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).

Exhibition Artists in Residence

Native Art Department International, a Brooklyn-based collaborative project created and administered by wife-and-husband artists Maria Hupfield (b. 1975) and Jason Lujan (b. 1971), is in residence in the fourth floor Gallery through July 7.

Hupfield and Lujan, who work to counter the pigeonholing of contemporary art by Native Americans and people of First Nations descent, are turning the space into a a television set where they are shooting a program dramatizing sequences from the life of anthropologist Franz Boas, the subject of the spring exhibition The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology . The media aesthetic of the project is loosely based on Potato Wolf TV, a series of fictional news segments and satirical takes on mainstream media developed by Lower East Side activist-artist collective Collaborative Projects (Colab) in the early 1970s.

Library Artists in Residence

From left: JoAnne McFarland and Rachel Selekman

In residence through July 19, are Library Artists in Residence, JoAnne McFarland and Rachel Selekman. This program invites visual or performance artists whose work is grounded in research to use the library collection as an incubator for new work. As part of this process, they may conduct research in subject areas relating to their work and address the library itself as an organized collection of print material, utilizing the reference staff as partners.

JoAnne McFarland is a poet, painter, and curator from Brooklyn. She is the former exhibitions director of A.I.R. Gallery and the founder of Artpoetica, a project space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, that links literary and visual expression. Her latest poetry collection, Identifying the Body, was published in 2018 by The Word Works. Her artwork is part of many public and private collections, including the Library of Congress and the Columbus Museum of Art. In her practice, McFarland treats violence and creativity as diametrically opposed: each act of making thwarts violence’s aim to destroy. www.joannemcfarland.com.

Rachel Selekman is a visual artist based in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Rosemont College in Rosemont, PA, and group exhibitions at the Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn; Marc Straus Gallery, NYC; Brooklyn Academy of Music; Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Berlin; Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA; and Lesley Heller Workspace, NYC; to name a few. Selekman’s work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Microsoft, the US State Department, and Montefiore Medical Center. Commissioned pieces can be found at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and the Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville. Her catalogue, Rachel Selekman: Making Connections, which surveys her sculpture and works on paper,was published in 2014. Selekman received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a full-tuition scholarship. www.rachelselekman.com.