Four Bard Alumnae Named to Zohran Mamdani’s Transition Team
Bard alumnae Ruba Katrib MA-CCS ’07 and Diya Vij ’08 were named to NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s Arts and Culture transition team, and Cynthia Conti-Cook ’03 was named to the Committee on Government Operations. Katrib is chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at MoMA PS1 in Queens, and Vij is vice president of curatorial and arts programs at Powerhouse Arts. Conti-Cook is the director of research and policy at the Collaborative Research Center for Resilience.
Four Bard Alumnae Named to Zohran Mamdani’s Transition Team
Post Date: 12-09-2025
Artist Jeffrey Gibson Profiled in the Financial Times
Artist in Residence Jeffrey Gibson was featured in the Financial Times ahead of his recent exhibition coinciding with Art Basel Paris. Gibson reflects on the trajectory of his artistic career, following his ups and downs before becoming the first Indigenous artist to represent the US at the Venice Biennale in 2024.Artist Jeffrey Gibson Profiled in the Financial Times
Gibson’s art includes sensory objects like flashes, jingle dress dance, and op-art patterns to produce a feeling of “luminous, multisensory release.” His upcoming show This Is Dedicated To The One I Love is focused on bright paintings inspired by prisms and nebulas. These pieces reflect his childhood, which he spent surrounded by many different cultures, and impart the sense that humanity is “encased by this planet… on the same, massive, phenomenal organism.”
Post Date: 11-05-2025
Bard College Faculty Member Lothar Osterburg Named a 2025 National Academician by the National Academy of Design
Bard College Artist in Residence Lothar Osterburg, an artist, master printer, and teacher of copperplate photogravure, has been elected by the National Academy of Design as a National Academicians in the Class of 2025. Recognized for their contributions to contemporary American art and architecture, this year’s class of newly elected Academicians includes 27 artists and architects from across the United States.Bard College Faculty Member Lothar Osterburg Named a 2025 National Academician by the National Academy of Design
“We are thrilled to welcome this extraordinary class of 27 artists and architects as members of the National Academy of Design as we celebrate our 200th anniversary,” said Gregory Wessner, executive director of the National Academy. “Their diverse and groundbreaking work reaffirms our enduring commitment to honoring innovation and excellence in contemporary art and architecture.”
The annual nomination and election of National Academicians dates back to the National Academy’s founding in 1825 as the United States’ first artist- and architect-led organization. New Academicians are nominated and elected by the current members of the National Academy, a growing community of 500 artists and architects across the country. In addition to providing leadership and vision for the National Academy and its programs and exhibitions, Academicians are also invited to donate a representative work—called the Diploma Work—to the National Academy’s collection. With more than 8,000 paintings, sculptures, works on paper, architectural drawings and models and more, the National Academy’s collection has been assembled almost entirely through the donations of its artists and architect members. It is one of the most significant collections of American art and architecture in the world.
As the 200th anniversary class of Academicians, these 27 individuals join the more than 2,400 artists and architects elected to the National Academy since its founding in 1825. Academicians include the most significant artists and architects in the United States over the past two centuries, ranging from Hudson River School painters like Frederic Church (1848), Thomas Cole (1826) and Asher Durand (1826), to contemporary practitioners like Marina Abramović (2013), Sanford Biggers (2023) and Julie Mehretu (2021) and architects such as Cass Gilbert (1906), Frank Lloyd Wright (1952) and Annabelle Selldorf (2012).
Artist Lothar Osterburg completed his studies in printmaking and experimental film at the Art Academy Braunschweig in Germany in 1989, received his training as master printer at Crown Point Press in San Francisco in the early 1990’s, and has operated his own printshop in New York since 1994. Osterburg has been at numerous artists residencies including the MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, the Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center in Maui, and the Cill Rialaig Arts Centre in Ballinskelligs, County Kerry, Ireland. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, both in 2010, two New York Foundations for the Arts Fellowships, and a 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Award for excellence in Printmaking. He has taught at Columbia University and Cooper Union and will retire from Bard College in fall 2025 after 27 years of teaching.
Post Date: 09-23-2025
More Arts News
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Nayland Blake ’82 Art Exhibition Opens in NYC on September 12
Nayland Blake ’82 Art Exhibition Opens in NYC on September 12
A survey of art works by Nayland Blake ’82, professor of Studio Arts at Bard College, will be on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City, from September 12 through October 25. For decades, Blake has made vital contributions to contemporary art and queer culture as an artist, curator, writer, and educator, and the three-part exhibition will be the largest show of their work in New York in nearly 20 years. The first part, Nayland Blake: Sex in the 90s, surveys Blake’s landmark works created in the midst of the ongoing AIDS crisis and the culture wars of the 1990s, many of which are on view for the first time in nearly 30 years. The second part, Inside: curated by Nayland Blake, includes works by 14 artists whose works Blake has “wanted to be in the presence of, to wander inside of, to refresh my eyes and mind with.” The final part of the exhibition, Session, will be an installation of Blake’s new sculptures, which build upon their works of the late 1980s.
The Studio Arts Program at Bard features broad offerings beyond the traditional categories of art, while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in basic techniques and principles.
Post Date: 09-02-2025
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Jonathan VanDyke and David S. Gassett Receive Research Grants from the American Philosophical Society
Jonathan VanDyke and David S. Gassett Receive Research Grants from the American Philosophical Society
Two members of the Bard College community have been honored with research grants from the American Philosophical Society, given annually to support the cost of noncommercial research leading to publication. Jonathan VanDyke, visiting artist in residence at Studio Arts, has been awarded a Franklin Research Grant, which are given annually to scholars in order to support the cost of research leading to publication in all areas of knowledge. David S. Gassett, a doctoral candidate at the Bard Graduate Center, has received a Phillips Fund 2025, which provides grants for research in Native American linguistics, ethnohistory, and the history of studies of Native Americans, in the continental US and Canada.
VanDyke’s grant will support further research on his project, “Remote Color: Plant Pigments of the Far North,” during which he will deepen fieldwork in interior and coastal Alaska, ethically gathering, analyzing, and processing plant pigments with regional experts and Alaska Native partners to fill critical knowledge gaps and model sustainable visual-arts practices rooted in reciprocity. Gassett’s grant will provide funding for his project “Art/Artifact/Ancestor: Museum Decolonization and Native American Material Culture Forty Years After ‘Primitivism.’”
The American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States, was founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin for the purpose of “promoting useful knowledge.” It supports research and discovery through grants and fellowships, lectures, publications, prizes, exhibitions, and public education.
Post Date: 08-27-2025
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Max Maslansky ’99 Speaks to ArtNews
Max Maslansky ’99 Speaks to ArtNews
Max Maslansky ’99, artist and Bard College alumnus, was interviewed by ArtNews for the article “Why Are So Many Artists Becoming Therapists?” Emily Watlington writes about the long connection between artists and psychotherapy, questioning why so many are talking about being in both careers now and noting that, “the practices involve many of the same skills: soul-searching, analyzing, and embracing complexities of life that cannot be easily resolved.”
Maslansky was interviewed along with three other artists about his choice to become a therapist. Since graduating from Bard’s Studio Arts program, his work has included paintings, photography, and sculpture. He went back to school in his 40s for counseling after deciding he wanted a stable career that could also give back to society. Asked how working as a therapist changed his art, he reflected, “It’s made my practice feel much more open-minded and expansive, less concerned with distinct purposes and goals in mind.”
Post Date: 08-20-2025
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Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo Named a Wynn Newhouse Award Winner
Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo Named a Wynn Newhouse Award Winner
Visiting Artist In Residence Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo was named one of the Wynn Newhouse Award winners for 2024. The award is a one-time grant to exceptional fine artists with disabilities, acknowledging their merit and giving them funding with no strings attached. Works by winning artists may also be on exhibition at the Palitz Gallery in New York City.
Branfman-Verissimo has taught in the Studio Arts program at Bard since 2024. Their work focuses on community-based work and installation building, and invites the viewer to recall and share their own lived narratives in order to create a dialogue around the telling of Black, Indigenous, Queer, and Trans stories. Their artist’s statement notes, “Through performance, painting, installation building, printmaking, interdisciplinary processes and cultural work, I strive to re-create and re-tell my personal tales and those of the people that surround me.”
Post Date: 05-05-2025
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Artist Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12 Creates Protest Painting in Wake of LA Fires
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Artist Tschabalala Self ’12 Commissioned to Create Portraits of Denzel Washington and His Sons
Artist Tschabalala Self ’12 Commissioned to Create Portraits of Denzel Washington and His Sons
Visiting Artist in Residence and alumna Tschabalala Self ’12 was commissioned to create portraits of the Washington family—father Denzel and sons John David and Malcolm—who were behind the recent movie adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Piano Lesson. Denzel, John David, and Malcolm respectively produced (with his daughter Katia), starred in, and directed the film. Rochelle Steiner writes for TheWrap, “In Self’s hands, images of the Washingtons are intertwined with the film’s characters, such that the real and fictional commingle as references that exemplify Black America.” Inspired by and named after a 1984 Romare Bearden lithograph, The Piano Lesson is one of Self’s favorite August Wilson plays. “When looking at the play’s origin within the context of American slavery, the significance of home for the characters in the play and the figures depicted in Bearden’s piece becomes all the more poignant when you realize the legacy of separation, loss and displacement inflicted on their ancestors,” says Self.
Her newly installed exhibition Tschabalala Self: Dream Girl is on view February 15–April 26, 2025 at Jeffrey Dietch in Los Angeles.
Post Date: 03-04-2025