Sophie Kovel '22 Exhibits in 'False Sponsor' at Bard College's Hessel Museum

Sophie Kovel '22 is featured in the Center for Curatorial Studies exhibition at Bard College's Hessel Museum of Art.

Curated by Ray Camp, False Sponsor borrows its title from a term used in covert intelligence operations to refer to an innocent party falsely incriminated to shield state agents. Through collaging declassified documents, restaging diplomatic wallpaper, and layering archival material, the exhibition considers the history of US cultural patronage.

Kovel’s work, which opens the exhibition, examines—quite literally—how aesthetic choices reproduce the facade of national identity. Plastered to the museum wall, Kovel's recreation of a French colonial-era panoramic wallpaper—first installed in the White House's Diplomatic Reception Room by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1961—depicts an idyllic Niagara Falls scene. Cascades of falling water appear alongside rugged bluffs, boats, and tiny onlookers, the plumes of their fancy hats mirroring the mist off the monumental falls. Kovel's The Diplomatic Reception Room (Views of North America) (2024) immerses the viewer in the White House's antechamber to international diplomatic meetings, where the paper still hangs today. 

Through her restaging of this diplomatic décor, Kovel examines how frontier imagery has produced and reproduced American national identity over the course of 250 years. More broadly, False Sponsor asks viewers how governmental participation in the arts has propagated rhetorics of nationalism and exceptionalism throughout the nation's history.

The exhibition occurs as part of Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, a collection of graduate student-curated exhibitions in fulfillment of the Bard College's class of 2026’s M.A. in Curatorial Studies.

Sophie Kovel is an artist, writer, and researcher whose work examines the economic, social, aesthetic, and ideological operations of nationalism. She has exhibited widely, with exhibitions including Petrine, Paris; diez, Amsterdam; NEON Art Foundation, Athens; Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York; University of California, Los Angeles; and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark. Her work has been featured in Camera Austria, Frieze, Monopol, Jeu de Paume Magazine, and elsewhere. Kovel graduated from Columbia University’s MFA in Visual Arts, where she was awarded the Agnes Martin and Andrew Fisher Fellowships, and was a 2022 studio fellow in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.

False Sponsor is on view April 4–May 24, 2026 at the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-On-Hudson.