Art & Education presents a new School Watch report on Sommerakademie Paul Klee and New Artists gallery featuring work from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Adaptable Platforms: Sommerakademie Paul Klee
By Aoife Rosenmeyer
“A fundamental principle of the Sommerakademie Paul Klee is sustainable collaboration in the development of built-to-last intellectual relationships in what Zolghadr calls ‘an amnesiac world.’ The summer school remains a generous proposition, with travel and accommodation in Bern fully covered, as well as a production budget and access to the HKB’s media and production facilities. Postgraduate (or equivalent) practitioners respond to the published theme and apply online; a long list of candidates selected by a jury are invited to Bern for interviews. Alumni of the previous Sommerakademie are encouraged to reapply; candidates must be at least proficient artists interested in both social issues and a structural engagement with contemporary art. In 2017, from approximately one hundred and fifty applicants, eight were selected: the minimum number for the Sommerakademie to function. The fellows must demonstrate curiosity and initiative, as the group is invited to cocurate the program as it evolves. To quote the Sommerakademie literature: ‘Although based on the idea of an academy, the aim is to transcend the blueprint of seminars and tutorials, and to focus on group research and cross-professional coalition building.’ And to take art more seriously as an agent with responsibility and potential. Zolghadr’s cycle was based on ‘realty,’ an ongoing project of his that encompasses art and financialization and the competitive nature of urban sites in which artists and art schools are embedded.” [read more]
School Watch presents distilled perspectives on degree programs in the arts, with interviews, critical texts, and editorial exposés on MFAs, Masters, Doctorates and certificate programs in fine arts, art history, curatorial, cultural and film studies, and other related areas of specialty.
Setup: Bard MFA Class of 2019 Thesis Exhibition
Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional master’s degree program for visual, written, and time-based arts. At Bard, the community itself is the primary resource for the student—serving as audience, teacher, and peer group in ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, and all-school presentations, as well as in-discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist students engage with approximately sixty noted faculty members as they develop their individual studio practices. The program probes a diversity of approaches and fosters imaginative responses and insights to aesthetic concerns across the disciplines of film/video, writing, painting, sculpture, photography, and music/sound. The MFA is low residency and takes place over two years and two months. Students complete three consecutive eight-week summer sessions on campus and two independent study sessions off campus during the intervening winters.
The Class of 2019 thesis exhibition, Setup, was on view July 21–29, 2018 at the Bard College Exhibition Center/UBS Gallery in Red Hook, New York. Presentations of performance, readings, and screenings of time-based works took place on the Bard College campus during the evenings of July 23–25, 2018.
The 2019 MFA candidates are:
Film/Video: Madeline Hollander, Alan Segal, Jon Wang, Alisha Wormsley
Writing: Sarah Reiter
Painting: Anne Cousineau, Colt Hausman, Ranee Henderson, Austin White
Sculpture: Violet Dennison, Onur Gökmen, Rin Johnson, Robert Keil, Lu Yim, John-Elio Reitman, Marina Xenofontos
Photography: Qais Assali, Charlotte Bonjour, Wei Leng Tay, Matt Waples
Music/Sound: Nadia Botello, Richard Kennedy, Stefan Maier, Ragnhild May, Tyler Wilcox.
Setup was coordinated by Line Ebert, Curatorial Studies, Städelschule / Goethe University.
Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy of Peter Mauney, 2018.
[view the exhibition]
New Artists offers schools a platform to present student work from degree shows, open-studio presentations, and other annual student exhibitions.