Hello Alumni,

It’s my great pleasure to introduce the new Alumni Newsletter bard, Julia Carabatsos (MA ’22)! I’m officially signing off and handing the keys over to Julia’s capable hands—she will introduce herself in our next issue.

I’d like to once again express my gratitude for hosting my voice in your inboxes these past couple of years! Please feel free to continue sharing your news with Julia via the online form, or by emailing the alumni gmail account.

With care,

Rachael Schwabe (MA ’20) | rachael.schwabe@gmail.com
Julia Carabatsos (MA ’22) | alumni@bgc.bard.edu

Please Share: Summer School for Undergraduates at BGC

Alumni Spotlight

Liz Neill (MA ’16) co-organized a colloquium, Monsters, guardians, and wonders: The hybrid or interspecies being in figure-decorated pottery and other ancient art and culture, at the 2025 AIA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, January 2–5. Well done, Liz!

Mei Mei Rado (PhD ’18) presented a paper, “Woven Animals: The Tenture des Indes for the Qing emperor” in the symposium, Mapping Animals in Global Space at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. Nice work, Mei Mei!

Cynthia Volk (MA ’21) provided a chapter for Morgan: The Collector, a new book edited by Vanessa Sigalas and Jennifer Tonkovich published by Arnoldsche. The book, including Cynthia’s contribution,“Gazing East: Morgan and Chinese Art,” is one of eighteen essays covering the diverse range of J.P. Morgan’s extraordinary art collection. Congratulations, Cynthia!

Sarah Scaturro (PhD Candidate) was the Ruth Ketterer Harris Lecturer for the UW-Madison Center for Design and Material Culture on February 22. She was introduced by Sophie Pitman (MA ’18), who is the Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and research director of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection. Well done, Sarah and Sophie!

Select Career Opportunities

The Design History Society has issued a call for papers for their online symposium, Textiles and Masculinities, taking place June 15. Application materials are due by April 11.

The Society of Architectural Historians Historic Interiors Group, in collaboration with the University of Arts, London, seeks proposals for its 4th Annual Emerging Scholars Symposium, Confronting the “Chamber of Horrors”: Taste in Interiors. Application materials are due by April 1.

ArtTable is accepting applications for the 2024 ArtTable Fellowship Program. Application materials are due by April 5.

The American Antiquarian Society invites applications for their 2024 Chavic Summer Seminar, “Disability Histories in the Visual Archive: Redress, Protest, Justice,” led by Lauren Daen and Jennifer Van Horn. Application materials are due by April 8.

The Decorative Arts Society is reestablishing the Charles F. Montgomery Award and Prize for excellence in decorative arts scholarship, honoring the pioneering work of connoisseur, collector, antiques dealer, author, and teacher Charles F. Montgomery (1910–1978). Application materials are due by June 3.

The Dallas Museum of Art is hiring eight Summer Camp Interns. Application materials are due by March 31.

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.
username: career.services@bgc.bard.edu
password: CareersBGC2023*=*

BGC Events

Sovereignties of the Imagination
Tuesday, April 2
6 pm
This talk by Wayne Modest of the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam takes up some of the more recent explorations of the concept of “worlding” to think about possible futures of the so-called “ethnographic” or “world cultures” museum. For more than three decades now, ethnographic museums—at least those in Europe—have received sustained critique. In its most recent iteration, this critique has congregated around ideas of restitution, repatriation, and more broadly, decolonization. Modest outlines both the main aspects of the critique of ethnographic museums over the last few decades, and museums’ responses to this critique. Despite the challenges associated with ethnographic museums’ roots in colonial history and calls for their closure, he suggests that these museums inhabit an important conjuncture today—precisely because of their histories—and that they hold important material and political potential for imagining a new museum for the future.

Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Decisive Museological Action of French Historicizing Painters
Wednesday, April 3
6 pm
On January 10, 1907, the Société de l’Histoire du Costume was founded in Paris to create a “Musée du Costume.” Sixteen of the founders were painters, and most of them were artists who historicized the eighteenth century. In this lecture, curator and scholar Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros considers the influence of artists such as Maurice Leloir (1853–1940), Gustave Jean Jacquet (1846–1909), and François Flameng (1856–1923) in the formation of the eighteenth-century fashion collection of the Palais Galliera and the construction of its image.

Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother
Wednesday, April 10
6 pm
Bard Graduate Center presents a triptych of pieces by Meghann O’Brien (Jaad Kuujus), a contemporary Indigenous weaver from British Columbia of Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw descent, working in collaboration with a team of anthropologists, technologists, and artists. This installation—including Sky Blanket, a robe created by O’Brien with contributions from First Nations artists Jay Simeon and Andy Everson; Wrapped in the Cloud, a digital animation critically engaging the photogrammetry and 3D-modeling process documenting Sky Blanket; and an untitled robe digitally woven on a TC2 loom materializing an instance of Sky Blanket’s digital modeling process—collectively illustrate the complex art of translation across media and material, kinship and teaching, the past and the future. Join us starting at 4 pm for a special viewing of the works and stay for a conversation at 6 pm with O’Brien along with Everson, museum anthropologists Kate Hennessy and Hannah Turner, and design researcher Doenja Oogjes, moderated by curator Laura Allen (MA ’20).

Select Virtual and In-Person Events in the World

New Directions in Fashion Research
Fashion Institute of Technology
Friday, April 5
10 am–5 pm ET (In Person)
The Museum at FIT’s 31st symposium, New Directions in Fashion Research, will focus on new avenues of study in the interdisciplinary field of fashion. Scholars, curators, and collectors will explore topics such as practice-based research, collecting practices, theories and methodologies, and the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in fashion education.

Emilie L. Gossiaux in Conversation with Sarah Cho
Queens Museum
April 7
3 pm ET (In Person, Live-Streamed)
Join Emilie L. Gossiaux and Sarah Cho, assistant curator, in celebrating Gossiaux’s exhibition Other-Worlding. Gossiaux and Cho will discuss Gossiaux’s practice, inter-species relationships, the deep recesses of imagination, access and touch as love, and everything in between.

Cotsen Textile Traces Colloquium: [re]Think Silk
George Washington University Museum | The Textile Museum
Wednesday, April 10 – Thursday, April 11
10 am–12:30 pm ET (Virtual)
[re]Think Silk is an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural examination of silk and sericulture that explores the subject beyond traditional geographic and cultural perspectives. Join established scholars, curators and other specialists as they share their recent research and discoveries on silk textiles from around the world. Panels include “Silk Around the World,” which reveals the global range of moths that produce cocoons of silk filament used to make thread. “Silk as an Interface Between Cultures” explores the social and psychological appeal of silk in different regions around the world. Finally, “Silk Innovations” considers contemporary technological and bioengineering efforts to modify silk.

Independent Publishing: A Survival Guide
Royal College of Art
Thursday, April 11
5 pm GMT (Virtual)
This talk brings together Adrian Shaughnessy, graphic designer, publisher and associate lecturer at the RCA, Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell from the graphic design and publishing company FUEL, and Betty Brunfaut and Bakhtawer Haider from the London-based graphic design studio Plan B. They will discuss how they started their imprint, the role of digital media in surviving as independent publishers and why there is still an audience for physical books in a digital/virtual world.

Eighth Annual Berkeley/Stanford Symposium: “The fog comes…and then moves on”: On Transience and Translucence
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Saturday, April 13
10 am–5 pm PT (In Person)
For the eighth annual Berkeley/Stanford Symposium, graduate students working across disciplines and time periods will take fog, San Francisco’s friendly ghost, as a common point of departure. Between water and air, earth and sky, fog presents an opportunity, or demand, for pause. Things transform when cloaked in mist, sometimes forcing a reversal of common sense; in foggy conditions, high-beam light creates even more haze. In such states of low visibility, what other senses displace sight in experiencing the world? What forms could art history take if, rather than stretching towards clarity, the field savored obscurity and hiddenness as spaces for discovery? What are works of art that embody the ephemeral ethos of fog in their making, material, or possibility? And what are works of art that push against fog, clearing historical forces of obscurity to allow what has been hidden to come into vision — into being? The symposium will interpret fog widely, whether as guiding visual motif, conceptual or methodological underpinning, meteorological intervention, or poetic engagement.

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