Lia Gangitano Wins 21st Annual Irmas Award
photo Domenica Bucalo
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) has named Lia Gangitano the recipient of the 2018 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. In 2001, Gangitano founded Participant Inc., a not-for-profit art space. As curator of Thread Waxing Space her exhibitions, screenings, and performances included Spectacular Optical (1998), Luther Price: Imitation of Life (1999), Børre Sæthre: Module for Mood (2000), and Sigalit Landau (2001). She is editor of Blood and Guts in Hollywood: Two Screenplays by Laura Parnes and Dead Flowers (2010) as well as the forthcoming anthologies M Lamar: Negrogothic and The Alternative to What? Thread Waxing Space and the ’90s. She currently teaches at CCS Bard and is a recipient of a Skowhegan Governors’ Award for Outstanding Service to Artists as well as the inaugural White Columns/Shoot the Lobster Award. Gangitano was presented with the Irmas Award at a gala celebration and dinner on April 9. Tom Eccles, executive director of CCS Bard says, “Lia Gangitano is a curatorial pioneer presenting artists and artwork that have often been marginalized. Looking back over more than three decades of exhibitions and curatorial projects, we are delighted to celebrate the significant contribution Lia has made to the cultural life of New York City.” For the past 20 years, CCS Bard has recognized individuals who have defined new thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition practice with the Audrey Irmas Award, named after patron and CCS Bard board member Audrey Irmas, who bestowed the endowment for the award and is an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award, designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, also comes with the Audrey Irmas Prize of $25,000.
Jonathan Greene ’65: Poet, Publisher, Farmer In his first year at Bard, Jonathan Greene ’65 enrolled in Ralph Ellison’s course on American literature. He still has his notes from that class, in which Ellison pushed him to consider writing “in the context of its historical moment,” and still remembers catching rides down to New York City with Ellison, chatting about jazz in Ellison’s robin’s-egg-blue Chrysler. Greene also recalls how “Ellison had a unique way of smiling when he saw the irony of things, the truth behind a news story. He wouldn’t submit to standard ‘black nationalism’ story lines: for example, that blacks singlehandedly invented jazz and no whites could play the music. He did not follow that line or many other orthodoxies.” Other Bard faculty helped draw new lines for Greene: among them philosophy professor Heinrich Bluecher and his wife, political philosopher Hannah Arendt, whom Greene interviewed for his Senior Project on the Austrian writer Hermann Broch; and Justus Rosenberg, professor of foreign languages and literature, who was on Greene’s Senior Project board. Serendipity led Greene to dine with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers in Tivoli, and as head of the literature club he brought an extraordinary assemblage of now-canonical figures to Bard, including writers Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Louis Zukofsky, Saul Bellow, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), Jerome Rothenberg, Paul Blackburn, and Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature Robert Kelly, who would soon become a member of the faculty after Greene proposed Kelly to replace the outgoing German professor. In 1966, Kelly published Greene’s first book, The Reckoning, containing poems Greene had read to a Bard writing group that met weekly at Ward Manor. Since that first reckoning, Greene has written 35 more books, “mostly poetry, though the last is my strange memoir, Anecdotage. There are also two commonplace books, my correspondence with Thomas Merton, and A 17th Century Garner, a prose-poetry collection that came out of my Bard studies with Andrews Wanning.” (Wanning was professor of literature from 1951 to 1977.) And he is a publisher in his own right. “I started Gnomon Press in 1965 to produce books I wanted on my own bookshelves,” he says, “and in the hope that others would agree with my taste.” They did: Gnomon’s best-selling title,
32 on and off campus
photo Dobree Adams
Gurney Norman’s Appalachian story collection Kinfolks, has sold more than 22,000 copies, with three stories adapted for an hour-long PBS special. Almost all Gnomon’s books are designed by Greene himself, and he also designs for other authors and distinguished presses like Knopf, Ecco, Copper Canyon, Rizzoli, and New Directions. Greene began setting and printing by hand from metal type. His designing has evolved in response to new printing technologies; he confesses to uncommon “typographic tastes,” particularly for little-known typefaces. After Bard and a stint in San Francisco, Greene moved to a Kentucky River farm, where he and his fiber artist–photographer wife live with chickens, horses, donkeys, and dogs. If this sounds idyllic, it is. But it isn’t retirement. Greene continues not only to design but to write. Gists Orts Shards (a collected edition of his commonplace books that includes quotes from Arendt, Bluecher, and Kelly) and a new book of poems, Afloat, came out in early 2018. —Micaela Morrissette ’02