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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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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.



The effort to conserve things is part of the human struggle with the pervasive activity of matter.


For as long as people have made and kept things, they have cared for and repaired them. Today’s conservator uses a variety of tools and categories developed over the last 150 years to do this work. In the next decades, new kinds of materials and a new scale of change will pose unprecedented challenges. As conservators turn to an ever-expanding set of constituencies, collaborators, and knowledge claims to do this work, how might they reconsider their role in conserving such “active matter” and in conversations about environmental and cultural sustainability? Conserving Active Matter explores the activity of matter through objects that span five continents and range in time from the Paleolithic to the present. From the things that clothe us to those that shelter us; from things that reflect our interest in the past to those that enable its performance in the present; and from sacred objects to the profane, Conserving Active Matter envisions the work of conservation as essential for the lives of the things that sustain us.


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Conserving Active Matter is part of Cultures of Conservation, a multi-year initiative generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. More information about the initiative can be found at www.bgc.bard.edu/cultures-of-conservation.


This exhibition and publication are generously supported by donors to Bard Graduate Center.