About
Upcoming Exhibitions
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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About

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).


Drew Thompson is a historian of art and an independent curator. His research areas include African and African-American visual and material culture, Black internationalist movements, modern and contemporary Black art, and histories of photography. Recent exhibitions include Sightlines on Peace, Power & Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery and Benjamin Wigfall & Communications Village at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He is the author of the monograph Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times (University of Michigan Press, 2021), and he is currently working on a book titled Coloring Surveillance through Polaroids: The Poetics of Black Solidarity and Sociality. His art criticism and writings on contemporary art and the history of photography have appeared in Africa Is A Country, FOAM Magazine, the White Review, and Source Magazine and in edited volumes published by Art Institute of Chicago, The Image Centre, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Walther Collection, David Zwirner Books, and HANGAR–Centro do Investigação Artística. With the aim of enhancing public access and engagement with the visual arts and humanities, he has served in an advisory capacity for several non-profit organizations, including the Estate of Benjamin Wigfall, Watson Foundation, SSRC–Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Program, Brooklyn Museum, and CONTACT Photography Festival.

Selected Recent Publications
Exhibition Catalogues:

SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power & Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Co-edited with Sarah Eckhardt. Benjamin Wigfall & Communications Village. Richmond: Virginia Museum of Art, 2023.

Essays in Art Catalogues:

“Reimaginations of Portraiture and Figuration through the Diaspora,” In Njideka Akunyili Crosby (New York: David Zwirner, 2025), 114-125.

“From Color to Blackness: The Subtleties of Liberation and the Search for Diaspora,” In Spaces of Subjection (New Haven: GHP, 2024), 48-62.

“Surveillance,” In Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media edited by Antawan I. Byrd and Elizabeth Siegel with Carl Fuldner (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2023), 382-85.

“Imaging history anew: Ângela Ferreira and the Art of Decolonization” and “Photography from the shadows,” In Atlantica: Contemporary Art from Mozambique and its Diaspora (Lisbon: Hanger Books, 2020), 65-69 and 213-21.

Peer-reviewed Publications:

“Telling on Archival Erasure: The Stories Behind Griffith Davis’s Liberia Photographs,” In Facing Black Star edited by Thierry Gervais and Vincent Lavoie (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023), 213-36.

“Photo Genres and Alternate Histories of Independence in Mozambique,” In Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History edited by Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), 126-55.