BGC alumni, faculty, students, and staff, and alumni have started 2026 with a bang! We’re proud to share news of our community’s workshops, talks, publications, promotions, and curatorial work.

Design journalist and curator Sarah Archer (MA ’06) has penned a guide to collecting vintage silver for Architectural Digest, in which John Stuart Gordon (MA ’04), Benjamin Attmore Hewitt Curator of American Decorative Arts at Yale University Art Gallery, relates how he first fell in love with it. Gordon is currently at work on a book about gold in America.

BGC’s alumni community, while diverse and globe-trotting, continues to collaborate on research and scholarship. Antonia Behan (MA ’14, PhD ’21) and Colin Fanning (MA ’13, PhD candidate), founders of the Craft History Workshop, presented virtual works-in-progress talks in December that expanded research on histories of making.

Another alumni pair, Madeline Porsella (MA ’23) and Mabel Taylor (MA ’24), published two new titles through their independent Mandylion Press, The Hill of Dreams and Elsie Venner. They also reissued one of their first books, The Gadfly. For sale on their website and in bookstores worldwide.

Mya Rose Bailey (MA ’25) is the Preservation Society of Newport County’s 2025–26 curatorial research fellow. Early next month, they will present their research, which focuses on the intersections of autonomy, multisensory experiences, temporality and memory in free and enslaved Black communities. They will also discuss their contributions to the upcoming exhibition, Revolution Reimagined: Evolving Stories from Newport’s Past. The exhibition aims to highlight Black and Indigenous voices within and beyond Rhode Island, coinciding with commemorations of the nation’s founding.

Cranbrook Art Museum has named Bridget Bartal (MA ‘22) special projects curator. Her most recent exhibition, Designing Cranbrook: The Saarinens’ Eclectic Vision, opened earlier this year. Bartal was cocurator of the museum’s 2025 exhibition Eventually Everything Connects: Mid-Century Modern Design in the US and coeditor of the exhibition companion book of the same name (Phaidon, 2025). She recently signed books after the screening of Stories Untold–Rebuilding Futures: Japanese American Designers in the Wake of Internment as part of Modernism Week at the Annenberg Theater in Palm Springs, California.

MA student Khushi Choudhary recently presented on “Bombay School Pottery: Sindh and Punjabi Origins” at “Sohbat: Third Biennial Graduate Symposium on Islamic Art and Architecture,” hosted by the Department of History of Art at the Yale University School of Architecture.

Professor Jeffrey Collins had a busy and productive fall-into-winter. Between September and December, he gave a series of four lectures at the New York Society Library, sponsored by the American Friends of Les Arts Florissants. The titles were, in sequence, “Serata Barocca: Defining a Style”; “Soirée Baroque: From Italy to France”; “Barockabend: Northern Europe”; and “Noche Barocca: Spain and Beyond.” His review of Pamela Bianchi’s book The Origins of the Exhibition Space (1450-1750), published by Amsterdam University Press, appeared in the September issue of Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. In December he delivered a paper on “The Social Life of Statues” at the international conference “The Future of the Antique: Interpreting the Sculptural Canon” held at the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute, University of London. Finally, his review of Caricatures, Campagna, and Connoisseurs: Thomas Patch and the British Grand Tour in Eighteenth-Century Italy, an exhibition held at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, appeared in the December issue of The Burlington Magazine.

In February, second-year MA students Maeve Diepenbrock and Ana Orobio Pinzon showcased research projects they worked on last summer for the Furniture History Society and British and Irish Furniture Makers Online. The free online seminar presented insights from recent research projects which examined particular aspects of the furniture and interiors at three important English estates: Raby Castle, Chatsworth House, and the Buccleuch Estates.

Caroline Elenowitz-Hess (PhD candidate) is a research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has been hard at work on the newly opened exhibition, Raphael: Sublime Poetry. She penned this piece for the Met’s website.

Emily Field (MA ’17) has launched an antiques restoration business, Heritage Workshop, in Rutland, VT. Field described to the Mountain Times how she transitioned from museum curation to restoration and how her studies at BGC support her work.

Professor Ivan Gaskell organized, with Martin van Gelderen, the exhibition Weihnachten mit Rembrandt at the Göttinger Verlag der Kunst, Göttingen, Germany, on view from last November through February 12. He and Van Gelderen also coedited the accompanying book, Rembrandt radiert … sich selbst, seine Stadt, seine Zeit (Göttinger Verlag der Kunst, 2025), to which Gaskell contributed the chapter “Angesicht zu Angesicht mit Rembrandt” (pp. 43–60).

PhD candidate Angela Hermano Crenshaw (MA ’24) presented her paper, “Mrs. Funston in Filipino Costume: Philippine Textiles, American Fashion, and American Imperialism in the Philippines,” at the annual American Studies Association conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The theme was “Late-Stage American Empire?,” and Hermano Crenshaw was part of a panel organized by the Material Culture Caucus entitled “Crafting Empire: Material Culture Perspectives on the Objects of Colonial Relation.” Her article, entitled “Embroidered Recuerdo: Memories of People and Places in Philippine Piña Textiles,” was also published in the winter edition of the embroidery magazine PieceWork.

In January, Rebecca Jumper Matheson (PhD ’22) delivered the BGC Alumni Spotlight Lecture “‘Humans Should Be as Well-Dressed as Horses’: Craft, Clients, and Continuity of Phelps Associates, 1940–1969.”

PhD candidate Elena Kanagy-Loux is in demand! She was the keynote speaker at Limerick Lace in February; she also gave a virtual lecture on the history of lacemaking in New York City for the Royal School of Needlework in London and the same talk in person for the Headford Lace Project in Ireland. While there, she was interviewed for Galway Talks on Galway FM. Up next, Kanagy-Loux will give an artist’s talk at Johns Hopkins University on April 8, and she will be the keynote speaker at the NYU Costume Studies program’s annual Richard Martin graduate symposium on April 10.

Craig Lee (MA ’12) cocurated Bruce Goff: Material Worlds at the Art Institute of Chicago, which closed on March 29.

PhD candidate Kenna Libes published an article in the Bloomsbury Dress and Costume Library on her work patterning plus-sized antique garments.

Dr. Annissa Malvoisin (affiliated faculty) is in the news. Her work on the Brooklyn Museum’s new African art galleries was the subject of a recent New York Times article. And the Studio Museum in Harlem announced that she is one of the eight curators selected from institutions across the country to participate in its Arts Leadership Praxis. The annual program provides professional development and cohort-building opportunities to mid-career museum professionals of color and those deeply invested in Black cultural production. The 2026 participants are the first cohort to convene in the Museum’s new home.

PhD candidate Joshua Massey (MA ’23) presented at the 2026 Deerfield-Wellesley Symposium, “The Local and the Global in New England.” He shared his work on thermoplastic photograph cases from the 1850s, which he used as a springboard to discuss scientific approaches to material culture studies, nineteenth-century industry in New England, and global trade in commodities from South and Southeast Asia.

Professor Caspar Meyer has been appointed editor of the Annual of the British School at Athens, one of the foremost journals in Mediterranean archaeology and history. He holds this position jointly with the director of the school, Rebecca Sweetman.

In mid-February, BGC research curator Dr. Laura Microulis (MA ’96, PhD ’16) accepted the Alfred Barr Award for Sonia Delaunay: Living Art at the College Art Association (CAA) conference. Microulis coedited the catalogue with Waleria Dorogova. The award recognizes “an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published in English by a museum, library, or collection.”

Meanwhile, Mei Mei Rado’s (PhD ’18 and BGC assistant professor) book, The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale University Press, 2025) was short-listed for the CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Award, which recognizes an especially distinguished English-language book in the history of art.

Liz Neill (MA ’16) began a new position as exhibition coordinator at Historic New England. Neill received her PhD from Boston University last year, and she has prepared two exhibitions set to open at Historic New England in 2026: Shoe Stories: Past, Present, Future and Myth and Memory: Stories of the American Revolution.

Brielle Pizzala (MA ’25) is thriving as the collections manager and registrar at the Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington.

Rachael Schwabe (MA ’20) oversees online courses at MoMA and launched a refreshed version of Fashion as Design as a three-part specialization on Coursera including Silhouettes and Icons, examples of silhouettes and garments from the twentieth century to today; Expression and Community, examining how the clothes in your closet express identity and create and demonstrate community ties; and Craft and Sustainability, considering concerns for the fashion industry’s labor and sustainability practices. She also recently launched Texture Studies, a research project hosted on Substack. You can read about her May 2025 visit with fiber artist Sheila Hicks here.

BGC deputy director and chief curator Dr. Julia Siemon published a Catalogue of Drawings by Johannes Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, 2025). She gave the keynote lecture, “Stradanus: Word and Image,” for the symposium entitled “Stradanus at Cooper Hewitt,” held at Bard Graduate Center on November 6–7, 2025.

Rebecca Tilles (MA ’07) is senior project manager of exhibitions at L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts, supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, the renowned French jewelry house. Tilles was profiled earlier this month in Classic Chicago Magazine.

Alyssa Velasquez (MA ’16), assistant curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art, was awarded a 2026 Center for Craft Fellowship. Her exhibition, Craft-itarianism: Community Action Through Craft, is on view at Center for Craft in Asheville, North Carolina, through September 27.