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Upcoming Exhibitions
BGC Gallery will resume its exhibition programming this September with the return of Sèvres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740 until Today, originally slated for fall 2024.
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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28th Annual Iris Foundation Awards
Honoring Irene Roosevelt Aitken, Dr. Julius Bryant, Dr. Meredith Martin, and Katherine Purcell
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Join us this spring for weekly programming!





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BGC Gallery reopens this September with the return of Sèvres Extraordinaire: Sculpture from 1740 until Today, originally slated for fall 2024.

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The Bard Graduate Center Gallery produces multiple exhibitions and publications each year, serving as a vital center of learning and a catalyst for engagement in the interrelated disciplines of decorative arts, design, and material culture. The gallery is celebrated in the museum world for its longstanding legacy of landmark projects dedicated to significant—yet often understudied—figures and movements in the history of decorative arts and design; these exhibitions and publications typically represent the definitive intervention on the artists and objects they investigate. BGC Gallery is also committed to generating and supporting a vast range of diverse presentations, small and large, that challenge traditional approaches to object inquiry; these examinations of material culture explore the human experience as manifest in our creation and use of “things” of all kinds. Whether originating in internal research and expertise, or in collaboration with external subject specialists, these endeavors prioritize rigorous scholarship while seeking to adhere to the field’s highest standards in production and design.



This is the third in a bimonthly series of photo-essays featuring objects from the Artek and the Aaltos exhibition and additional photographs, sketches, and other ephemera from the Aalto Family Collection.

Located on the shore of Lake Alajärvi in western Finland, Villa Flora is one of the few architectural projects from the 1920s credited solely to Aino Marsio-Aalto. Originally built in 1926 and expanded in 1938, Villa Flora served as the Aaltos’ vacation home, where they would have stayed during midsummer celebrations. The photographs of the house below, which show both house and the playhouse Marsio-Aalto built for the children in the yard, come mostly from the Aaltos’ family albums.


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Page from album with photographs of Villa Flora. Aalto Family Collection.


Kirstin Purtich, Project Assistant Curator for Artek and the Aaltos: Creating a Modern World, is an alumna of the Bard Graduate Center master’s program.