The exhibition Frontier Shores: Collection, Entanglement, and the Manufacture of Identity in Oceania, which closed in September 2016, marked the fifth anniversary of Bard Graduate Center Focus Projects. Inaugurated in 2011 with an investigation of the material relations between Indigenous peoples and newcomers on the Northwest Pacific coast in the late nineteenth century, Focus Projects have examined subjects as diverse as the design and circulation of American Christmas cards, the role of actresses as fashion setters in the Belle Époque, the fractal images of Benoît Mandelbrot, the coca-bag or chuspa—a component of Andean life for the past 1,500 years, and the personal computer—a component of modern life for the past forty.
Conceived by Dean Peter N. Miller in collaboration with then chief curator of the Gallery, Nina Stritzler-Levine, who ran it for the first year, the Focus Project is now headed by Professor Ivan Gaskell. It is an arena in which faculty develop research projects into exhibitions with the collaboration of students supported by the Gallery, Digital Media Lab, publications, and art department staff. Focus Projects have evolved into major facets of the Center’s research, teaching, and exhibition programs.
Beginning in 2017, two Focus Projects will be the feature of Bard Graduate Center’s spring exhibition seasons. Design by the Book: Chinese Ritual Objects and the Sanli Tu will examine a medieval Chinese book that is the oldest extant illustrated study of classical Chinese artifacts and New York Crystal Palace 1853 will shed light on a near-forgotten aspect of New York City’s cultural history. As Professor Gaskell explains, “Bard Graduate Center is a nimble institution, where the ambitions—of students, of curators, of faculty—can actually be realized through Focus Projects that provide a laboratory in which to test theories empirically and to present them functionally to a broader audience.”
Focus Projects 2011 through 2016:
Objects of Exchange: Social and Material Transformation on the Late Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast
January 26–April 17, 2011
American Christmas Cards, 1900–1960
September 21–December 31, 2011
Staging Fashion, 1880–1920: Jane Hading, Lily Elsie, Billie Burke
January 18–April 8, 2012
The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking
September 21, 2012–January 27, 2013
Confluences: An American Expedition to Northern Burma, 1935
April 4–August 3, 2013
An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915–1928
September 27, 2013–February 2, 2014
Carrying Coca: 1,500 Years of Andean Chuspas
April 10–August 3, 2014
Visualizing 19th-Century New York
September 19, 2014–January 11, 2015
The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing
April 3, 2015–July 19, 2015
Revisions—Zen for Film
September 18, 2015–February 21, 2016
Frontier Shores: Collection, Entanglement, and the Manufacture of Identity in Oceania
April 22–September 18, 2016
