Former Students Celebrate Michele Majer

In June 2022, Bard Graduate Center (BGC) assistant professor Michele Majer retired after eighteen years of teaching the history of dress and textiles. Several BGC alumni mentored by Majer (Emma Cormack MA ’18, an associate curator at BGC who is currently working on the Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen exhibition with Majer; Billy DeGregorio PhD ’21, a freelance researcher and one of the authors of a two-volume set about the collector Percival Griffiths, forthcoming from Yale University Press; Kirstin Purtich MA ’15, wardrobe manager at Garde Robe, the luxury fashion storage company; and Leigh Wishner MA ’00, the digital media and content manager for Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in downtown Los Angeles who is currently at work on a book about twentieth-century American textiles and their design significance) recently discussed her impact and shared their memories of studying and working with her. Here are some excerpts from their conversation; you can read the full transcription on bgc.bard.edu.

Emma: I showed up to BGC as a pretty freaked out and overwhelmed twenty-three-year-old. Michele’s class was the first one of my whole BGC career. And I was really nervous beforehand. She was so welcoming, and I felt comfortable to say whatever was on my mind, even if it wasn’t correct. And then I took every class that she offered, and eventually, we took a trip to Cora Ginsburg, which was so amazing. And then I came back by myself a different time, and Michele and Titi [Titi Halle, owner of Cora Ginsburg] brought out a silk moiré gown and a little spencer and were like, here you go. And then they left the room, and I was stunned. I could study and write about them. … And Michele would connect me with past students. Her network of people is huge, and she’s so generous with making those connections. Everyone’s very happy to be connected with another “Michele person.” And working on this lace project (Threads of Power) has been amazing. Making an exhibition is so much work, and you spend so many hours sitting together and traveling together, and I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to do it with Michele.

Billy: I would say the two things that stand out for me about Michele are patience and trust. When we started working on Staging Fashion, she had already collected binders of

Michele Majer. Photo by Liz Ligon.

postcards, and we started to bond when I volunteered to transcribe all the postcards. And we would just sit for hours saying, “What do you think this word is?” And you know, they were all in French. We’d ask, “Should we transcribe the printed material, the copyright date?” It was the minutia of minutia, and she was always patient and game to entertain the questions.

Michele and Titi taught me how to dress any silhouette and various mannequin and photography tricks. That’s where the trust comes in. The community that studies actual clothing is small, and you very quickly get the sense of who you can trust: either they know how to touch an old dress or they don’t. And I’m glad that they trusted me. I also took every class Michele taught while I was there and did an independent study with her, and in addition I got to learn and discover on my own, with her guidance.

Kirstin: Michele was the first person who made me realize that fashion history was a pursuit in and of itself. I think my class might have been the first to have the “Approaches to the Object” methodology course. And after the fashion history lecture, it was so obvious to me that that was what I wanted to do. I think Michele brought some 1820s gown from Cora Ginsburg, and it truly was the first time I’d gotten to handle anything like that and see it up close. I had done costume design in college, but I’d never done research in a formal way. … I appreciated that Michele remains so intellectually curious. She would incorporate new research into her lectures and in individual conversations, and nothing was ever stagnant. She kept her classes fresh and engaging with new scholarship.

Leigh: I remember Michele handed each of us a document of eighteenthcentury silk to take home. We asked, “Are you sure we’re allowed to?” and she said, “Yes, and I expect you to take them out. I expect you to look at them, to touch them and feel them and examine them.” I don’t remember the actual assignment. I just remember coming home with something precious and feeling like my world had changed. And the field trip to Cora Ginsburg … we passed around shawls and corsets, we were looking at a lot of things, and we were able to touch them and feel them. It’s always about the primacy of the object. I could go on for hours. I love Michele so much and I owe her so much.

Jennifer Mass

In the summer of 2021, I worked with my colleagues at Bard Graduate Center and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to teach the four-week course “Art Detectives.” This course was designed for the underrepresented high school students throughout the New York metropolitan area. It included introductions to art conservation and cultural heritage science and to the conservation laboratories of the Guggenheim. The students studied collection objects such as the architectural collaborative LOTEK’s installation Mixer (2000). We worked with time-based media conservator Agathe Jarczyk to develop substitute materials for degraded polyurethane foam from the original installation and led discussions about the use of plastics in contemporary art and their environmental and aesthetic challenges. We also made faux Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock paintings for each student and conducted elemental, molecular, and imaging analyses of the works so the students could learn about the techniques conservators and scientists use to address condition and attribution questions. The students were each assigned a painting for handson microscopy, spectroscopy, and infrared imaging to create a hypothesis about the work’s date and the appropriateness of its attribution. From broad-ranging philosophical discussions on the nature of authenticity to hands-on multispectral imaging of works by Paul Gauguin in the Guggenheim’s Thannhauser collection, the students were exposed to career options in the arts, humanities, and sciences and learned how cultural objects can teach us about present

Jennifer Mass. Photo by Filip Wolak.

concerns such as non-degradable plastics pollution.

During the fall of 2021, I focused on adding social and environmental justice components to my “Polychrome Revolutions” course on the industrial revolution’s impact on artists’ materials of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I expanded the invention of photography segment to include how photography was used by Lewis Hine in his campaign to end child labor in the United States. His striking and shocking photographs of children working in textile mills, coal mines, glassworks, and farms were critical to his social reform mission. We also studied the work of Jacob Riis as he documented immigrant poverty in New York City, relating this to the illegal apartments in Queens that flooded this fall during Hurricane Ida. We then moved into the civil rights era to examine how the photographs of segregation by Gordon Parks laid bare the impossibility of “separate but equal” in the American South. His Outside Looking In and Department Store (Mobile, Alabama, 1956) are stunning indictments of the cruel realities of the Jim Crow era. We also studied the invention of plastics, starting with nineteenth-century innovations such as cellulose nitrate and acetate replacements for ivory and tortoiseshell, moving in the early twentieth century to bakelite, polyethylene, and polyurethanes. We considered the tremendous utility and rapid proliferation of these new materials, but also their degradation in cultural heritage objects and their environmental costs from the 1850s to the present. Similarly, we examined the new inorganic and organic pigments of the nineteenth century and how the ubiquitous adoption of these hazardous materials in fabrics, house paints, wallpapers, and even food coloring led to the need for new levels of government oversight into artists’ materials.

This year, I also had the opportunity to present my research to classes at Columbia University Law School, Portland State University Department of Chemistry, Sotheby’s Institute, and the Art Conservation Department at SUNY College at Buffalo. I presented a paper on my chrome-tin pink research at the Majolica: The French Connection conference and did a public lecture with Spike Bucklow entitled Beautiful and Deadly: The Dark Side of Pigment. I also had two publications come out in conjunction with the Conserving Active Matter exhibition.

Caspar Meyer

I was very busy in 2020–21, teaching four courses overall, including three new ones: “Making the Future in the Past: Material Culture Approaches to Craft and Time” (spring 2021), “Greek and Roman Technology” (spring 2021),

and “Metalwork: Technology, Value, Reception” (co-taught with Ittai Weinryb). The students were exceptionally motivated and creative, despite the difficult conditions we found ourselves in. Together with Meredith Linn, I served on the faculty team of the Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion Working Group throughout the 2020–21 academic year. While travel restrictions prevented me from accepting several lecture invitations, I did deliver an online seminar at the University of Oslo on “Making and Meaning: Early Attic Stelai as Lithic Technology” (March 2021), in addition to the work-inprogress paper at Bard Graduate Center entitled “Connoisseurship: Between Craft and Cybernetics” (October 2020). In May 2021, I convened an online workshop with colleagues from Europe and the US in preparation for the inperson symposium, “The Future as a Cultural Artefact,” which took place in April 2022. In my capacity as one of the editors of the journal West 86th, I reviewed submissions towards a special issue on metalwork which appeared in fall 2021. Finally, I wrote a book chapter on “Domesticating the Ancient House: The Archaeology of a False Analogy,” which will appear in Housing in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Textual and Material Approaches, ed. Jennifer Baird and April Pudsey (Cambridge University Press).

Caspar Meyer. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Peter N. Miller

Looking back on the report I wrote for 2020–21, I realize it was entirely devoted to an unfinished project. I began fall 2020 by launching my exhibition project on research (spring 2026) with a course in which the students and I identified potential objects for the show. A work-in-progress seminar report with wonderful questions from the audience led me to doubt the prior exhibition model. A second, intermediate version led to a third version of the show that will now concentrate on artists doing research. Between December 2020 and March 2021, I spent much of my time preparing a grant proposal for a “citizen research” project for underserved communities in New York City. It began as an idea about research as practices useful for daily life and quickly developed into a four-continent, twelve-person, multi-million dollar grant proposal. A year after submission I was told that the foundation would neither reject it nor approve it—but would simply not evaluate it.

Conserving Active Matter and Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object? took up most of my time in summer 2021, when I was writing what ended up being seven essays for the two books and the websites. In fall 2021 I was involved in designing the Richard Tuttle book with Luc Derycke. With a small grant from the MacArthur Foundation, I was able to convene a second series of MacArthur x BGC panels, this one on conservation. Later in the spring, with enormous help from Yukio Lippit at Harvard and Laura Minsky and Jen Ha at Bard Graduate Center, we ran the concluding Mellon symposia, Conservation Thinking in Japan and Conservation Thinking in India. A week after that came the symposium for Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object? All of these will be published—but that work will be accounted for in next year’s report! Finally, in this age of Zoom, I gave only one talk these past two years, at a seminar on German art literature at the École Normale Superieure, Paris.

Andrew Morrall

One of the most heartening things about the 2020–21 pandemic year that helped ensure many of the usual stimulations and satisfactions of teaching and supervision was the commitment and good-humored resilience of the students, whose consistently high standards of work in the face of isolated study, restricted library access, and the stresses and strains of blended and distance teaching, was truly impressive. The range and depth of research projects that came out of my fall 2020 class, “The Renaissance Rediscovery of the World,” was exemplary.

Meanwhile, switching personal research to largely online resources and conference participation to Zoom were interesting adaptive experiences. In fall 2020, the Material Culture Forum at Cambridge University kindly organized a meeting around the volume Religious Materialities of the Early Modern World that I co-edited with Mary Laven and Suzanna Ivaniç, which brought together an interesting gathering of papers on material themes by academics and graduate students from a range of disciplines in the humanities and material and conservation science. Much of my research in 2020–21 was devoted to exploring the role of artisans in the mathematical culture of the Renaissance. Fruits of this were given as a work-inprogress talk to the Bard Graduate Center community, based on an article, “Turning Back the Sun: Christoph Schissler’s Horologium Achaz as Kunststück,” published in 2021 in a special edition of Nuncius, edited by Volker Remmert and Julia Ellinghaus, on Picturing Astronomical Miracles from the Bible in the Early Modern Era. In June 2021, I gave a paper on “Nuremberg Goldsmiths and the

Nina Stritzler-Levine accepts the Society of Architectural Historians Award for Best Exhibition Catalogue for Eileen Gray in April 2022. Photo courtesy Society of Architectural Historians.

Mathematization of Nature,” at a conference that forms part of a five-year SSHRC-funded research project: Before the ’Great Divide’: The Shared Language(s) of Art and Science in the Early Modern Period. Other publications this year included an essay, “Object Worlds,” in A Cultural History of Objects in the Renaissance, ed. James Symonds, part of the six-volume Bloomsbury series A Cultural History of Objects.

Nina Stritzler-Levine

Teaching Bard Graduate Center students has been the absolute high point of this academic year. The exceptional group of students in the curatorial thinking and exhibition-making course exceeded my expectations on many fronts. I grounded the syllabus in Holland Cotter’s review for the New York Times of the exhibition Promise Witness Remembrance at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, commemorating the death of Breonna Taylor. Cotter argued that after that exhibition it was incumbent upon curators to be responsive to the socio-political climate of the present moment. The students fully embraced this idea by addressing issues of racism, feminism, gender, and design reform in the exhibitions they created for the class. In addition to teaching, I managed two Focus exhibitions that opened in spring 2022, and I engaged with several faculty members, BGC fellows, and BGC alums on future Focus exhibitions that will be held in spring 2023 and 2025.

My work as a curator also responded to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. I selected eleven contemporary artists working in different practices from film and photography to drawing and painting for the exhibition Focus: Art & Social Justice at Woodstock Artists Association & Museum in January 2022.

It was a great pleasure to publish another edition of Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor and to reissue the out-of-print book, Artek and the Aaltos: Creating a Modern World, in a larger trim size that gives greater visibility to the many previously unknown Artek drawings and projects. I was honored to accept the Society of Architectural Historians Exhibition Catalogue Award for Eileen Gray at the annual meeting in Pittsburgh. My scholarship and research expanded in new directions when I was invited to be a contributing author to the book Irma Boom: Book Manifest, published by the Koenig Verlag in the Netherlands, that launches in the fall of 2022. My text considers Boom as a dramaturgical designer through the lens of Bertolt Brecht’s writings on dramaturgy.

Drew Thompson

My introduction to Bard Graduate Center was in fall 2020 when I joined Catherine Whalen and Meredith Linn in planning the first convening of the Seminar in the Art and Material Culture of Africa and the African Diaspora. Our collaboration continued into fall 2021 and involved organizing two more seminar talks featuring Monica Miller of Barnard College and Michelle Wilkinson of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

In spring 2022, I formally joined the BGC faculty. I taught my first BGC course titled “African, AfricanAmerican, and Black Diaspora Visual and Material Culture,” which featured a visit to a retrospective on Faith Ringgold at the New Museum; guest speakers included Emilie Boone (City Tech, CUNY, and CUNY Graduate Center), Shawyna Harris (Georgia Museum of Art), and Leslie Wilson (Art Institute of Chicago).

Last spring, the University of Michigan Press published my first monograph, Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times. This past academic year, I presented on this book project at the University of California, Berkeley, New York University, University of Toronto, and University of Western Cape. I conducted interviews on my research and teaching projects with the New Books Network and Art & Education. The arts and literary journal The White Review published my interview with the multi-media artist Lubaina Himid on the occasion of her first solo show at Tate Modern.

Exhibition design and curation are central aspects of my research. Since April 2020, I have worked on an exhibition about the Black American artist Benjamin Wigfall and the artist residency and youth arts center he established, called Communications Village. The exhibition is scheduled to open in September 2022 at the Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, and then it will travel to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in April 2023. My counterpart at the VMFA, Sarah Eckhardt, and I have been

Drew Thompson. Video still courtesy of Byline Studio.

researching, writing, and editing an encyclopedic catalogue and selecting over seventy-five works to be showcased from various private and museum collections.

Ittai Weinryb

In the 2021–22 academic year, I continued to work on a new book series together with Caroline Fowler and Princeton University Press entitled Art/Work. The series narrates a new history of art founded in the study of objects, materials, and technology. We have commissioned volumes centering on the media of ceramics, pigment, plastics, and weaving. In my capacity as co-editor of the journal West 86th, together with Caspar Meyer, I prepared a special issue on metalwork. Also in this academic year, together with Elizabeth Williams of Dumbarton Oaks, I have organized the conference Rethinking the Wearable in the Middle Ages (BGC, April 28–29, 2022).

I continued to research and write parts of my book project, Art and Frontier. The book carefully examines the place of art and material culture in frontier societies by concentrating on a complex moment in the history of European expansion in the Middle Ages when material consumption and production intensified dramatically. I focus on the geographical region of Crimea, a peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea, during a roughly two-hundred-year period of European exploration and colonization. Through a focused look into how art and material culture worked to produce, define, and profess the actual and conceptual space of the frontier, I argue a new understanding of the center can simultaneously arise.

Ittai Weinryb. Photo by Liz Ligon.

Catherine Whalen

In 2020–22, I developed and taught two new courses grounded in the philosophy of inclusive pedagogy and Bard Graduate Center’s commitment to greater diversity, equity, access, and inclusion. The

first, “Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2020,” was inspired by Pat Kirkham and Susan Weber’s landmark 2000–2001 exhibition and catalogue and the hundredth anniversary of US women’s suffrage. Drawing upon the expertise of practicing curators, the class offered a special focus on Black, Latina, and Indigenous women designers. The second, “Americana Redux: Materializing Multiculturalism in the Postwar United States,” investigated how individuals and groups have deployed material culture to challenge, redefine, and expand constructs of citizenship and belonging in the United States of America. For BGC’s ongoing foundation course “Objects in Context,” I also implemented a new “Contemporary World” session, in which students presented on recently designed objects while addressing issues of social justice, sustainability, and history and memory. In 2021, my advisees Anne Hilker and Antonio Sánchez Gómez successfully defended their dissertations, respectively “The Legal Lives of Things: The Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Boundary between Public and Private” and the prize-winning “Diógenes A. Reyes’s Silhouette Biography: Print Culture and the Politics of Technology, Distance, Mediation, and Things Left Unsaid in the Transnational History of the Colombian Caribbean (1898–1920).” William DeGregorio, co-advised by Michele Majer and myself, also successfully defended his dissertation on ideologies of collecting and displaying fashion at the Museum of the City of New York.

In 2021, BGC launched Voices in Studio Glass History: Art and Craft, Maker and Place, and the Critical Writings and Photography of Paul Hollister, a digital exhibition and publication co-created by Barb Elam, Digital Collections metadata librarian and Study Collection manager, Jesse Merandy, director of Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions, and myself.

Helen Polson chats with PhD student Elizabeth Koehn. Photo by Liz Ligon.