June 6, 2024

Dear Alumni,

Hello from Philadelphia, where I’m spending a few days participating in a conference titled Making Nature: The Labor of Natural History, organized by the American Philosophical Society. I’m presenting some of my research on nineteenth-century seaweed albums. Turns out that heading to the shore, collecting seaweed, and preserving the samples in books was all the rage in the 1860s! Perhaps these early sunny days of June will bring you to the beach, and if so, maybe you’ll even appreciate the seaweed with the wonder and joy of a Victorian.

In other news, I’d like to welcome BGC’s graduating class of 2024 to this email list! Congratulations on all of your achievements, including the excellent Qualifying Paper Symposium, which I had the pleasure of attending.

As always, you can submit your news via our online form!

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

Alumni Spotlight

Sydney Maresca (MA ’24) was nominated for an award in Outstanding Costume Design by the Outer Critics Circle for her work on the 2023 Broadway play The Cottage. Congratulations, Sydney, and see you at BGC this fall when you begin the PhD program!

Bailey Tichenor (MA ’18) hosted a pop-up exhibition of historic ceramics at current student Katrin Zimmermann‘s Harlem brownstone through her online gallery, Artistoric. Many BGC alumni, staff, and students attended the opening on May 16.

BGC PhD candidate Caroline Elenowitz-Hess and assistant professor Mei Mei Rado (PhD ’18) have been helping organize the first Fashion Studies Network Symposium. The event, titled “Unraveling Fashion Narratives,” will take place June 6–7 at Parsons and feature several BGC students and recent alumna Antonia Anagnostopoulos (MA ’24).

The exhibition catalogue for A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes, edited by Susan Brown, associate curator and acting head of textiles at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian American Design Museum, and Alexa Griffith Winton (MA ’03), manager of content and curriculum at Cooper Hewitt, won the 2023 George Wittenborn Memorial Award for best art book. John Stuart Gordon (MA ’03) and Leigh Wishner (MA ’01) contributed chapters and Stephanie Lake (BGC MA ’00, PhD ’09) provided vital research support via the Bonnie Cashin Archive.

Select Career Opportunities

The Center for Curatorial Leadership has opened a call for its annual fellowship. Twelve curators are selected each year for the core CCL fellowship. Applicants must be full-time art museum curators; the ideal candidate demonstrates a track record of success with and commitment to the full range of the curatorial endeavor—management, care, and scholarly study of collections as well as the development and execution of exhibitions, publications, and community programs.

The Rutgers Art Review seeks papers from current graduate students and recent PhD graduates for its upcoming edition. Submissions may address all topics, geographies, and historical periods within the history of art and architecture, visual and material culture, art theory and criticism, archaeology, cultural heritage and preservation, digital and public humanities, museum studies, film, and photography. Submission instructions can be found on their website.

For more job listings, please visit the BGC job board.
username: career.services@bgc.bard.edu
password: CareersBGC2023*=*

BGC Events

Encounters of Text and Material Culture in Ancient Judea
Thursday, June 6
6 pm
Tonight, BGC hosts the final lecture in the three-part series Encounters of Text and Material Culture in Ancient Judea. The lectures engage with Judean and later Jewish material culture during the first millennium BCE, mostly at the latter third of this millennium during the Hellenistic-Roman period. This is not an archeological study surveying pottery assemblages and architectural plans. Instead, Jonathan Ben-Dov focuses on particular types of material objects that lend themselves to interaction with texts. The surveyed materials are widely variegated: from monumental rock reliefs that straddle the borders of nature and culture to handheld devices for time measurement. Special attention is dedicated to scrolls, which posit the text-and-matter encounter in a particularly poignant way, and where new paths are trodden today, in the digital age.

Selected External Events

Liberty to Imagination: Drawings from the Eveillard Gift
The Morgan Library & Museum
Friday, June 7
6 pm

Join Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director of the Morgan Library & Museum, for a special opening night lecture that explores drawings by Rembrandt, Watteau, Degas, Renoir, among other highlights in the exhibition Liberty to Imagination: Drawings from the Eveillard Gift. The Morgan is a collection of collections and the one-hundredth anniversary of its founding provides an opportunity to celebrate a promised gift of twenty-eight master drawings from the seventeenth to the twentieth century from collectors Jean-Marie and Elizabeth Eveillard. This lecture takes place in Gilder Lehrman Hall on the ground floor. Doors to the hall open thirty minutes before the program begins and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Liberty to Imagination can be viewed before the program; free admission begins at 5 pm.

Concerts in the Parks
The New York Philharmonic
Tuesday–Friday, June 11–14, and Sunday, June 16
8 pm

The New York Philharmonic Concerts in the Parks, presented by Didi and Oscar Schafer, have become an iconic New York summer experience since they began in 1965. The free events have transformed parks throughout the city into a patchwork of picnickers enjoying friends, family, and music under the stars. This summer, Thomas Wilkins conducts the orchestra in a program that ranges from classics by Beethoven, Elgar, and Rimsky-Korsakov to Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, with Randall Goosby as soloist, to new music by Carlos Simon and the New York Philharmonic Very Young Composers.

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.