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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.



Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 provides a window into the culinary spectacles created during Europe’s early modern period. The exhibition explores the dining customs and practices of the time through illustrated books used by servants, or upwardly-mobile middle class readers hoping to emulate nobles and aristocrats. The manuals include instructions for carving meats, fishes, and fruits and folding napkins into elaborate sculptural forms. Images from the books are displayed alongside the material culture of the table: rarely seen table linens and carving knives and forks made of precious materials. Together, these words, pictures, and things provide a glimpse of the ephemeral world of the early modern table.


This online companion explores the major themes of the exhibition, presenting instructional manuals, and tools for carving at the table, through their decorative as well as functional attributes while showcasing how the drama of the early modern banquet was produced, from the creation of intricately folded napkins and sculptural tabletop displays, to the ornate tableside carving techniques. A student-developed interactive featuring a deck of carving-themed playing cards invites visitors to learn about early modern European foodways and their illuminating, often surprising and far-flung, connections to dining practices in our own time and around the world
Online Exhibition


Credits
Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 has been organized as part of the ongoing series of faculty-student collaborations that is the Bard Graduate Center Focus Project.

Support for Staging the Table in Europe 1500–1800 is generously provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation and Joseph S. Piropato, with additional support by the Cafaro Foundation, the Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, and Suzanne Slesin and Michael Steinberg, as well as donors to Bard Graduate Center.