Greetings Alumni,

I had the pleasure of visiting the Breakers for the first time this past weekend and it did not disappoint! The estate’s Gilded Age interiors were spectacularly opulent and I was especially charmed by the Billiards Room decorated in the style of an ancient Roman bath, complete with a plethora of mosaics and depictions of dolphins. Better yet was viewing the neighboring Newport mansions from the cliff walk amidst the crisp air and spray from the salty sea–it made me feel rather amphibious myself. 

Now that I am back on dry land, I would love to hear about your successes, updates, and adventures! Please don’t hesitate to send your news, either by email or through the online form. 

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

Alumni Spotlight

The chair of the American Ceramic Circle’s Book Committee announced at the American Craft Council annual symposium on October 29, 2021, that Brian Gallagher’s (MA ‘98, PhD ‘12)  Classic Black: The Basalt Sculpture of Wedgwood and His Contemporaries, co-published by the Mint Museum with D Giles Limited, won this year’s Book Award. This catalogue accompanied an international loan exhibition of the same name that was organized by the Mint and opened in Charlotte, NC, on February 8, 2020. Congratulations, Brian!

Katie Hall Burlison (MA ‘06) curated Artistry in Iron: Blacksmiths of New Orleans at the Gallier House Museum. The exhibit, partially funded by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, takes a closer look at the lives, production, and working conditions of enslaved and free blacksmiths of color and celebrates their contributions to the material landscape of New Orleans’ most historic neighborhoods. 

Michael Dewberry’s (MA ‘17) podcast, Artroverted, has begun its second season and features two conversations with Bonnie Pitman and Shirley Mueller, M.D., on the topic of Art + Medicine.

Select Career Opportunities

Select Events at BGC

Unlearning by Undoing: Towards a Pluriversal, Enlivening Cultural Practice, Poetics, and Politics
Tuesday, November 23
12:15 – 1:15 pm ET
Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen will present at the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation Seminar in New York and American Material Culture. Tchen has organized two online gatherings, Hacking the University Reckoning with Racial Equity, Climate Justice, and Global Warming (2020) and Dismantling Eugenics (2021), as collaborative aligning efforts, or what Arturo Escobar would call exercises in “pluriversal design.” His lecture will discuss decolonizing and what we can call de-eugenicizing our universities, arguing that our collaborative task is to reimagine and to enact a regenerative way of being. 

Eco-Gothic, Titian, and the Crossing of the Red Sea
Tuesday, November 30
6 pm ET
Hannah Baader will discuss a large-scale print by Titian. The piece must have been a re-edition of a lost first version, developed by the artist approximately thirty years earlier. The woodcut is covering a surface of 290 x 100 cm of paper and therefore has the size of a panel painting. Spreading over several sheets, Titian has represented the biblical theme of the Crossing of the Red Sea. The main protagonists of this representation are the agitated waters, but the meaning of this artistic choice still needs explanation. The work unfolds a dynamic investigation into divine and naturalized powers, political forces or fears and early ecological thought, calibrated with high artistic skills on the surface of the paper sheets.

Gold Rush, Congo Style: Gustav Klimt’s Marble Mosaic Frieze in the Brussels Palais Stoclet, 1905-1911
Wednesday, December 1
12:15 – 1:15 pm ET
Debora Silverman’s lecture will discuss how Gustav Klimt achieved what he considered the highpoint of his experiments with ornament not in Vienna, but in Brussels, where he designed, with unlimited budget, a large-scale frieze of gold and bejeweled mosaics to wrap the dining room walls for the Palais Stoclet (1905-1911). This remarkable work revitalized Klimt’s career and changed his style. The Stoclet project also concentrates myriad and unrecognized connections to Africa. Klimt became enmeshed in a web of links that tied his patron and circles of Brussels elites to the Congo and to Egypt. These shape not only the circumstances of his commission but the stylistic forms, raw materials, and figural compositions that he devised for it. Vienna, golden style, is reborn in the gold rush of the Belgian empire.

Select Virtual and In-Person Events Out in The World

Drinking and Scribbling in the Garden: Xu Wei’s Wild Cursive Calligraphy
Thursday, November 18
7:30 – 9 pm PT
Peter Sturman, professor of art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses the artistic polymath Xu Wei (1521–1593) and his uninhibited style of calligraphy, known as kuangcao, or “wild cursive.” Sturman introduces Xu’s calligraphy, and in particular, three scrolls that Xu wrote in an increasingly drunken state during a garden gathering, within the context of the colorful history of that script, which has been associated with wine.

Material Cultures of Islamicate China: New Perspectives
Friday, November 19
10 am – 1 pm ET
Over the past decades, archaeological excavation in China has brought to light a wide range of portable objects produced in the medieval Islamic world. Many of these come from dated contexts, providing fixed points in their chronology that are sometimes lacking in their place of production. The material culture of the various Muslim communities of China itself is also attracting increasing attention. This workshop offers an introduction to some recent work on the Islamic or Islamicate art of China and its relationship to the artistic traditions of the Islamic lands that lay to the west and south.

Design and Practice Exchange: Navigating the (Post) Pandemic Terrain
Friday, November 19–Saturday, November 20
Various times
The Design + Practice Exchange (DPE) is a one-and-a-half-day symposium of compelling conversations and design presentations centering on the voices of women in architecture, co-hosted by the AIANY Women in Architecture Committee and the Boston Society for Architecture Women in Design.

Hampton National Historic Site Tour
Tuesday, November 30
1 pm ET 
Join the Decorative Arts Trust for a virtual tour of Hampton National Historic Site with curator Gregory Weidman. Hampton, located north of Baltimore, MD, was the largest private home in America when completed in 1790 and is considered one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in the country. Greg will also share the extensive research conducted on the people who lived at Hampton, free, indentured, and enslaved.

A Journey Through 500-years of Embroidered History with Dr. Jessica Grimm
Wednesday, December 1
1 pm ET
Dr. Grimm’s talk will begin about 1000 years ago with the magnificent goldwork embroideries that are held in Bamberg, Germany, and then end in the early sixteenth century with mass-produced goldwork orphreys from the Netherlands. In between, she will explore spectacular examples of Stumpwork embroidery from Central Europe. Throughout this talk, she will share why certain techniques and materials were dropped in favor of others and how the invention of printing made particular designs “go viral.”

Picturing the Subway in 1970s New York
Thursday, December 2
3:30 pm ET
The New York Public Library’s Julie Golia and historian Kim Phillips-Fein explore a collection of evocative photographs of the New York City subway system in the 1970s by Alen MacWeeney, discussing what the images reveal about the city during a decade of crisis and transformation.

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.