Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

Bard Graduate Center advances the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through its object-centered approach to teaching, research, exhibitions, publications, and events.

At BGC, we study the human past and present through their material expressions. We focus on objects and other material forms—from those valued for their aesthetic elements to the ordinary things used in everyday life.

Our accomplished interdisciplinary faculty inspires and prepares students in our MA and PhD programs for successful careers in academia, museums, and the private sector. We bring equal intellectual rigor to our acclaimed exhibitions, award-winning catalogues and scholarly publications, and innovative public programs, and we view all of these integrated elements as vital to our curriculum.

BGC’s campus comprises a state-of-the-art academic programs building at 38 West 86th Street, a gallery at 18 West 86th Street, and a residence hall at 410 West 58th Street. A new collection study center will open at 8 West 86th Street in 2026.

Founded by Dr. Susan Weber in 1993, Bard Graduate Center has become the preeminent institute for academic research and exhibition of decorative arts, design history, and material culture. BGC is an accredited unit of Bard College and a member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH).

NEW YORK — MARCH 02, 2011: Bard Graduate Center on March 02, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Nagle)

New York, New York, April 26, 2016—Bard Graduate Center is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Aaron Glass has been named a 2016–17 Getty Scholar to contribute to the annual theme of “Art and Anthropology.” The award will support a three-month residency at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where Glass will investigate Franz Boas’s development of an anthropological theory of art at the end of the nineteenth century.

Dr. Glass’s teaching and research focuses on First Nations visual art and material culture, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast of North America, as well as the history of anthropology and museums. Themes recurring in his work include colonialism and indigenous modernities, cultural brokerage and translation, the politics of intercultural exchange and display, discourses of tradition and heritage management, and cultural and intellectual property. His dissertation, along with a companion film, In Search of the Hamat’sa: A Tale of Headhunting, examines the ethnographic representation and performance history of the Hamat’sa or “Cannibal Dance” of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) of British Columbia. In spring 2011, he curated Bard Graduate Center’s first Focus Project: Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast. He is currently collaborating with the U’mista Cultural Centre to restore and present Edward Curtis’s 1914 silent film, In the Land of the Head Hunters, and, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, creating a critical, annotated, digital edition of Boas’s pioneering 1897 monograph on the Kwakwaka’wakw culture. Glass received his undergraduate degrees from Reed College (BA) and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (BFA), his master’s from the University of British Columbia, and his PhD in anthropology from New York University