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).

Lynda Klich is an art historian specializing in modernism in Latin America. Her first book, The Noisemakers: Estridentismo, Vanguardism, and Social Action in Postrevolutionary Mexico (University of California Press, 2018) examined Latin American and European transnational networks and the relationships among culture and politics, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and modernism and popular culture. It received the Phillips Collection Book Prize. While a visiting fellow at Bard Graduate Center, she will focus on a book project that considers colonial revival aesthetics and race in 1920s–30s Mexico. Klich was co-editor and contributor to Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices (Routledge, 2018; paperback 2021). She also is curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Collection, the subject of various collaborative projects with the MFA Boston, including the recent exhibition and catalogue, Real Photo Postcards: Pictures from a Changing Nation (2022). Klich is associate professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, where she earned her MA. She received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.