Form Follows Function/Function Follows Form: Another Look at Women’s Fashion from World War I
Tuesday, May 4
2 pm
Pay What You Wish*

Join Bard Graduate Center educators Juliana Fagua-Arias and Kristin S. McCool for a lively conversation about BGC’s virtual exhibition French Fashion, Women, and the First World War. Explore how fashion can both inform and reflect social roles and trace the changes in garments by female designers like Jeanne Lanvin (1867–1946), whose work directly responded to women’s changing roles, from the domestic sphere to those traditionally occupied by men. Other objects we will consider include caricatures and posters produced as a result of growing tension and anxiety between men and women due to changes in traditionally established gender roles.

Joe the Pressman: Ethnicity, Labor, Literacy, and Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Quebec Slavery
Tuesday, May 4
12:15 pm
Free

Join Charmaine A. Nelson for this talk which will explore an African-born man named Joe’s life as an enslaved male in Quebec through the complex intersecting lenses of his ethnicity, labor, literacy, and resistance.

Materiality and Politics: How Integrated were Diaspora Jews in the Roman Empire? Lecture 1
Tuesday, May 4
6 pm
Free

In the course of three lectures, Seth Schwartz will challenge the rosy picture of stable and successful Jewish corporate life under Rome through skeptically minimalistic analysis of Asian Jewish materiality and the ways in which it has been deployed in modern historiography. He will also try to account for what in the final analysis were divergent Jewish experiences in different Roman provincial settings.

From Spaces of Resistance to the Architecture of Repair
Thursday, May 6
6 pm
Pay What You Wish*

Join us for a conversation with cultural activists, artists, and scholars Nandini Bagchee, Libertad O.Guerra, and Todd Ayoung. Led by Gregory Sholette, and focusing on past, present, and future forms of collective self-organizing in the face of ongoing economic, political, environmental, and aesthetic crises, the group will discuss the construction of urban counter-institutions in the defunded ruins of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s, as well as Community Land Trusts and ecologically structured social zones that have emerged since the 1980s, despite neoliberal privatization and displacement.

Workshop: Writing Historical Fiction
Saturday, May 8
2 pm
Pay What You Wish*

In this workshop, you will explore how to approach research, world-building, and character development in historical fiction. 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. This workshop is led by author Katrina Carrasco. Her debut novel, The Best Bad Things (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), was a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards and Washington State Book Awards, and won the Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel.

Next Week:

Curators on Curating: “A Map is Not the Territory”: Unsettling the Curatorial Voice in Shaped by The Loom
Thursday, May 13
12 pm
Pay What You Wish*

Join curator Hadley Jensen and her guests to learn 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.

Disability Cultures, Creativity, and Consciousness: Art in the Time of a Pandemic
Saturday, May 15
2 pm
Pay What You Wish*

Disabled culture is actually a multiplicity of cultures that encompass a broad range of identities and talents. Discover the many ways in which disabled people have showcased their artistry and reflected their cultures during the pandemic. Join us for a live conversation led by Dr. Therí A. Pickens.

*Any donation of $1 or more gratefully accepted!