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).

Sophie Foley is an artist. She draws. She creates collages. She is a zine maker. This, she tells me on the afternoon we speak by phone, is part of what drew her to Bard Graduate Center’s Lab for Teen Thinkers.

“My mom did push me to do this,” Sophie Foley is an artist. She draws. She creates collages. She is a zine maker. This, she tells me on the afternoon we speak by phone, is part of what drew her to Bard Graduate Center’s Lab for Teen Thinkers. “My mom did push me to do this,” she says of the decision to apply to the program, “but that was also in addition to me being very interested in the arts.”

It was an interest that blossomed throughout the summer of 2019, as Foley’s research culminated in an expansive presentation on zine making, informed by the Museum of Art and Design’s exhibition Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976–1986. For the young artist, the Lab for Teen Thinkers placed her in the center of a dynamic institution and its brand of cultural inquiry that has guided artists, curators, critics, and historians for decades—what Foley describes as “this very interesting study of how objects and materialism form our identities.”

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Jessica Lynne is a writer, art critic, and a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives.