About
Upcoming Exhibitions
BGC Gallery will resume its exhibition programming this September with the return of Sèvres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740 until Today, originally slated for fall 2024.
Bard Graduate Center is an advanced graduate research institute in New York City dedicated to the cultural histories of the material world. Our MA and PhD degree programs, Gallery exhibitions, research initiatives, scholarly publications and public programs explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.

About
28th Annual Iris Foundation Awards
Honoring Irene Roosevelt Aitken, Dr. Julius Bryant, Dr. Meredith Martin, and Katherine Purcell
Events
Wednesdays @ BGC
Join us this spring for weekly programming!





About

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).


Welcome new faculty members Arjun Appadurai, Max Weber Global Professor, and Drew Thompson, associate professor of visual culture and Black studies.

Burlington Magazine published professor Ivan Gaskell’s review of the new galleries of Dutch and Flemish art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gaskell also published “Against Theory—Again (Though with Reservations)” in Contemporary Aesthetics.

Two new essays by assistant professor Freyja Hartzell (MA ‘05) have appeared this month as chapters in edited volumes: “Dürer, Goethe, and the Poetics of Richard Riemerschmid’s Modern Wooden Furniture,” in Design and Heritage: The Construction of Identity and Belonging, edited by Grace Lees-Maffei and Rebecca Houze (Routledge, 2022), and “The Emperor’s New Glass: Transparency as Substance and Symbol in Interwar Design,” in Material Modernity: Innovations in Art, Design, and Architecture in the Weimar Republic, edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Maria Makela (Bloomsbury, 2022).

Professor Francois Louis’s 2003 article, “Shaping Symbols of Privilege: Precious Metals and the Early Liao Aristocracy,” has been republished in the 50th anniversary volume of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies. It was selected as one of six articles that “continue to have an impact on the evolution of the field.”

Jennifer Mass, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Conservation Science, was recently featured in The Guardian and Hyperallergic in coverage of a surrealist painting by Yves Tanguy thought lost after a fascist and anti-Semitic attack in Paris in 1930. Professor Mass authenticated the painting when it resurfaced and has a forthcoming study of the Tanguy painting.

Jesse Merandy (director of digital humanities and exhibitions) is featured in Next-Generation Dissertations: New Approaches to Humanities Scholarship, a web-based National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored project created by Syracuse University and launched in January. Interviews and links to his project can be found throughout the site.

Professor emeritus Paul Stirton is still mining the Tschichold archives and has published an article entitled “Max Burchartz, the avant-garde, and the New Typography” in ULTRABOLD, the journal of the St. Bride Library in London, that follows on from a lecture he gave to the library’s members last year.


Nina Stritzler-Levine
, professor of curatorial practice, contributed to the New York Times article, “Shining a Light on Forgotten Designers.” She profiled fashion designer Ann Lowe. Stritzler-Levine also served as juror for the exhibition, FOCUS: Art and Social Justice, at Woodstock Artists Association and Museum. The exhibition includes work by a selection of Hudson Valley artists who address themes of political or social justice and is on view through March 13.

Congratulations to Susan Weber, BGC’s founder and director and Iris Horowitz Professor in the History of the Decorative Arts, and a team of authors including BGC curators Earl Martin and Laura Microulis (BGC PhD ‘16), on winning the Historians of British Art Book Prize for an outstanding multi-authored book on the history of British art, architecture, and visual culture. According to the HBA Book Prize Committee, “From beehive Stilton cheese stands to cockatoo jugs, the three lavishly illustrated volumes of Majolica Mania offer a visual fantasia that is as fascinating and comprehensive as its scholarship. … Majolica’s historiography, design, production, uses (from architectural decoration and sculpture to hygienic dishware), iconographies, relationship to design reform, promotion through exhibitions, and more are explored in this major research undertaking, which definitively establishes the importance of these ceramics for our understanding of nineteenth-century culture, and offers serious delight while doing so.”

Faculty members also launched a number of new courses this semester, including
  • “Global Renaissance” (associate professor Deborah Krohn and professor Andrew Morrall)

  • “African and African American Visual and Material Culture” (associate professor Drew Thompson)

  • “Terracotta to Glaze: Ceramic Art in Africa from Antiquity to the Islamic Period” (Annissa Malvoisin, Bard Graduate Center/Brooklyn Museum Postdoctoral Fellow in the Arts of Africa)

  • “In Focus: Fire: Staging the Hearth in Eighteenth-Century France” (Jeffrey Collins)

  • “What Is the Object” (Peter N. Miller and Richard Tuttle)