Professor Karen Barkey Receives Grant to Support Research on Historical Religious Pluralism
Professor Karen Barkey has been awarded a 2024 Expenses Grant from the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University in support of her upcoming book project, Successful Religious Pluralism in the Mediterranean: A Comparative-Historical Study. The grant also supports Barkey’s work with a Bard undergraduate who is transcribing, translating, and organizing Greek interviews into English.
Professor Karen Barkey Receives Grant to Support Research on Historical Religious Pluralism
Charles Theodore Kellogg and Bertie K. Hawver Chair of Sociology and Religion Karen Barkey has been awarded a 2024 Expenses Grant from the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. This grant was awarded in support of her upcoming book project, Successful Religious Pluralism in the Mediterranean: A Comparative-Historical Study. The grant supports Barkey’s archival trips to religious communities including Marseille Espérance, a faith leaders’ committee in Marseille, France, and the Simon Attias Synagogue and Haim Zafrani Research Center in Essaouira, Morocco. It also supports Barkey’s work with a Bard undergraduate who is transcribing, translating, and organizing Greek interviews into English.Professor Barkey has taught at Bard since 2021, during which time she was named the 2021-22 Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean Studies from the Institute for Advanced Studies D'aix-Marseille. Her current research explores how religious coexistence, toleration and sharing occurred in different historical sites under Ottoman rule. Previously, she focused on the comparative and historical study of the Ottoman Empire in relation to France and the Russian Empire.
Post Date: 02-17-2025
Professor Joshua Glick Writes About AI in Film for the Los Angeles Review of Books
Professor Joshua Glick critiqued the movie Here in his recent article for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He considers the movie through the lens of its use of AI, finding that the film’s dependence on the technology mirrors “an embattled film and television industry in dire need of creative reinvigoration and struggling to find a path forward.”Professor Joshua Glick Writes About AI in Film for the Los Angeles Review of Books
Associate Professor of Film and Electronic Arts Joshua Glick critiqued the movie Here in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He considers the movie through the lens of its use of AI, finding that the film’s dependence on the technology mirrors “an embattled film and television industry in dire need of creative reinvigoration and struggling to find a path forward.” Glick analyzes the film’s machine-learning AI, which lets Here represent thousands of years across time and de-age its two main actors: “while Here aimed to be a proof of concept for how AI could be ethically applied to a project at a moment when labor unions, cinephiles, and a wary public have risen up against it, the film once again exposed its fault lines.”Glick has taught at Bard since 2022 and his research focuses on comparative histories of film, television, and radio and the use of emerging technologies. In 2023, he wrote about the emergence of AI in Hollywood for Wired Magazine.
Post Date: 02-17-2025
New York Times Features Christine Sun Kim's MFA ’13 Survey Show at Whitney
Christine Sun Kim MFA ’13, artist and music/sound faculty member in Bard’s MFA program, was profiled in the New York Times, which covered her new survey show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Using musical notation, infographics, and language—both in her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—Kim’s work takes the form of drawings, videos, sculptures, and installations that often explore non-auditory, political dimensions of sound.New York Times Features Christine Sun Kim's MFA ’13 Survey Show at Whitney
Christine Sun Kim MFA ’13, artist and music/sound faculty member in Bard’s MFA program, was profiled in the New York Times, which covered her new survey show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition, All Day All Night, encompasses her entire artistic output to date, featuring works that range from early 2010s performance documentation to her 2024 mural Ghost(ed) Notes, which has been recreated across multiple walls at the Whitney. Using musical notation, infographics, and language—both in her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—Kim’s work takes the form of drawings, videos, sculptures, and installations that often explore non-auditory, political dimensions of sound. Kim, who was born deaf, knows “how sound works, and what the expectations around it are,” she told the New York Times. “So why wouldn’t I use that in my work instead of rejecting it outright? Sound isn’t part of my life, but when I found sound art, it became really interesting to me as a medium.”For Further Reading:
https://www.vulture.com/article/the-exhilarating-anger-of-christine-sun-kim.html
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/fine-art/christine-sun-kim-all-day-all-night-review-lines-of-communication-at-the-whitney-airdigital-77dacfeb
https://robbreport.com/shelter/art-collectibles/in-the-studio-with-christine-sun-kim-1236164748/
Post Date: 02-17-2025
More CFCD News
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Clara Sousa-Silva Gives Talk on the Search for Alien Life
Clara Sousa-Silva Gives Talk on the Search for Alien Life
Post Date: 02-18-2025
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Lucy Sante Writes About Larry Fink for the New York Review of Books
Lucy Sante Writes About Larry Fink for the New York Review of Books
Lucy Sante, writer, critic, and former Bard faculty member, reflects on the life and legacy of the late photographer Larry Fink, who was professor emeritus of Photography at Bard, in a piece for the New York Review of Books. Sante discusses Fink’s impact at Bard, his childhood on Long Island, and his evolution as a photographer, from documenting figures of the civil rights era to his work as a society photographer. “Larry believes in light and its companion, shadow, as much as he believes in the inexhaustible variety of human beings and the forms and degrees of connection among them,” Sante writes. “He has been our spy, our witness, our explorer in the human jungle, and here are the specimens he has brought back, annotated by his emotions.”
Post Date: 02-06-2025
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Filmmaker Ephraim Asili Named a 2025 United States Artists Fellow
Filmmaker Ephraim Asili Named a 2025 United States Artists Fellow
Ephraim Asili MFA ’11, associate professor and director of film and electronic arts, has been selected as one of 50 artists to receive a 2025 United States Artists (USA) Fellowship. Each year, individual artists and collaboratives are anonymously nominated to apply by a geographically diverse and rotating group of artists, scholars, critics, producers, curators, and other arts professionals. USA Fellowships are annual $50,000 unrestricted awards recognizing the most compelling artists working and living in the United States, in all disciplines, at every stage of their career.
“My approach to filmmaking is both hybrid and experimental. My films often alternate between essayistic or observational documentary form, narrative fiction, and self-reflexive gestures which foreground how the film medium itself, and the filmmaker using it, frame lived experience,” says Asili.
Ephraim Asili is an African American artist and educator whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. Often inspired by his quotidian wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations on the everyday. He received his BA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and his MFA in Film and Interdisciplinary Art at Bard College. Asili’s films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, The Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Asili’s 2020 feature debut The Inheritance premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival and was recently the focus of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art where it is a part of their permanent collection. In 2021 Asili was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the summer of 2022 Asili directed a short film Strange Math along with the 2023 Men’s Spring/Summer fashion show for Louis Vuitton. In 2023, Asili was the recipient of a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, and in 2024 Asili was awarded a grant from Creative Capital.
Sancia Miala Shiba Nash '19 and Drew K. Broderick MA ’19 of kekahi wahi also won a 2025 United States Artists fellowship. kekahi wahi was instigated in 2020 by filmmaker Sancia Miala Shiba Nash and artist Drew K. Broderick. The grassroots film initiative is committed to documenting transformations across the Hawaiian archipelago and sharing stories of the greater Pacific through time-based media.
Post Date: 02-03-2025
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First Comprehensive Survey of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art Opens June 2025 at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art
First Comprehensive Survey of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art Opens June 2025 at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art
All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College’s (CCS Bard) Hessel Museum of Art is the first exhibition to contextualize and historicize an essential chapter in Arab modern and contemporary art. This in-depth presentation of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, which was founded in 1951 and remained a creative force through the early 1970s, presents a spirited picture of multiple generations of artists working together to forge a new and distinct aesthetic that captured the dynamism and hope of postcolonial life in Iraq. The exhibition invites audiences to learn about modernism from the vantage point of Iraq—a vibrant site of exchange and influence across West Asia, North Africa, and Europe, reflecting on the group’s formation, progression, and impact on subsequent generations of artists.
On view June 21 through October 19, 2025, All Manner of Experiments will combine significant examples of painting, sculpture, and drawing from the Group with archival material, including newsreel footage, the Group’s manifesto, exhibition posters, and artist-designed brochures. The exhibition is curated by expert in modern Iraqi art history Nada Shabout along with specialist in modern Iraqi art Tiffany Floyd, and Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator at CCS Bard Lauren Cornell.
“The artists of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art thought of themselves as international citizens carving contributions in an inclusive modern history through forging unique artistic identities. Their explorations manifested in iconic work and charted a path of aesthetic formation that engaged their heritage in a dynamic present. Most importantly, the exhibition allows for a rare opportunity to gather and view works by members of the Group, many of which have not been seen since their initial exhibition,” said Shabout.
“Developed through extensive research, this foundational show reflects CCS Bard’s commitment to building scholarship of contemporary art histories, in this case, a chapter of Iraqi art that has not yet been exhibited or studied at a U.S. institution,” said Cornell. “The exhibition provides a rich teaching and learning opportunity, as it reframes Iraqi art and global modernism for students, scholars, and broad audiences, both in New York and around the world.”
All Manner of Experiments draws from eminent collections such as the Barjeel Art Foundation (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates), Dalloul Art Foundation (Beirut, Lebanon), Ibrahimi Collection (Amman, Jordan and Baghdad, Iraq), and Qatar Museums / Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha, Qatar), as well as from artists and estates.
The Baghdad Group for Modern Art was formed after a dynamic period of accelerated change and growth in Iraq following the nation’s liberation from British rule in 1932. During the 1930s and ’40s, amid ongoing political turbulence, artists began a crucial negotiation between a nascent postcolonial national consciousness and a burgeoning modernism. Iraqi artists were challenged on two intersecting fronts: on the one hand, with the need to construct points of continuity with Iraqi visual history, and on the other, with the call to create new forms of representation capable of expressing a modern existence.
Jewad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al Said, founders of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, united artists under the shared commitment of “Istilham al turath,” which translates to seeking inspiration and motivation from artistic heritage through innovative methods. Amid the broader sociopolitical tensions and rising revolutionary fervor, the Group synthesized the concerns of a vast swathe of artists by interpreting the abstraction of Western modernism through aesthetics drawn from Islamic and Mesopotamian cultures into various styles. The notion of istilham remains central to their legacy, reaching beyond the Group’s active years and geographical borders to impact today's Iraqi art scene.
Spanning works from 1946 to 2023, All Manner of Experiments will focus on the relationships within the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, including teacher-student dynamics, aesthetic experiments, and the contributions of lesser-known members as well as Group precedents and peers. The exhibition is organized into a series of experimental narratives that demonstrate membership in the group as not a fixed process, but a flow of people and ideas held together by a common impetus toward material innovation and aesthetic exploration.
In addition to examining the Group's formation through the work of its two leaders and the contributions of its original members, All Manner of Experiments will track the Group’s changing membership over the first decade of its formation and attempts to retain its continuity as a group after the untimely death of Selim in 1961. The loss of Selim ushered in a period of fragmentation that coincided with political and social upheaval in Iraq, including regional conflicts such as the 1967 Arab defeat, as well as the rise of pan-Arabism, which strongly impacted Iraqi artists and intellectuals. This era also saw newly established institutions flourish, including the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad (later the College of Fine Arts) and National Museum of Modern Art, bringing about a new understanding of modernism and the emergence of the New Vision Group in 1969, which expanded on the Baghdad Group’s ideals to confront contemporary injustices. Their manifesto emphasized activism, reflecting the turbulent realities of the era and marking a departure from earlier artistic focuses.
By the 1980s and beyond, the movement’s legacy persisted amid challenges, including war, sanctions, isolation, and diaspora. A later generation of artists grappled with the destruction of cultural infrastructure and sought inspiration from the Group’s principles. Many artists in the diaspora reexamined their heritage, drawing on the movement's ideals to navigate new realities. After the 2003 invasion, which shattered Iraq’s art scene, private efforts to revive the Group’s vision emerged, emphasizing the need to reconnect with Iraq’s cultural identity.
Featured artists include Faraj Abbu, Himat Mohammed Ali, Sadik Alfraji, Dia al-Azzawi, Rasoul Alwan, Shakir Hassan Al Said, Khalil Al-Warid, Kahtan Awni, Bogus Bablanian, Amar Dawod, Ismail Fattah, Ghassan Ghaib, Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Fouad Jihad, Ardash Kakafian, Hanaa Malallah, Mahmoud Obaidi, Widad Orfali, Suad Al Attar, Khalid al Rahal, Miran al-Saadi, Mahmoud Sabri, Naziha Selim, Nazar Salim (Nizar Selim), Jewad Selim, Lorna Selim, Kareem Risan, Walid Siti, Madiha Umar, and Nazar Yahya.
About Nada Shabout
Nada Shabout is a Regents Professor of Art History at the University of North Texas (UNT) and a leading expert in modern Arab art. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art (2010), Modernism and Iraq (2009), and A Banquet for Seaweed: Snapshots from the Arab 1980s (2023). Shabout is the founding director of the Modern Art Iraq Archive (MAIA), a project preserving Iraq’s modern artistic heritage, and has advanced the field through her leadership roles, including as founding president of the Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey (AMCA). She is the author of Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics (2007) and co-editor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018).
Exhibition Catalogue
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog designed by Hala Al-Ani and published by CCS Bard featuring essays by Nada Shabout, Tiffany Floyd, and Nabil Salih (CHRA Bard ‘25), reflections from participating artists, and illustrations of featured works. This catalog will be followed in 2026 by an additional publication featuring extensive scholarship on the Baghdad Group for Modern Art by Shabout, published by the American University in Cairo Press.
Exhibition Organization and Credits
All Manner of Experiments is curated by Nada Shabout with Tiffany Floyd and Lauren Cornell.
Lead support for All Manner of Experiments is provided by the Barjeel Art Foundation (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates), the Dalloul Art Foundation (Beirut, Lebanon), the Ibrahimi Collection (Amman, Jordan and Baghdad, Iraq), and Qatar Museums / Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha, Qatar).
Major support for All Manner of Experiments is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.
Exhibitions at CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum of Art are made possible with generous support from Lonti Ebers, the Marieluise Hessel Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.
Post Date: 01-30-2025
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Bard College Named a 2024 Tree Campus by Arbor Day Foundation
Bard College Named a 2024 Tree Campus by Arbor Day Foundation
Bard College has been recognized as a 2024 Tree Campus by the Arbor Day Foundation, a global nonprofit with a mission to inspire people to plant and celebrate trees. The Tree Campus program, operated in partnership with the National Association of State Foresters and with support from professional partner Bartlett Tree Experts, recognizes schools, universities, and healthcare facilities that utilize trees to improve their communities.
“This is Bard’s 13th year as a Tree Campus, and I couldn’t be more excited to once again celebrate this distinction,” said Amy Parrella, director of Horticulture and Arboretum at Bard. “As a Level II ArbNet accredited arboretum, Bard will honor this recognition and also celebrate our 18th year as a campus arboretum with our annual Arbor Day tree planting on April 25.”
The Landscape and Arboretum Program at Bard aims to provide a campus environment rich in horticultural diversity and beauty that can be readily enjoyed by the College and surrounding community. The program promotes knowledge and appreciation of conservation through its preservation of the natural and landscaped resources of Bard’s nearly 1000-acre campus, which serves as both a place for community enjoyment as well as a living classroom, and comprises meadows, forests, wetlands, tidal estuary, and the Sawkill Creek, a Hudson River tributary.
“Trees have the power to inspire learning and improve well-being,” said Michelle Saulnier, vice president of programs at the Arbor Day Foundation. “By growing campus green spaces, forward-thinking higher education leaders like Bard College are cultivating vibrant learning communities that also benefit the greater environment.”
The Arbor Day Foundation fosters a growing community of more than 1 million leaders, innovators, planters, and supporters united by their belief that a more hopeful future can be shaped through the power of trees. The organization has planted more than 500 million trees in forests and communities across more than 60 countries since 1972.Bard College has been recognized as a 2024 Tree Campus by the Arbor Day Foundation, a global nonprofit with a mission to inspire people to plant and celebrate trees. The Tree Campus program, operated in partnership with the National Association of State Foresters and with support from professional partner Bartlett Tree Experts, recognizes schools, universities, and healthcare facilities that utilize trees to improve their communities.
“This is Bard’s 13th year as a Tree Campus, and I couldn’t be more excited to once again celebrate this distinction,” said Amy Parrella, director of Horticulture & Arboretum at Bard. “As a Level II ArbNet accredited arboretum, Bard will honor this recognition and also celebrate our 18th year as a campus arboretum with our annual Arbor Day tree planting on April 25th.”
The Landscape and Arboretum Program at Bard aims to provide a campus environment rich in horticultural diversity and beauty that can be readily enjoyed by the College and surrounding community. The program promotes knowledge and appreciation of conservation through its preservation of the natural and landscaped resources of Bard’s nearly 1000-acre campus, which serves as both a place for community enjoyment as well as a living classroom, and comprises meadows, forests, wetlands, tidal estuary, and the Sawkill Creek, a Hudson River tributary.
“Trees have the power to inspire learning and improve well-being,” said Michelle Saulnier, vice president of programs at the Arbor Day Foundation. “By growing campus green spaces, forward-thinking higher education leaders like Bard College are cultivating vibrant learning communities that also benefit the greater environment.”
The Arbor Day Foundation fosters a growing community of more than 1 million leaders, innovators, planters, and supporters united by their belief that a more hopeful future can be shaped through the power of trees. The organization has planted more than 500 million trees in forests and communities across more than 60 countries since 1972.
Post Date: 01-30-2025
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Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal
Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy Reviewed in the Wall Street Journal
A new book by Joseph Luzzi, Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, has been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal. Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, covers how Dante Alighieri’s poem profoundly influenced other writers and artists in the centuries that followed, leaving its mark on authors such as John Milton, Mary Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, and shaping issues ranging from women’s identity to debates about censorship of canonical literature. “By recounting the history of the poem’s reception by readers over the centuries—from Giovanni Boccaccio and Michelangelo in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance to modernist writers and filmmakers such as Antonio Gramsci and Jean-Luc Godard, Mr. Luzzi shows what a many-headed and irreducible beast it has always been and continues to be,” writes Andrew Frisardi for the Wall Street Journal.
Post Date: 01-28-2025
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Julia Rosenbaum | Faculty Director | [email protected]
Nicholas Lewis I Codirector | [email protected]