August Orientation Session

The August Orientation Session is required of all incoming master’s degree students. It is designed to introduce new students to the field, research techniques, and the range of resources available within the city. Intensive language courses are offered to students to prepare them to complete the BGC language requirement.

The Academic Programs Office offers three intensive, noncredit, two-week classes in French, Italian, and German to prepare students for the language proficiency examination. Classes meet four days a week.

Students are initially tested for language proficiency upon arrival. Those who require additional instruction will be tested again at the end of the orientation session. All entering BGC students must fulfill the language requirement by April 15 of their first year.

Courses

The list below gives some sense of the range and depth of courses offered at the BGC over the last few years.

IND Independent Study
INT Internship
TUT In Focus: Carrying Coca Design Tutorial
500 Survey of the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture I
500/501 Survey Review - Group A
500/501 Survey Review - Group B
501 Survey of the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture II
502 Approaches to the Object
505 Bibliographical Information in the Digital Age
506 European Gold and Silver
509 History of European Textiles
510 Islamic Decorative Arts up to the Mongol Conquest
511 Manners, Morals, and Aesthetic Reform in 19th-Century America
514 The Arts and Crafts Movement in America
518 History of European Jewelry
519 Arts of the Ancient World
520 Medieval Art and Society
521 Decorative Arts of the Renaissance
522 Arts of the Baroque
523 Ornament, Primitivism, and the Idea of Decoration
524 From Morris to the Mackintoshes: Arts and Crafts in Britain and Europe, 1860–1900
526 Arts of China (Decorative Arts of Later Imperial China, 1000-1900)
527 American Decorative Arts and Design to 1820
528 Decorative Arts and Design in America, 1820–1914
530 English and American Ceramics
536 The Aesthetic Movement
539 Mode and Manners in the Eighteenth Century, 1675–1804
541 Northern European Interiors, 1550–1680
542 Ancient Ceramics and Glass
543 Nineteenth-Century European Furniture
544 The Rediscovery of Antiquity
548 Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2000: Diversity and Difference
552 Gothic Revival
554 Art Nouveau in Europe
559 Domesticity, House, and Home in 19th-Century America
561 The Arts of the Book
562 Politics and Design of World’s Fairs
564 Ritual and Design in Imperial China
565 Twentieth-Century Fashion
566 Rites of Passage: Arts of Marriage and Childbirth in the Italian Renaissance
567 Art and Material Culture of the Tang Period, 618–907
568 American Silver
571 Fragmenting Modernism, Deconstructing Postmodernism: Design, Architecture, and Film
572 Arts of Song Period China
573 Graphic Design in Europe, 1890-1945
574 History of Glass
581 Studies in Culinary History and the Decorative Arts
583 The Northern Renaissance: The Arts in an Age of Uncertainty, ca. 1520–1600
584 Survey of European Ceramics, 1400 to the Present
585 The Museum
586 Inside Today’s Museums
587 Object Exhibition and Display
589 Historic House Museums
591 American Furniture of the 19th Century
592 Origins of Commercial Society in 17th-Century Holland and 18th-Century Britain
593 American Furniture of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
594 The Material Culture of Childhood
595 Aspects of Domestic Interiors, 1850–1920
596 Aspects of Domestic Interiors, 1920–1970
602 Attic Red Figure Vases and Their Influence
604 Japanese and Korean Ceramics
605 European Carpets
606 The Colonial Revival
608 Western Europe in the 18th Century
611 Oriental Carpets
612 History of European Clothing
613 Ancient Jewelry and Metalwork
615 Ceramics in the American Marketplace
621 The Renaissance Discovery of the World: Collecting and Collections in the Early Modern Era
622 From “Wild Things” to “A Sense of Things”: Issues in Design History and Material Culture Studies
624 Classicism in the North, 1500–1620
625 Architecture and Design in the Weimar Republic
627 Western Luxuries and Chinese Taste
632 Topics in Ancient Furniture
634 Supply and Demand: The Decorative Arts Marketplace, 1662–1889
647 Thinking about Things: Walter Benjamin as Historian
648 Art and Ornament in Early China
650 Issues in Modern and Contemporary Architecture
652 City and Country in the Italian Renaissance
654 Objects of Virtue: Material Culture and Moral Order in 16th-Century Northern European Society
655 Markets to Manners: Cooking and Eating in Early Modern Europe
656 Eighteenth-Century European Ceramics: A Social and Cultural History
672 Design and Architecture, 1950–1975
674 Society and the Arts in 18th-Century France
675 Art and Court Culture at Versailles
678 Arts and Crafts in Early Modern Europe: The Case of the Kitchen
679 Neoclassicism and the Arts in Europe and America, 1740–1840
680 Survey of American Glass
682 The Anthropology of Museums
686 Furniture and Furnishings in Early Modern France
691 Nineteenth-Century Fashion
692 American Material Culture Studies: Methods and Models
693 Craft and Design in the USA, 1945 to the Present
694 Landscape and Rusticity in the Chinese Living Environment
695 The Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean: Methods of Material Culture in the 20th Century
702 A Cultural History of Gardens in China and Japan
704 Reading the American Landscape
706 The Art and Architecture of the Baroque Garden
726 North American Frontiers: The Landscape of Early North America
729 Silk Road Textiles: Producers and Patrons
730 The Social Lives of Things: The Anthropology of Art and Material Culture
731 Late Antique/Early Medieval Material Culture and the Making of Europe
732 Design Reform in Britain: From Pugin to Mackintosh
733 The Exhibition Experience: Design and Interpretation
734 Field Seminar: Readings in Early Modern Visual and Material Culture
735 The Medieval Reliquary: Shrine, Pilgrimage and Souvenir
736 Christmas Cards in America, 1875-1975: A Focus Gallery Course
737 The Triumph of Mars: Arms, Armor and the Material Culture of War in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1800
738 Readings in Design History
739 Christmas Cards in America, Part II: Exhibition and Publication
740 Native Arts of the Northwest Coast
741 Renaissance Mythologies
743 Popular Entertainment in the United States
744 Anthropology’s Collection Histories, ca. 1840-1911
748 The Sea Inside: Art and Material Culture of the Mediterranean World 1050-1250
749 Arts of the Book in the Islamic World
752 Antiquarianism and Archaisms in Chinese Design
753 Tudor and Stuart Textiles
754 Film and Design in Hollywood
755 Thinking with Technology in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
758 European Modernism
761 Design and Material Culture of the Qing Period, 1644–1911
762 The Exhibition Experience
763 The Monument: Designs and Meanings
764 The Material Culture of New York City: The 19th Century
765 New Amsterdam in the Dutch Atlantic (BGC/N-YHS Collaboration)
766 Material Culture in New Netherland (BGC/N-YHS Collaboration)
767 Collecting Islamic Art, from Historical Sources to Modern Times
769 Bronzescapes: Metal Cultures of the Middle Ages
771 The Rococo: 18th Century to Today
772 The Aesthetic Movement: Designing Modernity, 1865–1905
773 Art of Island Southeast Asia
774 The Material Culture of New York City: The 20th Century
775 In Focus: Envisioning Nineteenth-Century New York
776 Self-Fashioning and American Portraiture, from 1700 through the Advent of Photography
777 Field Seminar: Readings in Early Modern Visual Culture
778 A Survey of Islamic Art and Material Culture from Early Islam to the Ottoman Period
779 The City in the Middle East from Late Antiquity to the Ottoman Period
780 Georges Hoentschel: Collector, Designer, and Architect in Belle-Époque Paris
781 The Early Modern Book: Cookbook as Case Study
782 Decorative Arts and Material Cultures of the Hispanic World
785 The Antiques Trade in America
786 Case Studies in Mid Century Modernism: Knoll International
788 Oriental Influences on 18th Century Decorative Arts
789 Useful Memory and Monuments in the Modern Middle East
790 Visualizing Nineteenth-Century New York: A BGC-NYPL Digital Exhibition Course II
791 Rus in Urbe: The Country in the Town, from the City Parks Movement to Urban Ecology
792 Georges Hoentschel: Collector, Designer, and Architect in Belle-Époque Paris II
793 The Grand Tour
794 Psychologies of Things: Emotion, Perception, and the Life of Inanimate Objects
795 Exhibiting Culture/s: Anthropology In and Of the Museum
796 Print and Visual Culture in Europe, ca. 1700–1900
797 Gender Issues in Design
798 Charles Rennie Mackintosh
799 Domestic Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century America
800 Print Culture 1700–1914 (from William Hogarth to Peter Behrens)
801 Other Europes: Design and Architecture in Central Europe, 1880–1940
802 The Arts of the Kitan-Liao Empire (907–1125)
803 Jewish Material Culture in the Modern Period
813 Material Rome, 1200–1700
817 The Archaeology of China’s Decorative Arts
820 Chinese Ceramics
821 Hispanic Arts of Design, 1300–1900
822 Foundations of Material Culture
823 American Consumer Culture
824 Twentieth-Century Interiors
827 Issues in the Study of Ancient Art
828 The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and Jean de France, Duc de Berry
829 Industrial Design in the 20th-Century United States
830 “Orientalism”: Meetings of East and West from the Crusades to Postcolonialism
831 Decorative Arts of 16th-Century Italy
832 English Silver
833 Modern Textiles, 1850–1970
834 American Collectors and Collections
835 Charles and Ray Eames and Mid-Century Modern Design
838 Technical Cultures of 19th- and 20th-Century America
841 Dress and Textiles in World Cultures
844 Interpretation of the Artifact in the Age of New Media
845 American Craft, Design, and Folk Art in the 1920s and 1930s
846 Objects of Knowledge: Renaissance Ornament and Society in Northern Europe, 1500-1650
847 Fashion and Theatre, ca. 1780-1920
848 Under Western Eyes: Metals, Ivories and Mosaics in the Medieval Italian Peninsula
849 Visual and Material Cultures of the Middle Ages: An Introduction
850 Ancient House and Garden
851 The Occult and Its Artifact in the Middle Ages
853 The Art of the Coin in Cross-Cultural Perspective
854 Ceramic, Metal, and Glass: Questions about the Relations between Design, Technology, Industries, and Trade Patterns in Pre-Modern Middle East
858 Ex Voto: Participation and Patronage in Medieval Europe (5:00 pm - 7:30 pm)
859 Interface Design: Material Objects and Immaterial Culture. A Focus Gallery Project
860 Qualifying Paper
863 Objects of Colonial Encounter
865 Material Itineraries: Anthropology of Collecting Expeditions
866 Transalpine Renaissances
867 Visual Cultures of Knowledge: History and Style of Technical Images (A Focus Gallery Course, part I)
868 Scenic Design in Western Theatre: From the Modern to the Postmodern (1870-present)
869 Georges Hoentschel: Collector, Designer, and Architect in Belle-Époque Paris (Exhibition Tutorial)
870 London - New York - Paris: Duveen Brothers and the Market for Decorative Arts between 1880 and 1940
871 Thinking with Things in North America
872 Design and Interior Architecture in Germany, 1700-2000
873 Exhibiting Technical Images (A Focus Gallery Course, part II)
874 The Material Culture of Women in Nineteenth-Century America
875 Design in Film and Television: Sets, Costume, Titles, Advertising, and Films about Design
876 Tangible Things: Observing, Collecting, Sorting
877 Picturing Things: Photography as Material Culture
878 Sophisticated Design and Fine Furniture – Paris, 1650-1830
879 Media and Materiality: How Technology Shapes Media and Media Shape Culture
880 Archaeological Approaches to Material Culture
881 Pleasing the Crowd: Public History and the Material Culture of the American Circus
882 Ethnography and the Material World
883 Damage, Decay, Conservation (Mellon Curriculum)
884 Weaving through the Past and into the Present: 10,000 Years of Andean Textiles
885 Antiquarianism: History, Theory, Future
886 Exploring the Frick's Collection of Decorative Arts: Perspectives of Art Historians, Curator, and Conservators (Mellon Curriculum)
887 Courtly Culture in the Medieval Mediterranean
888 Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800
891 The England of William Kent
892 The Arts of the Table in Postwar America
893 Al-Andalus
894 Objects of Belief: Religion and the Arts of Northern Europe 1450-1600
895 Cultures of Conservation: From Objects to Subjects – On Sites, Rites, and Paradigms