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).

Leonie Sophie Treier is a museum anthropologist focusing on the histories of collecting and representing Native American material culture in museums and beyond. Supported by a Smithsonian Institution predoctoral fellowship at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, her dissertation research studies the collection of material culture belonging to George Catlin’s Indian Gallery and focuses on material fabrications consisting of (de)construction, repurposing, and adding decorative elements of Native North American and non-Native source material, among other modifications, undertaken on a variety of items. She analyzes how specific disciplinary concerns have informed scholarly and museological (dis)engagement with this materially hybrid and ethnographically ambiguous collection, thereby shedding light on both historical and contemporary constructions of Native American cultural identity and change under colonialism. She holds an MPhil in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from the University of Oxford, in the context of which she worked with residents of Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, on a photographic album created by Barbara Freire-Marreco. She has published in The Journal of Museum Anthropology, Museum Worlds, and Museum Anthropology Review.