Dear Alumni,

Orientation for new BGC students is currently in full swing, which means that fall is imminent! I’m looking forward to crisper, cooler weather, but in the meantime I am spending the dregs of August at home in Chicago, which has been unpleasantly muggy. But that said, I have been enjoying soaking up my parents’ A/C while I can! I’m also debating how best to use my stay-at-home vacation time: paging through my favorite tween novels, watching all the DVDs that are not currently available to stream, or channel surfing cable channels. Perhaps I’ll get to all three in this period of reversion…  

In any case, I will catch you on the other side of Labor Day Weekend! Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your news via the online form, or by emailing the alumni gmail account. 

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

Alumni Spotlight

Anna Mikaela Ekstrand (MA ’17) has co-curated the second edition of Immigrant Artist Biennial Contact Zone, which will take place across nine venues in New York and New Jersey between September, 2023 and January 2024. The launch party is on September 8, 6–10 pm at PS122, and the roundtable “Undocumented Artists: The Politics of Visibility” at Brooklyn Museum will take place on October 7, 6–7:30 pm, all programming is free and open to the public.

Select Career Opportunities

Select BGC Events

The Invention of Connoisseurship
Wednesday, September 6, 6 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall
Connoisseurship—a bundle of practices combining a sense of the quality of works of art, the ability to attribute them to their makers, and to discriminate between originals, copies, and forgeries—is a contested term with a contested history. In this lecture, Peter Burke argues that the “invention” of connoisseurship happened gradually rather than suddenly and took place in the West neither, as has sometimes been argued, in the nineteenth century, nor—perhaps surprisingly—in the Renaissance, but in the seventeenth century when treatises on the subject begin to appear.

Select Virtual and In-Person Events in the World

Circular Museum: Ecology and Sustainability Beyond Museum Walls
MoMA
Tuesday, August 29
11 am ET
The Circular Museum, a collaboration between MoMA’s Ambasz Institute and ART 2030, is a virtual panel discussion series inviting artists, museum directors, curators, exhibition designers, and other museum practitioners from around the world to talk about their efforts to address the climate crisis through their work. In six episodes, the series explores how incorporating sustainability and circularity into various levels of museum practice is not only urgent but desirable. The sixth episode brings artist/seeker/farmer Tabita Rezaire together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London, who collaborated as part of the 2022 exhibition Back to Earth, which questioned how art can respond to the climate emergency. This conversation will explore how artists and museum practitioners can utilize ecological practices and meditations, from the corporeal to the technological, within the museum and beyond its walls.

Managing Wildfires in Los Angeles County
Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
Thursday, August 31
12 pm PT
​​Moderated by historian Wade Graham, Chief Drew Smith and Chief Ron Durbin of the Los Angeles County Fire Department continue their discussion on the challenges of wildland fires in the Los Angeles area from both a management and ecological perspective.

Original Cast Recordings: Art, Artefact, and Analysis
New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Tuesday, September 5
12:30 pm ET (In Person and Virtual)
The Billy Rose Theatre Division at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is pleased to host an in-person session and keynote of the international, virtual conference Original Cast Recordings: Art, Artefact and Analysis. This conference, held mostly virtually for participants around the world, aims to explore the enduring popularity, sonic heritage, cultural influence, and future possibilities of popular musical theatre on record. In this special, hybrid live and online portion of the conference, Billy Rose Theatre Division curator Doug Reside presents a selection from his new book, Fixing the Musical: How Technologies Shaped the Broadway Repertory, which will be published on September 8. The keynote will then be delivered by Professor Laurence Maslon of the Tisch School for the Arts at NYU, building on the work of his 2018 book, Broadway to Main Street: How Show Tunes Enchanted America.

A Life in the Landscape: How Artists Worked in the Forest
The Morgan Library & Museum
Thursday, September 7
12 pm (In Person)
In nineteenth century France, a number of artists fled industrialized Paris for the calm refuge of the Fontainebleau forest, setting up an artists’ colony in the nearby town of Barbizon. All were drawn to nature but each from a different set of circumstances. Some artists had large families, others were singularly devoted to their craft, while several of them were involved in the political revolutions brewing in Paris. In this lecture, Elizabeth Eisenberg, Moore Curatorial Fellow, discusses the lives of artists such as Rousseau, Millet, Diaz, and Cuvelier, exploring how they came to work in the forest and how the forest shaped their lives.

Weave-In with New York Guild of Handweavers
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
Thursday, September 7
10 – 5 am ET (In Person)
In celebration of New York Textile Month, join members of the New York Guild of Handweavers to see and experience the craft of handweaving at this drop-in event. Inspired by the experimental and colorful weavings of Dorothy Liebes, currently on view in A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes (co-curated by alumna Alexa Griffith Winton (MA ‘03)!), expert weavers from the guild will be on hand to demonstrate some of the weaving techniques and materials often used by Liebes and the weavers in her studio, including the hand-tied loop fringe technique. Weavers will be using materials inspired by Liebes, including reeds, leather, ribbons, and other unusual materials on their looms. There will be opportunities for visitors to try their hand at weaving themselves, if they wish.

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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.