May 8, 2026

Dear Alumni,

I hope this message finds you well and enjoying what I suspect is a busy time for many of you. I’m wrapping up the academic year with final exam grading and looking forward to a vacation to Paris with my family. We’re planning to visit Notre-Dame, which we’ve never done before, and my parents have enjoyed perusing the page on this cathedral in BGC’s online exhibition companion to the current BGC Gallery show Viollet-le-Duc: Drawing Worlds in preparation for our trip. If you’re in New York, there’s still time to see the exhibition at BGC before it closes later this month! Just use code “ALUMNI” at checkout and your tickets are free. 

As always, please share your latest news through our online form. I look forward to hearing your updates!

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

From Amy Estes, BGC’s Chief Communications Officer:

Hello alumni! I have loved seeing and hearing from so many of you this spring. Here on 86th Street, second-year MAs are preparing for their QP Symposium and commencement! Many of them are also feeling stressed about their job searches, and would be interested in learning more about your career paths, current jobs, and the institutions you work for. If you would be willing to make yourself available for a 30-minute informational interview with a graduating student, please let me know. We will match you with a student particularly interested in learning from you and schedule the meeting at a time that is convenient for you. Thank you for your consideration!

Alumni Spotlight

Hear from Pim Supavarasuwat (MA ’22), Director of Donald Heald Rare Books, and Barbara Gifford (MA ’04), Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Craft, and Design at the Museum of Art and Design, about the lasting impacts of their studies at BGC in a new YouTube video. Well done, Pim and Barbara!

Alumni also discussed life after BGC in the second Recent Alumni Panel, where current students learned about the transition from grad school to the professional world from three graduates: Dylan Leah Brekka (MA ’19), a Registrar for the Art Students League of New York who has worked in galleries and private art collections in New York City since graduation; Natalie DeQuarto (MA ’21), a Deaccession Curator for New York State Parks, Recreation, & Historic Preservation who previously worked as an Assistant Curator at Mattatuck Museum; and Jackie Mazzone (MA ’20) is the Manager of Public Programs: Museums, Preservation, & Historic Resources at Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, where she has been for nearly four years. Thank you all for sharing your reflections during this event! (And if you’re interested in serving as a panelist for future events of this kind, please reach out to Julia Cullen, Senior Manager of Academic Programs and Student Affairs, at julia.cullen@bgc.bard.edu.)

Emily Hayflick (MA ’20) returned to BGC to present a paper at Sensing Matters: Objects, Experiences, and Objects, a student-led symposium that explored how material things become animated through sensory engagement and how attention to the sensorium alters our understanding of them. Emily, now a PhD candidate in anthropology at Cornell, gave a talk titled “One Whole Eagle: Assembling Eagle Bodies at the National Eagle Repository” on the panel “From Ephemeral to Accumulated.” Well done, Emily!

Select Career Opportunities

The D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry is looking to fill two new positions that will support the library’s partnerships with tribal nations. Both positions will support activities within a Mellon-funded implementation grant, “Expanding Indigenous Access and Stewardship at the Newberry Library” (2026-2030), which is a five-year community-driven initiative that centers Indigenous voices, builds lasting relationships, and creates accessible, sustainable pathways to Indigenous histories and knowledge. Building on a 2020–2023 Mellon-funded planning grant and larger institutional initiatives, the project will fund community-led research, digitization, and training—ensuring that American Indian and Alaska Native nations have greater access to and control over the presentation of historical materials that contain their histories and knowledge. The Tribal Outreach Coordinator will coordinate and administer grant-related activities, assist with outreach to tribal nations, and support the McNickle Center’s work as a meeting ground for research and collaboration with Native communities. The Materials and Metadata Coordinator will facilitate the digitization of materials from the Newberry’s Indigenous Studies collection, enhance the metadata of Indigenous Studies materials under community guidance, and support the work of the Newberry’s Digital Initiatives and Services department.

The editorial board of the Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts invites submissions for volume 101, to be published in May 2027. The Bulletin is a peer-reviewed publication with a broad readership dedicated to original scholarship across the fields of art history and visual culture, including fine arts, decorative arts and design, film, and new media. The theme for this volume, Figures in Context: Social Worlds Behind the Image, seeks to foreground the social, historical, and material conditions surrounding the human figures represented within works in the DIA’s collection, and those who participated in their creation. We welcome contributions that examine sitters, models, and other—often anonymously depicted—figures across periods, geographies, and media, with attention to questions of labor, class, ethnicity, gender, race, and religion, among other possibilities. Essays may also consider questions of authorship, anonymity, workshop practice, and collaborative or distributed modes of artistic production. Abstracts are due on May 29—find more information here.

Thresholds, the annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture and published by MIT Press, is now accepting submissions to be published Spring 2027. While seemingly concrete, the concept of property is frequently fragmentary, contingent, and ephemeral, premised in an array of theoretical descriptions. It is constructed through social relationships and defined through reciprocal accord. These social dynamics highlight the proximity of property to power through its delimitation of rights to access, possession, and exclusion. Ideas of property have been foundational in both western and non-western frameworks of culture and law, implicated in understandings of individual autonomy, rights, and the economy. From the enclosure of land to its representation in painting, from waqf funds to development mechanisms to environmental protection, to labor, protest, and repatriation, imaginaries of property have shaped art and architecture through history and across geographies. Thresholds 55 invites scholarly writing, criticism, and artistic interventions that interrogate these interactions. Submissions are due on June 1.

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.**

Drawing out the Gothic: A Curator Conversation with Barry Bergdoll (Columbia University) and Femke Speelberg (Metropolitan Museum of Art), moderated by Basile Baudez (Princeton)
Wednesday, May 19
6:00 pm

Join us for a discussion about the gothic and Gothic architectural drawings as we enter the final week of one exhibition (Viollet-le-Duc Drawing Worlds) and the early weeks of another (Gothic by Design: The Dawn of Architectural Draftsmanship). This program, organized as a partnership between the Drawing Foundation, Bard Graduate Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will begin with a critical response to the two exhibitions by Basile Baudez (Princeton), followed by a conversation with curators Barry Bergdoll and Femke Speelberg.

Select External Events

Virtual Book Launch: Artistic Provenance Research 
Wednesday, May 20
11 am

Thinking Through the Museum presents a virtual book launch for Artistic Provenance Research by Tal Adler and Sharon Macdonald. What can art and artists bring to researching the origins and biographies of objects? How do they shed new light on – or even unsettle – existing approaches to such questions? Proposing the new term – artistic provenance research – the contributors to this innovative book illuminate art’s capacity to expand provenance research in critical and provocative ways. Join Editors Tal Adler and Sharon Macdonald to discuss their new book Artistic Provenance Research. Moderated by Dr. Cara Krmpotich, the conversation will touch on the urgent concerns in contemporary heritage research and practice such as colonialism and decolonization, ownership and art-markets, institutionalization, human remains, return and restitution. This event is hosted by Thinking Through the Museum and supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Concordia University.

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.