Sustainability News by Date
Results 1-12 of 12
December 2023
12-21-2023
Through the Community Sciences Lab within CESH, Bard will provide technical and analytical support for the project over two years for study sites in the Hudson Valley, including sites in Kingston, Red Hook, Annandale-on-Hudson, Newburgh, and Poughkeepsie. Specifically, CESH will provide and install weather stations, with air quality and meteorology sensors, at Newburgh and Poughkeepsie sites; and support Dr. Bari’s group in monitoring indoor and outdoor air quality in 40 homes in the Hudson Valley over the next three years—testing for a broad range of air pollutants, including black carbon, volatile organic compounds, ultrafine particles, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and ozone. Bard student involvement will include supporting monitoring efforts (indoor and out) and using the air quality data to assess air quality challenges in the Hudson Valley in classes.
“We are incredibly thankful to Dr. Aynul Bari and the Research Foundation for SUNY Albany for including us in this EPA grant,” said M. Elias Dueker, associate professor of Environmental and Urban Studies at Bard. “We look forward to using these funds to expand our indoor and outdoor air quality work with groups like the Kingston Air Quality Initiative and the Hudson Valley Air Quality Coalition. The right to breathe clean air inside and outside our homes is not something we can take for granted as we wrestle with important climate-based challenges, including increased wildfire smoke plumes from other parts of the country, flood-induced molding of our aging housing stock, and increased wood burning in our valley communities.”
The Community Sciences Lab (CSL) was created to support the work conducted by CESH. Built on the success of the Bard Water Lab and its partnership with the Saw Kill Watershed Community (SKWC), CSL expands CESH’s reach by allowing us to refocus our work on projects that address the interconnectedness of land, air, water, and communities. CSL projects include: Saw Kill Monitoring Program, Roe Jan Monitoring Program, Kingston Air Quality Initiative, Bard Campus Station, Hudsonia Eel Project, and Amphibian Migration.
Photo: Dr. Eli Dueker installing a MetOne 212-2 particle profiler atop the Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center in Midtown Kingston. Courtesy City of Kingston
Meta: Type(s): General | Subject(s): Division of Science, Math, and Computing,Environmental and Urban Studies Program,Environmental/Sustainability,Giving,Grants | Institutes(s): Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities |
Meta: Type(s): General | Subject(s): Division of Science, Math, and Computing,Environmental and Urban Studies Program,Environmental/Sustainability,Giving,Grants | Institutes(s): Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities |
October 2023
10-17-2023
The principal investigators on the project, Elias Dueker, associate professor of environmental and urban studies, and Gabriel Perron, associate professor of biology, will work with students to analyze microbiological micropollution samples and then synthesize those results with historical water quality data obtained from Bard and community partnership programs that monitored the Saw Kill tributary from the mid ’70s to early ’80s, and from 2015 to present. Bard faculty members Krista Caballero, Jordan Ayala, Beate Liepert, and Josh Bardfield, who helped write the grant, will also participate in the project during its second year.
“This partnership with Hudson River Foundation allows the Bard Center for Environmental Science and Humanities to strengthen its commitment to using science as a tool for environmental and social change,” said Deuker. “We hope this unique effort to utilize and elevate community-fueled science will serve as a model for contemporary and meaningful approaches to creating climate resilient communities in the Hudson Valley.”
The research will be presented to community groups, and community member participation will be solicited. The results will be published in white papers and academic journal articles with the hopes that the information will be used to inform tributary stewardship and management decisions. Bard will partner with the Saw Kill Watershed Community and the Hudson River Water Association to disseminate the results.
The Hudson River Foundation (HRF) seeks to make science integral to decision-making about the Hudson River and its watershed and to support science-based stewardship of the river for all who live, work, and recreate there. As the primary resource and advocate for science and environmental research on the Hudson River and its watershed, the HRF connects the scientific community, policy makers, and the general public with a wealth of information and analysis. For the general public, HRF offers research results, reports, and opportunities for education regarding efforts to restore and sustain the Hudson’s waters. For the scientific community and policy makers, HRF is the gateway to scientific information, research opportunities, and dialogue about technical issues facing the river. For more information, visit hudsonriver.org.
Photo: Students who gathered water quality data during a Bard program in 2015. From left, Becket Landsbury ’16, Pola Khun ’17, Clea Schumer (Red Hook High School), Daniella Azulai ’17, Haley Goss-Holmes ’17, Yuejiao Wan ’18, and Marco Spodek ’17.
Meta: Type(s): Faculty,Staff | Subject(s): Awards,Biology Program,Civic Engagement,Division of Science, Math, and Computing,Environmental/Sustainability,Faculty,Giving,Grants | Institutes(s): Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities |
Meta: Type(s): Faculty,Staff | Subject(s): Awards,Biology Program,Civic Engagement,Division of Science, Math, and Computing,Environmental/Sustainability,Faculty,Giving,Grants | Institutes(s): Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities |
10-04-2023
Photo: L-R: Alisha B. Wormsley MFA ’19 and Maryam Monalisa Gharavi MFA ’18.
Meta: Type(s): Alumni | Subject(s): Alumni/ae,Bard Graduate Programs,Environmental/Sustainability | Institutes(s): MFA |
Meta: Type(s): Alumni | Subject(s): Alumni/ae,Bard Graduate Programs,Environmental/Sustainability | Institutes(s): MFA |
June 2023
06-06-2023
KAQI began in January 2020 as a partnership between Bard’s Community Sciences Lab and the City of Kingston Conservation Advisory Council’s Air Quality Subcommittee. Since then, Kingston residents and Bard College students, staff, and faculty have facilitated both indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring projects throughout Ulster County. Standing as the first air quality study of its kind in Kingston, KAQI’s monitoring efforts focus on a regional assessment of air pollution as measured from the roof of the Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center on Broadway in Kingston.
KAQI’s main monitoring efforts focus on a regional assessment of air pollution from fine particulate matter (PM2.5), made up of microscopic particles that are the products of burning fuel, and is released into the air through exhausts from oil burners, gas burners, automobiles, cooking, grilling, and both indoor and outdoor wood burning. PM 2.5 particles are so tiny, they stay suspended in the air for long periods of time, allowing them to travel long distances before depositing. When these particles are inhaled, they can enter the bloodstream through the lungs, creating or exacerbating health issues. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that “small particulate pollution has health impacts even at very low concentrations – indeed no threshold has been identified below which no damage to health is observed.”
After 3 years of monitoring in Kingston, air quality trends associated with daily activities are observable. The findings show that air pollution in the city is variable and appears to have a seasonal context—higher levels of pollution are shown during colder months (associated with fuel burning), and lower levels are generally seen in spring and summer. The difference between levels seen during 2020—when COVID shut down many activities and resulted in a decrease in vehicles on the road—and pollution levels detected in years since is also significant.
Two important measures of PM2.5 air quality are the annual mean standard and the 24-hour average standard. Kingston’s PM2.5 air quality met the annual standards of both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the WHO, although it came close to exceeding the latter. For the 24-hour standard, air quality met the EPA’s but exceeded the WHO’s.
As of January, 2023, a revision was proposed to change the EPA's primary public health-based annual standard from its current level of 12.0 micrograms per meter squared to the range of 9.0-10.0 micrograms per meter squared. This revision would lean closer toward, but not come close to meeting, the WHO's PM 2.5 annual standard of 5 micrograms per meter squared. Based on the EPA annual mean calculations, these values come close to exceeding the WHO annual standard.
One factor associated with instances of air quality breaching the WHO’s 24-hour threshold is the development of atmospheric inversions, which occur when the temperature of the atmosphere increases instead of decreases with altitude and surface level air parcels are unable to rise up, trapping any present air pollution at ground level. Being in the Hudson Valley, Kingston is more susceptible to inversion events as the air is blocked from all directions. It's possible that, if Kingston residents were aware of when these events are occurring, we could start making different decisions about woodburning and car use during these times to make our air cleaner for all. Another potential factor may be pollutants from smoke carried from wildfires on the West Coast.
More detail about KAQI’s findings can be found at the Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities website: https://cesh.bard.edu/kingston-air-quality-initiative-kaqi/
“While our annual averages meet EPA standards, as many residents of Kingston and the surrounding areas know, air quality at ground level can vary widely from neighborhood to neighborhood,” said Lorraine Farina, co-founder of KAQI and the Hudson Valley Air Quality Coalition, and former Kingston CAC air quality sub-committee chair. “The average adult takes in 1000 breaths per hour, and exposures to dangerous fine particulate matter very much depend on whether wood is being burned nearby, as burning wood is dirtier and more polluting than burning oil, gas, or coal. There is no safe level of exposure to PM 2.5, so the expanding neighborhood-level monitoring efforts of the Bard Community Science Lab will help residents understand the actual air quality right where they are breathing, so we can all make choices that benefit both our health and that of the planet.”
“I want to thank Bard and the Community Sciences Lab for allowing Kingston to participate in this initiative,” said Steve Noble, the mayor of Kingston. “I am pleased to see that our air quality is superior to many of the places around us, but it’s a profound reminder that our daily activities do impact our health, and the health of our environment. We appreciate Bard’s investment in monitoring Kingston’s air, as it has been an invaluable learning tool. Together with Kingston’s Conservation Advisory Council, we will continue to monitor local air quality alerts, and will continue to work together with leaders in our region on policy and initiatives for cleaner air.”
Dr. Eli Dueker, co-director of the Bard Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities, added, “Clean air is something we often take for granted in the Hudson Valley. Our findings show that meeting annual EPA standards (particularly current standards) is one thing, but on a day-to-day basis, our air quality is sometimes degraded and can be unhealthy. After all, we are not breathing on an average yearly basis—we are breathing on a second-by-second basis. We can make decisions as a community to keep our own air clean – for example, we could reduce or even stop our wood-burning in city limits (particularly on days with atmospheric inversions), reduce our car use, and make our homes more energy efficient.”
The Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities at Bard College, in collaboration with KAQI, has been working on a handful of air quality related projects centralized around community needs and concerns. These include:
- Developing a publicly-accessible atmospheric inversion monitoring system for the Kingston area.
- Neighborhood-level air quality monitoring, through the fast-developing Hudson Valley Library Air Quality Network. Using outdoor real-time air quality monitoring devices stationed at public libraries, air quality data is free and accessible online. We are always looking for new locations throughout the Hudson Valley to add to the network and provide more localized data for residents. If any libraries are interested, please reach out to [email protected].
- In partnership with SUNY-Albany, conducting indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring in homes with woodsmoke, mold and structurally-related air quality challenges.
For more information or ways to get involved, please visit https://kingston-ny.gov/airquality or https://cesh.bard.edu/kingston-air-quality-initiative-kaqi/.
Photo: Dr. Eli Dueker installing a MetOne 212-2 particle profiler atop the Andy Murphy Neighborhood Center in Midtown Kingston. Courtesy City of Kingston
Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Division of Science, Math, and Computing,Environmental and Urban Studies Program,Environmental/Sustainability | Institutes(s): Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities |
Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Division of Science, Math, and Computing,Environmental and Urban Studies Program,Environmental/Sustainability | Institutes(s): Center for Environmental Sciences and Humanities |
April 2023
04-11-2023
Photo: L-R: Stacy Burnett ’20 MBA ’23 and Charlene Reyes. Photo by Stacy Burnett, courtesy Bard MBA in Sustainability
Meta: Type(s): Alumni,Staff | Subject(s): Business/Entrepreneurship,Environmental/Sustainability | Institutes(s): Bard MBA in Sustainability,Bard Prison Initiative |
Meta: Type(s): Alumni,Staff | Subject(s): Business/Entrepreneurship,Environmental/Sustainability | Institutes(s): Bard MBA in Sustainability,Bard Prison Initiative |
04-05-2023
Produced in Association with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard, the Biennial Continues May 4–7, 2023
Festival Features World Premiere Performances from Kenyon Adams in Collaboration with Omar Tate, Osayi Endolyn, and Ambrose Rhapsody Murray; Tara Rodríguez Besosa; Tania El Khoury; and Kite
Festival Is Part of the Fisher Center’s Milestone 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground
The Fisher Center at Bard presents four world premiere performances for the second half of Common Ground: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food, curated by the artist Tania El Khoury, who serves as Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA), and Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester. Common Ground—the 2022-2023 iteration of the Fisher Center LAB Biennial, for which the Fisher Center commissions new work that grapples with some of the most pressing questions of our time—has gathered artists whose practices engage with food sovereignty, climate change, and land rights. The concluding offerings in Common Ground’s international program, which began last fall at harvest time, take place at the beginning of the growing season, May 4–7. Multiple artists here emphasize food’s fundamental relationship to communion, sharing food with audiences/participants as a core facet of their new works.
New works play out through various modes of inviting interaction, providing opportunities to collectively imagine together a more equitable, sustainable, and healthful future. Interdisciplinary artist Kenyon Adams, collaborating with chef and artist Omar Tate (Honeysuckle Provisions, Netflix’s High on the Hog), James Beard Foundation Award-winning food and culture writer Osayi Endolyn, and visual artist Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, creates a “blues Eucharist” with COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration (May 5–7). Architect, activist, and farmer Tara Rodríguez Besosa’s Somos OtraCosa (May 5–7) introduces audiences to the queer homestead OtraCosa—in the mountains of San Salvador, Puerto Rico—through an installation and decolonized living manuscript. With Memory of Birds, Tania El Khoury builds a sound installation in the trees around the Fisher Center, evoking the imprint of political violence on contested lands (May 4–7). In Aǧúyabskuyela (May 4–7), Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist and composer Kite (MFA ’18) explores the practice, amongst the Lakȟóta people, of sharing cakes with images of the deceased in frosting at funerary wakes—and considering various forms of loss with guest speakers. (See below for descriptions and schedule of each project.)
For complete Biennial information visit the Fisher Center website or call 845-758-7900.
Beyond the programming presented in person at the Fisher Center, the 2022–23 Biennial is truly global, as the subjects of foodways, seed preservation, and the right to access food and land are inherently interconnected. International editions of the program have been held in Colombia, Palestine, and South Africa—curated by Juliana Steiner, Emily Jacir, and Boyzie Cekwana, respectively. These three international programs are supported by the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard (CHRA). Documentation from these programs will be on display at the Fisher Center during the festival, with an in-person curator’s panel (May 6).
Videos of video works commissioned by CHRA on the politics of food from Ama Josephine Budge, Brian Lobel with Season Butler, Alexandre Paulikevitch, and Emilio Rojas with Pamela Sneed will be on display throughout the festival.
The fourth edition of the Biennial, Common Ground, kicked off in October 2022. Fall programming included the U.S. premiere of When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]], a trilogy of performative installations from the acclaimed Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe), tracing the effects of salmon farms on multiple ecologies, and the world premiere of The Belly is a Garden, a performance and walk through the cultivated Bard Farm and the wild spaces that surround it with celebrated seed keeper, artist, and chef Vivien Sansour, created with live artist Adrienne Truscott as dramaturg.
Common Ground follows the 2019 LAB Biennial, Where No Wall Remains, the first that Tania El Khoury and Gideon Lester curated together, which focused on borders—political, personal, and geographic—as sites of significance and contention. That festival moved beyond the walls of the Fisher Center to include a land art project by Emilio Rojas, who used the traditional “three sisters” crops to grow a vast map of the U.S./Mexico border at the Bard Farm, and a site-specific dinner in a former church, created by Mirna Bamieh, who traced the history of ingredients and dishes forgotten or erased during the occupation of Palestine. Those two projects resonated in the sociological, political, geographic, and historical context of the Hudson Valley, an agricultural region undergoing swift gentrification while still containing areas of significant poverty and even food apartheid.
The Fisher Center LAB Biennial is a curatorial platform that reimagines the Fisher Center as a site for performance and installations. Art works are installed in backstage areas, rehearsal studios, even storage rooms, to create a playful dialog with Frank Gehry’s building, and inviting audiences and artists to engage with it in unconventional and surprising ways. Previous editions of the biennial have included The House is Open (2015) which explored the dynamic relationship between the visual and performing arts worlds, and We’re Watching (2018) which focused on surveillance.
The 2022–23 biennial is also inspired by the various social and political initiatives happening in the Hudson Valley, some of them on BIPOC-run farms that are experimenting with sustainable and equitable farming practices, often rooted in indigenous practices of seed preservation and in collaboration with the original stewards of the land.
Gideon Lester, Artistic Director of the Fisher Center, said, “The subject matter of the 2022–23 Fisher Center LAB Biennial is both vast and timely, encompassing questions of ethics, politics, history, science, and aesthetics. We’ve commissioned some of the world’s most imaginative artists to address these urgent concerns. Taken together, the wide-ranging works they’re creating for Common Ground will provide audiences with a complex, multi-dimensional opportunity to explore foodways, land politics, and their central importance in sustainability, social justice, and climate action. The festival is a thrilling demonstration of what’s possible when the Fisher Center collaborates with the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts and a reflection of Bard’s commitment to sustainability, advocacy, and support for marginalized communities in the region, and to the study and implementation of new directions in regenerative farming practices and food science.”
Tania El Khoury, Director of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard, said, “Common Ground is about connections: between different species; between our food and art practices and the land on which we are settlers; and in between artists and seed and food activists across the U.S., Colombia, Palestine, and South Africa.”
Spring 2023 Common Ground Schedule and Descriptions
Kenyon Adams
COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration
World Premiere
May 5 at 8 pm
May 6 at 8 pm
May 7 at 4 pm
Sosnoff Stage Right
Live Performance
In what ways does a meal distinctly allow commemoration, and also provide nourishment? And where are the joy-working and life-sustaining spaces of the future?
COMMUNION: a ritual of nourishment and commemoration is a participatory “blues Eucharist” – inspired by Kenyon Adams’ early experiences in the Black Protestant churches of his childhood in the Southeast region of the United States. In collaboration with chef Omar Tate (featured in the Netflix series High on the Hog), writer Osayi Endolyn (The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food: A Cookbook), and visual artist Ambrose Rhapsody Murray, Kenyon is creating an offering to the audience, with poems, prayers, movement, music, and food. The ritual applies the distinct paradox that imbues a Eucharistic meal: the partaking of which is simultaneously a commemoration of death as well as a claim of unity with that which cannot die or be diminished. COMMUNION seeks to construct new spaces and traditions of testimony and witness.
This work is part of the artist’s own reckoning with death in the pandemic and the ways it has disproportionately affected BIPOC communities, as well as the ongoing violence against black bodies within American society. COMMUNION is the second installment of a ritual trilogy, WATCHNIGHT: WE ARE ALMOST TO OUR DESTINATION. The first part, Prayers of the People, was presented by the Fisher Center in 2018, in collaboration with the Hannah Arendt Center.
All tickets $25
$5 tickets available for Bard students through the Passloff Pass
Tara Rodríguez Besosa
Somos OtraCosa
World Premiere
May 5 from 5–7 pm
May 6 from 1–6 pm
May 7 from 1–3 pm
Sosnoff Backstage
Interactive Installation
Architect, activist, and farmer Tara Rodíguez Besosa is creating an installation and resource center to introduce the public to OtraCosa, an off-grid DIY queer homestead in the rural, mountainous community of San Salvador, Puerto Rico. For the past year Tara has been mapping and cataloging the species and food systems of OtraCosa, creating a decolonized, living manuscript of the different human and non-human exchanges that provide nourishment, healing, and life. Tara, inspired by the Drake Manuscript, is creating their own decolonized version of a living manuscript, handmade by them on the farm. Throughout the festival Tara will guide audiences through the installation and its manuscript, inviting us to explore the principles and practices of OtraCosa and those who steward its land.
Free and open to the public
Tania El Khoury
Memory of Birds
World Premiere
May 4 from 5–7 pm, on the half-hour
May 5 from 5–7 pm, on the half-hour
May 6 from 1–6 pm, on the half-hour
May 7 from 1–3 pm, on the half-hour
Fisher Center Lawn
Interactive Sound Installation
Memory of Birds is an interactive sound installation in trees, in collaboration with a trauma therapist and migrating birds. The work explores political violence that gets buried in the soil of contested lands. Through a guided somatic experience, Memory of Birds transforms into a work that eats itself, designed to be forgotten.
Limited Capacity
All tickets $10
$5 tickets available for Bard students through the Passloff Pass
Kite (MFA ’18)
Aǧúyabskuyela
May 4 at 7:30 pm, with guest Corey Stover
May 5 at 6 pm, with guest Lou Cornum
May 6 at 6 pm, with guest Jolene K. Rickard
May 7 at 2 pm, with guest Alisha Wormsley
Veterans of Foreign Wars Red Hook Post 7765
30 Elizabeth St, Red Hook, NY
Transportation available from the Fisher Center, check website for schedule.
Live Performance
Sharing cakes at funeral wakes is a practice common amongst the Lakȟóta people; often these cakes have an image of the deceased imprinted in the frosting. Kite, an Oglála Lakȟóta performance artist and composer, explores this tradition in a performance in which she decorates funerary cakes made from local indigenous ingredients while speaking with friends, relatives, and elders about traditions, kin, land, and species they have lost. As we face death in the world, Kite hopes to turn towards protocols for mourning to process the death of beings, human and non-human. Cake and coffee will be served.
All tickets $10
$5 tickets available for Bard students through the Passloff Pass
More Common Ground
in Colombia, Palestine, and South Africa
LUMA Theater Lobby
Common Ground also includes three international programs, curated by Juliana Steiner (Colombia), Emily Jacir (Palestine), and Boyzie Cekwana (South Africa), supported by CHRA in collaboration with students and faculty at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotà, Al-Quds Bard College in East Jerusalem, and University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Documentation from these programs will be on display at the Fisher Center during the festival.
Common Ground Curators Panel
May 6 at 1 pm
Resnick Studio
CHRA Video Commissions on Food Politics
Works from Ama Josephine Budge, Brian Lobel with Season Butler, Alexandre Paulikevitch, and Emilio Rojas with Pamela Sneed
LUMA Theater Lobby
CHRA has commissioned international artists to create digital commissions on the politics of food. First released online in 2022, these four videos will be on display during the festival.
Common Ground: An International Festival on the Politics of Land and Food is presented as part of the Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season: Breaking Ground, which features genre-defying new visions for dance, theater, opera, and public discourse and culminates with the groundbreaking for a new performing arts studio building designed by Maya Lin (October 2). The Fisher Center’s new 25,000-square-foot building which will offer artists at all stages of their careers vastly expanded room to explore as they build works from the ground up.
Funding Credits
The Fisher Center LAB Biennial has received grants from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Educational Foundation of America, in support of COMMUNION, and the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.
Kite is a 2022 Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck Artist-in-Residence.
The Fisher Center’s 20th Anniversary Season is dedicated to the founders of the Fisher Center who have cultivated extraordinary artistic experiences—past, present, and future. We honor the memory of Richard B. Fisher, a true champion of the arts and Bard College, and his visionary leadership.
The Fisher Center is generously supported by Jeanne Donovan Fisher, the Martin and Toni Sosnoff Foundation, the Advisory Boards of the Fisher Center at Bard and Bard Music Festival, Fisher Center and Bard Music Festival members, the Ettinger Foundation, the Thendara Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature. Fisher Center LAB has received funding from members of the Live Arts Bard Creative Council, the Lucille Lortel Foundation, and the Fisher Center’s Artistic Innovation Fund, with lead support from Rebecca Gold and S. Asher Gelman ’06 through the March Forth Foundation.
A special thank-you to all who have made this special season possible. Thank you for your contribution to our artistic home.
About Fisher Center LAB
Fisher Center LAB is the Fisher Center’s artist residency and commissioning program, providing custom-made and meaningful support for innovative artists across disciplines. Since its launch in 2012, Fisher Center LAB has supported residencies, workshops, and performances for hundreds of artists, incubating new projects and engaging audiences, students, faculty, and staff in the process of creating contemporary performances. LAB strives to provide artists with the environment, resources, and funding they need to experiment, dream, and fully realize their artistic potential. Where possible, Fisher Center LAB builds long-term relationships for artists, powering their work by taking on administrative and producing support of their practices and companies. Productions developed by Fisher Center LAB often premiere in the annual Bard SummerScape festival and frequently tour around the country and across the world.
Photo: Photo by Chris Kayden
Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Bard Network,Environmental/Sustainability,Event,Fisher Center,Fisher Center LAB,Open Society University Network | Institutes(s): OSUN |
Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Bard Network,Environmental/Sustainability,Event,Fisher Center,Fisher Center LAB,Open Society University Network | Institutes(s): OSUN |
04-04-2023
Photo: Montgomery Place Campus, Bard College.
Meta: Type(s): Staff | Subject(s): Campus and Facilities,Environmental/Sustainability | Institutes(s): Bard Undergraduate Programs,Montgomery Place Campus |
Meta: Type(s): Staff | Subject(s): Campus and Facilities,Environmental/Sustainability | Institutes(s): Bard Undergraduate Programs,Montgomery Place Campus |
March 2023
03-28-2023
On Wednesday, March 29, Bard will host its own teach-in from 5–8 pm in the Bertelsmann Campus Center. A free, low-carbon dinner will be provided alongside “People and Planet Working on Climate Repair,” a panel discussion led by Professors Felicia Keesing and Eban Goodstein. The evening will culminate in discussion groups focused on climate solutions. In addition to the teach-in, 40 Bard courses will integrate climate discussion into their classes this week, and on March 30, a Climate Game Night will be held in Kline Commons.
The Worldwide Teach-in is a project of the Graduate Programs in Sustainability at Bard College in partnership with educators across the world. The project has received support from the Open Society University Network, Lever for Change, an affiliate of the MacArthur Foundation, and the United States Embassy in Kyrgyzstan.
Meta: Type(s): Event | Subject(s): Bard Farm,Bard Graduate Programs,Environmental/Sustainability,Open Society University Network,Solve Climate by 2030 | Institutes(s): Bard Center for Environmental Policy,Bard MBA in Sustainability,OSUN |
February 2023
02-21-2023
The project will transform a twelve-acre cornfield into a pollinator habitat on Bard’s Montgomery Place Campus, and will support pollinator health, cultivate biodiversity, support sourcing and propagating native seeds, build soil health, and manage invasive species. It is a critical early step in the “Pollinate Now” initiative, a bioregional strategy for habitat restoration in the Hudson River Estuary Watershed, developed by Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley together with Landscape Interactions.
The “Bard Bee-Lives” project is designed to attract and sustain a wide range of native bee, butterfly, and moth species that are currently at risk of local extinction in the Hudson Valley. Bard is committed to properly implementing the site-specific design and to continue the long-term habitat management required of this effort, with the hope that the varied habitat meadow will eventually be self-sustaining with limited intervention. The list of native plants and the site design developed during the project will be publicly shared, allowing for it to be replicated throughout the region at different scales.
“This new pollen, nectar, and habitat-rich plant community will support more than 100 species of pollinators and will strengthen the ecosystem services this plot of land had previously lost as a cornfield,” said Amy Parrella, Director of Horticulture and Arboretum at Bard. “This will also be a native planting and bee nesting demonstration site for residential homeowners, landscape professionals, and farmers.”
The New World Foundation is rooted in a long tradition of advancing ever-compelling challenges to economic equity, democratic rights, and civic participation in the United States. As a national community foundation, it aims to strengthen community-based organizations and local leadership, working from the bottom up to build coalitions around issues that converge in place, creating alliances locally and building movements nationally. Partners for Climate Action Hudson Valley is an organization which develops programs, gives grants, and offers strategic and operational consulting in order to combat barriers to local ecological action.
Photo: Montgomery Place campus. Photo by Chris Kendall
Meta: Type(s): Staff | Subject(s): Arboretum and Horticulture,Environmental/Sustainability,Giving,Grants,Open Society University Network | Institutes(s): Montgomery Place Campus,OSUN |
Meta: Type(s): Staff | Subject(s): Arboretum and Horticulture,Environmental/Sustainability,Giving,Grants,Open Society University Network | Institutes(s): Montgomery Place Campus,OSUN |
02-07-2023
The honors were based primarily on a survey of more than 17,800 students enrolled at 224 MBA programs during the past several academic years. The student survey asked students more than 90 questions about their school's academics, student body, and campus life, as well as their career plans.
Meta: Subject(s): Bard Graduate Programs,Environmental/Sustainability | Institutes(s): Bard MBA in Sustainability |
January 2023
01-24-2023
In December 2022, it was announced that Samat’s team would be awarded a prize of $1,500 in the annual pitch competition sponsored by Bard’s MBA in Sustainability. Bermet Suiutbekova, the group’s instructor at AUCA, said that the game “will bring a positive change to Central Asian countries. With the help of $1,500 in prize money from the competition, the team is planning to release the beta version of the product in June of 2023 and go to market in July of 2024.”
Photo: Alua Samat ’25 and other students at AUCA and Bard College developed the online game Not A Shame as part of the OSUN course Social Entrepreneurship.
Meta: Type(s): Student | Subject(s): Academics,Bard Network,Business/Entrepreneurship,Environmental/Sustainability,Open Society University Network,OSUN Online Courses | Institutes(s): Bard MBA in Sustainability,OSUN |
Meta: Type(s): Student | Subject(s): Academics,Bard Network,Business/Entrepreneurship,Environmental/Sustainability,Open Society University Network,OSUN Online Courses | Institutes(s): Bard MBA in Sustainability,OSUN |
01-08-2023
Photo: Brooke Jude.
Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Biology Program,Division of Science, Math, and Computing,Environmental and Urban Studies Program,Environmental/Sustainability,Faculty,Global Public Health Concentration |
Meta: Type(s): Faculty | Subject(s): Biology Program,Division of Science, Math, and Computing,Environmental and Urban Studies Program,Environmental/Sustainability,Faculty,Global Public Health Concentration |
Results 1-12 of 12