Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (September 24, 2024) — The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and Bard College’s Human Rights Project announce architect and architectural historian Valentina Rozas-Krause as the 2024-25 recipient of the Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism. The appointment marks a decade since the fellowship was established in 2014 as an annual award bringing prominent scholars, activists, and artists to teach and conduct research on Bard’s campus. To date, the position has supported a diverse roster of artists, poets, theorists, journalists, and practitioners advancing sociopolitical engagement in their respective fields.
Rozas-Krause’s research interests lie at the intersection of the built environment and global cultural practices across the Americas and Europe. An assistant professor in design and architecture at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Santiago, Chile, Rozas-Krause has written on strategies of oppression; resistance and memory within varying urban contexts; the absence of women in the global memorial landscape; colonialism’s sustained presence in the built environment; and the social, historic, and political dynamics of place more broadly.
As the 2024-25 Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism at Bard College, Rozas-Krause will work on her book Memorials and the Cult of Apology, which examines the role that memorials play in processes of symbolic and material reparation after political conflicts. Following a series of case studies in Berlin and Buenos Aires, the book builds an empirical and theoretical understanding of multiple aspects of apology and memorialization, their material forms, the actors involved, and the diverse effects that built apologies can produce.
“Valentina’s research unearthing the layers and complex symbols embedded in the built environment enables a deeper reading of the world around us,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. “We look forward to having her on campus, where she will engage students in this critical study of the urban landscape, complementing and building on the rigorous examination of art objects and curatorial practices within CCS Bard’s program.”
“To interpret memorials in all their political complexity requires a combination of aesthetic and historical knowledge that few scholars possess,” said Thomas Keenan, director of Bard’s Human Rights Project. “Valentina is a remarkable exception to that rule. Her work offers genuinely new insights into a carefully-chosen range of material objects and into the larger question of what can happen at the intersection between human rights and the arts.”
The 10th anniversary of the Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism follows CCS Bard’s announcement this year of a new 12,000-square-foot addition to its library and archives named in recognition of a lead, $3M gift from the Keith Haring Foundation. The new Keith Haring Wing, expected to be completed in late 2025, builds on a longstanding partnership with CCS Bard and the Keith Haring Foundation, including the permanent endowment of the Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism in 2022. More information on previous appointees can be found at ccs.bard.edu.
About Valentina Rozas-Krause
Valentina Rozas-Krause is an assistant professor in design and architecture at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile and was the 2023-24 Frieda L. Miller Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She holds a Ph.D. in architectural history from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a master’s degree in urban planning, and Bachelors of Architecture from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She held a postdoctoral fellowship in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan. She has published three books: Ni Tan Elefante, Ni Tan Blanco (Ril, 2014), the co-edited volume Disputar la Ciudad (Bifurcaciones, 2018), and the collective volume Breaking the Bronze Ceiling: Memorials and Gender (Fordham, 2024). These publications join peer-reviewed articles in Future Anterior, History & Memory, e-flux, Latin American Perspectives, Anos 90, ARQ, Revista 180, Cuadernos de Antropología Social, Memory Studies, and Bifurcaciones alongside a chapter in Neocolonialism and Built Heritage (Routledge, 2020). She edited a special issue of the ARQ journal on Decolonization, and is currently leading a multiyear research project examining female representation in public space(s) in three Chilean cities.
Her research has been supported by numerous institutions, including Mellon/ACLS, the UC Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities, the UC Berkeley Institute of International and Comparative Studies, the German DAAD, and the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID-Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo de Chile). She serves as an elected board member for the Society of Architectural Historians (2023-25), and is an adjunct researcher of the Center for Conflict and Social Cohesion Studies, which brings together interdisciplinary researchers from four universities across Chile. As a founding member of Rumbo Colectivo, a Chilean political foundation, she engages with public scholarship across media, including a monthly participation in Ciudad Pauta, a Chilean nation-wide radio show, in which she talks about public space, heritage, migration, public housing, monuments, and more.
About the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College
Founded in 1990, CCS Bard is the leading international graduate program dedicated exclusively to curatorial studies, a field exploring the historical, intellectual, and social conditions that inform exhibition-making. With the Marieluise Hessel Collection of Contemporary Art at its core, alongside an extensive and growing library and archival holdings, CCS Bard has served as an incubator for the most experimental and innovative practices in artistic and curatorial practice. Broadly interdisciplinary, CCS Bard encourages students, faculty, and researchers to question the critical and political dimension of art and its social significance.
About the Human Rights Project
The Human Rights Project, founded at Bard in 1999, introduced the first free-standing interdisciplinary undergraduate degree program in Human Rights in the United States. Through teaching, research, and public programs, the Project is committed to exploring the too-often neglected cultural, aesthetic, and representational dimensions of human rights discourse. Since 2009, the Human Rights Project has collaborated with CCS Bard on the development of seminars, workshops, research projects, and symposia aimed at exploring the intersections between human rights and the arts. While academic in nature, this research and teaching draws heavily on the realm of practice, involving human rights advocates, artists, and curators.
About the Keith Haring Foundation
Keith Haring (1958-1990) generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes during his life. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and communities impacted by systemic inequity. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.
The Keith Haring Foundation gives grants to not-for-profit entities that engage in charitable and educational activities. In accordance with Keith’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: the support of organizations which enrich the lives of young people, and the support of organizations which engage in education, prevention, and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection. The Foundation additionally maintains a collection of Haring’s art and archives and funds exhibition programming and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate the artist’s work and philosophy. www.haring.com.