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.

About
28th Annual Iris Foundation Awards
Honoring Irene Roosevelt Aitken, Dr. Julius Bryant, Dr. Meredith Martin, and Katherine Purcell
Events
Wednesdays @ BGC
Join us this spring for weekly programming!





Publications

Bard Graduate Center publishes award-winning exhibition catalogues, books, and journals focusing on scholarship in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture.

Contemporary Artists
Publications
Barbara Nessim
An Artful Life


Publications
Waterweavers
A Chronicle of Rivers

Publications
Sheila Hicks
Weaving as Metaphor

Publications
Richard Tuttle
What Is the Object?
BGCX
Publications
Ritual and Capital
BGCX
2020

Publications
What is Research?
BGCX
2021

Publications
What is Conservation?
BGCX
2023

In the late nineteenth century, the growing discipline of anthropology was both a powerful tool of colonial control and an ideological justification for it. As European empires and their commercial reach expanded, different populations became intertwined in relationships of exchange and power. Frontier Shores accompanies the exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery and draws from the collection of the American Museum of Natural History. Focusing on Oceania—the vast region encompassing Australia, New Zealand, and the tropical Pacific Islands—it examines cross cultural contact and the contest for power between indigenous and non-indigenous people.

Many of Oceania’s peoples were perceived in mainstream European scientific thought as belonging to humanity’s lowest tiers. Although these notions have long since been discredited, Shawn C. Rowlands traces their impact on the development of anthropology, colonial policy, and national identity. Ultimately, Frontier Shores reveals important processes of “othering” and the difficult issue of manufacturing identity and authenticity.

Table of Contents
Director’s Foreword

Foreword

Acknowledgements

On Nomenclature

Map of Oceania

Introduction

“This Hypothetical Primitive Condition” Ethnographic Collections and the Contemporary Stone Age

“All is Race” Anthropology and Colonial Control

“Doubtful Things” Dismissing Cultural Entanglements

“Proper Ones Would Be Much Better”

Appendix A: “What the Tongans Say about Napoleon”

Appendix B: Exhibition Object List

Bibliography

Index
Images