Our fall course for the general public opens our extensive Study Collection for hands on workshops. Materials and Making is a five-week object handling course taught by our world-renowned faculty and alumni. Each session will focus on a different material, allowing participants to discover different histories of materials, making, and production through tactile engagement with objects.

The purpose of the Bard Graduate Center Study Collection is to support pedagogy by providing hands-on, close examination of objects as part of the classroom experience and includes a number of rare, unusual, and delicate objects in a range of materials.

Classes begin October 2
Tuesdays 7–9 pm

$450 adults
$375 students and educators
Individual classes not for sale.
Space is Limited.


Week 1 (October 2)
Textiles
With Bard Graduate Center Doctoral Candidate Antonia Behan


Week 2 (October 9)
Ceramics
With Meredith Linn, Assistant Professor


Week 3 (October 16)
Paper and Print
With Paul Stirton, Associate Professor, Editor of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture


Week 4 (October 23)
Silver
With Debra Schmidt Bach, Curator of Decorative Arts, New York Historical Society

Debra Schmidt Bach
is the Curator of Decorative Arts at the New-York Historical Society and a former Tiffany & Co. Foundation Research Fellow in American silver. She has curated several exhibitions at the Historical Society, including First Jewish Americans: Freedom and Culture in the New World, Superheroes in Gotham, Treasures of Shearith Israel, Beer Here: Brewing New York’s History, Stories in Sterling: Four Centuries of Silver in New York, and The Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New-York Historical Society. She has written or contributed to numerous articles and catalogues, lectures widely, and regularly teaches at the Bard Graduate Center; Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Master of Arts Program; and Parsons The New School for Design. Bach has an M.A. from Columbia University, and M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the Bard Graduate Center. Her dissertation, Makers, Masters, and Manufacturers, examined the early industrialization of New York City’s antebellum silver trade.
Week 5 (October 30)
Glass
With Alexandra Ruggiero, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Glass, Corning Museum of Glass


We are also pleased to extend complimentary need-based community tickets by request to all ticketed events. To learn more, please email [email protected].

Leading support for Public Programs at Bard Graduate Center comes from Gregory Soros and other generous donors.