Dear Alumni,

Last Friday I treated myself to a visit (or, more accurately, a pilgrimage) to the Whitney Museum to see Ruth Asawa: Through Line. Intimate works from Asawa’s active mind were a feast for my eyes, and nourished my own creative sensibilities. More intimate still was my viewing, a few days later, of Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. If you enjoy soaking up fluffy carpets and plush couches, this movie was made for you. If I seem enthusiastically fixated on the things of this film, it’s because Anthony Lane’s review has been rattling around in my head: “To point out that ‘Priscilla’ is superficial, even more so than Coppola’s other films, is no derogation, because surfaces are her subject.” Personally, I’ll show up to survey any surface; whether it’s a wide open sheet of paper, or the leather upholstered walls of a Graceland bedroom–I’m there.

I want to draw your attention to BGC’s fellowships—additional details in the Select Career Opportunities section below.  Application deadlines are coming up soon, so please consider applying or sharing these amazing opportunities with your colleagues.

Please keep in touch with your news or irreverent recommendations through the online form, or by emailing the alumni gmail account! I’ll be on the other end, ready to uplift your notes! 

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

Select Career Opportunities

Application deadlines for BGC’s fellowships are fast approaching. The Fields of the Future Fellowships (January 15) promote diversity and inclusion in the advanced study of the material world. Artists and scholars are urged to apply. Funding and housing are provided. Visiting Fellowships (March 1) provides scholars from university, museum, and independent backgrounds with workspace in the BGC Research Center and an invitation to join BGC’s dynamic, intellectual, and scholarly community in New York City. These non-stipendiary visiting fellowships are intended for scholars who have already secured means of funding.

The French Heritage Society has issued its slate of Summer 2024 programs for the following sites: Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, Musée Cognacq-Jay, Opera de Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Musée Carnavalet, and Archives Nationales.

The Wolfsonian is accepting applications for its Research Fellowships (due December 31) and Creative Fellowships (due April 30). 

The Connecticut Ceramics Circle is currently accepting grant applications for awards of up to $2,500 for ceramics-related research or projects. Application materials are due by January 15. 

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) has issued a call for papers for their Eighth Annual Symposium of Latin American Art, to take place at ISLAA, New York, from April 12 to 13, 2024. Application materials are due by December 20.

North Carolina State University is seeking to hire an Assistant/Associate Professor of Design Studies.

The Library Company of Philadelphia is accepting applications for its William H. Helfand Fellowship for American Visual Culture. Application materials are due by January 15. 

Artsy is seeking a Cataloguer to research and catalog works offered through Artsy’s secondary market channels including Artsy’s Curated Auctions.

The Department of Humanities at NYC College of Technology of CUNY is seeking adjunct instructors to teach the following art history courses in the Spring semester of 2024.Some of these courses will be taught online synchronously while others will be taught in person on campus. The class size for the courses is 35. 

• ARTH1102, History of Western Art: Renaissance to Modern, 
  Wed, 2:30 pm–5 pm, in person, on campus. 
• ARTH1104, Art of the United States
  Mon, 11:30 am–2 pm, online synchronous
  Tue, 2:30 pm–5 pm, online synchronous 
• ARTH1110, Islamic Art and Architecture
  Tue/Thu, 2:30 pm–3:45 pm, online synchronous 
• ARTH3311, History of Graphic Design
  Sat, 9 am–11:30 am, in person, on campus. 

For appointment as an adjunct lecturer, a minimum of a master’s degree in the field is required; for adjunct assistant professor, the Ph.D. or equivalent is required. Preference will be given to applicants with prior college-level teaching experience within the same discipline in both online and in-person modalities. Applicants must be eligible to work in the United States and must provide a commutable distance address in the New York City Metropolitan area. If you are interested in teaching any of the courses, please send a CV to zhijian.qian91@citytech.cuny.edu, and copy cswift@citytech.cuny.edu and sboyd@citytech.cuny.edu.  

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has opened a search for a contractor to provide communications, outreach, tracking, and logistical support for Fellowships and Academic Program. This is a full-time, on-site contractual position located within the museum’s Research and Scholars Center (RSC). SAAM will award a firm fixed-price contract for one year (approximately 2,080 hours) to one (1) Contractor, with an option to extend annually for up to four (4) additional years. SAAM seeks bids from emerging scholars who have knowledge and experience in U.S.-American art, craft, and visual culture along with a minimum of two (2) years of experience in the humanities in the following competencies or qualifications: writing and editing scholarly essays and articles; writing and editing museum wall texts; writing and editing grant or donor reports; organizing symposia, colloquia, study days, or other academic convenings. The successful bidder will have excellent writing, editing, organizational, and communication skills. These capacities can be demonstrated in your cover letter, resume/CV, writing sample, and by a combination of work experience and education, preferably academic coursework leading to an M.A. in American art history or a related field. Interested candidates may send all application materials to SAAMFellowships@si.edu by January 1. They anticipate having the contract in place no later than February 1 with work to commence on or about March 1, 2024.

For more job listings please visit the BGC job board.

Username: career.services@bgc.bard.edu
Password: CareersBGC2023*=*

Select BGC Events

Virtual Open House for Prospective Students
Sunday, December 3
11 am ET
Bard Graduate Center Open Houses give prospective students the opportunity to learn much more about our MA and PhD programs. At this remote event, you’ll join faculty for a conversation about their research and teaching, have the chance to meet current students, and have your admissions and financial aid questions answered. The December event will be hosted by our Chair of Academic Programs, Prof. Deborah Krohn, and will include faculty members Jeffrey Collins, Aaron Glass, Meredith Linn, and Drew Thompson.

“The Finest of its Kind”: Percival Griffiths’s Collection of Early English Needlework
Wednesday, December 6
6 pm ET (In Person) 
In the interwar period, chartered accountant Percival D. Griffiths (1861–1937) formed what is today considered to be one of the finest collections of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century English furniture and needlework amassed in the twentieth century. At Sandridgebury, his country house near St. Albans, Griffiths created an antiquarian fantasia, surrounding himself with masterpieces of walnut and mahogany, accented by hundreds of masterworks of the needle. While his collection of furniture is more widely known due to the extensive bibliography devoted to it by his advisor, scholar R.W. Symonds, Griffiths’s exceptional collection of Stuart and early Georgian needlework has remained, until now, far less recognized for its quality and significance. This alumni spotlight lecture, delivered by William DeGregorio (MA ‘12, PhD ‘21) and based on his research for the recently published two-volume monograph on Griffiths, provides an overview of Griffiths as a man and collector, and explores the pivotal role he played in transforming the popular opinion of seventeenth-century needlework, from “grotesque” embarrassment to a “glorious” source of national pride.

Religiosity, Spirituality, Material Culture in Korea
Thursday, December 7–Friday, December 8
Various Times
Religiosity and spirituality may be intangible in concept and principle, but these ideas are manifest in materiality. This two-day symposium expands the scope of Korean art history to objects outside the traditional category of “fine art” and moves beyond aesthetic analysis to consider sensorial engagement, ritual function, the transformative reception of materiality, techniques of production, and histories of consumption. Participants will discuss both institutionalized and unorthodox objects and practices from Buddhism, Daoism, Shamanism, and Christianity over a wide chronological range of themes from ancient worship objects to fandom in contemporary popular culture.

Select Virtual and In-Person Events in the World

Virtual Docent Spotlight Tour: Dickens
The Morgan Library & Museum
Friday, December 1
12:30 pm ET (Virtual)
The Holidays are almost upon us! Join the Morgan docents as they take a close look at the 1843 manuscript of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. It has been a holiday tradition for many years to display the original manuscript in Mr. Morgan’s library. Join us for a virtual look at this beloved object as well as a discussion of Dickens’ life and the history surrounding the book.

A Migration Crisis? Re-Collecting the Racialized Assemblages of the Border
New York Academy of Science
Monday, December 4
6:30 pm ET (In Person and Online)
This talk will present and discuss on-going work on the Greek-Turkish border in the framework of which I record and analyze border-crossing, bordering practices, and the assemblage of the border as material, sensorial and embodied phenomena. This border has been, for several years now, at the center of what has been termed a European “migration crisis”, a phrase that masks a crisis of whiteness and Eurocentrism and hides the racialized character of bordering practices. I direct sensorial attention to the materiality of the assemblage of the border in both, its top-down constructions and its reshaping by bottom-up initiatives and practices, especially by people-on-the-move. Much of my discussion will focus on the camp of Moria, the largest refugee camp/”reception” facility in Europe which was burnt down by fire in September 2020. Far from being a typical migrant or refugee camp, this facility was a complex material reality, suspended between spectacle and surveillance. While it was known widely as one of the worst of such camps, detailed work on its materiality illustrates not only the structural violence at its core but also the agency, resilience and initiative of the people-on-the-move who managed to reshape it.

Virtual Insights: Reasserting Black Presence in the Early American North
American Folk Art Museum
Thursday, December 7
1 pm ET (Virtual)
Through over 120 remarkable works including paintings, needlework, and works on paper from from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the exhibition Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North shares the untold stories of Black experience in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. In this program, exhibition curators Emelie Gevalt, RL Watson and Sadé Ayorinde walk us through the exhibition, reconsidering a selection of early American objects and archives with Black visibility in mind. Inviting new considerations of old images, positioning the Black figure as the principal subject of inquiry, this curatorial walk through will offer a new window onto representation in a region that is often overlooked in narratives of early American history. Speakers will trouble traditional narratives, challenge faulty popular memory and reassert Black presence in unexpected places.

Design Practice: Accessory Design with Mia Wright-Ross of MWR Collection
Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
Thursday, December 7
4:30 pm ET (In Person)
Build your design toolkit! Design Practice is a series of free, drop-in workshops exploring techniques, strategies, and careers in design. No prior experience required—just bring yourself and a creative mindset. This month, join leather artisan Mia Wright-Ross to build, emboss, and paint your own leather clutch or leather keychain. Feeling festive? Design your accessory as a gift! Snacks and hot chocolate will be served. 

Rug and Textile Appreciation Morning: Past, Present and Future of Chilkat Weaving
George Washington University Textile Museum
Saturday, December 9
1 pm ET (Virtual)
Originating in the Pacific Northwest, Chilkat weaving uses a complex finger-twined technique requiring immense skill, time and dedication. These boldly patterned robes, also called “dancing blankets,” are worn for ceremonial occasions by dignitaries and high-ranking tribal members of the Haida, Tsimshian, Tlingit and other Northwest Coast Indigenous peoples of Alaska and western Canada. A single Chilkat robe can take years to weave, and the knowledge of how to complete them has always been held by only a small number of weavers. Join an online conversation with Chilkat weaver Lily Hope and researcher Zachary Jones about the past, present and future of this complex weaving tradition.

Make a gift today.

Shop the BGC Store!

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.