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).

This new series features one of our seminars at Bard Graduate Center. This month, Professors Paul Stirton and Ittai Weinryb talk about their team-taught course:

Gothic Visions: From the Visigoths to Post-Punk

This course is something of an experiment for both of us. Instead of teaching within our own periods (Medieval and Modern), we are thinking about the longer span of history, and how styles and concepts in the decorative arts change over millennia. Most people think they have a sense of what the “Gothic” is, or was, but the closer we have examined this stylistic category, the less clear and straightforward it has become.

The fine metalwork produced by a nomadic tribal society in the fifth century has very little to do with the dominant design style of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Indeed, no one thought of it as something called “Gothic” until the rather self-important Italians of the sixteenth century began using it as a critical term to dismiss the culture of Northern Europe.

What is more, the various “Gothic” revivals of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries suggest that the category functioned as a receptacle for increasingly eccentric ideas about national identity, morals, climate, socialism, and horror. It has been quite an experience contrasting the medieval objects at the Cloisters with Pugin’s “Bread Plate” of 1850, with its edifying pseudo-Gothic inscription, which we were able to handle in the Met seminar room.

The post-punk era has given a further twist to this long history, as “Gothic” has entered the world of youth sub-cultures with the full range of clothing, jewelry, graphics, and doom-laden music. It is still not clear whether the students (or the professors) will emerge with a firm grasp of “Gothic,” but we will all have a better idea of the problems in trying to define a style across time and place.

—Paul Stirton and Ittai Weinryb

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Photo by Eusebius (Guillaume Piolle)