Search results for ""bard graduate center, exhibitions department""

Research underlies nearly every aspect of our culture, with expansive investment poured into it and its significance acknowledged by governments, industries, and academic institutions around the world. Yet the idea, practice, and social life of research have not been a subject of study. Of the 164 million items in the catalog of the Library of Congress, only forty-three fall into the category of “Research—History.” To begin the task of understanding research as a concept and practice, Bard Graduate Center gathered a group of artists, scientists, and humanists—all recipients of MacArthur “genius” grants—for three evenings of discussion moderated by Peter N. Miller, who is also a MacArthur Fellow.What is Research? includes conversations with theater director Annie Dorsen, biomedical researcher Elodie Ghedin, sculptor Tom Joyce, physicist Hideo Mabuchi, poet Campbell McGrath, photographer and filmmaker An-My Lê, neuroscientist Sheila Nirenberg, geochemist Terry Plank, and historian Marina Rustow, all of whom grapple with questions about the nature of research from their varied perspectives.

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Derived from Latin ex voto suscepto "in pursuance of a vow," an ex voto embodies the hopes, dreams, and anxieties of the person who deposits it. Almost anything, regardless of size, weight, form, or original function, can become a votive object. Ultimately, the category refers to a subset of the material world in which a thing is not necessarily made to be a votive, but instead becomes charged with votive meaning once dedicated to a deity or deities. This volume, one of the first collections devoted exclusively to the subject, builds on the assumption that a shared conceptual framework underpins votive objects, and that by merit of their consecration they have become a category representing a special stage in the life of a material. The contributors to this comparative study examine ex votos across a range of locations and time periods, including the classical Mediterranean world, medieval Europe, the period of the Catholic Reform, and on to Mexico, Shinto and Buddhist Japan, and Muslim Iran. Voluminous and diverse, Ex Voto will appeal in a wide range of fields, including history, religion, and anthropology.

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Bringing together the work of over twenty international scholars from various disciplines, Cultural Histories of the Material World provides a substantial collection of works that explore materiality and material culture from a historical perspective. These scholars represent some of the most innovative voices in their respective fields, using historiographical lens to chronicle how the field of material culture has operated between multiple disciplines and has grown to prominence in the last two decades, both inside and beyond the academy. Essential reading for the study of material culture and including writing by Bill Brown, Nancy Troy, Horst Bredekamp, Ja&sacute Elsner, and Pamela H. Smith, this book builds on the recent proliferation of works that address materiality and offers unified collection of key perspectives on the material turn across the humanities.

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History is usually thought of as a tale of time, a string of events flowing in a particular chronological order. But as Karl SchlOgel shows in this groundbreaking book, the where of history is just as important as the when. SchlOgel relishes space the way a writer relishes a good story: on a quest for a type of history that takes full account of place, he explores everything from landscapes to cities, maps to railway timetables. Do you know the origin of the name "Everest"? What can the layout of towns tell us about the American Dream? In Space We Read Time reveals this and much, much more. Here is both a model for thinking about history within physical space and a stimulating history of thought about space, as SchlOgel reads historical periods and events within the context of their geographical location. Discussions range from the history of geography in France to what a town directory from 1930s Berlin can say about professional trades that have since disappeared. He takes a special interest in maps, which can serve many purposes one poignant example being the German Jewish community's 1938 atlas of emigration, which showed the few remaining possibilities for escape. Other topics include Thomas Jefferson's map of the United States; the British survey of India; and the multiple cartographers with Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, where the aim was to redraw Europe's boundaries on the basis of ethnicity. Moving deftly from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to 9/11 and from Vermeer's paintings to the fall of the Berlin Wall, this intriguing book presents history from a completely new perspective.

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A first of its kind exploration of early modern European culinary history.Staging the Table in Europe represents the first book-length study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century illustrated handbooks for cooking and dining that provided instruction for nearly every element of the dining experience, from expertly carving meats and fruits to folding napkins into animal forms, performing tableside magic tricks, and creating tablescapes for courtly banquets. Deborah L. Krohn opens a window into a world of culinary spectacle and sheds light on what became a pan-European culture of elaborate performance surrounding the preparation and presentation of food. Krohn shows that the rise of instructional manuals followed the decline of formalized, in-person modes of craft education, such as guilds and familial instruction. More broadly, she demonstrates how these manuals illuminate the material and social worlds of their readers. Beautifully illustrated, Staging the Table in Europe reveals the rich material culture that accompanied lavish banquets and state events as well as everyday dining, enabling readers to imagine the tastes, smells, and sights of Europe’s early modern culinary world.

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Thought-provoking discussions on conservation from various points of view.What is Conservation? is an unconventional introduction to the topic of conservation in all its forms, facilitated through discussions with MacArthur Fellows. The discussions took place in New York in the Spring of 2022 alongside an exhibition at Bard Graduate Center called "Conserving Active Matter.” This volume seeks to acquaint readers who are new to the subject by presenting it in its broadest sense, while also focusing on its greatest significance as described by MacArthur Fellows. It touches on aspects of conservation through the lenses of art, science, literature, poetry, humanism, and more. It also features photographs from the accompanying exhibition.

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In The Art of the Jewish Family, Laura Arnold Leibman examines five objects owned by a diverse group of Jewish women who all lived in New York in the years between 1750 and 1850: a letter from impoverished Hannah Louzada seeking assistance; a set of silver cups owned by Reyna Levy Moses; an ivory miniature owned by Sarah Brandon Moses, who was born enslaved and became one of the wealthiest Jewish women in New York; a book created by Sarah Ann Hays Mordecai; and a family silhouette owned by Rebbetzin Jane Symons Isaacs. These objects offer intimate and tangible views into the lives of Jewish American women from a range of statuses, beliefs, and lifestyles—both rich and poor, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, slaves and slaveowners. Each chapter creates a biography of a single woman through an object, offering a new methodology that looks past texts alone to material culture in order to further understand early Jewish American women’s lives and restore their agency as creators of Jewish identity. While much of the available history was written by men, the objects that Leibman studies were made for and by Jewish women. Speaking to American Jewish life, women’s studies, and American history, The Art of the Jewish Family sheds new light on the lives and values of these women, while also revealing the social and religious structures that led to Jewish women being erased from historical archives.

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Considers the future of conservation and its connection to the human sciences. This volume brings together the findings from a five-year research project that seeks to reimagine the relationship between conservation knowledge and the humanistic study of the material world. The project, “Cultures of Conservation,” was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and included events, seminars, and an artist-in-residence. The effort to conserve things amid change is part of the human struggle with the nature of matter. For as long as people have made things and kept things, they have also cared for and repaired them. Today, conservators use a variety of tools and categories developed over the last one hundred and fifty years to do this work, but in the coming decades, new kinds of materials and a new scale of change will pose unprecedented challenges. Looking ahead to this moment from the perspectives of history, philosophy, materials science, and anthropology, this volume explores new possibilities for both conservation and the humanities in the rethinking of active matter.

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Ritual and Capital is an expansive volume that collects an interdisciplinary range of voices and genres that reflect on ritual as a form of resistance against capitalism. The poems, essays, and artworks included in this anthology explore habits and practices formed to subvert, subsist, and survive under the repression of capital. These works explore the refuge in ritual, how ritual practices might endow objects with qualities that resist market values, the use of ritual in embodied practices of healing and care, and how ritual strengthens communities. The publication of Ritual and Capital is the culmination of a series of public readings organized by Wendy’s Subway, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn, as part of their Spring 2016 Reading Room residency at the Bard Graduate Center. Copublished by the Bard Graduate Center and Wendy’s Subway, Ritual and Capital is the first title in the BGCX series, a publication series designed to expand time-based programming after the events themselves have ended. Springing from the generative spontaneity of conversation, performance, and hands-on engagement as their starting points, these experimental publishing projects will provide space for continued reflection and research in a form that is inclusive of a variety of artists and makers.

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How do works of art endure over time in the face of aging materials and changing interpretations of their meaning? How do decay, technological obsolescence, and the blending of old and new media affect what an artwork is and can become? And how can changeable artworks encourage us to rethink our assumptions of art as fixed and static? Revisions is a unique exploration of all of these questions. In this catalog, which accompanies an exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center, Hanna B. Holling examines Zen for Film, also known as Fluxfilm no. 1, one of the most evocative works by Korean-American artist Nam June Paik. Created during the early 1960s, this piece consists of a several-minutes-long screening of blank film; as the film ages and wears in the projector, the viewer is confronted with a constantly evolving work. Because of this mutability, the project, as HA lling shows, undermines any assumption that art can be subject to a single interpretation. By focusing on a single artwork and unfolding the inspirations, transitions, and residues that have occurred in the course of that work's existence, Revisions offers an in-depth look at how materiality enhances visual knowledge. A fresh perspective on a piece with a rich history of display, this catalog invites interdisciplinary dialogue and asks precisely what-and when-an artwork might be.

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In the West at the turn of the twentieth century, public understanding of science and the world was shaped in part by expeditions to Asia, North America, and the Pacific. The Anthropology of Expeditions draws together contributions from anthropologists and historians of science to explore the role of these journeys in natural history and anthropology between approximately 1890 and 1930. By examining collected materials as well as museum and archive records, the contributors to this volume shed light on the complex social life and intimate work practices of the researchers involved in these expeditions. At the same time, the contributors also demonstrate the methodological challenges and rewards of studying these legacies and provide new insights for the history of collecting, history of anthropology, and histories of expeditions. Offering fascinating insights into the nature of expeditions and the human relationships that shaped them, The Anthropology of Expeditions sets a new standard for the field.

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The transition from roll to codex as the standard format of the book is one of the most culturally significant innovations of Late Antiquity. The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity examines surviving evidence in order to better understand how this transition took place. Placing the codex into the general cultural, religious, and technological context of Late Antiquity, the book examines the major types of codices the wooden tablet codex, the single-quire codex and the multi-quire codex in all their structural, technical, and decorative features. Georgios Boudalis argues that the codex was not an ingenious invention but rather an innovation that evolved using techniques already widely employed by artisans and craftspeople in the creation of everyday items such as socks, shoes, and baskets, revealing that the codex was a fascinating, yet practical, development.

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In the late nineteenth century, the growing discipline of anthropology was both a powerful tool of colonial control and an ideological justification for it. As European empires and their commercial reach expanded, different populations became intertwined in relationships of exchange and power. Frontier Shores accompanies the exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery and draws from the collection of the American Museum of Natural History. Focusing on Oceania—the vast region encompassing Australia, New Zealand, and the tropical Pacific Islands—it examines crosscultural contact and the contest for power between indigenous and non-indigenous people.Many of Oceania’s peoples were perceived in mainstream European scientific thought as belonging to humanity’s lowest tiers. Although these notions have long since been discredited, Shawn C. Rowlands traces their impact on the development of anthropology, colonial policy, and national identity. Ultimately, Frontier Shores reveals important processes of “othering” and the difficult issue of manufacturing identity and authenticity.

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A volume considering questions of conservation that arise with new artistic mediums and practices. Much of the artwork that rose to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century took on novel forms—such as installation, performance, event, video, film, earthwork, and intermedia works with interactive and networked components—that pose a new set of questions about what art actually is, both physically and conceptually. For conservators, this raises an existential challenge when considering what elements of these artworks can and should be preserved. This provocative volume revisits the traditional notions of conservation and museum collecting that developed over the centuries to suit a conception of art as static, fixed, and permanent objects. Conservators and museums increasingly struggle with issues of conservation for works created from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first century that are unstable over time. The contributors ask what it means to conserve artworks that fundamentally address and embody the notion of change and, through this questioning, guide us to reevaluate the meaning of art, of objects, and of materiality itself. Object—Event—Performance considers a selection of post-1960s artworks that have all been chosen for their instability, changeability, performance elements, and processes that pose questions about their relationship to conservation practices. This volume will be a welcome resource on contemporary conservation for art historians, scholars of dance and theater studies, curators, and conservators.

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In early twentieth-century Berlin, the museumsdebate was set into motion with Wilhelm von Bode's sweeping proposal to reorganize a group of the city's museums. Between 1907 and 1910, two particularly striking series of articles appeared in the journal Museumskunde: Journal for the Administration and Technology of Public and Private Collections. The first was a six-part essay by Otto Lauffer on history museums and the second was a ten-part piece by Oswald Richter regarding ethnographic museums, and both initiated a century of important dialogue. Presented together here as Collecting, Displaying, and Interpreting Material Culture, these first full English translations of the two book-length articles remain unequalled presentations about the different implications of art, historical, and ethnographic museums. They show how sophisticated the discussion of museums and museum display was in the early twentieth century, and how much could be gained from revisiting these reflections today. Accompanied with short commentaries by a group of museum professionals, these translations and associated commentaries allow for an intervention and intensification of the current level of debate about museums, one that will further invigorated by the opening of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin in 2019.

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