Alumni Spotlight

Anne Eschapasse (MA ‘00) will become the deputy director of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC). She will lead the management of operations across the Musée and will be involved in the strategic planning of the institution’s main objectives. Among other projects, she will manage all activities related to the major transformation project and the Musée’s move in close collaboration with the director and chief curator of the MAC. You can read more about this appointment here. Congratulations, Anne!

Select Career Opportunities

Select Virtual Events at BGC

Workshop: Writing Historical Fiction
Saturday, May 8
2 pm ET
In this workshop, explore how to approach research, world-building, and character development in historical fiction with facilitator Katrina Carrasco. The specific focus will be on how to reimagine spaces and voices that are not well-documented—or not documented at all—in the historical record. The workshop will include guided writing exercises and opportunities for class discussion.

A Stain on an All-American Brand: How Brooks Brothers Once Clothed Enslaved People
Tuesday, May 11
12:15 pm ET
Jonathan Michael Square will present his research on Brooks Brothers’ connections to slavery. Brooks Brothers was founded in 1818 and, in the first few decades of its operation, provided merchandise to elite gentlemen as well as livery for their domestics. Some of those domestics were enslaved people. In this talk, he will use two Brooks Brothers coats worn by enslaved men as a point of departure to explore the history of this “heritage” brand.

Politics: Jews, Asian Cities, and the Roman State
Tuesday, May 11
6 pm ET
This is the second in a series of three lectures with Seth Schwartz. A close reading of the mainly (but not exclusively) literary sources for the early and high Empire reveals not a simple story of integration but a highly complex one of a three-sided negotiation between Jews, cities, and the emperor and his representatives. For reasons to be explored, at least some Jews experienced the Roman state as at least sporadically sympathetic to their desire to balance integration and separation, though to be sure this tendency faded over time in the High Empire, under the impact of the Jews’ rebellions elsewhere. Cities, though, had highly varied responses to their Jewish populations, but often tended to be hostile. Some texts, especially Christian ones, suppose that the Asian Jews more or less systematically cultivated buffer groups of friendly pagan citizens, who could save the Jews from having to rely on the sporadic and undependable support of the emperor. But such groups were not as widespread as the Christian texts imagine, and demonstrably often failed to fulfill their function as intermediaries between Jews and Greeks.

“A Map is Not the Territory”: Unsettling the Curatorial Voice in Shaped by The Loom
Thursday, May 13
12 pm ET
Join Hadley Jensen and her guests as they consider the dynamic opportunities and unique challenges of curating for a digital platform. Their discussion will provide a window into the curatorial process that underpins Bard Graduate Center’s upcoming online exhibition, Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest, the first virtual exhibition to showcase the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)’s collection of Indigenous textiles from the greater American Southwest, set to launch in spring 2022.

How to Respond to Anti-Asian/American Harassment When It Happens to You
Friday, May 14
3–4 pm ET
BGC is offering this workshop exclusively for those in the BGC community, including alumni, who identify as Asian, Asian American, and/or Pacific Islander. During this one-hour, highly interactive training you’ll learn Hollaback!’s methodology for responding to harassment, how your identities can shape your experience of harassment and the impact that harassment has on you and your community as a whole, what to look for when assessing your safety, and how to determine if responding in the moment is the right action or not. There will also be a deep dive into how to build your resilience on an individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, and societal front. You’ll leave with new tools on how to respond to harassment, whether your response is in the moment while that harassment is happening or long-term. Free; please register by Monday, May 10.

A Hat for Every Head: Children’s Workshop
Saturday, May 23
11 am ET

How do you like to accessorize? What do your hats say about who you are or what you like to do? Join us as we investigate ideas of identity and decoration through interactive activities designed for kids 8-11 and their caregivers. Inspired by the hats French women wore during World War I, build your own hat that communicates something about you during this outdoor art-making workshop in Central Park!

French Fashion Virtual Guided Tours
Through 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

Dressing a Picture: Reimagining the Court Portrait 1500 – 1800
Thursday, May 6 – Friday, May 7
8 am – 1:30 am ET
As Ulinka Rublack asserts in Dressing Up, her seminal book on dress in early modern Europe, society was extremely dress-literate and nowhere more so than in the courtly environments that generated and fuelled fashion. Within these sartorially-minded elite communities, one was constantly on display. Capturing dressed sitters in paint for prosperity, portraiture was a unique vehicle for the inherent dialectic in clothing between subject and observer, and presentation and perception. As such, this conference will examine three themes surrounding early modern portraiture: the artist, the depicted material culture and the setting for its iconographic display, that is the court. We aim to examine these connections via the prism of the period’s intricate social stratification and complex gender power dynamics. To provide sufficient breadth, the conference will present papers dealing with material between 1500 and 1800.

The Preservation Society of Newport County Emerging Scholars Colloquium
Thursday, May 13
12:30 pm ET
The Decorative Arts Trust will collaborate with The Preservation Society of Newport County for the third annual Colloquium featuring students and young professionals in the fields of decorative arts and historic preservation. Join this speaker series featuring new research by young scholars.

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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.