Research at the BGC

The BGC sponsors a rich array of research activities, from our weekly seminar series to special symposia hosted throughout the year.

The Bard Graduate Center Library is a non-circulating research collection supporting advanced studies in the decorative arts, design, garden history, landscape studies, and culture. The Library's collection comprises approximately 40,000 volumes, including rare books, microforms, and videos.

About the BGC

The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture is a graduate research institute committed to studying the cultural history of the material world. Our degree program, research projects, and  exhibition program together work to suggest a new field of questions at the crossroads where the decorative arts, design history, and material culture studies meet. At the BGC, our focus is on Cultura. This ancient Latin word referred to the class of activities in which human beings acted on, and so transformed, their natural surroundings. We have taken this as the outline of our institutional project: studying the substances intervened upon, the processes used to make these interventions, and the consequences of these interventions for the lives of human actors.

The BGC was founded in 1993 in New York City, and is a part of Bard College. The BGC occupies a six-story townhouse at 18 West 86th Street that is the home of its Galleries, and a second townhouse at 38 West 86th Street that is the academic center. A third building, at 410 West 58th Street, offers faculty, student, and guest housing.

Degree Programs

The BGC offers two programs of study, one leading to a master of arts degree and the other to a doctor of philosophy degree.

Students in these programs can select from a wide array of courses dealing with various aspects of the cultural history of the material world.

Students in the MA and PhD programs take the same courses, although their programs are articulated in different ways. The curriculum for the master’s degree includes a number of required courses, tutorials, independent studies, travel, and internships in fields chosen by the student in consultation with a faculty adviser. Students are otherwise free to construct their own program of study.

Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick

September 18, 2009– January 24, 2010

This autumn the Bard Graduate Center participates in a state-wide celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's voyage and the legacy of Dutch culture in New York with a landmark exhibition, Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick.

Organized by the BGC and the New-York Historical Society and curated by Marybeth De Filippis and Deborah L. Krohn, Dutch New York will make a major contribution to the quadricentennial and to the scholarship of colonial New York by focusing on the life and times of a woman who during the seventeenth century lived in the rural village of Flatbush on eastern Long Island, a neighborhood still known by that name in the borough of Brooklyn today.