Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions

BGC students in the Digital Media Lab. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Bard Graduate Center launched the Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions (DH / DX) program in fall 2020. It shares research— exhibitions, publications, projects, and events—with local and global audiences, in the BGC Gallery and online. In addition, DH / DX provides BGC students with a comprehensive curricular approach to the use of digital tools and methodologies to support, develop, and exhibit scholarship in decorative arts, design history, and material culture. BGC’s digital literacy initiative requires students to apply these tools, essential for academic and museum careers, to their own research and collaborative projects.

In March 2021, DH / DX launched an online exhibition to accompany Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915. It includes several exhibition objects rendered as detailed 3D models that users can view from multiple perspectives. The site also includes features related to the sources and styles, manufacture, marketing, and uses of majolica, an audio guide, excerpts from the catalogue, contemporary responses to majolica, and a K–12 educator guide.

That same month, BGC launched its first born-digital exhibition, Voices in Studio Glass History: Art and Craft, Maker and Place, and the Critical Writings and Photography of Paul Hollister, a project that rethinks the history of postwar American studio glass through the curation and presentation of an extensive collection of archival photographs, ephemera, and hundreds of audio and video interviews with artists, curators, critics, historians, and gallerists. It also features an annotated bibliography of more than seventy essays and reviews by noted glass historian Paul Hollister.

In 2022, BGC launched two more online exhibition sites to accompany exhibitions in the BGC Gallery: Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object? And Conserving Active Matter. BGC students worked with exhibition curators and DH / DX to develop content and interactive features for each of the projects.

DH / DX hosted two symposia, one in 2021 entitled Refresh / Reset / Reformat and one in 2022 entitled High Availability: Museums’ Digital Response During the Pandemic. The first brought together scholars to discuss the use of digital tools to help recover, redefine, and reimagine the past through the exploration of lost and marginalized voices and cultures. The second assembled museum professionals to the discuss how they used digital tools to address the challenges they faced during Covid.