About the Ralph Ellison Center at Bard College

Ellison taught American and Russian literature at Bard from 1958 to 1961. There, he moved in as roommates with famed author Saul Bellow. For three years, while Ellison taught at the College, the two shared a large 17th century house that Bellow owned in the nearby town of Tivoli. 

Prior to his literary accolades, Ellison’s earliest artistic interests resided in the realm of classical music, both as a composer and as a trumpet performer. Growing up in Oklahoma City, Ralph Ellison found a tremendous sense of meaning in his musical pursuits early on. He was a beneficiary of the rigorous music education system created and cultivated within the segregated African American public schools of Oklahoma City by Supervisor of Music Zelia Breaux. Ellison was also raised within a civic community that valued and supported his pursuit of music-making, a community that produced musical luminaries such as Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing.
 
Ellison’s early musical interests prompted him to pursue collegiate study at Tuskegee Institute, under the tutelage of renowned composer William Levi Dawson. Though he never completed his undergraduate studies, at Tuskegee, Ellison found a cadre of faculty mentors including eminent concert pianist Hazel Lucille Harrison, English department chair Morteza Drexel Sprague, and French professor W. Henri Payne. These scholars served as Ellison’s dialogical partners in his exploration of self and search for meaning, purpose, and belonging. 

In 1936, Ellison moved to New York City and met artists, critics, and writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Michael Gold, and more. This nexus of engagement across varied disciplines fostered a rich ecosystem from which Ellison would ultimately emerge as an artist-intellectual par excellence. His commitment to this practice of exploring multiple crafts and methods while in constant conversation with various partners was one that he steadfastly maintained for the rest of his life. The Ellison Center is motivated to foster similar networks of creativity and critique for the next generation of writers and thinkers.

In Harlem, where he lived for many years in an apartment at 730 Riverside Drive in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood (also known as the Beaumont apartment building), Ralph Ellison met Fanny Mae McConnell. Fanny and Ralph married in 1946. In addition to being an accomplished writer and editor in her own right, having founded the Negro People's Theater in Chicago in 1938, Fanny became an effective champion of her husband’s work until his death in 1994.

In his widely-studied essay, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” Ellison wrote, “Where there's a melting pot there's smoke, and where there's smoke it is not simply optimistic to expect fire, it's imperative to watch for the phoenix's vernacular, but transcendent, rising.” The Ralph Ellison Center at Bard seeks to be that melting pot, acting at the intersection of art, intellect, and materiality, to ignite transformation in the lives of students through meaningful engagement and exchange.

The Center models and inspires an integrity of process indicative of Ellison’s characteristically multi-modal approach to artistic and scholarly expression, by convening an ecosystem of artists and intellectuals who explore and address substantive issues of our time. The Center believes there is a fundamental relationship between meaning making, purpose, and integrity; that one pursues those things which one experiences as meaningful; that purpose is the byproduct of that pursuit when there is an integrity of process. Students come to the Center with a pursuit that gives them meaning, and leave with a community of practice to infuse their pursuit with an integrity of process, which in turn influences how they choose to show up for others.  

The Center also serves as a central hub bringing together campus-wide efforts that amplify meaning and purpose. Center activities and programs include: a bi-annual lectureship hosted at Bard, in NYC and at an HBCU, to then be published through a university press; a salon series to create consistent opportunities for connection and conversation over important issues of our times; the digitization of Ellison’s archive in the Library of Congress; student fellows to help administer Center activities and engage in research on Ellison’s life and legacy, or more broadly on the virtues the Center promotes; expanding professional development offerings to increase a sense of meaning and purpose for faculty, staff, administrators, and students; curricular support for faculty; and more.

The Ellison Center is made possible by an agreement between Bard College and the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Trust, which transferred all copyrights, intellectual property rights, and claims to royalties to Bard College.