August 22, 2024

Dear Alumni,

Believe it or not, summer is coming to a close—just yesterday, BGC’s newest students began their orientation program! Some members of the incoming class already participated in a pre-orientation tour of Beatrice Glow: When Our Rivers Meet, a New-York Historical Society exhibition curated by Rebecca Klassen (MA ’11).

If you would like to reconnect with BGC in a really impactful way, please take a look at the call for new members of the DEAI Working Group below.

As always, you can share any updates through the online form.

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

Alumni Spotlight

Berit Lavender (MA ’11) was recently named executive director at MIT’s Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Congratulations, Berit!

Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy (MA ’16) cocurated R & Company’s triennial exhibition Objects: USA 2024, opening September 24, in Lower Manhattan.

Select Career Opportunities

The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University is hiring a chief curator. More information can be found at the above link.

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art seeks a Blackmon Perry Assistant/Associate/Full Curator of African American Art & Art of the African Diaspora. Reporting to the chief curator and supported by the Curatorial Department, the curator, will hold the first endowed position in the museum’s history. The curator will oversee the museum’s growing collection of African American and African diasporic works in all media, generate groundbreaking presentations of African Diasporic art in the form of temporary exhibitions and permanent collection displays, and help establish the curatorial approach to the museum’s $180-million capital project to build a new museum building in Downtown Memphis.

The Decorative Arts Trust offers Dewey Lee Curtis Symposium Scholarships to graduate students and young professionals in a field related to the decorative arts to attend the Decorative Arts Trust’s biannual symposia. The Trust supports at least two scholarships for each symposium. Applications are due on September 6, 2024.

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.
username: career.services@bgc.bard.edu
password: CareersBGC2024-5*=*

BGC Events

Call for new members: Diversity, Equity, Access, and Inclusion (DEAI) Working Group

BGC’s DEAI Working Group seeks new members. This coalition of students, staff, faculty, and alumni volunteer their time to learn, research, make recommendations, and take action to increase diversity, equity, access, and inclusion for all at BGC. This group is self-sustaining; each cohort serves a two-year term with 1-2 meetings per month during the academic year.

If you are interested, please fill out this form by September 13. If you have any questions, please contact working group co-chairs Julia Cullen (julia.cullen@bgc.bard.edu) and Amanda Thompson (amanda.thompson@bgc.bard.edu).

Playtime with River L. Ramirez: A Lecture Performance
September 11, 2024
6 pm

Join us for an evening with comedian, storyteller, and musician River L. Ramirez, who will curate and activate a collection of objects from the Bard Graduate Center Study Collection in an original lecture performance. Following the lecture, Ramirez will be in conversation with BGC PhD student Ellen Enderle (MA ’22). River L. Ramirez (they/them) is an NYC-based artist originally from Miami, FL. Working in the mediums of comedy, film, TV, writing, visual art, and music, it’s easy to forget that they are just a little furby with a knife. River’s work explores magick, collective consciousness, and liberation through play. Their work has been written about in the New York Times, Forbes, Art in America, SSENSE, and GQ. They teach a class called How to Be in Front of People at the Brick Aux, and just released their new EP: GIVING. You can also find them in Julio Torres’s Fantasmas and Problemista out now.

Select External Events

Crafting Modernity Networks, Part 1: Craft as Resistance in Venezuela and Mexico
MoMA
August 28, 2024
5 pm

In conjunction with the exhibition Crafting Modernity: Design in Latin America, 1940–1980, MoMA will host a three-part series of conversations among Latin American scholars intended to highlight new research, amplify complexities, and strengthen networks of scholarship and  fellowship among creative circles interested in art, architecture, and design. In this session, scholar Jorge Rivas (PhD ’18) and curator Ana Elena Mallet will introduce the key questions and complexities raised by the exhibition and discuss craft as an act of resistance in Venezuela and Mexico. This conversation will be moderated by Amanda Forment, curatorial assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design.

Brush of Insight/Faces of God: Book talk with Profs. Yael Rice and Murad Mumtaz
CUNY Graduate Center
September 6, 2024
5:30 pm

The Art History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center invites you to attend a panel featuring the authors of two groundbreaking monographs on Mughal painting, both published in 2023: The Brush of Insight by Dr. Yael Rice and Faces of God by Dr. Murad Khan Mumtaz. The authors understand paintings to have been portals for dreams, visions, and sacred presence, and to have invited spiritual insight. With innovative interpretations grounded in close looking, Rice and Mumtaz deepen our understanding of Mughal visuality. Each explores the provocative question: what do Mughal paintings do? Additionally, the authors significantly advance the study of artists, patronage, and artistic processes. The panel offers a chance to learn about Indo-Muslim ontologies, the power of gazing, especially on beauty, and the expressive sophistication of Mughal pictures. We invite colleagues outside Mughal art history to engage with what these scholars have to teach us about images. Specialists are welcome, too! Graduate-student organized, discussion oriented.

Make a gift today.

Shop the BGC Store!

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

Sign up for Gaggle!

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.