This area of study approaches museums as complex social, economic, and political institutions amenable to historical, theoretical, and practical study. Emerging from European princely, aristocratic, and mercantile collections of artificial and natural curiosities, museums entered the public sphere between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. They developed new paradigms of collection acquisition, categorization, scholarship, conservation, and display. Proliferating worldwide, museums of all kinds reflect the social and economic developments of industrialization, colonialism, and the movements of peoples. Scholarship at museums includes conservation science devoted to understanding the material properties of collection items. We bring together human science and material science skills focused on museums to expand the toolkit of material culture scholars.
Courses address the origins and spread of museums, the history of collecting and museum acquisition, conservation, curatorial and scientific museum scholarship, and public education and outreach. Courses span the temporal, geographic, and disciplinary range of our faculty and the broad variety of objects studied at BGC. Collaborative projects among faculty, students, and Gallery staff have included numerous main gallery or Focus Exhibitions and publications such as New York Crystal Palace 1853, Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935, and Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Mellon Foundation-funded project Cultures of Conservation, culminated in symposia and the Gallery exhibition Conserving Active Matter, which lives on as a digital project. Partnerships with the Museum of Arts and Design, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art support ongoing initiatives in curatorial practice. Our students emerge equipped to think about museums as protean institutions at the center of contemporary cultural policy.
Courses address the origins and spread of museums, the history of collecting and museum acquisition, conservation, curatorial and scientific museum scholarship, and public education and outreach. Courses span the temporal, geographic, and disciplinary range of our faculty and the broad variety of objects studied at BGC. Collaborative projects among faculty, students, and Gallery staff have included numerous main gallery or Focus Exhibitions and publications such as New York Crystal Palace 1853, Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935, and Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Mellon Foundation-funded project Cultures of Conservation, culminated in symposia and the Gallery exhibition Conserving Active Matter, which lives on as a digital project. Partnerships with the Museum of Arts and Design, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art support ongoing initiatives in curatorial practice. Our students emerge equipped to think about museums as protean institutions at the center of contemporary cultural policy.
