Art History

$3.2 Million Given to Bard College Endowing Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism in Perpetuity
Untitled wall drawing, circa 1981, Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation.

Endowment Coincides with CCS Bard’s Permanent Reinstallation of Keith Haring Wall Drawing Created During 1981 Visit to Bard College

Egyptian Author Haytham el-Wardany Appointed 2022-23 Fellow
Bard College announced today it has received $3.2 million to endow in perpetuity 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 the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program. The endowment is made possible by a grant of$800,000 from the Keith Haring Foundation and matching funds from the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and benefactor George Soros. First launched in 2014, the fellowship embodies the shared commitment of Bard and the Keith Haring Foundation to imaginatively explore the complex connections between sociopolitical engagement and artistic practice. It also speaks to the historic relationship between the college and Keith Haring, which is further honored with CCS Bard’s permanent reinstallation of a wall drawing the artist created in an act of spontaneity while visiting the campus in 1981.

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

In conjunction with the gift and reinstallation, Bard simultaneously announced that writer Haytham el-Wardany has been named the 2022-23 recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship and will be in-residence on campus during the spring semester to teach and conduct research. El-Wardany brings to Bard students 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. Using collective reading as a vehicle for cultural research and debate, his teaching will bring a richly literary and global dimension to CCS Bard and the Human Rights Program’s curricula, advancing Bard College’s mission of cultivating critical thinking and creative action through deeper understandings of human history, society, and the arts.

“The Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism has been an enormous source of pride for the Keith Haring Foundation for the last eight years. It is a nod to the spirit and belief of Keith Haring that both art and activism can complement one another and bring about social and political change. We are honored to partner with the Marieluise Hessel Foundation and George Soros to ensure this critical work continues perpetually,” said Gil Vazquez, Executive Director of the Haring Foundation.

About the Haring Wall Drawing
In the early 1980s, Keith Haring was invited by Bard College Professor of Art History Tom Wolf to speak at the Procter Art Center (now the Fisher Studio Arts Building) about his practice and personal ethics around graffiti art. Prior to the talk, in an act of spontaneity, using a fat Magic Marker, Haring drew a series of five crawling babies on the wall of Wolf’s office. During a phase of construction and expansion in the Fisher Arts Studio Building, a portion of the wall with the drawing was carved out and moved to Wolf’s new office located in a different building on campus.

With Wolf’s imminent retirement from Bard College, the work will be transferred from the Department of Art and Art History to CCS Bard to undergo conservation and stabilization. It will be permanently installed in the CCS Bard Library, where students, researchers, and guests will have continued access to Haring’s work, illustrating the connection between Keith Haring and Bard College.

See more https://www.bard.edu/news/32-million-given-to-bard-college-endowing-keith-haring-fellowship-in-art-and-activism-in-perpetuity-2022-09-21

The students in Professor Susan Merriam’s Curiosity Cabinet course have done some fascinating work at Montgomery Place this semester. They’ve been delving into the collection, which houses more than 8,000 objects, to research some of the most unique pieces. The course explores the historical phenomenon of the curiosity cabinet, a precursor to the modern museum. Yesterday, they opened an exhibition at the Stevenson Library showcasing their work. Well done! #bardcollege #arthistory #hudsonvalley

Silver Faces in Late Medieval Sculpture: Just How Charismatic, Just How Lifelike?

St. Christopher, c.1375-1425, French, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sculpture and painting in the late Middle Ages tends to be written as a narrative of increasing verisimilitude and lifelikeness – and indeed, when played out across paint and wood, the naturalistic representation of human presence (charismatic, bodily, idealized, and gruesome alike) appears paramount. This trajectory, however, becomes complicated when examining figural sculpture in gold and silver: How did these media, cast for centuries as vehicles of heavenly light and otherworldly irruption into the mundane, participate in late medieval practices of mimetic representation, particularly when figuring the human body? In considering figural mimesis in northern Europe during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, do we detect a competitive antagonism or a fertile codependence between faces rendered with paint and faces rendered with metal? Considering the place of gold and silver in Gothic and early Renaissance sculpture serves to expand our sense of the pictorial priorities of this pivotal transitional period, and it also sets up a retrospective glance at earlier medieval centuries, thereby offering another approach to the ceaselessly complicated question of material, mimesis, and meaning in medieval art.

Thursday, November 2, 2017
5:00 pm, Weis Cinema

sponsored by the Art History Program

Rabih Mroue and Lina Saneh, “Biokraphia” (2002) Courtesy of Askhal Alwan

Hanan Toukan
Brown University

Monday, April 3, 2017
6:30 p.m.
Olin, Room 102

This talk is about the relationship between contemporary art, dissent, cultural diplomacy and cultural politics in the Arab Middle East. Since the start of the Arab revolutionary process and the violence that has accompanied it, the culture and arts domain has come to play an ever more crucial role as mobilizer, witness, and archivist of historical events. As a result the domain has enjoyed an exponential growth in the technical and financial support it receives from US and EU funding bodies. This growth has provoked intense debates within policy circles and a plethora of academic literature on what the role of visual and cultural practices are and should be in violent warfare, political change, and the study of politics and culture in the region.

This talk will historicize and contextualize this phenomenon as its focus predates 2011 and grapples with it from its first appearance in the 1990s and until its consolidation in the aftermath of 9/11. Specifically the talk examines the ways in which transnational circuits of visual cultural production are related to how society makes, sees and experiences the political in art and its relevance to the wider publics in Jordan, Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I address prevalent debates about the nature of the political in art as well as the role of art and the intellectual in political change. It shows that both are part and parcel of shifting structural dynamics in local and international politics that directly impact the production of culture and how different generations practice them, perceive them and process them. Hence this talk is not is not so much about “art”, as much as it is about the “artworld” from a local perspective, and how culture in it is produced in a global world. It is equally about some of the centers of power that fund and disseminate visual knowledge about the Middle East.

Hanan Toukan is Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Middle East Studies at Brown University.
This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Project and the Art History program
For more information: contact Dina Ramadan at 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

A lecture on Kevin Jerome Everson’s Rhinoceros (2013), an imagined staging of the last speech of the first Duke of Florence, Alessandro de’ Medici (1510-1537), also known as the first black European head of state due to his mixed Italian and African ancestry.

Tuesday, March 7, 2017

6:30 pm
Olin 203

Join Bard Art History alum Emma Weinman ’14 for a short talk about the show she helped curate at Bard’s Stevenson Library featuring contemporary artists Tauba Auerbach’s Diagonal Press.

When:  Tuesday, March 7, 2017
               4:00 – 4:45 pm
Where: Stevenson Library lobby

Followed by Tauba Auerbach’s talk at 5:00 pm in Fisher Studio Bldg. Center Studio.

All are welcome!

The Brant Foundation Lecture in Contemporary Art Series presents
 Carrie Lambert-Beatty

“How do you know? Contemporary art and the politics of knowledge”

When: Wednesday, February 15, 2017 at 5pm
Where: Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center, Bard College

The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is pleased to present the first in The Brant Foundation Lectures in Contemporary Art series with a lecture by art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty entitled How do you know? Contemporary art and the politics of knowledge . Lambert-Beatty will give the lecture at 5pm on Wednesday, February 15th in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College. This lecture is made possible by the major grant given from The Brant Foundation to Bard College to support The Brant Foundation Fellowship in Contemporary Arts.

Carrie Lambert-Beatty is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, and Director of Graduate Studies for the Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies.

An art historian with a focus on art from the 1960s to the present, and a special interest in performance in an expanded sense, she is currently at work on a book for University of Chicago Press expanding on her 2009 October magazine essay “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.” What happens, aesthetically and ethically, when artists deceive their audiences? Why has the presentation of fiction as fact—“parafiction,” in Lambert-Beatty’s term—become such a common way of working in contemporary art, and in culture more generally, since the early 1990s?

In the past decade one of Lambert-Beatty’s chief research concerns has been the potential and limits of political art in contemporary practice, which she has explored through work on hybrids of art and activism such as Women on Waves and The Yes Men. Her essay on recuperation —both neurological and ideological—in the work of the art team Allora + Calzadilla accompanied their representation of the United States at the 2011 Venice Biennial. Her 2008 book Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (MIT Press) was a study of the art of a signal member of the American avant-garde. Treating aesthetic issues such as minimalism, dance, documentation, and the problem of politics in Rainer’s work, the book is also driven by the problem of how artists responded, often at unconscious levels, to the burgeoning media culture of the 1960s. Being Watched was awarded the 2008 de la Torre prize for dance studies.

Lambert-Beatty’s writing has also appeared in collections such as the Blackwell-Wiley volume Contemporary Art 1989 to the Present, exhibition catalogs including Dance/Draw and A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968 and journals such as Artforum, Art Journal, and Signs , as well as October magazine, of which she is an editor.

In conjunction with the exhibition S/Election, curated by Maxwell Barnes, Sarah Bastacky, Aaron Boehlert, Anne Burnett, Issy Cassou,
Adrienne Chau, Reza Daftarian, Hannah Kay, Alex Kitnick, Harrison Kroessler, Alex Lau, Sondra McGill, Erin O’Leary,Flannery Seager-Strode, Raphael Wolf, and Sam Youkilis, there will be a screening of two videos at:

6pm on Thursday, December 8, 2016
Center for Curatorial Studies
Bard College

Paul Chan’s Now Let Us Praise
American Leftists (2000) and
Jacqueline Goss’s Hart’s Location (2016)

There will be a discussion after the screening. All are invited to attend.