Calling cards: the 2025 Graduate Student Curated Exhibitions

Early every April, a fleet of chartered buses departs Manhattan, ferrying a collection of curators, gallerists, and artists two hours north to the pastoral reaches of the Hudson Valley. This annual pilgrimage to Annandale-on-Hudson, a fixture of the New York art scene’s calendar, marks the arrival of the Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies thesis exhibitions at the Hessel Museum. For two months each spring, the museum hosts roughly a baker’s dozen of graduate-curated exhibitions that not only encapsulate the program’s pedagogical ambitions but also afford a window into the discourse currently animating the field of curatorial practice.

Among graduate curatorial programs in the US, CCS Bard is both the first and the most recognized. Founded in 1990, it occupies a distinct role in the larger ecosystem of contemporary art, functioning as an incubator of institutional curatorial practice whose influence is palpable well beyond its bucolic setting. The program is also uniquely resourced, sporting an accomplished faculty with deep institutional ties. Students are granted access to the Marieluise Hessel collection, comprising over 3,500 works from the past six decades, a library rivaling that of MoMA—including an ever-growing archive of primary source documents—and, crucially, the infrastructure of a fully operational museum.

In addition to the school’s unrivaled assets, what distinguishes the CCS Bard program is its integration of rigorous academic inquiry with museum-standard exhibition production. “CCS is not just a professionalizing program; it is a place to think critically about contemporary art and culture,"  noted Lauren Cornell, who, since 2017, has served as program director and chief curator of the Hessel Museum in tandem.[footnote In April, the program announced that Cornell will become the museum’s inaugural artistic director; Argentinian scholar and curator Mariano López Seoane will become CCS’s program director.] “Really, we give [students] both,” she added. “They are encouraged to synthesize research, readings, and conversations and be bold in their thinking, but at the same time, they’re working in a museum, with all the processes and limits that come with that—budgets, loans, conservation, installation.” This duality creates what the program’s executive director Tom Eccles calls a “productive contradiction” within CCS. It operates both as an academic program and as professional training; Eccles describes CCS as “a museum with a school and a school with a museum.” Students navigate between seminar discussions of critical theory and conversations with registrars about shipping insurance. They must defend conceptual frameworks to thesis committees while calculating floor space and whether their finite budgets can accommodate international shipping costs. Reconciling the program’s entwined double objectives produces some inevitable challenges. Faculty member Evan Calder Williams, who teaches a yearlong theory course, emphasizes the importance of avoiding what he calls “the problem of illustration”—reducing artworks to mere demonstrations of theoretical concepts. “Despite teaching ‘theory’ as a shorthand term,” Calder Williams explained, “I'm deeply invested in encouraging people not to reduce artworks to illustrations of theories.”

These contradictions culminate in the thesis exhibition—a project that provides each student a full year to plan and mount a curated exhibition in the Hessel. Toward the end of their first year, students present initial proposals to a committee comprising core faculty (Cornell, Eccles, Calder Williams, Dawn Chan, and Lara Fresko Madra), Hessel director of exhibitions and operations Ian Sullivan, and a rotating collection of external advisers—writers, artists, and other curators, mostly drawn from the orbit of New York institutions. “All the faculty at CCS are intensively involved in the students' thesis project development,” Dawn Chan told me. “Office hours aren’t just limited to a faculty member's thesis advisees. We collectively guide the evolution of student thesis projects over their two years at the program.” The resulting exhibitions are ambitious, research-intensive, and very publicly visible. With a $6,500 budget and full access to the Hessel’s 17,000-square-foot galleries, each student works with artists, negotiates loans and transport, collaborates with the museum’s exhibition designer and staff, and produces supporting texts.

The transformation of the thesis exhibitions into genuine components of the Hessel's public programming represents a significant evolution in CSS’s curatorial pedagogy, a shift attributable in part to Sullivan’s arrival as director of exhibitions in 2018. Cornell underscored that exhibitions have “really gained in ambition” over recent years, attributing this to “student collaborations with CCS Bard faculty and staff representing a diverse spectrum of backgrounds, whose teachings support research and experimentation in exhibition-making.”  Before Sullivan, as Eccles noted, “there was no collaboration with an exhibition designer per se.” Now, exhibitions represent what Cornell describes as “a dialogue between the student body and Sullivan, in terms of design,” resulting in shows achieving genuinely professional museum standards. Student work closely with the Hessel's team of preparators, whose broad range of skills—woodworking, AV systems, lighting design, textile handling, and more—afford them a wide range of presentational possibilities. The preparators’ contributions often go unmentioned in the broader discourse around CCS, but it’s hard to understate their impact. The success of the thesis exhibitions relies not only on students’ conceptual ambitions but on the behind-the-scenes labor of these technicians, installers, and problem-solvers who translate proposals into built environments.

The thesis exhibitions have consequently come to serve as the program’s most formidable calling card. For the students, the thesis exhibitions represent a singular opportunity to work at the scale and standard of a major contemporary museum, with full institutional support. For visitors encountering CCS primarily through these shows, it is where the school’s identity is most vividly on display. For CCS itself, the exhibitions are a rubber-meets-the-road moment in which its pedagogy finds expression in a very public context—a spotlit stage on which the many roles it seeks to perform are gathered.

View of “Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken,” Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2025. Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Sibia Sarangan. Photo: Olympia Shannon 2025.

Rather than isolated individual assignments, the thesis exhibitions represent a continuum of inquiry, with each class year’s conversations rippling forward into the next. Many of the threads that have defined recent shows can be seen extended into the fifteen projects that comprised the 2025 exhibitions, presented this spring under the flatly descriptive banner “15.” A salient through line within this year’s thesis projects was a commitment to urgent social and political themes. In keeping with a trend that has burgeoned during Cornell’s tenure as director, the thesis shows also displayed a decidedly international sensibility: more than half of the 2025 projects highlighted artists from non-Western, diasporic backgrounds, a makeup that reflects both the diversity of the current cohort and the program’s pedagogical priorities. The group exhibition format continues to serve as a favored vehicle for this model of curation as social commentary; over three-fourths of this year’s projects assemble multiple artists’ work under their respective umbrellas.

A central thread that emerged in this year’s group exhibitions was diasporic experience. Sibia Sarangan’s thesis project "Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken" showcased works by artists Simon Benjamin, Keli Safia Maksud, and Suneil Sanzgiri, whose contributions position lived experience and collective memory as correctives to “official” histories. Sarangan’s curation took its title and conceptual framework from a long-form experimental essay film by Sanzgiri that traces the complex afterlife of the Portuguese colonization of Goa, India. Echoing the Persian word for “chat” or “gossip,” Zuhra Amini’s "gap gap gap" brought together the three Afghan diaspora artists Hangama Amiri, Latifa Zafar Attaii, and Zelikha Zohra Shoja, whose practices all occupy an intersection of photography and embroidery. In a literal act of mending fragmented histories, the artists each used the careful craft of needlework to alter images of themselves, their families, or their communities.

Other 2025 exhibitions reflected a preoccupation with media and digital culture’s impact on lived experience. Audrey Min’s "Intercession" gathered works by four artists—Lois Bielefeld, Ryan Kuo, Viktor Timofeev, and Harris Rosenblum and Theresa Tomi Faison—to examine the sense of agency that, as Min writes, “seems to animate the digital devices” underpinning our social and political lives. Both Kuo’s and Timofeev’s interface-based installations probed the uneasy forms of presence that digital interfaces manifest, while Bielefeld’s large-format photographs of a Midwest megachurch’s complex AV setup dryly reflected upon the technological mediation of the spiritual.

In a related vein, Matthew Lawson Garrett’s "The Appearance of Distance" investigated the lingering physical and psychological effects of today’s image economies. His exhibition brought together Tiffany Sia, Kobby Adi, and Jackie Karuti—artists whose practices make visible the residues of media images throughout the world, foregrounding what Garrett calls the “material consequences of mediated vision.” Similarly, Jungmin Cho’s "The Edge of Belongings" examined the affective weight of mass-produced consumer goods. Featuring works by Eugene Jung, boma pak, Jiajia Zhang, and Bruno Zhu, the exhibition scrutinized the ways in which consumer-subjects under capitalism forms intimate attachments to disposable commodities by amplifying the social, economic, and affective narratives encoded into mass-produced materials.

Revolving away from flows of information and capital towards the intimate and interpersonal, Micaela Vindman’s "Right now I’m not there" delved into experiences of alienation. Taking its cue from Lacan’s concept of “extimacy,” the exhibition was structured around Narcisa Hirsch’s The Myth of Narcissus, Women Who Speak with Their Own Image (1974–2005), in which the Argentine filmmaker captures women studying their own images. Hirsch’s work was joined by Rosario Zorraquín’s freestanding veil-like “readings”—drawings that the artist created by swaddling her subjects in linen gauze, and then drawing, writing, and painting on the fabric while engaging said subjects in intimate conversations. Nearby, a series of videos by Argentinian artist Luiz Roque depict a languorous free-fall through nighttime Buenos Aires, where fleeting intimacies unfold in the city’s hidden spaces. With their atmosphere of dreamlike interiority, the works in Vindman’s exhibition collectively limn the unease and fascination of witnessing a subject’s interiority brought to the surface. 

Each of these projects reflects an understanding of curating as a method of performing overt social and political critique. Ariana Kalliga’s project "Mutable Cycles" epitomized this approach, continuing a framing of curatorial research as a historiographic and activist practice that reaches back years at CCS Bard. From Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick’s like drawing a line in the sand at the ocean’s edge (2019), which revisited the contested construction of Interstate H-3 on Native Hawaiian land, to Allie/A.L. Rickard’s Cripping Curatorial Studies (2021), a platform for disabled artists and activists that made the act of curation itself the subject of institutional critique, students have consistently used group exhibitions to interrogate intersections of infrastructure, protest, identity, and justice.

Drawing on recent histories of financial crises in Lebanon and Cyprus, Kalliga’s project examines the financialization of infrastructure and privatization of utilities across the Mediterranean. In Joyce Joumaa’s multi-screen video Mutable Cycles II (2024), imagery of solar panels in Lebanon—installed after the country’s economic collapse as citizen-led energy solutions—is paired with found footage from nationwide protests in 2019. In an adjacent gallery, The Broken Pitcher (2022–), a collaborative project by Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian, restages a 2019 meeting between a Cypriot family facing foreclosure and bank representatives in a reading room-style environment, enfolding the story in layers of commentary and contextualization that situate it within colonial histories of debt and dispossession.

With the inclusion of Iris Touliatou’s untitled (diversion) (2025), in which all the artist’s phone calls and utility bills were forwarded to the Hessel Museum’s administrative offices, Kalliga further complicates her inquiry, incorporating an element of critique of the exhibition’s own institutional context. Touliatou’s work literally diverts institutional resources to handle a private citizen’s obligations, an inversion which functions as a pointed commentary on the processes through which institutions (and by extension, states) redistribute burdens.

View of “Mutable Cycles,” Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2025. Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Ariana Kalliga. Photo: Olympia Shannon, 2025.

While group shows constitute most thesis projects, over the past few years a handful of students have opted to focus their theses on single living artists, developing their respective projects as forms of collaboration or co-authorship. (At one time, single-artist thesis projects were frowned upon, but they have become more common in the program.) Such exhibitions involve the student in sustained partnership with an artist to develop new commissions, recontextualize existing works, and construct an interpretive framework expanding the artist’s practice in real time. The result often blurs the line between curator and producer, with the exhibition emerging as a joint creation.

In 2021, Georgie Payne’s "Yacht Metaphor: The Collected Works of @CoryInTheAbyss" offered a twist on the one-artist collaboration, shifting it to the realm of digital culture. Payne worked with the Instagram-native meme artist Jenson Leonard (aka @CoryInTheAbyss), translating his frenetic oeuvre of digital graphics into a gallery-equivalent experience online. The recontextualization gave Leonard’s work a contemplative pacing that social media timelines don’t afford, while allowing Payne to highlight the political dimensions of Leonard’s Black radical meme imagery. More recently, Leo Cocar’s "An Anathema Strikes the Flesh of the Laborer" (2023) ventured into an immersive partnership with the Massachusetts-based artist Harry Gould Harvey IV. Cocar spent months working closely with Harvey, drawing on the artist’s iconography of New England mill towns, mystical theology, and anarchist folklore. The ensuing exhibition spoke to a deep mutual trust between curator and artist, softening the usual boundaries between their roles in service to a kind of storytelling.

In the current cohort, Hayoung Chung’s "Queer bird faces" extends this collaborative model. Conceived as an evolving conversation between the curator and Sung Hwan Kim, a multidisciplinary artist known for enigmatic films and layered installations, the exhibition’s focal point was Kim’s film Hair is a piece of head (2021), a project that grew out of the New York-based artist’s ongoing research into the largely undocumented history of early twentieth-century Korean immigrants in Hawai’i. Chung’s curatorial approach emphasized the porous, living nature of Kim’s work; Chung supplemented the gallery presentation with a publication of translated poems by early Korean Hawaiian immigrants and organized a live concert by David Michael DiGregorio, Kim’s longtime collaborator. By extending the show beyond static display to include performative and literary components, "Queer bird faces" placed viewers in an environment that expanded the boundaries of Kim’s practice—less an exhibition about Sung Hwan Kim than an immersion into the artist’s way of working.

Another vector through recent CCS Bard exhibitions has been a distinct turn toward archival research and art-historical recovery. This approach has had outsize significance: in an era of resurgent interest in overlooked or suppressed figures, many CCS students have used their thesis projects to shine light on visionary artists outside the established canon. The resulting exhibitions function as critical art-historical interventions—curatorial projects that double as original scholarship, with the show itself making an argument for historical re-evaluation.

The past several years have seen students foreground visionary, often female-identifying or queer artists working in ephemeral, conceptual, or alternative media, whose contributions have been under-recognized or partially erased. The late Jenni Crain’s thesis project "Kate Millett: Terminal Piece" (2021) restaged the feminist writer and artist’s 1972 installation at the Women’s Interart Center in New York, arguing for the continued relevance of its critique of patriarchal institutions and contemporary carceral structures. Min Sun Jeon’s "Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: audience distant relative" (2022) similarly sought to deepen and complicate the reception of an artist mostly known for a single work, Cha’s genre-defying collection of poetry Dictee (1982). Marina Caron’s "Bettina: The Fifth Point of the Compass" (2023) extended this mode of recuperative scholarship through a deep dive into the work of Bettina Grossman, a reclusive artist whose systematic photographic series and conceptual drawings were largely unknown during her lifetime.

View of “Madeline Gins: Infinite Systems,” Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2025. Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Charlotte Youkilis. Photo: Olympia Shannon, 2025.

In the 2025 cohort, Charlotte Youkilis’s "Madeline Gins: Infinite Systems" extends this thread. Gins, an American artist and architect who passed away in 2014, is known for collaborative architectural experiments as half of Arakawa+Gins. Her solo work however, spanning drawings, artist books, and textual propositions, has remained largely unseen. Youkilis spent months “delving into Gins’s writings—her notebooks, diaries, and correspondences—and speaking with her close friends and contemporaries to better understand her way of thinking.” The resulting exhibition showcased works from the 1960s through early 2000s, many exhibited publicly for the first time. "Infinite Systems" pushed the archival turn into the domain of the metaphysical, suggesting that the task of recovering Gins’s solo voice is also a task of rethinking what art can say, and how.

Unifying these projects is an engagement with what might be described as critical caretaking, in which archival labor is not just recuperative but reparative, positioning exhibitions as forms of historiographic redress. What distinguishes these CCS projects is the degree to which they assume both intellectual and logistical responsibility for the legacies they steward.

If some CCS thesis exhibitions use the museum as a site of artistic collaboration or historical recovery, others turn the institution itself into the subject of inquiry, treating the museum less as a neutral container and more as a structure to be interrogated, reconfigured, or exposed. The result is a mode of curating that overlaps with spatial practice and institutional critique—where the thesis becomes a platform to question the very mechanisms of display and power through which curatorial work is usually conducted. Such projects seem to stretch a little further out from the museum than most—or circle back on it in restless, self-interrogating arcs.

In the 2025 cohort, Lekha Jandhyala’s "CONCRETE" typifies this approach. Featuring work by Robert Barry, Jason Hirata, and Ghislaine Leung, "CONCRETE" foregrounded the latent systems—architectural, bureaucratic, perceptual—that shape how exhibitions function. Ghislaine Leung’s Surgery (2024) comprises a directive: walls were inserted into the gallery to subtract a volume of space proportional to that removed from the artist’s body during a hysterectomy. Installing the work required extended conversations across departments about timing, labor, and access to space, making visible normally hidden institutional negotiations. Jason Hirata’s Inverted Lighting Scheme (2015)—an electrical conduit snaking from a plenum wall into the gallery—literally projected normally unseen museum infrastructure into view, becoming entangled with real-time institutional operations. Drawing on Marina Vishmidt’s concept of “infrastructural critique,” Jandhyala’s approach treated the institution “not just as something to critique, but as a medium through which meaning is made.”

Eduardo Andrés Alfonso’s 2022 thesis exhibition "Frame (traced)" similarly interrogated the Hessel Museum’s spatial logic and operations. Working with artist Alan Ruiz, Alfonso staged subtle material interventions that unveiled the behind-the-scenes labor of exhibition-making. Works were pulled from storage, partitions removed, lighting recalibrated. The effect was to destabilize the gallery’s apparent neutrality; the space itself “recurated” to reveal how institutional framing quietly governs what and how we see. Going a step further, Roman Stark’s "Criteria" (2021) employed a rule-based selection algorithm applied to the Hessel Collection, foregrounding the normally invisible criteria—loan availability, shipping logistics, conservation needs, internal politics—that shape even the most intuitive-seeming exhibition choices. By making these hidden logics the basis of his show, Stark delivered a metacuratorial intervention, laying bare the scaffolding of curatorial work.

View of “CONCRETE,” Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 2025. Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Lekha Jandhyala. Photo: Olympia Shannon, 2025.

The impact of CCS exhibitions on international curatorial discourse has been steadily increasing. While many of the methodological threads traced here—the group show engaged in social issues, the reflexive institutional critique, the archival resurrection, the experimental format, the collaborative “one-on-one” exhibition—are not unique to CCS, the program has effectively become one of curatorial studies’ most watched laboratories, with alumni seeding major institutions worldwide with approaches that inform and are informed by the thesis exhibitions.

While there may not be a CCS “style,” there is unquestionably an underlying metanarrative at play in the program that frames curatorial practice as a fundamentally critical, intellectual, interdisciplinary, and research-driven endeavor. The program models curating as a means of deeply thinking through and engaging with diverse fields of contemporary cultural production, with a marked emphasis on the “thinking through.” In tandem, the CCS program robustly prepares students for work in an institutional context, probably to a greater degree than any other curatorial studies program in the US.

Even if one does not go on to enter the professional curatorial field—it’s worth noting that many CCS graduates decide to pursue careers in other fields—the program’s dual emphasis on the critical and the professional can help foster deeper ways of engaging with the world. Alum Paulina Ascencio Fuentes told me that the program taught her to think of curating as “a toolbox”—a set of critical and practical skills applicable in contexts far beyond traditional art institutions. This expanded understanding has proven transformative in her current doctoral studies in anthropology at NYU, where she applies curatorial methodologies to other forms of cultural and historical research. “Something CCS gave me is the urge to look for those sources of knowledge outside the art world,” Acencio-Fuentes recently observed. “Being in that environment made me look for something else, something even more interesting than art.”

From an outside perspective, however, one might wonder if this deep immersivity in institutional practice might come at the expense of other aspects and considerations of curatorial work. As an example, although many students come to the program with some experience in commercial art contexts, and many plan to either continue or enter this field after graduation (in part due to financial considerations), the program for the most part seems to avoid tackling the unwieldy project of demystifying the obscurantism that presides over the commercial art market.

It’s also worth noting that the program’s generous funding and professional infrastructure create conditions that most curators will likely never experience again. Does such a rarefied environment prepare graduates for a field increasingly defined by precarity and compromise? The concern isn’t whether CCS fails in its commitment to scholarly and institutional rigor; it succeeds in both. The question is whether that rigor can be transposed onto the larger challenges currently facing the art world. A deeper question is whether the program’s dual commitment to criticality and institutional excellence might ultimately reinforce the very systems it seeks to question. Students learn to critique museums while mastering museum practice, to challenge hierarchies while navigating them expertly. This produces graduates who are institutionally fluent enough to succeed within existing structures, but perhaps too inculcated in those structures’ logic to fundamentally reimagine them. The “productive contradiction” Eccles identifies may be more circular than transformative—generating curators who can articulate sophisticated critiques of the art world while remaining excellent ministers to its reproduction.

Yet perhaps this circularity contains its own potential for change. If institutional transformation happens not through radical departures but through the gradual accumulation of practitioners who understand systems well enough to subtly redirect them, then CCS’s contradictions may be productive after all. Underlying the annual migration of buses to Annandale-on-Hudson is a belief that institutions can evolve through the accumulation of thoughtful practitioners. In this light, the hope lies not in dramatic rupture, but in the patient work of making space—exhibition by exhibition, decision by decision—for different ways of organizing cultural life.

The author would like to extend his sincere gratitude to the numerous CCS Bard faculty and staff, current graduates, alumni, and artists who took time to speak with him about the CCS program and their experience with the thesis exhibitions.