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
Bard College Artist in Residence Lothar Osterburg 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. The Hudson Valley based, German native Lothar Osterburg is an artist, master printer, and teacher of copperplate photogravure. He has been teaching in the in Studio Arts Program at Bard since 1999.
“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.
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.
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.
Two members of the Bard College community have been honored with research grants from the American Philosophical Society. Jonathan VanDyke, visiting artist in residence at Studio Arts, has been awarded a Franklin Research Grant, and David S. Gassett, a doctoral candidate at the Bard Graduate Center, has received a Phillips Fund 2025.
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.
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.”
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.”
Artist Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12 Creates Protest Painting in Wake of LA Fires
When the recent Los Angeles wildfires burned down the Altadena home of artist Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio ’12, his brick fireplace and chimney were the only structures left standing. “I began thinking about the resilience of these chimneys,” Aparicio told Hyperallergic. “I’m always looking at symbols that can hold both sides of an emotion: resilience and trauma.” In his first painting since the fires, Aparicio collaborated with Bay Area artist and activist David Solnit and a group of about two dozen volunteers to create a protest painting made with paint that was mixed by Solnit using pigments made from ash and charcoal collected at Altadena burn sites. Aparicio’s black-and-white painting depicts his chimney and fireplace standing among charred ruins and belching dark black smoke. The words “Invest in Communities, Not Fossil Fuels” are printed in both English and Spanish. Environmental activists assert that oil and gas companies have directly contributed to climate change–fueled disasters, like wildfires, that are devastating communities. Aparicio’s painting was unveiled at a Pasadena rally calling for CalPERS, the nation’s largest public pension fund, to fully divest from fossil fuels. An identical painting was unveiled the same day at another rally in front of the Chevron oil refinery in Richmond in northern California.
Suzanne Kite MFA ’18, aka Kite, distinguished artist in residence, assistant professor of American and Indigenous Studies, and director of the Wihanble S’a Center for Indigenous AI at Bard, was profiled in ArtForum’s Spotlight series. The profile focuses on Kite’s performance art and use of technology, particularly the piece “Pȟehíŋ kiŋ líla akhíšoke. (Her hair was heavy.)”, referred to as one of Kite’s “braid performances.” Writer Christopher Green calls Kite one of the “foremost Indigenous artists exploring the capacity of music, video, installation, and [technology] in combination with performance to examine the embodiment and visualization of contemporary Lakȟóta ways of knowing.”
The profile also explains Kite’s goal of making art for Native, Lakȟóta audiences. “Her refusal to legibly encode or concretize her scores for the mainstream destabilizes the ethnographic gaze and its desire to document, categorize, and control Indigenous culture, language, and bodies,” Green writes. Her upcoming Wičhíŋčala Šakówiŋ (Seven Little Girls), a scored performance which will be accompanied by a full orchestra, will be presented at MIT later this year.
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.
Jeffrey Gibson Reflects on a Standout Year in Artnet
Jeffrey Gibson, artist in residence at Bard College, reflects on 2024—a year that started with Gibson being honored as the first Indigenous and openly queer artist to have a solo representation of the US Pavilion in Venice Biennale and continued with MASS MoCA’s commissioning of Power Full Because We’re Different, the largest single museum installation in his career—in an interview with Artnet. Gibson notes the opening events of the Venice Biennale as a personal highlight of 2024 “because of the sheer joy felt by myself and many other Native and Indigenous people who traveled to Venice to celebrate together and bring life to the installation through music, dance, poetry and performance. To see how the images ricocheted through Indian Country in the US was thrilling.” He also mentions Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self Determination since 1969, organized by Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies at Bard Candice Hopkins CCS ’03, at the Hessel Museum of Art, as one of the best exhibitions that he saw in 2024. “It is the kind of exhibition that I have been waiting for and it established a fresh starting point for many when considering the history of Native American Art,” says Gibson.
Ottaway/Avery Auditorium10:10 am – 11:30 am EST/GMT-5 A talk by Svitlana Biedarieva
Thursday, September 28, 2023
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema6:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 "For over forty years Wendy Ewald has collaborated on photography projects with children, families, women, workers, and teachers around the world. She’s developed collaborative frameworks for her practice that challenge the concept of individual authorship and casts into doubt an artist’s intentions, power, and identity. Her work may be understood as a kind of conceptual art focused on expanding the role of esthetic discourse in pedagogy and creating a new concept of imagery that challenges the viewer to see beneath the surface of these relationships."
Saturday, April 8, 2023 – Sunday, April 16, 2023
Fisher Studio Arts Building5:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Studio Arts Department Senior Thesis Exhibition in Fisher Galleries. Opening reception will be on Saturday, April 8 from 5–8 pm. There will be a performance by the artist at 7 pm.
Saturday, April 8, 2023 – Saturday, April 22, 2023
Oscar Haas, Catherine Lyu, Luca McCarthy, Olivia McLeod, Cora Quinlan, Brandon Vanbach, Samaira Wilson, Bennett Wood Bard Exhibition Center3:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Studio Arts Department Senior Thesis Exhibition in UBS. Opening reception will be on Saturday, April 8 from 3pm to 6pm.
Thursday, April 6, 2023 – Monday, April 8, 2024
Studio Art Senior Thesis Exhibition Fisher Studio Arts Building
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.
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Bard Studio Arts Spring 2023 Lecture Series Fisher Studio Arts Building5:40 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5 Mark Thomas Gibson’s personal lens on American culture stems from his multifaceted viewpoint as an artist—as a black male, a professor, and an American history buff. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his exploration of contemporary culture through languages of drawing, painting, print, and sculpture revealing a vision of a satirical, dystopian America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within the story.
Mark Thomas Gibson (b. 1980, Miami, FL) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. He is represented by M+B in Los Angeles and Loyal in Stockholm. In 2016, he co-curated the traveling exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo. Gibson has released two artist books, Some Monsters Loom Large (2016) and Early Retirement (2017). In 2021, Gibson was awarded residencies at Yaddo and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency and had his most recent solo exhibition Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood at M+B Los Angeles. He was also awarded a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia, PA and a Hodder Fellowship from Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. Gibson was most recently awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, NY.
Monday, February 6, 2023
Only 30 minutes and there'll be popcorn! Bertelsmann 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.