Bard Graduate Center offers a rich range of programs and resources for the study of New York and American material culture. Drawing on faculty with expertise in American decorative arts, the history of art and architecture, craft and design history, museology and the history of collecting, philosophy of taste and aesthetics, anthropology, archaeology, cultural landscapes, visual culture, photography, and digital humanities, this area offers a culturally inclusive, multi-disciplinary approach to the relationships between people and things in the Americas.
Courses introduce students to methodologies encompassing hands-on object study and connoisseurship; ethnography and oral history; historical archaeology and local history; techniques of visual, material, spatial, and textual analysis; and critical approaches to studying the past “Archaeology of African American Communities,” “Henry David Thoreau and Material Culture,” “Americana Redux: Materializing Multiculturalism in the Postwar United States,” and “African and African American Visual and Material Culture” are some examples of recent courses. Faculty-student collaborations have included the Excavating the Empire City Summer School for Undergraduates and have featured Focus exhibitions such as American Christmas Cards, 1900–1960; An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915-1928; and Shaped By the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest. The exhibitions Visualizing 19th-Century New York and New York Crystal Palace 1853 also showcased special digital publications. Bard Graduate Center is also a member of the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium, which fosters public projects animated by humanistic inquiry in support of art, culture, history, and education for a more democratic society.
Courses introduce students to methodologies encompassing hands-on object study and connoisseurship; ethnography and oral history; historical archaeology and local history; techniques of visual, material, spatial, and textual analysis; and critical approaches to studying the past “Archaeology of African American Communities,” “Henry David Thoreau and Material Culture,” “Americana Redux: Materializing Multiculturalism in the Postwar United States,” and “African and African American Visual and Material Culture” are some examples of recent courses. Faculty-student collaborations have included the Excavating the Empire City Summer School for Undergraduates and have featured Focus exhibitions such as American Christmas Cards, 1900–1960; An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915-1928; and Shaped By the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest. The exhibitions Visualizing 19th-Century New York and New York Crystal Palace 1853 also showcased special digital publications. Bard Graduate Center is also a member of the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium, which fosters public projects animated by humanistic inquiry in support of art, culture, history, and education for a more democratic society.
