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Artists in Residence Pop-Up Exhibition
Ellen Sampson’s Emotional Objects
December 6, 2019–January 5, 2020
Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 18 West 86th Street

Open Studio
December 6, 2019
5-7pm

During Ellen Sampson’s residency and through her pop-up exhibition, Emotional Objects, she will explore the material culture of change and loss through two everyday objects: the handkerchief and the glove. They are emotional objects, artifacts required to convey, stand in for, or embody emotion. These artifacts, mundane, yet overdetermined, are bound up with the etiquette and traditions of courting and mourning, of private and public, of work and of war. They are souvenirs, love tokens, and mementos, deeply entangled with performances of love, labor, and grief. Despite their ritualized and socially proscribed mode of use, gloves and handkerchiefs are also deeply personal and tactile objects, often understood as indivisible from those who used and wore them. They are Bodily objects, objects that stand in for absent bodies.

About the Artist
Ellen Sampson is an artist and material culture researcher whose work explores the relationships between bodies, memory, and clothing, in museums and archives and in everyday life. She notes that the First World War catalyzed multiple shifts in women’s lived experience: changes in social structure, employment, and dress practices. The spaces women occupied, the roles they played, and the ways they dressed all changed, so that as war ravaged Europe, their tactile and sensory experiences were shifted and reframed. It was equally a period of previously unparalleled loss, of lives and of behaviors, of futures and of traditions; so much so that it is hard to think of the material culture of that period as anything other than the material culture of loss.

About Artist in Residence Programs
Bard Graduate Center’s Artists in Residence (AiR) programs bring artists into conversation with the Bard Graduate Center Gallery’s current exhibition, French Fashion, Women, and the First World War. The work of these artists animates the BGC Gallery as a living space and draws connections between the exhibitions on view and contemporary art making. Fall 2019 AiR programs include a pop-up exhibition, maker workshops, and performance lectures, as well as a runway show exploring the history of counter-fashion.

The pop-up exhibition will be on view on the Fourth Floor of Bard Graduate Center Gallery.

Gallery Hours
Tue, Fri–Sun 11 am–5 pm
Wed, Thu 11 am–8 pm
Closed on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day.

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On View in the Gallery
French Fashion, Women, and the First World War
September 5, 2019 – January 5, 2020 Learn More Button
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