July 15–23, 2023
The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College (Bard MFA) is pleased to present Stage Presence, the thesis exhibition of the class of 2024. Stage Presence brings together twenty-three distinct practices from candidates in the disciplines of film/video, music/sound, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing.
In its standard usage, the phrase “stage presence” refers to a performer’s capacity to command the attention of a room. The phrase was also used by art critic Michael Fried in 1967 to condemn minimalist artists’ rejection of modernist artistic values of autonomy and absorption. In Fried’s account the minimalists instead embraced “the situation” in which an art object and viewer existed together, reflexively confronting an audience with their relationship to viewing. Following Fried’s essay, the phrase has had many more lives within artistic contexts, from a postmodern reclamation to a contemporary embrace of its more commonplace associations.
When taken together, the distinct artistic practices of the Bard MFA Class of 2024 resonate with issues of stage presence. Experimentation with display structures; activations of text in space; investigations into mapping and absence; disruption of voice and conventional notions of authorship; emphasis on the scale of the body; and integration of theatrical techniques such as props or backdrops are just a few of the strategies by which these artists explore modes of presence, viewership, and relationality.
The thesis exhibition is coordinated by Marina Caron (MA ’23), a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Caron is a curator, writer and researcher based in New York City. Her thesis exhibition, Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass, focused on the work of the prolific and under-recognized artist Bettina Grossman (b. New York, 1927; d. New York, 2021).
Kaur Alia Ahmed
June Canedo de Souza
Francesse Dolbrice
Camonghne Felix
Christina Graham
Tallulah Haddon
Lara Carmen Hidalgo
Sam Lasko
Khan Lee
Lotte Leerschool
Eli Benjamin Neuman-Hammond
Mira Putnam
Anna Roberts-Gevalt
Natalia Rolón Sotelo
Francie Seidl Chodosh
Sydney Spann
Allie Taylor
Lauren Tosswill
Nora Treatbaby
Marty Two Bulls Jr.
Sam Wenc
Alexa West
Drew Zeiba
Founded in 1981, Bard MFA is a nontraditional school 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 an ongoing dialogue. In interdisciplinary group critiques, seminars, school presentations, as well as discipline caucuses and one-on-one conferences, the artist-student engages with accomplished faculty members while developing their individual studio practice. 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. Bard MFA is a low-residency program that takes place over two years and two months. Students are on campus for three consecutive eight-week summer sessions and off campus for two independent study sessions completed during the intervening winters.