The Center for Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College is an artist-led center that researches and supports scholarship, 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, and the significance of politics in aesthetic form. Through its postgraduate masters of art program, it opens a space for activists, artists, and scholars to co-learn and co-create. 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 aesthetic and imaginative methods 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 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.
Sponsored By
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.