Hello, prospective students!

My name is Emily Harvey and I am a second-year MA student here at Bard Graduate Center and the current Admissions Ambassador. I came to BGC with a background in Historic Preservation and Museum Studies and my current interests are 18th and 19th century Russia and also the depiction of women wearing eyewear in the same centuries. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have about the student side. Please do not hesitate to reach out!

One of my favorite parts of being at BGC is the overlap between both the school and the gallery and as we celebrate the exciting opening of Threads of Power: Lace from the TextilMuseum St. Gallen here at our gallery, I wanted to share how students can get involved with exhibitions and some of the exciting projects we work on. Almost every semester, one or two courses are based around upcoming exhibitions. In the fall of 2021, eleven students, including myself, got the opportunity to take a class based around Threads of Power and lace in general. This class was filled with opportunities to have conversations with contributing authors to the exhibition catalogue, visit the Antonio Ratti Textile Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view incredible works of lace, and to help design interactives and write text that are visible in the gallery today. Professor Emerita Michele Majer and Associate Curator Emma Cormack co-taught the class and gave students creative freedom to create in-gallery interactives that would highlight areas of the exhibition that would otherwise not be talked about. Working in groups, students got to take a deep dive into the world of lace and lacemaking, while also gaining important digital skills.

My own interactive group focused on the influence of lace on the United States’ nineteenth-century fashion market and how women of all classes could now purchase lace and feature it in the up and coming technology of photography. Other groups created interactives based on the lives of lacemakers in Europe, and the variations of lace found in Central and South America. However, creating these interactives is only one small part in participating in an exhibition focused course. These courses help prepare us to write catalogue entries, interact with contributing scholars, and also help us understand just how much work goes into the exhibitions down the street. 

For the current fall semester, Bard Graduate Center is offering two of these exhibition based courses—In Focus: Welcome to the Dolls House I and In Focus: Staging the Table in Europe, 1500-1800. The latter of the two courses pertains to Spring 2023’s exhibition Staging the Table curated by Professor Deborah Krohn. 

I hope this has been helpful in showing the collaborative efforts between the school and the gallery and to learn more about BGC’s exhibition-focused courses. If you have any admissions or BGC related questions, feel free to contact me. I look forward to meeting some of you at our open house on October 23!

Best Wishes,
Emily Harvey ‘23
Admissions Ambassador
emily.harvey@bgc.bard.edu

Upcoming Open Houses
Sunday, October 23, 11 am – 12:30 pm, 38 West 86th Street
Sunday, November 13, 11 am – 12:30 pm, 38 West 86th Street
Sunday, December 4, 11 am – 12:30 pm, ZOOM