Bard Graduate Center Year in Review 2022–23

2022–23 Year In Review

About Bard Graduate Center

Founded in 1993 by Dr. Susan Weber, Bard Graduate Center (BGC) is a research institute in New York City dedicated to studying the human past through objects, from those created for obvious aesthetic value to ordinary things that are part of everyday life. Its MA, PhD, and summer programs; gallery exhibitions; research initiatives; publications; and events explore new ways of thinking about the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. BGC is a member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History and an academic unit of Bard College.

bgc.bard.edu

Board of Trustees

Michele Beiny Harkins

Nicolas Cattelain

Brandy S. Culp (MA ’04)

Hélène David-Weill

Nancy Druckman

Helen Drutt English

Carol Grossman

Ana Horta Osório

Holly Hotchner

Fernanda Kellogg

Dr. Wolfram Koeppe

Dr. Arnold L. Lehman

Martin Levy

David Mann

Dr. Caryl McFarlane

Dr. Steven Nelson

Jennifer Olshin (MA ’98)

Melinda Florian Papp

Lisa Podos

Ann Pyne (MA ’06)

Linda Roth

Sir Paul Ruddock

Emma Scully (MA ’14)

Gregory Soros

Luke Syson

Dr. Charlotte Vignon

Shelby White

Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.

Philip L. Yang, Jr.

Ex-Officio

Dr. Leon Botstein

Dr. Christian Ayne Crouch

Dr. Susan Weber

In Memoriam

Philip Hewat-Jaboor

73 Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen

80 Reciprocal Learning: Reflections on Being a Gallery Educator

84 Focus Exhibitions

85 Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest

90 Diné Artists Participate in Shaped by the Loom Opening Events

93 Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800

98 A Book about Books: Staging the Table Catalogue Marries Substance and Form

102 Public Humanities + Research

103 “From Wax to Paper”: The Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and

by Charles Kang

118 Threads of Power Catalogue Honored with AAMC 2023 Award

Collection of trade cards (many for domestic products including soap, patent remedies, clothing, etc.), 19th century. Bard Graduate Center Study Collection, Gift of Jeffrey L. Collins. Photo by Barb Elam.

Director’s Welcome

May 2023

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Greetings from Bard Graduate Center’s West 86th Street home. After the whirlwind of spring dissertations, qualifying papers, and commencement, and the joys of summer travel and research projects, we turn toward fall and our new academic year. As you might imagine, I am feeling the anticipation of new beginnings and enormous pride in all that BGC students, faculty, and staff have accomplished in the past year.

At thirty, Bard Graduate Center has firmly established itself as the premier American institution for graduate study in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. It is quite an achievement for a young institution, and one that owes much to Peter N. Miller, who joined BGC’s faculty in 2001, became chair of academic programs in 2006, and dean in 2008.

This summer, Peter assumed a new role as president of the American Academy of Rome. I am confident he will thrive there and that the Academy will benefit, as BGC has, from his leadership, innovation, intelligence, and boundless energy.

The BGC board of trustees and I, along with chief operating officer Janet Ozarchuk, chair of academic programs Deborah L. Krohn, and Bard College dean of graduate studies Christian Ayne Crouch, intend to use this moment of transition to reflect on the institution’s accomplishments and the heights it has yet to climb. We look forward to sharing our next steps with you.

With this annual report, I invite you to explore the research, publications, exhibitions, and events that BGC’s students, faculty, and staff have produced in the past year. I have been especially pleased with the excitement and energy around the fall and spring exhibitions, both online and in the gallery; the meticulously researched and beautifully written and illustrated catalogues that accompanied them; and the development of new

Susan Weber. Photo by Da Ping Luo.

Public Humanities + Research events that link the BGC community with artists and scholars from other disciplines and institutions. Also in this edition of the Year in Review, I am delighted to introduce to you to two new faculty members, Mei Mei Rado (PhD ’18) and Drew Thompson.

As I review these achievements and look ahead to the 2023–24 academic year, when we will welcome an incoming class of twenty-four brilliant young scholars, launch a bevy of new publications and events, and open two new exhibitions—one that brings African metal arts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into conversation with works by contemporary African and African diasporic artists and another that brings new discoveries about the life and work of the great Sonia Delaunay to light—I see a very bright future indeed.

Susan Weber Founder and Director

Deborah Krohn, Hadley Jensen (MA ’13, PhD ’18), and Susan Weber at the opening of the spring 2023 Focus Exhibitions. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Dean’s Introduction

May 2023

As Susan noted in her welcome letter, Bard Graduate Center is thirty years old. For twenty of those thirty years, it sponsored new research through the development and expansion of the Seminar Series. I was proud of those wonderful events and their intellectual value as well as their social role in the institution, which extended far beyond even their intellectual contribution. But however new the research, the forms in which it was presented— the lecture and the seminar— would have been familiar to people living 170 years ago when “research” (Forschung) and the research university were born. So we decided, as if writing a grant proposal to ourselves, that in Seminar Series 2.0 we would try and develop new forms of presenting research and aim to be as innovative in form as we were for the previous two decades in content.

We aimed to do this by bringing in Andrew Kircher as the director of the renamed department of Public Humanities + Research (PH+R), while also continuing to support convergences among BGC’s public programming, academic vocation, and exhibitions. It is a tall order, but Year 1 was a great success and we have been under the hood making some inevitable tweaks (read: improvements) for Year 2. I will be watching how this plays out from afar.

Dean Peter N. Miller. Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

After twenty-two years at the BGC, and seventeen as its chief academic officer (first as chair and then as dean), the time has come for me to move on. It’s been a great run. I look back fondly on many accomplishments and many good times.

Let me try briefly to say something as if from 35,000 feet above, about the course traveled and maybe about the ways ahead that will be the responsibility of others to chart. I feel that my main achievement was in having our work admired for its seriousness. This was a project conducted on many levels, formal and informal, in both obvious and subtle ways. To give one example, when we first created this publication, to ensure that the varied outputs of this institution would be visible to those who only interacted with it through only one of its enterprise-level activities, I used to call it “the Jahrbuch.” I wasn’t just joking. I had in mind the annual Jahrbuch of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW), because I wished for BGC the kind of impact that the KBW— and then the Warburg Institute, an exemplary multidisciplinary institute for the study of the cultural past—had in the world. I talked about Warburg when I gave introductions; I wrote about the continuity between Warburg’s defense of the decorative and other “marginal” material creations from across the spectrum of human making, with BGC’s goals in mind. I also talked about BGC as being born into the historical gap that emerged in 1929 when Warburg died and the KBW lurched toward more purely intellectual history, and the Annales d’histoire économique began publishing, focusing on material history stripped of the intellectual. Our impact zone, our historical destiny—I wasn’t above speaking in these high-flown terms—was to bridge that gap. The other thing that I

Peter N. Miller and Susan Weber at a celebration to honor Miller’s twenty-two years at BGC.

Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

tried to do, for myself as well as for the institution, was to make the articulation of administrative direction a historical project—that we could be doing research and intervening in history while making policy. This is always an option, but everywhere else it is the road not taken.

I could go on, but these points—seriousness, research and an over-the-horizon vision that was actually an act of scholarly recovery— are pretty good ways to describe what I tried to do in my time here.

It was important to me to broaden the institution’s scope from a narrower vision of decorative arts and design history to material culture by hiring historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and a chemist. So was escaping from the geographical constraint of a Euro-American focus, with its warping impact on content. To fully grasp the importance of the material world means taking a worldwide view—and this is not just politics with a small “p.” For example, the first non-European decorative arts position that I hired was in Islamic art, precisely because it is a culture in which there is no division between fine and decorative art and no hierarchy that placed the object at the bottom. Studying Islamic art was simultaneously a way of making a methodological point. And the newest positions we have created, in pre-modern and modern Africa and the African diaspora, are among the achievements of which I am most proud, though I still regret the lack of faculty positions that would keep the contributions of Latin America and South Asia in view at all times.

Finally, our Cultures of Conservation initiative enabled us to build a model of a long-term cross-faculty collaboration that fully integrated teaching, research, and exhibition like nothing else we’ve done here. Yes, it was a grant-driven project, but we could do this ourselves and restructure our own curriculum to be more holistically project-driven in the same way. The model is there.

I will look from afar with pride and pleasure at BGC as it goes from strength to strength. To my dear, dear colleagues, I extend my arms in virtual embrace. I could not imagine a more collegial and supportive institution. I wish you all well, and I am grateful to you for all that you have given me.

Peter N. Miller Dean and Professor Dean's

Introducing Janet Ozarchuk, BGC’s New Chief Operating Officer

Janet Ozarchuk took on the role of chief operating officer at Bard Graduate Center in July 2022. Amy Estes, BGC’s director of marketing and communications, recently sat down with Ozarchuk between meetings to learn how she is finding her new role and life at BGC. Ozarchuk laughingly admitted that she is still learning some institution-specific lingo (for example, at BGC, the acronym AP refers to academic programs, not accounts payable), but when Estes visited her sunny office above BGC’s gallery, she looked right at home.

Amy Estes: What was the career trajectory that ultimately brought you to BGC?

Janet Ozarchuk: I started out as a double major in biology and economics at Fordham College. I had a job in the dean’s office and I became very interested in higher education administration. That led me to Harvard where I received my MBA. I had a Wall Street career that included stints in mergers and acquisitions as well as public finance. Then I transitioned to working for a nonprofit, Local Initiatives Support Corporation, which does extraordinary work in community development and urban revitalization. Over the course of my career, I’ve worked for many not-for-profit institutions, including the Calvert Foundation, TruFund, Capital Impact, and the Legal Aid Society. When this position came up at Bard Graduate Center, it presented an opportunity to return to my first interest in higher education. And I have never been happier.

AE: Wow, what a full-circle moment! What’s the best part of the job for you, so far?

JO: I love the people at BGC and the culture of the place and working with Susan [Weber, Bard Graduate Center’s founder and director]. I enjoy the variety of the work. It really keeps me on my toes. No two days are the same! One day I am looking at student scholarships and how we can free

up more resources for that, the next I am visiting Bard Hall to check in on a gym remodel, and the day after that I’m meeting with curators about upcoming exhibitions. I’ve never worked at an organization where change is such a constant; every year there are new students, new classes, new events, and new exhibitions. I love the cycles and the pace of things here.

AE: What do you see on the horizon for BGC that excites you?

JO: Although I have only been here since last July, I sense the institution is in a real period of rebirth since Covid. There’s such vibrancy in the incoming MA class. The exhibitions coming up in the gallery are very, very exciting. I feel that BGC is coming out of the pandemic stronger than ever.

AE: Is there anything more you would like to add?

JO: I genuinely feel it is a privilege to work here. I see the chief operating officer’s role as one of service to the community—to students, faculty, curators, and other members of the staff. I am truly thrilled to be in their company.

Janet Ozarchuk. Photo by Liz Ligon.

Making Material Worlds in “Tangible Things”: A Reflection on Ivan Gaskell’s Seminar

By Joshua Massey (MA ’23)

Think about your last trip to a museum. Any museum—art, science, history—works. Picture yourself walking through the galleries. What kinds of objects do you see? Paintings? Taxidermied animals? Old books? Pottery fragments? Photographs? How do they fit into the narrative of the assembled objects in the museum?

In “Tangible Things: Observing, Collecting, Sorting,” a seminar taught by professor Ivan Gaskell, we explored the historical formation of Western disciplinary categories in the United States through the objects made to embody them. Each week, our discussions centered on a different category of tangible things—among them, art, medicine, commerce and law, and arboriculture and dendrology—and the museums, libraries, and archives at Harvard University built to house and display their objects.

As the nation’s oldest university, founded in 1636, Harvard’s long and complex institutional history and dozens of collections offer instructive case studies about how things are collected, classified, and deployed in educational contexts. Gaskell’s previous tenure at Harvard, where he worked as a curator and professor for twenty years, informs his knowledge of the university’s collections. There, he taught interdisciplinary object-based research seminars with historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich Teaching

Joshua Massey (MA ’23), Daniel Chamberlain (MA ’23), and Anna Riley (MA ’23) photographing objects. Photo courtesy of Joshua Massey.

and co-curated a Tangible Things exhibition, which introduced “guest objects” from the various Harvard collections into displays at other Harvard museums. Examples include the placement of a flower-shaped Tiffany glass vase from the Harvard Art Museums next to glass flowers made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka for scientific use in the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and an eighteenth-century pocket globe from the Harvard University Archives beside models of Native American canoes and kayaks in the Hall of the American Indian at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Among over a dozen creative juxtapositions, both examples challenge conventional disciplinary categories and propose alternatives for how museums organize and display objects.

In many cases, a deep historical study of Harvard collections reveals that the categorization of objects is intertwined with the social, cultural, and political history of the United States. For instance, Harvard biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz, who founded the Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1859, was one of the leading American proponents of scientific racism in the nineteenth century. His daguerreotypes of enslaved African Americans, among the first ever taken of enslaved people in America, have been the subject of continued legal and moral debates since their rediscovery in Harvard’s Peabody Museum collections in 1976. Other Harvard figures, including botanist Asa Gray and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., were intimately involved in the professionalization and institutionalization of their respective fields in the United States. As such, many disciplinary distinctions and, by extension, museum collections reflect nineteenth-century values and ideals in tension with those of the present.

Each week, seminar students brought in tangible things to form a class collection of objects that embodied or challenged a given week’s category. We were encouraged to bring something we already owned or found, but, as a rule, if we did buy something, we were not allowed to spend more than five dollars on it. I limited myself to objects I found while walking in New York City, except for one that I found in Paris.

Two of my objects reflect my creative and academic interests in “found” objects and the practice of assemblage in art, philosophy, and archaeology; they also reflect the intellectual and historical contradictions that underlie Western disciplines. For our week on botany, we read about Asa Gray, who founded the Harvard University Herbaria in 1842. As a botanist and professor, he is known for his efforts to introduce Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to wider audiences and standardize North American plant taxonomies. For the class collection, I brought what was at one time snow.

A little backstory is necessary. I moved to New York from North Carolina in 2021 to attend BGC, and that winter was my first “true” city winter. After a heavy snowfall (for me) in January 2022, I stuffed some snow into a glass bottle as a memento of my first winter in the city. I was aware it would melt (it did in a matter of half an hour), but I kept it on my windowsill as a sort of conceptual art piece I cheekily called “New York Snow.” After a few weeks, I noticed a green film accumulating on the water’s surface and at the bottom of the bottle.

I realized that exposure to the sun was causing algae in the water to grow and multiply.

Eight months later, I decided to bring my algae bottle to class to test and tease the limits of botany as a category of a tangible thing. Technically, algae are a biologically complicated group of organisms that fall between categorization as plants and protists, a sort of taxonomic grab bag of things that are neither plants, animals, bacteria, nor fungi. Yet, there are connections. Like plants, algae are photosynthetic and eukaryotic; unlike plants, they do not have roots, stems, or leaves, so they are excluded from botany. Like other botany-related items that my classmates brought— such as a postcard for Canal Rubber, a bundle of sacred white sage, and a sweetgrass basket—my algae bottle challenged the historical boundaries of the category and the limitations of universal classifications.

“New York Snow,” 2022, water and algae in a glass bottle. Photo by Joshua Massey.

During our week on history, sociology, and Afro-American studies, we read about the Harvard University Archives, the Social Museum Collection, and the General Artemas Ward House Museum. Our discussions revolved around General Artemas Ward, a forgotten figure in the American Revolutionary War, who, through the actions of his eager descendants, was immortalized through written and material sources, and the Social Museum, a Gilded Age institution dedicated to documenting and illustrating sociological trends in a quickly changing world. Each collection fostered the idea that historical narratives can be drawn from objects brought together in assemblage with each other. Student objects, including a model of the H.M.B Endeavour, an election flier, and a chunk of kaolinite, complemented these case studies.

I brought four Kodak 126 photographic prints I found on Broadway at West 84th Street. In June 2022, while sifting through boxes of discarded books, I discovered an envelope from a camera shop with four prints made for a woman from Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, sometime in the 1960s.

Four photographs found on Broadway at West 84th Street in 2022. Photo by Joshua Massey.

Somehow, they had found their way to New York and eventually to the trash. The pictures show young people in colorful clothes in various poses, perhaps as part of a freewheeling theatrical production of Hair or another countercultural escapade. The circumstances under which I discovered them leave me with many questions about who took the pictures, why they were taken, and exactly what they depict. By classifying these photographs as “historical objects,” I demonstrated their simultaneous stability as tangible things and instability as evidence of past lives and actions.

“Tangible Things” exemplifies everything a course at the BGC should be: challenging, creative, collaborative, and fun. Student projects, which proposed introducing “guest objects” from Harvard collections into existing New York displays, exemplify the wide range of possibilities the study of tangible things affords. Could you imagine massive glass lens “blanks” in the Noguchi Museum or a mahogany sideboard in a tropical diorama at the American Museum of Natural History? Or my juxtaposition of botanical apple pressings from the Harvard University Herbaria next to a still life of apples by Paul Cézanne in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?

Our weekly meetings, filled with enticing discussions, abundant objects, and delicious cookies, were a highlight of my time at BGC and one of many reasons I chose to stay here for my PhD. The questions we asked about collection, categorization, and display are applicable to contexts beyond Harvard collections. I find myself returning to them in my coursework and my own research on assemblage practices and “found” objects in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. They allow me to think critically about relationships between objects and the historical narratives into which we place them. For me, the chance to create and engage with worlds of tangible things was one well worth taking.

The questions we asked about collection, categorization, and display are applicable to contexts beyond Harvard collections.

Faculty Reports

Susan Weber

I traveled to the Sèvres National Manufactory and Museum, outside of Paris, to continue selecting objects for our upcoming exhibition Sèvres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740 until Today. The show, scheduled for fall 2025, will present the history of the manufactory and its production of sculptural objects made by artists in various ceramic pastes. I am co-curating the project with Charlotte Vignon, director of heritage and collections at Sèvres. The exhibition is accompanied by an extensively illustrated catalogue written by Tamara Préaud, who held the position of archivist for the past forty years at Sèvres. Vignon and I will edit this publication, which will include other texts written by additional sculpture and ceramic experts.

Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850–1915 finally opened at its third venue, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent. This was an important showing, since Stoke was the birthplace of this remarkable ceramic—with pieces manufactured by local firms such as Minton, Wedgwood, and George Jones from 1850 to 1900. Many of the Potteries Museum’s important majolica pieces were part of the exhibition. Majolica Mania was spawned more than seven years ago when fellow scholars, curators, and collectors congregated in Stoke to explore the possibility of mounting such a show.

The majolica team traveled back to Stoke and opened the exhibition there on October 7, 2022.

On June 20, 2023, I presented a paper on the friendship and careers of architect-designers E. W. Godwin, the subject of my dissertation, and William Burges. Titled “Reflections on E. W. Godwin and William Burges,” it was part of the “Burges and Friends Conference” at Worcester College, University of Oxford. This paper will be included in a special issue of the conference proceedings 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, to be published in autumn 2024.

Research continues on my upcoming show on Philip Webb, the first in-depth exhibition of this multitalented Arts and Crafts architect and designer. I wrote chapters on furniture, stained glass, glassware, and tiles for the complementary catalogue. Other authors including Julius Bryant and Tessa Wild were commissioned to contribute to the catalogue. Visits were made to two of Webb’s country houses: Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, and Standen in West Sussex. Other memorable stops included Emery Walker’s House, Kelmscott House, the William Morris Gallery, and Kelmscott Manor, which all contain furniture, metalwork, glassware, and tiles designed by Webb. Substantial research was done at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds Webb’s sketchbooks, letters, and architectural and design drawings.

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Assistant professor Meredith Linn working with students in the BGC Summer School for Undergraduates. Photo by Brayden Heath.

Peter N. Miller

Two writing projects dominated my schedule this year. The first was a very short book on newspaper weather maps as a way to understand historical thinking. This will be published by MER. in Ghent, continuing a collaborative relationship that began with production of the exhibition catalogue for Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object? (2022). The second also followed a 2022 BGC exhibition, On Conservation as a Human Science. Starting with writing done for the exhibition’s website and book, the project was expanded with two new chapters and the incorporation of additional material.

In May, I took up a long-delayed offer of a visiting professorship at the École normale supérieure in Paris. Invited to give the E. H. Gombrich Lectures at the Warburg Institute, London, in June 2023, I devoted much of the year to trying out parts of the argument in front of different audiences in Amsterdam, Chicago, and Paris. The lectures in their final form will be published by Princeton University Press. Finally, my next big project, on the history and meaning of research, will launch at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago, which will host a large international conference in November 2023.

Jeffrey L. Collins

In the fall, I co-taught “Approaches to the Object” with Andrew Morrall

and offered the seminar “Versailles: Palace and People,” paired with an eight-part film series, “Palace and Popcorn,” which explores how the domaine and its inhabitants have been imagined on screen. The spring term was devoted to exploring the feasibility of a revised second edition of the BGC textbook History of Design (Yale University Press, 2013), including an evaluation of the existing text to identify desired changes and additions.

Publications during the 2022–23 year included two chapters for the six-volume survey A Cultural History of Furniture, edited by former BGC research fellow Christina M. Anderson and published by Bloomsbury. For the volume on furniture in the Age of Exploration (1500–1700), my chapter, “Visual Representations,” addressed media ranging from design drawings and pattern books to frescoes. For the volume on the Age of Enlightenment (1700–1800), my chapter, “The Public Setting,” explored furniture in churches and synagogues, libraries, museums, shops, schools, taverns, coffee houses, and restaurants, among other sites.

In March, I addressed the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in St. Louis. My paper, titled “Seeing Is Believing: Marchionni and Bergondi at the Crossing of St. Peter’s,” presented archival evidence for a previously unknown artistic project at the heart of the Vatican basilica

in connection with the Holy Year of 1775. In July, I chaired a panel at the 16th Congress of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, held in Rome. To contribute to the theme of “Antiquity and the Shaping of the Future in the Age of Enlightenment,” my panel focused on “Excavating the Past / Making the Modern: Antiquity into Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Drawing.”

Ivan Gaskell

In the fall 2022 semester, I taught “Tangible Things: Observing, Collecting, Sorting” and “From the Arctic to Oceania: Overseas Visitors in Early Modern Europe.” The former examined the role of material items in the emergence of disciplines of study in museums and research universities. The latter considered visitors to Europe from North and South America, North and sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia.

Because I was in the Research Institute, my teaching in the spring 2023 semester was confined to advising PhD students and one student for a qualifying paper. I completed a book manuscript on philosophical aesthetics, “Mindprints: Henry David Thoreau and Material Culture.”

I was appointed the delegate of the American Society for Aesthetics to the American Council of Learned Societies and to board membership of the European Research Council project “The Kinetic Author: Transmediations of Authorship in the Modern Cultural Sphere.”

I presented “The Duchamp Fallacy: A Response to Miguel Dos Santos” and chaired the session

“Defining Art” at the American Society for Aesthetics meeting in Portland, Oregon, in November 2022. In April 2023, I presented “‘To build still more deliberately’: Henry David Thoreau’s Philosophy of Shelter” at the American Society for Aesthetics meeting in Philadelphia. In May 2023, I delivered “Rembrandt and the Limits of Connoisseurship” at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts symposium

“The Catalogue Raisonné: A Social Practice” in Washington, D.C.

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Professor Ivan Gaskell and Joshua Massey (MA ’23). Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

I recently published “America’s Virtues” (review of Glenn Adamson, Craft: An American History, 2021), Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 85 (2022); “Aesthetics, Ontology, and a Museum Acquisition,” in Aesthetic Literacy, Volume II: Out of Mind, ed. Valery Vinogradovs (Mongrel Matter, 2023); and “A Seventeenth-Century Likeness of Rembrandt and the Limits of Connoisseurship,” in Bloomsbury Contemporary Aesthetics, ed. Darren Hudson Hick (Bloomsbury Philosophy Library, 2023).

In the summer, I rusticated at my home in Massachusetts to continue writing a book on the subject of museum values.

Aaron Glass

This academic year began with a fall residency in BGC’s Research Institute, during which I continued writing annotations about global museum collections for my planned critical edition of Franz Boas’s 1897 monograph The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. The project, which I co-direct, was awarded a 2022 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, with which I am coordinating the development of new navigation and accessibility features for the edition’s digital platform. In spring, I taught two BGC courses, “Objects in Context II,” and (with Drew Thompson) “Picturing Things: Photography as Material Culture.” Additional service to BGC included participation in a public event on George Kubler’s classic book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the

History of Things and three tours of the newly renovated Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History.

After Covid-related delays, I resumed my role as the chair of the faculty council for the biannual Otsego Institute Workshop for Native American Art History, held in October 2022 at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. In addition, I presented at two conferences: the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, at which I organized an invited session in honor of Ira Jacknis, and a symposium, “Surrogates: Embodied Histories of Sculpture in the Short Twentieth Century,” hosted by Yale University’s Department of the History of Art.

Finally, I published four essays: a chapter on digital media, museum collections, and Indigenous knowledge in the first volume of the Smithsonian Institution’s Handbook of North American Indians; an article on Edward Curtis’s 1914 film In the Land of the Head Hunters in the Getty Research Journal; a reflection on co-curating BGC’s Focus Exhibition Conserving Active Matter for Indiana University’s digital curriculum initiative, Engaging Religion; and an obituary (with BGC alumna Hadley Jensen) for my friend and colleague Ira Jacknis in Museum Anthropology

Over the summer, I continued more annotation writing and enjoyed overdue family travel to New Zealand.

After The Story Box: Aaron Glass Wins Award from National Endowment for the Humanities

In 2022, Bard Graduate Center associate professor Aaron Glass was awarded a $150,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support his collaborative project to create a critical, annotated, digitized edition of anthropologist Franz Boas’s landmark 1897 monograph on the Kwakwaka’wakw culture of the Pacific Northwest Coast. NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants support the implementation of innovative digital humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field. This grant will support the development of additional features and extensions for a multimedia platform specifically designed to support Indigenous cultural and linguistic content.

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Aaron Glass at the opening of The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt, and the Making of Anthropology (2018).

Glass’s project, “The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’s Pioneering Ethnography,” is codirected with Judith Berman (University of Victoria) and continues the work he presented in a 2018 BGC Focus Exhibition entitled The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt, and the Making of Anthropology.

Boas’s The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897) is one of the first holistic ethnographies based on fieldwork. The text brought together data on Kwakwaka’wakw social structure with art and material culture, detailed narratives in the Kwak’wala language, photographs taken in situ in British Columbia and at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, transcribed songs, eyewitness description of ceremonial performances, and extensive contributions from Boas’s Indigenous collaborator George Hunt. The goal of this project is to reunite the scattered archival material with the original text and with the Indigenous families whose cultural heritage is represented. It promises new ways of using digital media to link together disparate archives, museums, textual repositories, and contemporary Indigenous communities.

About the National Endowment for the Humanities

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

Freyja Hartzell

I published my first book Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things with MIT Press in November 2022. The book’s production was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. A related article, extending the book’s culminating discussion of Munich designer Richard Riemerschmid’s personal and career crises during the Nazification of Germany in 1933, appeared in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte in September 2022. I gave a book talk at Yale University in late November.

During the fall, I continued work on my new book project Doll Parts: Designing Likeness and taught the first in a series of courses in support of my related Focus Exhibition Dollatry, opening at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in February 2025. In conjunction with this, I inaugurated BGC’s first Faculty in Focus series, inviting and collaborating with three expert guests on the topic of “Dolls and Human Likeness” and sharing this exploration with the BGC

community in a series of lectures and workshops. In Spring 2023, I taught my second “In Focus” course on the exhibition topic, and held a related symposium—“Doll Parts: Playing with Human Likeness”—that drew together current BGC students and Faculty in Focus guests from the fall semester, along with new scholars on dolls, robotics, and specialists in prosthetic technologies. In a position paper titled “Image and Likeness: Dolls Picturing Power,” I exposed hidden power relations implicit in photographs, illustrations, and advertisements depicting both children and adults interacting with dolls.

This summer, I further developed material for my second book during a residential research fellowship at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. I presented a related paper, “‘Nothing but a DOLL!’ Defining and Designing Likeness,” at “Toys Matter: The Power of Playthings,” the International Toy Research Association’s 9th World Conference in Rochester, August 8–10, 2023.

Faculty members Jennifer L. Mass, Freyja Hartzell (MA ’05), and Meredith Linn, with Dean Peter N. Miller.

Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

On Richard Riemerschid and Thingliness: An Interview with Freyja Hartzell

By Mackensie Griffin (MA ’24)

Freyja Hartzell (MA ’05) is an associate professor specializing in European and American design, architecture, and art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This spring, MA student Mackensie Griffin sat down to talk to Hartzell about her new book Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things, published by MIT Press last year.

Photo courtesy of MIT Press.

Mackensie Griffin: Hi, Freyja. I want to begin by saying congratulations on the publication of your book! When did this project begin, and why were you drawn to Richard Riemerschmid as a subject?

Freyja Hartzell: It really began when I was doing my MA at BGC in 2002, so I’ve been working on this project for about twenty years! I was in an art nouveau course with Amy Ogata, who was an inspiring professor here for many years, and I saw this incredible silverware design by Riemerschmid, who was a German Jugendstil (“Youth Style”) designer. I’d never seen anything like it—it looked like something between plants and bones. I became fascinated, and I kept kind of going back to him. What I found was that there wasn’t very much published in English on his work, so I was forced to dust off my German and go read what I could.

MG: In your book, you describe a vibrant world of objects that seems to have engaged the human imagination and your imagination. You use the word “thingliness” to describe Riemerschmid’s designs, so I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that and how thinking about objects as living beings figures into your research.

FH: Yeah, I think that’s really at the core of the whole project. I came to use “thingliness” because I was trying to find a translation for the German word Sachlichkeit It’s an important word for design and architecture in that period,

but people use the English word “functionalism” as shorthand for that term. It’s usually understood as something very dry and straightforward. I was trying to reconcile how the word Sachlichkeit was applied to Riemerschmid’s work because when I look at Riemerschmid’s work, I see the opposite of that. So I looked into how that word had been used historically. What I arrived at was this idea of not straightforwardness in the sense of sobriety or objectivity, but a kind of object that, through its form or through its materials, really tells a story about what it is. Almost like the way I’m wearing my clothes or my hair tells you something about who I am. Or even how we react to meeting particular people. We might like them right away, and we’re not even quite sure why: it’s something about the way they look and the way they talk, and the way their body moves. I came to understand the word Sachlichkeit in relation to Riemerschmid’s work much more along those lines, so I came up with the adjective “thingliness.” It’s almost a transliteration of Sachlichkeit because Sache, the root of that word, can mean “thing” or sort of “matter.” Like when you say, “Let’s get to the heart of the matter,” that’s kind of what Sache is. It’s like the essence of something.

So that’s how I arrived at “thingliness.” It also lines up in many ways with a kind of current discourse in object studies. The scholar Bill Brown is credited with coming up with this idea of “thing theory,” which

is in many ways similar to what I’m talking about with “thingliness” in the sense that it explores the thing as being different from the object. His idea of the thing is that it’s somehow beyond just a utilitarian object in that it has a kind of force or a presence. His work was useful for me because I didn’t want to impose a theory on the past, but I saw that what I was finding in my historical research had a lot in common with his work and with some current work that’s really about the nature of the object. Sometimes people call it “object-oriented ontology,” but that also gives you a sense of this idea that objects have some sort of presence beyond what we usually credit them with.

In this book, I play around a lot with the notion of objects coming alive. I think it might be important to make the distinction that I’m not so much pretending that objects come alive, but I’m really talking about blurring the lines between the way that we typically understand relations between subjects and objects. I feel like Riemerschmid’s objects— for example, a mustard pot with feet that he designed in 1902 (pictured below)—start to approach the subject and encourage the user to start to think differently about what our relationships to objects are, and maybe start to unsettle that perceived stability that I exist over here and the thing exists over there. I got really interested in

Richard Riemerschmid, Mustard Pot & Egg Cup (fine-grained stoneware), 1902, Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Angewandte Kunst, © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

that because I started to realize as I was doing more research that it wasn’t just about a fantasy that Riemerschmid had, although I think he was very fanciful, imaginative, and playful. I think he was doing what I would call “serious play.” He was really invested in that kind of fantasy, but also that these objects, being kind of animated in their forms, were able to take on roles in the household.

The example that I use all the time when I talk about this is a beer mug he designed: it’s a piece of salt-glazed stoneware that has a long historical tradition in German society, and people would’ve understood it as something fundamentally German. In the early twentieth century in Germany, design was being taken really seriously. People were thinking carefully about their purchasing choices and what to have in their houses. This mug would have seemed modern but also historically rooted. The combination of modernity, historicism, and a physical, animated appeal creates an experience for the user. It becomes much more about a narrative or a tableau or a play that’s happening in the interior, and it’s influencing the people who use it just as much as the people who use it can pick the thing up and take a drink out of it. I like using the word thingliness not only because the sound of the word mimics Sachlichkeit, but it also evokes the kind of playful animacy that I’m trying to convey in the writing. I tried to write the book in a way that invites the reader to play

within that space. Even though it’s a scholarly book, I also want it to be a book with which people can become absorbed in the same way that they would become absorbed in using the objects.

MG: Yes, definitely. I found your writing to be very engaging, and I loved the wide range of sources you pull from: you incorporate fairy tales, theory, art history, and natural history. I also noticed quotes from theater historians and a puppetry scholar. I personally respond to that kind of writing, and I feel like it engages a variety of interests and people. It made me wonder about your approach to researching and writing this book and if you have a process?

FH: Yeah, that’s a great question because I’m working on a new project now, and I’m trying to figure out what my process is! I try to strike a balance. I guess what I mean by that is I kind of work from a hunch. Looking at an object or reading a text, I tend to have an instinct. Usually, the research process kind of flows from that instinct. What I find in my own work is that my job is to really stay honest, and when I’m in the archive, to bring my instinct about the form or the objects that I’ve seen into contact with the archival material and really try to figure out if my hunch is correct. Sometimes that’s a daily process. When I’m doing really active research, if I’m on a fellowship or I’m traveling, and I’m looking at archives, I try to go into the archive every day with

a new question. Not so much what am I looking for, but what am I asking of this material? What is it that I’m trying to figure out? That’s usually helpful, especially because anybody who does archival research knows that it’s really easy to get overwhelmed. You’ve got all kinds of stuff in front of you, and you could go down a rabbit hole. Sometimes you do, and it’s a great rabbit hole, but I think it really helps me to stay rooted in the object and then to bring that object into conversation with the more textual sources that I’m looking at. I say this in the book too, but it’s important to me that I’m not writing text and applying it to the object. I’m not theorizing and then being like, “And here’s an example of my theory.” I’m working from the object out and trying to see where it occupies historical space.

For this project, I did a lot of periodicals research, and I found these brilliant intellectuals writing in a very earnest way about design objects. There was very strong interest in the philosophical and intellectual dimensions of design. That kind of blew me away because the things that I saw in Riemerschmid’s objects they also saw. That was a wonderful confirmation to me because it was like, okay, I’m not just some goofy art historian or design historian coming in and imposing my opinions on this stuff. I’m seeing something that was seen one hundred years ago.

So I guess my process is a balance between bringing in historical

literature, keeping in touch with the objects, and then also thinking about what contemporary scholars are wrestling with. Some of this interest in object-oriented ontology, or neovitalism, is part of what we’ve been talking about at BGC for a while now, with the concept of active matter: that objects are made up of energetic matter. They have lives, and they change and decay. In this project, it was exciting to see all those things come together and then try to figure out a way to write about it to make it so that readers would actually care. That was probably the biggest challenge.

MG: Well, I’d say that you’ve succeeded. Having taken your class “Doll Parts” in my first year at BGC, I saw a lot of connections between our class discussions and your work on Riemerschmid. I know that you’re currently working on putting

I try to go into the archive every day with a new question. Not so much what am I looking for, but what am I asking of this material?

What is it that I’m trying to figure out?

together a BGC Focus Exhibition related to that class and your research on dolls. I’m just wondering if you also see intersections between these two projects?

FH: I’m glad you asked because I had to really think about that. It’s going to be a Focus show, and I’m also writing a book on this topic. I think it’ll be called “Doll Parts: Designing Likeness.” It’s funny, when I pivoted to the doll topic, I was like, “Well, now for something completely different!” But I quickly realized that the subject–object relationship that I was talking about earlier really connects the two projects. In many ways, I feel as though the doll is kind of the quintessential object for this because it’s designed to be a companion and to look like us. Of course, the big question is why do we design something that looks like us, and what does that mean? People say to me, “Dolls are so creepy. Why are you working on dolls?” I think that another word for creepiness is “uncanny,” and I think the whole point of the uncanny is that it does destabilize the relation between the subject and the object.

We have this thing that we know is not alive, but at the same time we imagine what its life might be. If we say it’s creepy, it’s because we have this fantasy of the doll coming to life and doing something weird or being dangerous or getting up to no good. I think it’s that strange place that I’m interested in exploring. And I feel like if I pick up

Riemerschmid’s mustard pot, it’s not so different from a doll, but thinking about dolls is almost like going to the source.

I’d like somebody to argue with me about this, but I don’t feel like I know another type of object that gets at this question of “Where is the boundary between the subject and the object?” in the same way that the doll does. To make a long answer short, I’m exploring the same questions, but now with the quintessential material object. I think another reason for me to work on the doll project is that I want to keep exploring these ideas that are so fascinating to me, but I don’t want to write about a single artist. I don’t want to write about a man. I want to be working at this intersection of race and ethnicity and gender and ability. Dolls are the best objects to be able to expand the scope of who this project is about and who it’s for.

MG: It is interesting to think of objects as dolls. I don’t think we think that we form the same attachment with a beer mug as a child does with a doll, but maybe we actually do. They’re like adult playthings.

FH: Right? I know we talked about this in the course, but so many things can be a doll without having to have all the attributes that we think about. One of the students in my class this semester brought in corn husks, and we made corn husk dolls. They’re made of almost nothing, and still, they can be dolls.

MG: Absolutely. My niece has a scrap of blanket that she has carried around with her since she was a toddler, and she named it Margaret as one would name a doll.

FH: I love that. We’ve also got this impulse to animate things. We seem to all do it when we kick technology that isn’t working or we yell at stuff. We can’t seem to understand that only humans are human. I find that totally fascinating.

MG: True, everyone forms an attachment to their objects, and they’re our constant companions. Just a final question on that note: I was curious if you have specific objects or furniture at home that you think of as a living being or a companion or something that sort of guides you?

FH: Well, the answer to that question is a bit sentimental, but I guess that’s kind of part of it. A couple of years ago, my mom passed away. Her house was a Connecticut saltbox house built in 1707. I inherited that house and moved in with my kids. I was just saying this to somebody the other day, and I think it all the time: that house, it’s a person. It’s absolutely saturated in history. It’s mind-boggling to think about all the people who lived there and used that house. It is the materials, the design, the fireplaces, the way that I walk around it, in and out of the spaces, touching it, and bumping my head on things! It feels like a living thing that I’m

collaborating with. Even when it falls apart and does bad things, it feels like somebody I’m negotiating with. I grew up all over the world and I had homes that I loved, but I think this is the first time that I felt that way about a building. It would be very, very hard for me to leave that house. Part of it is because of my mom, but a lot of it is this feeling of having a partnership with an inanimate thing. It’s this daily give-and-take. I want to go home and tell the house that I just told you that [laughs].

MG: You should, don’t keep any secrets from the house! [laughs] But thank you for sharing. I think that’s beautiful and a perfect way to bring this conversation to a close.

Associate professor Freyja Hartzell in her home in Connecticut. Photo by Matt Kelsey.

Andrew Kircher

I am BGC’s director of Public Humanities + Research. In addition to my core responsibilities—public programming and media, gallery education, research programs, and fellowship—I launched a new course in spring 2023 called “Public Humanities.” A group of six students (including three international exchange students) explored critical theories of public engagement, participated in curator meetings for upcoming BGC exhibitions, and learned practical skills including budgeting, contracting, and navigating intellectual property rights. This course culminated in a fully developed public programming proposal for an upcoming exhibition of their choice. While this was designed as a liminal exercise—a practice-based learning process— many of the thoughtfully designed programs submitted by the students will, in fact, be realized in the years to come!

My interactive art installation The Gift was installed at the main branch of the New York Public Library and was in a presentation from March through June 2023 at the Fine Arts Center in Colorado Springs. I collaborated on A Thousand Ways, an interactive experience that has toured to more than fifty locations in ten countries and has been translated into six languages. I recently was dramaturg for a new research-based artwork by Sister Sylvester and Nadah El Shazly, The Constantinopoliad, on the early life of poet C. P. Cavafy, supported by the Onassis Foundation.

Deborah L. Krohn

I spent the fall semester putting the finishing touches on my Focus Exhibition and accompanying book, Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800, which opened in mid-February. My fall 2022 class, based on the research for the book and exhibition, culminated in a student-created website that used images from a seventeenth-century deck of playing cards illustrated with images based on the manuals for carving meats and fruits that are featured in the exhibition. For the exhibition’s opening week, I was thrilled to host master napkin folder Joan Sallas, who helped stage the sculpted linen napkins and delighted students and the public with his spirited workshops. Other sold-out public events included a symposium titled “Instruments of Dining” that featured the well-known creator of historic installations Ivan Day, historian Molly Taylor-Poleskey, and art historian Evelyn Lincoln, and an evening program with Day in dialogue

Associate professor Deborah Krohn presents the 2023 Iris Foundation Award for Outstanding Dealer. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

with the early music ensemble Sonnambula, which performed period table music. A final public event featured a screening of a new film about food in Paris called The Way It Was. Directed by art historian Stephen Scher with James Ivory as executive producer, the film was shot during the 1970s and recently re-cut. Among my other recent publications is a book chapter, “Verbal Representations of Furniture,” that appeared in A Cultural History of Furniture: The Age of Exploration, 1500–1700, edited by Christina M. Anderson and published by Bloomsbury in 2022.

Meredith B. Linn

In 2022–23, I was busy teaching, organizing conferences, giving talks, and finishing writing projects. During the fall semester, I taught “Archaeologies of American Life” and “Medical Materialities.” In the spring, I co-taught “Unsettling Things” with Drew Thompson and “Digital Archaeological Heritage” with Caspar Meyer. I supervised Kenna Libes’s PhD exam and MA ʼ23 Emily Harvey’s qualifying paper, and I participated in BGC’s “Shape of Time” public event, organized by Jeffrey L. Collins and Joshua Massey. With Catherine Whalen and Columbia University colleagues Mary Marshall Clark, Amy Starcheski, Eileen Gillooly, and Chris Chang, I co-organized the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium meeting, during which I gave a walking tour of the Seneca Village site, a workshop on public humanities and material culture, and, with

Catherine, an object workshop using BGC’s Study Collection.

This year I also gave walking tours of Seneca Village to the Metropolitan Chapter of the New York State Archaeological Association and an NYU class. I presented talks about Seneca Village for the Louis Latimer House Museum, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and a course at Fordham University. With Jessica Striebel MacLean and Felipe Gaitan-Ammann, I co-organized a symposium about urban archaeology at the annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Lisbon; there, I presented a paper about my new research on Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century New York City.

An article I workshopped at BGC in 2021, “Neither Snake Oils nor Miracle Cures: Interpreting Nineteenth-Century Proprietary Medicines,” was published in Historical Archaeology, and a book chapter I co-authored with Nan Rothschild and Diana diZerega Wall was published in Advocacy and Archaeology: Urban Intersections, edited by Kelly Britt and Diane George. My two book projects are nearing completion: the monograph Irish Fever is being page set and the publication Revealing Communities, which I am editing, will soon return from peer review.

Finally, BGC doctoral candidate

Tova Kadish and I taught BGC’s Summer School for Undergraduates, focusing on the archaeology of New York City. Teaching

François Louis

I offered two courses in fall 2022: “Design and Material Culture of the Qing Period, 1644–1912” and “Tang Gold and Silver.” The latter was done in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Jason Sun, curator of early Chinese art, kindly made it possible to have several viewing sessions in the Met’s storage including one with Michael Seymour, curator of ancient Near Eastern art. In the spring term, I taught a course on the decorative arts of Mongol China (circa 1200–1400). I also resumed my tenure as director of doctoral studies for the year, filling in for associate professor Ittai Weinryb, who was on research leave.

Last fall I was a discussant for a conference panel, “Inscribed Metalwork from China,” at the University of Pennsylvania and a

contributor to the Bard Graduate Center event “Reading The Shape of Time, 60 Years Later.” In September, I will give a paper at the Conference of the European Association for Asian Art and Archaeology to be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia. My talk is part of a panel on collecting, titled “The Object that Isn’t.” I have also been invited to speak on Liao dynasty art at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, together with BGC doctoral student Boxi Liu. Next spring, I will be on sabbatical leave. I hope to see my article on “Jue tripods” in press by then.

Annissa Malvoisin

Throughout the past academic year, I gave several public and guest lectures including the David F. Grose Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Department of Classics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the Ceramics History Seminar at Alfred University; and “Collective Histories: Display Practice of Ancient African Collections” at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University.

In fall 2022, I traveled to London to conduct research on the display of African art in museum collections and to view the exhibition Africa Fashion, which opened in June 2023 at the Brooklyn Museum and was co-curated by myself and the institution’s curator of African art. In spring 2023, I co-curated Sakimatwemtwe: A Century of Reflection on the Arts of Africa

Louise Lui (MA ’23) and Professor François Louis at Bard College for the 2023 commencement ceremony.

Photo by Benjamin Krevolin.

I presented my doctoral and curatorial research on the display of African collections on two separate panels—first at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Seattle and then at the American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR) Annual Meeting in Boston. On a separate panel at ASOR, I presented my research on interregional connections between late antique Egypt and Meroitic Nubia and Iron Age Nigerian Nok, Malian Jenné-Jeno, and Garammantian Fezzan (Libya) through material culture.

I contributed to the exhibition catalogue of Africa & Byzantium, opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in fall 2023, and will publish a review of the 2022 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina in a forthcoming issue of West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture

I offered a new course on African art at BGC in spring 2023, titled “Global Materials along the Nile: 3400 BCE–500 CE.” During the summer, I planned the upcoming symposium

“Exhibiting Africa” with associate professor Drew Thompson.

Jennifer L. Mass

This year I developed a new course, “Science and Sylvester Manor,” which consisted of seminars on the technologies behind the nineteenth-century collection that comprises most of the extant material in the Sylvester Manor building, a Georgian home dating to 1735. This is Bard Graduate Center’s first laboratory-oriented course in which the students were asked to evaluate their chosen objects (or decorative finishes) through a scientific lens. Each student selected a semester-long research project focused on an object from the manor and studied this object using elemental and molecular analysis (X-ray fluorescence and

Teaching 33

Annissa Malvoisin at the 2022 Iris Foundation Awards. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, respectively). We visited the manor in September, giving the students an opportunity to select their objects for study, examine these objects in relation to the rest of the collection and document them in situ. In selecting the objects for study, we worked with Donnamarie Barnes, the director of history and heritage at the manor. The course proved to be immensely popular, and the students enjoyed delivering the results of their research as presentations and papers for the manor staff. The manor is incorporating the results of the students’ research into their interpretation tours.

My article, “Selenium-Based Black Bronze Treatments, as Compared to Other Patination Technologies of Ancient and Historic Black Bronzes,” was selected for publication in Technè, a French journal of technical art history, as part of a special two-issue series on the technologies behind black surfaces on works of art. In addition, I have had a book chapter accepted for publication, “New Advances in Technical Art History,” which will be included in All About Appraising: The Definitive Appraisal Handbook (3rd Edition), which comes out in 2024. Two journal articles that I wrote were published this year: “Modigliani’s Painted Nudes: a Technical Study” and “Works by Modigliani that Have Paintings beneath the Visible Surface.” Both appeared in Tate Papers, no. 35, 2023. I also have several manuscripts in progress, including

“When Is Art Crime a History Lesson in Disguise? A Reassessment of Authenticity Focused on Objects versus Paintings,” a commissioned article for a special issue of the Journal of Art Crime that will be edited by Jehane Ragai, and “The Chemistry and Physics of Color inside the World’s Most Magnificent Paintings and Gemstones,” a book chapter for a volume on color edited by Benjamin Zucker.

BGC Students Explore the History of Sylvester Manor

By Mackensie Griffin (MA ’24)

On a Saturday morning in September 2022, I boarded a bus with fellow students in Jennifer L. Mass’s course, “Science and Sylvester Manor,” and headed to the eponymous historic estate located on Shelter Island. The estate originally belonged to Nathaniel Sylvester, an Englishman who came to the New World via Amsterdam and bought Shelter Island in 1651. Sylvester, the first European to settle there, established one of the largest plantations in the northern United States. It was worked by enslaved Africans and indentured Indigenous people who raised and processed food that was shipped to the Sylvester family’s sugar plantations in Barbados. Around 1652, Sylvester built a house for himself, his wife Grizzell, and their many children. Over the next century, the house changed hands but stayed within the family. After much of the land was

Sylvester Manor, built in 1735. Photo by Mackensie Griffin.

sold off, the property passed to Brinley Sylvester, who tore down the original house and built a Georgian-style manor in 1735. This house, called Sylvester Manor, still stands today, and it was home to Sylvester descendants until 2006.

Amazingly, much of the eighteenth-century home remains intact, although some additions and renovations were made during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the 1980s, landscape historian Mac Griswold happened upon the property and contacted its inhabitants, Andrew and Alice Fiske. Griswold began researching the Sylvester family’s history, and after Andrew passed away, Alice and Griswold arranged for archaeological excavations on the property. Griswold ultimately wrote a book, sharing the findings from her research and the excavations. After Alice Fiske’s death, the estate was turned into an educational farm and the house opened to the public. It remains one of the few surviving remnants of a northern plantation.

“Science and Sylvester Manor” came about after BGC founder and director Susan Weber learned of the manor several years ago. Weber thought examining the house’s interior and furnishings could provide students with a unique opportunity to understand how objects can teach us about the past. BGC faculty expressed great interest in the history and material culture of the manor, so Weber proposed a collaboration: the manor would provide material for students to study, and BGC would help the manor interpret its extensive collection to aid its ongoing transformation into an educational center.

Mass, who specializes in the scientific study of the decorative and applied arts, thought that teaching a course on the house would be a compelling way to “tell the story of slavery in the North, which is a neglected piece of history.” She described her first visit to the property as “an astounding experience.” In March 2020, she met with the manor’s executive director Stephen Searl and director of history and heritage Donnamarie Barnes to discuss plans for “Science and Sylvester Manor.” After delays caused by the pandemic, BGC was finally able to offer the course in fall 2022. In the first week of class, Mass shared images of various intriguing objects we could analyze on-site using her portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer, a non-destructive method used to determine the elemental composition of materials. From these images, students selected the following objects for study: a Wedgwood matchbox, a silver teapot, Zuber & Cie scenic wallpaper, an American fancy chair, a mahjong set, a Chinese export lacquer tea box, mourning jewelry made of braided hair, mid-twentieth-century kitchen fittings, a Civil War–era green Union case, and the fragment of a blanket supposedly given to one of the manor’s inhabitants by the pirate Captain Cook.

Our excitement grew as we took a ferry across the Long Island Sound. Entering the property, we drove down a narrow dirt road through the woods and met Barnes in the parking lot. She led us past formal gardens to the house, covered in worn yellow shingles and overlooking a creek. Barnes pointed out a patch of lawn where a cobblestone path had been discovered during the excavations. The manor staff leaves a small section of the path exposed to remind themselves and visitors that enslaved laborers likely laid down these cobblestones.

Inside, we followed Barnes down a wide carpeted hallway and into the rooms branching off: formal parlors, a study, and a walk-in vault bursting with boxes of old letters, silverware, and ceramics. Upstairs, in one of the bedrooms, Barnes laid out a pristine Victorian girl’s mourning dress covered in black polka dots for us to admire. We climbed a steep staircase to reach the attic where the enslaved and indentured servants once slept. Two indentured brothers from the Montaukett tribe, William and Isaac Pharoah, had carved outlines of sailboats into the wall. In the depths of the sprawling basement, we encountered a heaping pile of coal and a stone sundial inscribed with the year 1679 and the phrase tempus fugit.

After this mind-boggling tour, the work of scientific analysis began. Mass connected her XRF spectrometer to her laptop, and we watched the data from each object come in. While at the house, Mass also collected microsamples from our objects if it was possible to do so without damaging them. A few weeks later, the class joined her at her lab at Maquette Fine Art Services in Long Island City to observe her use Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), which measures how much infrared light each sample absorbs at different wavelengths to provide a molecular fingerprint for each sample.

Professor Jennifer L. Mass reading XRF data from Sylvester Manor’s collection of objects. Photo by Mackensie Griffin.

This data, when compared to a database of thousands of artists’ materials, would allow us to determine what materials might be present in our objects. Guided by Mass’s expertise, we spent the rest of the semester exploring our objects’ cultural and scientific contexts through readings, presentations, and class discussions. In our final papers, we used science to tell the stories of the objects and families connected to Sylvester Manor, combining the XRF and FTIR results with historical research. These papers were shared with Barnes and Searl and will also be presented to members of the BGC community in the spring. More BGC professors will offer courses on Sylvester Manor in the future. Mass looks forward to opportunities to study excavated materials that date back to when the site was a plantation.

Analyzing paint on a kitchen table using a portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer.

Photo by Mackensie Griffin.

Caspar Meyer

In the 2022–23 academic session, I convened “Objects in Context: A Survey of Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture” (with Aaron Glass) and taught my elective classes “Craftscapes in Action: Makers and Making in the Ancient World” and “Digital Archaeological Heritage” (with Meredith B. Linn). I continued to serve as director of MA Studies, identifying suitable internship opportunities for our students and acting as a liaison with sponsoring institutions, this year notably the French Heritage Society and the Borscht Belt Museum in the Catskills.

I was invited to give two lectures: one titled “Beazley the Craftsman” at the workshop “Beazley for the 21st Century” at the University of Oxford and another titled “Containers within Containers: Vitrinized Museum Display as a Cultural Technique” in the “Ancient Vases in Modern Showcases: Future Possibilities for Exhibiting Ancient Greek Pottery in Museums” conference at the Allard Pierson

Museum in Amsterdam. On April 14 and 15, I convened jointly with Francesco de Angelis (Columbia University) and the New Antiquity consortium a workshop titled “Processes of Making.”

I published a book chapter on the representation of domesticity in archaeological museum displays and a journal article exploring archaeology’s theoretical articulations with possibility studies. My volume on Drawing the Greek Vase (co-edited with Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis) was released in May by Oxford University Press.

As I did last year, I led the second leg of the BGC travel program in Greece, introducing our students to archaeological field and conservation methods on the island of Despotiko in the Cyclades. This year our daytime work at the site was complemented by evening pottery sessions with Vassilis Politakis, a specialist in Bronze age ceramic technology from Crete, so that we could produce our own clay and slip and construct a kiln to fire clay figurines.

Professor Caspar Meyer in the BGC Gallery.

Bard Graduate Center Field School in Archaeology and Material Culture

In its second year, the field school in archaeology and material culture was again offered on the Cycladic island of Antiparos and the adjacent island Despotiko, where students participated in a project to excavate and rebuild the sixth-century BCE sanctuary of Apollo. Professor Caspar Meyer, who has been working on the sanctuary site since 2017, leads the field school. All first-year BGC students have the opportunity to add the field school to the existing BGC travel program to Berlin and Paris. This year, thirteen students participated in the program.

The region exported marble to centers like Athens—some of the earliest statues from the Acropolis were made of Parian marble—and current work on the site contributes to our knowledge of the material’s enduring cultural significance. Since its discovery in the early 2000s, the sanctuary on Despotiko has produced an uninterrupted string of finds, including votive deposits under the temple floor and domestic buildings pre-dating the sacred structures. The site has become key to understanding the connections between seafaring, craft, and religion that shaped Greek culture for centuries.

Photo by Emily Harvey (MA ’23).

Students spent two days visiting significant ancient sites and museums in Athens and then traveled to Antiparos for six days of work and study. Each morning, students crossed a small channel to Despotiko to work on the excavation site until the afternoon. Evenings were dedicated to building an outdoor kiln for making clay ceramics under the guidance of an expert in ancient potting techniques. This unique opportunity in the handcraft behind the pottery fragments found at the site facilitated an understanding of object interpretation and reconstruction.

The purpose of a field school is to take students out of the classroom so they can test what they have learned there against practical, firsthand experiences. Students are confronted with the unpredictability of unearthing, cleaning, and identifying an object, as well as subsequent collaboration required to archive, conserve, and reconstruct an object that may eventually find its way into a museum display.

Student participation in the BGC Field School in Archaeology and Material Culture was made possible in part by the generous support of the Malcolm Hewitt Wiener Foundation, Inc.

BGC Summer Field School participants with Professor Caspar Meyer at the Acropolis. Photo courtesy of Rachel Salem-Wiseman (MA ’24).

Andrew Morrall

Two courses stand out from the teaching year: “The Arts of the Tudor Court,” which took full advantage of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of the same title, as well as the generosity of the Met’s curators in introducing students to different aspects of the show; and “The Culture of Craft in the Era of the Kunstkammer.” Both produced some satisfyingly original student papers.

The past year saw a number of articles go to press, including “Turning Back the Sun: Christoph Schissler’s Horologium Achaz as Kunststück,” and “Nuremberg Goldsmiths and the Mathematizing of Nature.” Both will appear in Nuncius Series. Studies and Sources in the Material and Visual History of Science. Another essay, “Ideas,” will appear in A Cultural History of Collecting in the Renaissance, part of Bloomsbury’s Cultural History series; and a review of Jan De Maeyer and Peter Jan Margery’s Material Change: The Impact of Reform and Modernity on Material Religion in North-West Europe, 1780–1920, will appear in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture

During the summer of 2022, I undertook research in Vienna on the visionary ambitions of the splendidly named Hugo Blotius, the first imperial librarian to the Habsburg court, to found a combined museum, library, and research center dedicated to the assembly of total human knowledge. This resulted in a preliminary talk, “Hugo Blotius’s

Musaeum Generis Humani and the Ideal of Universal Knowledge,” at a conference at the University of Oregon in October 2022. It was the second of three conferences (the first was at BGC in 2018), of a larger research project: “Prudence, Techne, and the Practice of Governance in the Early Modern Kunstkammer,” which explores the political relationship between statecraft and collecting.

In July 2023, I gave a paper on “Dürer and the Materiality of Vision” in a workshop that forms part of a research project, “Albrecht Dürer’s Material World – in Melbourne, Manchester and Nuremberg.” The workshop was hosted by Manchester University, United Kingdom, in conjunction with an exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery, Albrecht Dürer’s Material World.

Professor Andrew Morrall and Heath Ballowe (MA ’23) at BGC’s annual end-of-year celebration. Photo by Liz Ligon.

Student Travel and Research: Talia

Perry (MA ’23) Studies

Tudor Chimneys

Travel has long been an important component of a Bard Graduate Center education. All MA students have the option of going on a BGC-sponsored trip to Europe in the summer between their first and second years. This past summer students traveled to Paris for a weeklong study of museums and historic homes led by professor Jeffrey Collins and then continued to the Greek island of Despotiko for a week of archaeological study with professor Caspar Meyer (see page 40 for more details about BGC’s Summer Field School). These trips afforded students the opportunity to become familiar with some of the great collections, museums, and historic sites outside of the United States and gave them hands-on, practical experience.

BGC also supports student travel for individual research. These trips often provide students with their only firsthand experience of objects that are central to their qualifying papers or dissertations.

Talia Perry (MA ’23). Photo by Maria Baranova.

In February 2023, Talia Perry (MA ’23) traveled to England to visit Tudor chimneys in preparation for her qualifying paper titled “Rooftop Fancy and Folly: Tudor Chimney Stack as Device and Discourse.” Perry is a practicing architect, but as she said is common at BGC, her interests expanded during the course of her studies, in particular to include the history of technology and how changes in technology and material production alter social structures and the way people relate to each other.

In professor Andrew Morrall’s fall 2022 course, “The Arts of the Tudor Court,” Perry encountered a photograph of Tudor chimney stacks and wanted to know more. She found discussions of Tudor architecture or of English chimneys that gave glancing references to the stacks, but no scholarship on the subject of Tudor chimneys specifically. She knew she needed to see the structures in person.

During her weeklong trip, Perry saw thirteen Tudor chimneys. She woke at 6 am every morning and traveled by train and bus to various locales, trekking more than one hundred miles by the end of the week. She was able to get “up close and personal” with a few of the chimneys, including the tower stacks at both Framlingham Castle and Lambeth Palace (which she viewed by peering down at its rooftop from a neighboring church tower). Ironically, she hates heights and found herself practicing yoga breathing and inching along the sides of the walls at many of these sites.

The Student Travel and Research Fund covered Perry’s plane ticket and some of her hotel stays. She was very frugal and stretched the budget so that she could see a variety of chimneys stacks during her short trip. According to Perry, “It was really important to me to see the chimneys in person, in part because I was very interested in the lives of the craftspeople who constructed them and their handcrafted nature. Despite having access to a lot of images of the chimneys, the photographs are usually taken from far away and the focus is not on mortar joint or the texture of the brick.” She continued, “I felt I could not do the project justice without having seen the structures with my own eyes.”

Talia Perry’s travel expenses were covered in part by an award from the Eugenie Prendergast Fund at Bard Graduate Center.

Chimney stack from Framlingham Castle, Suffolk, England. Composite of an older, Norman ashlar stone stack below, extended in the late-fifteenth century with cut-and-rub brick. Photo by Talia Perry.

Helen Polson

In 2022–23, I taught “Writing Objects” in the fall and spring semesters, which is a required course for all incoming MA and PhD students that develops the knowledge of forms and proficiency in techniques required for effective graduate-level writing. I enjoyed helping students refine assignments, essays, qualifying papers, and dissertations, and was especially pleased to work with a number of students who successfully applied to and gave conference papers, wrote book and exhibition reviews, and completed catalogue essays and journal articles for publication. This year, my work at BGC expanded to include editing interpretive texts for the BGC exhibitions Threads of Power, Shaped by the Loom, Staging the Table in Europe, and the upcoming SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power & Prestige. I also worked with colleagues in publications and Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions on texts for the Threads of Power and Staging the Table catalogues and the online exhibition for Shaped by the Loom

Mei Mei Rado

I joined the BGC faculty in January 2023. In February, my article “Botanic Fantasy in Silk: Transformations of a Rococo Floral Design from England to China” appeared in the edited volume Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility and Change (Bloomsbury, 2023). In March, I gave a talk titled “Ornaments from the Western

Ocean: Rococo as a Qing Imperial Style in the Decorative Arts” during the symposium “Rococo Across Borders: Designers and Makers,” which was co-organized by French Porcelain Society and Furniture History Society and took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In May, I spoke about one of my research projects, “Chinese Dress Refashioned in Europe: From Eighteenth-Century Indoor Robes to Twentieth-Century Couture,” at the “(Re)Made in China: Material Dis:connections, Art, and Creative Reuse” conference at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. I also contributed research and a catalogue essay on nineteenth-century Qing court arts and culture to the British Museum’s exhibition China’s Hidden Century and presented a paper, “The Japan Connection: Meiji-Period Arts and the Late Qing Court,” in the related symposium “China’s 1800s: Material and Visual Culture” in June.

With the support of a three-year grant offered by the Society of the Antiquaries of London, I traveled to Taipei and Hong Kong in July to conduct research on the development of the qipao dress in the mid-twentieth century. Yale University Press will publish my book The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles in the Qing Court in fall 2024.

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.

Assistant professor Mei Mei Rado (PhD ’18) with BGC professor emerita Michele Majer at the 2023 Iris Foundation Awards. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

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.

Professor of practice and director of Focus Exhibitions Nina Stritzler-Levine, research curator Laura Microulis (MA ’96, PhD ’16), and associate curator Emma Cormack (MA ’18) at the opening of the spring 2023 Focus Exhibitions. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

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.

Teaching 49

Dean Peter N. Miller, director of Public Humanities + Research Andrew Kircher, and associate professor Drew Thompson. Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Drew

Thompson

Named

Associate Professor of Visual Culture and Black Studies

Bard Graduate Center and Bard College announced the joint appointment of Dr. Drew Thompson as associate professor of visual culture and Black studies in 2022. Dr. Thompson’s research and teaching at BGC focuses on the art and material culture of Africa and the African diaspora, with courses on visual history and theory, the art of decolonization, Black modernism, vernacular photography, and museums as (de-)colonial spaces. At Bard College, he teaches an undergraduate course that nurtures interests in the topics taught at BGC. Dr. Thompson’s expertise complements the BGC faculty’s diverse interdisciplinary research, which includes Indigenous material culture studies, urban archaeology, architectural history, fashion and textiles studies, culinary history, conservation studies, and material science.

“Drew Thompson is an exceptional scholar whose work explores the recent history of Lusophone Africa and its diasporic extensions but also the relationship between art, technology, and politics in Africa and the United States. We are thrilled that Dr. Thompson has chosen to bring his expertise to BGC,” said Peter N. Miller, dean of Bard Graduate Center.

Associate professor Drew Thompson presenting at the Wednesdays @ BGC event, Polaroids as Black Material Culture: An Introduction. Photo by Amy Estes.

“I am delighted that professor Drew Thompson undertakes this new role at Bard Graduate Center. He is expertly positioned to consider and interweave contemporary African and African American art across multiple disciplines, and Bard College as a whole will benefit from his track record of innovative scholarship and public-facing programming. This is an exciting new chapter for both Bard Graduate Center and Bard’s Annandale community,” said Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies at Bard College.

Dr. Thompson stated, “I have long admired Bard Graduate Center. My appointment brings an unparalleled opportunity to advance BGC’s curriculum and public programming in the areas of African and Black diaspora visual and material culture. Furthermore, I am excited to expand my own research into new areas, including exhibition making, and to bring new constituencies to the conversation about the role of art in society at the pivotal moment we are living. I am grateful to BGC director and founder Susan Weber and Dean Miller for their foresight and vision in crafting this unique position.”

Dr. Thompson joins BGC from Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts where he has served as associate professor of contemporary art history and visual culture. Prior to his tenure at Ryerson, Dr. Thompson was assistant professor of historical and African studies (2013–21) and director of Africana studies (2017–20). In 2018, he launched the interactive arts platform “Creative Process in Dialogue: Art and the Public Today,” which featured Elizabeth Alexander, Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Thelma Golden, Amy Sherald, and Bradford Young as invited speakers.

A writer and visual historian, Thompson authored Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times (University of Michigan Press, 2021), which features a study of the role of photography in Mozambique’s history as a colony of Portugal and an independent nation. He is currently working on a second book project, provisionally titled “Coloring Black Surveillance: The Story of Polaroid in Africa, Anti-Apartheid Protest, and the Contemporary Art World,” which seeks to draw connections between the development of instant color photography, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and the use of Polaroids in US prisons.

Dr. Thompson earned his BA in history and art history from Williams College (2005) and his PhD in history from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2013).

Ittai Weinryb

In the 2022–23 academic year, I was fortunate to be a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin— the most senior research institute in Germany.

This year, the first volume of my new book series Art / Work, created with Caroline Fowler, was published by Princeton University Press. This volume centers on ceramic arts; the second volume on pigments is now in production. I also finished writing my new book Art and Frontier, which 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.

Together with Eiren Shea and Qiao Yang, I am now organizing a twenty-speaker conference on the Golden Horde that will take place in the next academic year at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Associate professor Ittai Weinryb and director of finance Rita Niyazova at BGC’s annual end-of-year celebration.

Photo by Liz Ligon.

Catherine Whalen

In 2022–23, two of my chief goals were to advance digital and public humanities at Bard Graduate Center.

The first entailed teaching students to create a website for the course “Women Designers in the USA, 1900–Present: Diversity and Difference.” I was inspired to develop this class by the eponymous 2000–01 landmark exhibition and catalogue curated and edited by professor emerita Pat Kirkham. The course dovetailed with Bard Graduate Center’s recently launched Exhibition Archive Project, dedicated to preserving and promoting records of the institution’s past shows.

Women Designers in the USA is the first of these historic exhibitions to be reinterpreted as a public facing digital project. In the class, students created an extensive microsite as a workshop for this online exhibition’s future development. The course and the Exhibition Archive Project greatly benefited from Professor Kirkham’s spring 2023 residency. She shared her expertise with students and staff working on the project through classroom instruction, individual conferences, archive advisement, and recorded interviews. The result was rich and revelatory for all.

My teaching also included my regular seminar on craft and design in the postwar United States, in which students conduct interviews with contemporary artists, craftspeople, and designers as part of building the Bard Graduate Center Craft, Art, and Design Oral History Project, a public digital archive that I direct.

On behalf of Bard Graduate Center, assistant professor Meredith B. Linn and I were very pleased to collaborate with Columbia University to co-host the meeting of the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium, delayed since 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The goal of the consortium is to foster public projects animated by humanistic inquiry in support of art, culture, history, and education for a more democratic society.

In addition to BGC and Columbia, its members include Brown, CUNY Graduate Center, Lehigh, Rutgers, Tufts, and Yale.

Faculty members Andrew Morrall and Catherine Whalen at the 2022 Iris Foundation Awards. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions

Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions (DH / DX) at Bard Graduate Center is a comprehensive curricular approach to decorative arts, design history, and material culture studies that leverages emerging digital tools and methodologies to support the creation and investigation of new modes of scholarship in the human sciences.

DH / DX begins in the classroom with BGC’s Digital Literacy Initiative, a program that actively seeks creative solutions to object-based research challenges and trains all students to use a variety of digital tools. Students then implement these skills in their own research and have opportunities to collaborate on course-based projects such as BGC’s Focus Exhibitions. This wide array of projects includes multimedia online exhibitions, location-based applications, 3D printing and modeling, mapping, and extended and mixed-reality (AR / VR) experiences, with a particular focus on the development of interactive features for galleries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions.

To support this work, students have access to BGC’s Digital Media Lab (DML), a well-equipped space with significant hardware and software resources that serves as a hub for digital project development, training, and collaboration within the institution. In addition, throughout the year, an extensive offering of digital-focused workshops, lunchtime talks, and events further connects the BGC community to important conversations, projects, and professionals from cultural and academic institutions in New York City and beyond. Merandy and educational technologist Julie Fuller host workshops on 3D printing, WordPress website creation, and SketchUp model-making that help students expand their research. They also offer photo, video, and audio equipment and demonstrations so students feel comfortable using the equipment. Merandy notes, “Each year students come in with different interests and abilities.”

In April, DH / DX held a Digital Media Lab Salon during which BGC students presented their recent projects, illustrating the inventive and diverse ways that students are using digital tools in their research. The salon was an excellent showcase of the breadth of work supported by DH / DX. The presentations at this year’s salon included digital interactives included in the Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 exhibition, websites created for coursework including Catherine Whalen’s “Americana Redux” and “Women Designers” courses, and student-made exhibition mockups.

Jesse Merandy, director of DH / DX, presenting at the BGC Digital Media Lab Salon. Photo by Amy Estes.

BGC Staff Present at MuseWeb

Earlier this month, Bard Graduate Center staff members Jesse Merandy (director of Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions), Julie Fuller (digital humanities educational technologist), and Emma Cormack (associate curator and MA ’18) attended MuseWeb, the world’s largest museum innovation and technology conference, in Washington, D.C., where they presented about BGC’s online exhibitions.

This was Fuller’s first-time experience at the MuseWeb conference. She was gratified to hear many positive responses to BGC’s online exhibitions from conference attendees who shared how impressed they were with the content and design of these projects, especially special features such as the Majolica Mania 3D models and the Shaped by the Loom 360˚ interactive map. Cormack also received many compliments on BGC’s work, including from someone who noted that the Shaped by the Loom online exhibition would be an excellent tool to accompany a textile-focused show currently on view at her institution.

Jesse Merandy, Emma Cormack, and Julie Fuller at the 2023 MuseWeb conference. Photo courtesy of Emma Cormack.

Cormack found seeing BGC’s digital work in the broader context of what’s happening with digital engagement in museums to be the most valuable aspect of her second MuseWeb conference. She continued, “It was great to see that the scope and execution of our projects are on par with large institutions and to confirm that we are doing some innovative things around creating online exhibitions that others aren’t. More specifically, it was extremely helpful to hear from other conference attendees and speakers how they organize the complicated workflow of projects across multiple departments!”

For both Fuller and Merandy, a reception at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) proved to be a highlight of the conference. According to Merandy, it was an incredible opportunity to explore how digital components can be thoughtfully integrated throughout a museum to create incredibly moving and power ful experiences. At NMAAHC, multimedia components, presented alongside a wide array of historic objects, helped bring to life the complex narrative of African American history and culture from the fifteenth-century transatlantic slave trade to the present day. For example, one memorable interactive installation featured a recreation of the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where young Black students in 1960 staged a sit-in. Museum visitors could sit at a replica counter, which was embedded with touch screens, to learn about the sit-in and the men and women who played a part in it. Questions on the screens challenged visitors to imagine what they would do in the protestors’ situation as archival video and audio interviews played on a large media wall behind the counter. The experience gave Merandy a deep appreciation for the team that devised, researched, developed, and implemented this interactive. He said, “It was a powerful reminder of how digital tools can give voice to stories that have historically been marginalized and underrepresented, and when used effectively in exhibitions, how these experiences can foster empathy and therefore shift our attention and alter our perspectives.”

It was a powerful reminder of how digital tools can give voice to stories that have historically been marginalized and underrepresented …

Student Internships

Bard Graduate Center’s internship program aims to provide MA students with a range of professional experiences to explore potential career paths. Students ordinarily satisfy this requirement in the summer between their first and second year and have done so in museums, auction houses, archaeological sites, and education and public history.

The internship program is generously supported by the Philip Hewat-Jaboor Memorial Award, the Lee B. Anderson Memorial Foundation, the English Professional Development Award, and other sources.

2022 Internships

Antonia Anagnostopoulos

Benaki Museum

Elliot Camarra

Good One Productions

Daniel Chamberlin

Black Craftspeople Digital Archive

Mackensie Griffin

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

Emily Harvey Bard Graduate Center Gallery

Bob Hewis

Borscht Belt Museum

Patricia Madsen

New York City Archaeological Repository

Sydney Maresca

Historic Huguenot Street

Isabella Margi

New-York Historical Society

Joshua Massey

Ben-Zion Estate

Julia Meitz

Asian American Arts Centre

Talia Perry

British and Irish Furniture

Makers Online and the Furniture History Society

Anna Riley

Summer Institute in Museum

Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History

Rachel Salem-Wiseman

Borscht Belt Museum

Maura Tangum

British and Irish Furniture

Makers Online and the Furniture History Society

Zoe Volpa

Musée Carnavalet

BGC Interns Bring New Life to the Borscht Belt

By Rachel Salem-Wiseman (MA ’24)

In January 2023, I had the opportunity to meet with the board of the newly created Borscht Belt Museum and was later hired, along with fellow Bard Graduate Center MA ’24 students Mackensie Griffin and Bob Hewis, as a curatorial intern. BGC faculty members Caspar Meyer and Aaron Glass helped to facilitate this opportunity, which fulfilled the MA degree’s internship requirement.

The Borscht Belt refers to a group of resorts in New York’s Catskill Mountains that catered to Jewish clientele in the 1950s and ’60s. They offered a vacation wonderland, an all-inclusive experience for families that included meals, childcare, sports and other recreational activities, entertainment, and nightlife. According to one of the founders of the Borscht Belt Museum, Allen Frishman, the museum will “preserve this slice of Americana” and share how the “region catered to Jewish families denied access to other resorts during an era of closeted anti-Semitism.”

Vacationland! Catskills Resort Culture 1900–1980 at the Borscht Belt Museum. Photo by Mackensie Griffin.

The primary purpose of my internship was assisting with the creation of a pop-up exhibition to foreground the opening of the permanent museum in Ellenville, New York. It covered roughly one hundred years of history, including the early settlements, the heyday of the resorts, and their eventual dilapidation. This was a lot of time to cover in a small-scale exhibition, so one of the primary goals of the curatorial team was researching and determining the themes that would frame the exhibition and inform our limited selection of objects. Every week we met on Zoom and each of us were given tasks to complete; some of mine included writing object labels, working on a land acknowledgement, researching specific objects and themes, and connecting with various collectors. I had never worked on a project of this scale before, so it has been a particularly valuable experience for me as a future curator.

Something that I found difficult was deciding as a team which objects to include in the exhibition, as there were many objects to choose from and we could only include so many. For example, we had access to hundreds of vintage postcards and so we had to determine which best communicated the themes that we wanted to convey. I became attached to certain objects and the stories they tell, so another challenge was accepting that not all the objects that I liked would be included in the exhibition.

Before becoming involved with the museum I was not familiar with the history of the Borscht Belt, but through my work on the exhibition

I came to realize how much my own family’s story is connected to these resorts. After I told my parents about the internship, I found out that my great-uncle and great-aunt spent their honeymoon at the prominent Grossinger’s resort. I spoke to my mother’s cousin who sent me a digitized home video that included footage of resort activities, evening entertainment, and my great-uncle and great-aunt romantically lounging by the pool. To my family’s excitement, some of this footage was included in the exhibition.

Rachel Salem-Wiseman, Bob Hewis, and Mackensie Griffin. Photo courtesy of Rachel Salem-Wiseman.

This personal connection was an indication of how important the history of the Borscht Belt is to a lot of people, and that was a bit daunting since I was partially responsible for communicating that history in a meaningful and accessible manner. Like members of my own family, many visitors to the pop-up had stayed at these resorts and lived the experiences the exhibition was intended to reflect.

This internship was longer than the one hundred hours that BGC requires. Internships are usually completed in the summer, but I began working on the exhibition in January and my commitment concluded at the end of July. I gained a lot of valuable work experience and professional connections; however, I had to balance this internship with schoolwork and my campus employment, which was quite stressful at times. In spite of this, I was really excited about helping to install the exhibition in Ellenville and seeing the pop-up come to life after working on it for so long. It was an especially rewarding project that brought me more in touch with my Jewish heritage and my relatives and gave me a valuable learning experience.

Like members of my own family, many visitors to the pop-up had stayed at these resorts and lived the experiences the exhibition was intended to reflect.

Something Blue: A Reflection on Indigo Dyeing at the Textile Arts Center

By Allison Donoghue (MA

Materials Days take Bard Graduate Center students to makers’ studios all over the city for hands-on experiences. Recent visits have included glassblowing, bookmaking, letterpress printing, jewelry making, and, in spring 2023, indigo dyeing.

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BGC students Rachel Salem-Wiseman and Allison Donoghue, both MA ’24, dyeing indigo at Textile Arts Center.

Photo by Brayden Heath.

In the back of the Textile Arts Center—a space that is equal parts art studio, science laboratory, and fabric shop—a group of Bard Graduate Center students gathered around a tall glass beaker filled with liquid the color of tea left to steep too long. Armored in a paint-stained apron, I wondered where the indigo was; I did not see any sign of the deep blue I was familiar with from my favorite pair of jeans. Then, our dyeing instructor Hannah Schultz performed a magic trick: she dipped a small scrap of white cloth into the brown liquid, and when she removed it a few minutes later and exposed to the air, it turned a startling shade of blue. I could not fathom how the leafy Isatis tinctoria shrubs I had seen growing on a recent trip to South Carolina could be transformed into a vibrant blue dye. Each Materials Day I have attended—glass blowing and now indigo dyeing— has given me a more nuanced perspective on the objects and materials I use and see every day. The hands-on dyeing process made me more reflective on the precise, scientific knowledge required to successfully dye with indigo and the long history of the pigment.

Schultz began by explaining the process of preparing indigo dye. The dye is made using indigotin, the indigo pigment derived from the plant Indigofera tinctoria, and a combination of a reducing agent and an alkali base. The reducing agent removes all oxygen from the solution, allowing the indigotin, which is insoluble in water, to penetrate the fabric. The solution formed by this process is called a reduction. The dye is ready to use when the indigo pigment changes from a deep blue to a pale green-brown. The textile is then soaked in the reduction. When the fabric is removed and exposed to air, the oxygen reenters the indigo molecule returning the indigotin to its insoluble form. This transformation is visible to the onlooker—slowly turning the textile from a murky green to a bright blue as it dries. Schultz explained that the dyeing process is accumulative; a dyer can create deeper shades of blue by repeatedly soaking the textile.

Each Materials Day I have attended— glass blowing and now indigo dyeing— has given me a more nuanced perspective on the objects and materials I use and see every day.

Schultz then demonstrated several folding and cinching techniques that would produce patterns on our textiles. We were encouraged to try tie-dyeing, a method of folding or pleating the fabric before binding with rubber bands or string. We also attempted shibori, a Japanese technique in which fabric is folded and clamped between two wooden blocks creating white lines of resists along the folds when it is dyed. The tie-dye was forgiving while shibori required patience and practice. We used paper to learn the precise folding methods that would result in the various blue and white patterns possible with simple shibori techniques: starbursts, stripes, and squares.

Next, we tested our dyeing skills on the clothing we had brought from home. We used two different dye vats made from natural materials based on historic dye practices: organic fructose reduction and an iron mineral reduction. The fructose vat resulted in fabric that was dyed a slightly softer blue while the iron vat produced textiles with a deeper hue. I chose to fold my white shirt with a shibori technique. I carefully laid the fabric out on the table and folded it like an accordion lengthwise. Then, starting at the bottom of the long strip, I folded the fabric into precise squares until it formed a compact cube. Next, I placed two octagonal tiles on either end of the folded fabric and secured them with a large clamp. The tiles are intended to block out the dye leaving a white resist pattern on the shirt. After submerging my project in the indigo vat, I spent ten minutes waiting eagerly while the shirt soaked. After gently removing the shirt from the reduction, careful to not to splash and expose the dye to excess oxygen, I let it sit, folded, for another ten minutes before rinsing the excess dye off with water. Finally, I unfolded my shirt to reveal a blue-and-white octagonal pattern, clearly defined at the top but blurring as it continued down the front. Although not perfect, my shirt is unique and demonstrates the many hours of practice required to successfully dye with indigo and perfect shibori patterns.

Photo by Brayden Heath.

Prized for its color and expense, indigo has a long and complex history. Indigenous to tropical climates, it has been used throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central and South America for thousands of years. The brilliant color and the time-consuming process required to produce the pigment made it a sought-after commodity, often used for trade. During the mid-eighteenth century, it became the second largest cash-crop produced by plantations in South Carolina, the immense wealth it generated for plantation owners only made possible through the labor of enslaved people. While visiting a former plantation on a recent trip to Charleston, South Carolina, I saw indigo growing in the fields. The plantation maintained a small crop, along with cotton, to demonstrate what had been grown on the property. It was too early in the season to see the dark purple flowers in bloom, and the small brown shrubs seemed unrelated to the blue dye reductions we used in Brooklyn. As I watched my own shirt transform from a muddy green to the distinctive indigo blue, I couldn’t help but juxtapose the experiences of seeing the growing plant and using the dye. It made me reflect on the little I knew about indigo and its role in the founding of the United States. Although today most indigo used in commercial products is synthetic, the complex legacy of the dye in the United States remains stained by years of exploitation.

Photo by Brayden Heath.

Courses Offered

Fall 2022

454. From the Arctic to Oceania: Overseas Visitors in Early Modern Europe

Ivan Gaskell

455. In Focus: Welcome to the Dolls’ House I

Freyja Hartzell

456. In Focus: Staging the Table in Europe, 1500–1800

Deborah L. Krohn

457. Science and Sylvester Manor

Jennifer L. Mass

458. Material Cultures of the Americas

Christian Larsen

459. Tang Gold and Silver

François Louis

460. Exhibiting ‘Africa’

Drew Thompson

461. Court, Society, and the Arts of Tudor England, 1485–1603

Andrew Morrall

485. Medical Materialities

Meredith B. Linn

500. Objects in Context: A Survey of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture I

Caspar Meyer

502. Approaches to the Object

Jeffrey L. Collins and

Andrew Morrall

510. Writing Objects

Helen Polson

675. Versailles: Palace and People

Jeffrey L. Collins

761. Design and Material Culture of the Qing Period, 1644–1912

François Louis

876. Tangible Things: Observing, Collecting, Sorting

Ivan Gaskell

926. Bauhaus, Before, and Beyond: German Design from Gründerzeit to Ulm School

Freyja Hartzell

959. Exhibition and Curatorial Practice

Nina Stritzler-Levine

991. Archaeologies of American Life

Meredith B. Linn

995. Craftscapes in Action: Makers and Making in the Ancient World

Caspar Meyer

Spring 2023

446. The Culture of Craft in the Era of the Kunstkammer

Andrew Morrall

447. Cultural Exchange: Trade, Religion, and War in Armenia, 300–1600

Helen Evans

448. Public Humanities

Andrew Kircher

449. In Focus: Welcome to the Dolls’ House II

Freyja Hartzell

450. Cosmic and Cosmetic: The Many (Sur)Faces of Ornament

Nicholas de Godoy Lopes

451. Global Materials along the Nile, 3400 BCE–500 CE

Annissa Malvoisin

452. In Focus: (Re)Dressing the American Body I

Emma McClendon and Lauren Peters

453. Arts of Yuan China, 1200–1400

François Louis

481. Unsettling Things: Expanding Conversations in Studies of the Material World

Meredith B. Linn and Drew Thompson

490. Digital Archaeological Heritage

Meredith B. Linn and Caspar Meyer

501. Objects in Context: A Survey of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture II

Aaron Glass

510. Writing Objects

Helen Polson

548. Women Designers in the USA, 1900–Present: Diversity and Difference

Catherine Whalen

693. Craft and Design in the USA, 1945 to the Present

Catherine Whalen

877. Picturing Things: Photography as Material Culture

Aaron Glass and Drew Thompson

951. Re-Orienting Fashion: Dress, Culture, and East Asia

Mei Mei Rado

Degrees Conferred

Doctor of Philosophy

Pengliang Lu, Shanghai, China

“Bronzes of the Yuan Dynasty, 1271–1368”

Lee B. Anderson Memorial Foundation Dean’s Prize

Thomas Daniel Tredway, Long Beach, CA

“Dinner at Tiffany’s: Walter Hoving, Van Day Truex, and the Arts of the Table at Tiffany & Co., 1955–1980”

CINOA Award for Outstanding Dissertation

Master of Philosophy

Lauren Vollono Drapala, Freeport, NY

“Making Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Artist Studio: Female Patronage, Transgressive Feminism, and the Rise and Fall of the Artist-Decorator in the Early Twentieth-Century United States of America”

Chika Matsuzaki Jenkins, Tokyo, Japan

“A Sense of Emergent Order: Post-Humanistic Ornament, Rhythm, and Possible Futures”

Tova Kadish, Chicago, IL

“Rocky Utopias: An Archaeology of Jewish Agricultural Collectives in Colorado”

Emma Calvert McClendon, Big Indian, NY

“The Sized Body: Standardized Sizing Technology and Normalcy in New York Fashion, 1860–1910”

Kate Sekules, London, England; Brooklyn, NY

“A History and Theory of Mending”

Members of the class of 2023 at Bard College for commencement.

Photo by Keith Condon.

Master of Arts

R. Heath Ballowe, Lynchburg, VA

“They Sound Different When They Break: The Scientific Struggle to Produce English Porcelain, 1672–1821”

Daniel Foster Chamberlin, Watkinsville, GA

“Comprehensive Stewardship: Responsibly Reconciling the Past”

Emily Louise Harvey, Leesburg, VA

“Seeing Women: The Rise in Popularity of Women’s Vision Aids in Nineteenth-Century America”

Jeffrey Law, New York, NY

“Spiral Ornament in Shang Dynasty China”

Louise Ke Sing Lui, Hong Kong

“The Splendor of Silk in Clay: Mongol Luxury Textiles and Yuan Blue-andWhite Porcelain”

Isabella Anne Margi, Williston, VT

“‘A Poppet-Queen, Drest up by me’: Dolls, Propriety, and Girlhood in Early Modern Europe”

Joshua Baker Massey, Denver, NC

“‘To choose and be surrounded with the finest creations’: Assembling Value in the Ben-Zion House”

Talia Ayslyn Perry, Pittsburgh, PA

“Rooftop Fancy and Folly: Tudor Chimney Stack as Device and Discourse”

Clive Wainwright Award

Madeline Porsella, New York, NY

“The New Promethean: Modernism and the Occult in Claude Fayette Bragdon’s Projective Ornament”

Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts Award

Anna Elizabeth Riley, Birmingham, AL

“Crafting Stories of Value: Commodity Paths for Herati Glass”

Clive Wainwright Award

Maura Tangum, Atlanta, GA

“‘Facing Determinedly Toward the Future’: Maxwell Shieff’s Involvement and Innovation within the Entertainment Industries of Canada and California, 1946–1959”

Zoe Volpa, Fort Collins, CO

“Imagining the French ‘Self’ and Its ‘Others’ Through the Display of Dress in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris”

Research

Bard Graduate Center is dedicated to new research in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. The research undertaken by faculty, curators, staff members, fellows, and students takes many forms, including exhibitions, publications, events. It is supported by BGC’s Department of Research Collections, which includes the library, Study Collection, and archives. BGC supports research and the expansion of our field by awarding fellowships and prizes that bring distinguished guests to campus, and it offers programs for undergraduates, often in partnership with other institutions.

Nancy Druckman (president, BGC board of directors) and Titi Halle (lender to the exhibition and owner of Cora Ginsburg, LLC) at the opening of Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Two-sided dragon amulet with snake and hanging tassel with snakes, rabbit, vegetables, etc., China, date unknown. Bard Graduate Center Study Collection, Gift of Susan M. Yecies. Photo by Barb Elam.

Exhibitions

Exhibitions, both in our gallery and online, frequently emerge from faculty research and teaching. They often serve as the basis for collaborations with scholars from elsewhere in the city and around the world. These critically acclaimed projects offer visitors cutting-edge perspectives on objects—from the mundane to the extraordinary—and their stories.

Exhibition view of Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen. Photo by Da Ping Luo.

Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen

September 16, 2022–January 1, 2023

Curated by Emma Cormack (MA ’18), associate curator, Bard Graduate Center; Ilona Kos, curator, Textilmuseum St. Gallen; and Michele Majer, professor emerita, Bard Graduate Center.

Generous support for Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen was provided by the Coby Foundation with additional support from the Zurich Silk Association, Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, Consulate General of Switzerland in New York, Switzerland Tourism, Forster Rohner AG, Tobias Forster, AKRIS, and other donors to Bard Graduate Center.

This project was supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

Special thanks to the Finger Lakes Lace Guild as well as the New England Lace Group.

Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen was organized by Bard Graduate Center and the Textilmuseum St. Gallen.

In fall 2022, Bard Graduate Center Gallery opened one of the most successful exhibitions in its history—Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen. The exhibition took on two contrasting perspectives: lace as an exalted handmade commodity that signified the wealth, taste, and prestige of those who wore it and lacemaking as an industry built on the labor of highly skilled but poorly paid women whose names are no longer known to us. Curators Emma Cormack (MA ’18), Ilona Kos, and Michele Majer bridged these two concurring realities through the display of over 150 examples of the world’s finest handmade needle and bobbin lace from the collection of Switzerland’s Textilmuseum St. Gallen alongside contemporary examples of lace, digital interactives, a collaboration with the Brooklyn Lace Guild, and an award-winning catalogue.

The exhibition was organized to trace the development of lace from its emergence in the late sixteenth century to the present. Its themes included early lace, ecclesiastical lace (Hapsburg Spain, and Bourbon France, 1600–1800), the mechanization of lace, revival styles, the invention of “chemical” lace, and finally, contemporary innovations in lace manufacturing and couture.

The first floor of the exhibition opened with a lace collar and portrait commissioned by lacemaker Elena Kanagy-Loux, a celebrated member of the contemporary lacemaking community. Her piece, made of red silk, was inspired by examples of antique lace that illustrate the Old Testament story of Judith beheading Holofernes.

The second and third floors of the gallery space highlighted lace in early modern Europe, ecclesiastical lace, Spanish and French lace, and the mechanization of lace production leading to postwar fashion and chemical lace. As visitors toured the exhibition, they could access the Tracing Lace Story Tour on their phones. Commissioned by BGC’s department of Public Humanities + Research and created by artists Janani Balasubramanian and James Harrison Monaco, the story tour included original musical compositions and a scientific narrative background.

Bard Graduate Center students served as gallery educators on weekly tours of the exhibition. In addition, a verbal description tour titled “Lace Speaks!” was offered for visitors with low or impaired vision.

On the weekends, the fourth floor of the gallery was activated by the lacemakers of the Brooklyn Lace Guild. A rotating cast of seventeen members of the guild shared their expertise in the craft with visitors of the gallery. The open studio format became a reason for visitors to return, engaging audiences of all ages. The fourth floor was also home to an interactive micro-exhibition, a kìí sèsó gbélé (we do not dress up beautifully to sit at home), curated by BGC graduate mary adeogun (MA ’22). adeogun produced a podcast of the same name, both of which explored lace in Nigerian history and culture.

Although the exhibition has closed, the Threads of Power experience has continued impact through its online counterpart, created by Cormack and director of Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions Jesse Merandy. The website hosts high-resolution images of many objects featured in the exhibition along with interpretive text written by the curators, as well as the story tour and the podcast.

These various facets of the exhibition illustrated the world of lace to experts in the field and curious visitors alike. Threads of Power received praise from press including Laura Jacobs from the Wall Street Journal who wrote “Handmade lace has been called ‘white gold,’ and the BGC exhibition . . . shows us why.” Apollo magazine’s Eve Kahn concurred, writing that it “dazzlingly conveys not only how wearers of lace climbed social ladders, but also how they financed the careers of the women who stitched it with bleary eyes.” Roberta Smith of the New York Times noted that Threads of Power “gives New York its first in-depth look in nearly forty years at the history of this intricate, fragile, and costly textile.”

Lacemaker Elena Kanagy-Loux at Lace Day beside Judith and Holofernes, a bobbin-lace collar that Bard Graduate Center commissioned her to make for the exhibition. Photo by Maria Baranova.

Praise for Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St.

Gallen

“Handmade lace has been called ‘white gold,’ and the BGC exhibition … shows us why.”

Laura Jacobs, Wall Street Journal

“Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen [is] an enticing exhibition [that] examines this textile’s development and technologies, its economic inequities and its role as status symbol among secular and ecclesiastical elites, as well as its seductive beauty. … Cormack and Majer have edited an extraordinary catalog / history, plainly written yet specialized.”

Roberta Smith, New York Times

“It turns out that some books can, indeed, be judged by their covers: Their exterior beauty can signal an interior of visual and textual pleasures. So it is with the handsomely proportioned, lace-embossed exterior of Threads of Power: Lace From the Textilmuseum St. Gallen at the Bard Graduate Center. Inside, the history of lace is told in about 17 highly focused essays that cover a great deal of cultural, political and economic as well as lace-making history without being overwhelming. It’s a big ongoing saga, made newly comprehensible here with the latest research, clear prose and lots of pictures.”

Roberta Smith, Best Art Books of 2022, New York Times

Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum

St. Gallen “dazzlingly conveys not only how wearers of lace climbed social ladders, but also how they financed the careers of the women who stitched it with bleary eyes.”

Eve Kahn, Apollo

“The Isabel Toledo–designed ensemble worn by Michelle Obama for the 2009 presidential inauguration is ‘one of the exhibition’s standouts.’”

Stephanie Sporn, Architectural Digest / ADPro

“Bard Graduate Center just published this incredibly extensive book that is the first volume of its kind to examine both historical and contemporary lace from around the globe.”

Fashion designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla, CNN’s Best Books of 2022

Threads of Power “offers more than enough to ignite the heart and mind of any lace-lover.”

Yona McDonough, Airmail

Threads of Power curators Michele Majer, Emma Cormack (MA ’18), and Ilona Kos at the exhibition opening.

Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Reciprocal Learning: A BGC Student’s Experience as a Gallery Educator

By Bob Hewis (MA ’24)

When you think of a gallery, you might think of a white, airy space blanketed with a reverent hush, fractured only by the sounds of echoing footsteps and muttered musings. However, ask a Bard Graduate Center gallery educator, and you will soon find that the gallery can be an exciting, bustling, and life-filled space through which a vast spectrum of humanity passes, each person leaving their mark as they do. These are the characteristics of a gallery that draw me into the world of museums: the opportunities they create to inform, entertain, and inspire. It is no surprise, therefore, that I leapt at the chance to become a gallery educator in my first semester at BGC, and the experience has proven more rewarding than I could have thought.

Bob Hewis leading a gallery tour. Photo by Ema Furusho.

If you were lucky enough to visit Bard Graduate Center’s exhibition, Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen, you can imagine what a joy it was for me to immerse myself in the world of lacemaking for three months. I immediately felt part of a collaborative and supportive team of my peers, led by our mentors Andrew Kircher, director of Public Humanities + Research at BGC, and mary adeogun (MA ’22), lead gallery educator, which made deep-diving into the questions and narratives of the exhibition all the more exciting.

We began our journey of unpicking the complex, tangled knots of this exhibition by approaching each floor of the gallery in isolation, giving each other space to throw up queries, problems, and intrigues. I found particularly valuable the acute focus we placed on close-looking or spending time with individual objects and using different lenses to see them in new ways. For example, in a repeat pattern, minute changes might reveal the humanity and creative agency of the lacemaker. The journey was, at every point, slow, intentional, and thoughtful. Revisiting the exhibition with the eye of an educator-in-training brought previously overlooked details and nuances into sharp relief.

The way you speak on a tour is as important as what you are saying. In one helpful workshop with Kircher, we thought about how tour-giving is a kind of performance involving bodily gesture and vocalization. In a series of vocal and movement exercises, we stretched our mouths as wide as they would go and then screwed up our whole face as small as it would go. It was good that we were such a close team because very quickly we had to get used to looking silly in front of one another as we practiced these theatrical techniques for clear annunciation and engaging body presence.

In another workshop, we were fortunate to be joined by Deborah Lutz, an artist and museum educator specializing in verbal description, a technique of describing art in a way that is accessible to people with vision loss or blindness. Lutz was a warm and kind teacher who took us slowly through the process of considering the needs of people with vision loss, thinking about our vocabulary and body position in tours. I was extremely grateful for this experience since I am deeply passionate about the

I am deeply passionate about the potential for museums and galleries to connect with as broad an audience as possible.

potential for museums and galleries to connect with as broad an audience as possible. I will definitely carry this experience with me as I pursue a career in this field.

We thought about the tour content as an essay, in which the “paragraphs” were the objects in the gallery that complicated or furthered our understanding of a given question. My classmate Angela and I took on the question of the relationship between the lace and the lacemaker as the focus of our tours. The Lacemakers’ Studio on the fourth floor of the gallery and the contemporary lace commission by Elena Kanagy-Loux, which opened the exhibition, encouraged me to think about the experience of creating lace and the fact that lacemaking is a living, evolving practice.

Approaching the exhibition through this lens profoundly affected how I experienced the objects on display. When thinking about the time, knowledge, and skill required to create these objects and the deeply personal relationships created with and through these textiles, the laces seemed to lift out from behind their glass cases and become animated. I suddenly saw them as moving, living entities that crystallized hours of labor by anonymous women.

When I started giving my tours, I was less nervous than I expected; I was more excited to bring the visitors on the journey with me and see how their reactions and questions might alter our course. Having delved into the world of lace in a level of detail one could never truly convey in thirty minutes, often the most rewarding moments of the tours were when the mere intricacy of the lace astounded visitors. These moments reminded me of the power objects have in telling their own stories, and each gasp or “Oh my goodness” took me back to the exciting spark I had felt the first time I saw these laces.

Some tours reminded me of the value of gallery educators in making people feel welcomed, seen, and represented in the museum space. One visitor, a Swiss national whose face visibly lit up whenever I mentioned St. Gallen, told me that he was so glad to hear the social history of the production and use of these textiles, which other exhibitions often overlook. In that moment, I realized that the personal connection this visitor had felt with the objects was far more meaningful than all the minute facts and figures I had worried about remembering.

The most important thing I have learned in my experience as a gallery educator is that giving tours offers you the opportunity to learn as much as you teach. The “educating” is truly a two-way process. Galleries are a unique space for this kind of reciprocal learning, a lively environment where the visitors I encountered and our conversations educated me as much as I hopefully educated them.

Iklé Frères and Co., chemical-lace imitation of reticella needle lace in a sample book, St. Gallen, Switzerland, 1900–30. Paper, cardboard, leather, and cotton. Textilmuseum St. Gallen, STI IKL 4. Photo by Michael Rast.

Focus Exhibitions

In spring 2023, the Bard Graduate Center Gallery came to vibrant life with Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest and Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800. These Focus Exhibitions, proposed and led by BGC faculty members and postdoctoral fellows, originated from their research and developed in collaboration with interested students through seminars, workshops, symposia, and “In Focus” courses that proceed from broad issues of conception and definition through the specific challenges of selection, layout, and interpretation of objects in two and three dimensions. Students were involved from genesis through execution and made substantial contributions to each project’s form and content.

Exhibition view of Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest. Photo by Da Ping Luo.

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest

February 17–July 9, 2023

Curated by Hadley Welch Jensen (MA ’13, PhD ’18), Bard Graduate Center and American Museum of Natural History Postdoctoral Fellow in Museum Anthropology (2018–21)

In consultation with Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas (Diné)

Support for Shaped by the Loom was generously provided by Art Bridges

Additional support provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, and other donors to Bard Graduate Center.

Shaped by the Loom was supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Special thanks to the American Museum of Natural History.

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest is an exhibition that grew out of curator Hadley Jensen’s research at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in her role as the Bard Graduate Center / AMNH Postdoctoral Fellow in Museum Anthropology. Over the course of five years, Jensen (MA ’13, PhD ’18) studied a collection of almost three hundred Diné (Navajo) weavings made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were acquired by the museum in 1910 and 1911. Very few of the items in the collection had been on view before the opening of Shaped by the Loom.

From that research, and in consultation with Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas, fifth generation Diné textile artists, Jensen developed an online exhibition and a multisensory gallery experience that would display these textiles in conversation with the work of contemporary Diné artists, emphasizing the ecological, historical, and cosmological contexts in which they were created.

Jensen collaborated with Bard Graduate Center’s director of Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions Jesse Merandy, composer and pianist Connor Chee (Diné), digital artist and printmaker Darby Raymond-Overstreet (Diné), and photographer Rapheal Begay (Diné) to create a space in the exhibition that would immerse visitors in the landscapes of the Navajo Nation, thanks to floor-to-ceiling projections of panoramic imagery featuring sites such as Window Rock, Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley, and Shiprock Pinnacle. These images were accompanied by Chee’s original composition, commissioned for this project by BGC.

Both the gallery and the online exhibitions were organized around the themes of homeland, creation, and cosmology; ecology; dyeing and coloring; knowledge and process; design elements; and value and exchange. The digital exhibition highlights historical and contemporary objects in each theme, as well as essays, interactive features, artist interviews, and the first online catalogue of the Navajo weaving collection at AMNH. Visitors to the gallery exhibition were invited to listen to audio reflections made by fiber artist and weaver Tyrrell Tapaha (Diné) in response to specific items on view; these recordings are also accessible from the online exhibition.

BGC’s department of Public Humanities + Research (PH+R) developed gallery tours for the public and for special groups including members of the College Art Association and for Arts and Minds, a nonprofit group that provides museum-based experiences for people with dementia and their care partners. In addition, PH+R produced an educators’ guide, a resource guide for visitors, and a series of events to enhance the Shaped

by the Loom experience, including a studio visit with Arnold Clifford, Diné ethnobotanist. In fact, many contemporary Diné artists led and participated in these events (see story on p. 90 for more details). As an additional complement to the exhibition, Juliana Fagua Arias and Jessie Mordine Young, members of BGC’s MA class of 2020, produced a podcast series, Fields of the Future: Unraveling the Loom. It features interviews with scholars, artists, and educators working with Indigenous textiles and the textile histories of the southwestern United States and Mexico.

Shaped by the Loom was included on the “T List,” a weekly roundup of recommendations from the New York Times’ design magazine T, and was covered by Forbes, HALI, Selvedge, Shuttle Spindle and Dyepot, Antiques and the Arts Weekly, American Craft Magazine, the Decorative Arts Trust Bulletin, the Navajo Times, Western Art and Architecture, First American Art Magazine, and the podcasts This Week in Art and DRESSED. HALI, an international publication focused on carpets and textiles, called Shaped by the Loom “a sumptuous visual feast” and continued, “Jensen, together with a group of Bard Graduate Center students, has created an accomplished and exciting show supported by an excellent and exhaustive digital exhibition, [whose] essence is the connection between thinking, making and knowing.”

With support from Art Bridges, the exhibition will tour to the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, and the Textile Museum in Washington, DC, in 2023–24.

Installation view of navajo weaving tools in Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest Photo by Da Ping Luo.

January 25, 2023

Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we’re eating, wearing, listening to, or coveting now.

VIEW THIS

Resurfacing Indigenous History Through Navajo Textiles

Left: unidentified Navajo artist, Germantown “eyedazzler” blanket (ca. 1895–1905), courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, 50.1/4400.

Right: Darby Raymond-Overstreet, The Passage, 2019, courtesy of the artist.

By Abigail Glasgow T Contributor

When the curator Hadley Jensen discovered a collection of Navajo weavings at New York’s American Museum of Natural History that had not been seen since 1910, she called on the fifth-generation Navajo, or Diné (as many Navajo people refer to themselves), weavers

Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas. Jensen wanted to create an exhibition around these textiles, and she looked to the sisters for programming guidance, artwork interpretation and educational input throughout the process. These textiles, Pete says, reflect “a time suppressed by scholastic interventions,” when Indigenous people were enslaved in the United States, their land overtaken and weaving styles replaced over time by colonialist patterns. Pete experienced cultural erasure firsthand when, in 1964, she was taken from her family home at age six to attend a boarding school in New Mexico as part of a federal program in which Indigenous students were forced to renounce their culture and often were subjected to violence. Pete and Ornelas remain committed as educators to “connecting lost linkages” for Navajo youth while raising awareness around Indigenous history—and that’s exactly what they’re doing in partnership with Jensen for Shaped by the Loom, an exhibit that will open Feb. 17 at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Featuring contemporary works in conversation with weavings from 1850 to 1910, Shaped by the Loom will emphasize the experience and ingenuity of Navajo weavers then and now. Navajo tapestry weavings will be accompanied by a soundscape by Diné composer and pianist Connor Chee, while wall-size photographs of the Navajo Nation by Raphael Begay will lead visitors to a second-floor exhibition featuring preserved weaving materials like juniper dye, sumac roots, and unwashed wool. The exhibit will also feature a K-through-12 educators’ guide. “We need people to be curious about the Navajo people,” Pete says. “We’re still here, by the grace of our ancestors, and we want the American public to learn our history too.”

We’re still here, by the grace of our ancestors, and we want the American public to learn our history too.

Diné Artists Participate in Shaped by the Loom Opening Events

appreciation for and knowledge of Navajo weaving.

The first of these events, a symposium titled “Ecologies of Making: Knowledge and Process in Navajo Weaving,” took place on the morning of February 17, before the gallery opened to the public, and was followed by an exhibit tour led by project collaborators. According to curator Hadley Jensen (MA ’13, PhD ’18), the symposium established a discourse

From left, Belvin Pete, Hadley Jensen (MA ’13, PhD ’18), Lynda Teller Pete, Barbara Teller Ornelas.

Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest opened at Bard Graduate Center on February 17, 2023. The occasion was the catalyst for a series of events that brought artists and scholars together with Bard Graduate Center students, faculty, and staff, to deepen their

that extended beyond the printed label and provided an opportunity for experts in the field to interact and to explore the ideas, histories, and theories that guided the creation of Shaped by the Loom. In addition to Jensen, speakers included Dr. Peter Whiteley (American Museum of Natural History), Lynda Teller Peter and Barbara Teller Ornelas (Diné textile artists), Wade Campbell (Diné historical archaeologist, Boston University), Larissa Nez (Diné scholar and educator, University of California, Berkeley), and Rapheal Begay (Diné photographer).

After visiting the Shaped by the Loom exhibition, which features several of his photographs, Begay shared the following comments: “Growing up on the reservation, I never thought my childhood home would become a vehicle for creative expression. Let alone for the memories and stories of my family to exist in spaces such as Bard Graduate Center in New York City. When entering the gallery for the first time, I was greeted by Connor Chee’s soundscape and moved to tears as I turned the corner to see the wall-size projection of my grandmother’s sheep within the corral. This was a sentimental and magical moment as my family lost our flock months prior, yet there they were to welcome me to this new space. This being my first visit to the city, my experience reminded me that shighan (my home) is always beneath my feet and k’é (kinship) is found within our surroundings.”

Unidentified Diné/ Navajo artist, Blanket, before 1972. Wool, tapestry weave. Donated by Dr. Isabel Bittinger. Courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, 50.2/ 6775.

Many contemporary Diné artists whose work was included in Shaped by the Loom attended the opening and its associated events, including Begay, Nez, sisters Lynda Teller Pete and Barbara Teller Ornelas, Darby Raymond-Overstreet, and Tyrrell Tapaha. BGC’s Public Humanities + Research department created many opportunities for students and faculty to engage with the artists and exhibition collaborators. The Teller sisters gave a lunch talk and conducted a workshop for gallery educators, as did Nez. Begay and Raymond-Overstreet were guest speakers in a photography class taught by BGC professors Aaron Glass and Drew Thompson. Tapaha recorded audio reflections in response to specific items in the exhibition that visitors can listen to in the gallery and on our companion digital project site.

Several of the participants appreciated the rare opportunity to gather and connect with their colleagues. Raymond-Overstreet said, “The opening for Shaped by the Loom was a joyous occasion that brought together and amplified the voices of Diné artists and scholars. I had such a positive experience and to be able to come together in community to celebrate the show, to hear from everyone who contributed, and to admire the stunning showcase of the selected works from the American Museum of Natural History collection, alongside the beautiful contributions of all the contemporary artists and weavers, all made for an exceptional opening.”

BGC board member Dr. Caryl McFarlane at the opening of Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800

February 17–July 9, 2023

Curated by Deborah L. Krohn, associate professor and chair of academic programs

Support for Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 was generously provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and Joseph S. Piropato.

Additional support provided by Cafaro Foundation, the Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, Suzanne Slesin and Michael Steinberg, and other donors to Bard Graduate Center.

Deborah Krohn and designer Jocelyn Lau at the opening of Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800

Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Occupying the third floor of the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 was the culmination of years of research by curator Deborah L. Krohn. It presented sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuals and handbooks containing instructions for folding table linens and carving meats and fruits alongside exquisite tools used for this purpose. The themes explored in the exhibition included carving manuscripts as objects, the carver as tableside performer, table linen folding, and the carving tools themselves. Together they depicted a rich material culture of the dinner table. The exhibition was accompanied by a beautifully considered catalogue designed by Jocelyn Lau.

The in-gallery experience included digital interactives designed and created by BGC students in Krohn’s fall 2022 “In Focus” course. One interactive brought to life a deck of “carving cards” from the seventeenth century, with each of the four suites of traditional playing cards presenting a different kind of food. The cards displayed recipes and images and diagrams from carving manuals.

Exhibition view of Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800. Photo by Da Ping Luo.

BGC held a symposium on March 31, 2023, in conjunction with Staging the Table. “Instruments of Dining” featured speakers Ivan Day, Molly Taylor-Poleskey, Elizabeth Weinfield, and Evelyn Lincoln. They explored themes of performance around the table, considering English coronation feasts, German court carvers, and musical accompaniments to dining.

Public Humanities + Research planned exhibition-related programs that included “Settings and Sound,” a lecture interwoven with short musical interludes performed on period instruments by the chamber ensemble Sonnambula, and a linen-folding demonstration with virtuoso napkin folder Joan Sallas.

The exhibition generated enthusiasm in the press. Camille Okhio from Elle Decor praised the exhibition for dissecting and celebrating banqueting and dining culture. She said, “Bard Graduate Center’s new show, Staging the Table in Europe, lays out the manifold ways in which entertaining at home really was entertaining. In the center’s historic townhouse setting, artistry of the table is put on full display. . . . Another show like this has not opened in New York for many years. It’s impossibly special.”

Exhibition view of Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800. Photo by Da Ping Luo.

What’s

view of Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800. Photo by Da Ping Luo.

Staging the Table in Europe

1500–1800

at Bard Graduate Center New York City

Oh, how we wish the only times we saw birds fly out of pies wasn’t just on Game of Thrones Centuries ago, a living element to your meal was par for the course— that is if you had the wealth to sustain such pomp. Bard Graduate Center’s new show, Staging the Table in Europe, lays out the manifold ways in which entertaining at home really was entertaining. In the center’s historic townhouse setting, artistry of the table is put on full display. Like a Laila Gohar of early modern Europe, skilled servants referenced manuals (of which several 16th- and 17th-century examples anchor the show) advising on napkin folding, the preparation and presentation of intricate dishes, and the careful carving of meats and fruits. Along with these reference materials are the objects—knives so pretty you would welcome the blade, forks of mother-of-pearl and carved ivory, dinner napkins depicting hunters and elegant steeds, soup tureens in the shape of boars’ heads, and even a damask tablecloth commemorating the English King George I—that together created the fleeting beauty of an evening meal, with visual aids in the form of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings and prints showing banquets well underway. Another show like this has not opened in New York for many years. It’s impossibly special. —Camille

Okhio

Another show like this has not opened in New York for many years. It’s impossibly special.

A Book about Books: Staging the Table Catalogue Marries Substance and Form

Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 opened on February 17, 2023. The exhibition provided a window into the culinary spectacles created during Europe’s early modern period through carving knives, table linen folding, directing table talk, and other kinds of performance. An exhibition catalogue of the same title, written by Bard Graduate Center associate professor and curator Deborah L. Krohn and designed by Jocelyn Lau, has been in demand ever since its debut.

Years in the making, the gallery exhibition and research encompassed several themes—meat and fruit carving, the performance of carving at the table, cutlery and carving tools, linen folding, and tablescapes— to name a few. Illustrated manuscripts were central to Krohn’s research and to understanding the ways in which these practices were disseminated across languages and kitchens in Europe. Krohn had the idea that the design of the exhibition catalogue would reflect the look of the manuscripts from her research. Designer Lau translated Krohn’s research into book form—the catalogue’s typography, page layouts, and image

Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 catalogue. Photo by Da Ping Luo.

Andreas Brettschneider, title page from Giacomo Procacchi, Trincier Oder Vorleg-Buch (Leipzig: Henning Gross the Younger, 1624). Engraving. Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, TX885.P96 1624.

formatting all reflect the ethos of the source material shown in the exhibition. The resulting publication is not only pleasing to the eye, but also meticulously inspired by the pages of the original illustrated manuscripts.

Krohn and Lau began their collaboration on the catalogue in the summer of 2022 with a trip to the New York Academy of Medicine. After researching and working with the original books for years, Krohn wanted Lau to experience the materiality of books for herself. Lau was able to handle and photograph a selection of books from the Academy’s collection, taking note of their layouts, decorative drops (created when the initial letter of a paragraph or page is enlarged and illustrated to make an impact as a design feature), typefaces, and the quality of the paper, its color and feel. She then researched paper stocks that are available today and typefaces that reflected forms from the carving tools that illustrated the publication but could express the characteristics of the original manuscripts.

The Staging the Table exhibition featured the title page from the second edition of Giacomo Procacchi’s Trincier oder Vorlege-Buch. Lau noted that this book had a major typographic influence on the catalogue’s design. Procacchi’s title page includes an engraving of a banquet scene which wraps around a text block in multiple languages. Each language is distinguished by different typefaces printed in contrasting red or black ink, which made the manual legible to people who spoke different languages.

Procacchi’s title page influenced Lau’s design for the Staging the Table catalogue’s cover and chapter openers. She used four different typefaces (ED Daffodil, Jager, Joseleen, and Signifier) on a single page. There are no strict rules in publication design, but using four typefaces would typically be an uncommon approach. Lau’s choice reflects the content of the catalogue, with a deliberate reference to the typography and layouts used in its source material. In Lau’s reimagining of early modern book design, subheaders, figure numbers, footnotes, and quotes within the running text stand boldly in red while the body text is decorated by ligatures. She interjected quotes styled as playful triangular shaped blocks to break up particularly dense passages of text, a common stylistic feature of early modern European publications.

Another feature of Staging the Table’s design is its horizontal layout. The manuscripts used in kitchens and by carvers at the time were shaped this way so that they would lay open with their own weight while the user’s hands were occupied with carving a capon or folding a turkey out of table linens. When the first bound proof of the catalogue arrived, Krohn and Lau tested it to see if it would stay open on its own as the original manuals would have.

During the months leading up to the printing of the book, Krohn and Lau often met in person, and Lau shared new design layouts and various proofs sent from the printers. They discussed the scanned images of the early modern books featured in the catalogue and how to preserve their raw edges and show the texture of the aged paper. For Krohn, having a designer who was as enthusiastic as she was about getting the materiality of the catalogue and its details just right was essential to its success.

Lau and Krohn’s creative rapport resulted in this rigorously designed volume full of considered details that embody Staging the Table’s ideas and research, both in form and content. The catalogue is full of clever nods to the historic books and objects in the exhibition.

Having a designer who was as enthusiastic as [Krohn] was about getting the materiality of the catalogue and its details just right was essential to its success.

Public Humanities + Research

In 2022, Bard Graduate Center welcomed Andrew Kircher as its director of Public Humanities + Research (PH+R). Kircher’s diverse background in production, teaching, and performing arts ensured that BGC programming came back into full swing post-Covid. Kircher launched Tuesday Lunches, wherein BGC faculty, students, fellows, and staff gather for weekly talks by guest speakers, and the Wednesdays @ BGC series, which offers unique events, from an evening of music played on historical instruments by the chamber music ensemble Sonnambula to an interactive lecture with artist Julia Weist, and from a performance-laced lecture with the highly regarded theater ensemble Elevator Repair Service to a wide range of presentations by BGC faculty members and other scholars.

PH+R also continues to work with BGC faculty and curators to develop symposia related to their research and exhibitions. In November, “Making Lace: Global Networks” was held in conjunction with Threads of Power. In the spring, associate professor Freyja Hartzell (MA ’05) convened a Faculty in Focus symposium called “Doll Parts: Playing with Human Likeness.” And the symposia, “Instruments of Dining” and “Ecologies of Making: Knowledge and Process in Navajo Weaving,” were presented in concert with the exhibitions Staging the Table and Shaped by the Loom respectively.

Research Forum with master napkin folder Joan Sallas (left). Photo by Da Ping Luo.

“From Wax to Paper”: The Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century French Decorative

Arts and Culture by Charles Kang

By Bob Hewis (MA ’24)

For the 2022 Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture, Bard Graduate Center had the pleasure of welcoming Charles Kang, curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drawings at the Rijksmuseum. His lecture centered a series of portraits of King Louis XIV of France, created by Antoine Benoist, that highlighted the dialogues among different media in the eighteenth century.

As an aspiring curator myself, I found Kang’s visit to BGC to be immensely inspiring. Kang exuded warmth and cheer throughout his visit with us, and he was more than happy to be approached with questions about life as a curator. The day before his lecture, Kang spoke to the BGC community at a Tuesday Lunch event about his work at the Rijksmuseum and a particular curatorial challenge he faced there.

Hendrik Pothoven, Portrait of a Servant, c. 1780, paper and chalk, Rijksmuseum.

Kang explained that just as he took up his current position, the Rijksmuseum acquired this circa 1780 drawing by Hendrik Pothoven. Pothoven was known to have painted two black servants in the court of the Oranges and what was believed to be a portrait of one of these young men, Willem Frederik Cupido, had already been identified. The tantalizing prospect of naming this portrait as the other, Guan Anthony Sideron, was therefore difficult to resist. Kang, however, faced with the question of what to name this work in the collection revealed a refreshingly self-reflexive approach. Kang did not feel he had enough evidence to comfortably call this a portrait of Sideron, and so he spoke us through his thought process of trying to choose the least charged terms, ultimately landing on the title Portrait of a Servant. In doing so, Kang offered us invaluable insight into the challenges of navigating the many conflicting interests acting on a museum: those of the directors, the donors, the curators, the visitors, and so on. Despite the obvious temptations in making claim to such a grand discovery, Kang made a convincing case for the value of remaining critical of one’s own thinking and of the limits to the arguments one can make with insufficient information. Perhaps what struck me the most was the fact that the Rijksmuseum restricts all of their object labels to seventy words, so it is impossible for Kang to inform the everyday museum visitor of these fascinating and complex debates underpinning the identity of the portrait’s subject. This draws us to the very heart of the question “What is the role of the museum?” and how do the parameters set by institutions help us understand their aims and objectives?

Kang inspired me with his thoughtful insights into what it means to be a curator, the constantly evolving nature of curatorial research, and the care and attention that is required when speaking for people who can no longer speak for themselves.

This draws us to the very heart of the question

“What is the role of the museum?” and how do the parameters set by institutions help us understand their aims and objectives?

Kang presented the Selz Lecture as part of the Wednesdays @ BGC series developed by the newly formed department of Public Humanities + Research. Having written his doctoral thesis at Columbia University on the ways in which the use of wax by eighteenth-century French artists and artisans redefined conceptions of fine art, Kang has long been fascinated by the relationship between wax and other media. We can see this unique approach to drawings and portraiture not as static but as ongoing negotiations of technologies of seeing and representing in Kang’s previous projects, including the 2010 exhibition Works as Progress / Works in Progress: Drawing in 18th- and 19th-Century France, which he co-curated at the Williams College Museum of Art.

The entire lecture centered on one particularly striking wax portrait of the Sun King. This relief portrait made for an imposing presence throughout the talk, difficult to get out of one’s mind both for its peculiarity and for its eerie lifelikeness.

Antoine Benoist, Louis XIV, c. 1705, painted beeswax, glass enamel eye, human hair, white lace, silk, velvet, pins, nails, Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.

Created around 1705, when the king was sixty-eight years old, Benoist’s portrait invites the eye to move over different media—velvet, silk, wax, and even human hair—to create a richly textured impression of the sitter. As Kang began his discussion of this portrayal of the king and of the history of wax as a material used to create likenesses of important individuals, my mind couldn’t help but return again and again to the work of Georges Didi-Huberman.

Writing in 1999, French philosopher and art historian Didi-Huberman meditates on the material properties of wax and the meanings which the material becomes imbued with as a result. He recounts the words of a Sicilian wax-worker who said, “it is marvelous, you can do anything with it . . . It moves.” These simple yet revealing words provide the launching

Antoine Benoist, Portraits de Louis le grand suivant ses âges, 1704, parchment, horn, gilt bronze, wood, glass, Bibliothèque nationale de France.

point for Didi-Huberman to explore the unsettling nature of wax, in all the senses of the word. Wax is “unsettling” in its ability to mimic human flesh: “the material of all resemblances…the unstable material par excellence.” It is also unsettling in the way it physically “moves” in its plasticity, but also in the way it “moves” its viewers emotionally. Its verisimilitude can upset, provoke, or excite. In these various ways, wax emerges as a medium of representation that permits a greater sense of human connection with the image.

In Kang’s lecture, this particular wax portrait also “unsettles” by challenging us to think critically about what message such royal portraits communicated. Kang’s central thesis was that to understand the role of this captivating portrait of King Louis XIV in communicating Benoist’s skill and social standing, it cannot be approached on its own but must be contextualized as one example in Benoist’s long career of depicting the monarch in diverse media. By bringing together various depictions of Louis XIV in paper, wax, and bronze by Benoist, Kang inventively argued that the artist was more interested in positioning himself as a chronicler of the king’s life than in fashioning himself as a highly skilled wax portraitist. Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence that Kang showed us in my opinion was a series of gilt bronze medals produced of Benoist’s portraits of Louis XIV at ten different ages. We should consider the possibility, then, that the power of this portrait was not wrapped up in its materials and techniques but rather in the fact that it illustrated Benoist’s unparalleled access to the king’s likeness at multiple stages across his life.

Bard Graduate Center is grateful for the generous support of the Selz Foundation.

Tuesday Lunches

September 13, 2022

Ilona Kos (Textilmuseum St. Gallen)

September 20, 2022

Hannah Duggan (Bard Graduate Center)

September 27, 2022

Charles Kang (Rijksmuseum)

October 4, 2022

Deborah L. Krohn and Jesse Merandy (Bard Graduate Center)

October 11, 2022

Isabelle Marina Held (Bard Graduate Center)

October 18, 2022

Charisse Pearlina Weston (Bard Graduate Center; artist)

October 25, 2022

Elizabeth Weinfield (Juilliard)

November 1, 2022

Ellen Harlizius-Klück and Annapurna Mamidipudi (PENELOPE Project)

Photo by Amy Estes.

November 8, 2022

Emilie St-Hilaire (Concordia University)

November 15, 2022

Richard Saja (artist)

November 29, 2022

Drew Thompson (Bard Graduate Center)

January 31, 2023

Elizabeth Emery (Montclair State University)

February 7, 2023

Simone Browne (University of Texas at Austin)

February 14, 2023

Michael Chazan (Bard Graduate Center; University of Toronto)

February 21, 2023

Barbara J. Ornelas and Lynda Teller Pete (Diné weavers)

February 28, 2023

Juan Carlos G. Mantilla (Bard Graduate Center; Columbia University)

March 14, 2023

Zun Lee (artist)

March 21, 2023

Karen B. Stern (Bard Graduate Center; Brooklyn College)

March 28, 2023

Ivan Day (food historian)

April 4, 2023

kelli rae adams (Bard Graduate Center; artist)

April 11, 2023

Caroline Hunter (educator and activist)

April 18, 2023

John Finlay (independent scholar)

April 25, 2023

Drew Thompson and Laura Microulis (MA ’96, PhD ’16) (Bard Graduate Center)

May 2, 2023

Janet Catherine Berlo (University of Rochester)

May 9, 2023

Annie Coggan (Bard Graduate Center; Pratt Institute School of Design) Research

Wednesdays @ BGC

September 7, 2022

Good Genes

A lecture performance by Sister Sylvester

September 28, 2022

From Wax to Paper: Antoine Benoist’s Portraits of Louis XIV

A Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture by Charles Kang (Rijksmuseum)

October 12, 2022

Resistance, Not Psychological Damage: Re-Evaluating the Clark Doll Tests

A lecture by Robin Bernstein (Harvard), followed by a conversation with Freyja Hartzell (BGC) and Dominique Jean-Louis (New-York Historical Society)

October 19, 2022

to stall, delay, invert

An artist talk with the Paul and Irene Hollister Fields of the Future Fellow, conceptual artist Charisse Pearlina Weston, followed by a conversation with Queens Museum assistant curator Lindsey Berfond

October 26, 2022

Lace and Music

An evening of music by Elizabeth Weinfield and Elena Araoz

November 2, 2022

Ulatbānsi / Zigzagging

A film screening and conversation with Ellen Harlizius-Klück and Annapurna Mamidipudi

BGC students participate in the inaugural Wednesdays @ BGC event, Good Genes, by Sister Sylvester (center).

Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

November 9, 2022

Therapeutic Play: Caring, Giving, and Being with Dolls

A lecture by Emilie St-Hilaire (Concordia University), followed by a conversation with Freyja Hartzell (BGC)

November 16, 2022

Justice Ginsburg and Her Lace

A performance-laced conversation with Vanessa Friedman (New York Times), Elena Kanagy-Loux (BGC lacemaker-in-residence), and the award-winning theater ensemble Elevator Repair Service

November 30, 2022

Reading The Shape of Time, 60 Years Later

Four perspectives on the seminal text by George Kubler from BGC faculty Meredith B. Linn, François Louis, Aaron Glass, and Drew Thompson, moderated by Joshua Massey and Jeffrey L. Collins

December 7, 2022

Embodied Intelligence and Performing Dolls

A lecture by Heidi Boisvert (University of Florida), followed by a conversation with Freyja Hartzell (BGC)

December 14, 2022

Preserving the Craft of Lacemaking in Contemporary Fashion

A conversation with designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla

January 18, 2023

Eureka, A Lighthouse Play

A performance by Ellie Ga

January 25, 2023

Can Art Be Evidence?

A mock-trial argued by Julia Weist with an introduction by Shannon Mattern (University of Pennsylvania)

February 1, 2023

Military Material Culture

A lecture by Matthew Keagle (PhD ’20; Fort Ticonderoga)

February 8, 2023

Photography and the Surveillance of Blackness

Reflections by Simone Browne (University of Texas at Austin) and American Artist, followed by a conversation with Drew Thompson (BGC)

February 22, 2023

Weaving Stories, in Textiles and Television

An intergenerational conversation with a family of Navajo weavers: Lynda Teller Pete, Barbara Teller Ornelas, and Sierra Teller Ornelas

March 1, 2023

Dyeing with Plants

A lecture by Diné ethnobotanist Arnold Clifford

March 15, 2023

Poetics of Black Sociality

A close reading of Polaroids with Zun Lee and Dawn Lundy Martin (Bard College), followed by a conversation with Drew Thompson (BGC)

March 22, 2023

Vajrabhairava Mandala and Medium Specificity in the Mongol Court

A lecture by Yong Cho (University of California, Riverside)

March 29, 2023

Settings and Sounds

An exploration of early modern dining with food historian Ivan Day and music ensemble Sonnambula

April 12, 2023

The Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement

A lecture by Caroline Hunter, followed by a conversation with Drew Thompson (BGC)

April 19, 2023

China and France in the Intercultural Eighteenth Century

A Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture Duet on Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture with John Finlay and Kristel Smentek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

April 26, 2023

Scenes from Dinétah

An evening of music with Diné composer Connor Chee

May 3, 2023

Not Native American Art? Forgeries, Replicas, and Other Vexed Identities

A lecture by Janet Catherine Berlo (University of Rochester)

May 17, 2023

THE WAY IT WAS: PARIS RESTAURANTS IN THE 1970’S

A screening of the film by Stephen Scher

May 24, 2023

Weaving Worlds

A screening of the film by Bennie Klain

Connor Chee performs his original compositions in Scenes from the Dinétah, a Wednesdays @ BGC event.

Photo by Da Ping Luo.

Research Forums

November 3, 2022

Wolfgang Schäffner (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

November 17, 2022

Yannos Kourayos (Greek Ministry of Culture)

January 19, 2023

Ellie Ga (artist)

February 16, 2023

Joan Sallas (folding artist)

March 2, 2023

Arnold Clifford (botanist)

April 20, 2023

Kristel Smentek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Research Forum with Diné ethnobotanist Arnold Clifford. Photo by Matthew Hintz.

Symposia and Convenings

September 24, 2022

Lace Day

A gathering of contemporary lacemakers

November 18, 2022

Making Lace: Global Networks

A research symposium on historical and contemporary lacemaking traditions around the world

February 17, 2023

Ecologies of Making: Knowledge and Process in Navajo Weaving

A research symposium in conjunction with Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest

March 31, 2023

Instruments of Dining

A research symposium in conjunction with Staging the Table 1500–1800

April 14–15, 2023

New Antiquity VII: Processes of Making

In partnership with Columbia University

April 20–22, 2023

North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium

Spring Symposium 2023

In partnership with Columbia University

April 28, 2023

Doll Parts: Playing with Human Likeness

A Faculty in Focus Symposium

Connor Chee and Raphael Begay at the opening of Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Special Events

July 27, 2022

The Lab for Teen Thinkers Presentations

October 1, November 5, and

December 3, 2022

Drag Story Hour

October 12–13, 2022

Cotsen Textile Traces Global Roundtable: Lacing Around the World and Across Time

Hosted by the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum

March 2, 2023

Enriching the V&A: A Collection of Collections (1862–1914)

The Lee B. Anderson Memorial Lecture by Julius Bryant (Victoria and Albert Museum)

April 25, 2023

Cripping Things in Late Nineteenth-Century Art

The Iris Foundation Awards Lecture by Elizabeth E. Guffey (SUNY Purchase)

May 1, 2023

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds Online

A guided tour of the digital exhibition

Drag Queen Story Hour with Oliver Herface in the Lacemaker’s Studio. Photo by Liz Ligon.

Publications

Bard Graduate Center publishes exhibition catalogues and scholarly books and journals that pertain to material culture, design history, and the decorative arts. Our journals include West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture and Source: Notes in the History of Art. Our book series include Cultural Histories of the Material World and BGC X, which aims to extend the learning period around time-based programming by reflecting the spontaneous alchemy of conversation, performance, and hands-on engagement that occurs at BGC events with artists, makers, scholars, and others.

Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen catalogue. Photo by Bruce M. White.

Published in 2022–23

Exhibition Catalogues

Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen

Edited by Emma Cormack (MA ’18) and Michele Majer

Designed by Laura Grey

Winner of the Association of Art Museum Curators 2023 Award for Excellence

Named one of the Best Art Books of 2022 by Roberta Smith in the New York Times

Named one of the Best Books of 2022 by fashion designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla for CNN

Staging the Table in Europe

1500-1800

By Deborah L. Krohn

Designed by Jocelyn Lau

Cultural Histories of the Material World

André Leroi-Gourhan on Technology, Evolution, and Social Life: A Selection of Texts and Writings from the 1930s to the 1970s

Edited and introduced by Nathan Schlanger (École nationale des chartes, Paris)

Translated by Nils F. Schott

Designed by Laura Grey and Bella Bennett

BGC X

What Is Conservation?

Edited by Peter N. Miller

Designed by Katie Hodge

BGC editorial director

Kat Atkins, art director

Laura Grey, professor emerita Michele Majer, associate curator

Emma Cormack (MA ’18), and assistant professor of practice in writing

Helen Polson at the AAMC 2023 Awards. Photo courtesy of Laura Grey.

Research 117

Threads of Power Catalogue

Honored with AAMC 2023 Award for Excellence

In late May 2023, the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) honored the Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen catalogue with a 2023 Award of Excellence in publication.

The AAMC’s Awards of Excellence are the only accolades by which curators directly honor their colleagues. This year, nearly 175 nominations were submitted and reviewed by jurors from around the world. Threads of Power was among eleven projects that were honored for original curatorial content that addresses issues of social justice, access, diversity, and inclusion.

Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen catalogue.

Photo by Da Ping Luo.

Emma Cormack (associate curator, MA ’18) and Michele Majer (professor emerita) edited the catalogue and co-curated the exhibition of the same name with Ilona Kos of the Textilmuseum St. Gallen. Cormack reflected, “Michele and I were truly honored by the recognition Threads of Power received at this year’s AAMC conference, and we were proud to be named alongside other awardees for publications, exhibitions, and digital projects. Celebrating Threads of Power again with our talented publications team of Laura Grey, Alexis Mucha (MA ’04), Kat Atkins, and Helen Polson as well as other current and former BGC colleagues was wonderful. The timing of this award was especially nice—we had just sent the book off for a second print run!”

Michele Majer and Emma Cormack accept the Association of Art Museum Curators Award of Excellence.

Photo by Liz Ligon.

Horowitz Book Prize

Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980. Photo by Bruce M.

Each year, Bard Graduate Center awards the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize to a book that demonstrates scholarly excellence and commitment to cross-disciplinary conversation in decorative arts, design history, or material culture of the Americas.

In fall 2022, BGC announced that Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America: Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980, edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw (McGill-Queens University Press), had won the award for books published in 2021.

The publication resulted from a research process involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors and explores how close, collaborative looking can discern the traces of contact, exchange, and movement of objects and give them a life and political power in complex cross-cultural histories.

In making the award, the members of the selection committee for the Horowitz Book Prize wrote, “The volume’s editors . . . and authors bring diverse disciplinary and community knowledges to the material culture of northern North America to draw out complex, dynamic histories of Indigeneity and settler colonialism. Through their creative and provocative research into the North, its authors contribute to restoring appreciation of the arts, technologies, and agencies of peoples indigenous to a region long characterized through imperial eyes as barren and empty.”

White

Joshua Massey (MA ’23) and visitor services coordinator Olivia Nathan welcome guests to the BGC Gallery. Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Fields of the Future Institute

The Fields of the Future Institute (FFI) aims to expand the sources, questions, practices, perspectives, practitioners, and audiences of interdisciplinary humanities scholarship. It operates through programming initiatives that explore how our intellectual landscape should change by posing new questions, suggesting new ways to answer old questions, and bringing new voices into the scholarly conversation. FFI explicitly aims to bring more Black, Indigenous, and people of color to the fields of decorative arts, design history, and material culture and to elevate their voices.

Since its founding in 1993, BGC has been focused on graduate training. With the launch of the Fields of the Future Institute in 2021, it added summer programs for undergraduates. They offer young people early access to graduate-level resources and provide opportunities to gain skills in the public humanities. In addition to enabling and inspiring the next generation of thinkers, FFI seeks to draw in scholars who are asking new questions and changing the way we think about the material world through its podcast, fellowships, and a student and alumni fund to support projects that align with the values of the FFI.

PhD candidate David Gassett with students in the HBCU Alliance of Museums and Art Galleries / BGC summer course. Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Partnership with the HBCU Alliance of Museums and Art Galleries

In 2021, Bard Graduate Center and the Alliance of HBCU Museums and Galleries (the Alliance), an organization comprised of fourteen Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) that have museums or art galleries, established a partnership to offer HBCU students and recent graduates a one-week intensive course at BGC in alternating summers.

The Alliance sees such programs as one way it can contribute to the diversification of the museum and art world. It established its first weeklong intensive with the Princeton University Art Museum in 2019, and now has similar programs with three other institutions, including BGC. The intensives expose participants to a variety of museum careers and opportunities and hone their skills in art analysis and academic research. This summer’s programs focused on archival and curatorial practice, conservation, and the topic offered by BGC—the use of digital tools in exhibition making.

Four HBCU students participated in the course, taught by Dean Peter N. Miller and director of Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions Jesse Merandy. The program was modeled on the digital literacy boot camp Merandy leads each fall for BGC’s incoming MA and PhD students. Participants learned how exhibitions can present arguments to the public in an accessible way and how those ideas can be presented online using WordPress and SketchUp software. With support from the Kress Foundation, students in the program received travel to and from New York, housing at Bard Hall, a stipend, meals, and an unlimited MetroCard.

Students in the HBCU Alliance of Museums and Art Galleries / BGC summer course. Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

2023 Summer School for Undergraduates

Excavating the Empire City: An Introduction to the Historical Archaeology of New York City

In 2021, Bard Graduate Center launched a summer school for undergraduate students, offering participants early access to graduate-level training to attract more young scholars to the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. The title of the summer 2023 course was “Excavating the Empire City: An Introduction to the Historical Archaeology of New York City,” modeled after a BGC course taught by assistant professor Meredith B. Linn.

While New York City is not typically considered a destination for archaeology, local historical archaeological studies since the 1970s have produced a rich array of material traces. “Excavating the Empire City” presented a new understanding of the city’s history from its days as a Dutch colony into the twentieth century. Linn led the two-week summer course, co-teaching with BGC PhD candidate Tova Kadish.

BGC Summer School for Undergraduates students visit the New York City Archaeological Repository.

Photo by Brayden Heath.

The critical analysis of material evidence was a key component of the course, framed by the following questions: What can historical archaeology reveal about the past that we wouldn’t know by any other means? How do we come to our assumptions of the past? How do issues of the past repeat or continue into the present? The course investigated to what extent material traces can relate people’s lives “on the ground” to larger historical trends, focusing especially on populations that have been neglected or misrepresented in written histories.

Seminar discussions, including object handling and research presentations, structured half of the course. After a brief introduction to archaeological methods and ethics, the content progressed into a chronologically and thematically organized curriculum. The connection of the past to the present was a throughline for all topics, which included colonization; enslavement and freedom; urbanization, environmental change, and health; middle-class ideology; immigration; working-class neighborhoods and the intersection of class-, race- or ethnic-, and gender-based discrimination; and community formation.

Guided visits to archaeological sites and museums were a second important component of instruction. Students visited the New York Archaeological Repository and chose an object from the collection to research. The Center for Archaeology at Columbia University offered students an opportunity to see Indigenous archaeological material excavated from the city. The African Burial Ground National Monument facilitated conversation on how historical archaeology of cultural resources should be communicated to the public, particularly with descendent communities. Students also visited Seneca Village, the site of a community of freed African Americans and Irish immigrants that was displaced to create Central Park. The Merchant’s House Museum modeled a rich interpretation of uppermiddle-class living in nineteenth-century New York, helping students visualize how the interpretive process can transform archaeological fragments into a fully furnished room.

According to Linn, it was “rewarding to work with an enthusiastic group of emerging scholars and introduce them to the historical archaeology of this future-oriented city.”

What can historical archaeology reveal about the past that we wouldn’t know by any other means?

Fellowships

The fellowship programs for researchers and artists at Bard Graduate Center are designed to promote research in the areas of decorative arts, design history, and material culture.

Fields of the Future fellowships promote diversity and inclusion in the advanced study of the material world. These fellowships for scholars and artists reflect BGC’s commitment to explore and expand the sources, techniques, voices, and questions of interdisciplinary humanities scholarship from different perspectives.

Visiting fellowships provide scholars from university, museum, and independent backgrounds who have already secured funding with non-stipendiary support, including workspace, research collections access, and the opportunity to join dynamic, intellectual, and scholarly community at BGC and in New York City.

Director of Public Humanities + Research Andrew Kircher with Fields of the Future Fellows kelli rae adams and Juan Carlos G. Mantilla. Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

2022–23 Fellows

Charisse Pearlina Weston Paul and Irene Hollister Fields of the Future Research Fellow Artist

kelli rae adams Fields of the Future Fellow Artist

Michael Chazan Visiting Fellow University of Toronto

Annie Coggan Lee B. Anderson Fields of the Future Fellow Pratt Institute School of Design

Isabelle Marina Held Visiting Fellow

Juan Carlos G. Mantilla Fields of the Future Fellow Columbia University

Karen B. Stern Visiting Fellow Brooklyn College

A Furniture Designer, a Sailor, and a Book Converge in Annie Coggan’s Research

In 2022–23, Bard Graduate Center expanded its Fields of the Future Fellowships by recruiting visual and performance artists whose research could bring diversity to the field of material culture. Annie Coggan, associate professor of interior design at Pratt Institute and a principal at the multi-scale design firm Chairs and Buildings Studio, was selected to be the 2023 Lee B. Anderson Fellow. Her research at BGC focused on Robert Manwaring, an eighteenth-century furniture designer and cabinetmaker based in London, and culminated in a small exhibition of the sketches and models of Manwaring’s designs she completed during her fellowship.

Annie Coggan’s Making Manwaring display. Photo by Heather Topcik.

Page from Houshold [sic] Furniture In Genteel Taste for the Year 1763 London: Printed for Robt. Sayer …, 1763. Bard Graduate Center Special Collections.

Manwaring, a Chippendale contemporary, was particularly well known for his chairs. He made distinctive sketches that illustrated two possible styles for each of the chair’s design elements, such as the legs and the back, within the drawing of a single chair. Coggan was drawn to the practicality, understanding of materials, and down-to-earth style reflected in Manwaring’s sketches.

Little could Coggan have known when she began her fellowship that her investigations would take her down a rabbit hole that connected Manwaring, a bootstrapping furniture designer, to James Philips, a sailor eager to advance his knowledge and understanding of the world, through the pages of a rare book housed in the BGC library. Nor could she have anticipated that her efforts to improve her understanding of Manwaring would find a kind of resonance with Philips’s efforts to improve himself.

When Coggan embarked on her research, she found a re-bound edition of Manwaring’s designs in the BGC stacks. It was published in 1763, without a formal title, and it is one of three extant copies of the book. The others are in the archives of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While in BGC’s possession, the volume had not had much life off the shelves, perhaps because of the flurry of marginalia that marked up many of its pages. At some point on its journey from publication to its current home in the BGC Library, the book passed through Philips’s hands. In the pages’ margins, and sometimes overlapping with the etchings themselves, he had written about his life as a seaman, taught himself mathematics, and pondered philosophical questions.

Soon after Coggan began leafing through the pages of the book, she became obsessed with deciphering Philips’s handwriting. With the help of Anna Helgeson, former associate director of the library, Coggan found records of Philips in Pembrokeshire parish in Wales. By painstakingly decoding his penmanship, she discovered that he traveled aboard a ship bound for the West Indies in 1777 and 1778, and that was likely when he used the book’s pages to provide the paper he needed for his practice.

Philips seemed not to have any interest in Manwaring’s illustrations, but he used the space between them to diligently transcribe word problems from Thomas Dilworth’s Schoolmaster’s Assistant, often substituting names and objects in the problems for people and situations relevant to his own life. In one instance, he posed the question “What is the devil?” before returning to a word problem on the very same page. Through the book’s materiality, Coggan uncovered a narrative of the life of John Philips, a cerebral fellow with a desire to better his occupational standing through math.

Manwaring and Philips were bound together only within the pages of this book. While Coggan ruminated on their unwitting and asynchronous connection, she sketched and created models of the Manwaring designs and detailed her near daily efforts online using the hashtag #beingmanwaring. This quotidian and endurance aspect of Coggan’s practice intuitively reflected Philips’s daily work of self-improvement and exploration.

Photos from Annie Coggan's Instagram account, @anniecoggan.

With the tools in BGC’s Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions department, Coggan ultimately created a small-scale 3D printed Manwaring chair. She also used a CNC router (a computer controlled cutting machine designed to carve out complex shapes from wood, plastics, foam, and some metals) to make a life-scale set of chairs and a footstool as a representation of his drawings. Coggan’s work culminated in a display of the drawings and models she made during her fellowship in the BGC Library. While Manwaring’s furniture designs and distinctive style of illustrations formed the heart of her research, the fortuitous meeting of Manwaring and Philips reflected in a rare book gave it a special pulse.

Annie Coggan’s Fields of the Future Fellowship was generously funded by the Lee B. Anderson Memorial Foundation.

Annie Coggan’s Making Manwaring display. Photo by Heather Topcik.

Pratt Fellows in Research Collections and Graphic Design

In the past two years, the departments of research collections and marketing, communications, and design have established fellowships in collaboration with Pratt Institute. The fellowships seek to promote diversity and inclusion in their respective fields and to provide mentorship to emerging professionals.

Vic Panata was Bard Graduate Center’s first library fellow in the Department of Research Collections. From fall 2021 through spring 2023, while they were earning their master’s degree in library and information science at Pratt, Vic worked closely with Heather Topcik, director of research collections, and Anna Helgeson, associate director of BGC’s library, immersing themselves in the daily practices of the department.

BGC designer Jocelyn Lau (right) reviews designs created by Pratt fellow Jacklyn Wang. Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

They processed periodicals and subscriptions and contributed to the maintenance of shifting collections. Vic also worked with Barb Elam, digital collections metadata librarian and Study Collection manager, gaining hands-on experience cataloging and identifying objects that were gifted to BGC and taking photographs of different textiles and other unconventional materials. Engaging with these objects created opportunities for them to speak and ask questions about where these objects came from and how they were being processed and labeled.

Jacklyn Wang, senior communications design major at Pratt, was selected as the pioneer of the design fellowship program. The one-year fellowship ran from September 2022 until August 2023. Wang was always curious about the relationship between curators and designers and their collaborative work executing an exhibition and producing the visual materials to support its ideas. This interest led her to apply for the position. BGC’s art director Laura Grey stated that “Wang’s refined design sensibility, interest in the museum world, and facility with motion design made her stand out” among an impressive pool of applicants.

Wang left her mark at BGC with the many printed pieces she designed to promote the Wednesdays @ BGC and Tuesday Lunches. She worked closely with designer Jocelyn Lau to create materials and graphics that are used on BGC’s campus and online—from event posters to gallery takeaway cards to social media posts. The fellowship gave her an understanding of designing for an institution with an existing design identity, learning best typesetting practices, adhering to style guides, and honing her technical skills with programs in the Adobe Suite.

Vic Panata, inaugural library fellow. Photo by Kathleen Ma.

Department of Research Collections

The Bard Graduate Center Department of Research Collections comprises the library, Study Collection, and the institutional archives, representing a comprehensive range of diverse research resources across all media in support of the advanced scholarly study of material culture. Bringing these three entities together aligns the institution’s collection with its approach to research, which challenges traditional boundaries, centers the object, and emphasizes interdisciplinarity.

The Department of Research Collections: Sebastian Moya, Anna Helgeson, Mike Satalof, Barb Elam, Abigail Walker, Vic Panata, and Heather Topcik. Photo by Maggie Walter.

In the 2022–23 academic year, Heather Topcik and the Department of Research Collections at Bard Graduate Center made important advances in their efforts to bring all BGC holdings together into one research environment. Their top priority was integrating objects from the BGC Study Collection into the institution’s bespoke catalog, FOLIO. This allows objects in the collection to be discovered along with books and articles on the same topic. For example, a FOLIO search for the term “majolica” now returns 391 books, journals, pamphlets, qualifying papers, dissertations, and videos; 7,680 articles aggregated from hundreds of scholarly databases; and nineteen images of objects in BGC’s Study Collection. Students or faculty members who want to use the objects that show up in a search can come to the library’s reference desk or make an appointment with Barb Elam, digital collections metadata librarian and Study Collection manager.

Topcik doesn’t know of another library that is doing this kind of integration in quite the same way. She said, “I see this as a very unique approach to collections, as a kind of materials library that is fully integrated with our more traditional research materials: the books, periodicals and databases.” The ability to take this approach is one of the things she loves about BGC’s scale. According to Topcik, “There are pros and cons to being a small place. One of the pros is that you can take a project like this and figure it out. There has been a lot of growth and activity in the Study Collection as we have accessioned new objects and installed shelving that allows for small pop-up exhibitions in a laboratory style. Faculty have also begun using the Collection more and more for teaching.”

Mike Satalof, BGC’s archivist and digital preservation specialist, has made significant progress over the course of the past year in processing the exhibition archives of BGC curators, such as the materials that founder

I see this as a very unique approach to collections, as a kind of materials library that is fully integrated with our more traditional research materials: the books, periodicals and databases.

and director Susan Weber gathered in the research phase for her exhibition John Lockwood Kipling: Arts & Crafts in the Punjab and London. Topcik described Satalof’s work as a collaboration with the curators to determine the best way of making their materials useful. She explained, “By working directly with curators on the archival process, Mike is able to implement best practices in terms of preservation and make sure that valuable resources are surfaced for future researchers.” In addition, Satalof and BGC’s content manager Maggie Walter are working to present a comprehensive history of the institution’s exhibitions on its website. So far they have added descriptions and photographs to the individual web pages for many of BGC’s early exhibitions, and soon they will add checklists and press clippings as well. Topcik envisions a time when the BGC Archives will also return results in a Folio search.

It has been a year of exponential growth for BGC’s Department of Research Collections, and several new projects on the horizon for the coming year promise to further deepen the value of this priceless resource to the institution’s scholars and students.

Research services

librarian Abigail Walker introduces students in the Summer School for Undergraduates to the BGC Library. Photo by Brayden Heath.

A Deeper Dive: Growing the Bard Graduate Center Archives

By Mackensie Griffin (MA ’24)

In 2005, librarian Heather Topcik began tilling the soil for the creation of the Bard Graduate Center archives. Looking back on the years after she was hired in 2001, she recalled, “From my perspective in the library, BGC was producing a wide variety of content around both exhibitions, academic programs and events, but there was no system in place to preserve and document the history of our young but quickly growing institution. In the first decade, it seemed too soon to create an archive, so the library just started to collect as much ephemera as we could from each department.” For many years, this vertical file containing exhibition brochures and gallery posters lived in the library’s lower level as an informal record of BGC history. However, in the months leading up to the celebration of BGC’s twentieth anniversary in 2013, the need for a more robust and easily accessible archive became increasingly evident when locating specific documentary materials to illustrate this important milestone proved to be a challenge.

Barb Elam, digital collections metadata librarian and Study Collection manager examining a publication in the Object Lab.

That same year, Mike Satalof was hired as a digital imaging specialist in the BGC’s Visual Media Resources department. With a library degree in archives, he had experience cataloging and digitizing materials at the Brooklyn Historical Society and New-York Historical Society, and Topcik was able to expand his position to help address the deteriorating images in BGC’s early exhibition files. Satalof recalled, “If you wanted to see the installation views from Susan Weber’s first exhibition, you had to dig the slides out of Bard Hall, dust them off, and scan them in a slide scanner, which is not great for preservation or for access.” The library proposed a pilot project to rehouse and digitize all of the deteriorating gallery images before they were permanently lost. Satalof completed that project and went on to work closely with Nina Stritzler-Levine, former gallery director and current professor of curatorial practice, to establish archival practices that would adhere to the Society of American Archivists’ standards and also meet BGC’s specific needs. At the same time, all of the Gallery’s past exhibition files were collected and moved to a dedicated space at Bard Hall to await processing.

In 2020, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic brought this work to a sudden halt. However, ultimately, the shutdown marked a turning point for BGC’s archival initiative. With the gallery closed, making exhibition content accessible on the internet became crucial, leading to an increased institutional enthusiasm for digital archiving. Additionally, it gave BGC staff the opportunity to revisit past exhibitions leading

Bard Graduate Center Archives.

Photo by Mike Satalof.

associate curator Emma Cormack (MA ’18) and director of Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions Jesse Merandy to launch the Exhibition Archive Project—an initiative to preserve past and future exhibitions in website form. Satalof consulted on this project, and when things were back up and running again, he was promoted to a new position at BGC: archivist and digital preservation specialist.

With an experienced archivist now firmly embedded, Topcik will be able to realize the vision she had for the archives back in 2005. She described BGC’s archival process as “tending to our assets.” As a non-collecting institution (although it has formed a small, but growing, Study Collection over the past ten years), some of Bard Graduate Center’s most important assets are the research and conversations that professors, curators, designers, students, and fellows produce when putting together exhibitions. To “make research visible,” as Dean Peter N. Miller puts it, Satalof gets involved in the exhibition-making process early: archiving email chains, Google docs, and tracking the development of exhibition themes through planning notes and loan research. In order to archive the research that went into Conserving Active Matter, an exhibition that closed shortly after he resumed working at BGC, Satalof worked closely with curator Soon Kai Poh. This was a particularly rewarding collaboration between curator and archivist due to Poh’s interest in digital conservation, a theme he highlighted in the exhibition.

Satalof is still in the thick of processing and archiving a variety of materials from the eighty-plus exhibitions BGC has launched since its inception, a task he will be working on for some time. He said, “Part of the challenge of trying to process this thirty-year backlog, much of which hasn’t been cataloged and preserved, balancing the analog material from the early years and the recent born-digital material, which in a way faces greater risks of a different kind due to the impermanence of the web.” Recent digital material includes qualifying projects created by second-year MA students and online exhibitions that require regular maintenance and care to prevent them from malfunctioning if software goes out of date. In addition, he is putting together an overview of Bard Graduate Center’s exhibition history, which he expects to launch on the BGC website early next year. Providing a baseline for the public and researchers to learn about the entirety of BGC’s exhibition history, it will include checklists, object highlights, installation images, and press coverage. As Topcik and Satalof diligently tend to the archives, they try to be as self-reflective as possible, acknowledging the implicit bias of any archivist and rejecting the archaic notion that archives are neutral. Moving forward, they hope to broaden their scope by incorporating the voices of students and the community.

Fundraising and Special Events

Bard Graduate Center is grateful for the generous donors who continue to support the programming, research, publications, exhibitions, and student activity that makes our institution what it is today.

Between July 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023, BGC received more than $3.2 million in contributions from more than 230 private and public sources. Resources provided by these individuals, corporations, and foundations were combined with income from endowed funds and other revenue to provide the institution with the stability and the opportunity to deliver the valuable programs detailed in this publication.

Fundraising and Special Events 141

Charm bracelet. Bard Graduate Center Study Collection, Gift of Susan M. Yecies.

Photo by Barb Elam.

Divine Bonga and Claudio Zemp of Switzerland Tourism attend the opening of Threads of Power. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

BGC Resources in Use

Where BGC Resources Come From

Endowed Funds 61.8%

Designated and general purpose endowments

Contributions and Special Events 19.7%

Contributed income from alumni, friends, foundations, and corporations; government grants; and proceeds from the annual Iris Foundation Awards luncheon and other special events

Tuition and Fees 9.3%

Tuition; application, housing, and usage fees

Other Earned Revenue

9.2%

Sales of publications and merchandise; facilities and residential rentals

Endowed Funds

Contributions and Special Events

Tuition and Fees

Other Earned Revenue

What BGC Resources Are Used For Academic Programs

28.5%

Faculty and academic staff, curriculum expenses, programs, and independent research

Administration and Fundraising 20.2% Director’s office, development, human resources, and finance and administration

General Management

and Operations 16.1%

Maintenance, security, technology, website, design, and finance

Gallery 13.4%

Exhibition research, staff, production, and publications

Financial Aid 10.4%

Tuition assistance, stipends, and work study

Public Programs 4.8%

Research events, fellowships, continuing education, and outreach

Residence Hall 3.7%

Management and upkeep of Bard Hall

Publications: 2.9%

Catalogues, monographs, and journals

Academic Programs

Administration and Fundraising

General Management and Operations

Gallery Financial Aid

Public Programs

Residence Hall

Publications

Students Give Thanks for Scholarships and Financial Aid

Since its founding, Bard Graduate Center has offered scholarships and fellowship packages to its students. Thanks to the generous support from a dedicated community of individuals, foundations, and corporations, Bard Graduate Center was able to support 31 master’s students and 25 PhD students with more than $1.6 million in tuition assistance and stipends. The true value of these scholarships is reflected in the words of the students themselves:

Photo courtesy of Anna Riley.

“Without the financial support provided by [this] fellowship, my participation in the BGC master’s program would not have been possible. I cannot express enough how grateful I am. The MA program was truly all that I hoped for—rigorous and supportive, focused and expansive.”

Anna Riley (MA ’23)

Photo by Liz Ligon.

“Close looking and detailed investigation of real-life objects is precisely the reason I wanted to come to Bard Graduate Center, and I’m so glad that I now have these unique opportunities to use the archival resources around us to their full potential. I am also excited to be able to take a more active role in the wider academic community.”

Bob Hewis (MA ’24)

“With the abundant class choices provided at BGC, I am building my knowledge of decorative arts and am refining my ideas for studying lacquerware and other painted surfaces as a medium to connect the trade and cultural exchange among East Asia, Europe, America, and the Islamic world. I hope that one day I will be in a position to pay it forward and provide the same support and encouragement to others.”

Luli Zou (MA ’24)

“My time [at BGC has been] so full and enriching . . . I truly believe the experiences and skills I am gaining will prepare me for a career in museums or academia, and I intend to continue my studies with a PhD after graduation.”

Angela Crenshaw (MA ’24)

Photo courtesy of Luli Zou.

Photo by Liz Ligon.

Donor Profile: Lenore G. Tawney Foundation

In 2023, the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation established an endowed scholarship at Bard Graduate Center to support a student pursuing research in textiles history. It is a gift that honors the Foundation’s long relationship with Bard Graduate Center and its students, spanning back to its earliest days.

Lenore Tawney (1907–2007) was an American artist known for her groundbreaking work in textiles as well as for her drawings, collages, and assemblages. Tawney’s innovative work was at the vanguard of what came to be called fiber art during the second half of the twentieth century. Her groundbreaking sculptural weavings range from intimate to monumental in scale and reflect both the originality of her vision and her sensitivity to the expressive potential of the medium.

Lenore Tawney in her Chicago studio, 1957. Photo: Aaron Siskind. Courtesy, Lenore G. Tawney Foundation

Tawney established her foundation in 1989 for charitable and educational purposes, and she endowed it with her life’s resources, artistic and financial. The Foundation supports the visual arts with a focus on craft media, including fiber art. Its broad aim is to increase public access to and knowledge about the visual arts and to support learning opportunities for emerging artists.

Amy Estes: Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today. In preparation for this conversation, I did some research about Lenore Tawney, and she sounds like an amazing person. I’m sorry that I didn’t know of her work until now.

Kathleen Mangan: She was an amazing person, Amy, and I feel so fortunate to have known her well for the last twenty years of her life. Recognition of her work has grown, especially over the past ten years. She is still an underrecognized artist, but it’s been my experience that when people become more acquainted with her work, with what she did and when she did it, it opens up new appreciation.

AE: She was really a trailblazer, wasn’t she?

KM: Very much so. That brings to mind something that the artist Jack Youngerman said when Glenn Adamson interviewed him for the major biographical essay published in Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe, in conjunction with Tawney’s 2019 retrospective at the

John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Youngerman knew Tawney from their Coenties Slip days in the late 1950s. He said that all of the artists working there were outliers, but even among this community of artists, people didn’t really understand what she was doing, and perhaps because she was a weaver, there wasn’t the same level of appreciation [as for people practicing other art forms]. In retrospect, Youngerman thought Lenore was the greatest outlier of them all. That admiration took time to grow.

AE: And she only came to New York and began her art career at the age of fifty?

KM: Yes, she reestablished herself as an artist and produced this extraordinary body of work during the remaining fifty years of her life.

AE: I find that both aspirational and inspirational.

Recently, Amy Estes, director of marketing and communications at Bard Graduate Center, sat down with Kathleen Mangan, an independent curator and executive director of the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, to learn more about Tawney’s life and work and the new scholarship established in her name. Fundraising and Special Events 147

KM: She broke ground as an artist and as a woman, and also by establishing her foundation as early as she did, in 1989, with the idea

that it would inherit her work and her assets when she passed away. At that time, there were certainly artist-endowed foundations being established, but not so many by women artists. She had a conviction, a belief in herself and her work, and that was the motivating force that led her to establish the foundation. She was the president, and it only existed as an entity on paper for a few years. The board formed in the mid-1990s, and one of the board members, Paul J. Smith (director emeritus of the American Craft Museum, now the Museum of Arts and Design, who passed away in 2020), asked a series of questions that he hoped would guide us when Lenore was no longer present. He asked her to outline her priorities for the foundation. Because we are a small foundation, there is a limit to what we can do, and it must be focused in a way that aligns with her intentions. She was very clear about what she did and did not want the foundation to do with its resources, and her top priority was the establishment of scholarships for artists and young scholars.

AE: How did you become familiar with Bard Graduate Center?

KM: The board member I mentioned, Paul Smith, was already connected with BGC, and he and I invited associate professor Catherine Whalen to bring her class to Lenore’s loft. It was wonderful because nothing had been touched, so the students were able to have a real studio visit and see that environment. It was a

4,000-square-foot loft that created a very otherworldly experience, stepping off the elevator and into that space with her artworks and all of the collections that she had amassed over her lifetime. It was at that point that we began discussions with Catherine about the possibility of BGC students working with us to help bring some clarity to this mass of material. We advertised for a summer intern, and we had such an enthusiastic response that we actually had three BGC MA students from the class of 2011 work with us—Lauren McDaniel, Rebecca Klassen, and Kate Fox—and they all stayed for a couple of years.

AE: Wow, they were deeply invested in the project.

KM: Yes, and we have a functioning archive as a result of their efforts.

Lauren McDaniel had a background in library sciences, and she did an extraordinary job of pulling Lenore’s personal papers into coherence, an experience she recently wrote up. (McDaniel’s article, “Archiving in the Clouds: Processing the Lenore Tawney Collection,” was published by Los Angeles Archivists Collective.) That touched me very much.

Rebecca Klassen worked on Lenore’s collection of black-and-white archival photographs, which is so important to documenting her early works and early years. And Kate Fox helped us pull all of the other information we had into a database. It was an incredible experience, and I am still in touch with all three of them.

AE: How fabulous that they had such an impact!

KM: Through that connection, I started thinking that down the line, it would be wonderful to establish a scholarship at BGC. We initially established several scholarships at art schools for students working in textiles. And then Lenore’s wishes were that we would support other kinds of projects like exhibitions, catalogues, and so forth. In more recent years, especially during the pandemic, arts organizations have really needed help to get through challenging times, so the Foundation has supported them. Hopefully, we’ve gotten through most of that, and we have begun looking toward the future and thinking, “What did Lenore really task us to do with our assets?”

It was time to return to her desire to fund scholarships, and the fund

we have endowed at BGC is the first new scholarship that we have established. I thought of it as a way of paying forward what those BGC students did for us in establishing this archive.

AE: One thing that I have noticed about students of textile arts at BGC: so often, they are both scholars and makers. It seems like the perfect intersection of Tawney’s desire to support practicing artists and share the history of the field.

KM: I am very proud to be encouraging future scholarship in the field.

AE: And we at BGC are so thankful for your support of our students! As Benjamin Krevolin, BGC’s chief advancement officer, said, it is a real honor to have a bit of the  Tawney legacy here at BGC.

Lenore Tawney’s studio, 1985. Photo: Paul J. Smith. Courtesy, Lenore G. Tawney Foundation

2023 Iris Foundation Awards Celebrate Excellence in the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture

The Iris Foundation Awards were created in 1997 to recognize scholars, patrons, and professionals who have made outstanding contributions to the study and appreciation of the decorative arts and thereby help to sustain the cultural heritage of our world. The awards are named for Bard Graduate Center founder and director Susan Weber’s mother, Iris Weber. Proceeds from the Iris Foundation Awards Luncheon help support scholarships and tuition assistance programs for BGC students.

The 26th annual Iris Foundation Awards were held on April 26, 2023, at the Cosmopolitan Club. The event recognized Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu (outstanding patrons), Meredith Chilton, C.M. (outstanding lifetime achievement), Elizabeth E. Guffey (outstanding mid-career scholar), and Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman, R & Company (outstanding dealers), and it raised more than $200,000 to support BGC student scholarships.

Daniel Chen, Dr. Vanessa Sigalas, BGC board member Michele Beiny Harkins, and Dr. Karine Tsoumis at the 2023 Iris Foundation Awards. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

About the Recipients

Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu Outstanding Patrons

Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu are longtime patrons of the arts both in New York and in Europe. The numerous organizations they support include Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò at New York University, CIMA (Center for Italian Modern Art), MANITOGA / The Russel Wright Design Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fattoria di Celle–Collezione Gori, ICA Milano, Collezione Danna e Giancarlo Olgiati, Castello di Rivoli, and many others.

Together they have built significant collections of modern and contemporary art, Arte Povera, and Murano glass. Their deep interest in the built environment led them to commission Miguel Quismondo to design Magazzino Italian Art, an award-winning exhibition space in the Hudson Valley, New York. Magazzino is also home to more than 7,000 archival works and publications and hosts an annual scholar-in-residence program, inviting academics to pursue independent projects contributing to research in the postwar and contemporary Italian art fields.

On June 4, 2018, Giorgio Spanu was bestowed the Insignia of Knight of the Italian Republic.

Giorgio Spanu and Nancy Olnick. Photo by Rathkopf Photography. Fundraising and Special Events

Meredith Chilton, C.M. Outstanding Lifetime Achievement

Meredith Chilton is a specialist in eighteenth-century European porcelain, dining, and social culture. She first joined Toronto’s Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in 1983, working with the team responsible for opening the museum. She subsequently became the museum’s curator, a role she retained for over twenty years.

In 2004, Chilton left the museum to work on Fired by Passion: Vienna Baroque Porcelain of Claudius Innocentius Du Paquier, a three-volume monograph for the Melinda and Paul Sullivan Foundation for the Decorative Arts. She was principal contributor to Daily Pleasures: French Ceramics from the MaryLou Boone Collection. Chilton returned to the Gardiner Museum as its chief curator between 2015 and 2017, leading a major renovation and reinstallation of the European porcelain gallery.

During her career, Chilton curated more than twenty exhibitions and published approximately fifty articles and books, including her award-winning Harlequin Unmasked: The Commedia dell’Arte and Porcelain Sculpture. She was honored by the Gardiner Museum Volunteers, who named the Meredith Chilton Commedia dell’Arte Gallery in perpetuity at the museum.

Chilton was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2017 and became curator emerita at the Gardiner Museum following her retirement.

Meredith Chilton, who was unable to attend in person, accepts her 2023 Iris Foundation Award from BGC board member Michele Beiny Harkins. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Dr. Elizabeth E. Guffey

Outstanding Mid-Career Scholar

Dr. Elizabeth E. Guffey’s scholarly work meets at the convergence of design history and disability studies. Having authored an extensive body of work, Guffey has been published in Art in America, the New York Times, and the Journal of Visual Culture. Additionally, she is the founding editor of the peer-reviewed journal Design and Culture. As a leading academic in her field, Guffey has most recently co-edited After Universal Design: The Disability Design Revolution (2023). Previously, she co-edited Making Disability Modern: Design Histories (2020) and authored Designing Disability: Symbols, Space, and Society (2017). In Designing Disability, Guffey explored how design symbols can alter the environment and make a person more or less disabled, depending on the use of the design. At Purchase College, State University of New York, Guffey teaches art and design history and heads the MA program in modern and contemporary art, criticism, and theory. Guffey’s dedication and substantial research have created greater visibility for design and disability studies.

Elizabeth Guffey with BGC associate professor Freyja Hartzell. Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman, R & Company Outstanding Dealers

For twenty-five years, R & Company has championed collectible design, advancing the present-day marketplace and growing a global collector base. Its founders, Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman, are widely recognized for identifying rising talent, deepening scholarship, and developing new avenues for growth in the industry.

In the mid-1990s, Meyers and Snyderman began sourcing twentieth-century furniture to sell at the 26th Street Flea Market in New York City. With eyes for rare works, the two opened R & Company (originally R 20th Century) in 1997 in Tribeca. Through acclaimed exhibitions and fair presentations, as well as growing publications and archival departments, R & Company has become a leader in the field, fostering relationships with collectors, cultural leaders, and scholars.

R & Company’s roster of designers includes Wendell Castle, Rogan Gregory, the Estate of Greta Grossman, Hun-Chung Lee, Katie Stout, Joaquim Tenreiro, and Jeff Zimmerman, among others. With passion and expertise, Meyers and Snyderman have built a critical platform for experiencing twentieth- and twenty-first-century design.

Evan Snyderman and Zesty Meyers of R & Company accepting their 2023 Iris Foundation Award.

Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Photo by Rathkopf Photography.

Honor Roll of Donors

Bard Graduate Center deeply appreciates the generosity of the donors who have helped to sustain the institution in 2022–23. Their contributions and grants support exhibitions, publications, and a wide range of programs and events. Most importantly, they allow us to support our MA and PhD students with scholarships and fellowships, for which we are deeply grateful.

Endowed Funds

American Members of CINOA Award

Sybil Brenner Bernstein Scholarship

Bonnie Cashin Fund for Study Abroad

English Professional Development Award

Philip Hewat-Jaboor Memorial Award

Paul and Irene Hollister Lectures on Glass

Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation Institute for the Arts of the Americas

Iris Foundation

Eugenie Prendergast Fund

Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century

French Decorative Arts and Culture

Peter Jay Sharp Scholarship

Marilyn M. Simpson Scholarship

Lenore G. Tawney Foundation

Trehan Fund for Islamic Art and Material Culture

$50,000 and Above

Anonymous

Lee B. Anderson Memorial Foundation

Art Bridges Foundation

Iris Foundation

David Mann and Fritz Karch

MR Architecture + Decor

The National Endowment for the Humanities

The Estate of Paul J. Smith

Lenore G. Tawney Foundation

Terra Foundation for American Art

$10,000–$49,000

Akris

Michele Beiny Harkins

The David Berg Foundation

Andrew J. Bernstein Foundation

The Consulate General of Switzerland

The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation

Nancy Druckman

Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation

Giles Ellwood and Philippe Sacerdot

Deborah and Philip D. English

Samuel H. Kress Foundation

Leon Levy Foundation

The Henry Luce Foundation, Inc.

Vera Mayer

The National Endowment for the Arts

Barbara Nessim and Jules Demchick

Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu

Pace Gallery

Peco Foundation

Anne Pyne (MA ʼ07)

The Ruddock Foundation for the Arts

The Scully Peretsman Foundation

Sherrill Foundation

Tavolozza Foundation

Deedee and Barrie Wigmore

Windgate Foundation

Deborah Miller Zabel

Zurich Silk Association (ZSIG)

$1,000–$9,999

Anonymous (2)

Jan and Warren Adelson

Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

Kathleen and Jeffrey Baum

Bloomberg Philanthropies

Nicolas Cattelain

Cowles Charitable Trust

Brandy Culp (MA ʼ04)

The Dana Foundation

Dr. Arnold J. Davis

Gus N. Davis

Annette de la Renta

Helen W. Drutt English

Carmen Dubroc and Lewis I. Haber

Tobias Forster

Geomar Foundation

Carol Grossman

Agnes Gund

Ana Horta Osório

William J. Iselin

Gerald and Jane Katcher

Virginia Kennedy

Wolfram Koeppe

Kroll Family Trust

Maryanne H. Leckie

Reeva and Ezra P. Mager

Jeffrey Munger

Liliane A. Peck*

Lisa Beth Podos

R & Company / Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman

The Richardson Foundation

Susan T. Rodriguez Architecture & Design

Lauren Santo Domingo*

Dr. Stephen K. Scher and Ms. Janie Woo Scher

Sikkema Jenkins

Suzanne Slesin and Michael Steinberg

Solomon Family Foundation

Judy Steinhardt

Switzerland Tourism

Ellen and William S. Taubman*

Barbara Tober

The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation

Jody Villecco*

Robin J. Weber

John and Beth Werwaiss

Shelby White

Hon. Kimba Wood and Frank E.

Richardson, III

Additional Donors

Anonymous (2)

Helen C. Adler

Constance Caplan

Leigh L. Carleton

Amy M. Coes (MA ʼ00)

Elizabeth English*

Anne E. Eschapasse (MA ʼ00)

Geraldine Fabrikant Metz

Marilyn Friedland*

Melissa Gagen

Barbara Gottlieb

Cristina Grajales Gallery

Titi Halle and Peter Felske

Dr. Evelyn J. Harden

Richard Hird

Holly Hotchner

Dr. Harriette Kaley (MA ʼ06)

Robin Kerenyi

Benjamin Krevolin*

Madame Phyllis B. Lambert

Jane Lane*

Dr. Minna Lee*

Dr. Arnold L. Lehman

Martin P. Levy

Helen R. Litt

Brenda Martin*

Janet Ozarchuk

Anne Pasternak

Phillips

Miranda Pildes (MA ʼ03)

Joseph S. Piropato

Dr. Jeffrey Quilter

Emily K. Rafferty

Drs. Irwin and M. Susan Richman

Dennis and Regina Santella

Philip Sarrel

Emma Scully (MA ʼ14)

Ann Scharffenberger and John Allen

Kimberly Sørensen (MA ʼ11)

Molly F. Stockley (MA ʼ96)

Stephanie Stokes

Barbara Toll

Paul D. Trautman

William M. Voelkle

Dr. Stefanie Walker*

Joan Canter Weber

Dr. Catherine Whalen

Contributors

Anonymous (2)

Armin Allen

Dr. Jere L. Bacharach

Georgette F. Ballance

Ann Barbul*

Laura Beach*

Judith M. Benson*

Helena and Peter Bienstock

Amy Parsons and Paul Bird

Julia M. Brennan*

Elizabeth A. Brown*

Phyllis Bryant*

Sara Clugage*

Paul Crenshaw

Alexandra de Luise

Mark DeRocco*

Susan W. Doelp*

Remi Dyll (MA ʼ03)

Rachel S. Epstein

Dr. Ruth Epstein

Kirk P. and Robert H.M. Ferguson*

Martha J. Fleischman*

Sharon W. Gibson (MA ʼ00)

Mary Ginsberg*

Jan Golann*

Janet Goldner

Susan Gottridge*

Marcia Green*

Emily Isakson (MA ʼ21)

Nancy Jackson*

Kathryn Johnson (MA ʼ07)

Roksolana Karmazyn*

Janet Koplos

Jill Lasersohn

Marjorie P. Lebenson*

Charles LeDray and Matthew Wehland*

Mary Leer*

Shelley Mintz*

Dr. Jeanne-Marie Musto (MA ʼ96)

Gloria Newton*

Caroline O'Connell (MA ʼ16)

Jody Pinto*

Gina Quinzani

Madeleine Ray*

Trudi and Peter Richardson*

Shax Riegler (MA ʼ07)

Terry A. Rosen and Alan Hochman

Lorraine Schneider*

Beatrice Schwartz*

Virginia A. Seay (MA ʼ14)

Jane E. Sheffield*

Seth Shulman*

Christine A. Smith*

Dr. Peter R. Smith

Salwa Smith*

Terrence O. Sneed*

Regina Soldner

Janice H. Tanne*

Jeannie Terepka*

Nora Tezanos*

Donna and James Viola

Patricia Vitanza*

Lise Vogel*

Walsh Associates, Ltd.

Kathleen T. Walsh

Hadassah R. Weiner

Genevieve Wheeler Brown*

Steven Whitesell (MA ʼ07)

Virginia Whitney*

Gabriel Wiesenthal

Gift-in-Kind

Anonymous (3)

Susan and Byron Bell

Stephen Blank

Sydney Cash

Dr. Jeffrey L. Collins

Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College

Helen W. Drutt English

Daryl Favor

Mayla E. Favor

Paula Dicker Gold

Greenwich House Pottery

Andrea Black Jeffries

Benjamin Krevolin

Michele Majer

Earl Martin

Carole Melman

Theodore Humphrey and Mary Eugenia Myer

The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent

Bets Ramsey

Stephan Rubin and Ana Wang

Claude-Albert Saucier

Susan R. Schmalz

The Estate of Paul J. Smith

Milton Sonday

Richard Tuttle

Susan M. Yecies

Benjamin Zucker

Gifts were made in honor / in memory of the following:

Lenore Blank

Meredith Chilton

Dr. Elizabeth E. Guffey

Philip Hewat-Jaboor

Ulrich Leben

Michele Majer

Josette Melman and Abbé Quinton

Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman

Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu

Dr. Susan Weber

*BGC Members

Please pardon any mistakes or omissions in the lists above. We endeavor to recognize all donors as they have requested. In the event that we missed the mark, we offer our sincerest apologies. Please let us know and we will make the correction in future publications. You can send your comments and corrections to support@bgc.bard.edu or call 212.501.3071. Thank you.

Bard Graduate Center 2022–23

Susan Weber, founder and director

Peter N. Miller, dean

Janet Ozarchuk, chief operating officer

kelli rae adams, Fields of the Future Research Fellow

mary adeogun (MA ’22), lead gallery educator

Mohammed Alam, budget manager

Ebony Allen-Reece, security officer

Karlyn Allenbrand, MA student

Eliza Alsop, MA student

Kenneth L. Ames, professor emeritus

Antonia Anagnostopoulos, MA student

Enrique Angeles, handyman

Arjun Appadurai, Max Weber Global Professor

Kat Atkins, managing editor

Jane Ayers, MA student

Samantha Baron, director of administration and employee relations

Irène Berthezène, MA student

Elliot Camarra, MA student

Daniel Chamberlin, MA student

Michael Chazan, visiting fellow

Miao Chen, accounting manager

Annie Coggan, Lee B. Anderson Fields of the Future Research Fellow

Katherine Cohen, MA student

Keith Condon, director of admissions and student affairs

James Congregane, director of facilities management and operations

Emma Cormack (MA ’18), associate curator

Angela Crenshaw, MA student

Anna Crowley, MA student

Carlos Cruz, security officer

Julia Cullen, degree programs coordinator

Artur Dibra, handyman / maintainer

Samrudha Dixit, PhD student

Allison Donoghue, MA student

Hannah Duggan, cultural heritage science fellow

William Dunsmore, MA student

Eric Edler, exhibitions registrar

Barb Elam, digital collections metadata librarian and study collection manager

Caroline Elenowitz-Hess, PhD student

Ruth Epstein, manager of institutional giving and development

Maria Jose Espinoza, MA student

Amy Estes, director of marketing and communications

Julie Fuller, digital humanities educational technologist

Ema Furusho, coordinator of marketing and communications

Ivan Gaskell, professor

David Gassett, PhD student

Aaron Glass, associate professor

Moses Godson, security officer

Laura Grey, art director

Mackensie Griffin, MA student

Alexander Gruen, chief preparator

Freyja Hartzell (MA ’05), assistant professor and editor, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture

Emily Harvey, MA student

Isabelle Marina Held, visiting fellow

Anna Helgeson, associate director of the library

Bob Hewis, MA student

Dorothy Hudson, MA student

Hadley Welch Jensen (MA’13, PhD ’18), guest curator

Elvis Kabaj, Bard Hall residential superintendent

Andrew Kircher, director of Public Humanities + Research

Pat Kirkham, professor emerita and guest lecturer

Ilona Kos, guest curator

Benjamin Krevolin, chief advancement officer

Deborah L. Krohn, associate professor and chair of academic programs

Christian Larsen, Windgate Research Curator

Isabelle Vincent (visitor services manager), Julia Cullen (degree programs coordinator), Maggie Walter (content manager), Ema Furusho (coordinator of marketing, communications, and design), Claire Rotella (development associate), Nadia Rivers (coordinator of public humanities + research), Jocelyn Lau (designer), and mary adeogun (lead gallery educator and MA ’22). Photo by Liz Ligon.

BGC staff, faculty, and students celebrate the end of the 2023 academic year. Photos by Liz Ligon.

Jocelyn Lau, designer

Jeff Law, MA student

Daniel Lee, director of publishing

Minna Lee, associate director of development

Kenna Libes, PhD student

Meredith B. Linn, assistant professor

François Louis, professor and director of doctoral studies

Raphael Machiels, MA student

Patricia Madsen, MA student

Annissa Malvoisin, Bard Graduate Center / Brooklyn Museum Postdoctoral Fellow in the Arts of Africa

Michele Majer, professor emerita and co-curator, Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen

Juan Carlos G. Mantilla, Fields of the Future Research Fellow

Sydney Maresca, MA student

Isabella Margi, MA student

Jennifer L. Mass, professor

Joshua Massey, MA student

Julia Meitz, MA student

Jesse Merandy, director of Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions

Caspar Meyer, professor and editor, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture

Laura Microulis (MA ’96, PhD ’16), research curator

Laura Minsky, associate director of Public Humanities + Research

Ravichand Moneram, maintainer

Caroline Montague, MA student

Andrew Morrall, professor

Sebastian Moya, technical services and systems librarian

Alexis Mucha (MA ’04), associate director of sales, marketing, and rights for publications

Izabella Mujica, executive assistant to the director

Olivia Nathan, visitor services coordinator

Katy Nelson, MA student

Rita Niyazova, director of finance

Jose Olivera, facilities coordinator

Ivan Ospina, handyman

Vic Panata, Pratt library fellow

Keyarr Patterson, maintainer

Talia Perry, MA student

Helen Polson, assistant professor of practice in writing

Mei Mei Rado (PhD ’18), assistant professor

Jeremy Reeves, PhD student

Anna Riley, MA student

Gilberto Rivera, maintainer

Nadia Rivers, coordinator of Public Humanities + Research

Rachel Salem-Wiseman, MA student

Samantha Santana, MA student

Mike Satalof, archivist and digital preservation specialist

Elizabeth Simpson, professor emerita

Chandler Small, director of security

Alex Stern, PhD student

Karen B. Stern, visiting fellow

Paul Stirton, professor emeritus and editor-in-chief, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture

Nina Stritzler-Levine, professor of curatorial practice and director of Focus Exhibitions

Edward Styles, MA student

Kenyi Sun, facilities operations manager

Kenneth Talley, security officer

Maura Tangum, MA student

Drew Thompson, associate professor

Heather Topcik, director of research collections

Cesar Vasconez, visitor services associate

Isabelle Vincent, visitor services associate

Zoe Volpa, MA student

Abigail Walker, acquisitions and serials librarian

Maggie Walter, content manager

Jacklyn Wang, Pratt graphic design fellow

Ittai Weinryb, associate professor and editor, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture

Zeev Weiss, visiting fellow

Carolyn Welch, security officer

Charisse Pearlina Weston, Paul and Irene Hollister Fields of the Future Research Fellow

Catherine Whalen, associate professor

Luli Zou, MA student

Credits

Editor in Chief

Amy Estes

Managing Editor

Hyunjee Nicole Kim

Art Director

Laura Grey Designer

Bella Bennett

Photo Editor Maggie Walter

Writers

Allison Donoghue (MA ’24)

Amy Estes

Ema Furusho

Mackensie Griffin (MA ’24)

Bob Hewis (MA ’24)

Joshua Massey (MA ’23)

Hannah Rolfes

Rachel Salem-Wiseman (MA ’24)

Content manager Maggie Walter with security guards Carolyn Welch and Ebony Allen-Reece.

Photo by Liz Ligon.

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