November 20, 2024

Dear Alumni,

It was such a pleasure to see many of you last week at our fall alumni event hosted by Susan Weber. I had a lovely time chatting with you and putting faces to the names I learn by sharing your news in these letters. I hope those who attended enjoyed hearing about the future BGC Gallery exhibition on nineteenth-century biscuit tins, and then snacking on biscuits (thankfully, those were twenty-first century)!

If that event left you feeling misty-eyed about your time at BGC, please encourage your favorite students, colleagues, and mentees to attend the final Open House for Prospective Students on Zoom on Sunday, December 8.

And don’t miss the next chance to gather with fellow BGC alumni! Please find more information below about a tour of Objects: USA 2024 organized for our community.

Please share your updates via the online form! If you’re at work on a curatorial project or recently worked on one, I encourage you to tell us about your work using this special survey for exhibition news.

All best,

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

Alumni Spotlight

Debra Schmidt Bach (PhD ’15) was recently appointed Director of Exhibitions at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut. Congratulations, Debra!

Julie Bellemare (PhD ’21) curated Sensorium: Stories of Glass and Fragrance, now on view at the Corning Museum of Glass. The show explores the millennia-long relationships between glass, perfumery, and the storage of scent. In a boutique-inspired setting, visitors will have intimate views of historical and modern glass objects related to scent, including perfume bottles by leading modern designers and contemporary artists. The featured objects are from around the world, and together they showcase the evolution of perfume bottles while telling larger stories about science, power, and luxury. You can learn more about the exhibition in a recent New York Times article. Well done, Julie!

Three BGC alums—Angela Hermano Crenshaw (MA ’24, current PhD student), Allison Donoghue (MA ’24), and Luli Zou (MA ’24)—recently participated in a panel entitled “Breaking Boundaries: Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Views in the Museum Field from Emerging Scholars” at the annual New England Museums Association conference in Newport, Rhode Island. Angela spoke about an upcoming Philippine textile exhibition at the RISD Museum, Luli shared research on imitation Chinese lacquer panels at the Newport Restoration Foundation’s Vernon House, and Allison presented on her research into multiple narratives of thimbles in the colonial Northeast at sites of cross-cultural contact, including settler colonial and Native American perspectives. Congratulations, all!

Select Career Opportunities

The Carnegie Museum seeks a Curatorial Fellow in Architecture and Design. The Fellow will work as part of a curatorial team with expertise in Architecture, Decorative Arts & Design, Modern and Contemporary Art, Photography, European and American Art, and in addition to interacting with colleagues across museum departments to support the development and implementation of Carnegie Museum of Art’s artistic program. The Curatorial Fellow will support the research and development of exhibitions and acquisitions as well as participate in special projects and initiatives, such as internal workshops, artist site visits and residencies, and education programs that advance the Carnegie Museum of Art’s mission. The Curatorial Fellow may have the opportunity to conduct their own independent research as an individual contribution to one of the Museum’s exhibitions or its public programming.

The Library of Congress is accepting applications for the Swann Fellowship. The Swann Foundation seeks to award one fellowship annually (with a stipend of up to $5,000) to assist the fellow in their ongoing scholarly research and writing projects in the field of caricature and cartoon. In lieu of one fellowship, the board has made smaller awards to several recipients in recent years due to the number, nature, and quality of fellowship applications.

The American Antiquarian Society is hiring for two paid internship positions, both including housing. The Conservation Internship was established in 2020 to provide training opportunities for graduate students with a specialization in book or paper conservation. The Seiler Library Internship is an opportunity to explore librarianship by working at a national research library, participating in its daily activities, completing library-based projects, and beginning to develop a network of contacts in the field.

The Rijksmuseum solicits applications to its Mellon Fellowship for research in art and cultural history. This Fellowship focuses on the Netherlands as an international intersection of art, artists, artistic ideas and materials. In recent decades, art and cultural historical studies have seen an upsurge in the scholarly attention paid to wide themes such as mobility, cultural networks, shared cultural heritage and globalization. The Rijksmuseum has actively contributed to this development, and international interfaces with Netherlandish art have been central to its collection and exhibition policy in the past decades. The Mellon Fellowship is in keeping with these themes, and aims to stimulate high-quality, object-based research, focusing on the Low Countries as a centre of international cultural exchange at large.

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.

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

BGC Events

Objects: USA 2024
A Tour for BGC Alums
Thursday, December 12, 2024
6–8 pm

BGC alums and friends are invited to an exclusive tour of Objects: USA 2024, a groundbreaking exhibition featuring nearly 100 works by 55 visionary American artists and designers. Curated by Kellie Riggs and Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy (MA ’16), the exhibition explores the dynamic intersections between fine art, craft, and design, featuring works that bridge the gap between sculpture and functional objects. Angelik will lead the tour with R & Company principal Zesty Myers. RSVP here by Monday, December 9. Guests are welcome.

Free Shipping on Domestic Orders!
Friday, November 29–Monday, December 2, 2024

BGC exhibition catalogues make fabulous holiday gifts! Pair your 40% alumni discount with free shipping from BGC’s online store. Enter code ALUMNI at checkout to receive your discount.

An Archive of the Beautiful Game: Football (Soccer) Jerseys and the Stories They Tell
Wednesday, December 4, 2024
6 pm

Football / fútbol / soccer is the most popular sport on earth. Its cultural, political, and social impact is undeniable, but as a game it remains ephemeral. Bard Graduate Center welcomes Jamal Thomas from Classic Football Shirts, a rapidly growing international collector and seller of vintage football jerseys and kits. He will exhibit a series of important football jerseys from the sport’s history, and then, in conversation with manager of public research and education, mary adeogun (MA ’22), reveal the stories imprinted in these material objects.

The Leon Levy Foundation Lectures in Jewish Material Culture: Thresholds of Contact and Conflict: Material Culture and Jewish History from Early Modern Times to the Fin de Siècle
Thursday, December 5, 2024
6 pm

In these three lectures, historian Daniel Jütte explores dynamics of contact and conflict in Jewish-Christian relations by focusing on one overarching theme: thresholds. Understanding thresholds in both a literal and figurative sense, his talks span a wide chronological arc from early modern times to the fin de siècle. The first lecture probes how shared objects, customs, and memories crossed thresholds between Christians and Jews in early modern Europe. The second talk homes in on the complex role that liminal spaces played in encounters between both religious communities in Renaissance cities. The final lecture examines how, in modern times, artistic representations of the Jewish condition—especially the little-known trope of “threshold dwellers”—influenced visions of the Jewish past and future.

BGC Open House on Zoom
Sunday, December 8, 2024
11 am

If you know any prospective students, I encourage you to share information about the final Open House of this recruiting cycle, which is held on Zoom, especially with those who might not be able to visit in person in mind. Attendees will learn about BGC’s MA and PhD programs, hear from faculty about their research and teaching, and meet current students. Prospective students can register here.

Select External Events

Medieval Ethiopia in a Global Frame
Silsila: Center for Material Histories, New York University
Friday, November 22, 2024
10 am

The past two decades have seen a remarkable burgeoning of interest in the art, architecture and archaeology of medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea. Campaigns of fieldwork have produced spectacular evidence for the dynamic connections that the region had to Nubia, Egypt and the Nile Valley, the Red Sea and Yemen, and even the Gulf and broader Indian Ocean world. Building on earlier pioneering exhibitions such as African Zion (1993), two recent major exhibitions have reintroduced audiences in the US to the beauty and richness of medieval Ethiopian culture. While much of the focus of recent research has been on the period after 1300 CE, this one-day workshop aims to showcase recent scholarship on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

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.