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).

Bard Graduate Center associate professor Aaron Glass has been awarded a $150,000 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) to support his collaborative project to create a critical, annotated, digitized edition of anthropologist Franz Boas’s landmark 1897 monograph on the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw culture of the Pacific Northwest Coast. NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants support the implementation of innovative digital humanities projects that have successfully completed a start-up phase and demonstrated their value to the field. This grant will support the development of additional features and extensions for a multimedia platform specifically designed to support Indigenous cultural and linguistic content.

Glass’s project, “The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’s Pioneering Ethnography,” is codirected with Judith Berman (University of Victoria). Boas’s The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897) is one of the first holistic ethnographies based on field work. The text brought together data on Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw social structure with art and material culture, detailed narratives in the Kwak’wala language, photographs taken in situ in British Columbia and at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, transcribed songs, eyewitness description of ceremonial performances, and extensive contributions from Boas’s Indigenous collaborator George Hunt. The goal of this project is to reunite the scattered archival material with the original text and with the Indigenous families whose cultural heritage is represented. It promises new ways of using digital media to link together disparate archives, museums, textual repositories, and contemporary Indigenous communities.

About the National Endowment for the Humanities
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.