March 6, 2025

Dear Alumni,

Happy March! For those of us on the academic calendar, that usually means spring break has almost arrived! I’m heading to England in about a week to participate in an annual symposium for art history students at Columbia and Cambridge. It’ll be my first visit to Cambridge, so I welcome any recommendations!

As always, you can share news via our online form. I look forward to hearing your updates.

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

Alumni Spotlight

J. Cabelle Ahn (MA ’15) served as a panelist for the event “The Machine Gaze: AI in Art Conservation and Analysis,” hosted at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Well done, Cabelle!

On January 26, Juliana Fagua Arias (MA ’21) presented at the Decorative Arts Trust and Jenrette Foundation’s Emerging Scholars Colloquium at the Park Avenue Armory. Juliana’s talk was titled “Luster, Shimmer, and Polish: Transpacific Materialities in the Arts of Colonial Latin America.” Congratulations!

Skylar Smith (MA ’19) was recently featured in an industry podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming services. The conversation covered the history of illustration courses that Skylar teaches as professor of liberal arts at Ringling College of Art and Design. Well done!

Select Career Opportunities

First, a special note for BGC alumni: Ana Gutierrez-Folch (MA ’14), director of appraisals at Gurr Johns, has noted that Gurr Johns might have some new full-time entry-level research positions opening up in the coming months. If you are interested, please send Ana a cover letter and resume at afolch@gurrjohns.com. Ana and BGC alum Patrick Sheehan (MA ’02), Gurr Johns’s director of decorative arts & design and senior appraiser, are always eager to hire BGC students and graduates.

The Victorian Society of New York (VSNY) invites undergraduate and graduate students and recent graduates to submit proposals by March 13, 2025, for its annual Emerging Scholars Program to be held on the evening of May 13, 2025. VSNY supports scholarship about every aspect of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century culture, including architecture, literature, theater, fine and decorative art, immigration, economics, politics, education, gender roles, reform movements, music, fashion, and food. Topics for recent event winners have included an electric gown, 1890s Black newspaper women, escalators, and Civil War panoramic battlefield paintings. For the May 13 event (to be held from 6–7:30 pm), VSNY will bring together three emerging scholars at the Center at West Park on the Upper West Side, where each will give a twenty-minute presentation and then field questions. Send 200-word proposals (preference given to American/New York topics) and CVs by March 13, 2025, to info@vicsocny.org.

The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago seeks a curator who will work closely with the Dana Feitler Director to implement the artistic identity and vision for the museum. This position will serve as a staff liaison to the Smart Board of Governors Collections Committee, take an active role in fundraising and grant writing, and represent the Smart on campus, as well as locally, nationally, and internationally. The ideal candidate will be a scholar with a successful track record of developing exhibitions, publications, collaborative projects, public speaking, and fundraising. While this position is not restricted to applicants with a background in a specific area of art, preference will be given to applicants whose expertise aligns with the museum’s collection and who have an ability to work across the collection. Find more information here

The Hajji Baba Club Research Fellowship supports primary research in the field of carpet studies. Find application requirements here.

For more opportunities please visit the BGC job board.

username: career.services@bgc.bard.edu
password: CareersBGC2024-5*=*

Select Events at BGC

Between the eras of Dürer and Rubens, artists, architects, and scientists in northern Europe collaborated to revive the Vitruvian concept of architecture as both art and science. They did so by creating images of architecture in drawing, painting, print, and sculpture that brought techniques of visual research to architectural practice—a phenomenon epitomized in Wendel Dietterlin’s 1593–98 Architectura treatise. In this talk—celebrating the publication of her new book, The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science: Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation (Cambridge, 2024)—Elizabeth Petcu argues that such architectural images created a hotbed of empiricism and rendered the medium indispensable to the advent of modern empirical science. She sketches a new method for investigating the roles of architectural images in the entwined histories of early modern art, architecture, and science.

Materializing the Past: The Leon Levy Foundation Lectures in Jewish Material Culture by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Thursday, March 20, 6 pm

The idea to create a museum of the history of Polish Jews emerged in 1993, inspired by the opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, that year. After more than a decade as a project, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews was cofounded in 2005 by the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland, which initiated the project, the Ministry of Culture, and the City of Warsaw. An international architectural competition for the building followed. Facing the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, POLIN Museum is located on the site of the Warsaw ghetto and prewar Jewish neighborhood. After suppressing the Warsaw ghetto uprising in May 1943, the Germans reduced the area to rubble. As a result, the museum project began without a historic neighborhood, without a building, without a collection, and without funds. Its greatest asset was the story it would tell, a thousand-year history of Polish Jews. In exploring the creation of POLIN Museum’s Core Exhibition and extensions of it, curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will explore how the museum materialized history and created and discovered novel kinds of objects.

Select External Events

2025 Paul Mellon Lecture: Behind Notre-Dame’s Monumental Restoration
The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine; livestream available on YouTube
Wednesday, March 12, 6 pm

Following Notre-Dame’s reopening in December 2024, get a behind-the-scenes look at the revival of this icon of French medieval architecture with World Monuments Fund’s annual Paul Mellon Lecture, taking place this year as part of the organization’s 60th anniversary program. Special guests will include Philippe Villeneuve, chief architect for historic monuments in France, including Notre-Dame de Paris; Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University; Bas Smets, landscape architect; and Patrick Malloy, dean at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, in conversation with WMF President and CEO Bénédicte de Montlaur.

Two Glass Houses: An Entangled History
Virtual
Sunday, March 16, 2 pm

During the late 1940s, two glass-walled pavilions were designed by then-leading modern architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. From their beginnings to the present, these houses have an intertwined history. Over the years, the National Trust for Historic Preservation acquired both houses, opening them to the public. At this event, the executive directors of each site discuss the fascinating shared history of these icons of Modernism.

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.