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).

Abigail Krasner Balbale gave a talk titled “The Caliphate and the Transformation of Culture from the Near East to Europe,” as part of the Dean’s Lecture Series, at Bard High School Early College Manhattan on March 14. She will be a respondent at the conference, “Sites of Religious Memory in an Age of Exodus: The Western Mediterranean,” to be held at Columbia University on April 6.

Ivan Gaskell once again served on the Old Master Paintings Vetting Committee of The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on March 6 and 7.

Aaron Glass presented lectures at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, on February 22 and March 5, and at Te Papa Tongarewa/National Museum of New Zealand on March 1. On March 28, he is delivering a lecture titled “Reassembling The Social Organization: Franz Boas, Indigenous Ontologies, and the Anthropology of Art” at Yale University’s History of Art Department. At the Society of American Archaeologists Annual Meeting in Washington D.C., April 11–15, he is presenting a paper with Judith Berman titled “Reassembling The Social Organization: Uniting Museums, Archives, and Indigenous Knowledge around Franz Boas’s 1897 Monograph” in the panel, “Connecting Collections: Collectors of Pre-Columbian and Indigenous American Art in the Americas and Europe.”

Freyja Hartzell gave a lecture in March at the Wilhelm Wagenfeld Foundation in Bremen, Germany, titled “Des Kaisers neue Kleider: die Politik der Transparenz im modernen Design” (The Emperor’s New Clothes: the Politics of Transparency in Modern Design), based on material from her second book project. An article on this topic will be appearing shortly in the Journal of Modern Craft, and a book chapter, “The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Modern Myth of Transparency,” will be published by Bloomsbury Press this year in an edited volume on visual and material culture in the Weimar Republic.

François Louis presented a paper titled “Confucian Classicism and Liao-Dynasty Ritual Design” in a panel on “Ritual Design in China” at the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, which took place March 22–25 in Washington, D.C.

Deborah Krohn delivered the keynote lecture for the Graduate Student Art History Symposium at Washington University in St Louis—More than Sustenance: Food in Art, on March 2.