Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

Bard Graduate Center advances the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through its object-centered approach to teaching, research, exhibitions, publications, and events.

At BGC, we study the human past and present through their material expressions. We focus on objects and other material forms—from those valued for their aesthetic elements to the ordinary things used in everyday life.

Our accomplished interdisciplinary faculty inspires and prepares students in our MA and PhD programs for successful careers in academia, museums, and the private sector. We bring equal intellectual rigor to our acclaimed exhibitions, award-winning catalogues and scholarly publications, and innovative public programs, and we view all of these integrated elements as vital to our curriculum.

BGC’s campus comprises a state-of-the-art academic programs building at 38 West 86th Street, a gallery at 18 West 86th Street, and a residence hall at 410 West 58th Street. A new collection study center will open at 8 West 86th Street in 2026.

Founded by Dr. Susan Weber in 1993, Bard Graduate Center has become the preeminent institute for academic research and exhibition of decorative arts, design history, and material culture. BGC is an accredited unit of Bard College and a member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH).

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of Art and Architectural Theory and Historiography at the School of Architecture and an Associated Faculty member of the Department of Art and Archaeology, as well as a member of the executive committees for the Program in European Cultural Studies and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. His work addresses the intersections between art, architecture, historiography, psychoanalysis, as well as the histories of science, anthropology, and psychological aesthetics. He is the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (The University of Chicago Press, 2012), the co-editor of Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (The MIT Press, 2014), and the author of over eighty articles published in academic journals and edited anthologies. He is currently completing a second personal book project titled World Ornament: Adornment on a Global Scale examining the cosmic analogies of bodily and architectural adornment from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and he is also preparing the first edition of Frederick Kiesler’s unpublished book project Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing with the collaboration of the Kiesler Foundation in Vienna. During his residency at Bard Graduate Center, Papapetros will draw from the BGC’s extensive resources in the history of applied arts to complete his World Ornament book project. Building on the ontological problematics he broached in his first book on the historiographic legacy of anthropological theories of animism and the survival of alternative epistemological mentalities in the art and architecture of modernity, this new global history of ornamentation, spanning the areas of art and architectural theory and historiography, anthropology, evolutionary biology, and psychoanalysis, proposes a novel theory of the decorative artifact informed by its allegedly marginal position on the world stage, as well as the infinite power of extensibility in the art and architectural economies and environmental politics of the modern era.