ON AND OFF CAMPUS: ART AND ACTIVISM

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

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.

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.”

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.