Hello Alumni,

Between the New York City Center’s Fall for Dance festival and the New York City Ballet’s fall season, I’ve had the immense pleasure of attending a slew of performances in the last few weeks–in addition to a transcendent Japanese Breakfast concert at Radio City. Being saturated in these experiences has made me eager to bring what I’ve seen on stage into my life, particularly the way I relate to people in public. How can my encounters on crowded subways and packed sidewalks be more graceful? How might we physically support friends and strangers in shared spaces? Perhaps this is the hill I’ll die on: Ballet is important for the way it can teach us spatial consciousness. 

Please feel free to share your news, either by using the online form, or by emailing the alumni gmail account. It’s always a pleasure to hear from you! 

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

Alumni Spotlight

Dare Turner (MA ‘17), alongside Meg Onli and Ashley James was included in a list of changemakers in Harper’s Bazaar India. Well done, Dare!  

Andrew Gardner (MA ‘15) has recently become the Manager of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Arts & Design team, where he will oversee large-scale public art commissions for the MTA, including subway and commuter rail stations. Congratulations, Andrew!

Jennifer Klos (MA ‘07) was quoted in GQ in an article, “How to buy your first piece of art like an industry pro” (she’s advice points #16 & #18). Well done, Jennifer!

Select Career Opportunities

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is accepting applications for its 2024—2025 season of fellowships. They are holding an information session for the Conservation Fellowships and Scientific Research Fellowships on Thursday, November 2. 

The Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute has issued a call for papers for its forthcoming symposium around the theme of “Parasitism.” Application materials are due by November 12.

NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World invites submissions for an inaugural session of a graduate conference series, “I Saw the Future of the Past.” Application materials are due December 20. 

The American Folk Art Museum is seeking a Warren Family curatorial fellow. Application materials are due by November 15.

The Golden Triangle Business Improvement District in Washington, DC is hiring a manager of public art and creative activation. 

The Bruce Museum has opened a search for an associate registrar, exhibitions.

Edith Wharton Restoration, Inc. is accepting applications for a director of development.

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.

Username: career.services@bgc.bard.edu
Password: CareersBGC2023*=*

Select BGC Events

Exhibiting Africa: State of the Field in African Art and the Diaspora
Thursday, October 19–Friday, October 20
Various Times ET (In Person)
This timely symposium explores present-day perspectives on the display of the arts and material culture of Africa and the Diaspora, examines its historiography in Western cultural institutions, and considers directions for its future. The event coincides with exhibitions at each of its host institutions that contribute new approaches to display practices in the field. Convened by Drew Thompson and Annissa Malvoisin, curators, scholars, and faculty members at Bard Graduate Center, the event features discussions among thought leaders whose expertise ranges from the ancient to the contemporary.

Textures of Play
Wednesday, October 25
6 pm ET (In Person)
Join acclaimed board game designer Cole Wehrle as he explores the relationship between play and material design in board games. He’ll share his approach to the physical elements of board games—cards, pieces, and the boards themselves—and how the materiality of each game invites a unique mode of play. This lecture will be followed by a conversation, moderated by Bard Graduate Center (BGC) PhD candidate Nicholas de Godoy Lopes.

Open House for Prospective Students
Sunday, October 29
11 am ET (In Person)
Bard Graduate Center Open Houses give prospective students the opportunity to learn much more about our MA and PhD programs. You’ll join faculty who will discuss their research and teaching, have the chance to meet current students, and have your admissions and financial aid questions answered. Our in-person open houses will include building and gallery tours. The October event will be hosted by our Chair of Academic Programs, Prof. Deborah Krohn, and will include faculty members Caspar Meyer, Andrew Morrall, and Mei Mei Rado.

Sightline: Maaza Mengiste
Wednesday, November 1
6 pm ET (In Person)
In the spirit of the exhibition title—SIGHTLINES on Peace, Power, and Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa—Bard Graduate Center (BGC) has invited writer and critic Jessica Lynne, novelist Maaza Mengiste, composer JJJJJerome Ellis, and choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili to create their own sightlines—ways of seeing the exhibited artworks through time, form, and space. Join us on October 11, November 1, November 15, and December 13 to experience these “sightlines” live.

Select Virtual and In-Person Events in the World

Black Capitalism and the City: African American Insurance and Actuarial Imagination
Graham Foundation
Friday, October 20
5:30 pm CT (In Person and Live Streamed)
Join the Graham Foundation, Places Journal, and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) for the inaugural SAH | Places Prize Lecture by architectural historian Ginger Nolan. Nolan is the inaugural recipient of the SAH | Places Prize on Race and the Built Environment, a unique collaboration between SAH and Places that supports the production of a major work of public scholarship that considers the history of race and the built environment through a contemporary lens.

Exhibition Program: Community Building and Quilts
The George Washington University Museum, The Textile Museum
Saturday, October 21
11 am ET (In Person)
Throughout U.S. history, quilt making has acted as an empowering process for women individually and collectively. Through the shared space of “quilting bees,” group sewing sessions intentionally and unintentionally worked as consciousness-raising settings, as communities came together to share struggles and stories. African American women in particular have used quilts as a means of expressing everything from rebellion to joy in their community. Join Niloo Paydar and artist Sandy Barrett Hassan in the exhibition Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts for a conversation on quilts, community and history focused on Hassan’s recent quilt “Conflict.” 

Artist Talk: Shary Boyle
The Museum of Arts and Design
Tuesday, October 24
6 pm ET (In Person)
Shary Boyle takes the stage in The Theater at MAD for a richly illustrated discussion of her creative journey from shadow puppetry and performance to her multidisciplinary solo exhibition, Shary Boyle: Outside the Palace of Me currently on view at the Museum through February 25. In the exhibition’s imaginative theatrical space, visitors are cast as active participants in the artist’s interrogations of the performative nature of identity. Continuing the dialogue between artist and audience, Boyle will answer questions and take us through the last decade of her career, in which she represented Canada at the 2013 Venice Biennale, became a highly skilled and deeply imaginative ceramicist, and synthesized her distinct figurative idiom to recast the museum as an empathetic space for considering some of society’s most intractable problems.

Book Talk: Frances Elkins: Visionary American Designer
Rizzoli and Liz O’Brien
Wednesday, October 25
4 pm ET (In Person)
Join Scott Powell to celebrate the publication of his new book on Frances Elkins. Called “the most creative designer we have ever had” by Billy Baldwin, Frances Elkins has been revered for her classic, erudite, and multidimensional decor. Ahead of her time, Elkins became a successful decorator who by the early 1930s had reached the top of her profession and was considered the only rival to Elsie de Wolfe. Through his extensive research on her life and work, Powell has become a leading expert on Elkins’s designs, influence, and biography and has documented more than 250 Elkins commissions, many previously unknown. Powell has gathered the most definitive images of Elkins’s interiors, as well as her extensive correspondence with the leading designers, artists, and creatives of her day.

Islamic Ceramics and Invisible Hands: Craft Skills in a Colonial Marketplace
Silsila: Center for Material Histories
Wednesday, October 25
6:30 pm ET (In Person and Live Streamed) 
Historical ceramics from the Islamic world have long been prized by collectors and are now dispersed across elite collections worldwide. Many of these objects migrated westward during the colonial-era heyday of Islamic art collecting, a period when craft skills in the Middle East—frequently portrayed as dying out with the advent of industrialization—were in fact redirected towards a new market generated by the colonial project and its fanatical harvesting of artefacts: the faking, forging, and fictionalizing of antiquities. Focusing on the under published collections of the American Midwest, this lecture seeks to recognize faking and forgery as economically logical, indigenous forms of skilled craft participation in modern global capitalism. It also reveals some of the challenges that colonial modernity presents to the discipline of art history, via the objects that moved through it and were remade in its image.

Food & Fashion Symposium
Fashion Institute of Technology
Friday, November 3
10 am – 5 pm ET (In Person)
The Food & Fashion Symposium features preeminent food and fashion scholars, as well as designers, chefs, and artists, exploring how, for over two centuries, food culture has impacted fashion and vice versa. Topics include sustainability, the creative overlap between fashion and food within haute cuisine and through social media, how cultural identity and social justice are communicated through food and fashion, how body image and eating practices intersect with food and fashion, and how artists express the relationship between these two vital aspects of culture and society. 

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Sign up for Gaggle!

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.