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).

Colin Fanning’s research encompasses a broad range of American and European design, craft, and architecture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. His dissertation engages the history of design pedagogy in the late twentieth-century United States; other work has concerned the material culture of childhood, intersections between design and fossil fuel in Victorian Britain, and the visual and material cultures of spaceflight. Fanning has held positions at the Museum of Arts and Design, the American Federation of Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), where he is currently assistant curator in the Department of European Decorative Arts and Sculpture. Focusing primarily on modern and contemporary design, he has curated and cocurated PMA exhibitions including The Architecture of Francis Kéré: Building for Community (2016); Design Currents: Oki Sato, Faye Toogood, Zanini de Zanine (2016–17); Channeling Nature by Design (2017); and Dieter Rams: Principled Design (2018–19). He was also a consulting curator for Designs for Different Futures (2019–20), organized in partnership between the PMA, the Walker Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.