Opening Reception: Thursday, December 5, 5pm - 7pm
From the Collection: First Year Curatorial Practice 2024 comprises three exhibitions curated in groups by the M.A. candidates of the Class of 2026. Staged in the three successive rooms of the inner CCS Bard Galleries, these shows include works drawn from the Marieluise Hessel Collection as well as materials sourced from the archives and special collections held by the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
Construing artworks as a chorus of voices, the first exhibition—titled the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue—explores how histories, representations, and meanings are layered through narrative processes, inviting audiences to engage with various strategies of attention and embrace the dissonances and resonances that emerge. The next show, Thing Valley, engages with the prop as a surreal, uncanny form, proposing that when objects that accompany or evoke performances are placed in an exhibition space, they proceed into a state we might think of as “middlelife.” Finally, gathering material from several collections that were privately held before moving to the Center for Curatorial Studies, the third exhibition, While You Were Out, foregrounds the residues of the personal that remain when objects and artworks are reoriented for a public audience.
Featured artists include: Laurie Anderson, Matthew Barney, Alexandra Bircken, John Bock, Tom Burr, Paul Chan, Tacita Dean, Nikita Gale, Robert Gober, Lyle Ashton Harris, Mona Hatoum, Jamie Isenstein, David Koloane, Glenn Ligon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Paul McCarthy, Marisa Merz, Gabriel Orozco, Frida Orupabo, Naudline Pierre, R. H. Quaytman, Danh Võ, Franz Erhard Walther, Gillian Wearing, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.
Graduate student-curated exhibitions at CCS Bard are made possible with support from Lonti Ebers; the Enterprise Foundation; the Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Wortham Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; and the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.
