Fall 2021
Paul Comolera (1818–1897), designer; Minton & Co., manufacturer. Peacock, shape no. 2045, designed ca. 1875; this example 1876. Earthenware with majolica glazes. The English Collection.
Plan Your Visit to Bard Graduate Center Gallery
Gallery Hours September 24, 2021–January 2, 2022 Wednesday, 11 am–8 pm Thursday–Sunday, 11 am–5 pm Closed for Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day COVID-19 Precautions Bard Graduate Center’s top priority is protecting the health and well-being of its students, faculty, staff, and guests. All visitors to our buildings must show proof of COVID-19 vaccination, photo identification, and wear face coverings that completely cover the mouth and nose.
Gallery Admission Admission is by timed entry only. Seniors and Students: $12 Adults: $15 People with Disabilities and Caregivers: Pay as You Wish
How to Get Here 18 West 86th Street New York, NY 10024 to 86th St bus Follow Us
BGC Members are entitled to two complimentary admissions between September 24 and October 10, 2021. To become a member, visit bgc.bard.edu/membership. BGC offers complimentary need-based tickets by request to all ticketed events, including exhibitions. To learn more or make a request, email public.programs@ bgc.bard.edu.
@BardGradCenter Tours Bard Graduate Center is delighted to offer in-person and virtual tours to groups of 10 or more. These tours require advance reservations. Free for public schools; all other tours start at $85 per group. To make a reservation, email tours@bgc.bard.edu.
K-12 Tours These virtual student-centered tours are led by graduate student educators who engage young people in lively discussion and activities that promote critical thinking and visual literacy skills. Tours are adaptable to your school’s curriculum and build thoughtful object-based inquiry and powerful learning experiences. In-Person and Virtual Tours Our gallery educators lead one-hour in-person and virtual tours. In-person tours can accommodate small groups of five to ten people, ages 12 and older and fully vaccinated against COVID19. Virtual tours take place on Zoom and can accommodate groups of up to 50 people.
On View in the Gallery
Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915 September 24, 2021–January 2, 2022
Colorful, wildly imaginative, and technically innovative, Majolica Mania features more than 380 diverse examples of this functional and aesthetic, modern and historicizing ceramic ware. Featuring loans from major private collections as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, and the Maryland Center for History and Culture, the exhibition and its accompanying publication aim to create new awareness and appreciation for nineteenth-century English and American majolica. From objects used in domestic conservatories and dining rooms to monumental works of majolica displayed at world’s fairs, the exhibition reflects a range of Victorian preoccupations, including botany, zoology, popular humor, and the macabre. As the first major exhibition of this material in nearly four decades, Majolica Mania presents the wares created by major manufacturers in England, such as Minton, Wedgwood, and George Jones, as well as the other British and US potteries, like those in New York, Trenton, Baltimore, and the Philadelphia area, that emerged to capitalize on the craze. Curated by Susan Weber, Founder and Director, Bard Graduate Center, and Jo Briggs, Jennie Walters Delano Associate Curator of 18th- and 19th-Century Art, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Organized by Bard Graduate Center Gallery and the Walters Art Museum, Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915 will be on view at the Walters from February 27 to August 7, 2022.
Griffen, Smith & Co. “Shell” ware, ca. 1879–90. Earthenware with majolica glazes. Private collection, some ex coll. Dr. Howard Silby.
Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850– 1915 is made possible by Deborah and Philip English, the Bernard Malberg Charitable Trust, the Abra and Jim Wilkin Fund, and the Gary Vikan Exhibition Fund, with the generous support of Marilyn and Edward Flower, Amy Cole Griffin, Darci and Randy Iola, James and Carol Harkess, Maryanne H. Leckie, the Lee B. Anderson Memorial Foundation, the Thomas B. and Elizabeth M. Sheridan Foundation, Inc., the Robert Lehman Foundation, and the Women’s Committee of the Walters Art Museum, with additional support by Carolyn and Mark Brownawell, Joseph Piropato, Ann Pyne, Lynn and Phil Rauch, George and Jennifer Reynolds, The Sherrill Foundation, Carol and George E. Warner, Michael and Karen Strawser / Strawser Auction Group, Laurie WirthMelliand and Richard Melliand, the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, Drs. Elke C. and William G. Durden, Joan Stacke Graham, Wanda and Duane Matthes / Antiques from Trilogy, Robin and Andrew Schirrmeister, Karen and Mike Smith, William Blair and Co., and other generous donors to the Bard Graduate Center and the Walters Art Museum. Special thanks to the Majolica International Society.
Exhibition Highlights In the early 1850s, a new type of earthenware—one highly modeled and vividly colored with lead glazes—captured the attention of the English upper classes. Majolica went on to become a commercial sensation among the middle classes in both Britain and the United States in the decades that followed. Made of porous, low-fired clay that could be transformed into myriad shapes and styles, majolica inspired novel and imaginative wares in both useful forms and purely ornamental ones. Bold, experimental, eccentric, and gloriously colorful, the ware appealed to a cross section of classes and budgets, and by the end of the nineteenth century, could be found in all types of homes.
James Hadley (1837–1903), designer; Worcester Royal Porcelain Company, manufacturer. Japanese Tea Kettle, shape no. 254, design registered 1872. Earthenware with majolica glazes. Rena and Sheldon Rice.
NEED NEW CAPTION W. T. Copeland & Sons. Caltha Cheese Stand, ca. 1870s. Earthenware with majolica glazes. Joan Stacke Graham.
This wide reach was made possible by a confluence of factors that included a large workforce comprised of men, women, and children alike; technological advances that enabled large-scale manufacturing at relatively low cost; and socioeconomic shifts that provided increasing numbers of people with discretionary income.
Wardle & Co. Vase, design registered 1868. Earthenware with majolica glazes. Rena and Sheldon Rice.
Hugues Protat (born 1816; active 1835–90), modeler; Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, manufacturer. Mermaid Clock Vase, pattern no. M1719, shape designed ca. 1871. Earthenware with majolica glazes, metal, and glass. Aviva and Gerald Leberfeld.
Event Highlights Bard Graduate Center’s events serve as catalysts for deep reflection with objects, building dialogue, and imagining new ways of seeing. Our fall 2021 schedule provides you with many opportunities to explore the decorative arts, design history, and material culture at home, as all of this season’s events will be held on Zoom. Register for Events Sign up for BGC events quickly and easily! Visit bgc.bard.edu/events Call 212.501.3010 Space for BGC events is limited; please register in advance. Programs are subject to change; check the BGC website for the most up-to-date details.
Thursday, October 21 @ 6 pm EST
Friday, October 29 @ 12 pm EST
Race-ing Whimsy: Black and Asian Figures in the Majolica Imaginary
Beautiful and Deadly: The Dark Side of Pigment
Curated by Adrienne L. Child, the Phillips Collection and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University With Sequoia Miller, Gardiner Museum, and Iris Moon, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pay What You Wish Majolica’s reputation for ornament, historicism, and lighthearted eclecticism is well understood; however, the ways in which majolica represented ideas of race remain little discussed. Curator Susan Weber observed that majolica, more than any other ware of the era, makes tangible the interests, desires, and anxieties of nineteenth-century consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. Join us for an exploration of how this popular ceramic ware reflected Victorian thinking about race.
With Spike Bucklow, University of Cambridge. Pay What You Wish Just in time for Halloween! Join us for a program investigating the dark side of some of the world’s most vibrant pigments. BGC professor Jennifer Mass will explain how lead, uranium, and arsenic are used to create these glorious but deadly hues and discuss their material histories with Spike Bucklow (University of Cambridge), author of Red: The Art and Science of a Colour. Wednesday, November 3 @ 6:30 pm EST
Poetry Reading With Sally Wen Mao, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Stacy Szymaszek. Pay What You Wish Join these acclaimed poets as they read their poems inspired by an object of their choosing in the Majolica Mania exhibition. Wednesday, November 10 at 6 pm
Histories of Lead Activism in America With Richard McKinley Mizelle, Jr., University of Houston. Pay What You Wish Learn about key moments in the long fight against environmental racism led by Black activists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
BGC Publications Bard Graduate Center publishes award-winning exhibition catalogues, books, and journals that focus on scholarship in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Majolica Mania This richly illustrated three-volume catalogue is the first comprehensive study of the most important ceramic innovation of the nineteenth century. Dozens of international experts contributed essays that address the extensive output of the originators and manufacturers in England, the migration of English craftsmen to the US, and new research on important American makers. According to the New York Times, these authors “tracked down urban and rural brickwalled ghosts of long-shuttered factories [and] pay homage to reformers who campaigned for legislation to protect laborers.”
The Art of the Jewish Family “From the moment this book opens … we know that we are in the hands of a terrific writer. … It’s a measure of the author’s gifts, both as a scholar and as a storyteller, that we come to know these women, their families, and the Jewish communities in which they lived with astonishing clarity and intimacy. Leibman richly deserves the widespread acclaim— and, even more so, the affection—that her remark able book has attracted.”—Judges’ Remarks, 2020 National Jewish Book Awards Author Laura Arnold Leibman offers a new perspective on early Jewish American history in The Art of the Jewish Family. The book explores the lives of five diverse Jewish women who lived in New York between 1750 and 1850 by examining objects they owned.
To view and purchase BGC publications, visit bgc.bard.edu/publications.
About Bard Graduate Center Bard Graduate Center is a research institute in New York City that studies the human past through objects, from those created for obvious aesthetic value to ordinary things that are part of everyday life. Faculty members are drawn from the fields of art history, history, anthropology, archaeology, and materials science. Alumni of BGC’s highly regarded MA and PhD programs hold curatorial and academic positions at important institutions around the world. And BGC’s summer programs for teens and advanced undergraduate students expose emerging scholars to its interdisciplinary, object-based approach. To learn more about BGC’s academic programs, visit bgc.bard.edu. Become a Member Engage with the beauty, diversity, and rich meaning of objects, design, and material culture. Join the Bard Graduate Center Membership Circle and receive invitations to openings and exclusive events; a 10% discount on items in our gift shop; early access to select public programs; and many opportunities for learning and exploring. bgc.bard.edu/membership 212.501.3071
Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen September 16, 2022–January 1, 2023
Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest An online exhibition launching in spring 2022
Conserving Active Matter February 25–July 10, 2022
Richard Tuttle: What is the Object? February 25–July 10, 2022
Upcoming Exhibitions
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