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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.

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28th Annual Iris Foundation Awards
Honoring Irene Roosevelt Aitken, Dr. Julius Bryant, Dr. Meredith Martin, and Katherine Purcell
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BGC Gallery reopens this September with the return of Sèvres Extraordinaire: Sculpture from 1740 until Today, originally slated for fall 2024.

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The Bard Graduate Center Gallery produces multiple exhibitions and publications each year, serving as a vital center of learning and a catalyst for engagement in the interrelated disciplines of decorative arts, design, and material culture. The gallery is celebrated in the museum world for its longstanding legacy of landmark projects dedicated to significant—yet often understudied—figures and movements in the history of decorative arts and design; these exhibitions and publications typically represent the definitive intervention on the artists and objects they investigate. BGC Gallery is also committed to generating and supporting a vast range of diverse presentations, small and large, that challenge traditional approaches to object inquiry; these examinations of material culture explore the human experience as manifest in our creation and use of “things” of all kinds. Whether originating in internal research and expertise, or in collaboration with external subject specialists, these endeavors prioritize rigorous scholarship while seeking to adhere to the field’s highest standards in production and design.



This is the second in a bimonthly series of photo-essays featuring objects from the Artek and the Aaltos exhibition and additional photographs, sketches, and other ephemera from the Aalto Family Collection.

Aino Marsio began working for Alvar Aalto in early 1924, and that October the two married in Helsinki. The Aaltos’ honeymoon, during which they traveled through Estonia and Austria on their way to Italy, was Alvar Aalto’s first trip to continental Europe. Aino Marsio-Aalto, on the other hand, had already travelled to Germany, Austria, and Italy with two female classmates from Helsinki’s Polytechnic Institute in 1921. The snapshots from the honeymoon below come from an album assembled by Marsio-Aalto, and they show her close attention to the local architecture.


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Aino Marsio-Aalto. Page from album with photographs from the Aaltos’ honeymoon travels in Venice, 1924. Aalto Family Collection.




Kirstin Purtich, Project Assistant Curator for
Artek and the Aaltos: Creating a Modern World, is an alumna of the Bard Graduate Center master’s program.