Bard College opens Ralph Ellison Center with $3.6 million trust gift

Ellison taught American and Russian literature at Bard from 1958 to 1961

Bard College, the private liberal arts school in New York’s Hudson Valley, is now home to the legacy of Ralph Ellison, the writer whose work explored race, identity and belonging in America. The college opened a center named for him late last month on its campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, about two hours’ drive north of New York City.

The Ralph Ellison Center was funded by a $3.6 million donation from the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust. Bard now has all the intellectual rights and royalties from the writer’s oeuvre, and the trust will soon begin winding down before closing.

Donn Zaretsky, the legal representative for the trust, said in a statement to The Associated Press that Bard made sense for two big reasons: Ellison had a genuine history there, and the college understood the full breadth of his interests.

“Bard made sense for two big reasons: Ellison had a genuine history there, and they understood the full breadth of his interests,” Zaretsky said. “Bard gives those different parts of his intellectual life space to interact, and it gives the legacy a living, breathing community of students, artists, and scholars who can keep finding new uses for it.”

The idea for the center began during an innocuous four-hour lunch between trustee John F. Callahan, the executor of the Ralph Ellison estate, and Nicholas Alton Lewis, Bard’s associate dean. Lewis now directs the center.

The rights transfer included “Invisible Man,” Ellison’s 1952 magnum opus and the only novel published in his lifetime. The book follows a Black protagonist who navigates social and psychological feelings of ostracization when he moves from the Jim Crow South to Harlem, New York City. It made Ellison the first Black person to win the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

Ellison was born March 1, 1913, in Oklahoma City. He studied music at Alabama’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, known today as Tuskegee University, before eventually landing in New York City, where friendships with writers Langston Hughes, Albert Murray and Richard Wright inspired his turn to fiction.

He continued writing while teaching at Bard. After the release of “Invisible Man,” he worked on “Shadow and Act,” his first collection of essays, and a second novel, the posthumously released “Juneteenth.” He died of pancreatic cancer in 1994 at his home in Harlem.

Lewis said scholars who engage the center will see it celebrating Ellison “not just for his literary legacy, but for all the modes through which he engaged in meaningful cultural production.”

As the 75th anniversary of “Invisible Man” approaches in 2027, the center is planning a yearlong commemoration of the novel, which is currently taught to first-year Bard students. Other flagship programs include the center’s Ralph Ellison lectures, a biannual convening of guest speakers and writers from across the country, a 10-week student internship to assist in the archival work and conduct independent research, and a digital archival effort of Ellison’s materials to the Library of Congress.

The internship program, which kicked off this past summer, trains the next generation of archivists among selected students from Bard and partner HBCUs.

Bee Hitz, a Bard senior studying art history, was one of six internship students who spent the past summer archiving Ellison’s work in Washington, D.C., and on Bard’s campus. The digitization process, Hitz said, requires a painstaking devotion to detail, a critical skill for the master’s degree in library sciences they hope to acquire after graduation.

“(It’s) preparing me for the next steps of my life in terms of grad school. It’s been a really, really valuable experience to have,” they said.

For visitors, the center also serves as a third space, or a community space separate from the home or workplace. It is meant to be a “salon,” an intellectual gathering space that facilitates ideas.

Since it opened, the center’s director has already been fielding scholars’ requests from across the country. “The reception has been, quite frankly, a little overwhelming, in a delightful way,” Lewis said.

Lewis said there are plans in the works to develop a community-based curriculum alongside Bard’s Institute for Writing & Thinking and roll it out across Bard’s institutions, including Bard High School Early College, the Bard Prison Initiative, the school’s microcolleges, and the 66 public libraries across the Hudson Valley Public Library System.

“We want to make sure the communities that surround us have these opportunities,” Lewis said, “to discourse around Ellison and what he has created, particularly ‘Invisible Man.’ There is no better place for this.”