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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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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 Sdiihldaa/Simeon Stilthda (ca. 1799–
1889), Haida
Wood, paint, leather, metal
Collected by Israel W. Powell between 1880 and 1885
Donated by Heber R. Bishop
American Museum of Natural History 16/376

This mask (niijaang.u) originally had two parts: the split outer face of a man, and an inner face representing a woman (lost sometime after it arrived at AMNH). Such mechanical masks usually represent ceremonial transformation— a physical or spiritual change in state. Although Powell identified this mask as a “hermaphrodite,” it more likely signals the change from male to female aspects of a mythical person or spirit being. Scholars have come to attribute this mask to the Haida carver Simeon Stilthda, who was known to have made many items for sale to Euro-Americans (such as portrait masks and shaman figures like the one on exhibit). He produced this mask at a time of great duress in Haida culture due to anti-potlatch laws, drastic population loss and relocation due to disease, and the suppression by missionaries of ritual art practices. Perhaps Stilthda took advantage of the robust tourist and ethnographic markets not only to make a living but also to maintain a material record of Haida visual and ceremonial form—like masks and face paintings— that were threatened with eradication.

Illustration of the mask with its original inner face. From John Swanton, The Haida of Queen Charlotte Islands (1905), pl. XXV(6). Courtesy the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.

Tags for Interactive Tag Cloud: model, souvenir, transformation