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).

Louisa Wood Ruby is a visiting fellow at BGC this spring. She was previously head of research at the Frick Art Reference Library where she was in charge of the Center for the History of Collecting, the Digital Art History Lab, and the Scholars’ Program. A specialist in Dutch and Flemish art, she has published a catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Paul Bril; numerous articles in journals such as Master Drawings, Burlington Magazine, and the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art; and contributed essays to several symposia proceedings and festschrifts. Her interest in the art collections of the early Dutch in New Netherlands/New York emerged in 2008 with her article “Dutch Art and the Hudson Valley Patroon Painters” published in Joyce Goodfriend’s volume Going Dutch: The Dutch Presence in America 1609–2009 and continued in 2014 with her essay, “Pictures Painted Chiefly in Oils, on Boards: Collecting Dutch Art in Colonial New York,” in the Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America, volume 1: Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals. In 2019–20, she co-curated and wrote the catalogue for the exhibition Jan Brueghel the Elder: A Magnificent Draughtsman, held at the Snijders & Rockoxhuis museum in Antwerp. Most recently, she contributed “A Family Affair: Bruegel and Sons in America,” to the Frick’s publication, America and the Art of Flanders: Collecting Paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Their Circles, and “Provenance Initiatives Emerging within the Digital Humanities,” for the book, Provenance Research Today: Principles, Practice, Problems, published by Lund Humphries.