March 11, 2025

Dear Alumni,

I write from sunny Los Angeles, where I’m spending two weeks for research at the Getty. The photographs and lantern slides I’m working with here will feature in a chapter of my dissertation, and also inspired a panel I’m co-chairing for this May’s TAG (Theoretical Archaeology Group) conference at the Pratt Institute. BGC is a supporting institution for the conference this year, and seven panels have been organized by BGC students and alumni. There’s still time to propose individual papers—I encourage you to get in touch with panel organizers by March 13 if you have a talk you’d like to present! Please find the full list of sessions here.

Professor Deborah Krohn hosted an Alumni Meetup in Chicago on February 19, during the College Art Association conference in Chicago. She said it was a very jolly evening and everyone had a lot of fun catching up! Pictured above are, clockwise from bottom left, Alexis Mucha (MA ’07); Alyssa Greenberg (MA ’12); Jonathan Tavares (MA ’07, PhD ’13); Professor Deborah Krohn; and Antonia Behan (MA ’14, PhD ’21). In attendance but not pictured were Craig Lee (MA ’12) and Julia Lillie (MA ’14, PhD ’24). Deborah also made it to Craig’s Bruce Goff: Material Worlds exhibition at the AIC and reported that it is terrific!

In addition, BGC’s communications team asks that you please look out for a short survey that they will be sending your way tomorrow. This will help them with recruiting and fundraising for the scholarship fund. Thank you in advance for your participation!

As always, please share your latest updates via the online form!

All best,

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

Alumni Spotlight

At this year’s College Art Association Annual Conference in Chicago, Jeanne-Marie Musto (MA ’96), currently an art historian and Judaica librarian in the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library, co-chaired the panel “The Islamic Material Text: Local Traditions and Intercultural Dialogue.” You can catch her upcoming presentation, “Illustrating the Exodus: The Art of the Haggadah” on Friday, March 20, in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building’s Lenox and Astor Room. Well done, Jeanne-Marie!

Chicago Classic Magazine recently profiled Rebecca Tilles (MA ’07). In the interview she discusses her interest in the decorative arts of eighteenth- and nineteenth century France, what brought her to BGC, and how a Met fellowship she did while completing her MA impacted her career trajectory. The feature also digs into her current role as senior project manager of exhibitions at L’ÉCOLE, School of Jewelry Arts, created in 2012 by Van Cleef & Arpels to share the history of jewelry culture with the general public, and her upcoming book project on Florence and George Blumenthal. Brava Rebecca!

Select Career Opportunities

The University of Tulsa’s Helmerich Center for American Research at Gilcrease Museum offers funding opportunities to support in-residence research projects within the Gilcrease Museum Library and Archives housed at the center. The collections contain roughly 100,000 rare books, documents, maps, manuscripts, photographs, and more. Spanning from the fifteenth through the twenty-first centuries, the collection documents the broad histories of the Americas, with particular strengths in the experiences of America’s Indigenous peoples, Native language materials, European colonization, Mexican Inquisition records, and the American West. Researchers are also encouraged to research materials relevant to their project at McFarlin Library Special Collections (on the University of Tulsa campus), holding collections related to British, Irish, and American modernist literature, as well as World War I, Native American history and culture, and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

The University of Neuchâtel and Maison Borel welcome applications for “Love’s Matter – The Material Culture and Art of Affection, c. 1700-1900,” an international workshop for PhD students and early career researchers. This workshop will explore how the affective properties of love shaped and were shaped by the material conditions of modernity from the early eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. Abstracts are due on March 20. Find more information here.

The Norman B. Levental Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library seeks to hire a Curator or Associate Curator of Maps and Geography.

Call for Papers for 2026 Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) Conference
Students at BGC are organizing a graduate symposium later this spring. Titled Sensing Matters: Bodies, Experiences, and Objects, this symposium invites papers from area graduate students that explore how material things become animated through sensory engagement and how attention to the sensorium alters our understanding of them. This half-day graduate symposium will take place in person on Friday, May 1, 2026, at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. Those interested in submitting papers for consideration should email graduate.symposium@bgc.bard.edu. The deadline for submissions is Friday, February 27, 2026. Accepted speakers will be notified in early March.

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

Indigenizing Fashion in the Colonial Andes
A lecture by Laura Beltrán-Rubio (independent researcher)
Wednesday, March 25, 6 pm

Textiles have been central to the material culture of the Andes since time immemorial. With the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the textile primacy of the Andes adapted: rather than a straightforward imposition of European trends, Indigenous fashion and textile practices have undergone complex processes of “cultural authentication” and “survivance.” This lecture unravels evidence from archival and pictorial sources from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century to recenter the Indigenous agents, materialities, techniques, technologies, and systems of knowledge that have shaped Indigenous fashion practices in the Andes. It thus offers a reevaluation of the history of fashion and textiles in the colonial Andes to demonstrate that Native American and Euro-American histories of fashion and textiles are inevitably intertwined, complex, and mutually influential.

Digital Technologies and Archaeological Reclamation
A lecture by Edward González-Tennant (Texas State University)
Wednesday, April 8, 6 pm

Historical archaeologists are uniquely positioned to explore hidden histories—those events erased or otherwise obfuscated in the present—by facilitating a nuanced understanding of the past and its legacies in the present. This presentation explores how a range of digital technologies support archaeological reclamation, an emerging approach that positions archaeological expertise at the service of communities and the public. Dr. González-Tennant discusses several case studies from Florida and Texas to provide concrete examples of this community-centered approach to historical archaeology. These case studies illustrate the centrality of digital technologies—e.g., GIS (geographic information systems), GPR (ground penetrating radar), LiDAR (light detection and ranging), photogrammetry, and VR (virtual reality)—in revealing new historical truths that facilitate public dialogue and engagement. By examining the intersections between technology, community, and historical memory, González-Tennant seeks to contribute to ongoing conversations about the role of archaeology in promoting restorative justice and reconciliation.

Select External Events

Illustrating the Exodus: The Art of the Haggadah
Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, NYC
Friday, March 20

Art historian and Judaica librarian Jeanne-Marie Musto (MA ’96) explores how various versions of the Haggadah, both in manuscript and printed forms, shaped one another over time. The Haggadah guides participants through the Passover Seder and the story of the Israelites’ delivery from Egypt. Musto will highlight different illustrated Haggadot from the New York Public Library’s Dorot Jewish Division—both handwritten and printed, dating from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries—and examines how their imagery and design evolved across generations.

The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas
Daniel H. Silberberg Lecture Series with Ana Lucia Araujo
Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Monday, March 30, 6 pm

Throughout human history, men and women have used artistic expression to overcome the most horrible atrocities. Africans and their descendants also embraced artistic creation to survive the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas, and to soothe their physical and spiritual wounds. Drawing on written and visual primary sources, artifacts, and artworks housed in archives and museums in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands, Ana Lucia Araujo’s book, The Power of Art: The World Black Artists Made in the Americas combines history, art history, and art to tell the story of enslaved artists and examine the works they created in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The author argues that Black creators drew on the long and powerful heritage of African arts and knowledge, which they combined with European and Native American artistic traditions, to design artworks and objects that asserted a defying world of their own. Many enslaved and freed artists modeled clay objects, forged magnificent iron pieces, wove textiles, mats, and baskets, carved wood and stone sculptures. These artists embraced the knowledge transmitted to them by their African ancestors, while also introducing innovations learned from European and indigenous creators. Drawing on these rich economic and cultural exchanges, African artists and their descendants in the Americas adapted and developed new techniques and combinations of forms and colors. When creating new artworks, these artists also embraced new materials to which they assigned new uses and meanings. Araujo contends that artistic creation offered bondspeople relief and hope, and sometimes also opened to them a path to emancipation. Ultimately, by shedding new light on the works of enslaved Africans and their descendants, which still remain largely invisible in most museum collections, The Power of Art illuminates their long-lasting contributions to the development of visual arts in the Americas.

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.