Studio Arts News
Bard Faculty Member Julia Weist Awarded a MacDowell Fellowship
While in residence from August 6–20, Julia will complete postproduction work on her project, Questioning, to be presented as a live work of theater debuting at New Theater Hollywood in July 2026.
Bard Faculty Member Julia Weist Awarded a MacDowell Fellowship
Julia Weist, visiting artist in residence in studio arts. Photo by Adam T. Deen.
Questioning re-enacts an exchange that occurred between Weist and New York's Department of State, which investigated her artistic use of a private investigator license. After leveraging her research-based artistic practice to earn PI credentials in 2022, Weist had gained access to restricted tools that aggregate sensitive, non-public data about American citizens. She used the data to create photographs that arranged and obscured information she purchased about herself, her spouse, and neighbors. When the work was exhibited, New York's Department of State opened an inquiry into her licensure, raising fundamental questions about artistic authority, investigative methodology, and the financial systems that value artistic labor. The state ultimately determined that none of Weist's work violated the rules of the credential, and dropped its case. In residence at MacDowell, she will edit video documentation of Questioning, which restages her interrogation with NY's deputy chief investigator, thereby closing the case on her own terms.
The Studio Arts Program at Bard provides a breadth of expanded offerings while retaining a strong core of courses that provide a firm grounding in basic techniques and principles, in an era when much contemporary art cannot be contained within the traditional categories and technology is transforming the production of visual images.
Post Date: 04-07-2026
Tschabalala Self ’12 Interviewed in the New York Times and Elle Decor
Self says she imagines the couple in “Art Lovers” as “museum patrons, possibly admiring one of their favorite works.”
Tschabalala Self ’12 Interviewed in the New York Times and Elle Decor
Tschabalala Self ’12. Photo by Paula Virta
Speaking to Gazelle Mba for the New York Times series Solo Show, Self says she imagines the couple in "Art Lovers" as “museum patrons, possibly admiring one of their favorite works.” To Elle, she expressed that public art “allows everyone to have some transcendent second with the artwork, even when they’re not anticipating it.”
Post Date: 03-31-2026
Bard Faculty Tanya Marcuse and Adriane Colburn Awarded a Marble House Project Residency
Marcuse will develop a new body of work titled Circle | Cycle, and Colburn will developher project Windward.
Bard Faculty Tanya Marcuse and Adriane Colburn Awarded a Marble House Project Residency
L–R: Tanya Marcuse, associate professor of photography; and Adriane Colburn, artist in residence at Studio Arts.
During her residency, Marcuse will develop a new body of work titled Circle | Cycle, exploring the symbolic and cosmological power of the circle as both subject and structure. Using natural materials gathered from the surrounding landscape, she will construct and alter a single circular assemblage, documenting its evolution through photographs and a looping stop-motion film. Long associated with ideas of wholeness, infinity, and cosmic order, the circle in this project becomes a site where creation and rupture coexist on the same plane. Marcuse will invite fellow artists to contribute locally found materials, creating a collaborative process rooted in place.
While in residence, Colburn will develop Windward, a suite of artworks that explore the resonance of trees increasingly felled by wind and water. Through research on vulnerable tree species across northeastern forests, riparian zones, and urban landscapes, and the climatic pressures that bring them down, her project examines the environmental conditions reshaping contemporary forests and the material possibilities of salvaged wood. Working with arborists, foresters, and rural sawyers, she will recover fallen trees and transform them into lumber and paper pulp as raw material for sculptures, installations, and works on paper. The resulting artworks explore interspecies connectivity, woodcraft traditions, and poetic traces of environmental forces embedded within the wood, illuminating escalating environmental crises and their complex web of cause and effect.
Post Date: 03-17-2026
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