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).

Ariel Fein received her PhD in Byzantine and Islamic art history from Yale University. Her scholarship explores the intersection of Christian and Islamic visual cultures, in particular the circulation of objects, peoples, and ideas across the frontier zones of the medieval Mediterranean. She is currently working on two projects. Her book project, Emir of Emirs: George of Antioch and the Shaping of Norman Visual Culture, examines the complex multi-visual culture of Norman Palermo, and in particular the Arab-Christian built environment, through the life and patronage of grand vizier George of Antioch. A second project, Fatimid Wood Networks: Circulation, Production, and Consumption, considers how Fatimid objects were conceived, perceived, and experienced in Egypt and the Maghreb. Other research interests include the arts of medieval Arab-Christians, identity negotiation and cultural memory in the post-Byzantine diaspora, and Jewish ceremonial art and architecture, with a particular focus on the Jewish communities of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East. She held the 2020–21 Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship in the Islamic Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is the 2020–21 recipient of the Frances Blanshard Dissertation Prize from the History of Art Department at Yale University.