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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.




Photograph by Edward Dossetter, 1881
From a glass plate
Donated by Israel W. Powell in 1885
Image 42298, American Museum of Natural History Library


This photograph shows the Kwakwaka’wakw village of Newitti during a survey trip conducted by Israel Powell for the purpose of monitoring new Native reserves on the coast of British Columbia. The village had benefited from the early fur trade in the late eighteenth century. Despite a period of hostility with the local Hudson’s Bay Company around 1850, Newitti became a key destination for traders and museum collectors by the 1880s. Multiple signs of intercultural exchange are visible here: the Westernstyle clothes and trade blankets worn by the Natives; the British flag flying from the second house’s roof; and the English messages mounted above the doors amidst hereditary family crest motifs. Powell reported that the two rival chiefs, who took the names “Cheap” and “Boston,” were eager to maintain lucrative commercial relations. By using the language of the colonizing culture, their signs spoke directly to prospective customers while also displaying chiefly status and identity, much as the crests do. Like the Native incorporation of new materials and motifs in this period, such overt borrowing of the foreign may have communicated to both indigenous and settler communities.

Text of house-front signs:

Left: “CHEAP: Hes one of the head chief/ of al tribes in this country/ white man can get information”

Right: “BOSTON: He is the head chief of/ Naweeti He is true and/ honest He don’t give no/ trouble to no white man”


Tags for Interactive Tag Cloud: English text, Hudson’s Bay Company, indigenization