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).

Charmaine A. Nelson is Tier 1 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Transatlantic Black Diasporic Art and Community Engagement at NSCAD University. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Manchester (UK) in 2001. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial and Black feminist scholarship, transatlantic slavery studies, and Black diaspora studies. She has made ground-breaking contributions to the fields of the visual culture of slavery, race and representation, and Black Canadian studies. Nelson has published six books including the edited book Ebony Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), and the single-authored books The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Slavery, Geography, and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2016). Her seventh book, Towards an African Canadian Art History: Art, Memory, and Resistance (Captus Press, 2018), is the first to consolidate the field of African Canadian art history. Her current research project juxtaposes fugitive slave advertisements, portraiture, and genre studies from Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Jamaica to examine differences in the visual dimensions of creolization between slave minority and slave majority sites of the British Atlantic world. She has garnered several prestigious fellowships and appointments including a Caird Senior Research Fellowship, National Maritime Museum, UK (2007) and a Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the University of California – Santa Barbara (2010). In 2016, she was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists and in 2017–18 she was the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University. Prior to joining NSCAD University she was professor of art history at McGill University.