About

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. The center engages with innovative art practices that investigate human rights violations and grassroots activism that use aesthetic and imaginative methods of resistance.

its international

M.A. Program in Human Rights & the Arts

is a space for activists, artists, and scholars to co-learn and co-create. The M.A. transcends boundaries of nationality and location as well as genre and professional practice.

We Support

multidisciplinary and collaborative knowledge production

through local and international public programming, research fellowships and grants, art commissions, activist collaborations, talk series, publications, and a multidisciplinary arts festival in partnership with the Fisher Center at Bard and other cultural institutions and practitioners around the world.

Based At

Bard College in New York’s Moh-He-Con-Nuck Valley

the Center for Human Rights and the Arts (CHRA) is integrated in its local and regional communities, and globally through collaborations and affiliations. CHRA was founded with support from the Open Society University Network (OSUN) an is currently partially supported by the Mellon Foundation Grant and donor-scholarships.

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.