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).

Ashley D. West is an associate professor of art history at Temple University with a particular interest in the history, practice, and theory of printmaking and the art of the Holy Roman Empire, ca. 1500. She investigates processes of cultural transmission and the dissemination of knowledge, as well as opportunities for artistic exchange through travel and portable objects, pilgrimages, warfare, global trade and exploration, and early collecting practices. She has published on early etchings; history painting and the German sense of the past; early modern antiquarianism; and early representations of peoples from the coast of Africa and India. West is finishing her book on Hans Burgkmair and the visual translation of knowledge in the German Renaissance, which reevaluates notions of the German Renaissance through the prints, drawings, and paintings of Hans Burgkmair the Elder, a contemporary of Albrecht Dürer. Her project at Bard Graduate Center focuses on the materials and technologies of sixteenth-century Augsburg as a site for negotiating the global and the local in everyday experience.

West currently is the vice president of the Historians of Netherlandish Art. She has been a visiting fellow with the international research project “BildEvidenz: History and Aesthetics” at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and her research has also been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) and Andrew Mellon Foundation, among others.