April 23, 2025

Dear Alumni,

One of my favorite BGC memories has to be the Materials Days workshop at Brooklyn Metal Works, where participants had the chance to learn how to make silver rings, from measuring and cutting the metal, to twisting or stamping the sized bands, to soldering the two ends together into a loop. We had an amazing afternoon learning about metalworking, making jewelry (sometimes I still wear my Materials Day ring!), and spending time together just weeks before several of us graduated.

Fortunately, we alumni now have the chance to participate in our very own Materials Day on Friday, May 8 from 7–9 pm at BKLYN Clay. I hope many of you will join for this special BGC alumni event. Space is limited, so be sure to RSVP soon!

As always, I’d love to hear your latest news, which you can share through our online form.

All best,

Julia Carabatsos (MA ’22)
alumni@bgc.bard.edu

Alumni Spotlight

Ann Bell (MA ’14) will join New York Society Library as its Curator. In this new role, she will work closely with rare books, manuscripts, and other special collections, and help shape the long term vision of the exhibition program. Well done, Ann!

Next month, Grace Billingslea (MA ’22) will start new position at the American Folk Art Museum as Assistant Curator and Art Bridges Cohort Project Manager. Congratulations, Grace!

Bridget Bartal (MA ’22) curated Designing Cranbrook: The Saarinens’ Eclectic Vision, now on view at Cranbrook Art Museum. Well done, Bridget!

Select Career Opportunities

A conference titled “Making the Museum: A Conference on the Historical Presences and Absences of Makers and Making in Museums” invites 20-minute paper submissions on the theme of makers and making in the museum context for a forthcoming conference at Linacre College, Oxford on 23–25 September 2026. This three-day conference will combine practical making sessions with an exploration of the AHRC-funded research project Making the Museum, which considers the way that makers and making have been understood in museums, both historically and in the present day. Drawing on emerging research that repositions museums as dynamic assemblages shaped and influenced by the agency of those who made them, this event seeks to complement project work foregrounding the often-overlooked individuals whose labor, knowledge, and creativity constitute museum collections. Abstracts of up to 300 words should be submitted by May 31, 2026. Please include a short biography of 100 words. We anticipate contacting successful submissions by mid-June 2026. Contact information: Rebecca Martin, becky.martin@prm.ox.ac.uk.

The Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms seeks a dynamic and scholarly Curator of Education and Collections to play a vital role in researching, preserving, and interpreting one of the nation’s most significant collections of American Arts and Crafts housed at the former estate of Gustav Stickley. This is a public facing curatorial position for which developing and teaching educational programs is a significant part of the work. Candidates who meet the requirements of either an Assistant Curator or Associate Curator are encouraged to apply. Find more information here.

“Calling All Eccentrics” is a one-day interdisciplinary symposium presented by undergraduates, graduate students, and emerging scholars with a keynote address by contemporary artist Mark Dion. The symposium will be held at the Concord Museum in conjunction with the special exhibition Mark Dion: Eccentric Collectors Like Us. Playing on the boundaries between fact and fiction, the exhibition will draw on the early history of the Concord Museum in order to provide opportunities for critical reflection, play, discovery, and public engagement around the work of museums today. Find more information here.

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.

username: career.services@bgc.bard.edu
password: CareersBGC2025-6*=*

Select BGC Events

**Alumni receive complimentary tickets to attend BGC exhibitions and events. Use code ALUMNI at checkout.**

Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds
On view in the BGC Gallery through May 24, 2026

Staged Fashion: Wonder and the Culture of Display
The Iris Awards Foundation lecture by Matthew Yokobosky (Brooklyn Museum)
Tuesday, April 29, 6 pm

The earliest museums were not organized around “art” as we understand it today; they were cabinets of curiosities—assemblages of shells, minerals, and botanical specimens valued for their beauty, rarity, taxonomic value, and capacity to render the world legible through material form. Matthew Yokobosky, a 2026 Iris Foundation Award recipient, draws from his own exhibition practice to examine how contemporary designers—such as Iris van Herpen—reconfigure the gallery as a twenty-first-century cabinet of wonders, which is activated by curatorial structure as well as the embodied presence of viewers whose looking completes and continually reanimates the work.

French Ornament in the Nineteenth Century: Nature, Life, and Form
A Lee B. Anderson Memorial Lecture duet by Ralph Ghoche (Barnard College) and Estelle Thibault (École nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Belleville), moderated by Martin Bressani (McGill University)
Wednesday, April 29, 6 pm

Inspired by thirteenth-century gothic architecture, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc understood ornament as the medium through which the vital energies of the living world became visible. Ornament distilled the anatomical logic of the plants or animals it imitated, reaching back to primordial, pagan cults of nature and acquiring a regenerative power for the modern age. In this lecture duet—hosted and moderated by Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds* co-curator Martin Bressani—Ralph Ghoche and Estelle Thibault explore, respectively, the contrasting ornamental philosophies of the Romantic/Eclectic and the Neo-Gothic movements, and the “natural laws” that guided nineteenth century ornamentation design in industrial arts education.

Sensing Matters: Bodies, Experiences, and Objects
A research symposium for New York City area graduate students organized by the students of Bard Graduate Center
Friday, May 1, 9:30 am–5 pm

This symposium will explore how material things become animated through sensory engagement and how attention to the sensorium alters our understanding of them. The aim is to cultivate new lines of inquiry, provoke unexpected connections, and expand object-focused scholarship within BGC and the broader New York City graduate scholar community. Not open to the general public but alumni are very welcome! Register here.

Select External Events

When is Asia Modern? Negotiating Borders of Modernisms
The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center
Friday, May 1, 9:30 am

Asian modern art has long been framed through a Western art-historical chronology, locating its “beginning” in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century — precisely the moment of intensified encounters with the West and the imposition of Eurocentric models of modernity onto Asia. Recent scholarship across the humanities has begun to unsettle this timeline: some push the chronology backward to examine early articulations of Asian modernity in mercantile networks and imperial formations; others push it forward to engage shared global histories of the post, i.e., postcolonial, post-imperial, post-socialist. To propose an alternative approach to thinking about Asian Modern, we ask: how do Asian modernisms emerge through the negotiation of borders? Here, borders may be understood as cartographic borders, those drawn and redrawn in nation-building, imperial expansion, or decolonization; cultural borders, those that define, delimit, or delegitimize certain formations of groups, ideas, practices; and aesthetic borders — the negotiations of style, medium, and form that highlight, contest, or blue distinctions and affinities within and across artistic traditions. Rather than recasting the Euro-American as the primary axis through which these borders are negotiated, we invite papers that consider intra-Asian encounters as sites of emerging Asian modernisms. By examining how these different borders are made, crossed, and reconfigured, we collectively explore alternative imaginaries of the Asia Modern.

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Visit our online store at store.bgc.bard.edu for 40% off all items. Enter code ALUMNI at checkout to receive the discount.

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Gaggle.mail is an opt-in list-serv that serves as a place to share job openings, conference attendance, published books/articles, and exhibition openings directly with fellow alums. It’s a communication forum for alumni, by alumni. To circulate your news in the Gaggle group, send an email to bgcalumni@gaggle.email.