Greetings Alumni!

I recently had the pleasure of attending a concert at Radio City Music Hall for the first time, and was blown away by Donald Deskey’s interiors. The dazzling murals, frosted lighting fixtures, and Ruth Reeves-designed carpets were perhaps an even greater draw than the concert itself! Sitting under the radiating glow of the auditorium, I felt particularly lucky to be able to comprehend much of the meaning of Radio City’s making. I hope you too have been dropping into moments of design appreciation, big or small, this fall.

This week’s round-up features a lot of wonderful alumni–please do keep in touch with your news, either by email or through the online form. 

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

Alumni Spotlight

In September, Irene Sunwoo (MA ’04) participated in a “Meet the Curators” session for the Art Institute of Chicago where she serves as the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design. 

Katherine Tycz (MA ’13) has been awarded an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She will be working on her postdoc project about printed prayers from 1460 to 1660 in Italy, at the Moore Institute. 

Amber Winick (MA ‘13) and Michelle Millar Fisher’s Designing Motherhood book is available for purchase, and their project was recently profiled in Hyperallergic. There’s still time to visit the Designing Motherhood exhibitions at the Center for Architecture and Design (closing November 13th, 2021) and at the Mütter Museum (closing May 1, 2022) in Philadelphia. 

Madeline Warner (MA ‘20) has left BGC’s Development office (sniff!) to become a Development Associate in Institutional Giving at the Museum of Modern Art. Congratulations, Maddy!

Natalie DeQuarto (MA ‘21) was recently hired as an Assistant Curator at the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, CT. Congratulations, Natalie!

An interview with Sarah Scuturro (PhD ‘22), in which she discusses repairing fashion objects, has been published in the peer-reviewed journal, Fashion Practice. Well done, Sarah!

Select Career Opportunities

Select Events at BGC

Race-ing Whimsy: Black and Asian figures in the Majolica Imaginary
Thursday, October 21
6 pm ET
Majolica’s reputation for ornament, historicism, and lighthearted eclecticism is well understood, and its astonishing breadth of styles and subjects and the explosion of workshops that manufactured the popular ceramic ware are thoroughly chronicled in BGC’s exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Majolica Mania. Curator Susan Weber observed that majolica, more than any other ware of the era, makes visible and tangible the interests, desires, and anxieties of nineteenth-century consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. However, the ways in which majolica incorporated ideas of race into its enduring subjects has remained little discussed. With this in mind, the panelists will consider issues of race and representation that were embedded in the majolica phantasmagoria of the nineteenth century.

Through the Priest’s Ear: An Entangled Story of Life and Death at the Jesuit Church of San Ignacio
Tuesday, October 25
6 pm ET
Dr. Felipe Gaitan-Ammann’s talk will examine multiple avenues of interdisciplinary research arising from a vast archaeological dataset recently recovered at the Jesuit church of San Ignacio–one of the most significant colonial buildings still standing in the historical district of Bogotá, Colombia. The evidence excavated at San Ignacio testifies to over four centuries of domestic, funerary, spiritual, and bodily practices which, in turn, mirror complex processes of identity construction in a particularly isolated urban area of the Spanish colonial empire. By exploring the analytical possibilities of this rich collection of skeletal, artifactual, and archival information, we not only suggest new developments and directions in Latin American historical archaeology, but also partake in important initiatives of memory construction currently permeating all layers of Colombian social and political life. 

Memorial Service for Heather Jane McCormick
Saturday, October 23
11 am ET
The Bard Graduate Center community comes together with family and friends of Heather Jane McCormick to celebrate her life and to mourn her passing on September 27, 2020. McCormick, an alumna of BGC’s MA program, valiantly battled metastatic breast cancer for more than a decade.

Beautiful and Deadly: The Dark Side of Pigment
Friday, October 29
12 pm ET
Just in time for Halloween! Join us for a program investigating the dark side of some of the world’s most vibrant pigments. BGC professor Jennifer Mass will explain how lead, uranium, and arsenic are used to create these glorious but deadly hues and discuss their material histories with Dr. Spike Bucklow (University of Cambridge), author of Red: The Art and Science of a Colour.

Object Biography: The Life of a Concept
November 2
5 pm ET
Dr. Ann-Sophie Lehmann’s talk presents a brief history and theory of the concept of the object-biography, from its literary and didactic origins in the eighteenth-century to its recent critics, asking what the concept can help us see, which we otherwise would not.

Select Virtual and In-Person Events Out in The World

Heliconias, Evolution, and Art: A Botanist’s Perspective
Friday, October 22
3:00 pm ET
Smithsonian botanist  W. John Kress discusses the interaction of science and art and how field observations and controlled experiments by botanists and ecologists have produced a wealth of new information about heliconias.

Designing Urban Agriculture Part II: Digging into Farming in the City 
Monday, October 25
6:30 pm ET
The second in a three-part lecture series on urban agriculture, this program will focus on the on-the-ground logistics of urban farming, including issues of land use, design, format, scale, community relationships, water management, composting and waste. The first panel asked, “Why now?” The second explores the “how?” of designing and establishing a farm in a city, especially in New York.

The Wharton Esherick Museum presents: “The Holzhausen Curtains”
Tuesday, October 26
12 pm ET
This event highlights Esherick’s Holzhausen curtains, a set of printed textiles made for the German artist Hanna Weil. This fun 20-minute program will explore Esherick’s friendship with Weil, which included the exchange of numerous gifts such as these block-printed curtains; the trip Esherick made to Germany that inspired the print; Weil’s artistic career; and connections to Weil in the museum’s collection. This program is offered in celebration of Daring Design: The Impact of Three Women on Wharton Esherick’s Craft, currently on view at the Michener Art Museum.

Posters & Cocktails Up in Smoke
Tuesday, October 26
7 pm ET
Poster House’s Chief Curator will be hosting Nicholas Lowry of Swann Auction Galleries and Don Spiro of the Green Fairy Society over Zoom as they blaze their way through the history of posters related to smoking! No, we do not condone or promote the use of tobacco, but we do love its rich visual history in advertising.

Frankenstein on Screen: Mary Shelley’s Adapted Progeny
Thursday, October 28
7:30 pm PT
Mary Shelley likened the writing of her famous book to Victor Frankenstein’s making of his creature. In this lecture, James Chandler, professor at the University of Chicago and the Huntington’s R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow, explores Shelley’s “creature,” in what is now one of the most widely-read novels in the English-speaking world. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus inspired many offspring in the form of myriad adaptations since its initial publication, including more than a century of screen adaptations. What can we learn about these various adaptations by looking at their different ways of handling Shelley’s novel? What can we learn about Shelley’s novel from this remarkably rich adaptation history? 

Smithsonian Craft Show
Thursday, October 28 – Sunday, October 31
Various Times (Virtual and In person)
The 2021 Smithsonian Craft Show will be held in-person for the first time since 2019. This juried show of fine American crafts features works from 120 artists representing all facets of contemporary craft and design—basketry, ceramics, decorative fiber, furniture, glass, jewelry, leather, metal, mixed media, paper, wearable art, and wood. The works will be on display and for sale; serious collectors and casual shoppers will find one-of-a-kind works of art at a wide range of prices.

Embassy Workshop: Colca Valley Embroideries From Peru
Saturday, October 30
11 am ET
Join the George Washington Textile Museum, in collaboration with the Embassy of Peru and the Pacific Alliance, for an overview and demonstration of the “maquinasqa” technique (machine embroidery) with experienced Peruvian artisans and the head of the Association of Embroiderers of the Colca Valley, Donato Ventura. As a national cultural heritage of Peru, the unique embroidery work from the Colca Valley in the Arequipa region is prized for its technical and historical wealth, as well as its artistic and traditional values. The crafts of the Colca Valley are heavily influenced by the pre-Inca conceptions of the world offered by the Collagua and Cabana peoples. The iconography in its fabrics, which use alpaca fiber, is evidence of the richness and color of the Andean world.

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.

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.