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
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Wednesdays @ BGC
Join us this spring for weekly programming!





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BGC Gallery reopens this September with the return of Sèvres Extraordinaire: Sculpture from 1740 until Today, originally slated for fall 2024.

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The Bard Graduate Center Gallery produces multiple exhibitions and publications each year, serving as a vital center of learning and a catalyst for engagement in the interrelated disciplines of decorative arts, design, and material culture. The gallery is celebrated in the museum world for its longstanding legacy of landmark projects dedicated to significant—yet often understudied—figures and movements in the history of decorative arts and design; these exhibitions and publications typically represent the definitive intervention on the artists and objects they investigate. BGC Gallery is also committed to generating and supporting a vast range of diverse presentations, small and large, that challenge traditional approaches to object inquiry; these examinations of material culture explore the human experience as manifest in our creation and use of “things” of all kinds. Whether originating in internal research and expertise, or in collaboration with external subject specialists, these endeavors prioritize rigorous scholarship while seeking to adhere to the field’s highest standards in production and design.





This symposium is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Frontier Shores: Collection, Entanglement, and the Manufacture of Identity in Oceania at Bard Graduate Center (April 22–September 18, 2016). Frontier Shores explores social Darwinism, imperialism, cross-cultural contact, and identity in Oceania from the nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. The exhibition showcases a wide selection of material to convey the ways in which colonial powers perceived those they controlled or sought to control, and the ways in which cultural exchange was realized in the material world. Frontier Shores explores the idea that the material culture collected in the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century made false assumptions about native identity and civilization in order to justify domination. This exhibition deals with the notion of trade between European collectors and native peoples, incorporating the idea of the object as the frontier itself, but it also explores how anthropology was used by colonial powers to justify their control over the resources and lives of colonized peoples—how collection both described and pacified the frontier. Frontier Shores illuminates how marginalized peoples adapted to, resisted, or otherwise exerted their own agency in the colonial context, and examines the objects on display as either symbols of power, or as records of how people lived, died, and interacted. The symposium will involve seminar presentations from leading scholars on the anthropology, archaeology, and history of Oceania, exploring the larger themes in diverse, local contexts.