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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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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.




Attributed to Hilamas/Ned Harris (1865–1920), ’Namgis Kwakwaka’wakw
Pencil on paper
Collected by Franz Boas (date unknown)
Boas Collection, Box 2, Folder 18, American Museum of
Natural History Anthropology Archive


Indigenous artists routinely made miniatures representing full-sized objects or legendary narratives. This drawing, made for Franz Boas by ’Namgis artist Ned Harris, may be seen as an extension of this modeling practice. Such pieces became pedagogical tools as they allowed Boas indirect access to ceremonialism and a visual means to disseminate ethnographic knowledge. A number of Harris’s drawings have graphite markings on the back indicating their transfer, and many are scattered unattributed throughout Boas’s texts. In this scene from a Kwakwaka’wakw winter ceremony, a painted dance screen (mawił) is depicted in the foreground, with central eagle and raven crests surrounding a human (possibly an ancestor). Behind this rises a Hamat’sa or “Cannibal” dancer displaying the conventional gesture of spirit possession. Hitherto, Native artworks that employed visual narrative or representation of ritual in action were uncharacteristic; however, when asked to depict ceremony as a means of instruction or illustration, Harris and other artists of the era did so with apparent ease. This adaptation to temporal sequencing represents a distinctly modern interface in modes of visual communication between Native artists and Euro-American viewers.

Verso of this drawing, with graphite suggesting transfer for reuse as an illustration.

Tags for Interactive Tag Cloud: English text, models, repurposing