Greetings Alumni,

I wish you all a belated Happy Easter and Happy Passover, and I hope you were awash in holiday leftovers earlier this week! It seems New York’s weather has finally, definitively turned towards spring. On Saturday, I tried to savor the warm sun and crisp breezes a bit by taking a meandering route through Central Park on my way to and from a visit to the Met. Perhaps by our next correspondence the cherry blossoms around the Park’s reservoir will have bloomed…

Until then, please send me your news, either by email or through the online form. It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

Best wishes,
Rachael Schwabe (MA ‘20)
alumni@bgc.bard.edu

Alumni Spotlight

Colin Fanning (MA ‘13, PhD candidate) gave a paper titled “The Language of Objects: Product Semantics and Industrial Design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art” at the 2022 IFA-Frick Symposium on the History of Art on Friday, April 8. Well done, Colin!

Select Career Opportunities

Select Events at BGC

Making Ornamental Africa: An Enlightenment Process
Tuesday, April 26
6–7:30 pm
Could it be that in the geographical conception of art developed in Enlightenment Europe, the primary role and the function of the so-called Black Continent was one of ornament? Or, on the contrary, did the aesthetic conception elaborated by the European Enlightenment deprive Africa of artistic potentiality? These two opposing hypotheses coexist in eighteenth-century artworks and texts. Anne Lafont’s talk will focus on some objects whose material, form, argument, use, and reception invite us not only to historicize the notion of African art, but also to identify the registers of categorization specific to this pivotal eighteenth-century moment, when both anthropology and aesthetics were invented. African objects, as well as European objects inspired by the African presence in Europe, rub up against the emergence of these two disciplines, which intersected around the importance of the senses and sight, in particular.

25th Annual Iris Foundation Awards
Wednesday, April 27
12–2:30 pm
In 1997 Susan Weber created the Iris Foundation Awards to recognize scholars, patrons, and professionals who have made outstanding contributions to the fields of decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Proceeds benefit the Bard Graduate Center Scholarship Fund. 

MacArthur x BGC
Wednesday, April 27
6–7:30 pm
Conservation is something humans do. A million years ago, our early ancestors were repairing handaxes. Five thousand years ago, Egyptians buried their rulers in elaborate containers, in spaces that also held precious objects, inside gigantic and impenetrable pyramids designed to last for all time. Preservation (of self) is a concept at the heart of both modern political and modern biological thought. Nineteenth-century physicists began describing the workings of nature in terms of conservation of energy / force / momentum. It was at just this time that the conservation of art objects took on a specific shape with specific practices and even norms. In this series of conversations between artists, scientists, humanists, and social scientists, we will explore the significance of conservation as a human practice with consequences for how we think about ourselves and our society, both past and future.

Symposium–Rethinking the Wearable in the Middle Ages
Thursday, April 28–29
Various Times
This conference seeks to expand our current understanding of the wearable in the Middle Ages. Current scholarship on the topic in Byzantine, western medieval, Eurasian art, as well as Islamic traditions tends to encompass clothing and jewelry, and is frequently medium-specific, with minimal regard to the interrelatedness of different aspects of appearance. On the one hand, work on medieval textiles has tended to approach questions of identity, consumption, and appearance by comparing textual sources and visual depictions with surviving textiles. The study of medieval jewelry, on the other hand, largely focuses on the classification and attribution of precious metal pieces from excavations and museum collections, as scholars make sense of pieces long removed from the bodies they once adorned.

Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Books and Exile in the Sahara
Tuesday, May 3
6–7 pm
Books have a longer history in West Africa and the Sahara than has been acknowledged until recently. A culture of writing and reading was firmly established in Timbuktu by the fifteenth century, and books were among the objects that moved with trading caravans across the Sahara. Against this background, Shamil Jeppie’s lecture will examine a case of reading and writing by an exile, the scholar Ahmad Bābā from Timbuktu, in Marrakesh in the 1590s.

Select Virtual and In-Person Events Out in The World

Lacunae of Art History and Kyiv’s Visual Culture
Friday, April 22
12–2 pm ET
This lecture is part of a series of events co-organized by Dumbarton Oaks in collaboration with North of Byzantium and Connected Central European Worlds, 1500–1700. Dr. Olenka Z. Pevny is Associate Professor of Slavic and Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is a cultural historian of medieval Rus’ and early modern Ukraine. Her primary research focuses on the place of visual culture in the shaping of premodern and modern identities. Dr. Pevny is the author of numerous articles on Byzantine, Rus’, and Ukrainian baroque culture. She also writes on nineteenth century and Soviet cultural restoration practices.

The Sixth Annual Berkeley-Stanford Symposium: Work in Progress
Saturday, April 23
11 am–4 pm PT (In Person)
Work in Progress, the Sixth Annual Berkeley-Stanford Symposium, takes on questions that challenge ideas about temporality, labor and value, and techniques of appreciation and assessment. These questions will be addressed across a range of disciplines, styles, periods, and geographies to draw connections between the unmade, unfinished, and the yet-to-be uncovered. The Keynote Speaker, artist Kenneth Tam, will draw on these themes of vexed temporality to address how the aesthetic, social, and political come together in his practice to complicate and critique the notion of progress. Together, the conference opens up ways to think critically about how the many ruptures across history and within our contemporary moment have fractured the logic of linear progress to reveal new aesthetic potentials.

New Works on the Indigenous West: “Indian Cities”
Wednesday, April 27
12–1 pm PT
Author Kent Blansett and ICW Associate Director Elizabeth Logan discuss Blansett’s co-edited book Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanization that highlights the impact of Indigenous people on urban places and the effects of urbanism on Indigenous peoples and politics.

The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW) presents a four-part webinar series on new histories of the Indigenous West where scholars discuss topics ranging from voting, basketball, photography, to urban spaces.

Commune(ing): Ghosts and Utopia, A Round Table Discussion and Reading
Wednesday, April 27
5 – 7 pm ET (In Person)
Please join Pratt to reflect on the cycles and intersections of experimental utopias, the needs of ghosts, haunted communities, and beyond. We will also celebrate the publication of two beautiful new books by Writing faculty members Adrian Shirk (Heaven is a Place on Earth) and Samantha Hunt (The Unwritten Book).

Block-Printed Amulets From the Qubbat Al-Khazna Damascus: Discovery, Technique and Texts
Wednesday, April 27
12:30 pm ET
Arianna D’Ottone Rambach’s lecture aims at illustrating two block-printed amulets found in the Qubbat al-khazna in the Great Mosque of Damascus and currently preserved in Istanbul, at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. These two specimens enlarge both the corpus of known block-printed amulets and the map of the regions in which the production of this peculiar type of written evidence is attested. The history of the find will be recalled in order to put the block-printed exemplars in a wider material and linguistic context. Moreover, the technique employed for their production will be discussed and other new specimens, of various provenances, will also be presented.

Online Program: The House of Gucci
Thursday, April 28 
6 pm ET
Author Sara G. Forden will discuss with fashion journalist Teri Agins her blockbuster book The House of Gucci: A Sensational Story of Murder, Madness, Glamour, and Greed, which recently became movie that debuted in theaters last November. On March 27, 1995, Maurizio Gucci, heir to the fabulous fashion dynasty, was slain by an unknown gunman as he approached his Milan office. In 1998, his ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani Martinelli—nicknamed “The Black Widow” by the press—was sentenced to 29 years in prison for arranging his murder. The Gucci story is one of glitz, glamour, intrigue, and the rise, near fall, and subsequent resurgence of a fashion dynasty. Join us for Q&A with the speakers during the YouTube premiere of this pre-recorded event.

Battery Park City: Creating a New Neighborhood
Saturday, April 30
1–3:30 pm ET (In Person)
After more than four decades of planning and construction, Battery Park City has been built out, following a master plan by Cooper, Eckstut and Associates. Learn about the area’s urban planning and discover its distinctive residential neighborhoods, distinguished parks and plazas, public art works, and signature commercial center.

From Palace to Cosmos–Assyrian Reliefs and the Construction of Empire
Wednesday, May 4 
5–5:45 pm CT
Join Michael Seymour, associate curator in the department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as he discusses Assyrian reliefs and the construction of empire. This lecture will focus on the dynamic between palace, empire, and imperial vision, and explore some of the ways in which the sculptures can contribute to more complex readings of all three.

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.

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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.