Bard College

Bard College seeks to inspire curiosity, a love of learning, idealism, and a commitment to the link between higher education and civic participation. This award supports Bard College to host a conference series to explore the intersection of the humanities and our scientific understanding of living systems.

if I read you/what I wrote bear/in mind I wrote is a public event organized around Jeffrey Gibson’s solo exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion for the 70^th Venice Biennale and is co-organized by Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson), the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), and SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe, NM) under the leadership of Christian Ayne Crouch, Director of the Center for Indigenous Studies and Dean of Graduate Studies, Abigail Winograd, Commissioner and Curator U.S. Pavilion, and Jeffrey Gibson. The title, drawn from the Lakota Poet Layli Long Soldier’s poem Vaporative, speaks to the notion of convening and creating dialogue that claims and proclaims space for Indigenous voices. 

Over three days, conversations and performances are intended to deepen the audience’s understanding of the innovations and contributions made by Indigenous communities. Raven Chacon performs with the collective White People Killed Them, a trio that also includes John Dietrich and Marshall Trammell. Visual artist Jeffrey Gibson plans to engage in a cross-disciplinary dialog with the poet Natalie Diaz around ways that spoken word and poetry interact with the visual arts. Novelist Dinaw Mengestu, whose own work considers belonging and migration, serves as moderator. 

 These dialogues are public events and are intended for the international academic community, including students from the Bard College global network and the Institute of American Indian Art, education partners of the U.S. pavilion team. Other invitees include K-12 teachers from Arkansas, New Mexico, and Oregon who are attending programmatic events and developing curricular resources around the exhibition.

Based in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Bard College is a liberal arts school with secondary, undergraduate, and graduate schools located across the country and internationally. Bard College identifies as a private institution in the public interest, one that sees civic engagement as central to its mission.

MacArthur Fellows Ahilan Arulanantham (2016), Sarah Stillman (2016), Jason de León (2017), and Dinaw Mengestu (2012), engage in a public conversation as part of the 2019 Live Arts Bard Biennial festival, Where No Wall Remains, which explores the notion of borders--natural borders, weaponized borders, political borders, and borders of the body—and focuses in particular on travel bans, deportation, family separations, and the construction of border walls, both domestically and internationally.  Distinctly situated in the fields of law, journalism, anthropology, and literature, all four MacArthur Fellows are concerned with the role borders play in our lives, and they connect their work to the dominant themes of the festival.  In addition to the shared conversation, Jason de León plans the construction of an interactive installation mapping the recorded deaths of individuals near the U.S./Mexican border.   

Jason de León’s installation, along with the public conversation with all four fellows is to be broadcast throughout the Bard International Network and screened for the festival participants in Berlin and Jerusalem.

To support the conference "The Recovery of Memory: Eastern Europe and the Question of Nationalism."

Support to establish a John D. MacArthur professorship.