Dean’s Introduction

May 2022

People often ask me, “what’s next at BGC?” This question always reminds me of the glorious medal designed by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) with his image and motto: Quid tum. What then? Or, as it’s often translated, what next?

Over the past two years, we have made visible and some less visible steps toward the future. We have brought our decade-long Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-sponsored Cultures of Conservation initiative to a resounding conclusion with the exhibition Conserving Active Matter, the twoday conference Conservation Thinking in Japan and India, and a second MacArthur x BGC series, What Is Conservation? We created a new seminar, Art and Material Culture of Africa and the African Diaspora, and a new post-doctoral fellowship in the arts of Africa with the Brooklyn Museum. We re-launched our public events in the second year of the pandemic, emphasizing week-long residencies to make the most of our time with visiting speakers. And, like so many institutions, we dramatically augmented our digital offerings, infrastructure, and aspirations.

Peter N. Miller. Photo by Alessandro Fresco, Fresco Arts Team.

The changes to the institutional structures supporting this work were less visible. In 2021 we created the Department of Research Collections to unify BGC’s book, object, digital, and archival holdings. This was undertaken with an eye to the steady expansion of the study collection and the institutional archive. This reorganization will facilitate access to an innovative digital re-curation of past and newly archived BGC exhibitions. Few activities are more future-oriented than creating an institutional archive, only superficially about the past. In 2022 we initiated Public Humanities + Research, or PH+R, to bring together all BGC events in a more efficient delivery system and align our entire output of programs with the institution’s mission to do research at every level and present it at every turn. PH+R will reach into the classroom, too, training our students to develop events and serving as a test bed to build upcoming BGC programming, whether for the gallery or the lecture hall.

What we have not yet gotten to—the real Quid tum—is the next step towards consciously integrating the various things we do into a more project-based approach. We already run multi-year research projects; we call them exhibitions. We have worked to integrate them more fully from start to finish into the academic program. However, what if we planned the academic program around these projects and others we took on? What if we accepted doctoral students who wanted to work on them? What if we thematically planned publishing and public events around them? The answer is that we would be unlike any other North American graduate research institute—and exactly like the European Research Council’s grantees. Maybe that’s too big a stretch for right now. The advantage of this exercise in thinking is to reveal how close we are to that unique situation.

Peter N. Miller Dean and Professor

BGC students in the library. Photo by Maria Baranova.