Dear Friends,

Greetings from West 86th Street. It has been an eventful academic year at Bard Graduate Center, filled with successes, challenges, and new opportunities. As the spring semester came to a close, our Bard Travel Program whisked one cohort of first-year MA students off to study in Paris and another to Venice.

Meanwhile, the second-year MAs presented their Qualifying Papers to the BGC community. This is always my favorite day of the year because it represents the culmination of the students’ journeys at BGC. Their research interests are fascinating. This year’s papers covered topics ranging from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sino-Portuguese porcelain to a previously unrecognized source of labor in the early twentieth-century glassmaking industry, and from Black neoclassicism to commodity exchange in the “golden age” of piracy! As always, celebrating graduation with our students at the end of May brought me great joy.

As many of you know, BGC Gallery was closed this past year for renovation. I eagerly anticipate returning to exhibition programming this fall with a pair of remarkable exhibitions: Sèvres Extraordinaire: Sculpture from 1740 until the Present and Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds.

Despite the demands of teaching and research for my upcoming exhibition on the British architect and designer Philip Webb, much of my time during the past year was occupied with plans for a new home for BGC’s growing Study Collection of more than 4,000 objects. This rare resource allows students to not only look closely at items that would ordinarily be in cases, but—after training in how to properly handle objects—to touch, hold, and to spend expansive time researching them. I look forward to sharing more about the collection with you in an upcoming issue of the newsletter.

In the meantime, I hope you will enjoy learning from BGC’s online exhibitions and recorded events, and especially reading about a wonderful gift to BGC’s students from our long-time friend and groundbreaking artist Barbara Nessim.

Have a wonderful summer!


Susan Weber
Director and Founder