About

The Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College is an artist-led center that researches and supports art and activist practices globally.

At its heart is a perspective that looks beyond art institutions and nonprofit organization industries to engage with international practices of activism, art, and knowledge production.

The Center is

committed to creating networks of collaboration and solidarity

and to enriching the conversation on the political potential of contemporary art within human rights discourse. Through its postgraduate masters of art program, it opens a space for activists, artists, and scholars to colearn and cocreate. Through its public program—operating locally in New York’s Hudson Valley (occupied homelands of the Munsee and Muhheaconneok people) and internationally—the center engages with innovative art practices that investigate human rights violations and grassroots activism that uses creative tools of resistance.

We Support

multidisciplinary and collaborative knowledge production

through annual resident research fellowships, research grants for students and faculty, yearly commissions for artists, public talks series, free and accessible publications, and a multidisciplinary biennial arts festival in partnership with the Fisher Center at Bard and other academic and cultural institutions around the world.

Based At

Bard College’s campus in New York’s Hudson Valley

the Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA) is integrated in its local and regional communities, and globally through its collaborations and affiliations. The center’s programs transcend boundaries of nationality and location as well as of genre and professional practice.

the Open Society University Network

(OSUN) is a global network of educational institutions that integrates learning and the advancement of knowledge—in the social sciences, the humanities, the sciences and the arts, on undergraduate and graduate levels.

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Acknowledging Bard's Origins

Bard College acknowledges that its origins are intertwined with the systems of racial injustice that have been a part of the history of the US from its foundations.