Research Institute

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Participants in the four-week institute will be engaged in a program of seminars, group discussions, trips to local and regional collections, presentations by participants, and individual consultations with the faculty. A guest faculty member will serve as co-leader each week, joining other guest faculty who will offer particular workshops, walking tours, and presentations.  Monday and Wednesday mornings will generally be devoted to seminar discussions on readings and object analysis led by the director and guest faculty leader for that week. Other afternoons or entire day field trips (Hudson River collections, Yale University Art Gallery) will allow for our visits to collections to pursue hands-on work guided by our guest faculty; we will also have two afternoons a week for individual meetings by participants with the director and the guest faculty as well as the opportunity to pursue research in New York collections. Friday feature a digital workshop where we will introduce participants to new methods of collecting information about artifacts, as well as methods of presentation such as digital exhibitions for scholarly use and student projects.  While our schedule is intense, there will be time for you to pursue materials and collections on your own in New York.

We will follow a chronological scheme to focus on case studies of nineteenth-century New York City material culture which will be used to develop themes based upon various collections; this historical approach to contextualizing our study will model for the participants how our particular practice for studying material culture might transfer to their own teaching or research.  We will also investigate some genres and forms over a longer period of time to allow participants to see changes in technology or modes of consumption; one example will be our study of prints and illustrated periodicals in week four.

Our first week (July 5-8) will be devoted to an Introduction to American Material Culture Studies.  Catherine Whalen (Bard Graduate Center), an expert in the culture of collecting and the methods and theories of American Material Culture, will be the co-leader this week. We explore the historiography of American material culture studies, along with the approaches of art history and the decorative arts and consumption studies. A Library Session will introduce participants to the BGC collections, survey other local library collections and discuss their relative strengths based upon the participants’ interests, and explain how library and collections access will work. Our guest faculty Ken Ames (Professor, BGC), author of several significant material culture studies including Death in the Dining Room and Beyond Necessity: Art in the Folk Tradition, and Debra Schmidt-Bach (N-YHS), assistant curator of decorative arts and a specialist in silver production in New York, begin our hands-on work with objects by conducting a workshop on silver artifacts at the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS).  We will continue our disciplinary discussions, surveying the landscape of historical archaeology, history, anthropology and sociology, joined by another of our guest faculty, Diana Wall (City College and Graduate Center, CUNY), who has written about the historical archaeology of New York and the archaeology of gender; she will take the participants on a walking tour of lower Manhattan to talk about New Amsterdam/New York and discuss her research on the African Burial Ground. Our first digital workshops, led by the BGC Assistant Director for the Digital Media Lab, Kimon Keramidas, will survey the resources available for material culture scholarship and teaching.

Our focus in week two (July 11-15) will be on Post-Revolutionary New York (1800-40).  We will discuss changes in the artisan’s workshop.  An increasing division of labor facilitated the growth of manufacturing while also promoting labor unrest and gender conflict. A visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new neoclassical galleries in the American Wing will facilitate those discussions. Our week’s guest instructor, Bernard Herman (George B. Tindall Professor of American Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), author of prize-winning works such as Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1760-1830, along with essays on self-taught and outside arts, foodways, and theoretical approaches to the study of objects. A trip to the Merchant’s House Museum in Greenwich Village illuminates how the architectural form of the New York row house became the archetypal housing form for middle class New Yorkers. Herman will conduct a session with the exemplary textile collection at the American Folk Art Museum to think about the complex issues around the concept of folk art and to learn to look at quilts as a way of thinking about social relationships and civic relations. Another guest faculty Jack Tchen (History and Asian/Pacific/American Studies, New York University), author of New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882, will conduct a walking tour of Chinatown’s Chatham Square, and talk about this recent research on recovering the history of the Asian-American community of nineteenth century New York and its cultural traditions of intermingling and improvisation; we will visit the new Museum of the Chinese in America with Tchen. Our weekly digital workshop will delve into how Omeka and other digital tools can facilitate the creation and use of online exhibitions in teaching and research.

In week three (July 18-22) we will shift attention to the domestic interior by looking at the parlor, that archetypal room in the Mid-century Victorian Home (1840-1880). We examine emerging industrial spaces for the production of culture such as the furniture workshop and factory; new modes of cultural entrepreneurship and the growing middle class and its ideology of domesticity; New York’s emergence as a cultural leader in the creation of new spaces of consumption such as the domestic interior, the restaurant, and hotels.  Katherine Grier (History, Museum Studies, University of Delaware), will be our co-leader; her book Culture and Comfort is a foundational text for understanding how the parlor became the site for middle class identity; her interests lie in the history of everyday life in America, especially household routines, domestic interiors, and foodways. Grier will be joined by Amelia Peck (Marica F. Vilcek Curator, American Decorative Arts,  Metropolitan Museum of Art) whose expertise on American period rooms will guide our visit with Peck to the Museum’s redesigned period rooms and the American Wing’s galleries. Peck has also written about Andrew Jackson Davis and we will make a full day visit to two Hudson River estates with Peck and Grier: Lyndhurst, the Gothic Revival mansion designed in 1838 by Davis as a country villa and then redesigned in 1864-65, and Glenview, to see the later arrival of American Arts and Crafts style.  Our visit will explore the changing relationship of city and hinterlands along with the idealization of nature and the rise of rural residences and allow participants to better understand the goals of nineteenth-century landscape design. Our digital workshop will consider the use of blogs and wikis in teaching and research.

Our focus in the fourth week (July 25-28) will be on the Immigrant City (1870-1900). In our discussions we will look at the rise of metropolitan New York with its distinctive urban culture, through examination of the emergence of new public institutions of culture such as art museums and libraries, along with new elaborate spaces for display and consumption such as department stores and amusement parks.  A visit to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum includes a behind the scenes tour of the collections. This week’s co-leader Joshua Brown (History, American Social History Project, Graduate Center, CUNY), has authored award-winning studies of the pictorial press of the Gilded Age, and has produced many digital NEH-sponsored projects such as History Matters and Picturing U.S. History.  Brown will guide the participants’ study of the various genres of prints (woodcut, lithograph photograph, half tone, cartoons, illustrated newspapers) in their technical aspects as well as their plural cultural meaning by leading discussions and also a hands-on Print Room session (NY-HS).  We will take a full day trip to New Haven, led by guest faculty Edward S. Cooke Jr. (Charles F. Montgomery Professor, Yale University) to visit the Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG).  Cooke has authored many books and curated exhibitions on topics such as pre-industrial New England furniture, American studio furniture, and Boston ‘s Arts and Crafts movement. He will lead a seminar on the late nineteenth century aesthetic movement, a reform effort that along with the Arts and Crafts movement, promoted handmade products and historic design sources in reaction to the flood of mass-produced goods. Cooke will also lead a hands-on session in the YUAG study collections.

Individual Projects: we ask you to bring your own case study drawn from teaching or research to the institute.  We anticipate that consulting with the institute leader and faculty, along with your fellow participants, will allow you to utilize the institute training to develop and deepen your practice on material evidence of your own choosing. Over the course of the program, you will design and create collaborative new media projects using Omeka in the Bard Graduate Center’s Digital Media Lab (DML). Exhibits will be based upon your institute teaching or research projects.  The Bard Graduate Center will host that site and support it after the institute, along with an institute wiki to continue collaboration and consultations.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has designated this institute as part of its “We the People” initiative, designed to encourage and enhance the teaching, study, and understanding of American history, culture, and democratic principles.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.