News and Events

×

Francine Prose for the Guardian: “Ali Faqirzada is an Afghan refugee. He deserves to stay in America”

Francine Prose, distinguished writer in residence at Bard College, has published an article in the Guardian in defense of Bard Baccalaureate student and Afghan asylum seeker Ali Faqirzada ’28, who was detained by ICE on October 14 just after he had been found to have a viable claim for asylum. The Faqirzada family, who had assisted the American government and NATO with projects to improve the lives of Afghan women, fled the Taliban after the US withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. “In a more reasonable, more compassionate country, the immigration official would have walked around the table, shaken Faqirzada’s hand, and thanked him for how much he has done on behalf of his people and our own,” Prose writes. “But that is not what happened.”

Efforts by Bard College to free Faqirzada—led by president Leon Botstein, himself a refugee from the Nazis—along with federal and state elected officials and the Episcopal Diocese of New York, have been complicated by a November 29 government ruling that has paused the final approval of asylum applications. The ruling, which comes in the aftermath of a Washington DC shooting of two national guard soldiers by an Afghan national who had worked with the CIA, includes a pause on the issuing of green cards to Afghans already residing in the US. “A genial, kind-hearted, highly motivated computer science student and hospital security guard should not be held accountable for someone else’s crime,” Prose writes. “Nor should the entire Afghan community.”

Post Date: 12-04-2025

×

Carlos Motta Named 2025-26 Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) and Bard College’s Human Rights Project are pleased to announce that multidisciplinary artist and professor Carlos Motta will hold the Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism for 2025-26. Established in 2014, the initiative supports an annual faculty position bringing leading scholars, activists, and artists to teach and conduct research within the CCS Bard graduate program and the undergraduate Human Rights Program. The endowed position represents Bard College and the Keith Haring Foundation’s longstanding commitment to advancing scholarship and creative practices at the intersection of art and social justice.

Born in Colombia and based in New York, Motta’s art practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities. A chronicler of untold narratives, he explores the experiences of post-colonial subjects and societies through a range of media, including video, installation, sculpture, drawing, web-based projects, performance, and symposia.

“Carlos Motta’s decades-long practice foregrounds art as a site of resistance and repair, expanding Keith Haring’s legacy of social engagement into the urgencies of the present. Through projects that bring together queer, trans, and decolonial perspectives across the Americas, Motta has consistently challenged the boundaries between artistic practice, research, and activism,” said Mariano López Seoane, Director of the Graduate Program and ISLAA Fellow in Latin American Art at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. “His work invites critical reflection on visibility, power, and collective memory—values that deeply resonate with CCS Bard’s mission and the spirit of the Keith Haring Chair initiative." 

“We are proud to have an artist and activist of Carlos Motta’s stature and commitments teaching with us this coming year,” said Thomas Keenan, Director of Bard’s Human Rights Project. “His focus on the rights and claims of under-represented communities, and his insistence on making their voices heard, is more important – and more creative – now than ever.”

The announcement of the 2025-26 Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism follows CCS Bard’s recent opening of a new 12,000-square-foot addition to its library and archives—the Keith Haring Wing, named in recognition of a lead $3 million gift from the Keith Haring Foundation. The expansion further builds on a longstanding partnership between CCS Bard and the Foundation, which also endowed the Keith Haring Chair in Art and Activism in 2022. More information on the new Keith Haring Wing is available at the link.

About Carlos Motta
Carlos Motta (b. 1978) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores sexuality, gender, and power through historical research and collaborative practice. In 2024, Motta presented Gravidade (Gravity) at Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo, and participated in Disobedience Archive, a project by Marco Scotini at La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. His mid-career survey Carlos Motta: Pleas of Resistance was presented at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2025 and will travel to OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz in 2026.

Past solo exhibitions include career surveys at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO) (2023); The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2022); Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (MAMM) (2017); and Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg (2015). His work has been featured in major international exhibitions, including Scientia Sexualis, Pacific Standard Time (PST), Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Los Angeles (2024); Signals: How Video Transformed the World, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (2023); Is it morning for you yet?, 58th Carnegie International (2022); ); The Crack Begins Within, 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2020); Home is a Foreign Place, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Incerteza Viva, 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016); and Le spectacle du quotidien, X Lyon Biennale (2010), among others.

Motta has been recognized with numerous prizes and awards, including the Artist Impact Initiative x Creative Time R&D Fellowship (2023); grants from the Penn Mellon Just Futures Initiative (2023), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (2019); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008). His work is held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Guggenheim Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá; among others.

Motta is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Practice in the Fine Arts Department at Pratt Institute.

Post Date: 11-12-2025