72, died July 2, 2022. August was a director, actor, playwright, documentarian, teacher, counselor, gardener, healer, and wanderer. With her trademark boldness, she talked her way into auditing most of the film classes she went to at Bard before she was officially a student. She was also a trailblazer; a single mother bringing her toddler with her to college classes without a care for what others might think. August is survived by her husband, Dean Kent; children, Autumn Armstrong-Berg, Willow Baer, and Amber Baer; and stepchildren, Bethany KentHawkins, Mathew Kent, and Jeremy Kent.

IN MEMORIAM

57

1992 Bartolomew John Calendar, 53, died October 10, 2022. While at Bard, Bart studied film and literature. He spent several years as a reporter in the Toms River and Manahawkin bureaus and business department of the Asbury Park Press before moving to police and court coverage at the Central New Jersey Home News and Tribune in 1996. Bart moved to Montpellier, France, in 2000 with his then-wife, Jessica Nesterak. He was known for his quirky and dark sense of humor, which frequently came out via his online persona, The Drunken Expat Writer— Montpellier Madman. After a brief post-divorce move back to the United States, he returned to France, where he met Christine Cantera, who would become his long-term girlfriend and business partner. Bart is survived by his parents, Carl and Jody Calendar, and his brother Shane.

Michael Galen Conelly, 51, died July 31, 2022. Michael started his career in visual effects for the Oscar-winning studio Rhythm & Hues, where he supervised such films as Charlotte’s Web and Snow White and the Huntsman.

He went on to found the virtualreality studio Blackthorn Media, and was a member of the Producers Guild of America as well as the Visual Effects Society. Michael will be remembered for his supportive management style, the scope of his visual work, and a foundational humanity. He is survived by his mother, Pamela Emerson; father, William Conelly; stepmother, Elizabeth Thiebe; and brothers, Raphael Conelly and James Conelly.

2004 John Laragh, 73, died June 14, 2022. John attended Dutchess Community College and Columbia Green Community College before graduating from Bard. He worked for the Columbia Paper in Ghent, New York, for many years, and was also an avid photographer.

John’s legacy will live on in the black-and-white landscape prints he created and gave to his family and friends. He is survived by his sister, Margaret.

2018 Katharine Lynn Miyajima Hochswender, 28, died June 27, 2022. Kate was born with a magnificent brain, an enormously loving and kind heart, and great beauty. For those who were fortunate enough to know her, Kate was the most wildly glittering jewel, the funniest, smartest, most beautiful little creature. She was kind and generous, and was able to see the humor in almost every situation. She is survived by her mother, Cynthia Hochswender.

2022

1993 Pēteris Cedriņš MFA, 59, died August 8, 2022. He was the son of Latvian intellectuals who escaped Stalin’s Soviet Union and eventually landed in the United States after World War II. His parents would not

58

countenance having a television in the house, so he grew up with literature and poetry. Impatient and precocious, Pēteris left high school before graduating and directly entered the Master of Fine Arts program at Bard.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he returned to Latvia. Pēteris carried the dual pedigree of a respected line of poets in Latvia and of a welleducated American. He was made foreign affairs director of the Latvian Writers’ Union and became a speech writer for Latvia’s president, Vaira VīķeFreiberga. Pēteris is survived by his sisters Sandra and Astrid.

IN MEMORIAM

Margarita Kuchma, 21, a student in the master’s degree program in Human Rights and the Arts, died November 22, 2021. A graduate of Smolny College and the University of St. Petersburg, Kuchma spent the

alums.bard.edu

fall 2019 semester as an exchange student in Bard’s Program in International Education. In summer 2020, after graduating from Smolny, she enrolled in an online class at Bard and expressed eagerness to return to Bard to join the new graduate program. She was a gifted video editor, filmmaker, rapper, musician, and music video artist. Kuchma was particularly proud of her part in Bard’s clemency video advocacy project. She is survived by her parents, Alexander and Alina, and sister, Daria.

2023 Angela McKenzie, 58, died February 3, 2022. Known as Angel to her friends, she was a first-year student of Bard Microcollege Holyoke and a graduate of the Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities. Angel visited the Annandale campus this December for the annual Women and Leadership summit.

Faculty Elie Yarden, 99, died September 5, 2022. As a teenager, he studied piano and music composition with Stefan Wolpe at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia. He went on to study music at University of Pennsylvania, Eastern languages at University of Chicago, and engineering at University of California, Los Angeles. In 1950, Elie moved to New York City, where he pursued his music career. His completed compositions include string quartets, pieces for piano, small ensembles, opera, and an orchestral work. He worked with the Living Theater, hung out at Ratner’s, and navigated the beatnik happenings of Greenwich Village. It was there that he was introduced to Nona Baird, to whom he was married from 1956 until her death in 2020.

Elie was a professor of music at Hebrew University of

Jerusalem and later at Tel Aviv University, and in 1967 the family moved to Bard, where Elie taught music and humanities for more than 30 years. He helped to build the Bard Music Program, bringing in such notable contemporary composers as Benjamin Boretz, Joan Tower, and Roswell Rudd, and later was instrumental in creating Bard’s groundbreaking low-residency Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Elie and Nona built a home in Annandale that was open to an extraordinary community of artists, students, and teachers who gathered frequently to share in the work of activism, love, learning, and food. During this time, Elie and Nona developed lifelong relationships with the artist Gale Sasson ’69 and the poet Timotha Doane ’66.

After retirement from Bard College in 1987, Elie joined Nona in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had moved to restart her own career. Elie spent many years building community with his neighbors there, working on issues of fair and equitable housing, city zoning, and environmental concerns. He was an active member of the GreenRainbow Party and participated in writing the party’s platform and advocating for social and environmental justice. At the age of 90, Elie ran for Cambridge City Council. He was a beloved teacher, spouse, father, composer, traveler, mentor, cook, and a resister. He had an unquenchable thirst for inquiry and knowledge, and he abhorred prejudice in any form. Elie is survived by Gale and Timotha, and his sons, Tal ’81, Guy ’84, and Seth.

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

Bard College has partnered with FreeWill, a free, online resource that guides you through the process of creating a legally valid will in just 20 minutes.

This opportunity allows you to secure your future, protect your loved ones, and create a legacy that will inspire curiosity, a love of learning, and an ongoing commitment to the link between higher education and civic participation.

Get started by visiting freewill.com/bard.

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

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

All inquiries are confidential.

Blithewood Garden overlooking the Hudson River, photo by Pete Mauney ’93 MFA ’00

freewill.com/bard

MARGARET AND JOHN BARD SOCIETY

Members of the Margaret and John Bard Society gathered for lunch at the Cosmopolitan Club, New York City, November 29, 2022, photo by Patrick Arias

Board of Governors of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association KC Serota ’04, President Mollie Meikle ’03, Vice President; Development Committee Cochair Gerry Pambo-Awich ’08, Secretary/Treasurer Beth Shaw Adelman ’74 Robert Amsterdam ’53 Hannah Becker ’11 Brendan Berg ’06 Jack Blum ’62 Connor Boehme ’17 Michael Burgevin ’10 Hannah Byrnes-Enoch ’08, Strategic Planning Committee Chair Matthew Cameron ’04 Kathleya Chotiros ’98, Development Committee Cochair Charles Clancy III ’69, past president Tyrone Copeland ’01 Peter Criswell ’89, past president Caia Diepenbrock ’15 Gregory Drilling ’16 Nicolai Eddy ’14 Nolan English ’13 Randy Faerber ’73, Events Committee Cochair Andrew F. Fowler ’95 Jazondré Gibbs ’19 Eric Goldman ’98 Hasani Gunn ’18 Alexander Habiby ’18 Boriana Handjiyska ’02, Career Connections Committee Cochair Nikkya Hargrove ’05

Sonja Hood ’90, Nominations Committee Cochair Miriam Huppert ’13 Maud Kersnowski Sachs ’86, Communications Committee Chair Kenneth Kosakoff ’81 Jacob Lester ’20 Darren Mack ’13 Peter F. McCabe ’70, past president Emily Melendes TŌN ’20 Ryan Mesina ’06, Nominations Committee Cochair Steven Miller ’70 Scot Moore ’14 TŌN ’18 Anne Morris-Stockton ’68 Anna Neverova ’07, Career Connections Committee Cochair; Bard Music Festival Junior Circle Cochair Karen G. Olah ’65, past president Claire Phelan ’11 Daniel Severson ’10 Genya Shimkin ’08, Diversity Committee Chair George A. Smith ’82, Events Committee Cochair Thokozile Soko ’20 Lindsay Stanley ’12 Geoffrey Stein ’82 Walter Swett ’96, past president Paul Thompson ’93 Maxwell Toth ’22 Zubeida Ullah-Eilenberg ’97 Kristin Waters ’73 Brandon Weber ’97, past president Ato Williams ’12 Nanshan (Nathan) Xu ’17

Emeritus/a Claire Angelozzi ’74 Dr. Penny Axelrod ’63 Naomi Bellison Feldman ’53, past president Dr. Miriam Roskin Berger ’56 Cathaline Cantalupo ’67 Arnold Davis ’44, past president Michael DeWitt ’65, past president Michelle Dunn Marsh ’95, past president Robert Edmonds ’68, past president Richard Gerber ’71, past president R. Michael Glass ’75 Barbara Grossman Flanagan ’60 Diana Hirsch Friedman ’68 Dr. Ann Ho ’62 Charles Hollander ’65 Maggie Hopp ’67 Cynthia Hirsch Levy ’65 Rev. William Lowe ’66, past president David E. Schwab II ’52, past president Roger N. Scotland ’93 Mackie Siebens ’12, past president Dr. Toni-Michelle C. Travis ’69 Paul Weinstein ’73, past president John Weisman ’64, past president Barbara Crane Wigren ’68

Board of Trustees of Bard College James C. Chambers ’81, Chair Emily H. Fisher, Vice Chair Brandon Weber ’97, Vice Chair Elizabeth Ely ’65, Secretary; Life Trustee Stanley A. Reichel ’65, Treasurer; Life Trustee Fiona Angelini Roland J. Augustine

Leonard Benardo Leon Botstein, President of the College, ex officio Mark E. Brossman Jinqing Cai Marcelle Clements ’69, Life Trustee The Rt. Rev. Andrew M. L. Dietsche, Honorary Trustee Asher B. Edelman ’61, Life Trustee Kimberly Marteau Emerson Robert S. Epstein ’63 Barbara S. Grossman ’73, Alumni/ae Trustee Andrew S. Gundlach Matina S. Horner, ex officio Charles S. Johnson III ’70 Mark N. Kaplan, Life Trustee George A. Kellner Mark Malloch-Brown Fredric S. Maxik ’86 Jo Frances Meyer, ex officio Juliet Morrison ’03 James H. Ottaway Jr., Life Trustee Hilary Pennington Martin Peretz, Life Trustee Stewart Resnick, Life Trustee David E. Schwab II ’52, Life Trustee Roger N. Scotland ’93, Alumni/ae Trustee Annabelle Selldorf Mostafiz ShahMohammed ’97 Jonathan Slone ’84 Geoffrey W. Smith Alexander Soros James A. von Klemperer Susan Weber Patricia Ross Weis ’52

Rise, 2017 Oil on canvas 48” x 60”

Laura Battle, professor of studio arts

Bard

Bard College PO Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504

Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage Paid Bard College

COMMENCEMENT & ALUMNI/AE REUNION WEEKEND IN ANNANDALE MAY 26–28 2023

Calling everyone in the classes of 2018, 2013, 2008, 2003, 1998, 1993, 1988, 1983, 1978, 1973, 1968, 1963, 1958, 1953, and alumni/ae from the 1940s Interested in being on your reunion committee?

Want to update your contact information?

Let us know!

alumni@bard.edu

845-758-7116

alums.bard.edu

#bardreunion