About
Upcoming Exhibitions
BGC Gallery will resume its exhibition programming this September with the return of Sèvres Extraordinaire! Sculpture from 1740 until Today, originally slated for fall 2024.
Bard Graduate Center is an advanced graduate research institute in New York City dedicated to the cultural histories of the material world. Our MA and PhD degree programs, Gallery exhibitions, research initiatives, scholarly publications and public programs explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture.

About
28th Annual Iris Foundation Awards
Honoring Irene Roosevelt Aitken, Dr. Julius Bryant, Dr. Meredith Martin, and Katherine Purcell
Events
Wednesdays @ BGC
Join us this spring for weekly programming!





Research

Bard Graduate Center is a research institute for advanced, interdisciplinary study of diverse material worlds. We support the innovative scholarship of our faculty and students as well as resident fellows, guest curators and artists, and visiting speakers.

Photo by Fresco Arts Team.

Our Public Humanities + Research department focuses on making scholarly work widely available and accessible through the coordination of the fellowship program and public programming that combines academic research with exhibition-related events. Across the institution—from the classroom to the gallery, from publications to this website—we utilize digital media to facilitate and share original research. This section outlines current programming and provides a repository for past scholarly content.

Margaret Holben Ellis gave a Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Wednesday, March 2, 2016, from 12–1:30 pm. Her talk was entitled “Paper Is Part of the Picture.”

Many of us spend time looking at, enjoying, deciphering, and mentally untangling marks on paper—but what about the paper itself? Paper can be read, just like the marks on it. And it involves more senses than just sight!


Margaret Holben Ellis is the Eugene Thaw Professor of Paper Conservation at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and serves as Director of the Thaw Conservation Center at The Morgan Library & Museum. She is currently Vice-President and Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC), Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC), and Accredited Conservator/Restorer of the International Institute of Conservation (ICON). Her professional and academic awards include the Caroline and Sheldon Keck Award (2003) and the Rutherford John Gettens Merit Award (1997), both conferred by the AIC; the Rome Prize (2014), awarded by the American Academy in Rome; and most recently, a scholar’s residency at the Getty Conservation Institute (2015). She has published and lectured on artists ranging from Raphael and Titian to Pollock, Samaras, and Lichtenstein, and her research on artists’ materials is similarly far-ranging. Her most recent publication is Historical Perspectives in the Conservation of Works of Art on Paper (2015), published by the Getty Conservation Institute. She received her BA from Barnard College and both her MA in Art History and an Advanced Certificate in Conservation from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.


This event is part of our Cultures of Conservation initiative, supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.