Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

Bard Graduate Center advances the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through its object-centered approach to teaching, research, exhibitions, publications, and events.

At BGC, we study the human past and present through their material expressions. We focus on objects and other material forms—from those valued for their aesthetic elements to the ordinary things used in everyday life.

Our accomplished interdisciplinary faculty inspires and prepares students in our MA and PhD programs for successful careers in academia, museums, and the private sector. We bring equal intellectual rigor to our acclaimed exhibitions, award-winning catalogues and scholarly publications, and innovative public programs, and we view all of these integrated elements as vital to our curriculum.

BGC’s campus comprises a state-of-the-art academic programs building at 38 West 86th Street, a gallery at 18 West 86th Street, and a residence hall at 410 West 58th Street. A new collection study center will open at 8 West 86th Street in 2026.

Founded by Dr. Susan Weber in 1993, Bard Graduate Center has become the preeminent institute for academic research and exhibition of decorative arts, design history, and material culture. BGC is an accredited unit of Bard College and a member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH).

The mission of the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design, based in Asheville, North Carolina, is to advance the understanding of craft by encouraging and supporting research, critical dialogue, and professional development. Bard Graduate Center is at the forefront of helping it reach these goals, and the CCCD has generously supported our students and faculty throughout the years.

Kaitlin McClure (MA, 2016) is the most recent member of our community to receive a Craft Research Fund Grant. When complete, Kaitlin’s project “Documenting a New York City Craft Community: The West Side Potters Oral History Project,” will be made publicly available online via the websites of the Bard Graduate Center Craft, Art and Design Oral History Project and the New York Public Library Community Oral History Project.

The CCCD partnered with Bard Graduate Center and the Museum of Arts and Design in the establishment of the Windgate Research Curator at MAD, supported by the Windgate Charitable Foundation. This position is currently held by Elissa Auther, Bard Graduate Center visiting associate professor. Auther, along with Catherine Whalen, Bard Graduate Center associate professor, and Sequoia Miller (MA, 2012; PhD candidate Yale University) recently contributed to CCCD’s 13th Annual Craft Think Tank on current and future strategies for the study of craft history, building upon the ongoing synergy between the two institutions.

Elizabeth Essner (MA, 2006) is one of the recipients of the newly established CCCD Curatorial Fellowship, made possible by the John & Robyn Horn Foundation. This year-long program gives emerging curators a platform to explore and test new ideas about craft. Essner and her co-curators Lily Kane and Meaghan Rodd recently mounted The Good Making of Good Things: Craft Horizons Magazine 1941-1979 in CCCD’s Benchspace Gallery & Workshop, on view through May 2017. The exhibition investigates this watershed publication and explores how the magazine documented and shaped the concept of craft as a movement, career, way of life, and cultural phenomenon.

The CCCD’s Windgate Museum Internship Program supports selected students to work under the direction of curators or directors in decorative arts or contemporary craft collections, exhibitions and/programs. In 2016, Linnea Johnson Seidling (MA, 2015) interned at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, assisting in research, evaluation, and administration related to the museum’s collections of American studio furniture, American studio glass, and contemporary East Asian and Southeast Asian jewelry and metalwork under the direction of Nonie Gadsden, Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture. Seidling is now curatorial assistant in the Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California.

- Catherine Whalen, Associate Professor