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).

Otto von Busch is Associate Professor of Integrated Design at Parsons School of Design, holds a PhD in design from the School of Design and Craft at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and was previously Professor of Textiles at Konstfack, Stockholm. He has a background in arts, craft, design, and theory, and his research explores the emergence of a new “hacktivist” designer role in fashion, where the designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective experience of empowerment. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned, and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This is an engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance, and DIY practice, where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces and develop new forms of craftsmanship.

He has published articles on these perspectives on design, fashion, and craft in The Design Journal, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, Organizational Aesthetics, CoDesign Journal, The Journal of Modern Craft, Textile Cloth and Culture, Craft Research, Creative Industries Journal, and Journal for Artistic Research & Fashion Practice. His book chapters have appeared in The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design (2017), The Routledge Companion to Design Research (2015), as well as The Routledge Handbook of Sustainability and Fashion (2014).

At Bard Graduate Center, he will examine a series of craft objects from the perspective of craft as a form of material cunning and agency, that is, craft as a mode of material power. Craft is a political modus operandi which moves the hands of the maker closer to power, with the possibility to touch and manipulate its workings. Making thus bypasses petitions and discourse, which per definition position governance as “above and beyond” through political representation, to instead suggest the political mode of direct action. He will specifically examine this perspective in relation to the work and legacy of educator and craftsman William Coperthwaite (1930–2013).