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).

My research interests include the history and theory of collecting, material culture studies methodology and historiography, craft and design history, digital oral history, public humanities, and vernacular photography. My book project is America First: Francis P. Garvan and the Material Politics of Collecting Antiques in the Interwar United States. Rather than offer a conventional biography, I show how this outspoken ideologue’s political and business dealings informed his collecting practices and unpack the hefty symbolic freight that he believed American antiques carried in service of what was, by the 1930s, an ambitious project of cultural and economic nationalism. By doing so, I elucidate how objects perform material politics; that is, enact political agendas and operate as an important form of cultural power. I am also the author of “Collecting as Historical Practice and the Conundrum of the Unmoored Object” in the Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture, edited by Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter. With colleagues Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, I am the co-creator of Voices in Studio Glass History. This digital exhibition and archive builds upon the work of noted critic and historian Paul Hollister, and includes new interviews with over fifty artists, curators, critics, historians, and gallerists. I also direct the Bard Graduate Center Craft and Design Oral History Project, a digital archive of interviews with contemporary craftspeople and designers conducted by graduate students in the seminar 693. Craft and Design in the U.S.A., 1945-present.

*On leave, spring 2025*

Selected Recent Publications

“Collecting as Historical Practice and the Conundrum of the Unmoored Object.” In the Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture, edited by Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Co-creator with Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, Voices in Studio Glass History: Art and Craft, Maker & Place, and the Critical Writings & Photography of Paul Hollister. Bard Graduate Center, 2021.

Project Director, Bard Graduate Center Craft and Design Oral History Project, 2012-Present.

Project Director, Interpreting the American Colonial Revival: Making the Invisible Visible, 2013. Digital publication with Alizzandra Baldenebro, Corrine Brandt, Maeve Hogan, Erica Lome, Emma Scully, and Kimon Keramidas.

Co-author, with Pat Kirkham and Amy F. Ogata, “Europe and North America 1900-1945,” and co-author, with Pat Kirkham, Christian A. Larsen, Sarah A. Litchtman, and Tom Tredway, “Europe and North America 1945-2000.” In History of Design, Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400-2000, edited by Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber. Yale University Press, 2013.

“Interpreting Vernacular Photography, Finding ‘Me’: A Case Study.” In Using Visual Evidence, edited by Richard Howells and Robert W. Matson. Open University Press/McGraw Hill, 2009.

“American Decorative Arts Studies at Yale and Winterthur: The Politics of Gender, Gentility, and Academia.” Studies in the Decorative Arts 9, no. 1 (Fall-Winter 2001-2002): 108-44.

Selected Courses

471 Americana Redux: Materializing Multiculturalism in the Postwar United States

548 Women Designers in the USA, 1900–Present: Diversity and Difference

606 The Colonial Revival

622 Issues in Design History and Material Culture Studies

693 Craft and Design in the USA, 1945 to the Present

834 American Collectors and Collections

845 American Craft, Design, and Folk Art in the 1920s and 1930s

877 Picturing Things: Photography as Material Culture

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