Center for Human Rights and the Arts (“CHRA”)

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, centering much of its work around its postgraduate masters of art program. The center fosters 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 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.

CHRA 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.