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).

Jeffrey Collins was invited to serve as respondent in the two-day interdisciplinary conference “Valuing Forgery: Ancient Rome between Authenticity and Fraud,” held at Rice University in Houston on February 21-22. Convened as a capstone to the 2017-18 Rice Seminar on “Forgery and the Ancient: Art, Agency, Authorship,” directed by John Hopkins and Scott McGill, the colloquium’s fifteen papers explored the shifting boundaries between forgery and creativity in works of art, historical documents, and literary texts from antiquity to the present.

Aaron Glass participated in the Met Roundtable —Boundaries in Native America on February 1, presented in conjunction with the Met’s exhibition, Art of Native America: The Charles and Valerie Diker Collection.

Michele Majer contributed an article, “Art, Fashion, and Commerce: Les Modes and l’Hôtel des Modes,” to the catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition, Boldini and Fashion, which opened at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara, Italy, on February 16.

Peter N. Miller’s review of Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present by Philipp Blom has been published online by the New York Times and will appear in the Sunday Book Review on March 10.

Ittai Weinryb recently visited the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas and Bard College in Annandale, New York, where he spoke about the fall 2018 BGC Gallery exhibition, Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place.