News and Events

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Pavlina Tcherneva Writes Levy Policy Note on Election Outcome

Pavlina Tcherneva, president of the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, professor of economics, and director of OSUN’s Economic Democracy Initiative, posted a policy note on the outcome of the US presidential election and how many Americans voted for progressive policies, such as state ballot measures to increase minimum wage and require paid sick leave, despite Donald Trump having won the presidential bid. She addresses how numerous issues, including economic concerns, wages, immigration policy, and reproductive health rights, among many other factors, affected the way voters responded, particularly in states that voted Republican. “All polls—whatever one’s feelings about their reliability—kept pointing to the same defining issue in this (as in every other) election: the economy,” writes Tcherneva. “Critical issues of democracy, abortion, and immigration filled the airwaves and political speeches, but the economy remained once again more powerful than any one of them.”

Post Date: 11-12-2024

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Joan Tower’s Cello Concerto A New Day Featured in Times Union

A New Day, a cello concerto released in 2021 by Joan Tower, Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard College, was featured in Times Union. The work, which began as a commission by the Colorado Music Festival, Cleveland Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra, was written while Jeff Litfin, her late husband of 50 years, was dying. “I was in real bad shape,” Tower said. “So I decided to write. In fact, all the music I've been writing since then is about him.” The concerto, which will be performed by Albany Symphony in Troy on November 16 and 17, contains four movements: “Daybreak,” “Working Out,” “Mostly Alone” and “Into the Night.” The titles are intentionally simple, allowing for many interpretations of a single day, she told Times Union.

Post Date: 11-12-2024

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Center for Indigenous Studies’ Three-Day Convening at the Venice Biennale Featured in Hyperallergic

Bard’s Center for Indigenous Studies (CfIS) hosted a convening in Venice to consider how Indigenous aesthetics, futurity, and arts intersect with global practices and modernism. The name of the convening, “if I read you/what I wrote bear/in mind I wrote it,” from a poem by Layli Long Soldier MFA ’14 (Oglala Lakota), gathered Native and non-Native poets, academics, artists, musicians, curators, teachers, and students to address the interdisciplinary, transnational nature of Bard Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson's (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) work in the US Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale Arte.

“The convening as a whole felt like an energizing disco, a kaleidoscopic exploration of Native identities in all their rich dualities, contrasts, and dichotomies: familiar and unfamiliar, past and future, joy and sorrow, detailed and monumental,” wrote Sháńdíín Brown (Navajo) for Hyperallergic.
  
The three-day event hosted luminaries of Native American and Indigenous studies and cutting-edge performers. Panels on beads, materiality, economies of labor and trade, aesthetics, poetry, performance, silhouette, and color also celebrated contemporary Indigenous artists, writers, and activists while examining the continued segregation of Indigenous voices in conversations regarding taste making, trade, modernity, and power. Several Bard College faculty and staff participated including Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies, associate professor of history and American and Indigenous studies, and CfIS director; Brandi Norton (Iñupiaq), CfIS curator of public programs; Melina Roise, CfIS program coordinator; and Dinaw Mengetsu, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of the Humanities and director of the Written Arts Program.

Further reading:
The Art of Jeffrey Gibson Shines in Venice (ICT)

Post Date: 11-07-2024

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Omar G. Encarnación Published in History Today

Omar G. Encarnación, Charles Flint Kellogg Professor of Politics in the Division of Social Studies at Bard, contributed to “Is It Possible to Forgive and Forget,” a group article published in History Today that examines how policies of remembrance and education, versus those that actively promote forgetting problematic pasts, have been used in approaching how countries grapple with their own fraught national histories. In his excerpt, Encarnación explores how Spain’s decision to enact the Pact of Forgetting from 1975 to 2007, intended to avoid confronting directly the authoritarian legacy of Francoism, meant adopting practices that promoted political amnesia. “Spain’s experience suggests that forgetting need not mean condemning the past to eternal oblivion, but rather setting it aside until society is ready to deal with it,” he writes.

Post Date: 11-05-2024

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Election Day on Bard’s Campus Featured in Inside Higher Ed

Bard College, now in its fifth year of having a consistent polling site on its Annandale campus, was featured in Inside Higher Ed (IHE) in a report about how campuses and faculty across the country are handling classes on Election Day. At least 86 colleges and universities have canceled classes to facilitate voting, according to Day on Democracy, an organization that helps students advocate for their institutions to give them Election Day off, IHE reports. Today, a group of professors at Bard are opening their classrooms for discussions about the importance of democracy, and are joining attendees for a walk to the campus polling site to support those who are voting. “Many faculty members see a fundamental link between higher education and democracy, that it’s a fundamental pillar of liberal education in the United States,” said Jonathan Becker, executive vice president of Bard College and director of the Center for Civic Engagement. “What more important act for an educator is [there than] to speak about the most fundamental democratic rights, which is the right to vote?”

Post Date: 11-05-2024

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Peter L’Official’s Essay “Black Builders” Published in Places Journal

Peter L’Official, associate professor of literature and director of the American and Indigenous Studies Program, has published “Black Builders,” an article exploring the relationship between both writing and architecture, and race and design, for Places Journal. In examining the works of visionary Black architect and urban planner W. Joseph Black (1961–1977), who tragically died of cancer at age 43, novelist Colson Whitehead, and other scholars and writers, L’Official asks: “What do we learn about visions of cities when we consider writing and architecture as mutually defining?” L’Official delves deeply into Black’s archives and grapples with his brilliant unfinished masterpieces including the ambitious Harlem Music Center and Gateway to Harlem complex, as well as two comprehensive volumes Visions of Harlem, intended as an exhibition and catalogue, and Black Builders of America, a compendium focused on the many known and unknown Black builders dating back from 1619 to the contemporary. Inspired by the career and legacy of W. Joseph Black, L’Official proposes a notion: “writing about architecture is also a method of practicing architecture—that is, by thinking it.” In contemplating “how many works by Black architects, planners, builders, and other dreamers lie dormant, still, in archives, or tossed by the wayside in frustration, never to be lauded as great works of even speculative imagination?” L’Official asserts “We should also expand our notions of who and what Black builders and Black building can be—and, indeed, of what it means to ‘build’ in the first place.”

L’Official’s “Black Builders” is the first essay in An Unfinished Atlas, a series funded by the Mellon Foundation and published by Places Journal that brings together scholars, cultural critics, essayists, and novelists of color to enrich the cultural record of place-based narratives across what is now called North America.

Post Date: 11-05-2024