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Bard Graduate Center is an advanced graduate research institute in New York City dedicated to the cultural histories of the material world. Our MA and PhD degree programs, Gallery exhibitions, research initiatives, scholarly publications and public programs explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.

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Applications for our MA program may be submitted until March 1, 2025





About

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).


Looking back now on an academic year that has almost run its course—amazing as this is to contemplate, I write this on the day that Qualifying Papers are due—one initiative emerges as most important, and in two parts. The main initiative has been rethinking the relationship between the exhibition-making, teaching, and research vocations of the institution. Arguably, this is a rethinking that has been ongoing since the BGC’s foundation. But in the last years, around our twenty-fifth birthday, the coming into focus of our identity as a researching institution has helped link together graduate training, seminars, symposia, digital work, and publications in a more productive way. All through this year we have been exploring with different constituencies the questions of what we can do with our exhibitions that is uniquely “ours,” and what thing that is missing in the wider exhibition-making world that we could help provide. As I look forward to wrapping up this series of exploratory conversations with a discussion with current students next week, I feel confident saying that not only have we learned something that we can put to work, but that these conversations have been, collaterally, successful experiences of community building at a time when we all really needed that.

All through 2018 and 2019 we were discussing, internally, BGC’s digital future. We were slowly figuring out ways in which to make the Digital Media Lab more central. Renaming its function in terms of Digital Humanities/Digital Exhibitions (DH/DX) was an early sign of where we were going. The pandemic pushed us further and faster towards realizing ambitious goals of online versions of in-gallery exhibitions and the creation of stand-alone digital exhibition content. This revived interest in an old pilot archiving program that took the working files and photos of past exhibitions and organized and digitized them for later use. BGC has, in fact, thanks to its 27 years of exhibitions, a collection of exhibitions. The archiving project would let us put all this past work to work in the future. The pandemic also made us realize that our study collection would play a bigger role in a world in which museums might be much more wary of lending—or simply too stretched to lend. And, finally, we were only able to move forward through the pandemic with our classes and research work, both institutional and individual, because of the library’s quick pivot to supporting digital resources. Putting all this together, we realized that to face the future, all these parts of our institutional life that worked with and on collections needed to be joined. And the common flag under which they flew was that of “research”—books, archives, digital files, and objects are BGC’s resources for doing research. The creation of a new Department of Research Collections, led by former director of the library, Heather Topcik, followed from this. Topcik has been an essential voice in many of our conversations about BGC’s digital future and its study collection, and she has been pushing us forward on an institutional archive for a long time. Her superlative direction of BGC’s library, long before the pandemic but especially in the last year, along with her forward-thinking vision for the institution’s long-term needs, ensure that we can roll out this new structure and orient the institution around its main activity with great confidence in her leadership.

We’re all excited about heading into a fully vaccinated world in the academic year to come. But, from my own vantage point, I’m even more excited that we’ve spent this past year—this difficult, strange year—doing the work that puts us in a position to do even better work at being ourselves in the fast oncoming future.