Hello Alumni,

I hope everyone’s spring allergies are under control! As the weather oscillates between warm and cold, I have tentatively shed my heavier winter clothes, only to re-open my sweater drawer days later–such is the journey towards consistently warm weather. 

It feels like a short lifetime since I was last in touch! Two Sundays ago, I visited the Hans Holbein: Capturing Character exhibit on view at the Morgan Library & Museum. I was captivated by the artist’s depictions of his sitter’s hands either clasped, or otherwise occupied with an attributable object like glasses, books, and most notably, a squirrel. I hope you too have been keeping your hands busy these past weeks! 

Until we next meet, please feel free to get in touch with your news, either by email or through the online form.

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

Alumni Spotlight

John Stuart Gordon (MA ‘03), curator of Yale University Art Gallery’s exhibition, Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power, will be giving a talk hosted by the Victorian Society of New York on April 20. See below for more information on the event! 

Daniella Ohad (PhD ‘06) curated an exhibition, The Female Voice in Modern Design, 1950–2000, at the Carpenters Workshop Gallery New York, that opens on April 20. Congratulations, Daniella!  

Nicole Pulichene (MA ‘13) edited and published The Boethius Diptych: New Findings in Technical Art History, Iconography, and Paleography alongside Catharina Blänsdorf and Esther Wipfler, in collaboration with Francesca Morandini. The book features examinations carried out by an international team of conservators, art historians and historians in 2019 and 2020 clarified questions concerning the material evidence of the Boethius diptych, regarding the making of the diptych in Late Antiquity, the internal chronology of the interventions in the Middle Ages and the painting technique. Congratulations, Nicole!

Amanda Thompson (MA ‘16, PhD candidate) co-authored “‘As We Have Always Done’: Decolonizing the Tomaquag Museum’s Collections Management Policy” with the Tomaquag Museum’s Executive Director, Lorén Spears (Narragansett-Niantic). The article was featured in the special thematic issue “Indigenous Collections: Belongings, Decolonization, Contextualization” of the peer-reviewed Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archive Professionals. This is a companion piece of sorts to Amanda’s 2020 article “A Sustaining Cherokee Basket: Colonial Inscription and Indigenous Resistance” published in Sequitur. Both articles seek to expose the colonial practices embedded in the language of museum collection cataloging. Well done, Amanda!

Select Career Opportunities

Select Events at BGC

Memory Work as Care Work
Tuesday, April 12
6 pm
“Memory Work as Care Work” explores the ways Black archives and archival practices testify to the complexity of how Black life is lived, documented, and remembered. During this conversation Zakiya Collier, a Brooklyn-based Black, queer archivist and memory worker; Steven G. Fullwood, archivist, writer and co-founder of the Nomadic Archivists Project; and Amy Sall, founder and editor-in-chief of SUNU: Journal of African Affairs, Critical Thought + Aesthetics (SUNU Journal) will discuss memory work as a practice that goes beyond archival labor.

Lissy Mineo-Gonzalez Instagram Live Studio Visit
Wednesday, April 13
12:15 pm
Join BGC Library Artist in Residence (AIR), Lissy Mineo-Gonzalez on the BGC Instagram for an intimate studio visit! Despite COVID-19, Lissy has been in residence with BGC since October. Come see what she has been working on in advance of the virtual exhibition opening in May.

Africa’s Struggle for Its Art
Wednesday, April 13
6–7:30 pm
Focusing on the two decades immediately after eighteen former colonies across the African continent gained independence from France, Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Bénédicte Savoy’s lecture follows the ultimately unsuccessful efforts by cultural and political leaders and politicians across Africa, in the diasporas, and in Europe itself, to demand the return of art and address the power dynamics and ideologies of racism and Western chauvinism—still prevalent in contemporary repatriation discussions—that prevented these myriad objects’ return to their countries of origin. 

Reading with Objects
Thursday, April 14
6 pm ET
Poet, author, and educator Anselm Berrigan has curated a reading list for Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object?, including poetry, prose, and cross-genre writing that meditates on our idiosyncratic experiences with objects. Join us for any (or all) of these reading group evenings, when we will engage with work by Renée Gladman, Francis Ponge, Clark Coolidge, and Tuttle himself, as well as read and listen to a selection of poems by artists that work in and from objects.

Lictenberg’s Knife: A Few Reflections on Conservation
Tuesday, April 19
6–7:30 pm
Undoubtedly, there are divergences—both practical and theoretical—among different cultures of conservation: the plural is indeed appropriate. All of those cultures, however, imply the materiality of the objects they take care of. But if we look at this issue from a distance, a long, complex historical trajectory will emerge. Its implications are at the center of our experience of living in today’s world.

What Does the Object Say?
Wednesday, April 20
6 pm
Acclaimed puppeteer and director Lake Simons offers an animated way of experiencing Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object?, in conversation with curator Peter N. Miller. What can we learn about objects when we bring them to life through puppetry? This is a question that Simons has explored in workshops with a mixed cohort of high school and graduate students, who will—as part of this evening—stage puppet performance interludes based on Richard Tuttle’s writings and using exhibition objects.

Select Virtual and In-Person Events Out in The World

ReFashion Week x Repair Shop Workshop: Darning Basics For Knits + Wovens
Thursday, April 7
6:30–8:30 pm ET
In partnership with ReFashion Week NYC 2022, Rachel and Sam of Repair Shop are hosting a 2-hour virtual darning workshop! Repair Shop is working to build a culture of repair by celebrating histories of wear and helping you extend the life of what you own.

Contested Histories: Art and Artifacts from the Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection
Friday, April 8–Saturday, April 10 (In Person)
11 am–6 pm ET
Complementing the exhibition No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) brings its pop-up display of the Allen Hendershott Eaton Collection to The Noguchi Museum for one weekend. 

Online Puppet Playdate: The Velveteen Rabbit 
Saturday, April 16
10 am ET
A stuffed velveteen rabbit is given as a Christmas gift to a small boy and so begins the rabbit’s journey of transformation. Using enchanting table top puppets and guided along by a live narrator, the Center for Puppetry Arts brings the story and characters of Marjery Williams’ timeless classic to life. The story’s universal themes of imagination, play, and deep, abiding love, along with the author’s original wit and touching honesty, are all respectfully reinvented in this live, interactive puppet tale filled with humor and sincere warmth.

Risa Puleo: Thinking with Sheep, Swallows, and Butterflies Against Settler Boundaries
Monday, April 11
6–7:15 pm ET
Risa Puleo, an Early Modern art historian and curator of contemporary art, will discuss thinking alongside animals in her research and exhibitions to unravel the logics of colonial property relationships and Western epistemologies. Her 2018 exhibition, Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly, took the migratory path of the Monarch as a metaphor for sovereignty connecting the 2016 Standing Rock Reservation to the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Contemporary Voices: Jovencio de la Paz
Tuesday, April 12
7 pm ET
Join artist Jovencio de la Paz online for a discussion on weaving the digital. The weaving loom is considered by many historians to be the precursor to the modern computer. In their art practice, de la Paz uses this interrelated history to examine the intersection of digital and material cultures, finding surprising narrative threads through science-fiction, histories of technology and queer identity. 

“Abou Farid’s War” and Other Love Stories: Artist Omar Mismar in Conversation with Joan Retallack
Wednesday, April 13
12:30 pm ET
Through sharing processes and insights on several projects, the talk draws provisionary schemata that grapple with desire in the city, the beautiful in the terrible, and the parasitical in the host. From ephemeral actions to sculpture, installation, video, and performance, Mismar seeks to establish a lexicon of practices that allow for scrupulous buoyancy between the gestural, the aesthetic, and the political. Between the aestheticization of lived realities, and the instrumentalization of ambiguity and aesthetic sensibilities, is there a space that we can occupy? By wagering on a poetic occupation, a performative obliqueness emerges, which preserves the fiction essential for artistic discourse while critically disarticulating, making strange, the ideological insinuations inherent to concrete political situations.

Beyond the Gilded Age: Gold in America
Wednesday, April 20
6:30–7:30 pm ET
Gold’s warm glow, resistance to corrosion, and rarity have made it a preferred material for objects meant to convey prestige, authority, or devotion. This talk by John Stuart Gordon, curator of Yale University Art Gallery’s current show, Gold in America: Artistry, Memory, Power, will focus on the exuberant and tumultuous years between the Gold Rush of 1848 and World War I. Many of the sumptuous objects, coins, and paintings in this talk are included in the exhibition, Gold in America, on display through July 10, 2022.

The Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University presents, Inheritance: How Communities Are Responding to Controversial Artwork 
Wednesday, April 27–Saturday, April 30
Various Times ET
Brown University’s symposium, Inheritance,  brings together activists, curators, educators, tribal leaders, artists, historians, heritage workers, and policy makers to explore the range of strategies that institutions and communities are using to respond to contentious representations of race, Indigenous lifeways and history in public art and architecture.

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