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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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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.




Attributed to Ldaaxeen/Sitka Jack and Koosk’aa/Susie, Tlingit
Silver
Collected by Mrs. J. W. Haslehurst in 1891
American Museum of Natural History 16.1/1244


Alaskan souvenir spoons are numerous in museum collections, but until recently information on them has been scarce. Although silver was a material known to the nineteenth-century coast only through trade, Native peoples had a long tradition of working copper and iron. After the 1860s, when supplies of the material increased, silver items were made for both Native and Euro-American consumption. This spoon, probably depicting bear and raven motifs, was likely crafted from American coinage, the most common source of silver among Natives. The distinctive bold, hatched script engraved on the bowl of this spoon has made it possible to identify the makers, who are mentioned by name in traveler accounts. Souvenir spoons were extremely popular with female tourists during the Victorian era, and Mary Alice Haslehurst likely collected this spoon as a material remembrance of her steamship travels. At the same time, objects of this kind are material evidence of the creative ways in which Tlingit metalworkers expressed their continued artistic vitality in the face of rapid social and economic transformation.


Tags for Interactive Tag Cloud: English text, indigenization, souvenir