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).

Qualifying Project:
Berenike: A Port City and its People, Between Egypt, Africa, India and Rome. 276 BCE to Ca. 530 CE

Digital Project Requirement:
I completed the digital requirement in Deborah Krohn’s class, Exhibition as Medium: Curatorial Thinking, in the fall of 2019. I created an exhibition design about Indo-Roman Trade based on many of the objects uncovered at the Egyptian Red Sea port of Berenike. Various phases of the city’s development and changes in trade patterns were presented in order to highlight the shifting patterns and dynamics that sustained trade between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean Basins.

What was the value of this project for you?
I first became interested in trade in the Western Indian Ocean while writing my undergraduate thesis on the Gemma Augustea, a piece of Sardonyx carved in the Roman Empire out of a stone originating in India. Trading the stone’s course led to writing a section on sourcing stones from India in the early empire. During my first MA at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, I used my Thesis on the Grand Cameo of France to research a much longer section on the development of Indo-Roman trade. This digital project allowed me to focus on the life of a port and the people that participated in it, and to consider how to exhibit their 800-year local history through their material culture, while using these same objects to recontextualize the Roman Empire as an interdependent participant in the interlocking trading circuits that amount to a hemispheric network of exchange in the ancient world.