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).

New York, New York, January 23, 2017—Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Paul Stirton has received a Getty Library Research Grant. The focus of his research will be the papers of the German graphic designer Jan Tschichold (1902-74) and those of the Soviet artist-designer El Lissitzky, both now held in the Getty Archives in California.During the 1920s Tschichold began a correspondence with several artist-designers in Central and Eastern Europe and the Netherlands (including Kurt Schwitters, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Piet Zwart), during which they exchanged examples of their work. This was the raw material that inspired Tschichold’s seminal book, Die Neue Typographie (1928), since described as “the definitive treatise on book and graphic design in the machine age.” Tschichold’s collection of modernist graphics, which was given to the Museum of Modern Art by Philip Johnson, will be the subject a spring 2019 Bard Graduate Center Focus Project. Dr. Stirton’s current research and publications are mostly concentrated in architecture and design in Britain and Central Europe (primarily Hungary) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is also the editor of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, published by University of Chicago Press for Bard Graduate Center.