Happenings at Bard
Wednesday, November 30th, 6pm
Henderson Annex 106
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has just released an amazing set of data pertaining to its exhibition history, beginning with the institution’s founding in 1929 and spanning up until the epochal year of 1989. The question that presents itself to us now is how to use it. What questions should we ask of this enormous trove of information, which includes not only things like installation photographs but also press releases? This Experimental Humanities Critical Potluck will consider questions of canon formation (how, for example, did Picasso come to be thought of as the modern artist par excellence?) as well as changing conceptions of the exhibition format itself. While techniques of “distant reading” have recently become important in the field of literary studies, art history is just starting to assimilate these methods. EH Fellow Collin Jennings will lead us through some of these methods, and Alex Kitnick from the Art History Program will serve as interlocutor. Both faculty and students are invited to attend.
Sponsored by Experimental Humanities
Happenings at Bard
THE ANNUAL ART HISTORY MAJORS EVENT!
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
5:00 pm
Fisher Studio Arts Center Studio
Students learned about Spring 2017 course offerings and heard
presentations by three alumni art history majors on
their experiences since graduating from Bard. Claire Demere ’14, Fiona Laugharn ’12 and Max Yeston ’08 shared their journeys into the work world.
Happenings at Bard
For Day of the Dead celebrations at Bard College an ofrenda was created in the campus center. Prof. Susan Aberth, (Latin American Art History), along with students from the Queer/Straight Alliance, Latin American Students Organization, Caribbean Students Organization and Black Students Organization created this altar to those who died at Pulse in Orlando, Florida this past summer. The students found a Mexican bakery that sold Bread of the Dead, Prof. Aberth lent her calaveras and finally photographs of all those murdered in Orlando were placed as a memorial backdrop. A very meaningful event that honored the dead and brought solidarity to the Bard community. 
Happenings at Bard
Amin Shopping Mall
A lecture by
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow (NYU)
Tuesday, November 1st, 6:30pm
Olin 102
Co-sponsored by the Art History, Africana Studies, and Human Rights Programs (maybe Anthropology as well?)
This talk examines a history of the world’s largest designated set of settlements for refugees through its constructed environment and archival record, interrogating an ephemeral territorial form and the paradoxical heritage it proposes. If architecture and infrastructure have entrenched a quarter century of humanitarian intervention by the United Nations at Dadaab, Kenya, the site has been depicted instead as precarious. Occluded at once through aesthetic codings and archival silences, its permanence has been veiled in fragile architectures of an international humanitarian aid operation and in pastoral landscapes of a contested desert borderland traditionally inhabited by nomadic Somalis. Rather than a provisional artifact of the 1991 crisis that occasioned humanitarian operations in northeast Kenya, I posit that this territory unfolded as exceptional and emergent over the course of a century: knowable through visual, historical, and ethnographic study of architecture and territory. My research recuperates a figuration and construction of humanitarian territory in missionary settlements for freed slaves in the nineteenth century, imperial and postcolonial systems of land tenure in the twentieth, and forced sedentarization of pastoralists in the twenty-first. Through this analysis, I interrogate a problematic humanitarian heritage of furtive architectures, which at once liberate and coerce, resist as well as assert colonial and national borders, and make claims upon abject suffering as well as its salvation. These confront and index our representations and constructions of emancipation, emergency, city, Africa, the native, and the precariousness of ephemerality itself.
Happenings at Bard
Sound in Theory, Sound in Practice brings together scholars and practitioners to consider the potential of thinking about and through sound. Recent years have witnessed a sonic turn in the humanities and beyond. Many working in the fields of anthropology, literature, urban studies, history, media studies, and the arts have increasingly shifted their attention to sound as both an expressive medium, a material, and a critical object of inquiry. Under the auspices of Experimental Humanities and the Sound Cluster at Bard College, this two-day symposium will focus on questions of aurality, transmission, aesthetics, and evidence.
Breaking with conference convention, the symposium will invite participants to engage in a lively dialogue around keywords and questions that have emerged through discussions in the sound cluster. Complementing a series of three roundtable discussions will be two keynote addresses by Emily Thompson, author of The Soundscape of Modernity and Jonathan Sterne, author of The Audible Past and editor of The Sound Studies Reader, an exhibition of sound art by Bard faculty, students, and invited sound artists, and experiential workshops taking the form of sonic “interludes” between panel discussions.
Organized by the Sound Cluster
Laura Kunreuther, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Alex Benson, Assistant Professor of Literature
Matthew Deady, Professor of Physics
Danielle Riou, Associate Director of the Human Rights Project
Maria Sonevytsky, Assistant Professor of Music (Ethnomusicology)
Julianne Swartz, Artist in Residence
Drew Thompson, Assistant Professor of Africana & Historical Studies
OIga Touloumi, Assistant Professor of Art History
Sponsored by Experimental Humanities, Center of Civic Engagement, Human Rights Project, and Bard College.
Happenings at Bard
Curated by Patricia Karetzky,
Oskar Munsterberg Chair of Asian Art, Bard College
The show comprises twenty-five photographs of the Cultural Revolution in China from the perspective of the youth sent to the countryside. The photographer, Tang Desheng, a youth himself, embedded himself in the movement traveling throughout China for ten years documenting the lives of displaced youth.
Campus Center
Bard College
April 1-30, 2016,
Opening Reception Wednesday, April 13 5-6, Refreshments served.
and
Panel Discussion with Thomas Keenan, Robert Berkowitz, Drew Thompson, Gilles Peress and Robert Culp
Weis Auditorium, April 13, 2016, 6-8 pm
Happenings at Bard
A film by Tchavdar Georgiev and Amanda Pope
Thursday, December 3, 7-9 pm Preston 110
How does art survive in a time of oppression? During the Soviet rule artists who stay true to their vision are executed, sent to mental hospitals or Gulags. Their plight inspires young Igor Savitsky. He pretends to buy state-approved art but instead daringly rescues 40,000 forbidden fellow artist’s works and creates a museum in the desert of Uzbekistan, far from the watchful eyes of the KGB. Though a penniless artist himself, he cajoles the cash to pay for the art from the same authorities who are banning it. Savitsky amasses an eclectic mix of Russian Avant-Garde art. But his greatest discovery is an unknown school of artists who settle in Uzbekistan after the Russian revolution of 1917, encountering a unique Islamic culture, as exotic to them as Tahiti was for Gauguin. They develop a startlingly original style, fusing European modernism with centuries-old Eastern traditions.
Ben Kingsley, Sally Field and Ed Asner voice the diaries and letters of Savitsky and the artists. Intercut with recollections of the artists’ children and rare archival footage, the film takes us on a dramatic journey of sacrifice for the sake of creative freedom. Described as “one of the most remarkable collections of 20th century Russian art” and located in one of the world’s poorest regions, today these paintings are worth millions, a lucrative target for Islamic fundamentalists, corrupt bureaucrats and art profiteers. The collection remains as endangered as when Savitsky first created it, posing the question whose responsibility is it to preserve this cultural treasure.
This film screening is in conjunction with Professor Oleg Minin’s course “Russian Art of the Avant-Garde” and the Art History Program, the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program, the Center for Civic Engagement, the Russian Film Series, the Russian Club and Russian Art and Culture Project.
Happenings at Bard
New Perspectives in Design History, Decorative Arts, and Material Culture
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 6:30 pm
RKC 103 Laszlo Z. Bito ’60 Auditorium
Amber Winick: “Playing with Nationalism: A Century of Hungarian Design for Children.”
Rebecca C. Tuite: “Fashioning a College Experience: The History of Seven Sisters Style.”
Happenings at Bard
Robert Wiesenberger is the 2014–16 Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow at the Harvard Art Museums, where he is responsible for their Bauhaus collections, and a Critic at the Yale School of Art, where he teaches a first-year seminar in the MFA program in graphic design. He is completing his doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, where he specializes in modern and contemporary art, architecture and design. His dissertation treats the work of the late American designer Muriel Cooper.
Graphic designer Muriel Cooper’s career at MIT spanned the transition from print to software, from the MIT Press in the 1960s to the Media Lab in the 1980s. Perhaps her best-known achievement in print was the monumental and still authoritative tome The Bauhaus, released by the MIT Press in 1969. But less known are Cooper’s restagings of that book in multiple media, including posters, a film, and an exhibition. This research coincided with her first exposure to computer programming, and can be understood as a way of prototyping in analog the effects she would spend her career seeking from software. The Bauhaus is thus both a landmark and an inflection point for Cooper: at once her masterpiece in print and evidence of a growing anxiety about the medium; a gesture toward reading’s possible futures, and a source of durable metaphors for them. Choosing this book for her research was also no coincidence: In both scale and subject, The Bauhaus was an ideal test case for Cooper.
Thursday, October 15, 2015
3:10-4:30 pm
RKC 103 – Lazlo Z. Bito ’60 Auditorium
Happenings at Bard
A Presentation by
Dr. Margo Machida
Professor of Art History & Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut
Trans-Pacific Visions in Asian American Art
This talk focuses on the Asia Pacific region and selected works by contemporary U.S.-based Asian American artists that engage themes of trans-Pacific circulation and global systems of cross-cultural exchange. Based on Dr. Machida’s current research in Hawai’i, this presentation draws attention to islands as a generative framework to analyze and to compare art in the Asia Pacific region and the Americas. The Pacific, with more islands than the world’s other oceans combined, is above all an island realm. Accordingly Islands and associated oceanic imaginaries exert a powerful hold on works by artists who trace their ancestral origins to coastal East and Southeast Asia and Oceania. All are invited to this talk about these exciting contemporary artists.
Wednesday, October 28th
6:30 pm
RKC 103 – Lazlo Z. Bito ’60 Auditorium
Sponsored by American Studies, Art History, Asian Studies, Religion, and Africana Studies
Wednesday, November 30th, 6pm
