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!





Research

Bard Graduate Center is a research institute for advanced, interdisciplinary study of diverse material worlds. We support the innovative scholarship of our faculty and students as well as resident fellows, guest curators and artists, and visiting speakers.

Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Our Public Humanities + Research department focuses on making scholarly work widely available and accessible through the coordination of the fellowship program and public programming that combines academic research with exhibition-related events. Across the institution—from the classroom to the gallery, from publications to this website—we utilize digital media to facilitate and share original research. This section outlines current programming and provides a repository for past scholarly content.

Following our “Extreme Conservation Symposium” (convened March 20, 2015), we asked each presenter to share one idea from his or her presentation in short form on this blog. We are grateful for this opportunity to continue thinking through their groundbreaking work.


This talk focused on the installation Little Savages by artist Tessa Farmer, exhibited at the Natural History Museum, London, in 2007. A taxidermied fox, other natural materials, and tiny malevolent fairies made by the artist out of insect and plant material, create narratives concerning ecology. The materials used by Farmer lead us to reflect upon the history of taxidermy, its impact on fashion and its position as a domestic handicraft. Farmer, a vegetarian, is using references to taxidermy, fairies, and social insects in order to question the authority of the institution in which she is exhibiting. She is not creating a nostalgic vision of craft. Instead, her work represents an alliance between handicraft and recent technologies in the age of the Internet. Natural materials and electronic mass media are interrelated in Farmer’s work, driven by curiosity about the material at hand, be it tangible or ephemeral. The audience is reminded that neither materials nor nature can be frozen and preserved for eternity, but instead are subject to processes of decay, death, and evolution.

Bio

Dr Petra Lange-Berndt works as Lecturer for Modern and Contemporary Art as well as History of Art with Material Studies at University College, London. She has been co-curating several shows, such as Mark Dion: The Academy of Things, Art Academy Dresden, in collaboration with the Green Vault and the Albertinum (2014-15); A World of Wild Doubt, Kunstverein Hamburg (2013) as well as Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois! Comrades and Contemporaries, The 1970s, an exhibition in three parts at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Clique, Pop, Politics, 2009-10), which won the Exhibition of the Year award by the International Association of Art Critics (German section). Apart from the according exhibition catalogues and Memphis Schulze: Catalogue raisonné 1969-1993 (Cologne 2014) she has published the book Animal Art: Präparierte Tiere in der Kunst 1850–2000 (Preserved animal bodies in modern and contemporary art, Munich: Silke Schreiber, 2009) and runs the forum Curious Matters (link) as well as the blog Preserved! (link) In 2015 a reader on Materiality will be published with Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press (link).