Mei Mei Rado Joins BGC Faculty

Bard Graduate Center welcomed Mei Mei Rado (PhD ’18) to its faculty in January 2023. Dr. Rado is an art historian specializing in textile and dress history, with a focus on China and France from the eighteenth through the early twentieth century. Her research and teaching interests also include late imperial Chinese visual and material cultures, eighteenth-century French decorative arts, late Edo- and Meiji-period Japanese textiles, and intercultural exchanges in the early modern periods. “Rado brings extraordinary intellectual energy and seriousness to the study of dress, textiles and fashion,” said Dean Peter N. Miller. “She also firmly establishes East Asia as a center of curricular and research strength. But her interest in cross-cultural communication adds still further depth to something BGC does very well.” Dr. Rado stated, “The stimulating intellectual milieu and object-centered approaches at BGC have profoundly shaped my academic work. I am thrilled to return to my alma mater in a new role to inspire future generations of scholars and to encourage further innovations in dress and textile studies.”

Most recently, Dr. Rado served as associate curator of costumes and textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), where she contributed to the reinstallation planning of its new David Geffen Galleries and helped build a fine and extensive collection of modern Chinese fashion, the first of this kind in North American art museums. Previously she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art (formerly Freer / Sackler Galleries), a pre-doctoral fellow in the Department of European Sculptures and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a residency research fellow in the Division of Textiles at the Palace Museum, Beijing. She holds an MA from the University of Chicago and a BA from Nanjing University.

Dr. Rado’s forthcoming book, The Empire’s New Cloth: Western Textiles at the Eighteenth-Century Qing Court, examines the forgotten history of European textiles at the Qing court and Qing imperial products after European models. It recounts a nuanced, multipolar story from both cultural ends, showing how objects, styles, and images traveled in multiple directions replete with reinvented meanings. Currently, she is developing two new projects. The first, in collaboration with European and American institutions, surveys Edo-period Japanese textile fragments collected by major European collectors in the late nineteenth century and their roles in the Japonisme movement and Japan’s arts and crafts reform. The second investigates the issue of light in Euro-American fashion from the early modern period to now. It parses how changing experiences and understandings of light have shaped fashion’s conditions of display, compositional and pictorial sources, conceptual and discursive frameworks, and symbolic implications. Dr. Rado has won a number of prestigious research grants, including from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Drawing on her previous experience working on important costume and textile collections and major exhibitions, including China: Through the Looking Glass (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015) and Interwoven Globe: Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), Dr. Rado plans to incorporate curatorial practice in her work and teaching at BGC.

Rado takes the baton from Michele Majer, who retired in May 2022 after twenty-eight years on the BGC faculty. Majer said, “It’s very meaningful for me that Mei Mei Rado took over the position because we have worked together. Her geographic scope is far larger than mine because she knows Eastern fashion history, which I really don’t, and she has those languages. I know how interested she is in what students are working on and what a good mentor she will be.”

Of Majer, Rado said, “As a doctoral student at BGC, I learned from Michele a solid object-based knowledge of textiles and garments, and I was greatly inspired by her sensitivity to literature and visual materials.” Rado looks forward to collaborating with other members of the BGC faculty in developing courses and public humanities programs. She continued, “BGC’s mission to study the past through tangible things resonates with my own commitment to advancing the field of dress and textile history by linking a deep understanding of materials and making with interpretive paths informed by multiple cultural perspectives. I believe this compelling combination of skills will empower students to meet contemporary global challenges with diverse historical visions and cultural insights.”

Nina Stritzler-Levine

Teaching the course on curatorial practice continued to be the most satisfying aspect of my work this year. The students continued to exceed my expectations. Each one of them began with an exhibition idea that went from a relatively traditional scheme to one that pushed the boundaries of curatorial thinking. Projects ranged from the study of an ancient Chinese bronze to nail salons in New York City.

As director of Focus Exhibitions, I worked with Deborah L. Krohn on Staging the Table and Hadley Jensen (MA ’13, PhD ’18) on Shaped by the Loom and began discussions of two subsequent Focus Exhibitions—Dollatry, curated by associate professor Freyja Hartzell (MA ’05), and ReDressing the Body, curated by BGC alumni Emma McClendon and Lauren Peters.

I was honored to be selected chair of the Society of Architectural Historians Exhibition Catalogue Award Committee. Steven Holl: Making Architecture, the publication I edited and contributed to was reissued in an expanded format with seven additional authors. The book appeared in conjunction with the exhibition, Steven Holl: Making Architecture, at the Gallery NTK, National Library of Technology, Prague, Czech Republic, and the House of Art, Gallery of Fine Arts, Ostrava, Czech Republic, from September through December 2022.

Drew Thompson

In October 2022, I delivered the talk “Coloring Black Surveillance” as part of the Warnock Lecture Series, presented by the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. In March 2023, the Art Institute of Chicago invited me to participate in the symposium “Critical Exposure— A Photography and Media Field Day,” where I presented the paper “Touching on the Mistruths of Polaroids.”

In preparation for a show that opened at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz in fall 2022 and then traveled to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in June 2023, I co-edited, along with Sarah Eckhardt, the exhibition catalogue Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village. The catalogue features two substantive essays that I wrote about Wigfall’s artistic practice and the community arts organization known as Communications Village, which Wigfall established and operated in upstate New York. I also published the article “Outside the Field of African Art” in the online publication Africa Is A Country and an article about the African American photojournalist and diplomat Griffith Davis in the edited volume Facing Black Star, published by MIT Press in June 2023.

Over the past year, I have worked closely with the BGC Gallery to curate the exhibition SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power & Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa. Over the summer, in addition to continuing preparations for the BGC exhibition, I drafted two catalogue essays for publication in 2024.

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