Alumni Spotlight

Mei Mei Rado (PhD ‘18) has been awarded a three-year Janet Arnold Major Award from the Society of Antiquaries of London for developing object-based research on modern Chinese fashion in preparation for a special exhibition at LACMA. The exhibition will further the understanding of Chinese fashions through the century spanning the late Qing dynasty, the Republican period, and the early Communist regime, exploring fast-changing styles, tailoring techniques, and textiles as responses to the semi-colonial social culture and successive national crises in China following the Opium Wars.

BGC alumna Emma Scully (MA ‘14) will present a pop-up gallery show of Cast Iron Editions at 16 East 79th Street in mid-May. A marriage of industrial making and digital connectivity, the show will feature the ideas of eight diverse artists produced by a local foundry, thus providing a model for a more equitable, and environmentally conscious way to run a collectible design gallery.

Select Career Opportunities

Select Virtual Events at BGC

Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another Screening and Panel Discussion
Tuesday, April 13
5:30 pm ET
With an elephant’s ivory tusk as the protagonist, Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another meditates upon the endless tactility of museological and ecological conservation, inviting reflection upon forms of representation, replicas, and embodiments of various materials, disciplines, and institutions. Join us for a screening of the film, followed by a panel discussion with the film’s director Jessica Sarah Rinland, anthropologist Grace Kim-Butler, and conservator Soon Kai Poh.

Epistemologies of Material Culture
Wednesday, April 14
6 pm ET
Robert Pogue Harrison and Susan Stewart will speak at the Seminar in Epistemologies of Material Culture. They will each speak briefly on their publications The Dominion of the Dead and The Ruin Lesson, respectively, and then be in conversation.

The Unnatural Ecologies of Modern Art
Thursday, April 15
12:15 pm ET
Fernando Domínguez Rubio will give this Brown Bag Lunch entitled “The Unnatural Ecologies of Modern Art.” Rubio (PhD Sociology, University of Cambridge, 2008) is an associate professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum, an ethnography of the Museum of Modern Art that explores the technologies, climatic infrastructures, and forms of care and labor required to prevent artworks from falling apart. Additionally, he has written on how different forms of subjectivity and objectivity are produced, focusing, for example, on the relationship between enhancement technologies and political subjectivity or on the politics of design and urban infrastructures.

Trenton’s Majolica Mania
Saturday, April 17
1:30 pm ET
In this lecture, Dr. Laura Microulis (PhD ’16), research curator at Bard Graduate Center (BGC), will briefly review the global phenomenon of majolica while previewing BGC’s upcoming Majolica Mania exhibition. She will then explore the pivotal role of Trenton’s potteries in bringing this popular ware to the US, from the American pottery displays at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia to the financial demise of the last majolica factory in Trenton in 1897.

Objects as Data, and in the Formation of Practice and Knowledge: A Short History of Beringian Collections in the Natural and Human Sciences
Thursday, April 22
12:15 pm ET
With a focus on the intersections of scientific practice and knowledge with economics and politics, this talk with Brooke Penaloza-Patzak (MA ’11) investigates objects as scientific data in theory and practice, offers a brief history of collection in Beringia, and discusses what shifts in data deemed suitable to support investigation can tell us about not only historical perspectives on ever-pressing issues like human difference and climate change, but processes of scientific specialization more broadly.

French Fashion Virtual Guided Tours
March 9 – June 1, 2021
Various times
We invite you to explore an exhibition from BGC’s past, French Fashion, Women and the First World War, and delve into the dynamic relationship between fashion, war, and gender politics in France during World War I. These tours are conversational in nature and take place weekly.

Virtual Events out in The World

The Material Lives of Objects
Wednesday, April 14
6 pm ET
Join the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Eric and Jane Nord Chief Conservator Sarah Scaturro (BGC PhD candidate), associate conservator of Asian paintings Sara Ribbans, and former senior conservator of paintings Marcia Steele as they highlight recently conserved works now on view in the exhibitions Stories from Storage and Variations: The Reuse of Models in Paintings by Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Together, they share the new stories and hidden histories that their research and treatments have revealed and discuss the differences between Western and Eastern paintings conservation methods, tools, and approaches.

From South to North: Kentucky and New England Furniture with Mack Cox and Philip Zea
Thursday, April 15
1 pm ET
Join the Decorative Arts Trust for this virtual dialogue about some impressive Kentucky furniture with a Yankee influence. Esteemed collector and scholar Mack Cox will share his insight on the influence of New England design and cabinetmakers on early nineteenth-century furniture from the Bluegrass state. Philip Zea, Historic Deerfield president and CEO, joins Mack for what will surely be a fascinating conversation.

Art & Environment in the Third Reich (Symposium)
Friday, April 23
12 pm ET
The Yale University’s Department of Art History will host this conference bringing together art and architectural historians working in medieval and modern fields to investigate the relationships between artistic practice, environmental science, and eugenic politics under Nazism. The event will focus in particular on the role played by the aestheticization of race and landscape in the visual arts. By examining the “Nazification of Nature” in art and its reception, the conveners additionally hope to draw critical lessons for reckoning with right-wing adaptations of ecological thought in the age of the Anthropocene. BGC assistant pofessor Freyja Hartzell (MA ’05) will present a paper titled, “Holz: Wood and the Werkbund in 1933.”

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Visit our online store at store.bgc.bard.edu for 40% off all items. Enter code ALUMNI at checkout to receive the discount.