2024 Graduate Exhibitions
April 6 – May 26, 2024
A capstone of CCS Bard’s Master of Arts program, this series marks the debut of 11 exhibitions featuring new commissions, original narratives, and fresh readings on themes and works that represent the next generation of curatorial practice. Distinct in theme and focus, each exhibition is independently curated by a member of CCS Bard’s 2024 graduating class and culminates in rigorous, multi-year research and collaborations with artists, writers, scholars, and other contributors.
The exhibitions are organized by Josefina Barcia, Daré Dada, Lucas Ondak, Clara Prat-Gay, Sophie Rose, Aïda Sidhoum, Thalia Stefaniuk, Pallavi Surana, Lili Rebeka Toth, Clara von Turkovich, and Luke Whittaker.
Ho Tzu Nyen: Time and the Tiger
June 22 – December 1, 2024
Time and the Tiger marks the first in-depth examination of Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976, Singapore) in the United States. Widely considered one of the most innovative artists to emerge internationally in the past 20 years, Ho works across a variety of media, including film, video, installation, painting, writing, and performance to critically examine how histories—be they state, cultural, or personal—are continually imagined, negotiated, and performed. Through vibrant narratives and visually stunning animations, Ho creates complex and compelling video/sound installations that probe reality, history, and fiction rooted in the culture of Southeast Asia.
The exhibition features five immersive film and multimedia installations spanning two decades that draw from historical events, documentary footage, art history, music videos, and mythical stories to investigate the construction of history, the narrative of myths, and the plurality of identities. Commenting on the cross-culturalism of Southeast Asia, Ho invokes and unravels a vast range of subjects, from pre-colonial and colonial myths, to European Renaissance paintings, to modernist narratives and geopolitics, to cinematic representations of a hybridized and unstable present. Past works will be joined by a new commission, T for Time (2023) that broadens the artist’s interest to examine timekeeping traditions from across Asia, their relationship to European conceptions of time as a linear progression, and how new technologies are reshaping perceptions in the digital age.
Ho Tzu Nyen: Time and the Tiger is organized by the Singapore Art Museum and Art Sonje Center (Seoul, South Korea) in collaboration with the Hessel Museum of Art.
Carrie Mae Weems: Remember to Dream
June 22 – December 1, 2024
Remember to Dream revisits the range and breadth of Carrie Mae Weems’ prolific career through rarely exhibited and lesser-known works that demonstrate the evolution of her pioneering, politically engaged practice. Moving beyond such iconic projects as the Kitchen Table Series (1990), the exhibition seeks to rebalance understanding of Weems’ artistic development over the past 30 years while locating her works in the context of her own lived experiences and commitment to activism, from growing up in Portland in the 1950s to meeting the Black Panthers in San Francisco in the 1960s to her involvement in the Black Lives Matter protests and more recent return to Portland to photograph the boarded-up, downtown storefronts during the so-called “disturbances.”
This long view of her practice and personal history, which intersects with the political history of the U.S., sheds light on what Weems, borrowing a phrase from American poet and scholar Amiri Baraka, has called “the changing same.” In the context of Weems’ work, this phrase gestures to the continuity of structural racism and sexism—the ways in which certain patterns of violence and oppression, particularly against women and people of color, are perpetuated from one generation to the next, even as the specific conditions of everyday life continue to change. Entitled Remember to Dream, the exhibition’s title suggests the possibility of resistance—of disrupting these longstanding patterns and making change.
Remember to Dream continues an ongoing dialogue between Weems and CCS Bard Executive Director Tom Eccles, following their collaboration on The Shape of Thingsthe at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City (2021) and Luma Arles in Arles, France (2023).
Start Making Sense
June 22 – October 20, 2024
Start Making Sense draws upon the exceptional art holdings at CCS Bard—the Marieluise Hessel Collection, and the many gifts of contemporary art received from donors over the past two decades. The exhibition “reads” these works through the lens of the center’s extensive archive and special collections, drawing a complex picture of how art gains meaning through the advocacy of curators, fellow artists, gallerists and others who form what is commonly referred to as the “art community.” Featuring artworks primarily from the 1990s, Start Making Sense highlights moments of critical cultural significance and exhibitions during this decade that changed how we see art today and whose voices and artwork made that possible.
Featured artists include Ida Applebroog, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Lyle Ashton Harris, Mary Heilmann, Chris Ofili, Catherine Opie, Laura Owens, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Christopher Wool, among others.
Start Making Sense is curated by Ann Butler, Director of the Library and Archives and Tom Eccles, Executive Director, CCS Bard.
2024 Spring and Summer Season Organization
Exhibitions at CCS Bard and the Hessel Museum of Art are made possible with generous support from Lonti Ebers, the Marieluise Hessel Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies, and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.
The graduate student-curated exhibitions and projects at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, are part of the requirements for the master of arts degree and are made possible with support from Lonti Ebers; the Enterprise Foundation; the Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Wortham Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.
About the Hessel Museum of Art
CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art advances experimentation and innovation in contemporary art through its dynamic exhibitions and programs. Located on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the Hessel organizes and presents group exhibitions and thematic surveys, monographic presentations, traveling exhibitions, as well as student-curated shows that are free and open to the public. The museum’s program draws inspiration from its unparalleled collection of contemporary art, which features the Marieluise Hessel Collection at its core and comprises more than 3,000 objects collected contemporaneously from the 1960s through the present day.
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading institution dedicated to curatorial studies, a field exploring the conditions that inform contemporary exhibition-making and artistic practice. Through its Graduate Program, Library and Archives, and the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard serves as an incubator for interdisciplinary practices, advances new and underrepresented perspectives in contemporary art, and cultivates a student body from diverse backgrounds in a broad effort to transform the curatorial field. CCS Bard’s dynamic and multifaceted program includes exhibitions, symposia, publications, and public events, which explore the critical potential of the practice of exhibition-making.