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).

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We are so pleased to announce BGC professor and alumni (MA ‘04) Freyja Hartzell on being selected for 2022 Grants to Individuals from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts!

Hartzell is among the 56 new grant recipients this year, awarded to individuals exploring ideas across disciplines that expand contemporary understandings of architecture, including established and emerging architects, artists, curators, designers, filmmakers, historians, and writers.

Hartzell’s book Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things, reveals the humble, ordinary objects of the influential modernist architect Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957) as extraordinarily powerful things that not only shaped the modern built environment, but changed the fate of German modernity. The first book on Riemerschmid in English, this innovative study reveals the social, cultural, and political import of Riemerschmid’s arresting designs for household objects, furniture, fashion, and interiors, positioning these “extra-ordinary” things as pivotal to his conception of domestic architecture, and his understanding of the modern world from the 1890s to the Second World War. Riemerschmid’s dynamically designed objects invite the reader to experience a radically and rapidly changing Germany from their unique perspective, as they engage—on direct, material terms—with its tumultuous cultural politics. This book uncovers a new, yet materially grounded history of modernism—one that was there all along, but told now, and for the first time, by modernist things, themselves. It argues for the seminal status of Riemerschmid’s “extra-ordinary” objects in the development of modern architecture, and for their capacity to revolutionize our understanding of its history today.