CLASS NOTES: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.