Faculty Misericordia: Together We Celebrate Laura Flax, 64, died on March 11, 2017. Flax was the clarinetist of the Naumburg Award–winning Da Capo Chamber Players for 20 years, a founding musician of the Bard Music Festival, principal clarinetist of the American Symphony Orchestra and the New York City Opera Orchestra, and a member of the faculty of the Bard College Conservatory of Music and the Juilliard Pre-College. She was a frequent guest with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, St. Luke’s, Orpheus, and American Composers Orchestras. Her solo appearances included performances with the Jerusalem Symphony, Bard Festival Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, and the Puerto Rico Symphony. Flax was involved in over 100 premieres, including works by Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, Shulamit Ran, and Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts Joan Tower. In 1981, at Merkin Hall, Flax premiered Wings, which Tower wrote for her. “The image behind the piece,” Tower wrote, “is one of a large bird—perhaps a falcon—at times flying very high gliding along the thermal currents, barely moving. At other moments, the bird goes into elaborate patterns that loop around, diving downwards, gaining tremendous speeds.” Flax is survived by her twin daughters, Fanny Wyrick-Flax ’13 and Molly Wyrick-Flax ’14, who were born on opening night of the 1991 Bard Music Festival. David Jaffee, 62, died on January 20, 2017. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, but soon became interested in visual culture and shifted his focus to the way objects and images speak to history. He taught at City College of New York and at the Bard Graduate Center, where he was a professor and director of new media studies. Jaffee was the author of People of the Wachusett: Greater New England in History and Memory, 1630–1860 and A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America as well as innumerable essays. He was predeceased by his wife, Barbara, and is survived by his daughter, Isadora. Betty Louise Josephson King died in Alexandria, Virginia, on June 2, 2016. She attended McGill University, graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in Russian, and earned a Ph.D. in microbiology from Harvard University. She taught biology at Bard College and Skidmore College for several years before returning to the Washington, D.C., area, where she was involved in forming Northern Virginia Community College’s biology department, where she taught for more than three decades. King was also an accomplished photographer and loved animals. Survivors include her sister, Nancy; brother, Bill; son, Geoffrey; and granddaughter, Alexandra.
by Stephen Schapiro ’55 Powerhouse Books Photographer Schapiro’s images capture the joy of the more than 600 children and adults with developmental disabilities and 1000-plus staff and volunteers busy at work and play at Misercordia, a residential program in Chicago for diverse individuals with developmental disabilities.
Embed in Egypt by Emine Gozde Sevim ’08 Kehrer Verlag In this photographic diary, Turkish photographer Sevim, who lived in Egypt during the revolution to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak, captures the stories of everyday people. She shows their personal moments during a tumultuous time of historical transition.
Factory: Andy Warhol by Stephen Shore, Susan Weber Professor in the Arts Phaidon Press At 17, Shore was invited to hang out at The Factory, Andy Warhol’s legendary studio, and spent almost every day of the following two years there taking pictures of the goings-on of famous artists, writers, and musicians. This book features photos from Shore’s personal collection taken between 1965 and 1967.
Projections of Memory: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Film by Richard I. Suchenski, associate professor of film and electronic arts Oxford University Press This study of a small body of innovative cinematic work reexamines film history through the lens of some of its most ambitious and transformative artists, connecting and elevating 20th-century avantgarde long-form films to the traditions of 18th- and 19th-century Romantic literature, theater, painting, music, and philosophy.
The Light of Darkness: The Story of the Griots’ Son by Alhassan Susso MAT ’13 Light of Darkness This memoir traces Susso’s immigration as a nearly blind teenager from Africa’s smallest nation, Gambia, to America. Holding steadfast to his family tradition of serving as griots, the keepers of peoples’ history, he makes a life teaching high school history to immigrants in his new homeland.
Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus by Matt Taibbi ’92 Spiegel & Grau This book collects 25 pieces from Rolling Stone and two original essays Taibbi wrote while covering the 2016 presidential campaign. Documenting the failures of the left and the right, Taibbi heralds the collapse of American democracy as we know it.
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