October 9, 2024

Dear Alumni,

I hope you’re all enjoying the fall! I’ve been trying to adjust to the rhythms of a new school year. I’m still working on my PhD in art history at Columbia, and this semester I’m balancing preparations for my qualifying exams in the spring with working as a TA for an American art lecture course. Luckily, my students’ first paper is on chairs at the Met—definitely a BGC-approved topic!

As always, you can share updates via this online form. If you haven’t updated your contact information recently, you can fill out this form. We’ll use this information to get in touch about an alumni gathering in New York on November 12, generously hosted by Susan Weber in her Manhattan home.

All best,

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

Alumni Spotlight

Corinne Brandt (MA ’14) curated the exhibit On Tour: Lafayette, America’s Revolutionary Rock Star at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library. Commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824–25 “Farewell Tour” of the United States, the exhibition explores Lafayette’s incredible impact on the young nation through a fascinating selection of Winterthur memorabilia and objects honoring the Revolutionary War hero. Congratulations, Corinne!

Maeve Hogan (MA ’14) has been named a Smithsonian American Art Museum Predoctoral Fellow in American Craft. Maeve will work on research related to a dissertation project titled “Between Utility and Art: Recovering Fiber-Based Craft Histories of the 1950s and 1960s.” Well done!

Select Career Opportunities

The Boston Athenaeum seeks a curator or associate curator of Special Collections to focus on the interpretation, development, and curation of its rich and historic nineteenth-century American holdings, with an interdisciplinary emphasis on visual, print, and book culture. The position will join a dynamic team that shares curatorial responsibility for the Athenaeum’s world-class collections of paintings and sculpture; prints, graphic arts, photographs and drawings; rare books, manuscripts, maps, and ephemera. Responsibilities include curating exhibitions, building the collections by gift and purchase, promoting the collections through research, teaching, publication, and other forms of outreach, and assisting with the interpretation and presentation of the collections within the Athenaeum’s landmark historic building. Reporting to the head of Special Collections, this position will join the Athenaeum at a moment of renewed vigor in its exhibition and outreach initiatives, with new opportunities presented by a new, state-of-the-art exhibition gallery and a dedicated, technology-enriched teaching space for rare materials that were centerpieces of a recently completed $17 million building expansion and revitalization project. The position is full-time with excellent benefits and a competitive salary.

The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for its annual Spring Academy on American History, Culture & Politics to be held from March 24–28, 2025. The HCA Spring Academy provides twenty international PhD students with the opportunity to present and thoroughly discuss their ongoing PhD projects. The conference offers a forum for PhD candidates in which they can present their research candidly and receive valuable feedback.

Fort Ticonderoga seeks a collections access technician. The collections access technician will assist the collections manager in the registration and movement of Fort Ticonderoga’s collections, maintain the collections database, conduct collections inventories, facilitate collections access, and help maintain collections storage and exhibition areas.

In March, the Huntington Library will host a workshop titled “New and Emerging Studies of the Spanish Colonial Borderlands,” which seeks to bring together advanced graduate students in the field of the Spanish Borderlands to bolster intellectual exchange and create community among graduate students and interested faculty working on similar or related topics. Successful workshop presentation proposals should highlight new and emerging research on the Spanish Borderlands and focus on some aspect of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Florida, or related regions from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. For full consideration please submit a proposal, bibliography, and CV by November 1. More information can be found here.

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.
username: career.services@bgc.bard.edu
password: CareersBGC2024-5*=*

BGC Events

The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture in China and Beyond: A Global Middle Ages lecture
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
6 pm

This lecture explores the dynamic spread of Buddhist print culture in China and beyond, drawing on a wealth of printed books—many bearing illustrations—that were discovered in remote archaeological sites, retrieved from inside statues, or found in museum collections. Shih-shan Susan Huang examines Buddhist woodcuts not merely as static cultural relics but holistically within multicultural contexts and as objects on the move, transmitted across a sprawling web of transnational networks, “Buddhist Book Roads.” Prime examples include: the world’s earliest dated printed book, the Diamond Sutra (868), discovered in Dunhuang’s “library cave” in northwest China; artistic editions of the Lotus Sutra, produced during the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1279–1368) dynasties in southern China, in the thriving printing center of Hangzhou, and later widely circulated throughout Japan, Korea, and Central Asia; and the Dharani Sutra, which became extremely popular in fifteenth-century Beijing, especially among female donors, for its acclaimed protective and healing powers addressing childbirth complications. Huang will explore these examples and trace the spread of Buddhist woodblock images beyond Asia, reaching European audiences by the seventeenth century where they were seen as prime visual examples of Chinese art, religion, and culture.

Open House for Prospective Students
Sunday, October 20, 2024
11 am

If you know any prospective students, I encourage you to share information about BGC’s Open Houses. These events give prospective students the opportunity to learn about BGC’s MA and PhD programs. Participants hear from faculty about their research and teaching, meet current students, and tour the library and building. This session will be repeated on Sunday, November 17 at BGC, and on Sunday, December 8 on Zoom, both beginning at 11 am. Prospective students can register here.

Huipiles for a 500-Year-Old Woman
Wednesday, October 23, 2024
6 pm

Malintzin—the interpreter for Hernán Cortés—is a crucial character in the history of what is now known as México. At a meeting hosted by the Museo Textil de Oaxaca, which included historians, linguists, textile scholars, and—most importantly—weavers and embroiderers from indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Guerrero, a seed was planted. After listening about the life of Malintzin, her context, her dexterity with different languages, and the possible structure and aesthetic of the huipiles (tunics) she may have worn, an invitation was extended to every artist in the room: if Malintzin were alive today and she visited your hometown, what is the huipil that you would create for her? This project was carried out on-site at the Museo, but also remotely via WhatsApp, voice messages, and Zoom meetings, and resulted in an exhibition presented at the Museo in October 2023.

Select External Events

Artists in Conversation | Helen Marten
Yale Center for British Art (online)
Friday, November 8, 2024
12 pm

At this online event, Turner Prize-winning artist Helen Marten will speak with Michelle Kuo, chief curator at large and publisher, Museum of Modern Art. Born in Macclesfield, UK, in 1985, Helen Marten is an artist and writer who works across sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and writing to create work that questions the stability of the material world and our place within it. From 2004 to 2005 she studied at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London, and in 2008 she graduated from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford. She is an honorary fellow of Exeter College, Oxford.

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.