News & Events

Welcome to the Press Room

To be included on our Press Mailing List, please supply all of the information requested on this page. To sign up for our e-newsletter, and to find past issues, visit this page. Press brochures for Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art can be downloaded here, while press brochures for Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935 can be downloaded here. To learn more about our Galleries, please visit our About the Gallery page.

If you wish to receive high resolution images of our upcoming exhibitions or have any questions, please contact the External Affairs Department at 212.501.3074 or e-mail barnhart@bgc.bard.edu.

• BGC in the Press
• BGC News
• Faculty News
• Alumni News
• Media Professionals

 

BGC in the Press

You Might Call Him the Decorator of the Met
Art Review by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, March 10, 2013

A Gilded Age Trove
by Eve Kahn, The New York Times, March 29, 2013

Georges Hoentschel and His World
The Magazine Antiques, March/April 2013

Your Weekend Starts Now 1/24/13
NY1, Stephanie Simon, "Circus And The City" Exhibit

Visionary Images: The Lost Fractals of Benoît Mandelbrot
Wired, January 3, 2013 

Mandelbrot: A new exhibit displays previously unpublished images from the father of fractals
Scientific American, December 21, 2012

The Approval Matrix:
New York Magazine, week of December 31, 2012

NYC-Arts Curators Choice: December 13
"Circus and the City" interview with Matthew Wittmann WNYC-Channel 13 

"New York exhibit captures historical life of circus"
by Sebastian Smee, The Boston Globe, November 10, 2012

"Circus Time"
Above and Beyond, The New Yorker, Oct. 29 & Nov. 5, 2012

Art in Review: "The Islands Benoît Mandelbrot: ‘Fractals, Chaos and the Materiality of Thinking’" 
by Ken Johnson,  The New York Times, October 4, 2012

"P.T.Barnum’s Bearded Ladies"
by Lance Esplund, Bloomberg News, October 2, 2012

"When Jumbo Was Toast of the Town"
by Glenn Collins, The New York Times, September 21, 2012

"Somers Historical Society's circus collection will put on show in NYC display"
by Christopher Vaughn, The Journal News, September 20, 2012

"'Circus and the City'” examines the big top in the Big Apple"
by Alliison Williams, Time Out New York,  September 17, 2012

Stylelist.com by Gerit Quealy
April 18, 2012  

"Pattern Recognition: New Books About Textile Design"
by Steven Heller, New York Times Book Review,
February 24, 2012 (featuring Knoll Textiles 1945-2010)

NYC-ARTS News: February 9
Featuring  Hats: An Anthology and the Main Gallery
WNYC-Channel 13

NYC-ARTS News: February 2
Featuring Staging Fashion and the Focus Gallery
WNYC-Channel 13

"After Hats comes Staging Fashion at the Bard Graduate Center"
by Evelyne Politanoff, Huffington Post, January 19, 2012  

"The Artblog, by Andrea Kirsh, January 12, 2012

"Happiness Is a New Hat"
by Steven Heller, Imprint, January 6, 2012  

Milliner's Ode To Hats Topped With Timelessness
Jacki Lyden interview with Stephen Jones, NPR, Weekend Edition Saturday
December 31, 2011

American Christmas Cards, 1900 - 1960
SundayArts, WNET Channel 13, December 11, 2011

A History of Christmas Cards
The Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2011

The New York Times recommends Pat Kirkham's Saul Bass: A Life in Film & Design
by Alice Rawsthorn, The New York Times, November 6, 2011

Mary Laven recommends Dutch New York
FiveBooks Interviews, The Browser, November 14, 2011

Master Milliner Stephen Jones a Pied Piper of Hats
by Leanne Italie,  Associated Press

Ingenuity Is a Thing With Feathers
by Roberta Smith, The New York Times, September 22, 2011

Time Out New York: Three must-see fashion exhibits
By Amanda Angel, August 22, 2011

Dwell Magazine reviews the Knoll Textiles catalog
by Aaron Britt, Dwell online, August 22, 2011

Daniella on Design: Florence + the (Knoll Textile) Machine
by Daniella Ohad, video, August 12, 2011

Design Notes: Knoll Textiles, 1945-2010
by Kimberly Phillips, Design Within Reach blog, August 1, 2011

Exhibit highlights textiles' role in modern interiors
by Ellen Freilich, Reuters, July 25, 2011

Vogue UK: Three Fashion-Culture Highs of Summer 2011
by Sarah Mower, Vogue.com, July 18, 2011

Material World: "Knoll Textiles at Bard Graduate Center
by Maika Pollack, New York Observer, July 18, 2011

Knoll Textiles: Over Fifty Years of Women in Design
by Sarah Coffey, Apartment Therapy blog, June 27, 2011

Showcasing Fabric of Art
by Lance Esplund, Wall Street Journal, June 25 - 26, 2011

Knoll Textiles at the Bard Graduate Center
SundayArts, video, June 19, 2011

Knoll Textiles,1945 -2010
by Jean Lin, Huffington Post online, June 9, 2011

Knoll Textiles at Bard
Wilsonart online, May 24, 2011

Behind the Scenes: Knoll Textiles
By Miyoko Ohtake, slideshow, Dwell Magazine online, May 2011

High Fiber
By Alexandra Lange, New York Times Style Magazine, April 27, 2011

Cloissoné at the Bard Graduate Center
SundayArts, video, March 27, 2011

American Indian Artisans
By Eve Kahn, The New York Times, March 25, 2011

When Enamel Wares Adorned China’s Imperial Courts
By Ken Johnson, The New York Times, February 18, 2011

Three Colours Blue
By Paul Weideger, The Economist, February 10, 2011

Not Just Wares for Ladies' Boudoirs
By Lee Lawrence, Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2011

Prized Chinese Crafts, Delicate and Detailed
By Eve Kahn, New York Times, January 28, 2011

Museum Gift Shops: Shopping with Susan Weber
By Geraldine Fabrikant, New York Times, July 22, 2010

Dutch New York
SundayArts, video, November 22, 2009

Old Dutch New York
By Eve M. Kahn, New York Times, September 17, 2009

Margrieta van Varick's East Indian goods
By Marybeth De Filippis, Magazine Antiques, September, 2009

Zealpolitik
By Shax Riegler, The New York Times Style Magazine, Design Fall 2009

 

BGC News

17th Annual Iris Foundation Awards for Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts
Dr. Susan Weber, BGC Founder and Director, has announced the recipients of the 17th Annual Iris Foundation Awards for Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts. This year's honorees are Richard Jenrette, Morrison H. Heckscher, Glenn Adamson, and Adrian Sassoon.  more>

BGC Receives NEA Grant
The BGC has received one of 832 Art Works grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. The award will support the presentation of Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.   more>

BGC RECIEVES MAJOR ENDOWMENT GRANT
The Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant of $1 million by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts to establish the Center’s first named institute. More>

Metropolitan Museum of Art Fellows
PhD candidates Jonathan Tavares and Pengliang Lu are among the 52 graduate students and scholars welcomed into The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2012 - 2013 class of fellows. The program is one of the largest museum-based research programs in the world.

Jonathan was awarded a renewal of his Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship to continue research and writing for his dissertation on the Victorian arms, armor, and curiosity dealer Samuel Luke Pratt (1805 - 1878) and to prepare portions for publication.

Pengliang was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship to conduct research towards a comprehensive study of bronzes from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).

BGC Receives Mellon Grant
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant of $490,000 to create a new curriculum, “Cultures of Conservation” at the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture. more>

BGC Receives NEH Grant for Digital Humanities Project
On March 29, 2012, the Bard Graduate Center received a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Start-Up program in Digital Humanities. The funding will initiate development of an annotated digital edition of Franz Boas's 1897 text, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians more>

BGC Named IFDA "Circle of Excellence" honoree
The New York Chapter of the International Furnishings and Design Association has announced that the Bard Graduate Center is the recipient of the 2012 Circle of Excellence Award for Education.  more>

16th Annual Iris Foundation Awards for Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts
The 16th Annual Iris Foundation Awards for Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts will take place on April 18, 2012 with a luncheon at 583 Park Avenue starting at noon. This year’s honorees are the Koç Family, Hans Ottomeyer, Alisa LaGamma, and Mark McDonald. Tickets are from $350 to $5,500.  The proceeds will benefit BGC Scholarship Fund, which provides financial assistance to future scholars in the field of decorative arts, design history, and material culture studies. more>

New York 20th Century Art and Design Fair (NYC20)
The Bard Graduate Center is honored to participate in the inaugural New York 20^th Century Art and Design Fair (NYC20), produced by Dolphin Promotions in association with 1stdibs. more>

First Expanded Focus Gallery Website Announced
The BGC is pleased to announce the expansion of our Focus Gallery website for the exhibition Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast, that opened in January 2011. more>

Folk Art and Craft in Latin America, 1950-2000
The second edition of the “Cisneros Seminar in the Material Cultures of the Ibero-American World at the Bard Graduate Center,” will take place on May 18 from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Bard Graduate Center.   This is seminar, created in conjunction with the Fundacion Cisneros/Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, will feature speakers Paul J. Smith, director emeritus of the American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Arts and Design), documentary filmaker Calogero Salvo, and Cándida Fernández de Calderón, director of Fomento Cultural Banamex, Mexico City. more >.

New Students Welcomed
The BGC is excited about the group of students selected to join Academic Programs this August. We look forward to welcoming these newest members of our community. more>

Ex Voto Symposium
The Bard Graduate Center hosted a symposium on April 28 and 29 entited "Ex Voto: Votive Images Across Cultures." Ittai Weinryb, BGC assistant professor,  assembled scholars from the United States and abroad who discussed these objects as they relate to the material culture of the human world. Read an interview with Ittai Weinryb.

NEH FELLOWSHIP
Elizabeth Simpson, professor of ancient art and archaelogy has received her third NEH fellowship. Dr. Simpson has spent years working on the wooden furniture and artifacts unearthed from the tombs dating from the eighth century BC—the period of King Midas and his predecessors—at Gordion, Turkey.  more >

BGC Suitcase Exhibitions: Taking the Gallery to New York City Schools
This winter, as part of an exciting outreach initiative, these and other fascinating questions are being explored by students in New York City schools together with Tracy Grosner, gallery outreach educator and BGC graduate student docents Alyssa Greenberg, Kimberly Vagner, Rebecca Mir, Ruthie Osborne, Sequoia Miller, Shahla Abdi, and Michelle Messer. more>

West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture
Published biannually by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Bard Graduate Center, West 86th (formerly published as Studies in the Decorative Arts) reaffirms the BGC’s commitment to expanding the conversation regarding the content, meaning, and significance of objects. more>

15th Annual Iris Foundation Awards, For Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts
Dr. Susan Weber, founder and director of the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, has announced the recipients of the Fifteenth Annual Iris Foundation Awards for Outstanding Contributions to the Decorative Arts. This year’s honorees are Donald and Shelley Rubin, John Harris, OBE, Juliet Kinchin, and Bernard Dragesco.  more>

Bard Graduate Center Renovations
After twelve months of renovations, the Main Gallery of the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, will reopen on January 26 with the exhibition Cloisonné: Chinese Enamels from the Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties.  On the same date, the new Focus Gallery, devoted to small-scale exhibitions resulting from the explorations and research of faculty and students, will launch its inaugural exhibition with Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast. more>

Bard Graduate Center Receives NEH Grant
The Bard Graduate Center has been awarded a $152,761 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to initiate a four-week NEH Summer Institute in July 2011 for college teachers to study American Material Culture: Nineteenth-Century New York. more>

Dutch New York Between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick, edited by Deborah L. Krohn and Peter N. Miller with Marybeth De Filippis, has won the 2009 First Runner-Up prize in the annual Association of Art Musuem Curators' (AAMC) Awards for Excellence in the Outstanding Exhibition Catalogue category. more>

BGC Publications Win Awards
The BGC is a winner of  the 2009 AAM Museum Publications Design Competition. more>

2010 Bard Travel Abroad
This year, the Bard Travel Abroad Program is taking place during Spring Break rather than at the end of the semester, as it had in the past. By tying the experience of study abroad explicitly to the on-going Survey course, it will now be connected more closely to the regular curriculum. more>

BGC and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Launch New Program
The Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture (BGC) and the Fundación Cisneros/Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) announce the launch of the The Cisneros Seminar in the Material Cultures of the Iberoamerican World. more>

BGC Fall Benefit, Highlighted by a Silent Auction, is a Major Hit
Last winter a former BGC student, Michelle Hargrave, had a brainstorm “What if,” she thought, “our Fall benefit to raise money for student scholarships, offered a silent auction highlighting an aspect of American design ingenuity?”. more>

BGC Publications Continue to Win Awards
September 25, 2009 - Shaker Design: Out of This World published BGC, Shelburne Museum, and Yale has won this year’s Historic New England Book Prize. more>

Visit by the Prime Minister of the Netherlands
September 21, 2009 - H.E. Dr. Jan Peter Balkenende, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, visited our exhibition, Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick while in New York City for the opening of the UN General Assembly. more>

BGC Website Redesign
September 18, 2009 - The redesigned website of the Bard Graduate Center debuted September 16, in conjunction with the expansion of its academic facilities. more>

BGC Building Renovation
September 18, 2009 - The renovation of 36 West 86th Street, located in Manhattan’s Upper West Side Historic District, completes the second phase of work for the Bard Graduate Center’s academic facility. more>

Margrieta van Varick
September 16, 2009 - BGC presents Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick, in its first collaboration with the New-York Historical Society as part of the quadricentennial celebration of Henry Hudson’s arrival in New York Harbor. more>

 

Faculty News

Pat Kirkam's book, Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, won not
only the prize for the best book on design but also the Prix D' Argent at FILAF (Festival International Du Livre  D’Art & Du Film), the international festival of art books and films held June 27 – July 1, 2012 at Perpignan, France. more>

About the Digital Media Lab
Kimon Keramidas, assistant director for the Digital Media Lab, talks about the lab and the resources it offers. more>

Interview with Michele Majer
Michele Majer is assistant professor of European and American Clothing and Textiles and curator of Staging Fashion, 1880 – 1920: Jane Hading, Lily Elsie, Billy Burke. more>

Interview with Ivan Gaskell
Ivan Gaskell will take up his new duties as BGC professor, curator, and head of the Focus Gallery in January 2012. more>

Interview with Kenneth L. Ames
Kenneth L. Ames, professor and curator of American Christmas Cards, 1900-1960, received a BA from Carleton College and MA and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. more>

Interview with David Jaffee
David Jaffee has been the project director of two previous National Endowment for the Humanities grants to develop multimedia resources for the teaching of United States history. He received his BA, MA, and PhD degrees from Harvard University. more>

Interview with Paul Stirton
Paul Stirton is Associate Professor of 19th and 20th century European Graphic Design and Architecure and the Editor-in-Chief of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture. more>

Jeffrey Collins collaborated with James Oles on the exhibition Pedro Friedeberg: Architect of Impeccable Confusions, which opened at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in October 2009. more>

Aaron Glass, assistant professor, has co-authored The Totem Pole: An Intercultural History to be published by the University of Washington Press in Spring 2010.  more>

Andrew Morrall’s essay "Dürer and Venice" has recently appeared in The Essential Dürer, Larry Silver and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, editors (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). more>

 

Alumni News

Spotlight on BGC Alumni: Jessica Lanier

Spotlight on BGC Alumni: Allison Stielau

Spotlight on BGC Alumni: Roisen Ingsleby: 

Spotlight on BGC Alumni: Sarah Archer

Spotlight on BGC Alumni: Shax Riegler

Spotlight on BGC Alumni: Jennifer Scanlan

Spotlight on BGC Alumni: Rachael Salisbury

Spotlight on BGC Alumni: Ronald T. Labaco

Meet the Alumni

 

Media Professionals
If you are a member of the press and wish to receive information about the BGC's academic programs, gallery exhibitions and related education programs, or any other information about the Bard Graduate Center, please contact the External Affairs Department.

High-resolution images of the current exhibition are available for download.  E-mail barnhart@bgc.bard.edu for information.

Hollis Barnhart

External Affairs 
barnhart@bgc.bard.edu
212.501.3074