Citizens gather at the Civil Rights March on Washington, DC, August 28, 1963.
National Archives, Records of the U.S. Information Agency, Record Group 306 (National Archives Identifier 542044)
The American and Indigenous Studies Program offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of culture and society in the United States.
Students take courses in a wide range of fields with the aim of learning how to study this complex subject in a sensitive and responsible way. In the introductory courses, students develop the ability to analyze a broad spectrum of materials, including novels, autobiographies, newspapers, photographs, films, songs, and websites. In junior seminars and the Senior Project, students identify and integrate relevant methodologies from at least two disciplines, creating modes of analysis appropriate to their topics. By graduation, students should have developed a base of knowledge about the past and present conditions of the American experience both at home and abroad.
Stone Row on Bard College campus. Photo by Karl Rabe
Bard College Receives $25 Million Endowment Gift from Gochman Family Foundation Supporting Renamed American and Indigenous Studies Program
Bard College is excited to announce a transformational $25 million endowment gift from the Gochman Family Foundation, which will substantially advance its work deepening diversity and equity in American Studies with a Center for Indigenous Studies, faculty appointments and student scholarships, and the appointment of an Indigenous Curatorial Fellow at Center for Curatorial Studies. The College’s American Studies Program will be renamed American and Indigenous Studies to more fully reflect continental history and to place Native American and Indigenous Studies at the heart of curricular innovation and development.
Associate Professor of History and Dean of Graduate Studies Christian Ayne Crouch speaks during a 2018 event dedicating new signage on campus designed to encourage critical reflection on Bard’s history. The installation of these historical markers took place in connection with the course Inclusion at Bard, an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences offering.
Bard College Awarded $1.49 Million Grant from Mellon Foundation for American Studies Initiative
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Bard College a $1.49 million grant for its “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project. Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck proposes a Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) approach to a revitalized American Studies curriculum and undertakes an expansive understanding of land acknowledgment that goes beyond addressing a single institution’s history in regards to Native peoples.
MARGARET KATHRYN CURTIN San Jose, California American Studies: “‘We had become the VC in our own homeland’: Indigenous Veterans of Vietnam and the 1973 Siege of Wounded Knee” Project Adviser: Wendy Urban-Mead
FRANCES J. LEWIS Cambridge, Massachusetts American Studies: “Encountering Authenticity: A Case Study on the Cooperstown Farmers’ Museum” Project Adviser: Julia Rosenbaum
MAXWELL RILEY TOTH Manchester, Connecticut American Studies and French Studies: “A Dazzling Détente: Exploring the Cultural Facets of the Kennedys’ 1961 Visit to Paris and the Instrumental Role of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy” Project Advisers: Simon Gilhooley and Éric Trudel
IMMANUEL JOSI WILLIAMS Troy, New York American Studies: “A Biomythography of Mommy” Project Adviser: Myra Young Armstead Studio Arts: “She Is Clothed with Strength and Dignity; She Can Laugh at the Days to Come!” Project Adviser: Dave McKenzie
Senior Projects 2021
CLAIRE FITZGIBBON LAMPSON Sebastopol, California American Studies: “Toward a Celebration of Native Resilience: Interrupting National Myth-Making in the American Classroom” Project Adviser: Christian Ayne Crouch
Senior Projects 2020
JONATHAN COLLAZO Clermont, Florida American Studies: “To Be the Sole Performer: A Selective Outline of the Development of the Solo Marimba in the United States” Project Adviser: Myra Young Armstead Percussion Performance (BMus): Haaksma: Skip, Still; Druckman: “Reflections on the Nature of Water”; Mackey: “See Ya Thursday”; Tower: “Clocks” Principal Teachers: So- Percussion: Eric Cha-Beach, Jason Treuting, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski
NICHOLAS JOSEPH FIORELLINI Merion Station, Pennsylvania American Studies and Literature: “‘A Visit to the Coffee Houses’: How Local News Wrote about the Humoresque Coffeeshop Raids” Project Adviser: Éric Trudel
ALEXIS KIMBERLY MARESCA Fairfield, Connecticut American Studies: “Feta, Blintzes, and Burritos: The Evolution of the Diner and Immigrants’ Role in Defining American Food Culture” Project Adviser: Donna Ford Grover ’80
SCARLETT ANN SINAY Sherman Oaks, California American Studies: “‘No Place’ in CyberSpace” Project Adviser: David Shein
MICAH RAQUEL THEODORE New Orleans, Louisiana American Studies: “Fruit of the Spirit: An Investigation of How French Colonialism Transnationally Created the Creolized Black Dance in New Orleans, Called Secondline, through the Lens of an Original Treme Babydoll” Concentration: Africana Studies Project Adviser: Donna Ford Grover ’80
Senior Projects 2019
BARI BOSSIS Delray Beach, Florida American Studies: “‘The Great Pleasures Don’t Come So Cheap’: Material Objects, Pragmatic Behavior, and Aesthetic Commitments in Willa Cather’s Fiction” Project Adviser: Matthew Mutter
AMY CASSIERE Metairie, Louisiana American Studies: “King Cake: A Look at the Cake That Gave Mardi Gras Its Flavor” Project Adviser: Christian Crouch Oboe Performance (BMus): Beethoven: Romance for Oboe and Piano, Op. 50; Hindemith: Sonata for English Horn and Piano; Dutilleux: Sonata for Oboe and Piano; Damase: Trio for Flute, Oboe, and Piano Principal Teachers: Elaine Douvas, Melissa Hooper, and Alex Knoll
ISABELLA THERESE FEINSTEIN Seattle, Washington American Studies: “Picturing a History” Project Adviser: Myra Young Armstead
JESZACK I. GAMMON Brooklyn, New York American Studies: “Black Oiler,” a narrative of a black male told through music and the lenses of different African diasporic authors Concentration: Africana Studies Project Adviser: Alex Benson
MADISON MICHELLE KAHN Pacific Palisades, California American Studies: “‘The Educated Indian’: Native Perspectives on Knowledge and Resistance in the 19th and 20th Centuries” Project Adviser: Christian Crouch
CARL ROBERT NELSON Newburyport, Massachusetts American Studies: “A Hundred Houses: Pauline Leader and the Spatial Poetics of Disability” Concentration: Experimental Humanities Project Adviser: Alex Benson
Courses and Requirements
Click below for a complete list of currently offered courses.
Courses and Requirements
Moderation Requirements
In addition to the standard Bard Moderation requirements, American and Indigenous Studies students are required to complete the following three courses in order to moderate:
American Studies 101, Introduction to American and Indigenous Studies, or American Studies 102, Introduction to American Culture and Values
At least two other courses focusing on the United States
For Moderation into American and Indigenous Studies, students should submit the two college-wide short Moderation papers (on past and future academic work) as well as a 10-12 page critical essay completed in one of their American and Indigenous Studies courses.
Following Moderation, American and Indigenous Studies students must complete five more courses, as well as their Senior Project, in order to graduate:
At least two more courses, any level, focusing on the United States (in addition to those taken for Moderation)
At least two courses, any level, focusing on non-U.S. cultures and societies
A Junior Seminar focusing on the United States (Junior Seminars are 300-level courses with an emphasis on research methods, culminating in a 20–25 page research paper or equivalently substantial final project. It is expected that one or more of these courses will be taken prior to beginning the Senior Project.) A second junior seminar in a different division is strongly encouraged.
Senior Project (two semesters)
At least two of the students’ U.S.-focused courses must emphasize the period before 1900. In order to ensure a variety of perspectives on students’ work, both the Moderation and Senior Project boards must consist of faculty members drawn from more than one division.
Program Faculty
Program Director: Peter L’Official Phone: 845-758-7556 E-mail: [email protected]
Groundbreaking Survey Examining Performance and Objecthood in Native North American Contemporary Art Opens at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, June 2023
The first major exhibition to center performance as an origin point for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Inuit, and Alaska Native artists opens this June at the Center for Curatorial Studies’ (CCS Bard) Hessel Museum of Art. Curated by leading scholar and curator Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 traces the history of experimentation that emerged from the Institute of American Indian Arts’ Department for New Native Theater in the late 1960s and continues to inform the practice of Native artists today. Indian Theater is on view from June 24 through November 26, 2023.
Groundbreaking Survey Examining Performance and Objecthood in Native North American Contemporary Art Opens at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art, June 2023
Featuring over 100 works from the 1960s through today, Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 centers performance as origin point for the practice of artists from across Turtle Island
Exhibition features commissions and performances by Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), Jeffrey Gibson (The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee), Maria Hupfield (Anishinaabe, Wasauksing First Nation / Canada), and Eric-Paul Riege (Diné)
The first major exhibition to center performance as an origin point for the development of contemporary art by Native American, First Nations, Inuit, and Alaska Native artists opens this June at the Center for Curatorial Studies’ (CCS Bard) Hessel Museum of Art. Curated by leading scholar and curator Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 traces the history of experimentation that emerged from the Institute of American Indian Arts’ Department for New Native Theater in the late 1960s and continues to inform the practice of Native artists today. The exhibition brings together over 100 works by over 40 artists and collectives, including new commissions and performances by Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), Jeffrey Gibson (The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee), Maria Hupfield (Anishnaabek, Wasauksing First Nation / Canada), and Eric-Paul Riege (Diné).
On view from June 24 through November 26, 2023, Indian Theater is part of a sweep of initiatives at Bard College to place Indigenous Studies at the heart of curricular innovation and development, including the appointment of Hopkins as CCS Bard’s inaugural Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies.
“This exhibition marks a critical contribution to contextualizing contemporary Indigenous art as part of a larger artistic movement whose history has been understudied and overlooked,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Founding Director of the Hessel Museum of Art. “This groundbreaking presentation at the Hessel Museum provides a new framework for the interpretation of Indigenous contemporary art, a field of study that we look forward to continuing to advance with new research and curatorial innovation.”
“This exhibition takes its impetus from a modest, yet significant document: Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process, published by the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 1969. The treatise was the first to attempt to define ‘New Native’ theater, ushering in a new way of framing the long practice of performance in Indigenous societies across Turtle Island; they were also creating a template for its future,” stated Hopkins. “Inspired by this document, the exhibition, Indian Theater is attuned to the intersections between objects, performance—in its expanded forms—film and video, and visual sovereignty in Native North American contemporary art.”
Taking a broad scope to examining the history of Native contemporary art through the lens of performance, the exhibition engages notions of object and agency, sound and instrumentation, dress and adornment, and the body and its absence. The presentation begins chronologically and cites the 1969 document, Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process, published by the IAIA. Featured is early documentation of IAIA theater performances, along with recently digitized footage of Spiderwoman Theater’s evocatively titled 1979 play Cabaret: An Evening of Disgusting Songs and Pukey Images, available for viewing for the first time since its original debut. The longest running theater group in the United States, Spiderwoman Theater emerged from the feminist movement of the 1970s and the disillusionment with the treatment of women in radical political movements of the time. Cabaret reflects the group’s contribution to the national dialogue on gender in its critique and satirization of how women are often made to swallow male platitudes about love and its challenges to homogenizing images of women.
The exhibition progresses with a survey of film, video, performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, and beadwork that at once pay homage to the legacy of innovative Native aesthetic traditions and this continuing tradition of experimentation and performativity. Jeffrey Gibson’s commission responds directly to the 1969 treatise, Indian Theatre, with a new performance, an arced choreography that centers music and oration. White Carver, an installation and performance by Nicholas Galanin features a non-Native carver engaged in carving a surprising object, one that might initially seem like a customary item in the vein of Northwest Coast Native American art. Galanin reconceives traditional carving practices, including the ways in which many Native carvers on the Northwest coast publicly perform their craft to a non-Native public, to confront the history of colonial fetishization of Indigenous cultures and objects. Another performance features artist Eric-Paul Riege as he engages with a series of soft sculptures of oversized pairs of Diné earrings. Over his day-long durational performance, his suspended sculptures are activated and sounded, becoming an extension of the artist’s body and Diné cosmology.
Both the Galanin and Riege performances will take place in the galleries during opening weekend (June 24-25, 2023), joined by Rebecca Belmore, who will activate her large-scale commission, Familia, with a seven-hour durational performance, and participate in an artist talk. Installed on the exterior of the Hessel Museum of Art, Familia is a monumental new work (17 x 30 ft) that will blanket the Museum’s façade. Using worker’s coveralls as raw material, the piece mirrors the dimension of a flag, but instead of symbolizing nationhood or sovereignty, this work questions the colonial impulses behind these gestures and their histories of labor exploitation. Belmore’s related performance will call attention to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Two-Spirit, and Trans People (MMIWG2ST+)through a collective performance of care that will center objects on the grounds of the Hessel Museum that are often overlooked.
Also on view are works by artists including KC Adams (Métis); asinnajaq (Inuk); Sonny Assu (Ligwiłda'xw Kwakwaka'wakw from Wei Wai Kum Nation); Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc); Rick Bartow (Wiyot); Bob Boyer (Métis); Dana Claxton (Lakota); Theo Jean Cuthand (Plains Cree, Scottish, Irish); Ruth Cuthand (Plains Cree, Scottish, Irish, Canadian); Beau Dick (Kwakwaka’wakw, Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw First Nation); Demian DinéYahzi’ (Diné); Rosalie Favell (Métis (Cree/ British); Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin, Czech and Dutch); Ishi Glinsky (Tohono O'odham); Raven Halfmoon (Caddo); Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill (Métis); Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians); Matthew Kirk (Navajo/Diné); Kite (Oglala Sioux Tribe); Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota); Tanya Lukin Linklater (Alutiiq/Sugpiaq); James Luna (Payómkawichum, Ipai, and Mexican); Rachel Martin (Tlingit/Tsaagweidei, Killer Whale Clan, of the Yellow Cedar House (Xaai Hit’) Eagle Moiety); Kent Monkman (Cree member of Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory, Manitoba); Audie Murray (Métis); Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee); New Red Order, Adam Khalil (Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians); Zack Khalil (Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians); Jackson Polys (Tlingit); Jessie Oonark (Inuit); Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish member of the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Nation); Walter Scott (Kahnawá:ke); Spiderwoman Theater, Charlene Vickers (Anishinaabe); Kay WalkingStick (Citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and Anglo); Marie Watt (Seneca and German-Scot); Dyani White Hawk (Sičangu Lakota); and Nico Williams (Anishinaabe). A full list of artists is available online here.
Additional performances by Ya Tseen and Emily Johnson/Catalyst as well as a series of artists talks will be curated by the Center for Indigenous Studies in complement with Indian Theater throughout the duration of the show.
Exhibition Publication Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 will be accompanied by a major publication, Native Visual Sovereignty: A Reader on Art and Performance, edited by Candice Hopkins and co-produced with Forge Project and charting the evolution of Indigenous North American performance in contemporary art over the past 60 years. The reader, which will be available in fall 2023, comprises newly commissioned essays, poetry, and oral history interviews, alongside reprints of critical texts by leading Indigenous scholars and artists.
Exhibition Organization, Credits & Sponsorship The exhibition and associated reader are made possible by Lonti Ebers, the Marieluise Hessel Foundation, the Gochman Family Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Center’s patrons, supporters, and friends.
Additional support for Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 has been provided by Forge Project, Teiger Foundation, and The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation.
Support for public programs has been provided through the Bard College’s Forge Endowment for American and Indigenous Studies and the Center for Indigenous Studies, generously supported by the Gochman Family Foundation with matching commitments from George Soros and the Open Society Foundation Endowment challenge.
The new commission by Rebecca Belmore for Indian Theater: Native Art, Performance, and Self-determination Since 1969 has been generously supported by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times project.
Post Date: 05-26-2023
Bard Archaeology Students Work on Excavation at Fisher Center’s Maya Lin Building Site, Reports the Daily Catch
Bard archeology students, under the direction of Archaeologist in Residence Christopher Lindner, have been working to unearth cultural clues about the past at a dig site where the new Maya Lin performing arts studio building will be built for the Fisher Center, writes Emily Sachar for the Daily Catch.
Bard Archaeology Students Work on Excavation at Fisher Center’s Maya Lin Building Site, Reports the Daily Catch
Bard archeology students, under the direction of Archaeologist in Residence Christopher Lindner, have been working to unearth cultural clues about the past at a dig site where the new Maya Lin performing arts studio building will be built for the Fisher Center, writes Emily Sachar for the Daily Catch. Ahead of the building construction, the students hope to find artifacts of daily living that may have been used by the Lenape and Muhheakantuck (Mohican), the original stewards of the land where Bard College now resides. “The project is a demonstration of Bard’s commitment to protecting what we can of the Indigenous past,” Lindner, director of the summer Bard Archaeology Field School and Bard’s archaeologist in residence, told Sachar. “It’s a way of showing respect and doing what we can to learn before we have an impact on the land.”
Bard College Hosts Harvard Professor Glenda Carpio as Inaugural Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Toni Morrison Lecturer on April 20
The Inaugural Rethinking Place Toni Morrison Lecture will take place on Thursday, April 20 at 6 pm in the Bitó Auditorium of the Reem-Kayden Center, Bard College. Delivered by Glenda Carpio, Chair of the English Department and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the lecture “Migrant Aesthetics,” adapted from Carpio’s forthcoming book of the same title, shows how through artistic innovation, contemporary authors allow us to apprehend the historical legacies and political injustice that produce forced migration. A reception prior to the talk will be hosted by Samosa Shack Kingston at 5 pm.
Sponsored by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, a Mellon Foundation Humanities for All Times project, this lecture series celebrates the work of both Electa “Wuhwehweeheemeew” Quinney, a citizen of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican nation and the first woman to teach in a public school in the territory which would become Wisconsin; and the American novelist, essayist, and editor, Toni Morrison, who was a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Bard College from 1979–1981. The series invites luminaries from fields like Native American and Indigenous studies, American studies, ethnic studies, and Black studies to give one lecture each fall and spring semester over the grant duration which models the kind of multi-disciplinary and intersectional scholarship that Rethinking Place seeks to promote.
The Quinney-Morrison Lecture Series provides opportunities for academics and other regional partners to learn what work needs to be done in the creation of land acknowledgement projects. It provides space to reflect on individuals' relationships with spaces, lands, and borders, to dissuade action without reflection, and to share responsibilities for encouraging this type of thought and engagement beyond tribal communities to all.
Bard College students, faculty, and staff along with non-Bard affiliated community members are welcomed. Please join us prior to the talk at 5 pm for a reception hosted by Samosa Shack Kingston. A recording of the lecture will be available upon request.
Glenda R. Carpio is the Chair of the English Department and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery (2008). She coedited African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (2011) with Professor Werner Sollors and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (2019).
Bard’s “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project affirms Bard’s tangible commitments to the principles and ideals of the College’s 2020 land acknowledgment and is supported by the Mellon Foundation’s 2022 Humanities for All Times. The Mellon grant offers three years of support for developing a land acknowledgment–based curriculum, public-facing Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) programming, and efforts to support the work of emerging NAIS scholars and tribally enrolled artists at Bard. Rethinking Place emphasizes broad community-based knowledge, collaboration, and collectives of inquiry and also attends to the importance of considering the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, upon whose homelands Bard sits.
“Self-determination is the basis for any decolonial movement”: Candice Hopkins Interviewed in ArtReview about Indigenous Studies and Native Art Initiatives at Bard
Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation) CCS ’03 recently joined Bard’s faculty as part of the College’s transformative initiatives in Native American and Indigenous studies, developed in partnership with Forge Project and supported by a $50 million endowment. Hopkins, CCS Bard Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies and Forge Project’s executive director, speaks with Shanna Ketchum-Heap of Birds (Diné/Navajo) for ArtReview about Indigenous self-determination and the importance of this new collaboration between the Native-led arts and cultural organization Forge and Bard College. “We realized that we could attempt to enact quite radical institutional change through a partnership between Forge and Bard,” said Hopkins. “One of those involved naming: American Studies is now American and Indigenous Studies. There are cluster hires for faculty at all different levels, and scholarships (including living expenses) for Native students. There is also support for the recruitment of Native students, because Native students do not always know what opportunities are out there for them. And if they do not know then they are not going to apply. But if they also do not see themselves represented, people are going to feel really alienated when they come to a place.”
Hopkins notes that these College-wide initiatives, including the establishment of a Center for Indigenous Studies, were “built upon the good work that Bard was already doing with their Andrew W. Mellon grant called ‘Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck’. At the center of it was the question of ‘how do we make land acknowledgments actionable?’ because they have become often rote, performative and not based on real collaboration or community engagement.”
Announced in September 2022, these initiatives are having an immediate impact on Bard’s community and its undergraduate and graduate academic programs. “The intent was for this to be felt right away, and I am already seeing it happening. People are coming here; more Native folks are coming to teach and be engaged with postdoctoral students. It will be interesting to see what comes out of it and what students do, what impact that they make,” she said.
Hopkins, who currently advises and teaches at CCS Bard, will curate a major exhibition Indian Theater, opening June 24, 2023 at the Hessel Museum of Art.
Myra Young Armstead Spoke with the Times Union about the Life and Legacy of James F. Brown, “One of the Country’s First Black Master Gardeners”
While slave narratives—“first-person retellings of the enslaved experience”—were persuasive to white abolitionists and widely distributed, quieter but no less important details about the early years of emancipation can be found in the diaries of one of the country’s first Black Master Gardeners, James F. Brown. Myra Young Armstead, vice president for academic inclusive excellence and Lyford Paterson Edwards and Helen Gray Edwards Professor of Historical Studies, spoke with the Times Union about Brown’s life and legacy. “In the period before the Civil War, freedom in the most obvious sense for a runaway meant emancipation,” Armstead said. “It also meant freedom from wage slavery, and freedom to operate in the civic sphere. We can explore the many meanings of freedom in the antebellum period through James’s diary.”
Bard College Professors Souleymane Badolo and Kite Each Receive 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards
Bard College Assistant Professor of Dance Souleymane Badolo and MFA alum in Music/Sound and American and Indigenous Studies Program faculty member Kite (aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18) have won 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures: Art, Culture, Impact” Awards, which will fund the creation of experimental, risk-taking projects that push boundaries formally and thematically, venturing into wild, out-there, never-before-seen concepts, and future universes real or imagined.
Creative Capital awarded 50 groundbreaking projects—comprising 66 individual artists—focused on Technology, Performing Arts, and Literature, as well as Multidisciplinary and Socially Engaged forms. Souleymane Badolo (with Jacob Bamogo) won an award in Dance. Kite won an award in Technology. Awardees will receive varying amounts up to $50,000 in direct funding to help finance their projects and build thriving artistic careers. The award provides a range of grant services from industry connections and financial planning to peer mentorship and community-building opportunities. Grant funding is unrestricted and may be used for any purpose to advance the project, including, but not limited to, studio space, housing, groceries, staffing, childcare, equipment, computers, and travel. The combined value of the 2023 Creative Capital Awards totals more than $2.5 million in artist support.
“The 2023 Creative Capital cohort reaffirms the unpredictable and radical range of ideas alive in the arts today—from artists working in Burkina Faso to Cambodia and across the United States. We continue to see our democratic, open-call grantmaking process catalyze visionary projects that will influence our communities, our culture, and our environment,” said Christine Kuan, Creative Capital President Executive Director.
The Creative Capital grant is administered through a national open call, a democratic process involving external review of thousands of applications by international industry experts, arts administrators, curators, scholars, and artists. The 2023 grantee cohort comprises 75% BIPOC artists, representing Asian, Black or African American, Latinx, Native American or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and Middle Eastern-identified artists; 10% of artists identify as having a disability; and 59% of artists identify as women, gender nonconforming, or nonbinary. The cohort includes emerging, mid-career, and established artists between the ages of 25 and 69. The artists are affiliated with all regions of the United States and its territories, as well as artists based in Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Germany, and Japan.
Kite also won a 2023 United States Artists Fellowship in Media. The award honors her creative accomplishments and supports her ongoing artistic and professional development. Kite is one of 45 USA Fellows across 10 creative disciplines who will receive unrestricted $50,000 cash awards. USA Fellowships are awarded to artists at all stages of their careers and from all areas of the country through a rigorous nomination and panel selection process. Fellowships are awarded in the following disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. Learn more about USA Fellowships here.
Souleymane ‘Solo’ Badolo is a Brooklyn-based dancer, choreographer, and founder of the Burkina Faso–based troupe Kongo Ba Téria, which fuses traditional African dance with Western contemporary dance. A native of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Badolo began his professional career with the African dance company DAMA. He has also performed with Salia nï Seydou and the National Ballet of Burkina Faso, and worked with French choreographers Elsa Wolliaston and Mathilde Monnier. Badolo and Kongo Ba Téria are featured in the documentary Movement (R)evolution Africa. He appeared in the 2015 BAM Next Wave Festival; has created solo projects for Danspace, New York Live Arts, Dance New Amsterdam, Harlem Stage, the 92nd Street Y, and New York’s River to River Festival; and was commissioned to create a dance for Philadanco as part of James Brown: Get on the Good Foot, which was produced by the Apollo Theater and toured nationally and internationally. He was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2011 as outstanding emerging choreographer, received the Juried Bessie Award in 2012, and a 2016 Bessie for Outstanding Production for his piece Yimbégré, which “gloriously communicated the clash and reconciliation of the different traditions held within one’s life, one’s body.” The Suitcase Fund of New York Live Arts has supported Badolo’s ongoing research in Africa. He graduated with an MFA from Bennington in June 2013. He has been on the Bard College faculty since 2017 and previously taught at the New School, Denison University, and Bennington College.
Kite aka Suzanne Kite is an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, with a BFA from CalArts in music composition, an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School, and is a PhD candidate at Concordia University for the forthcoming dissertation, sound and video work, and interactive installation Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). Kite’s scholarship and practice explores contemporary Lakota ontology through research-creation, computational media, and performance. Kite often works in collaboration, especially with family and community members. Her art practice includes developing Machine Learning and compositional systems for body interface movement performances, interactive and static sculpture, immersive video and sound installations, poetry and experimental lectures, experimental video, as well as co-running the experimental electronic imprint, Unheard Records. Her work has been featured in various publications, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, the Journal of Design and Science (MIT Press), with the award-winning article, “Making Kin with Machines”, and the sculpture Ínyan Iyé (Telling Rock) (2019) was featured on the cover of Canadian Art.
ARTnews Highlights Bard among People and Places that Made a Stage for Indigenous Art in 2022
ARTnews highlighted individuals and institutions that had a significant impact on public engagement with Indigenous art in 2022, including Bard College on the short list. In September, the College announced a transformational $25 million endowment gift from the Gochman Family Foundation to support a renamed American and Indigenous Studies Program. A matching commitment by the Open Society Foundations will create a $50 million endowment for Native American and Indigenous Studies in undergraduate and graduate academics and the arts in Annandale, to include a center for Indigenous Studies and the appointment of an Indigenous Curatorial Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard).
Peter L’Official Interviews Architect and Writer Sekou Cooke on Hip-Hop as a Blueprint for Architecture
For Architectural Record, Bard Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the American and Indigenous Studies Program Peter L’Official interviews architect and writer Sejou Cooke, who is the curator of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, an exhibition on view at the Museum of Design Atlanta through January 29, 2023.
In the interview, L’Official quotes from Cooke’s 2021 book Hip-Hop Architecture: “Many have managed to exist simultaneously as successful architects and Black. Few have managed to express their Blackness through their architecture. Within hip-hop culture lies the blueprint for an architecture that is authentically Black with the power to upend the racist structures within the architectural establishment and ignite a new paradigm of creative production.” L’Official references Toni Morrison’s “unapologetic use of codes embedded in Black culture” and “her own struggle for writing that was ‘indisputably black,’” asking Cooke “Does Hip-Hop Architecture also strive for an architecture that is, after Morrison, ‘indisputably black?’”
Bard College Hosts Inaugural Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Conference, October 20–22
“The DRE: Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives” Conference Features Keynote Speakers Elizabeth N. Ellis and Marisa J. Fuentes
Bard College will host its inaugural Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck conference from October 20 through 22. This conference, “The DRE: Disturbance, Re-Animation, and Emergent Archives,” considers the topic of archives from a range of humanistic perspectives, with keynotes showcasing methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies and African and African-American Studies, as well as offering the viewpoints of contemporary artists on these topics. The DRE is the first of three annual conferences supported by Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, part of the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative.
On Thursday, October 20 at 5 pm, multimedia Tsitsistas/Suhtai Nation (a.k.a. Northern Cheyenne) artist Bently Spang will open the conference with a screening and presentation in Weis Cinema, Bertelsmann Campus Center followed by an opening reception at the Center for Experimental Humanities in New Annandale House. On Friday, October 21, keynotes by award-winning scholars bracket a day of smaller sessions exploring and modeling ethical practices in the archive, open to students, faculty, and staff. Dr. Marisa J. Fuentes, Presidential Term Chair in African American History and Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, will deliver a keynote lecture, “Buried ‘Without Care’: Social Death, Discarded Lives, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade” on Friday at 9:30 am in the László Z. Bitó ’60 Auditorium of the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Center for Science and Computation (RKC). Dr. Elizabeth N. Ellis, Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University and citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, will deliver the second keynote lecture, “Recovering Indigenous Histories of Survival: Enduring Louisiana Nations” on Friday at 4 pm in Bitó Auditorium, RKC. Friday’s events, which include concurrent workshops, screenings, and presentations, also take place in RKC. On the morning of Saturday, October 22,recipients of Rethinking Place student research funding will present on their work.
On Saturday, October 22 at 2 pm, Oglála Lakȟóta scholar and multimedia artist Kite aka Suzanne Kite MFA ’18 will close the conference with a talk, “Makȟóčheowápi Akézaptaŋ (Fifteen Maps),” at the Fisher Center’s LUMA Theater. This event is free and open to the public. Reserve your seat here.
For the full conference schedule, click here. All events are open to Bard College students, faculty, and staff. To register click here. Keynote addresses and Bently Spang’s opening artist presentation are open to the public dependent on space. Non-Bard community members who are interested in attending, please email: [email protected].
Bard’s “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project affirms Bard’s tangible commitments to the principles and ideals of the College’s 2020 land acknowledgment and is supported by the Mellon Foundation’s 2022 Humanities for All Times. The Mellon grant offers three years of support for developing a land acknowledgment–based curriculum, public-facing Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) programming, and efforts to support the work of emerging NAIS scholars and tribally enrolled artists at Bard. Rethinking Place emphasizes broad community-based knowledge, collaboration, and collectives of inquiry and also attends to the importance of considering the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, upon whose homelands Bard sits.
Olin LC 208; Olin Language Center4:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 The students of AS 315 and Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck present a two-part letter writing night in solidarity with Indigenous political prisoners Maddesyn George and Leonard Peltier:
5/15 - Community letter writing night at Blackbird Infoshop, 587 Abeel Street, Kingston, NY.
5/17 - Olin Languages Center 208; Information and letter writing night with virtual talk by Hupa abolitionist scholar Stephanie Lumsden, Gender Studies, UCLA; Maddesyn George Defense Committee.
Stephanie Lumsden (Hupa) is a scholar and teacher. She received her B.A. in Women's Studies from Portland State University in 2011 and her M.A. in Native American Studies from the University of California, Davis in 2014. She earned her second M.A. in Gender Studies from UCLA in 2018. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Department at UCLA . Stephanie is a 2021-2022 Ford Fellow and a recipient of the University of California President's Postdoctoral fellowship
Maddesyn George (Colville Confederated Tribes) is a survivor of domestic and sexual violence who has been incarcerated since July 2020 for defending herself against a white man who raped and threatened her. Facing a murder charge and decades in prison, Maddesyn accepted a plea deal from federal prosecutors after being incarcerated and separated from her infant daughter for more than a year. She was sentenced in the Eastern District of Washington Federal Court on November 17, 2021 to serve 6.5 years in prison.
This website is organized by Maddesyn George’s defense committee, a grassroots coalition of members of Maddesyn’s family; members of the Colville Confederated Tribes and Spokane nation; survivors of gender violence; and advocates, organizers, and scholars who work on issues of colonial, sexual, and domestic violence; policing and incarceration; and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples. Read the defense committee’s statement on Maddesyn’s sentencing
Leonard Peltier is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Dakota/Lakota nations who has been imprisoned for 48 years. . Leonard Peltier was wrongly convicted in the 1970s for his organizing with the American Indian Movement in defense of Pine Ridge traditionalists, and is now the longest-held indigenous political prisoner in the United States. “The United States of America has kept me locked up because I am American Indian,” said the ailing Indigenous rights activist who Biden could free, but hasn’t. For more info, see the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.
Tuesday, April 18, 2023
Weis Cinema6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Why did Indigenous peasants support but ultimately resist the Maoist Shining Path guerrilla group in highland Peruvian Quechua communities? The different ways rebels and government security forces interacted in each Andean community explain the diverse peasant responses. At first, the politics of pursuing social justice mobilized a large part of the rural population, especially the youths, who often sympathized with the Maoist revolution. The motivating factors in engaging with the insurgency in rural communities include local experiences of state neglect, social inequality, power relation, and fear and intimidation. Shining Path’s mounting authoritarianism, most notably their brutal killing of community authorities and demand that peasants withdraw from the market economy, explains the root of violent peasant uprisings against the rebels. The Indigenous struggle involved making the anti-guerrilla and pro-state coalition called the Pacto de Alianza entre Pueblos. It brought internal security and order, allowing Indigenous peasants to maintain daily life and protect their local affairs in wartime violence. The Pacto de Alianza was not limited to the counterinsurgency goals; its functions extended to the local governance, social cohesion, and post-conflict reconstruction.
Monday, March 27, 2023
Fantastic Fungi is a consciousness-shifting film about the mycelium network that takes us on an immersive journey through time and scale into the magical earth beneath our feet, an underground network that can heal and save our planet. Olin, Room 1026:45 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 John Michelotti is the founder of Catskill Fungi which empowers people with fungi through outdoor educational classes, cultivation courses, mushroom art, and mushroom health extracts. John is a former President of the Mid-Hudson Mycological Association (MHMA). He serves as Medicinal Mushroom Committee Chair and is a Poison Control Consultant for the North American Mycological Association. He was chosen by the Catskill Center as a "Steward of the Catskills" for his contribution to the environment. John has had the pleasure to engage students from Elementary Schools to Colleges and Universities. He has taught at the New York Botanical Gardens for the past 8 years and regularly presents to Mycological Associations across the country. He served on the Mushroom Advisory Panel for Certified Naturally Grown to develop ecological standards in mushroom production across North America and has taught the Wild Mushroom Food Safety Certification Course to certify foragers to sell wild mushrooms to restaurants and supermarkets in 13 states. His goal is to educate and inspire people to pair with fungi to improve the environment, their health, and communities.
Catskill Fungi Catskill Fungi produces high integrity, triple-extracted health tinctures from mushrooms that are wild- crafted or grown near our family farm in the Catskill Mountains. We enjoy sharing our love of mushrooms on our guided mushroom walks, medicinal and cultivation workshops, and our fungi retreats. Catskill Fungi has a foundation of permaculture principles. This means the core of our business is about helping people and improving the planet through our work with mushrooms. We practice sustainable harvesting, leave-no-trace principles, and compassion for the environment. We aim to empower people to grow edible mushrooms as a sustainable source of fresh food, to heal themselves through utilizing health properties of fungi, and to explore the historical uses and present day innovations of these essential fungi.
Monday, March 27, 2023
With Beka Goedde's Printmaking II class, Rebecca Yoshino, and guest speaker Lucille Grignon of Ancient Roots Homestead Montgomery Place Greenhouse11:00 am – 12:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Seed a traditional dye garden for making natural pigments and dyes to be grown, processed, and used on Bard campus.
Monday, March 6, 2023
Hosted by the Bard Farm Campus Center, Weis Cinema6:30 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5 The Bard Farm is hosting a screening of the film Gather, a documentary about Indigenous food traditions and food sovereignty. The screening will feature food provided by Bard’s Test Kitchen and a discussion afterward. Learn more by visiting gather.film!
Friday, February 10, 2023
Webinar talk by Danielle Purifoy Online Event12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST/GMT-5 This talk examines how the contemporary timber industry reproduces plantation power. It explores the “remote control” of land — such as absentee land ownership, Black family land grabs, new markets for energy, and legal regimes designed to “devalue” common property in favor of individual ownership and profit. Multi-generation Black homeplaces and communities, rooted in alternative modes of land relations, sustain themselves despite the friction between the economic interests of racial capitalism and the ecological interests of long-standing forest interdependence. With the further concentration of forestland ownership and local divestment throughout the Alabama Black Belt and the US South, the reciprocal traditions of Black forest ecologies represent modes of land relation and intervention that are necessary for livable futures.
The CHRA Talk & Book Series celebrates critical voices working at the intersection of Human Rights and the Arts. Each year, we invite inspiring artists and activists from around the globe to share their practice or discuss their research. Each public talk is followed by a moderated discussion, and both are subsequently edited and published in a collected volume.
Monday, February 6, 2023
Only 30 minutes and there'll be popcorn! Campus Center, Weis Cinema6:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Join us for a film screening about the Wooden Funeral Sculpture Program, an initiative supported by OSUN's Center for Human Rights and the Arts. This program aims to preserve the culturally significant Tomb House Statues in Kon Tum, Vietnam, and to introduce the value of this folk art to younger Indigenous people and the public. The program is currently seeking submissions from young artists for its Wooden Funeral Sculpture Exhibition in Vietnam in 2023.