The Bard Graduate Center Library is at the heart of its academic building, and its workshops, field trips, events, and curated displays of materials from BGC’s collection are often at the heart of the student experience. Polly Cancro, research services librarian, makes biweekly social media posts that appear in BGC’s Instagram feed; here they serve as journal entries from the fall semester.
October 17, 2025
The BGC Library is getting in the spooky spirit with selections from the Study Collection and library!
Highlights include a 19th-c. cast iron urn, an early 20th-c. spider brooch, and an 18th-c. Dutch blood-letting dish, as well as the following books:
- The Ivory Mirror: The Art of Mortality in Renaissance Europe
- Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife in Ancient South Italian Vase Painting
- The Artfulness of Death in Africa
- The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China
- Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt.
October 3, 2025
BGC students recently visited the Watson Library at the Met as well as New York Public Library’s Wallach Division of Art, Prints, & Photographs and Manuscripts, Archives, & Rare Books Division for annual orientation tours organized by our research services librarian, Polly Cancro.
In addition to touring the research spaces, students had the opportunity to browse selected collection items and learn more about finding and accessing material.
September 19, 2025
Welcome to the Big Apple!
BGC library staff welcomed the incoming class – many of whom have come from out of town and abroad – with a NYC-themed display of library books and objects from the Study Collection.
Highlights include a glass apple by artist Oiva Toikka, ceramic apples by Barbara Eigen, and a collection of NYC-themed compacts from the 1890s to the 1940s.
September 5, 2025
New library acquisitions alert!!
BGC students, fellows, faculty, and staff can take a closer look at these and other recent purchases on display in the third-floor alcove in the library.
August 21, 2025
We kicked off this year’s orientation with a day of library activities!
Our new cohort of MA and PhD students explored the library building and collections through a self-guided discovery tour and had the opportunity to get up close and personal with a few items from BGC’s special collections. In this workshop, students analyzed rare books and periodicals as objects, with a focus on their materiality, history, use, and cultural significance.
Selections included the oldest book in our collection (Traité des festins, 1682), a Montgomery Ward catalog (1966), and a guide to the 1900 Paris Exposition, complete with a fold-out map of Paris.
