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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.



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Unknown maker, Haida
Argillite
Donated by Amelia White in 1961
American Museum of Natural History 16.1/2558

Argillite pipes (xahliidaa.u) were the most common Haida objects carved for the souvenir trade between 1820 and 1865. The genre of foreign ships and sailors was popular in Haida pipe imagery of the period, as indigenous artists depicted—perhaps caricatured—explorers and settlers. This panel pipe, meant for display rather than use, depicts seven men and women wearing highly detailed Euro-American fashions, seated on what appears to be a paddle steamer. Its whimsical dynamism gives the impression that the artist enjoyed representing the foreigners, while the non-Native origin of the pipe form itself may have given him further freedom from the confines of formline-style crest imagery. For their part, the sailors and tourists who bought these pipes were probably attracted to the exotic representations of themselves. This pipe was acquired by the AMNH in 1961, when anthropologists were finally recognizing the historical and aesthetic value of such “acculturated” First Nations objects. These had been often ignored by nineteenth-century ethnographers who privileged pre-contact Native material, which they regarded as “pure.”


Tags for Interactive Tag Cloud: ship imagery, souvenir