Join us for a conversation between two pioneering scholars who are changing the way we experience art through our most evocative sense, smell. Andreas Keller and Jessica Murphy will share their experiments in olfactory design: how smells can invite new interpretations, provide sensorial context, and enhance aesthetic appreciation for the museumgoer or gallery visitor. Keller will focus on how he works with artists to include scents in their creations; the resulting work, he argues, prompts a slower, embodied way of interacting with art. Murphy will discuss her method of crafting museum tours that combine visual and olfactory elements, always starting with a critical question: for example, how might an eighteenth-century potpourri vessel have smelled? Theodora Brown (MA ’26) will moderate the conversation.
Jessica Murphy is a museum professional and fragrance historian whose work connects art, scent, and popular culture. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of Delaware and has worked in research positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As manager of visitor engagement at the Brooklyn Museum, she created a series of scented gallery tours of special exhibitions and permanent collections from 2019 to 2025. She has lectured about fragrance through cultural venues including the Corning Museum of Glass, the Timken Museum of Art (San Diego), and the Institute for Art and Olfaction (Los Angeles). Her writing about fragrance has appeared in Atlas Obscura, Olfactive Material, and Viscose Journal, and she has been interviewed about perfume by media outlets including Vogue, the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, InStyle, Glamour, and Harper’s Bazaar. She shares her insights on olfactory and visual topics at her Substack, Show & Smell, and is currently a resident scholar at the New York Public Library’s Center for Research in the Humanities, where she is working on a book project related to fragrance.
Andreas Keller, author of The Philosophy of Olfactory Perception, is an academic with PhDs in neuroscience and philosophy who is interested in smells. He was the owner and operator of Olfactory Art Keller, an art gallery in New York’s Chinatown that encouraged artists working in all mediums to experiment with scents as objects of aesthetic appreciation by providing a dedicated exhibition space for olfactory art.
Object Labs
At BGC, we use an object-centered approach to advance the study of the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Join our student educators before select spring 2026 public events to learn about some of the objects in BGC’s Study Collection. Each week we will showcase three objects carefully selected from the collection, which includes more than 5,000 objects in a variety of media. Drop in anytime between 5 and 6pm; the experience takes roughly 10 minutes.
February 25; March 4 and 25; April 8, 15, and 22
38 West 86th Street, 5–6 pm
Founded in 2011, the BGC Study Collection supports student research by providing opportunities for hands-on close examination of objects. Learn more about the BGC Study Collection here.
