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).


News of the BGC Community


Emily Banas (MA ’15) was promoted to associate curator of decorative arts and design at the RISD Museum, where she has worked since 2015. Congratulations Emily!

Professor Jeffrey Collins contributed two chapters to the six-volume Cultural History of Furniture, edited by former BGC research fellow Christina M. Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Press. Spanning 4,500 years and involving 70 expert scholars, the series charts the changing cultural frameworks within which furniture was designed, produced, and used in Western Europe, asking what social, religious, political, and economic factors have shaped its form and functions and how furniture demonstrates transformations in private and public life. For the volume on the “Age of Exploration” (fifteenth through seventeenth centuries), Collins’s chapter addressed “Visual Representations of Furniture” in a variety of media, ranging from design drawings and pattern books to frescoes; for the volume on the “Age of Enlightenment” (eighteenth century), he explored furniture in “The Public Setting,” including churches and synagogues, libraries, museums, shops, schools, taverns, coffee houses, and restaurants, among others.

Anna Mikaela Ekstrand (MA ’17) co-curated the second edition of the Immigrant Artist Biennial, Contact Zone, which will take place across nine venues in New York and New Jersey between September 2023 and January 2024. A roundtable discussion, Undocumented Artists: The Politics of Visibility, will take place at the Brooklyn Museum on October 7. All programming is free and open to the public. Well done Anna!

Brian Gallagher (MA ‘98, MPhil ‘12), senior curator of decorative arts at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, organized the special exhibition, Walter Scott Lenox and American Belleek, which opens on September 23, 2023, and will be on view through January 21, 2024. Best wishes Brian!

Borscht Belt Museum’s pop-up exhibition Vacationland! was featured in Smithsonian Magazine. The article included quotes from assistant curator, Mackensie Griffin (MA ‘24). Congratulations to Mackensie and curatorial interns Bob Hewis and Rachel Salem-Wiseman, also members of the MA class of 2024, for their work on the exhibition and all of the positive attention it has garnered.

Hadley Jensen (MA ’13, PhD ’18) curated Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles with Rapheal Begay. It is on view at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe through June 2, 2024. Well done Hadley!

Associate professor Deborah L. Krohn has been much in the news. She was featured on the podcast Around the Table produced by the Recipes Project. She spoke about her recent BGC Focus Exhibition, Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800, and its catalogue.

Both the exhibition and the catalogue have continued to accrue praise. The New Criterion’s weekly newsletter called the exhibition “a tempting show” and highlighted its “savory catalogue.”

The catalogue was also featured in The World of Fine Wine. The glowing review raved, “Deborah Krohn is an eloquent and trustworthy guide. The book has been beautifully produced, with a rich hoard of visual materials gracing virtually every page. Variously shaped knives have never looked so fascinating.” Writer Stuart Walton went on to praise the catalogue’s design by BGC senior designer Jocelyn Lau: “Textual flourishes such as the old-fashioned ligature connecting an ‘s’ or a ‘c’ to characters with ascenders, or the setting of quoted passages in large red italics with billowing or dwindling symmetrical justification at each side, add to the book’s charm and are an exemplary way of showing that an academic text need not be a dry scroll. A work on visual ostentation and the all-but-vanished history of performative table service demanded nothing less.” Bravi Deborah and Jocelyn!

Assistant professor Meredith B. Linn was quoted in a recent New York Times article Once a Force in Harlem, the Oldest Black Church in New York Hangs On by Mia Jackson.

Associate professor Ittai Weinryb will give the keynote lecture at Princeton University’s conference “Black Sea Migrations in the Long Thirteenth Century: Bodies, Things, Ideas,” September 22–23.